Septimus Heap 3 - Physik (11 page)

“Well, it wasn't exactly in the Queen's Room,” said Jenna.

“Oh.” The Scribe sounded surprised. “Then where was it?” She picked up a pen and a notebook from the table and stood poised to write down the information. It was not forthcoming.

“I cannot say,” said Jenna, adopting the Scribe's officious tone. She felt grumpy at the intrusive questions—the secrets of the Queen's Room were none of the Scribe's business.

Jillie Djinn looked cross but there was nothing she could do. “But this Glass does look the same as the other Glass— wherever that may be?” she persisted.

“I think so,” said Jenna. “I can't remember all the details of the other one. But it's got the same black glass and ... the same horrible feeling.”

“That is not entirely illuminating,” said Jillie Djinn, “for a Glass will, to some extent—depending on your susceptibility to such manifestations that may or may not be apparent—reflect your own expectations.”

Jenna had an inkling of how Wolf Boy had felt earlier. “They do what?” she asked.

“You see what you expect to see,” said Jillie Djinn briskly.

“Oh.”

The Scribe sat down at the table and opened a drawer. She drew out a large leather-bound notebook, a sheaf of papers covered in columns of figures, a pen and a small bottle of green ink. “Thank you, Jenna,” she said without looking up. “I believe I have enough information. I will now proceed.”

Jenna waited patiently for a few minutes and then, when the Scribe showed no sign of stopping her scribbling, she asked, “So ... Septimus—he'll come back here, will he?”

The Chief Hermetic Scribe looked up, already lost in another world of calculations and conjunctions. “Maybe yes. Maybe no. Who can say?”

“I thought you might,” Jenna muttered crossly.

“I may,” said Jillie Djinn sternly, “be able to say when my calculations are done.”

“When will they be done?” asked Jenna anxiously, feeling that she could hardly wait another minute to see Septimus again and ask him what had happened.

“This time next year, if all goes well,” replied the Scribe.

“This time next year?”

“If all goes well.”

Jenna walked back into the front office in a bad mood. At the sight of the Princess, Beetle jumped up from his seat behind the desk. His ears suddenly turned bright red; he gave a hamster-style squeak and said, “Hey.”

“What?” snapped Jenna.

“Um. I wondered...”

“What?”

“Um ... Sep okay?”

“No, he's not,” Jenna replied.

Beetle's black eyes looked worried. “I guessed not.”

Jenna shot Beetle a glance. “How did you know?”

Beetle shrugged. “His boots. He's only got one pair of boots. And you've got them.”

“Well, I'm going to give them back to him,” said Jenna, making for the door. “I don't know how I'm going to find him, but I will—and I'm not waiting a whole year to do it either.”

Beetle grinned. “Well, if that's all you need to do, it's easy.”

“Oh, ha-ha, Beetle.”

Beetle gulped. He didn't like making Jenna cross. “No, no, you don't understand. I'm not being funny. It's true. He's easy to find—now that he's Imprinted a dragon.”

Jenna stopped, hand on the doorknob, and stared at Beetle. “How do you mean?” she asked slowly, not daring to hope that Beetle might have the answer that his Chief Hermetic Scribe did not.

“I mean that a dragon can always find his Imprinter,” said Beetle. “All you have to do is a Seek and then, whizz bang, off he goes. Easy-peasy. You could go with him if you wanted, seeing as you're the Navigator. Just got to do a Locum Tenens, that's all. Problem solved.” Beetle folded his arms with an air of satisfaction.

“Beetle, could you ... um, could you say all that again? A bit slower this time, please?”

Beetle grinned at Jenna. “Wait a minute,” he said. Beetle hurled himself through the door and vanished into the back of the Manuscriptorium. Just as Jenna was wondering what could have possibly happened to him, the door burst open and Beetle was back, clutching a bright red and gold tin.

He held the tin out to Jenna. “Yours,” he said.

“Mine?”

“Yep.”

“Oh, well, thank you,” said Jenna. A silence ensued while she looked at the tin and read the words LOKKJAW TOFFEE COMPANY FINEST TREACLE TOFFEES, printed in thick black letters on the lid. “Would you like a toffee, Beetle?” asked Jenna, trying to pry open the tin.

“Not toffees,” said Beetle, coloring.

“Oh?”

“Here, let me get the lid off for you.”

