The Song of the Quarkbeast: Last Dragonslayer: Book Two Read online

  I watched Moobin and Patrick as the power flowed through to them, and the effect was almost instantaneous. Moobin lifted two stones from one of the piles in unison and clicked them into place on the far side of the bridge as easily as if it were Lego. There was a gasp from the crowd, a resounding cheer and our odds on the scoreboard rose from 500:1 to 50:1 against. I breathed a small sigh of relief. At least we were now actually in the game, even if far behind. The iMagic team completed their first arch within half an hour and then moved on to the next.

  I spent the next hour moving up and down the daisy-chain to ensure all was well and that the areas between the sorcerers remained relatively clear and no one lingered too long within the streams – passive spelling was a very real risk, and it sapped power. There was a minor hiccup when a van parked in the way and we had to interrupt the stream while we moved the sorcerers across to the other side of the road, but it all worked, and within that hour we accelerated to being only one arch behind iMagic.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Blix as I walked past him with some chocolate for Patrick, ‘but you can’t keep up that rate of sustained spelling for ever.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Tiger and I spent our time making sure that the sorcerers were kept cool by drinking gallons – and I mean gallons – of iced water, as simply being a conduit for wizidrical energy without actually using it made one grow hot, as a wire does with an electrical current passing through. We also had to ensure that the changeovers went smoothly when, predictably enough, they needed a visit to the bathroom. And all this subtly, without alerting Blix as to what we were up to. Within another twenty minutes we had drawn level with iMagic, and half an hour after that we had passed them. We were now in the lead, something reflected by the odds on the leader board and much to the delight of the crowd, but not the King, who sat in the royal box, tapping his fingers impatiently on his second-best throne.

  Blix paused for a moment and walked over. He looked at us both in turn, then gave a rare smile.

  ‘Where are you getting all this power?’

  ‘Skill, hard work and efficient use of resources,’ replied Moobin. ‘You should try it some day.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  He thought for a moment, then abruptly changed his manner.

  ‘Okay, here it is, with me eating humble pie: congratulations. You’ve bested me.’

  Moobin and I looked at one another.

  ‘A trick of some sort, Blix?’ asked Moobin, not pausing for one second in placing a carved piece of stone in place. ‘We’re barely half an arch ahead.’

  ‘We’re almost worn out,’ Blix replied. ‘Corby and Muttney have been . . . disappointing. Perhaps we can negotiate my defeat so I am not utterly humiliated?’

  It seemed an astonishing request, given his own deceitful conduct. In answer, Moobin was firm, but clear.

  ‘We will give you the same courtesy and kindness you gave us, Blix.’

  ‘How unpleasant of you,’ Blix said after a pause. ‘What happened to all the “brother wizard” stuff?’

  ‘It evaporated when you had us all thrown into jail.’

  ‘Really?’ Blix asked, as though it had only just occurred to him that we might be annoyed. ‘Yes, I suppose it might have. Never mind. I will go and draft a letter conceding my position. But irrespective, we should finish the bridge, yes? A good show for the King and the citizenry?’

  ‘I agree,’ said Wizard Moobin suspiciously.

  Blix gave us another smile and moved off to speak to the colonel, who had been hovering close at hand.

  ‘I strongly suggest that we don’t relax for a moment,’ I said as soon as Blix and the colonel had departed, seemingly in some haste. ‘I smell a very large Blix-shaped rat that is up to something.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Moobin. ‘But what?’

  I didn’t answer, and left them to carry on while the iMagic team, now without their leader, began to fall farther and farther behind. By the time we had the second arch more or less finished, the odds on the scoreboard made us the clear favourites and iMagic merely washed up old has-beens. But just as we were about to start on our final arch, something happened.

  * * *

  1 No one knows why – it just does. Shoelaces untie them-selves almost immediately, which explains the almost universal use of loafers among sorcerers. ‘Anti-spell’ clothing is of man-made cloth with welded seams, and looks terrible. Most sorcerers simply change clothes hourly when working.

