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But the most interesting project that occupied the Supreme Custodian was Simon Heap. Simon had been brought straight from the chapel to the Ladies’ Washroom and chained to a pipe. As Jenna’s adopted brother, the Supreme Custodian reckoned he would know where she had gone, and he was looking forward to persuading Simon Heap to tell him.
As the Big Freeze set in and neither the Message Rat nor Marcia returned to the Castle, Simon languished in the Ladies’ Washroom, constantly questioned about Jenna’s whereabouts. At first he was too terrified to talk, but the Supreme Custodian was a subtle man, and he set about gaining Simon’s confidence. Whenever he had a spare moment, the unpleasant little man would prance into the washroom and prattle on to Simon about his tedious day, and Simon would listen politely, too scared to speak. After a while Simon dared to venture a few comments, and the Supreme Custodian seemed delighted to have a reaction from him, and began to bring him extra food and drink. And so Simon relaxed a little, and it was not long before he found himself confiding his desire to be the next ExtraOrdinary Wizard, and his disappointment with the way that Marcia had fled. It was not, he told the Supreme Custodian, the kind of thing that he would have done.
The Supreme Custodian listened approvingly. Here at last was a Heap who made some sense. And when he offered Simon the possibility of an Apprenticeship with the new ExtraOrdinary Wizard—“seeing as, and I know this will just remain between you and me, young Simon, the present boy is proving most unsatisfactory, despite our high hopes for him,”—Simon Heap began to see a new future for himself. A future where he might be respected and be able to use his Magykal talent, and not treated merely as “one of those wretched Heaps.” So, late one evening, after the Supreme Custodian had sat down companionably beside him and offered him a hot drink, Simon Heap told him what he wanted to know—that Marcia and Jenna had gone to Aunt Zelda’s cottage in the Marram Marshes.
“And where exactly would that be, lad?” asked the Supreme Custodian with a sharp smile on his face.
Simon had to confess he did not know exactly.
In a fit of temper the Supreme Custodian stormed out and went to see the Hunter, who listened in silence to the Supreme Custodian ranting on about the stupidity of all Heaps in general and of Simon Heap in particular.
“I mean, Gerald—” (For that was the Hunter’s name. It was something he liked to keep quiet about, but to his irritation the Supreme Custodian used “Gerald” at every possible opportunity.) “—I mean,” said the Supreme Custodian indignantly as he strode up and down the Hunter’s sparsely furnished room in the barracks, waving his arms dramatically in the air, “how can anyone not know exactly where their aunt lives? How, Gerald, can he visit her if he doesn’t know exactly where she lives?”
The Supreme Custodian was a dutiful visitor of his numerous aunts, most of whom wished that their nephew did not know exactly where they lived.
But Simon had provided enough information for the Hunter. As soon as the Supreme Custodian had gone, the Hunter set to work with his detailed maps and charts of the Marram Marshes and before long had pinpointed the likely whereabouts of Aunt Zelda’s cottage. He was ready once again for the Chase.
And so, with some trepidation, the Hunter went to see DomDaniel.
DomDaniel was skulking at the top of the Wizard Tower, passing the Big Freeze by digging out the old Necromancy books that Alther had locked away in a cupboard and Summoning his library assistants, two short and extremely nasty Magogs. DomDaniel had found the Magogs after he had jumped from the Tower. Normally they lived far below the earth and consequently bore a close resemblance to huge blind worms with the addition of long, boneless arms. They had no legs but advanced over the ground on a trail of slime with a caterpillarlike movement, and were surprisingly fast when they wanted to be. The Magogs had no hair, were a yellowish-white color and appeared to have no eyes. They did in fact have one small eye that was also yellowish-white; it lay just above the only features in their face, which were two glistening round holes where a nose should be and a mouth slit. The slime they extruded was unpleasantly sticky and foul-smelling although DomDaniel himself found it quite agreeable.