Jenna handed Beetle the tin. He struggled with it for a few seconds; then the lid popped off, and a flurry of what appeared to be bits of very thin leather, most of them either singed, crumpled or torn, tumbled to the floor. A strong smell of dragon filled the air. Flustered and hot, Beetle knelt to retrieve the pieces of sloughed dragon skin.

“Not toffees,” muttered Beetle as he collected them.

“No, they're not,” agreed Jenna.

“Navigator stuff,” Beetle elaborated. He picked out a long piece of green leather and held it up, saying, “ Seek.” Then he found a charred red scrap and said, “ Ignite.”

Lastly he found what he was looking for—a much-folded sheet of thin blue papery material—and said triumphantly, “ Locum Tenens!”

“Oh. Well, thank you, Beetle. That's really nice of you.”

Beetle went a deeper red. “It's okay. I mean ... um, you see, after you became Sep's Navigator on Spit Fyre, I collected all the stuff I could find about Navigators and put it in my toffee tin. The one that my auntie gave me for MidWinter Feast Day. I hope you don't mind,” he said a little sheepishly. “I mean, I hope you don't think I was being nosy or anything.”

“No, of course not. I always meant to find out about being a Navigator but I never did. I think Sep thought—I mean, thinks—that being a Navigator means cutting Spit Fyre's toenails and cleaning out the dragon kennel.”

Beetle laughed and then stopped as he remembered that something horrible had happened to Septimus. “So ... would you like me to show you the Locum?” he asked.

“The what?”

“The Locum Tenens. It will let you take over from Sep, and Spit Fyre will do everything you ask after that—or, well, he'll do everything that he would have done for Sep.”

“Not everything then.” Jenna smiled.

"No. But it's a start. Then you can do the Seek and off you go to find Sep.

Easy—well, it should be. Here it is.“ Beetle carefully took the thin blue piece of sloughed skin, unfolded it and flattened it out on the desk. ”It's a bit complicated, but I reckon it will work okay."

Jenna stared at a mass of confusing symbols, which were written in a tight spiral that wound its way up to a burned corner. Complicated was putting it mildly. She had no idea where to start.

“I can translate it if you like,” Beetle offered.

Jenna brightened. “Could you really?”

Beetle's ears went deep crimson again. “Yeah. Of course I could. No problem.” He took a large magnifying glass from the drawer and squinted at the skin. “It's quite simple, really. You just need something belonging to the Imprinter—” Beetle stopped and glanced at Septimus's boots. "Which ... um ... you've got. You lay it ...

them in front of the dragon, I mean Spit Fyre, and then you put your hand on the dragon's nose, look into his eyes and tell him—look, I'll write this down so you don't forget." Beetle reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled card, then, taking his pen from its inkstand, he wrote a long string of words with great concentration.

Grateful, Jenna took the card. “Thank you, Beetle,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“ 'S all right,” said Beetle. “Anytime. Except. I mean. I hope there isn't any other time. I mean. I hope Sep's okay and ... if you need any help...”

“Thanks, Beetle,” said Jenna, a little tearfully. She ran for the door and wrenched it open. Wolf Boy was leaning up against the window, looking extremely bored.

“Come on, 409,” said Jenna, and she ran off toward the Great Arch at the end of Wizard Way. Soon she and Wolf Boy had disappeared into the blue shadows of the lapis lazuli archway.

Back at the Manuscriptorium, Beetle sat down and ran his hand over his forehead.

He felt hot, and he knew it was not just because he always went red whenever he saw Jenna. As Beetle leaned back in his seat, a cold sweat ran over him from top to toe and the office began to spin.

The scribes inside the Manuscriptorium heard the crash as Beetle fell off his chair.

Foxy, the son of the disgraced former Chief Hermetic Scribe, rushed out to find Beetle sprawled on the navigator tin the floor. The first thing that Foxy noticed was a single puncture mark, from which spread a brilliant red rash, in the gap of flesh between the top of Beetle's boots and his leggings.

“He's been bitten!” Foxy yelled to all the shocked scribes. “Now Beetle's got it!”

