OLWIZCOMYR
All Wizards Come Here
Chapter 1
Clovis turned his head in direction of the noise resembling the one the nail makes on the nail file. Why this noise in particular? Well, simply because there was no nail file on this side of the Hedge. But there were glutton-sands able to swallow one, and even two, Clovis in just one bite! Fortunately for him, Clovis could spot a glutton-sand as surely as a red hair and clever female fairy could spot a haircutter!
Of course, he would rather forget about this very day when his friend Zelda had to pull him out of one of theses monsters of sand before he was completely gobbled up. Clovis had lost his shoes, his socks and half of his trousers.
‘They look dangerous like this, but they only want to play,’ Zelda had explained between two bursts of laughters.
Clovis was missing Zelda’s laugh.
He turned his head toward the tentacles of sand that were idly lifting themselves above the ground before falling back. He shrugged his shoulders and went his way. He had not come here to play.
Clovis Axehead would soon turn twenty. Two years earlier he had let his mustache growing but had cut it very quickly afterward because every morning, his mirror was telling him his mustache was making him look older. So the following year he had let his dark hair growing too. But he had to take care of it, to cut it, to wash it, to comb it. And his soup was constantly complaining that a hair in the plate was not very appetizing!
Therefore Clovis had no mustache, his black hair was cut short and he was very happy with it.
He couldn’t say the same about this day that had really started badly. The whole week had in fact started badly.
On Monday, Clovis was coming back from Caroline‘s home when he realized he had lost the key of his own house. Fortunately he was able to enter by the window he had left open. And thus he was able to go to sleep and have nice dreams.
The following day, while he was trying to chase a bee that had entered by the window he still had not closed the night before, Clovis had set fire to his most beautiful shirt. The one he was ironing and was always wearing while visiting Caroline. Luckily it was not his shirt, but Narcisse Claude Émile François Dureflet de Lamarre, who had foolishly lent it to Clovis, was now willing to provoke him in a duel.
And Wednesday, the unthinkable had happened. Clovis had failed a magidecontamination (or a magic exSpelling as he was supposed to say!) It was because of the music his key had made while bouncing on the floor of the Steamy Potion. The key was the one he had lost two days earlier and the tune had reminded him of the one the bell hanging on Caroline’s door does. This tune had distracted him at the wrong time and the crystalithe he had almost grabbed in his hand, had exploded. Luckily it was a very small crystalithe, a crystalithe from a beginner sorcerer, a crystalithe of less than a quarter unit. And the explosion was a minuscule one. Surely not enough to produce this famous magic hurricane everybody secretly dreamt to see. But all the same, it was very much humiliating for a magiCleaner of Clovis’s standing!
Edgar Fogelwick was the one who had called Clovis to the Steamy Potion. A group of sorcerers had chosen the best, and most of all the only inn of Olwizcomyr, to celebrate the first wand of one of them. It was a wand-party in a way. Clovis had always lots of work after these parties, when sorcerers are even more headless than usual and forget that casting spells inside Olwizcomyr is absolutely forbidden. And of course, in these cases, Clovis the magiCleaner is the one to fix everything. Yes, Clovis was always busy at the Steamy Potion. Actually, he was always busy, full stop! One could swear that sorcerers really didn’t give a spell about what was forbidden in Olwizcomyr!
However unfortunate these events had been though, the worse had happened the day after, when Clovis had learnt he had not been selected for the Day of the Fabulous Dust that was to take place on Saturday!
How could Jasmine have done that to him? He would have to wait fifteen years now to get another opportunity. And fifteen years from now, he would be…he would be…well, he would be old. He would maybe even never enter the Castle of Spell to harvest the precious Dust!
So when this dreadful Saturday had arrived, Clovis had had no heart to watch the ceremony. On the contrary, as he was usually doing when he was upset, Clovis had walked to Troll Street, had turned right just after the Corridor of Hazard then had walked along Enchantress Alley. From there, one could see the Hedge. It was now five years since Clovis had found the way to cross the Hedge. That is to really cross! Nobody knew the one who had crossed first. And it would probably remain a mystery. Similarly, nobody knew how this first one had discovered the way to cross. Since that day, several citizens of Olwizcomyr had figured out the password to cross and had visited the other side of the Hedge. Amongst these, some never came back. People were not very keen talking about those who had never come back.
Nothing good had ever come from the other side of the Hedge, people kept saying. Otherwise, why would the Hedge exist? Nothing had ever come and there was no reason why it should change today!
