Septimus Heap, Book Six_ Darke - Angie Sage [72]
Suddenly, what everyone in the audience had been waiting for happened. With a shout of something long and complicated—that later no one could remember—Marcia threw her arms into the air. There was a loud whoosh, and a curtain of blindingly bright purple light shot as high as the very tips of Marcia’s fingers, then raced off along the Cord with the zipping fizz of fire along a fuse.
A loud and appreciative “ooh” rose from the crowd, which seemed to startle Marcia. She swung around and glared at the assembled throng.
“Shh!” she hissed.
Abashed, the crowd fell silent. Some began to sidle away, but the more knowledgeable stayed, knowing that the best was yet to come.
Marcia had set the curtain of light racing off in one direction only—to her right. The reason for this was that she wanted to be present at the place where the light joined up. The join in a Safety Curtain was a delicate thing, and although some Wizards, for dramatic effect, would have sent the light racing off in both directions and hope that it successfully melded somewhere on the other side of the Palace, Marcia was more careful. She also disapproved of drama; she thought it devalued Magyk and encouraged people to see it as an entertainment—hence her irritation with the crowd.
Now the wait began for the return of the purple fire. It took a while. The nearly seven-foot-high purple curtain had to travel all around the Palace and, at the back of the building, where there had been too many people on the Cordon, down through the garden too—fairly close, in fact, to the hedge that divided the Dragon Field from the Palace garden.
Spit Fyre slept through the oncoming rush, but his Imprintor and Pilot, Septimus Heap, was wide-awake. He had been expecting a Safety Curtain, as he knew Marcia did not do things by halves. At the sight of the swathe of Magykal purple moving behind the top of the Dragon Field hedge, Septimus looked gloomily at the oncoming purple wall, admiring its evenness and brilliance. Marcia had clearly performed a textbook piece of Magyk—and he had not been part of it. Septimus watched the Safety Curtain travel on its way, and then he went back to the Dragon House, unwilling to face Marcia just then. He knew what she would say. It would be exactly what he would say to an Apprentice of his own if he or she ever missed something like this. And he didn’t want to hear it.
At last the crowd saw the purple curtain reappear on the other side of the Palace. Conscious of the disapproving presence of the ExtraOrdinary Wizard, they greeted it with a restrained murmur of excitement and watched with bated breath as one end of the shimmering curtain traveled toward the other.
Later some said that the Closing of the Safety Curtain was an anticlimax, but others said it was the most amazing thing they had ever seen. It depended—like many things in life—on what you expected to see. All saw the meeting of the two sheets of light and the violent flash that accompanied it, but those who truly looked saw, for a few amazing seconds, the history of the Castle played out before them. The Safety Curtain was ancient Magyk (which always involved some form of breath control) and had been used by Castle Dwellers in a more primitive form even before the advent of the very first ExtraOrdinary Wizard. Before the Castle Walls had been built, a Safety Curtain had often been put around the Castle at the dark of the moon in an effort to keep out marauders from the