  The surge

  * * *

  It was a surge. A burst of almost unprecedented violence, but oddly, only through Patrick and Moobin – the iMagic sorcerers were unaffected. With the two of them caught unawares, the heavy blocks of masonry that Patrick and Moobin were moving suddenly flew high in the air. One fell on the road bridge two hundred yards away, where we could hear the sound of cars braking and colliding, and another fell into the river. Two others, each a quarter of a ton, were thrown so high in the air that they disappeared from sight.1

  Moobin swore as he tried to control the surge. He described it later as like being in a car with no brakes and the throttle jammed full on while trying to negotiate the St Nigel’s Day parade without hitting anyone. To absorb the raw energy that was now entering his body, he pointed his fingers at the river and in an instant the water had changed to a cheap German white wine and receded in both directions, revealing a lot of mud and more shopping trolleys than I thought existed in the world.

  I looked across at Patrick. He, too, was struggling to do something with the massive surge, and had switched his attention to what he usually did – lifting cars for the city’s clamping unit. All cars within a 250-yard radius were violently lifted three feet into the air and then, when this wasn’t enough to absorb the power, he began moving them all to the car pound2 two miles away.

  I bit my lip. An oversurge of this power generally ended only in one way – when the power overcame the sorcerer completely and caused them to physically burst. It would be painful, and very messy.3 I watched them with growing concern as random spells began to bubble up from Patrick and Moobin’s subconscious as the increased power started to invade their thoughts. There was a brief shower of toads, dogs started barking and everyone in the crowd who had curly hair found it had straightened. The river turned from cheap wine to an expensive 1928 Château La Tour, every watch in the local postal district reset itself to midday and the clouds above the city started to form into farmyard-animal shapes.

  Just when I thought our sorcerers could take no more, the surge stopped. The wine river washed back, the cloud shapes and toads vanished, and in the distance we could hear Patrick’s cars fall with expensive-sounding crunches. Moobin and Patrick fell to their knees, their index fingers purple with bruises that had spread across their hands to their forearms. It would be painful to spell for weeks.

  I ran up to Moobin as the crowd started to murmur in an excited fashion. Blix’s team – minus Blix himself, who was nowhere to be seen – were staring at us, open mouthed. They’d never seen anything like it either.

  ‘Check the chain,’ muttered Moobin, ‘make sure everyone’s okay.’

  Tiger and I dashed back down the daisy-chain to see whether anyone had burst. The first link was Margaret O’Leary, who was standing on the corner by a sideshow tent, where the Two-Headed Boy had popped his heads out of the tent flap to witness the event.

  ‘What in Shandar’s name was that?’ she said. ‘I just channelled more power in thirty seconds than I’ve expended in a lifetime.’

  ‘Has Blix been past you?’

  ‘No.’

  We moved on to the next in the chain, who was Bartleby the Bald. He was in much the same state as O’Leary – in shock, but okay. We worked our way back to Zambini Towers and were relieved to find that although the sorcerers were hot and sweaty and bruised with the effort, none had dared break the chain, and for good reason. If they’d tried, they would have borne the full brunt of the power themselves – the only safe option
was to hope those at the end could safely expel the extra power.

  ‘You check the Moose,’ I said to Tiger. ‘I’ll look in on Lady Mawgon.’

  I put my head round the door of the Palm Court, but Mawgon was unchanged. Wherever the power was coming from, it wasn’t the power stored in the Dibble Coils – they remained as resolutely full and unhacked as before.

  ‘Jenny!’ came Tiger’s voice. ‘In here!’

  I dashed through to the lobby, where Tiger was kneeling next to a blackened moose-shaped hole burnt into the carpet. There were similar burned shapes on each of the four walls, too – of neat moosian front, back and side elevations, and a perfect moose-shaped plan view hole burned through the ceiling and three storeys up. It was so neat you could see the delicate splay of his antlers.

  ‘He said it was the only way to stop the surge,’ said Ex-Weathermonger Taylor Woodruff IV, who was standing close by, ‘by taking the full force internally. He said he was sorry if it messed up your bridge building.’

