Septimus Heap 4 - Queste (35 page)

“Ouch,” said Beetle, dusting himself off and struggling to his feet. “You might have warned us you were putting on the brakes.”

“Didn’t have time,” said Septimus. “Look.” He pointed to the fog.

Beetle whistled between his teeth. “Where did that come from?”

“I saw it,” said Jenna, “but I thought it was snow.”

It was true—the fog was exactly the same color as snow. It stretched from left to right as far as the eye could see and blended seamlessly into the gray-white snow-filled sky. Jenna did not like fog; it reminded her of the time when she had sat marooned inside a Magykal

fog near the Marram Marshes, listening to the click of a pistol no more than a few feet away, aimed at her heart. “Do you think the Thing is in there, waiting for us?” she whispered.

“No,” said Beetle. “Look—the Thing

saw it before we did. There are the tracks.” The lopsided tracks had left the frozen stream, doubled back on themselves and disappeared up the hill and into the trees.

As they scanned the tracks, a long low rumble began to shake the ground. Deep within the fog, something was coming.

“Can you hear that?” asked Jenna, wide-eyed and pale.

Septimus and Beetle nodded.

“Run?” said Beetle as the ground vibrated through the soles of his boots. “Now?”

“Where to?” asked Jenna, glancing around. Nowhere looked safe to her.

Septimus shook his head. “No…no. It’s going away now. Listen. It’s passed by. Whatever it was.”

“Whatever it was,” muttered Beetle, “I would not have liked to have been in the way.”

Not so very far away, at the top of the hill, the Thing

stopped and looked down on the three figures standing uncertainly on the edge of the fog bank. It grimaced, contorting Ephaniah’s rat mouth into a vicious snarl. Just a few more careless steps, it thought, and the job would have been done.

But no matter—let them take their chance with the Foryx on the precipice path. And if they miss the Foryx then it will do exactly as its new Master had instructed. The Thing

respected its new Master. Slowly and clumsily, it turned away and, increasingly tired of the unwieldy body it had saddled itself with, lumbered off through the snow.

Back at the frozen stream Septimus was looking at the compass, shaking it in irritation. “Bother, bother, bother. Stop it.”

The needle, however, took no notice of being spoken to and carried on spinning wildly. “Jen,” he said, “we’d better look at the map. I think we’ve reached the edge of the hole.”

“Literally,” Beetle said with a gulp. “Look.” The fog was a mixture of eddies and swirls that drifted up in the air. It was constantly shifting, in some places dense, in others almost clear—and it was in one of these clear patches that Beetle had seen that no more than a few steps away the frozen stream had become a waterfall of ice, plunging over the edge of an abyss.

“Oh…” Septimus swayed and closed his eyes. A horrible feeling of vertigo shot up from the soles of his feet and made his head spin.

Beetle and Jenna crept forward and warily peered over. The fog rose, swirling in long tendrils that wrapped themselves around their feet and chilled them to the bone. Beetle crept even closer to the edge; he picked up a rock from the pile of stones beside the waterfall and hurled it into the chasm. They counted the seconds, waiting for the sound of the rock hitting the bottom, but after one whole minute they had still heard nothing. A sudden gust of wind caught Beetle’s cloak and sent it noisily flapping.

“Beetle!” Jenna gasped, grabbing hold of his sleeve. “You’re too close. Come back.” This was exactly the kind of thing that Beetle’s mother would have done. If it had been his mother, Beetle would have become extremely petulant and deliberately stood even closer to the edge—but not with Jenna. A decidedly unpetulant Beetle allowed himself to be pulled away.

Septimus, meanwhile, had no intention of going anywhere near the edge. He had found a nice, solid tree a safe distance away and was leaning against it, his head still spinning. He hadn’t felt vertigo like this in a long time—certainly not since he had had the Flyte Charm. How he wished he had the Flyte Charm now. Trust Marcia, he thought, to take away the one thing that would have made this whole expedition actually easy. He took a deep breath. Not more than a few feet away was the deepest chasm he had ever come across. Septimus didn’t need to look over the edge to know that—he could feel it all the way up from his feet, and he knew.

