Fyre (48 page)

Destroyed,
signed Duglius, matter-of-factly.

Yes. Unfortunately that will be necessary,
signed Marcellus. “And now, Duglius, I shall take the Drummin way out.”

Duglius looked at his Master critically. “You won’t fit,” he said.

“I will have to fit,” said Marcellus.

Like a blindworm, Marcellus crawled up through the main Drummin way—the large burrow that ran up inside the rock like the hollowed-out trunk of a tree. There was not much space for a six-foot-tall Alchemist who had recently been eating too many potatoes.

Marcellus saw the way winding ahead, speckled with tiny wriggling lights, the GloGrubs that had colonized the burrows thousands of years in the past. The trunk went up at a slope that was gentle for a Drummin but fiendishly steep for a human. It was hot and horribly stuffy and, like a Drummin, was coated with a fine dust. The dust made the climb even more difficult—it caused Marcellus to slip and slide and it got into his lungs, making him wheeze and gasp for breath.

But anger drove Marcellus on. Anger at what Duglius Drummin told him he had found beneath the Cauldron after Julius had shut down the
Fyre
. Anger at how he had been misled. But most of all, Marcellus was angry that, because of the deceits of Julius Pike, the Castle had once more been put at risk. And so he scrabbled and scraped his way up through the main burrow, past the tiny branching burrows that led to Drummin nests that until only a few hours ago had been filled with Drummin cocoons.

As he climbed painfully upward, Marcellus noticed that the rock was becoming cooler and he guessed that he was now moving out of the cavern, away from the
Fyre
. The branches leading to the Drummin nests had ceased, and to Marcellus’s relief the escape burrow had actually widened. The gradient had also eased and the burrow settled into a series of loops like a huge corkscrew along which Marcellus was now able to crawl rather than climb. Spirits rising by the minute, Marcellus crawled fast, no longer caring about skinning his knees or scraping his fingers or the fact that, with the GloGrubs growing sparse, he was crawling in semidarkness. He was, he was sure, very nearly at the escape hatch that would take him into the lower Ice Tunnel beneath the Great Chamber of Alchemie.

And then disaster struck. As he rounded another turn of the corkscrew, Marcellus crawled at some speed into a rockfall. With the hollow thud of a coconut hitting the ground, Marcellus’s head made contact with the rock. A shower of stars exploded in his eyes, he reeled back and collapsed into the dust. And there he lay, eyes closed, blood trickling from a spreading bruise on his forehead.

Far below in the Chamber of
Fyre
, a Drummin set—the third to try—at last reached the Control Room. They swarmed up the wall and swung the first of the bank of levers down. Seconds later, with a thunderous roar, a cascade of coal tumbled down the chute in the roof and fell through the air into the Cauldron. As the rain of soft coal hit the flames, a tremendous
hisssss
filled the Deeps and a great cloud of black dust rose into the air, covering the Ring Wizards and turning their green carapaces a dusty black. Buzzing with anger, like two wasps emerging from hibernating in the ashes of the grate, the Wizards wheeled around searching for victims but found none—a Drummin in a dusty cloud is very nearly invisible. Thwarted, the Wizards swung their red light beams across the blanket of coal that now rested on top of the
Fyre
. With a great
whooomph
, the coal ignited and a sheet of flame leaped into the air. The Wizards were jubilant.

Far below in the sooty dust, the Drummins, too, were happy. As long as the coal burned, the
Fyre
was safe.

Slowly, slowly, the flames from the coal fire began to creep beneath the Castle. They spread through the Vents that Marcellus had so recently opened, warming the rock above and the floors of the older houses. People threw open their windows, complaining of the late afternoon heat, and when the evening clouds came in from the Port, the rain sizzled as it hit the pavement.

Up in
Search
and Rescue, Hildegarde saw the first flame as it licked up through the pavement in front of Terry Tarsal’s shop. She raced down to the Great Hall, where Marcia had set up what she called her “command post.”

