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

  ‘It’s suffused with negative wizidrical energy – a jumble of hateful, hurtful emotions. It remembers violence and betrayal. It’s cursed.’

  ‘That would explain all those creepy feelings,’ said Perkins with a grimace.

  Everyone took a cautious step back. Curses were the viruses of the magical world – mischievous strands of negative emotional energy wrapped up in nastiness and waiting to jump out and ensnare the unwary. They’d attach themselves to anything and anybody and were the devil’s own job to remove. It was Lady Mawgon who broke the uneasy silence.

  ‘What are we worrying about?’ she said. ‘Five thousand moolah is five thousand moolah. Besides, it’s none of our business, and what’s new about a curse? The country is littered with redundant strands of curse-spells left over from past suffering.’

  This was all too true. The sometimes violent history of the Ununited Kingdoms had seeded the ground with spells cast when something terrible had happened. They had an inordinately long life and could be reanimated by something as simple as digging the garden. One moment you’re planting the spuds and thinking of dinner and the next you’re taking cover from a shower of pitchforks.

  ‘The public can take their chances like the rest of us,’ added Lady Mawgon. ‘Are you suggesting that all we’ve been through this morning should be ignored in case we inadvertently pass on the possibility of a curse?’

  ‘Odd as it may seem,’ said Tiger, feeling where the hair was missing from the top of his head, ‘I am in agreement with Lady Mawgon on that count.’

  ‘A rare moment of clarity from someone usually capable only of stupidities,’ remarked Lady Mawgon. ‘Our work here is done.’

  She was right. We returned to the lay-by in silence and Lady Mawgon departed on her motorcycle without another word. I sighed. Earning one’s keep by magic was rarely plain sailing. For every simple job there are others, like this one. If the ring had a potential curse, then its return would definitely cause unpleasantness for Miss Shard or anyone associated with it. But then again, five grand would support our key function: the dignity and majesty of the wizidrical arts. But then again, where was the dignity in just finding lost stuff and doing loft conversions? And as Lady Mawgon had said: it’s none of our business.

  I walked up to where the Rolls-Royce was still parked, the gold ring in the palm of my hand. I tapped on the tinted window, which lowered with a hum.

  ‘Did the finding exercise meet with a modicum of positive fortitude?’ asked Miss Shard.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Did you find it?’

  I paused for a moment, and held the ring tightly in my fist.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ I said, returning the other ring, the one she had lent us. ‘Please offer our apologies to your client. We did all we could.’

  ‘No hints at all as to where it might be?’ she asked, mildly surprised.

  ‘None at all,’ I replied. ‘It’s been over thirty years, after all.’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Shard, ‘I’m grateful to you nonetheless. Perhaps my client will look for it personally when he returns.’

  And after she had bade me good day, the Rolls-Royce purred out of the rest area, rejoined the morning traffic and headed off. I watched the car go with an odd feeling of foreboding. About what, I wasn’t sure. I popped the ring back in the pot, and wedged my handkerchief in as a stopper.

  As we drove back into town without the five grand, I considered my action over the ring. I had done the right thing. The power we had was power abused if we didn’t accept responsibility for any adverse outcomes, and spell-curses damaged our already poor standing. I smiled to myself. I think it’s what the Great Zambini would have done.

  All in all, it had been quite a morning.

  Zambini Towers

  * * *

  I parked the car in the yard at the back of Zambini Towers and after telling Tiger to go and have a shower to remove the stinking well-mud, I made my way through the building. In more glory-scented days Zambini Towers had been the Majestic Hotel, one of only four hotels to ever host the coveted ‘Despot of the Decade’ award ceremony and was featured in What Hotel? as ‘the most luxurious hotel to be found in the lesser Kingdoms’, where, it noted, ‘food poisoning was likely, but by no means a certainty’.

  That was then.

  Today, the Majestic was a shabby relic far removed from its former glory. The ballroom, where once B-list princes wooed their consorts to the dulcet tones of string quartets, was now a dining room that smelled strongly of burnt toast and damp, and the presidential suite, long ago the playground for an exotic array of noblemen, was these days the dwelling place of the Mysterious X, who was less of a who, and more of a what – with peculiar and borderline disgusting personal habits.