  Tiger and I stood in silence in the empty corridor, musing on the once Transient Moose’s passing. He had frazzled every single line of the spell that made up his existence and vanished in a brief blast of energy. I picked up the small pot with the ring in it. It still didn’t make any sense. Not to me, not to anyone – certainly not to Tiger, who hated unanswered questions more than anyone.

  ‘Look,’ he said, showing me the readout from the Shandargraph. There were multiple peaks from what we had just seen outside, but also another drain, sustained over thirty-seven seconds, and peaking at 1.2 GigaShandars. The range and direction were the same as Moobin and Patrick’s; up around the old bridge somewhere.

  ‘Was that Blix?’ asked Tiger.

  ‘If it was he didn’t use it on the bridge,’ I said, looking at my watch. It had been reset to midday in the surge, and now read five minutes past.

  ‘1.2 GigaShandars?’ queried Tiger. ‘Isn’t that the power drain requirement of a—’

  ‘It is,’ I replied, not far behind him. ‘Call 999 and mutter “Quarkbeast” in a panicky voice. I need Once Magnificent Boo at the bridge as soon as possible.’

  ‘You think—?’

  ‘I do. The Quarkbeast has just divided.’

  * * *

  1 It was found out later that one fell harmlessly to earth in an orchard at Belmont a few miles to the south, while the other landed on the Ross-to-Hereford branch line, derailing a train transporting Hereford Zoo’s Tralfamosaur, which was on an exchange trip to Woburn Safari Park. It took three weeks to recapture, with considerable difficulty. For more details see DS3: The Return of Shandar.

  2 Later investigations found that he had moved eighty-six cars a combined total of nineteen miles in under twenty-two seconds – a record that would never be surpassed.

  3 The technical term is an ‘Accelerated Feedback Oversurge Blowout’, when the power you are using is less than the power coming in. The last documented occurrence was fourteen years previously when an unlicensed cadet attempted to direct six MegaShandars of power towards lifting a Buick. He absorbed more than he could safely expel and the resulting imbalance caused him to literally explode. The largest bit of him they found was a small section of bone later identified as a kneecap.

  Risk of confluence

  * * *

  I ran back to the bridge to find Moobin and Patrick sucking on ice cubes and trying to get their breath back. The iMagic team were still working, but without Blix they were a good four hours behind, if they could finish at all.

  ‘The Moose is gone,’ I said to Moobin, ‘so you’re on your own. The surge you felt was a power drain as something latched on to the ambient wizidrical energy and drew what it needed through you. Blix had a plan B in case we were to defeat him. A plan he has hatched with the help of the colonel. This is no longer a magic contest – it’s an assassination attempt!’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘To put Blix on the throne. Legally the Court Mystician is eighth in line after the Royal Family and the Lord Chief Adviser. Everyone that stands between him and the Crown is here today, gathered conveniently in one place to suffer . . . death by Quarkbeast!’

  ‘A bit of a long shot,’ responded Moobin doubtfully. ‘The last incidence of a person savaged by a Quarkbeast was over a decade ago – and he did attack it first with a garden fork. I can’t see the King attacking anything with a garden fork.’

  ‘He’d have a footman do it for him,’ said Margaret O’Leary, who had joined us, ‘but I’m not sure a Quarkbeast would be able to make the distinction between the attacker and the person who ordered it.’

  ‘Not that way,’ I replied, still out of breath from the run, ‘I mean with a confluence. Place a captured Quarkbeast next to a source of heavy spelling and it will draw the vast quantity of power needed to divide. It tried earlier with Patrick when he was moving the oak, but couldn’t draw enough. The Moose gave it as much as it needed – and more.’

  ‘But if it is not separated after division,’ said Moobin, who knew a bit about Quarkbeasts as well, ‘then—’

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘if unable to escape itself in a thousand seconds, it will recombine with enough energy to take out a third of the city.’

  They stared at me, horrified at the suggestion.

  ‘How long is a thousand seconds?’

  ‘Sixteen minutes and forty seconds.’

