The Darke Toad (11 page)

Marcellus swung himself onto the metal ladder that led down from the upper platform and cautiously began the descent into the
Fyre
Chamber—or the Deeps, as the Drummins had called it. The ladder shook with each step as Marcellus headed doggedly downward toward a wide platform far below from which yet more
Fyre
Globes winked up at him. Some ten long minutes later, he set foot on what was known as the Viewing Station, and stopped to take stock.

Marcellus was now level with the top of the
Fyre
Cauldron. He peered down at the star-shaped tops of the
Fyre
rods glistening with the dull shine that undamaged
Fyre
rods possessed. The last time he had seen them they were on fire, disintegrating before his eyes and now … Marcellus shook his head in admiration. How had the Drummins done it?

A narrow walkway known as the Inspection Circle ran around the rim of the Cauldron. It was made of metal lattice, which Marcellus could see had been repaired where it had buckled in the heat. Very carefully, he stepped down onto it, holding tight to the guardrails on either side. From his tool belt he took a small hammer, known as a drummer, and clasping it tightly he set off. Every few paces he stopped and tapped the metal rim of the
Fyre
Cauldron, listening intently. To his ears it appeared to be sound, although he knew his hearing was nowhere near as acute as it needed to be for the job.

This was what the Drummins had done all day, all night, all the time. They had swarmed over the Cauldron, drum, drum, drumming with their tiny hammers, listening to the sounds of the metal, understanding everything it told them. Marcellus knew he was a poor substitute for a Drummin but he did the best he could. After walking the Inspection Circle, he returned to the Viewing Station, knowing that he could put off no longer the thing he had been dreading the most. He must go down to the floor of the Chamber of
Fyre
.

A flight of curved metal steps wound their way around the belly of the Cauldron down into the dimness below, which was lit by a few scattered
Fyre
Globes. Slowly, Marcellus descended into the depths and the smell of damp earth came up to meet him. On the bottom step, he stopped, gathering the courage to step onto the ground. Marcellus was convinced that the cavern floor must be strewn with the remains of the Drummins and he could not bear the thought of crunching their delicate little bones like eggshells underfoot.

It was some minutes before Marcellus stepped off. To his relief there was no sickening crunch. He took another step—on tiptoe—then another, and felt nothing below his feet but bare earth. Carefully, Marcellus tiptoed around the base of the Cauldron, tapping it with his hammer, listening, then moving on. Not once did he tread on anything remotely crunchy. He supposed that the delicate bones had already turned to dust. After a circuit of the underside of the Cauldron, Marcellus knew that all was well.

It was now time to begin the
Fyre
.

Back on the Viewing Station, Marcellus headed off along another frighteningly flimsy walkway that was strung out across the cavern, thirty feet up. He walked cautiously, glad of the light from a corresponding line of
Fyre
Globes placed on the ground. At last he arrived at a chamber burrowed into the rock face at the back of the cavern and stepped inside. He was back in his old control room.

Below the coating of hundreds of years' worth of dust, Marcellus could see that the walls had been repainted white and everything shone—there was no sign of the greasy soot that had covered everything. Marcellus walked across to the far wall where, beside a line of iron levers, there was a large brass wheel set into the rock. Taking a deep breath, Marcellus grasped the wheel. It moved easily. As he slowly turned it, Marcellus could feel the slip and slide, the
clunk
and the
thunk
of the chain of command, which reached up through the rock into the depths of the UnderFlow. Somewhere far above him a sluice gate opened. A great gurgle echoed around the sooty darkness of Alchemie Quay and the sluggish waters began to move. Marcellus felt the rumble inside the rock face of the tumbling water as it poured through ancient channels and began to fill the reservoir deep within the cavern walls.

Now Marcellus turned his attention to a bank of twenty-one small wheels farther along. Once the
Fyre
was begun, he must have a way of getting rid of excess heat. In the old days the heat had been dispersed through what were now the Ice Tunnels and used to warm the older buildings of the Castle. Marcellus had given the current ExtraOrdinary Wizard, Marcia Overstrand, his word that he would preserve the Ice Tunnels. This meant he needed to open up the secondary venting system—a network of pores that snaked up to the surface of the Castle.

Marcellus dared not risk discovery yet. He needed precious time to set the
Fyre
going, time to prove that it was not a danger to the Castle. Although Marcia had agreed that he could start up the
Fyre
, Marcellus knew that she assumed that the
Fyre
was the small furnace in the Great Chamber of Alchemie and Physik. Indeed, that was what he had led Marcia to think. Julius Pike had told Marcellus that he would make sure that no ExtraOrdinary Wizard would
ever
give permission to open up the Chamber of
Fyre
again—and Marcellus had believed him.

And so now Marcellus turned his attention to the little brass wheels that would open heat vents scattered throughout the Castle and wick excess heat safely away from the awakening
Fyre
. Marcellus had given this some thought—the trick was to open vents in places where the unusual heat could be explained away as something else. He took a rumpled piece of paper from his pocket and consulted a list. Counting carefully along, he spun nine selected wheels until they stopped. Marcellus checked his paper again, checked the wheels and stood back satisfied.

By now a red pointer on a dial was telling him that the reservoir was nearly full; Marcellus turned the wheel to close the sluice gate, rechecked his list and left the control room. Job done.

Two hours later, the water was flowing through the Cauldron and the
Fyre
was beginning the slow, gentle process of coming alive once again. Wearily, Marcellus pushed his Alchemie
Keye
into the dip on the lower
Fyre
hatch. He remembered the time, when they were both growing old, that Julius had come to see him. He had given Marcellus back the Alchemie
Keye
because, “
I trust you
,
Marcellus
.
I know you will not use it
.” And he hadn't.