Today, Clovis was walking while carefully looking around but was especially looking up the sky. If one Will-O’-the Wisp was to come, it would come from up there, Clovis thought. The narrow and winding path Clovis was walking on was lined with Mohrderirs, these purple bushes covered with hilarious thorns Clovis carefully avoided. He stepped over a hand wide river of black water coming out of one rock on his right to disappear immediately under another rock on his left.
While walking with his nose up, a hand stretched across his face to avoid being blinded by the sun, Clovis nearly fell.
‘Don’t stay in my legs, Pikpok!’ he said to the strange animal that was escorting him and that had just slalomed between Clovis’s legs. ‘And most of all, keep your eyes open, any one of them! If a Will-O’-the Wisp comes to land around, I don’t want to miss it. I have been waiting to see one for too long.’
His companion, Clovis had called by the name of Pikpok, could have been described as the crossbreeding between a dog and an alligator. Its body, as its long tail, was almost completely covered with scales. But its impassive face looked more like the one of a dog, with its hanging ears.
The first encounter between Clovis and Pikpok had been much of a shock. Much of a shock for Clovis that is! All he knew about these animals were few black and whites sketches drawn in a book published by the famous Tricobert Dalembourg, the greatest scientist of Olwizcomyr, whose portrait was hung on the wall in the dining room of Agatha Lamark’s home. Agatha was Caroline’s mother.
In his book, titled ‘‘You won’t believe me but they did exist’’, Tricobert had described some of the animals that had lived in Olwizcomyr one day or another but that had become extinct since.
To tell the truth, Tricobert Dalembourg had never met any of the animals he had described since they precisely had disappeared well before his birth. But thanks to testimonies from old ones from Olwizcomyr who had met older ones who themselves had met even older ones, Tricobert had made a list of the most odd creatures.
Tricobert might have been a great scientist but he would have been unable to draw a circle with a compass. Well, nobody’s perfect. Accordingly, his drawings were less than perfect and one would have needed very good eyes or a great deal of imagination to recognize any of the animals he claimed to describe in his book.
At page 44 of ‘‘You won’t believe me but they did exist’’, one of the ancestors of Pikpok had been drawn with three legs, a single ear and three eyes. It’s mainly thanks to the three eyes that Clovis had eventually recognized Pikpok! And Pikpok was so far the only success for Tricobert.
This animal, that was supposedly long dead, had seemed on the contrary very much alive to the young Clovis when this one had crossed the Hedge the first time. Pikpok had immediately chased him with a starving expression on its face. While running away, Clovis had dropped his school bag and all school certificates of his schoolmates of the Giggle Year.
It was nevertheless thanks to these nineteen certificates that Clovis and Pikpok had become great friends. It was because of these certificates too that Clovis had received the heaviest bunch of detention hours one had ever heard in Olwizcomyr. Three hundred and eighty hours! Clovis had actually camped at the Unwise College for a month and a half.
After walking some ten minutes, Clovis went to a tree stump. There, he apologized to a blue lizard that was warming its belly and its two heads. The lizard stood up like a lightning, made a rude gesture with its arms and run away to safe distance.
‘It’s a good omen,’ Clovis thought. ‘The last time a two-head lizard insulted me this way, I won the Slippery Ring of Tatamajikado.’
From his bag, he took a parcel wrapped in brown paper. Pikpok looked at him like a beggar but Clovis didn’t allow himself to get moved. From his bag he also took an envelope. He kneeled and knocked three times on the top of the stump that seemed to come to life. Two knots in the veins of the wood opened up like eyes. Below these two knot-eyes, a large and deformed mouth opened too.
‘Yep, what’s that for?’ a deep and cavernous voice coming from the stump said.
But without answering and without any hesitation, Clovis stuffed the parcel and the letter inside the mouth in a swift move. At the same time he picked up another letter that was already inside.
‘Sawdust of wood! I got caught once again,’ the cavernous voice said after Clovis had taken away his hand.
Clovis had taught the stump these two sentences and it had regularly got ‘‘caught’’ like this for nearly three years.
‘Good,’ Clovis thought when he saw that the parcel he had put there two weeks ago had disappeared.
The stump eventually took its normal appearance and Clovis brushed away the dust covering it before sitting down.
Pikpok came and sat beside him.
Clovis’s legs were thin and loose in his short. He shook his head and clapped his tongue in his mouth when he realized one of his socks was blue while the other one was black. He dried his forefront with his sleeveless shirt and drank a mouthful of water from his water bottle. He didn’t forget to fill one of the leave-glass growing at his feet and Pikpok immediately came to quench its thirst. The animal simply swallowed the water and the leave-glass at the same time. The Droolers were not ones to lose any time.
