Stardust

And so the weeks passed, in a rattling, bone-jarring sort of a way, in the witch’s caravan, for the witch, and the bird, and the dormouse, and the fallen star.

Chapter Nine

Which Deals Chiefly With the Events at Diggory’s Dyke

Diggory’s Dyke was a deep cut between two chalk Downs — high, green hills, where a thin layer of green grass and reddish earth covered the chalk, and there was scarcely soil enough for trees.

The Dyke looked, from a distance, like a white chalk gash on a green velvet board. Local legend had it that the cut was dug, in a day and a night, by one Diggory, using a spade that had once been a sword blade before Wayland Smith had melted it down and beaten it out, on his journey into Faerie from Wall. There were those who said the sword had once been Flamberge, and others, that it was once the sword Balmung; but there were none who claimed to know just who Diggory had been, and it might all have been stuff and nonsense. Anyway, the path to Wall went through Diggory’s Dyke, and any foot-traveler or any person going by any manner of wheeled vehicle went through the Dyke, where the chalk rose on either side of you like thick white walls, and the Downs rose up above them like the green pillows of a giant’s bed.

In the middle of the Dyke, beside the path, was what appeared at first glance to be little more than a heaped pile of sticks and twigs. A closer inspection would have revealed it to be something in nature partway between a small shed and a large wooden teepee, with a hole in the roof through which grey smoke occasionally could be seen to trickle out.

The man in black had been giving the pile of sticks as close an inspection as he could for two days now, from the top of the Downs far above and, when he dared chance it, from closer. The hut, he had established, was inhabited by a woman of advanced years. She had no companions, and no obvious occupation, apart from that of stopping each and every lone traveler and each conveyance that passed through the Dyke and passing the time of day.

She seemed harmless enough, but Septimus had not become the only surviving male member of his immediate family by trusting appearances, and this old woman had, he was certain of it, slit Primus’s throat.

The obligations of revenge demanded a life for a life; they did not specify any way that the life should be taken. Now, by temperament, Septimus was one of nature’s poisoners. Blades and blows and booby traps were well enough in their way, but a vial of clear liquid, any trace of taste or odor gone when it was admixtured with food, that was Septimus’s metier.

Unfortunately the old woman seemed to take no food she did not gather or trap herself, and while he contemplated leaving a steaming pie at the door to her house, made of ripe apples and lethal baneberries, he dismissed it soon enough as impractical. He pondered rolling a chalk boulder down from the hills above her, dropping it onto her little house; but he could not be certain that he would hit her with it. He wished he was more of a magician — he had some of the locating ability that ran, patchily, in his family line, and a few minor magics he had learned or stolen over the years, but nothing that would be of use to him now, when he needed to invoke floods or hurricanes or lightning strikes. So Septimus observed his victim-to-be as a cat watches a mouse hole, hour after hour, by night and by day.

It was past the mid-hour of the night, and was quite moonless and dark, when Septimus finally crept to the door of the house of sticks, with a firepot in one hand and a book of romantic poetry and a blackbird’s nest, into which he had placed several fircones, in the other. Hanging from his belt was a club of oak-wood, its head studded with brass nails. He listened at the door, but could hear nothing but a rhythmic breathing and, once in a while, a sleeping grunt. His eyes were used to the darkness, and the house stood out against the white chalk of the Dyke. He crept around to the side of the building, where he could keep the door in sight.

First he tore the pages from the book of poems and crumpled each poem into a ball or a paper twist, which he pushed into the sticks of the shack’s wall at ground level. On top of the poems he placed the fircones. Next, he opened the firepot, and with his knife he fished a handful of waxed linen scraps from the lid, dipped them into the glowing charcoal of the pot and, when they were burning well, he placed them on the paper twists and the cones, and he blew gently on the flicker-ing yellow flames until the pile caught. He dropped dry twigs from the bird’s nest onto the little fire, which crackled in the night and began to blossom and grow. The dry sticks of the wall smoked gently, forcing Septimus to suppress a cough, and then they caught fire, and Septimus smiled.

Septimus returned to the door of the hut, hefting his wooden club on high. For, he had reasoned, either the hag will burn with her house, in which case my task is done, or, she will smell the smoke and wake affrighted and distracted, and she will run from the house, whereupon I shall beat her head with my club, staving it in before she can utter a word. And she will be dead, and I will be revenged.

“It is a fine plan,” said Tertius in the crackling of the dry wood. “And once he has killed her, he can go on to obtain the Power of Stormhold.”

“We shall see,” said Primus, and his voice was the wail of a distant night bird.

Flames licked at the little wooden house, and grew and blossomed on its sides with a bright yellow-orange flame. No one came to the door of the hut. Soon, the place was an inferno, and Septimus was forced to take several steps backwards, from the intensity of the heat. He smiled, widely and triumphantly, and he lowered his club.

There came a sharp pain to the heel of his foot. He twisted and saw a small bright-eyed snake, crimson in the fire’s glow, with its fangs sunk deep into the back of his leather boot. He flung his club at it, but the little creature pulled back from his heel and looped, at great speed, away behind one of the white chalk boulders.

The pain in his heel began to subside. If there was poison in its bite, thought Septimus, the leather will have taken much of it. I shall bind my leg at the calf, and then I shall remove my boot and make a cross-shaped incision in the place where I was bitten, and I shall suck out the serpent’s venom. So thinking, he sat down upon a chalk boulder in the fire’s light, and he tugged at his boot. It would not come off. His foot felt numb, and he realized that the foot must be swelling fast. Then I shall cut the boot off, he thought. He raised his foot to the level of his thigh; for a moment he thought his world was going dark, and then he saw that the flames, which had illuminated the Dyke like a bonfire, were gone. He felt chilled to the bone.

“So,” said a voice from behind him, soft as a silken strangling-rope, sweet as a poisoned lozenge, “you thought that you would warm yourself at the burning of my little cottage. Did you wait at the door to beat out the flames should they prove not to my liking?”Septimus would have answered her, but his jaw muscles were clenched, his teeth gritted hard together. His heart was pounding inside his chest like a small drum, not in its usual steady march but in a wild, arrhythmic abandon. He could feel every vein and artery in his body threading fire through his frame, if it was not ice that they pumped: he could not tell.