He remembered the Young Army saying: On the brink, stop and think. Now that he was a little older, the rhymes he had learned parrot-fashion seemed to make sense in a way they hadn’t at the time. And so, leaning against the tree—as close to the brink as he was willing to get—Septimus began to think. He thought about the Queste. He thought he really should tell Jenna and Beetle about the Questing Stone. He should tell them to go on without him and leave him to do the Queste—wherever that would take him. But then he thought of walking away from Jenna and Beetle, of leaving them alone to find Nicko, and he knew he couldn’t—he just couldn’t.

Jenna’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Look, Sep,” she said, laying the map on the snow beneath the tree. Then, “No, Ullr, go sit somewhere else,” she said, gently pushing the cat off the paper. Ullr looked unimpressed. He sat down in the snow and began to lick his paws. Jenna kneeled down and ran her finger around the edge of the hole where the missing piece should have been. “It’s funny,” she said, “that the edge of the hole in the map is at the edge of a chasm. It’s almost as if it were a real

hole, if you see what I mean. I figure the House of Foryx is over there.” She pointed into the fog. “It all makes sense now. That must be what Aunt Ells called the great pit.”

Suddenly Beetle said, “Look! There’s the bridge.” He whistled. “That is some bridge.”

Far away to the left they could just make out the spindly outline of a structure leaping high into the air and disappearing into the fog. It looked beautiful—a delicate tracery of fine lines like a spider web suspended in space. And then the fog closed over it once more and it was gone.

“That’s it!” said Jenna, excited. “All we have to do is cross that bridge and we’re there. Isn’t that great?

“Great,” said Septimus with a sinking feeling that started in his stomach and went all the way down to his feet. “Really great.”

They set off toward the bridge, following the edge of the chasm but keeping—on Septimus’s insistence—a safe distance away. After a while it became apparent that they were, for the very first time in this strange place, actually following a path. The snow looked trampled by animals rather than humans and Septimus could not help but wonder what kind of animals. Whatever they were, they had the kind of droppings that Septimus preferred not to step in.

As the morning wore on, the sun rose above the fog and the heavy snow clouds in the sky began to clear. But the fog remained, moving and shifting like a great brooding creature beside them. Sometimes Septimus thought he heard distant voices far below, somewhere deep within the fog. Once, Jenna stopped, convinced she had heard someone cry out.

The thought that soon they would have to step onto a bridge and walk into this shifting, brooding bank of fog preoccupied all three—and Septimus in particular. He dropped back and let Jenna and Beetle move ahead. As he trudged behind the two wolverine-cloaked figures with their Forest backpacks—and a small orange cat with its fur puffed out—something else began to preoccupy Septimus. Very reluctantly, but unable to resist, he put his hand into his tunic pocket and drew out the Questing Stone. Hardly daring to look, he closed his eyes and then—remembering how near they were to the edge of the precipice—he opened them again fast. The Stone was yellow. Yellow to guide you through the snow, thought Septimus with a sinking feeling.

Jenna turned around suddenly. “Hey, Sep. You okay?”

Septimus quickly shoved his hand back in his pocket. “Yeah,” he said, heavily. “Fine.”

All along their journey beside the chasm, the path had steadily been curving to the right as it led them around in a great circle, but the fog had always obscured the bridge. But now, as they approached a thick-set, snow-covered tree standing close to the path, two tall, iron pillars appeared out of the fog. Tall, thin and strangely beautiful, the pair of pillars leaned slightly backward, glistening with damp from the mist, their tops tapering and disappearing into the swirls of fog that drifted up from the chasm below. With a feeling of dread, Septimus knew they had arrived.

“Wow…” breathed Beetle. “Look at that.”

Septimus thought he would rather not.

The bridge itself was a precarious structure of wooden planks laid across two thick cables that rose in a curve and disappeared into the fog. How long did it go on for? he wondered. Was it just a few more yards or was it for miles?

Septimus had a horrible feeling that the latter was more likely. There was something about the curve that made it look

like a wide span. It was an odd structure; from the top of the pillars, four cables swooped down. Two stretched far behind them and were buried in the snow and the other two followed the curve of the bridge and vanished into the fog.

Septimus searched for something that might reasonably be called “sides” or possibly “handrails,” but all he could see was what seemed to him to be a couple of pieces of string. He’d had nightmares about bridges like this—but none of them had been this bad.

Septimus glanced at Jenna and Beetle, strangely relieved to see that they did not look exactly overjoyed at the prospect of the bridge either. He was about to suggest they have some of Sam’s fish—anything to delay the awful moment when he would have to step onto what looked like no more than a piece of beginner’s knitting—when he heard a movement in the tree behind them.