‘It feels good, doesn’t it?’
Clovis scrutinized the landscape around him. As far as he could remember, he had never seen any fruits on the skeleton trees he could see. Their wood was blackened, cracked and some of them were leaking a stinky liquid that was preventing everything else to grow several meters around. Then Clovis opened the letter he had collected and read it. He read it several time to learn it by heart. Eventually he put it back in his pocket without paying attention to Pikpok.
‘It looks to me that we won’t see any Will-O’-the Wisp today either,’ Clovis predicted.
Upon hearing the word Will-O’-the Wisp, Pikpok let go a sound like a long sigh and put its head down under its paws. Will-O’-the Wisp chase was Clovis favorite activity. And too bad if Will-O’-the Wisps only existed in Clovis’s mind and in Tricobert Dalembourg’s book!
‘What? You don’t believe in Will-O’-the Wisp either?’ Clovis asked, as if Pikpok could really understand what he was saying.
The animal sighed once again. Clovis translated this as a ‘‘of course I do! Of course Will-O’-the Wisps exist’’ and moved his head in a sign of satisfaction. At least Pikpok agreed with him!
‘There is no reason to doubt. After all, before I meet you, I, too, believed Droolers had completely vanished. It was written on page 44. Ah! They were pretty surprised at the village when I told them I had found a real one in flesh and scales.’
In fact they had been more than surprised and had simply not believed Clovis. This is why his punishment for losing the class certificate had been doubled! Because losing them all was already something unforgivable. But to accuse an animal dead for centuries of eating them, that was simply unacceptable.
But true as it had been, the first time Clovis and Pikpok had come face to face and when Clovis had run away, the class certificate had fallen out of the bag. They were all stamped on their cover with same name, the name of the paper mill where they had been made. The paper mill ‘‘Pikpok.’’
The certificate had all ended up in Pikpok’s stomach and only the name had remained. Pikpok was happy enough with this name. In any case it had never complained.
‘I even got the impression that Berthold still doesn’t believe me when I talk about you,’ Clovis added. ‘And since Berthold is not ready to come here and since you can’t cross the Hedge, in Berthold eyes, you’re only a legend, a ghost!’
This time Pikpok raised its head and stared at Clovis with its single round eye. It had probably lost the other two in a fight with some of the creatures of the swamp. But its eyes would eventually grow back. The Droolers could grow back almost any part of their body. It was very practical, except maybe for those who tried to draw a Drooler in a book called ‘‘You won’t believe me but they did exist’’ and who were giving them three legs and a single ears.
‘In any case, Berthold only believes what he reads. I can see that you exist,’ Clovis said to reassure his companion. ‘I just wanted to give you an example. I will have to take a picture of you one of these days.’
A shiver went down Clovis’s back. He was used to that but it was happening more frequently and was rather unpleasant on this side of the Hedge.
‘When I was shivering like this, grandma used to say the ghosts of all the ants I crushed were haunting me,’ Clovis told Pikpok. ‘And mind you, I was very careful and I didn’t step on so many of them. You can trust the word of a magiCleaner! But I was a kid and I didn’t know I had the Gift. Grandma was so proud of me!’
Pikpok had never met Clovis’s grandma and never shivered, whether spring or winter. It had never crushed any ants and so there was no reason why their ghosts would come and haunt it.
After few minutes rest, Clovis took a small object out of his pocket. It was rectangular, blue, a little bit longer than the palm of his hand and as wide as two fingers.
‘I believe we well deserve a little treat,’ he said. ‘I bet you won’t say no. Look, see what I have for you.’
He delicately unfolded the wrapping paper on which the word ‘Infek’ was printed and started to chew the blue jelly that was inside the paper. He was making a face at each bite he was taking while Pikpok was getting excited and turning round and round.
‘Be patient!’ Clovis snapped. ‘Let me first check if I won or not.’
As soon as he had swallowed the last bit of the jelly, Clovis took a look at the wrapping paper he was safely holding away from Pikpok. Soon a word appeared on the paper. It was printed in red letters.
LOST
‘No luck,’ said Clovis, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I’ll be luckier next time.’
Over the last two years, Clovis had already collected the Coward Shield from Toupourlamagy, the shield that was even afraid of being hit by the wind; the Slippery Ring from Tatamajikado and the Strangling Flyer of Tuttipermaggio. Only four more and he would get the whole set of the Seven Awfully Messed Maginstruments. Then he would be entitled to claim the reward.