  I walked past the lobby, where a mature oak tree had grown, its gnarled boughs wrapped tightly around the furniture and ornate cast-iron railings of what had once been the lobby café. David, the younger of the Price brothers and known to all and sundry as ‘Half’, had grown it as a first-year student project twenty years ago, but had never got round to ungrowing it.

  I walked into the Kazam offices, flicked on the light, dumped my bag on a chair and put the small terracotta pot in my desk drawer. This office was the nerve centre of the company, and a half-century ago, during the days of full-power magic, would have been humming with action as the thirty or so managers fielded calls and scheduled enchantments. The desks were all empty these days, but we kept the tables, chairs and telephones, just to remind us how good it had once been, and if we had our way, would be again.

  I sat down at my desk, thought for a moment about the morning’s adventure, made a few notes on my pad, then picked up the phone and dialled a number from memory.

  ‘iMagic,’ came a snotty voice on the other end, ‘better, faster and cheaper than Kazam and home to the All Powerful Blix. Can I help you?’

  ‘That’s not helpful, Gladys,’ I said. Competition had become fiercer between the two companies since the Big Magic, but at least we at Kazam never stooped to badmouthing the opposition.

  ‘Only speaking the truth, Jennifer,’ she sneered. ‘I’ll get the All Power – I mean, the Amazing Blix, for you.’

  I thought for a moment while I was connected. Conrad Blix was not only the Head Wizard over at Industrial Magic, but also general manager, doing what I did here at Kazam. The Great Zambini had disliked Blix intensely, and not just because he was the grandson of the infamous ‘Blix the Hideously Barbarous’, but because they had never seen eye to eye as regards the direction of the Mystical Arts. Zambini saw them as a tool for social justice and good in general, but Blix saw them as more of a way to make cash, and lots of it.

  ‘Strange by name, Strange by nature,’ came a supercilious voice, intentionally to irritate. ‘I’m busy, dear girl, so better make it quick.’

  Despite the animosity between the two companies, we were compelled to agree on a number of matters to be able to function at all. After all, we all drew our power from the same wizidrical energy source, and any usage above five thousand Shandars was worth a phone call.

  ‘What’s with the “iMagic” name change?’ I said without preamble.

  ‘Industrial Magic was a bit of a mouthful,’ he explained. ‘Besides, putting “i” in front of anything makes it more hip and current. Is that why you called?’

  ‘No. We’ve got a ten-kilo spell cooking at eleven fifteen this morning and I wanted to make sure we wouldn’t clash.’

  ‘We’ve got nothing big on until half past four this afternoon,’ replied Blix suspiciously. ‘What are you up to? Ten Meg is a serious chunk of crackle to be using at short notice.’

  ‘You weren’t jamming us yesterday, were you?’ I asked, ignoring his question and referring to some interference we’d been having at a routine scaffold-build the previous afternoon.

  ‘Jennifer, when you say things like that you really hurt me,’ retorted Blix insincerely. ‘We are a professional outfit, and accusat
ions of jamming insult our integrity.’

  ‘If a shred of integrity fell into your soul it would die a very lonely death.’

  ‘One day I will make you eat your impertinence, Jennifer – and you won’t enjoy it. Anything else?’

  ‘Actually, there is. Since when did your accolade jump from “the Amazing” to “the All Powerful”?’

  Accolades were self-conferring, and making yourself seem more astounding than you were was not against any written rules, but bad manners. And sorcerers were big on dignity and honour – or were meant to be, anyway.

  ‘I can’t think how that happened,’ he replied insincerely. ‘I’ll speak to Gladys about it.’

  ‘I’m most grateful. And don’t forget that we want a clear hour at two o’clock for Perkins’ licence application.’

  ‘Already in the diary, dear girl. In fact, I might even see you there.’

  ‘That would be joyous.’

  ‘You’re very disrespectful, Jennifer.’

  ‘Mr Zambini made me promise. Sandop kale n’baaa, Amazing Blix.’

  ‘Sandop kale n’baaa, Miss Strange.’