“That’ll cost you,” said a harsh voice from above.

They leaped into the air at the sound of the first new voice they had heard since Sam had said good-bye.

“I said, it’ll cost you,” the voice repeated.

Septimus looked up. “Where are you?” he asked.

“Up the tree. And I’m coming down.”

THE TOLL-MAN

A small, wiry man clad

head to toe in an assortment of furs clambered down the trunk of the oak tree and jumped lightly onto the snow. His deep-set eyes, like two little black beads, quickly took in Jenna and Beetle and then fixed on Septimus as he came toward them. The man’s brown, wrinkled face put Jenna in mind of an organ grinder’s monkey she had once seen at a fair—she hadn’t liked the look of the monkey then, and she didn’t like the look of the man now.

The man waited until Septimus had joined them and then he spoke. “In case you was a’wondering, I be the Toll-Man,”

he said. “No one crosses the bridge without paying a price. Some pay more than others. It depends.”

“On what?” asked Jenna sharply. She didn’t like the way the man was looking at her.

“On whether I like ’em. And on how much gold they have.” He smiled unpleasantly. The smile showed, to their surprise, two rows of gold teeth in bizarrely mismatched shapes and sizes. “Don’t worry, Missy,” he said, “I can tell you young ’uns still got your own teeth and they’re no good to me. I’m a fair man. Don’t ask folks for what they can’t give.”

He shook his head as though amused. “But I is always surprised by what folks can give when they have to.” He ran a long pale tongue over his uneven teeth and grinned.

“So, how much does it cost to cross the bridge?” Jenna asked.

“How much do you want to cross?” asked the Toll-Man.

No one answered because no one actually wanted to cross at all. All they wanted was to be on the other side.

“So are you crossing or just looking?” asked the Toll-Man irritably. “I charge for looking, too. Can’t have folks cluttering up the place all day just looking.”

“We’re crossing,” said Jenna decisively. “How much do you want?”

The Toll-Man looked Jenna up and down. “Well, Missy. That’s a nice circlet of gold you have upon that pretty head of yours. I’ll take that.”

Jenna’s hands flew up to her gold circlet—the one that her mother, the Queen, had worn as a girl. “You can’t have that!”

she gasped.

The Toll-Man shrugged. “Then you can’t cross.”

With a heavy heart, Jenna reached up to take the circlet off. It was only an object, she told herself. Nicko was worth more than gold. Much

more. But the Toll-Man did not notice; he was already eyeing Beetle. “You, boy—I’ll have your timepiece,” he said.

Beetle looked shocked. “How do you know I’ve got a timepiece?” he asked.

The man paused, briefly wrong-footed. “I can hear it ticking,” he said. “Got an ear for ticking, I ’ave.”

Beetle frowned. He shot a questioning glance at Septimus, who returned it with a slight nod of his head. “And you, boy,” the Toll-Man said, turning to Septimus, “you’ve got a nice silver belt there with a few bits of gold on it. That’ll do me well enough. I’ll have the little trinkets inside, too.” The man regarded them all with his bright yellow smile. “You see—I’m a fair man. I don’t ask for what you haven’t got.” From his pocket he drew out a large velvet bag that hung from a collapsible wooden ring. With a practiced flick of the wrist he snapped the ring open and the bag hung down like an empty sock. Like the organ grinder’s monkey, the Toll-Man pushed the bag toward Septimus. “You first, boy. Put your belt in there.”

Very slowly, Septimus unbuckled his Apprentice belt, closely observed by the eager eye of the Toll-Man, who licked his teeth once again in anticipation. “’Urry up, boy. You won’t get across in daylight at this rate.” Septimus was fumbling with the last part of the buckle, partly because his cold fingers were clumsy and slow, but mainly because he needed time to think. Another Young Army saying was going around in his head: To win the fight, time it right. Time it right, he thought, gritting his teeth, time it…right!

With a click, the buckle finally snapped open and the Toll-Man leaned forward with his collecting bag. At that moment, to Jenna’s shock, Septimus sprang at the Toll-Man and knocked him to the ground. The man fell back into a thick patch of snow. Before he had time to push Septimus off, Beetle had piled on top of them and Jenna watched in horror as, like a giant snowball, the struggling trio rolled toward the edge of the precipice.