Physik - By Angie Sage Page 0,63

he wore the strange pointy-toed shoes that were fashionable and made him feel very foolish. Septimus had actually cut the ends off each point because he had kept tripping over them, but it did not exactly improve the shoes' appearance and made his toes cold. He sat huddled in his winter woolen cloak. The Great Chamber of Alchemie and Pnysik felt cold that morning, as the furnace was cooling after many days of use.

The Great Chamber was a large, circular vault underneath the very center of the Castle. Aboveground there was nothing to show but the chimney that rose from the great furnace and spouted noxious fumes - and often rather interestingly colored smoke - day and night. Around the edge of the Chamber were thick ebony tables, carved to fit the curve of the walls, on which great glass bottles and flasks filled with all manner of substances and creatures, alive, dead - and halfway between - were lined up and neatly labeled. Although the Chamber was underground and no natural light reached it, it was full of a bright, golden glow. Everywhere great candles were set burning and the light from these reflected off a sea of gold.

Set into the wall near the entrance to the Chamber was the furnace where Marcellus Pye had first transmuted base metal into gold. Marcellus had so enjoyed the thrill of seeing the dull black of the lead and the gray of the mercury slowly change to a brilliant red liquid and then cool to the beautiful deep yellow of pure gold that barely a day since had passed when he did not make a little gold just for the fun of it. Consequently, Marcellus had amassed a large amount of gold, so much that everything in the Chamber that could be made of gold was - hinges on the cupboard doors, drawer handles and their keys, knives, tripods, rushlight holders, doorknobs, taps - everything. But all these little golden knickknacks paled into insignificance beside the two largest chunks of gold that Septimus had ever seen - and wished he never had - The Great Doors of Time.

These were the doors that Septimus had been pushed through one hundred and sixty-nine days ago to the day. They were set into the wall opposite the furnace, two ten-feet-tall chunks of solid gold covered with long strings of carved symbols, which Marcellus had told him were the Calculations of Time. The Doors were flanked by two statues brandishing sharp swords, and they were Locked and Barred - Septimus had found that out soon enough - and only Marcellus had the Keye.

That morning, Septimus was seated at his usual place, the Siege of the Rose, next to the head of a long table in the middle of the Chamber, with his back to the hated Doors. The table was lit with a line of brightly burning candles placed down the center. In front of him was a pile of neatly stacked paper, the results of his early morning's work that had involved the last, laborious checking of Marcellus's astrological calculations, which were the final touches on what he called his Great Work.

At the other end of the table sat seven scribes, for Marcellus Pye had a thing about sevens. Normally the scribes had little to do and spent much of the day staring into space, picking their noses and tunelessly humming strange songs. The songs always made Septimus feel terribly alone, for their notes were put together in an odd way and they were like nothing he had ever heard before. Today, however, all seven scribes were fully employed. They were scribbling furiously, copying out in their very best script the last seven pages of the Great Work, desperate to meet the deadline. Every now and then, one stifled a yawn; like Septimus, the scribes had been hard at work since six that morning. It was now, as Marcellus reminded everyone as he strode into the Chamber, ten o'clock, or ten of the clock, as he put it.

Marcellus Pye was a good-looking, somewhat vain young man with thick black curls of hair falling over his brow in the fashion of the day. He wore the long black and red robes of an Alchemist, which were encrusted with a good deal more gold than those of his Apprentice. That morning there was even a dusting of gold on his fingertips. He smiled as he looked around the Chamber. His Great Work - the I, Marcellus that