  And having exchanged the ancient salutation required of us, we both hung up. I thought for a moment. If Blix was attempting to give himself the accolade ‘All Powerful’, there might be trouble brewing. Wizards on a self-aggrandising kick usually set the alarm bells ringing.

  ‘Do you think Blix will try and sabotage Perkins’ application?’ asked Tiger, rubbing his damp hair with a towel as he walked in.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past him. Samantha “Pretty-but-dim” Flynt has failed to get her licence for three years running, and Perkins’ success would really piss them off.’

  ‘Cadet Flynt couldn’t find her foot without tattooed arrows running down her leg,’ said Tiger, ‘and failed her basic practical skills test. I don’t know why they bother.’

  ‘Hopeless she might be,’ I said, ‘but she’s dazzlingly pretty and Blix thinks that a physically attractive sorcerer would be good for business.’

  ‘She’d certainly be unique in that respect,’ remarked Tiger. Sorcerers were not known for their good looks.

  ‘In any event, we should be on our guard as regards Blix. I wouldn’t trust him farther than Patrick of Ludlow could throw him.’

  Patrick, it should be noted, was our ‘Heavy Lifter’. His speciality was moving objects, which was mostly used for removing illegally parked cars for the city’s clamping unit. He had a heart of gold and was as gentle as a lamb, despite his power and odd-looking appearance.

  ‘I’d like to see Patrick try, though.’

  ‘Me, too. Hello, Hector.’

  I was talking to the Transient Moose, who had suddenly materialised in the office over by the water cooler and was now staring into space and thinking grand Moosian thoughts. The Moose was a practical joke perpetrated by a sorcerer in the long distant past. No one knew what the joke had been, who did it, or even whether it was funny or not. The spell that kept him going was skilfully woven and surprisingly resilient. His joke complete, he had very little to do and most of eternity in which to do it, so he consequently looked painfully bored as he appeared and disappeared randomly about Zambini Towers. Despite my speaking to him on many occasions, he had not replied – and since he was a large North American herbivore, I didn’t really expect him to.

  The Transient Moose stared at us both for a moment, gave a doleful sigh and then faded from view.

  ‘You didn’t give that Phantom Twelve girl the ring, did you?’ asked Tiger.

  He knew me quite well by now. Despite being only twelve, he was pretty switched on. Foundlings generally are.

  ‘No – and I’m sorry you had to risk your neck because of it.’

  He shrugged and gave me a smile.

  ‘It was quite fun, actually. Except the bit where I went down the well – and got shot into the air. Do I tell the others we’re five grand poorer because of you?’

  ‘Better not.’

  I sifted through the mail for anything that looked desperately urgent – bills mainly – and then checked the level of the Background Wizidrical Radiation using a device called a Shandargraph. Unlike the hand-held Shandarmeter which measured local magical energy, the Shandargraph gave one an idea of broad trends of wizidrical energy over time – a bit like measuring atmospheric pressure. You could not only tell when a spell was being cast, but how powerful and where. I looked at the long ribbon of paper that was slowly emerging from the machine and noted that our morning’s misadventure was dutifully recorded – fourteen MegaShandars, six miles away to the east. I could even see where it peaked as Full Price tried to keep the well open. The spells undertaken by iMagic in Stroud were also apparent. Our workloads seemed relatively equal, although I knew for a fact Blix would have the Truly Bizarre Tchango Muttney levitate a truck somewhere on the other side of town and hold it there for twenty minutes to make us think they had more work on than they actually did.

  iMagic were troublesome, but not a real threat. With only Blix, Tchango and Dame Corby ‘She Whom the Ants Obey’, iMagic had only three sorcerers to our five. We also had two flying carpeteers1 and one decent precog, of which they had none. But on the upside, they didn’t have thirty-six barely sane ex-sorcerers to feed, and they also had a secondary income: Dame Corby was the heiress to the Corby Trouser Press empire, and yearly dividends were apparently still robust, despite the invention of drip-dry garments.

  I picked up one of the two remaining self-cleaning cups from the draining rack and poured myself tea from the never-ending teapot, then took some milk from the perpetually half-empty enchanted milk bottle in the fridge.