But since this wrapping paper had become useless, Clovis handed it to Pikpok.
Clovis was not doing this out of selfishness or because he wanted to make fun of his friend with three eyes. But quite simply Pikpok was eating almost exclusively paper. For example, the stinky wrapping paper of the ‘Infek’ bar or nineteen class certificates
The Drooler rushed to catch the aluminium-flavoured paper that was its favorite. It has so much better taste than simple paper and was so much crunchier than cardboard. Pikpok wolfed it down in a single mouthful.
Clovis set himself about unwrapping another bar he had taken out of his pocket. Two bars meant twice as many chances to win even if it also meant twice as many of this jelly to swallow. Those selling them could have given them a better taste!
But Clovis never got the chance to taste this second bar. Just when he was thinking about coming back home once again with nothing but sunburn on his cheeks, he saw the lightning that was to make him forget all about his disappointments of the week. It was like an arrow of fire, half blue-half scarlet, that swirled few seconds above the trees before diving toward the ground. Clovis let his candy bar fall.
The blue two-head lizard that was patiently waiting to get back to the stump rushed to the jelly but ran away pulling its forked tongue with a grimace of disgust.
‘Up there! Did you see that?’ Clovis cried. ‘It’s surely one of them. It’s surely a Will-O’-the Wisp and it didn’t fall too far. Quick Pikpok! Hurry up. There’s no time to lose!’
Clovis rushed in direction of the light as fast as he could. He had heard that Will-O’-the Wisp didn’t last long once they had landed. But the landscape was very steep there and Clovis had to climb and to thread his way between wild plants and dangerous nettles. He was using his hands but his thin legs were trembling under the strain.
Pikpok, having lost two eyes but still having its four legs, moved faster even if he had lost some time swallowing the second wrapping paper. It was trotting with its head turned on one side so that its only good eye could see where it was going. Despite this, Pikpok banged some rocks several time, losing few of its scales. It didn’t bother the Drooler. It has a tough nut. And as soon as the scales had touched the ground, fishmonger moles quickly buried them.
‘This way,’ Clovis cried, pointing out a light few tens of meters in front on him. ‘We are going to get it!’
But Clovis, his face purple, was breathless and Pikpok arrived first, driven by curiosity much more than by the indications of its two-legged companion it probably could not understand anyway. Few seconds later, Clovis caught up with the Drooler just in time to see him growling against a kind of basket. The claws of Pikpok were scraping deeply in the ground. The animal seemed to be held back by some invisible hand. Pikpok kept on struggling then suddenly turned its head and, with a single bite, cut its own tail. Free at last, the Drooler turned to the basket and closed its jaw on a white object and devoured it.
‘What are you doing? Leave it alone!’ Clovis screamed before plunging.
He grabbed the piece of the paper still outside the mouth of Pikpok and pulled so hard the paper was torn apart. Clovis lost his balance, fell backward and landed on his bottom. Pikpok made the most of it and quietly finished its meal.
‘You PIG! What went through your mind? You ate my Will-O-the-Wi…’
The rest of the sentence stayed inside Clovis’s throat when he saw what was inside the basket. He didn’t believe his eyes at first. And nevertheless!
‘By Merlin’s cauldron! But where is this one coming from?’ Clovis marveled, staring at the basket. ‘For a Will-O’-the Wisp, this one is a strange one. My! This time, even Berthold will be impressed.’
Still flabbergasted, Clovis looked at the small piece of paper, still wet from the saliva of Pikpok, sticking out of his hand. Not much of it was left. Just a small stripe the size of an ‘Infek’ bar. As for what had been written on it, apart the rest of one letter printed with purple ink, most of the message was now inside the stomach of Pikpok.
‘Really Pikpok! You’re incredible. Something tells me you’ve just eaten something rather important. Farewell and the others won’t appreciate. And they’re going to blame me!’
But Pikpok wasn’t impressed the least and had nothing to do with Farewell’s opinion for what matters. It just licked its chops and its tail. It would take about three weeks to grow a new tail but the saliva of the Droolers was known to stop the pain and quicken healing. This saliva had been used for long times at Olwizcomyr before the race of the Droolers died out.
Clovis stood up and looked carefully all around him. Especially toward this house surrounded by a brownish fog day and night, summer like winter. But he saw nobody. He pocketed the piece of paper he had saved from Pikpok and in exchange, he gave the Drooler the letter he had found in the stump. Clovis didn’t need it anymore now that he knew it by heart.
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