“Fire!” yelled Hildegarde. “Fire, fire,
fire
!”

42

F
ORYX

W
hile Marcellus lay unconscious in
the dark, the Dragon Boat flew into the night—across the sea, over the Isles of Syren where the CattRokk Light shone bright, and on toward the Land of the House of Foryx. Septimus, Nicko and Jenna took turns at the tiller—not to guide the dragon, who knew where she was going, but to keep her company on her journey. The night was calm and clear and the stars glittered like ice crystals spilled across the sky. Lulled by the
up-and-down-and-up-and-down
of the Dragon Boat, Nicko lay on his back staring up at the night until he began to believe he was back at sea, rolling through a storm swell riding in from the ocean.

In the small hours of the morning Septimus saw landfall and took the Dragon Boat down low to see where they were. As they flew over a long sandspit dotted with fishermen’s shacks on stilts, Septimus caught sight of a little girl gazing out of a lighted attic window. He waved and the child waved back. She watched the Dragon Boat go on her way, then fell asleep and dreamed of dragons.

The Dragon Boat flew on, above the Trading Post where a necklace of lights showed its line of harbors, across the inlet on which they lay and then over a maze of sandbanks that gave way to marshes, then miles of flatness of drained farmlands. They were now in the Land of the House of Foryx.

While it was still dark back at the Castle—and darker still where Marcellus lay—for those on the Dragon Boat the night began to slip away. Aunt Zelda, who was sitting in the prow with Jenna, who was sleeping curled up under a quilt, saw a thin band of pale green appear on the horizon above the darkness of the nighttime fields.

“We are flying into the sun,” Aunt Zelda whispered.

Steadily,
up-and-down-and-up-and-down
, the Dragon Boat flew on. Wrapped in another of Aunt Zelda’s quilts, Nicko dozed, while Septimus drowsily held the tiller and watched the land passing below. In the encroaching dawn he saw the shapes of scattered farmhouses dark against the land and the glow of the occasional lonely light as people began to wake and go about their early-morning tasks.

The band of pale green spread slowly across the sky and washed into a dull yellow. Far below the shining band of a river wound through a patchwork of fields dusted with snow. Jenna woke and yawned. She felt stiff and cold but the sight of the lightening sky ahead, which was now taking on a delicate pink hue, revived her. She became aware of Nicko moving around the deck and turned to blearily say good morning.

Nicko was advancing with two mugs in one hand, holding on to the gunwales with the other. “Morning, sleepyhead,” he said. “Drinkies.”

He passed Jenna and Aunt Zelda mugs of hot chocolate.

“Wow, Nik, thanks.”

“You can thank Sep. He’s got some new gizmo in that bag of his.”

“A
hot
-chocolate
Charm
?” Jenna smiled.

“Yep. Each in its own mug. Neat, hey?”

“Thanks, Sep,” Jenna called down the boat.

“S’okay, Jen. Hey, I can see the forest now!”

Jenna looked down and saw that the landscape was changing fast. The dusting of snow had become a continuous blanket of white that showed dark lines of tracks winding through large expanses of trees. As she watched, the treetops grew closer and closer together and the tracks disappeared, hidden beneath the canopy of white.

Like the forest beneath them, the Dragon Boat’s crew fell silent. The steady
swoosh-whoosh
of the wingbeats was the only sound as the dragon flew onward until all that could be seen below was a featureless sea of snowy treetops stretching out to the wide horizon. On and on they flew, gazing down at the trees, until they lost their sense of direction and even Septimus began to wonder if the Dragon Boat was flying around in circles.

All traces of pink were gone from the sky when the crew sensed a change in the Dragon Boat’s flight. The wings began to slow to a
swoosh-oooosh-whoosh
, the dragon’s neck dipped and Jenna saw her emerald eyes scanning ahead.