  ‘Hello, Jennifer,’ said a voice from the sofa, and a very rumpled-looking figure sat up and scratched himself.

  ‘Good morning, Kevin,’ I said, handing him a cup of tea and a biscuit from the never-ending supply in the biscuit tin. ‘All well?’

  Kevin was a lean man whose thirtieth birthday had passed unannounced two decades before. Despite his dishevelled appearance, with tatty clothes that would have been rejected by the most desperate Troll War widow charity shops, he was clean-shaven and his finely cut hair was immaculate. He looked, in fact, like a yuppie in tramp fancy dress.

  ‘As well as ever,’ he replied with a yawn.

  The reason Kevin always slept fully dressed on the sofa when he had a perfectly good bedroom was because he had foreseen that he would die in his bed, and reasoned that if he stayed away from it he wouldn’t die. That might sound daft until you consider that the Remarkable Kevin Zipp was our precognitive, a breed of sorcerer who had turned their attention to shuffling through the millions of potential futures and occasionally picking out a winner. But as with all oracles, his visions could be vague and misleading. The time he foresaw ‘killer aliens from Mars’, it actually turned out to be about ‘millers named Alan in cars’, which isn’t the same thing at all. And when he predicted the ‘reign of a matron named Grace’ we actually got a ‘rain of meteors from space’. Despite this, his strike rate was a respectable 73 per cent, and since the Big Magic, improving still.

  ‘Anything for us?’ I asked, as quite often Kevin had dazzling visions that he never told anyone about as he couldn’t see their relevance.

  ‘A few,’ he replied, taking a sip of tea. ‘Something about Vision Boss, and the price of elevators is set to fall.’

  ‘Fall?’

  ‘Or rise. One of the two. Perhaps both.’

  ‘Vision Boss?’ I asked, fetching the Visions Book, in which we logged every vision, notion and foresightment our precognitives ever had. ‘You mean like the chain of spectacle shops “Should have gone to Vision Boss”?’2

  ‘Not sure. It might have referred to the Boss of Visions – the greatest precog ever.’

  ‘Sister Yolanda of Kilpeck3 has been dead over twelve years,’ I said, writing it in the Visions Book anyway. ‘Got hit by a tram on the High Road.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kevin sadly, ‘didn’t see that coming.
’

  ‘Why would you be thinking of her?’

  ‘I don’t know. Oh, and I had another vision about the Great Zambini.’

  I was suddenly a lot more interested.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘He’s going to reappear.’

  This was good news indeed. The Great Zambini had vanished eight months earlier while conducting a simple dematerialisation during a children’s party, and we had been trying to get him back ever since. Because Kevin and Zambini knew each other well, his predictions over Zambini’s appearances were always correct – just too late for us to do anything useful with them.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon at 16.03 and fourteen seconds.’

  ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘Not a clue – but he’ll be there for several minutes.’

  ‘That’s not so very helpful,’ I pointed out. ‘There’s an awful lot of “where” in the unUK, and a minute isn’t exactly bags of “when” in which to find him.’

  ‘Precognition is not an exact science,’ grumbled Kevin defensively. ‘In fact, I don’t think it’s a science at all. But I may know more nearer the time.’

  ‘Can you predict when you might know?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘No.’

  I allocated each vision a unique code – RAD094 to RAD096 – and then asked him to hang around the office and call me the second he knew more. The last time this happened, Kevin had us all staking out a village in the weekends-only Duchy of Cotswold, where Zambini reappeared for a full fifty-seven seconds before vanishing again. Despite fifteen of us dispersed around the village with eyes peeled, we missed Zambini when he turned up in a jam cupboard belonging to a Mrs Bishop. He must have been confused as to where he was, but not so confused that he couldn’t manage to consume an entire pot of best loganberry. And that was the problem with Zambini. He was rattling around the Now like a ping-pong ball, doing pretty much the same as the Transient Moose, but on a much broader geography, and with shorter visits. Moobin thought that Zambini must have corrupted his vanishing spell as he disappeared, but we’d not know for sure until we got him back – if we did.