StarChaser, Page 2

  “But how?” the Lady wailed.

  “I will go and get the antidote from the Apothecary—”

  But the Lady was not listening. All her pent-up grievances and petty annoyances with her brother were tumbling out. “He’s hopeless! I told him he shouldn’t count his Orms before they were hatched, but he wouldn’t listen. And then he promised that awful Queen something that there was no way he could give her. And even if he gets better now, what use is the Wizard Tower to him without the Orm? He’s never going to be powerful enough to run a place like that. Never.”

  Marissa saw Mitza looking at the Lady, shocked.

  “Well, he’s not,” the Lady said defiantly. “I know my brother. He needs all the lapis lazuli he can get to be even a half-decent Wizard. He knows a few Darke tricks and he can Conjure up some nasty creatures, but he’s not properly trained.”

  Marissa busied herself pouring out more peppermint tea, listening with great interest as the Lady continued to pour out her frustrations about her brother. At last the Lady subsided, exhausted by her rant.

  “Actually,” Marissa said, “the Orm is already where His Highness wants it: in the Castle. I hear they are going to set it burrowing under the Wizard Tower so there’ll be plenty of lapis lazuli for him. It already sits on a load of the stuff anyway. In fact there will soon be so much lapis underneath it that anyone could run it.” Marissa affected a giggle. “Even little old me.”

  “Huh!” Mitza burst out. “A silly, empty-headed little thing like you? That, girl, is taking things too far.”

  Marissa felt like kicking Mitza, but she merely said, “Miss Mitza, do have a drop more tea.” Marissa poured the tea and then hurried upstairs to get her witch cloak. She took a wad of money and a few trinkets from the Lady’s bedroom in case a bribe was needed, then ran back down and headed for the door.

  “Marissa,” the Lady called querulously. “Where are you going?

  Marissa stopped halfway out the door. “To the Apothecary. To get the HeadBanger antidote. Must go. Got a camel train to catch.”

  “But Marissa . . .” the Lady called as the door was closing.

  “What now?” Marissa demanded.

  “You won’t be back until nearly midnight. What shall I do if they come for Orrie before then?” The Lady’s voice rose into a wail.

  What Marissa wanted to say was, Who cares what you do, you stupid old bat? But she restrained herself. “They won’t,” she said, and slammed the door.

  Mitza waddled over to the door and pushed the bolt across. “She’ll never get it. There is no way that nasty Apothecary woman is going to give that silly witch the antidote to the HeadBanger. No way at all.” Mitza shook her head with a grim enjoyment.

  The Lady sighed. “Well, if anyone can persuade that ghastly Karamander Draa woman to hand it over, Marissa can. She seems very determined, don’t you think? I find her rather scary, to tell you the truth.”

  Mitza tried not to look surprised at the Lady’s confidential way of speaking to her. She had noticed that since Oraton-Marr had been rendered incapable, the Lady had relaxed and begun to take her into her confidence. Mitza realized that she was metamorphosing from a servant to a companion—maybe even, she thought, a friend. Although Mitza was not entirely sure what a friend actually was, she liked the idea. It would give her much greater influence over events. And probably better food, too.

  Mitza considered her answer carefully. “There is indeed something about that witch, my Lady,” she said. “But even so, I do not think the Apothecary will give her the potion. She will not forget that His Highness stole her children from her.”

  “But it’s not as though he kept them,” the Lady protested a little petulantly. “She got them back in the end, didn’t she?”

  Mitza nodded. “She did indeed. And why she wanted them back I cannot imagine. That small one was a noisy little brat. And the big one was plain rude.” Mitza sighed. “But children are precious to their parents, so they say. And that can come in useful at times.” She smiled, showing her sharp little white teeth, so closely packed together. “Very useful in all kinds of ways. Ha-ha.”

  The Lady flashed Mitza a puzzled glance. Sometimes the woman worried her.

  Mitza warmed to her theme. “Perhaps Marissa is planning to do something unpleasant to one of them and use it as a bargaining tool. I imagine that would work.”

  “I imagine it would,” the Lady replied, a little uncomfortably. Then she brightened up. “Well, as long as she comes back with the antidote I won’t be asking how she got it.”