Well, not until now.

Romilly and Partridge had long gone back to work, but in the Vaults, Beetle still watched the
Live Plan
—he knew that what goes down must come up. Beetle's stomach rumbled and as if on cue, Foxy, Chief Charm Scribe, poked his head around the half-open door. Beetle looked up.

Marcellus climbed through the lower
Fyre
hatch
.
Once again, he was a blip on
The Live Plan of What Lies Beneath.

“Ta-da!” said Foxy. “Sausage sandwich!” He put a neatly wrapped package beside Beetle's candle. It smelled wonderful.

Marcellus closed the lower
Fyre
hatch and began to climb—fast
.

“Thanks, Foxy,” said Beetle. He looked back at the plan but his eyes, tired after so much staring, did not focus well enough to see the Marcellus blip. He glanced at the sausage sandwich longingly. He had no idea he was so hungry.

“I'll unwrap it for you,” said Foxy. “You don't want sticky stuff on the
Live Plan
.”

Beetle peered at the plan once more.

“Seen something?” asked Foxy.

“Yeah—I think …” Beetle pointed to the Marcellus blip.

Foxy leaned forward and his beaky nose cast a shadow over the blip.

Marcellus reached the upper
Fyre
hatch
.

“Shove over, Foxy,” said Beetle, irritated. “You're blocking the light.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Beetle looked up. “Sorry, Foxo. Didn't mean to snap. Thanks for the sandwich.”

Marcellus was through the upper
Fyre
hatch and off the
Live Plan.

Beetle bit into his sausage sandwich.

And down in the Deeps, the
Fyre
began to wake.

T
he Big Freeze had come
in, covering the Castle in a deep blanket of snow.

On a sunny late afternoon in the breathtakingly still air, pencil-thin columns of smoke rose from a thousand chimneys up into the sky. Along Wizard Way a crowd had gathered to watch a wedding procession walk from the Great Arch to the Palace. As the procession passed by, people from the crowd dropped in behind and followed, chattering about the young couple who had just gotten married in the Great Hall of the Wizard Tower: Simon and Lucy Heap.

Simon Heap, with his curly straw-colored hair neatly tied back in a ponytail, wore new blue robes—which, as the son of an Ordinary Wizard, he was entitled to do on his wedding day. The freshly dyed blue was bright and trimmed with traditional white wedding ribbons, which trailed behind him. Lucy Heap (née Gringe) was wearing a long, white, floaty woolen dress, which she had knitted herself and edged with pink fur. She had lovingly embroidered entwined blue and pink letters “S” and “L” across the skirt. Her mother had objected to this, saying it was bad taste, and for once in matters of taste Mrs. Gringe was probably right. But it was Lucy's Big Day and what Lucy wanted to do, Lucy was going to do.
No change there, then
, her brother, Rupert, had remarked.

The wedding party progressed down Wizard Way toward the Palace, crunching through newly fallen snow. The sky was a brilliant winter blue, but a small snow cloud directly above obligingly provided a few fat snowflakes, which floated down and landed on Lucy's beribboned long brown hair, where they settled like confetti. Lucy and Simon were laughing and talking happily to each other, Lucy twirling in the snow to show off her dress and sharing a joke with her new brothers.

Next to Lucy walked her own brother, Rupert, and his girlfriend, Maggie. Simon had considerably more companions: his adoptive sister, Princess Jenna, and his six brothers, including the four Forest Heaps: Sam, twins Edd and Erik, and Jo-Jo.

Mrs. Theodora Gringe, mother of the bride, walked right behind her daughter, occasionally treading on Lucy's train in her eagerness to be at the front. When they had emerged from the Great Arch, Mrs. Gringe had had to be restrained from actually leading the wedding party down Wizard Way. Lucy's mother was the proudest mother of the bride that the Castle had seen for a long time. Who would have imagined, thought Theodora Gringe, that the guests at her daughter's wedding would have included the great dignitaries of the Castle? The ExtraOrdinary Wizard, the Princess and the Chief Hermetic Scribe, and even that weird Alchemist fellow: they were all here. There was no doubt about it—the Gringes were on the way up.

But it was a shame, she thought, about the Heaps. They were a disreputable-looking bunch, and there were so
many
of them. Everywhere she looked she saw the distinctive curly straw-colored Heap hair topping a scruffy-looking individual. The Gringes were massively outnumbered.

A shout of laughter drew Theodora Gringe's attention to a group of four noisy men who reminded her of Silas Heap and who, she supposed (correctly), were his brothers. Mrs. Gringe grimaced and cast her critical eye over the Heaps she recognized. She grudgingly admitted to herself that Silas and Sarah looked smart enough in their blue and white wedding clothes—if a little eccentric with Sarah carrying that ridiculous duck-in-a-bag. Mrs. Gringe eyed up the duck: ready-plucked, perfect for a stew. Deciding to suggest that to Sarah later, she scrutinized the Heap boys with mixed feelings. The two youngest, Nicko and Septimus, weren't too bad.

Septimus in particular looked rather fine in his impressive formal Apprentice robes with the long purple ribbons dangling from his the sleeves. He was taller than Mrs. Gringe remembered and she noticed that his typical Heap hair had actually been combed. She didn't approve of Nicko's sailor's braids wound through his hair, although she supposed that his sober navy-blue boatyard tunic with its rather fetching sailor's collar was acceptable.

But at the sight of the remaining Heaps, Theodora Gringe's mouth puckered in distaste. The four Forest boys were a
disgrace
. She tutted as she watched Sam, Edd, Erik and Jo-Jo straggle along beside the bridegroom like—she searched for the right words—yes, that was it, like a pack of wolverines. At least they could have had the decency to keep to the back.