Each Magog would probably have been about four feet tall if you had stretched it out straight; although that was something no one had ever attempted. There were better ways to fill your days, like scratching your nails down a blackboard or eating a bucket of frog spawn. No one ever touched a Magog unless it was by mistake. Their slime had such a revolting quality to it that just remembering the smell of it was enough to make many people sick on the spot. Magogs hatched underground from larvae left in unsuspecting hibernating animals, such as hedgehogs or dormice. They avoided tortoises as it was hard for the young Magogs to get out of the shells. Once the first rays of the spring sunshine had warmed the earth, the larvae would burst out, consume what was left of the animal and then burrow deeper into the ground until it reached a Magog chamber. DomDaniel had hundreds of Magog chambers around his hideout in the Badlands and always had a steady supply. They made superb Guards; they could deliver a bite that gave most people rapid blood poisoning and saw them off in a few hours, and a scratch from a Magog’s claw would become so infected that it could never heal. But their greatest deterrent was how they looked: their bulbous yellowish-white head, apparently blind, and their constantly moving little jaw with its rows of spiked yellow teeth were gruesome and kept most people at bay.
The Magogs had arrived just before the Big Freeze. They had terrified the Apprentice out of his wits, which had given DomDaniel some amusement and an excuse to leave the boy shivering out on the landing while he tried, yet again, to learn the Thirteen Times Tables.
The Magogs gave the Hunter a bit of a shock too. As he made it to the top of the spiral stairs and strode past the Apprentice on the landing, deliberately ignoring the boy, the Hunter slipped on the trail of Magog slime that led into DomDaniel’s apartment. He just got his balance back in time, but not before he had heard a snigger coming from the Apprentice.
Before long the Apprentice had a little more to snigger about, for at last DomDaniel was shouting at someone other than him. He listened with delight to his Master’s angry voice, which traveled extremely well through the heavy purple door.
“No, no, No!” DomDaniel was shouting. “You must think I am completely mad to let you go off again on a Hunt on your own. You are a bumbling fool, and if there was anyone else I could get to do the job, believe me, I would. You will wait until I tell you when to go. And then you will go under my supervision. Don’t interrupt! No! I will not listen. Now get out—or would you like one of my Magogs to assist you?”
The Apprentice watched as the purple door was flung open and the Hunter made a quick exit, skidding over the slime and rattling down the stairs as fast as he could. After that the Apprentice almost managed to learn his Thirteen Times Tables. Well, he got up to thirteen times seven, which was his best yet.
Alther, who had been busy mixing up DomDaniel’s pairs of socks, heard everything. He blew out the fire and followed the Hunter out of the Tower, where he Caused a huge snowfall to drop from the Great Arch just as the Hunter walked under it. It was hours before anyone bothered to dig the Hunter out, but that was little consolation to Alther. Things were not looking good.
Deep in the frozen Forest, the Wendron Witches set out their traps in the hope of catching an unwary wolverine or two to tide them over the lean time ahead. Then they retired to the communal winter cave in the slate quarry, where they burrowed into their furs, told each other stories and kept a fire burning day and night.
The occupants of the tree house gathered around the wood-burning stove in the big hut and steadily ate their way through Galen’s stores of nuts and berries. Sally Mullin huddled into a pile of wolverine furs and quietly mourned her cafe while comfort-eating her way through a huge pile of hazelnuts. Sarah and Galen kept the stove going and talked about herbs and potions through the long cold days.
The four Heap boys made a snow camp down on the Forest floor some distance away from the tree house and took to living wild. They trapped and roasted squirrels and anything else they could find, much to Galen’s disapproval, but she said nothing. It kept the boys occupied and out of the tree house, and it also conserved her winter food supplies, which were being rapidly nibbled through by Sally Mullin. Sarah visited the boys every day, and although at first she was worried about them being out on their own in the Forest, she was impressed by the network of igloos they built and noticed that some of the younger Wendron Witches had taken to dropping by with small offerings of food and drink. Soon it became rare for Sarah to find her boys without at least two or three young witches helping them cook a meal or just sitting around the campfire laughing and telling jokes. It surprised Sarah just how much fending for themselves had changed the boys—they all suddenly seemed so grown up, even the youngest, Jo-Jo, who was still only thirteen. After a while Sarah began to feel a bit of an interloper in their camp, but she persisted in visiting them every day, partly to keep an eye on them and partly because she had developed quite a taste for roast squirrel.