  Mitza was silent. The talk of children and their parents had turned Mitza’s thoughts to Alice TodHunter Moon and the Castle, where the girl now lived. If there was any chance of going there soon, then Mitza must make her own visit to an Apothecary. She would hate to be unprepared for a meeting with young Alice. It would be a wasted opportunity, and Mitza hated waste.

  FISHFACE

  Dawn was breaking as Marissa hurried out through Beggars’ Gate, the only unguarded entrance to the Red City, and joined the queue for the camel train. As Marissa waited, she took in the scene. Spread before her was a sprawling encampment of tents of all shapes and sizes and conditions, ranging from a ragged blanket thrown over a few sticks to some large circular structures of richly embroidered cloth, which were quite beautiful. Their inhabitants were a mixture of beggars, free spirits, criminals, conjurers, mavericks and misfits—anyone who preferred to live outside the harsh regime of the Red Queen. Many there felt that the sacrifice of a house with stone walls was worth the peace of mind it brought. It was, with some justification, known as the City of the Free.

  As Marissa shuffled forward, getting ever closer to the steaming, harrumphing camels, she gazed down at the sea of tents, many of which glimmered from within with candlelight, and in the dull light of the dawn they looked far more enticing than the camel train ahead. Marissa watched the early-morning activity; she saw fires being coaxed into life, listened to the gentle murmur of conversation and smelled the coffee being brewed. Then she looked out to the empty desert beyond and up to the lightening sky, where a few stars were still visible. Marissa was used to the confines of the Forest and the city, and the great emptiness of the desert sent a feeling of panic rushing through her.

  To overcome the panic, Marissa concentrated on the camels ahead. She saw hot camel breath steaming in the air, heard the phlegmy snorts, felt the ground shake with the thud of their stamping feet and watched their ungainly lurching lope as they set off with their passengers. Which made her feel even worse.

  So Marissa turned her thoughts to the earlier hours of the morning. What stuck in her mind was her comment to Mitza about the Wizard Tower: Anyone could run it. Even little old me. Mitza’s scathing response rang in her ears, and Marissa thought how fed-up she was with people treating her with no respect. If she ran the Wizard Tower, that would show them. No one would dare belittle her then. Marissa allowed herself to savor the idea: Witch Mother in charge of the Wizard Tower. Why shouldn’t a witch run the Wizard Tower? With all that new lapis soon to be made by the Orm, it was true that pretty much anyone with a little bit of Magyk could run it. All they needed was the nerve to walk in and do it. And she, Marissa thought with a smile, had more nerve than anyone else she knew.

  The queue shuffled forward one place and the person behind stepped on Marissa’s cloak. Fired up with her newly imagined status, Marissa turned around and glared imperiously at the man, who, to her immense satisfaction, shrank back with a hasty apology. Marissa turned away nursing a smile. She could get used to this.

  Suddenly, Marissa found herself at the head of the camel queue. Her smile changed to an expression of distaste as she eyed “her” camel. It was a large, ragged beast. Its hair was coming off in clumps, half its ear was missing, and its yellow eyes regarded Marissa with undisguised malevolence. It did not smell too good either.

  “Where to, missy?” the camel driver asked.

  A sudden realization came over Marissa: sh
e did not want Oraton-Marr to recover. She didn’t want him bossing her around again and making snide remarks—and more to the point, she did not want him in the Wizard Tower—she wanted it for herself.

  Marissa looked at the camel driver: small, wrinkled and burnished like a nut from the desert sun. She saw his one-toothed smile and his calculating leer, and it was with great pleasure that she told him, “Nowhere, Fishface,” then turned on her heel and walked away.

  A LOZENGE FOR A BAG OF KRAAN

  Marissa took the path down into the encampment and wandered slowly through the tents. She stopped a few people to ask for what she sought, and after ten minutes she found herself outside a beautiful tent with faded red and blue stripes. A small handbell sat on a low stool; Marissa rang the bell and waited. Some minutes later—just as Marissa was thinking of giving up—a tiny woman with piercing blue eyes looked out suspiciously.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “Are you an Apothecary?” Marissa asked.

  “What if I am?” the woman demanded angrily.