  I looked at my watch. It was eleven minutes past. If the Quarkbeast divided when the surge ended, we had less than five minutes. We looked around. Most of the south of the city would be taken out and, with it, King Snodd and all his family, half the police, most of the Imperial Guard, all the spectators – and us. Blix would be taking cover somewhere out of the blast radius.

  ‘No witnesses,’ said Moobin, ‘and no one to refute whatever version of events King Blix decided on – he could blame it on anything he chose.’

  ‘We need to find a locked room within fifty metres of the royal box,’ I muttered. ‘Wait here.’

  I ran across to where Lord Tenbury was standing, presumably wondering whether the King was serious about stuffing him and Blix with sawdust if they lost. I explained as briefly as I could what was up, and Tenbury, eager to regain the King’s trust, immediately ordered the Royal Family’s evacuation, then returned to us to see how he could help. He may have been corrupt, but he was no coward.

  ‘Where do we start?’ asked Moobin. ‘There must be hundreds of rooms big enough to hide two equal but identically opposite Quarkbeasts.’

  As we looked about, wasting time, word was getting about that something was up – the hurried way in which the Royal Family were removed most probably, and then the Imperial Guard themselves, who had a reputation for running from danger wherever it presented itself. In any event, the crowd began to grow restless, and when those in the expensive seats started to move away with their jewellery rattling in a panicked fashion, those in the cheaper seats also decided to make a run for it.

  I looked around to see where a Quarkbeast might be hidden, but then a notion drifted into my head. I told Moobin straight away.

  ‘Perkins is imprisoned with the Quarkbeast!’

  ‘You know this or you think this? We don’t have time to make a mistake.’

  I had to make a swift judgement call. Half of Hereford and thousands of lives depended upon it.

  ‘I know this,’ I said, taking a deep breath, ‘because it’s an odd notion that popped uninvited into my head. And if Perkins has any particular skill, it’s that of seeding ideas. I think he might be trying to communicate with me.’

  I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind, which was difficult as the mass exit of spectators made something of a noise as the panic increased.

  ‘Moobin,’ I said, ‘I need you to take out all my senses.’

  He pointed his finger at me and in an instant everything went empty. It was as though I had fallen into an empty space within myself that had nothing in it but time, thoughts, smells and the deep red of the
sky at dawn. It was extraordinarily peaceful, and without the distraction of overwhelming sensory input I felt unusually clear headed. At first I could sense nothing except the jumble of my own thoughts firing across my mind and the smell of bacon and Irish stew, but after a moment or two I forced these to one side and, all of a sudden, there was a small voice on the very edge of my conscious mind, where the froth of random thoughts meets free will. It was Perkins, and he was sending me ideas. But he wasn’t that good at it, and seemed to be coming across like a greetings telegram, and what’s more, one that was badly spelled.

  . . . WEST OF SNOOD BLVD SELLAR ++ KWARKBEAST DIVIDED ++

  EXPLOD EMMENINT ++ THREE STEPS DOUN ++ STILL WANT DATE? ++

  REPEAT SNOOD BLVD SELLAR ++ KWARKBEAST . . .

  And so it went on, repeating itself. I listened to it three times, each time spelt differently, until Moobin brought me back to the world of heat, light and sound just as Once Magnificent Boo and Tiger turned up in the Quarkbeast containment vehicle. I related what I’d heard as my watch passed thirteen minutes – three minutes to go.

  ‘Anyone who wants to head for safety has to leave now,’ I said. ‘No one will think any the worse of you for it.’

  No one made a move. Not even Lord Tenbury.

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘follow me.’

  Snodd Boulevard ran from the cathedral to the north end of the bridge, and after a hurried search we found a house that had three steps down to a green-painted cellar door. It was locked but Patrick pulled it off its hinges with a powerful flourish of his bruised hands and we hurried in to find ourselves in a long corridor with doors on either side, all locked.

  ‘Where now?’ asked Tiger as our final minute began to tick away.

  ‘Doorknobs,’ growled Boo, ‘find the warm one.’