A sudden flash of sunlight from a gap in the clouds lit up a fragile silver arc strung high above the trees, making it sparkle like a giant, dew-drizzled spiderweb—and the bridge to the House of Foryx was revealed. Even Septimus, who had terrifying memories of crossing the bridge, was taken aback by how beautiful it looked. A few seconds later the sun slipped behind the clouds and the bridge was gone, blending once more into the white skies. The Dragon Boat leaned sharply into a turn and headed downward.

And then, suddenly, the House of Foryx was there. Stark-black against the snow, a great fortress of granite, it sat in solitary splendor on a pillar of rock encircled by a deep and dark abyss. Its four huge octagonal towers, which surrounded an even larger octagonal core, reared up into the white sky, and above them wheeled a murder of crows, cawing at the morning.

“Oh, dear,” whispered Aunt Zelda.

Nicko slid along the deck and came to sit next to Aunt Zelda. She put her arm around him and wrapped him in her quilt. Nicko, who did not like to be “fussed,” as he called it, did not resist. Together he, Aunt Zelda and Jenna watched the House of Foryx draw closer.

Nicko shivered. What really spooked him was not the building—it was the knowledge that inside the fortress below, where Time did not exist, there were so many people, their lives suspended while they waited to go back out once more to their own Times. Just as he and Snorri had once waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. Nicko looked down at the blind windows, covered with a shifting film like oil on water, and wondered which one it was that he and Snorri had spent what had felt like an eternity gazing out from. Suddenly he got up and made his way up the sloping deck to Septimus.

“Sep. Don’t go back in there.
Please
.”

“Hey, Nik, it’s okay,” said Septimus. He pulled the
Questing Stone
out of his pocket and turned it upside down to show Hotep-Ra’s hieroglyph underneath it, gold against the black. “See, this is my pass. It means I can come and go as I please. I can always return to my Time. It really
is
okay this time.”

Nicko shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

“Nik, even if you don’t believe the pass will work, it is
still
okay. You and Jenna are here. Aunt Zelda is here. In our Time. If I don’t come out, you can ring the bell and ask for me, and then I can walk back out into our Time. You
know
that.”

Nicko shook his head again. “You can’t trust them.”

Septimus knew there was nothing he could say to win Nicko over. He renewed his grip on the tiller and began to guide the Dragon Boat low across the House of Foryx, toward a glass dome in the very center, invisible from below. Unlike the dead windows in the rest of the House of Foryx, a soft yellow light spread up from the dome and glowed in the gray morning air.

Hotep-Ra had become a creature of habit. In a place where Time did not exist, the ancient Wizard had created his own rhythm of time. Every day, to the second, he did the same thing, and often he even thought the same thoughts. The last time his routine had changed had been when a young Apprentice named Septimus Heap had come to see him at the end of his
Queste
. How long ago that had been, Hotep-Ra had no idea. It could have been the previous day. It could have been hundreds of years in the past. In the House of Foryx it made no difference.

That morning, Hotep-Ra’s routine and thoughts traveled their usual tracks: he lit a candle, lay back in his chair beneath the dome, gazed up into the white-snow sky and thought about his Dragon Boat. So when Hotep-Ra actually saw the brilliant gold and green of the Dragon Boat fly overhead, he was not at first surprised. It was only after her second pass that Hotep-Ra realized that his Dragon Boat actually
was
outside. In what Time she was, he did not know. But she had come for him, as he had known one day she would.

Hotep-Ra got out of his chair and said to his Apprentice, Talmar Ray Bell, “I am just going outside. I may be some time.”

Talmar looked horrified. “Don’t say that!”

Hotep-Ra smiled at his Apprentice. “Why ever not?”

“It’s bad luck,” she said. “Someone said it once and never came back.”

“I’ll be back,” said Hotep-Ra.

“Someone said
that
once too.”

The Dragon Boat was coming in to land. She knew where she was heading, but her crew did not. Septimus felt the tiller move beneath his hand as the Dragon Boat tipped forward in a steep dive. With her wings outstretched and her tail down like a brake, she dropped down toward the wide, flat marble terrace at the front of the House of Foryx.