  Marissa took out the money that she had intended for Karamander Draa and held the notes out flat on her palm, as though she were offering sugar lumps to a horse.

  The woman looked at the notes; it was more than she would earn in months. “Come in, my darling,” she told Marissa. “You are lucky. You have found the most skilled Apothecary in the City of the Free. I can supply anything you wish.” The woman cast her shrewd gaze over Marissa. “And no questions asked, my lovely, no questions at all.”

  Marissa handed over the notes and stepped into the dimness of the tent, redolent with the tang of bitter powders, fragrant with the oily musk of suspensions.

  An hour later, Marissa slipped unnoticed into Hospitable Gard. To the sound of snores drifting down the stairs, she quietly made Oraton-Marr’s favorite sherbet drink and laid it on a tray with a small bowl of sugared almonds—the only food he could bear to eat. Beside the bowl she placed the green lozenge for which she had exchanged her handful of notes. Treading softly on the stone stairs in her bare feet, Marissa took the tray up to Oraton-Marr’s room on the upper floor. As she pushed open the door the long white muslin drapes in front of the window moved gently in the cool morning breeze.

  The sorcerer lay prone on a simple, low bed covered with a linen sheet. His green eyes, dark with pain, watched Marissa as she walked lightly across the room. As Marissa knelt down beside him with the tray, Oraton-Marr attempted a smile. It was, Marissa noted, very weak. She did not give him much longer in this world. “Good morning, Your Highness,” she whispered. “I have brought you something to ease the headache.”

  Oraton-Marr groaned. “Nothing . . . will ease it,” he whispered. “Only . . . only the Apothecary . . .”

  “I have been to the Apothecary,” Marissa said, well aware that there was only one Apothecary who Oraton-Marr would think she meant.

  His eyes lit up with hope. “She gave you something?” he whispered.

  “She gave me this.” Marissa showed him the green lozenge.

  “For me?” he asked.

  Oraton-Marr’s expression reminded Marisa of a dog begging. It revolted her, but she hid her revulsion well. “It is indeed for you, Your Highness,” Marissa replied. “And here is a sherbet to help you swallow it.”

  With a wheeze of pain, the sorcerer struggled to raise his head.

  Marissa closed her fingers over the lozenge, trapping it inside her fist. “But first,” she said softly, “first, there is something I want.”

  Oraton-Marr let his head fall and gave a cry of pain. “A price . . .” he murmured as his head hit the pillow. “But of course . . .” He looked Marissa in the eye. “Name it. I will pay.”

  “I need a bodyguard,” Marissa said. “Something really scary.”

  “How scary?” asked Oraton-Marr.

  Marissa leaned forward. Oraton-Marr smelled her breath, sweet with one of his sugared almonds. “Extremely scary,” she whispered. Marissa had given some thought to how she was going to clear the Wizard Tower of its current occupants. “And it must particularly prey on Wizards. Oh, and Apprentices too, of course.”

  Oraton-Marr opened his eyes wide in amazement. But he felt too ill to question Marissa. All he wanted was the lozenge. “I have . . . something,” he croaked.

  “I knew you would,” Marissa said.

  Oraton-Marr said nothing. Marissa was extremely lucky that he had what she wanted. He was an itinerant sorcerer and traveled light, with little Magykal hardware—as it was known in the Wizarding trade. He kept what he had in a wooden trunk recently painted purple in honor of the position he had hoped to occupy in the Wizard Tower. The contents of the trunk were a mixture of stolen Charms, Engenders and Talismans—none of which were of any use to him in his present state. “Kraan,” he whispered. “In the trunk. They kill . . . anyone with . . . green eyes.”

  Marissa rifled through the contents of the trunk, gritty with sand. She had no idea what she was looking for. She held up each object in turn until she showed him a soft black leather drawstring bag. “Yes,” he grunted.

  Marissa weighed the bag in her hand. It was very heavy for its size. She pulled open the cords and peered inside to see it was full of shining red beads. “So how do they work, then?” she asked.

  “Instructions in . . . bag,” Oraton-Marr whispered. “Take six beads. Only six. Makes one Kraan.”

  “I’ll take the whole bag,” Marissa said, jiggling it up and down, listening to the glassy clinking of the beads, as though it were a toy.