Marcellus Pye

Marcellus Pye hated mornings. Not that you could easily tell when it was morning in the depths where he lurked. Night or day, a dim red light suffused the Old Way under the Castle. The light came from the globes of everlasting fire, which Marcellus now considered to be his greatest, and certainly most useful, achievement. The Old Way itself was lined with the large glass globes, which Marcellus had placed there some two hundred years ago when he had decided he could no longer live above the ground, among the mortals of the Castle, for it was far too noisy, fast and bright, and he no longer had any interest in it whatsoever. Now he sat damp and shivering by a globe at the foot of the Great Chimney, feeling sorry for himself.

Marcellus knew it was morning because he had been out the night before on one of his nighttime walks under the Moat. Nowadays, Marcellus only needed to breathe every ten minutes or so, and it did not particularly bother him if he did not take a breath for thirty minutes. He enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness under the water; it took away the terrible pain of his old fragile bones for a while. He liked to wander through the soft mud, picking up the odd gold coin that someone had thrown into the Moat for luck.

When he returned, squeezing through a long-forgotten Moat inspection chamber, Marcellus had taken a tall candle, marked the hours off down its length and stuck a pin into the fourth mark as an alarm. Not because he was afraid he might fall asleep, for Marcellus Pye slept no more—indeed he could not remember when he had last slept—but because he feared that he would forget the Appointed Hour, which he had promised his mother faithfully he would not miss. The thought of his mother made Marcellus grimace as if he had just eaten an unexpectedly rotten piece of apple with a fat maggot sitting in it. He shuddered and huddled up inside his threadbare cloak for warmth. He placed the candle in a glass, then sat on the cold stone bench under the Great Chimney and watched the candle burn all through the night, while old Alchemical formulae drifted in and out of his mind in their usual haphazard and useless way.

Above him the Great Chimney rose like a pillar of darkness. Cold wind swirled inside it and howled the way the Creatures in Marcellus's flasks once used to howl to get out—now he knew how they had felt. As the candle steadily burned down, Marcellus cast the occasional anxious glance at the pin and stared up into the blackness of the Chimney. As the flame approached the pin he tapped his foot nervously and started to chew his fingernails, an old habit that he soon thought better of. They tasted disgusting.

To pass the time and take his mind off what he would soon have to do, Marcellus thought about his escapade the previous night. It had been many years since he'd been out in the open air and it had not been so bad. It had been cloudy and dark and there was a pleasant mist that had muffled any sounds. He had sat for a while on Snake Slipway and waited, but Mother had been wrong. No one had arrived. That hadn't bothered him too much for he liked the Slipway; it held happy memories of when he had lived there, next to the house where they now kept those silly paddleboats. He had sat at his old place by the water and checked that his gold pebbles were still there. It had been good to see a bit of gold again, even though they had been hidden under a coating of mud and were badly scratched, presumably by those stupid boats. Marcellus frowned. When he'd been a young man he had had a real boat. The river was deep then, not the silted-up and lazy waterway that it was now. True, the waters had been fast and treacherous, but in those days, boats were big with long and heavy keels, great swaths of sail and beautiful woodwork painted in gold and silver. Yes, thought Marcellus, boats were boats in those days. And the sun always shone. Always. Never a rainy day that he could remember. He sighed and stretched out his hands, looking with distaste at his withered fingers, the parchmentlike skin stretched tight and transparent across every lump and hollow of the old bones inside, and at his thick yellow fingernails that he no longer had the strength to cut. He grimaced again; he was completely and utterly revolting. Would nothing release him? A faint memory of hope came to him and then slipped from his mind. He was not surprised—he forgot everything nowadays.

There was a sudden ping as the pin fell from the burning candle and hit the glass.

Wearily Marcellus got to his feet, and feeling inside the Great Chimney, he clutched at a rung and swung himself onto an iron ladder that was bolted to the old brick of the inside walls. Then, like a misshapen monkey, the Last Alchemist began the long climb up the inside of the Great Chimney.

It took Marcellus longer than he had expected to reach the top of the Chimney. It was more than an hour later when, exhausted and weak, he pulled himself onto the broad ledge that ran around the top. And there he sat, eyes shut tight, pale and wheezing, trying to catch his breath and hoping that he wasn't too late. Mother would be angry. After a couple of minutes Marcellus made himself open his eyes. He wished he hadn't. The faint light from his candle way down at the foot of the Chimney made him feel dizzy and sick with the thought of how far he had climbed.

He shivered in the dank wind and drew his feet up under his cloak; his cracked old toes felt like blocks of ice. Maybe, thought Marcellus, they were blocks of ice.