Free Septimus Heap 3 - Physik by Angie Sage

lad a break, Marcia. He fell into the Moat last night and—”
    “He did what?”
    “Fell into the Moat. I really think you should postpone—”
    “How come he fell into the Moat, Alther?” Marcia asked suspiciously.
    Eager to change the subject, Alther wandered over to Marcia and sat down companionably on the corner of her desk. He knew he would regret it, but he could not resist saying, “Well, perhaps you should have predicted this would happen, Marcia, and scheduled the Prediction Practical for later in the day.”
    “That's not funny,” snapped Marcia, checking through the papers. “In fact, you are getting horribly predictable yourself. Predictably childish. You are spending far too much of your time flying around with Septimus and generally showing off when at your age you should know better. I shall send Catchpole down to the Palace to fetch Septimus right now. That will wake him up.”
    “I imagine you'll have to wake up Catchpole first, Marcia,” Alther commented.
    “Catchpole's on night duty, Alther. He's been awake all night.”
    “Funny habit he's got, that Catchpole,” said Alther pensively, “of snoring while he's awake. You'd think he'd find it irritating, wouldn't you?” Marcia did not deign to reply. She got up from her desk, drew her purple robes around her and stormed out, slamming the Library door behind her.
    Alther floated through the hatch that led onto the golden Pyramid roof and wandered up to the top of the Pyramid itself. The autumn morning air was cool and a fine drizzle fell. The base of the Wizard Tower had disappeared into a thick white mist. A few roofs of the taller houses were visible as they broke through the white blanket, but most of the Castle was lost to view. Although as a ghost, Alther did not feel the cold, he felt like shivering in the wind that eddied around the top of the Wizard Tower. He drew his faded purple cloak around him and looked down at the hammered-silver platform that surmounted the Pyramid. Alther had always been fascinated by the hieroglyphs inscribed in the platform, but he had never deciphered them, as indeed no one else had. Many hundreds of years ago one ExtraOrdinary Wizard had been brave enough to climb to the top of the Pyramid and taken a rubbing of the hieroglyphs, which now hung in the Library. Every time Alther, as ExtraOrdinary Wizard, had looked at the old gray piece of paper framed on the Library wall, he had felt a horrible sense of vertigo, for it reminded him of the time when, as a young Apprentice, he had been forced to chase his Master, DomDaniel, up to that very place.
    But now, as a ghost, Alther was fearless. He experimented with standing on the platform first on one leg and then the other; then he threw himself off, tumbling and turning through the air. As he fell, he tried to imagine what it must have felt like to fall as a human being, as DomDaniel had once done. Just above the mist he leveled out and set off for the Palace.
    Catchpole was having a bad dream and it was about to get worse. He hated being on night duty down in the old spell cupboard beside the huge silver doors to the Wizard Tower. It wasn't so much the lingering smells of decaying spells that upset Catchpole; it was the fear of being asked to do something by a more senior Wizard.
    Catchpole was only a sub-Wizard and he was not progressing as fast as he had hoped—he had had to retake his Primaries twice and still had not passed—which meant that all Wizards in the Tower were senior to him. After years of being deputy to the fearsome Hunter, Catchpole hated being told what to do, especially when he always seemed to do it wrong. So when Marcia Overstrand strode into the old spell cupboard and demanded to know just what he thought he was doing, sitting there with his eyes closed and looking about as useful as a dead sheep, Catchpole's heart sank. What was she going to ask him to do? And what was she going to say when, as usual, he made a mess of it? Catchpole was