  Oraton-Marr groaned. The noise felt like needles stabbing his eardrums. He looked regretfully at the soft black leather bag. He would miss those little red beads. He had been planning to use the Kraan to help him take over the Wizard Tower—once he had acquired a pair of dark glasses, of course. But Oraton-Marr would pay anything the witch asked if she would only give him the green lozenge to cure his headache.

  It was only after he had swallowed the lozenge and was falling headlong into a deep pit of sleep that Oraton-Marr realized that Marissa had never actually said that it would cure his headache.

  With the bag of Kraan weighing heavy in her pocket, Marissa let herself into a deserted courtyard, which contained nothing more than a channel of cool, clear water running around the edge of its high walls and a single palm tree in the middle. She walked into the small patch of shade beneath the tree and disappeared.

  PART II

  DUST IN HIS EYE

  In the Castle, in the cool of the early morning, Septimus Heap and his young Apprentice, Alice TodHunter Moon—known to most people as Tod—were setting off to visit Septimus’s eldest brother, Simon Heap.

  They hurried down Wizard Way, the broad avenue that led from the Wizard Tower to the Palace, keeping to the middle to avoid the early-morning bustle that accompanied the opening of the various shops and businesses that lined the Way. The rays of the sun, still low in the sky, skimmed across the low roofs and sent shafts of light glinting off tall silver torch posts, eclipsing the light of their still-burning flames. At the far end of Wizard Way, Septimus and his Apprentice took a sharp right turn into Snake Slipway. This was a much narrower, winding street that led down to the Moat. On either side were houses, the more impressively tall ones on the right-hand side, but it was to the smaller houses on the left that Septimus and Tod were heading. The waters of the Moat were in sight, flowing sluggishly by the end of the slipway, when Septimus took a turn into a pretty front garden, walked up a short path and knocked on a bright red front door.

  A young woman opened the door. Lines of worry etched her face, and her brown hair was hastily braided and tied in a knot, lacking her usual ribbons. She wore a long white tunic covered with intricate colorful embroidery, and some serious brown boots. “Hello, Lucy,” Septimus said. “I just got your message.”

  “Oh, Septimus. Thank you for coming,” Lucy Heap said with a strained smile.

  “Tod’s with me; hope that’s okay?”

  “Tod is
welcome here anytime,” Lucy said. She looked at Tod, who was hanging back behind Septimus. “You know that, Tod, don’t you? Anytime, night or day. After what you did for our William, this is your home too. Anyway, come in, both of you. Simon’s upstairs.”

  Septimus and Tod followed Lucy along the narrow corridor to the stairs. “Your message said that Simon has dust in his eye?” Septimus asked.

  “Yes. Dust,” Lucy said.

  Septimus thought she sounded somewhat overwrought about such a little thing. “I was wondering,” he said carefully, for Lucy was clearly on a short fuse, “whether Simon should see a physician. Have you asked Marcellus to look at it?”

  Lucy wheeled around to face her visitors. “It’s not that kind of dust,” she said desperately, and she turned and ran up the stairs. Septimus and Tod hurried after her.

  Lucy led Septimus and Tod into the large room at the front of the house. Simon was lying on the bed, which was made up for the day and covered with a patchwork quilt. He was half propped up on a nest of pillows with his head tilted back and his eyes closed. “Si,” Lucy said quietly, “there’s someone to see you.”

  Simon covered his right eye with his hand and pushed against it hard as if to keep it in place. Warily, he opened his left eye. “Oh,” he said. “Sep. Tod. Sorry, can’t sit up. Afraid of it all . . . falling out.”

  “Falling out?” asked Septimus. “What . . . you mean your eye?”

  “Yeah. What’s left of it,” Simon answered quietly.

  Lucy slipped her arm around Tod’s shoulders and they drew back while Septimus went over to his brother. “It’s your lapis eye?” Septimus asked, knowing full well it was, but needing time to think. The iris in Simon’s right eye, already injured, had turned to lapis lazuli after he had used Darke Magyk to travel through solid lapis in order to rescue his son, William. This had, of course, blinded him in that eye, but apart from that had given Simon no trouble—until now.