The Song of the Quarkbeast tld-2 Read online

  ‘It’s a million Shandars, or if you prefer to use the older imperial measurements, about twenty-six cathedral miles, which is enough crackle to. . .’

  ‘. . . move a cathedral twenty-six miles?’

  ‘You learn fast. Yes, or move twenty-six cathedrals one mile each – or a medium-sized church five hundred miles, or, if you like, take a cricket pavilion all the way to Melbourne.’

  ‘Would there be any point to that?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘So a capacity of four GigaShandars is enough to move one cathedral – hang on – one hundred and four miles?’

  ‘Pretty much, although moving cathedrals cross-border by magic would be a bureaucratic nightmare. The paperwork would swamp you before you’d even got as far as Monmouth.’

  Tiger went silent for a moment.

  ‘I’m sensing there’s a reason why cathedral-moving is not on our rate sheet.’

  ‘You sense right. Dibble died while servicing this enchantment twenty-six years ago and he left it in “standby” mode and passthought protected, so what we have now is a very, very big battery and no charger. It didn’t matter when the crackle was negligible because we didn’t have a hope of doing any big jobs. But now the power of magic is on the rise, we really need the Dibble back online if we’re to do any serious magic, like digging canals or laying railway track or building henges or something.’

  ‘I get that,’ said Tiger, ‘kind of. But don’t you think they should be called “Zargon Coils” or “Znorff Inverters” or something groovy rather than “Dibble”?’

  ‘Isn’t “Dibble” groovy?’

  ‘No, not really. It’s more . . . dorky.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ I replied, ‘but real life isn’t like that. Dibble invented them, so Dibble they are.’

  We walked across the lobby and into the Palm Court. In the heyday of the Majestic Hotel, this would have been an exotic indoor garden of tropical plants, tall palms and limpid pools with lily pads and koi carp. Scattered around would have been small tables filled with gossiping nobility taking tea, while waited upon by attentive waitresses.

  No longer.

  The room had not been used for entertaining or growing tropical plants for years, and many of the glass panes in the bell-shaped roof were either cracked or missing. Buckets lay scattered about into which water dripped during rainstorms, and the marble floor was stained and uneven. In the centre of the room was a large and very dry fountain. Standing next to it was Lady Mawgon. She had changed out of her usual black crinolines and into her even blacker ones, which showed she meant business. Her clothes were so black, in fact, that they were simply a dark Lady Mawgon-shaped hole in the world, and it could give one vertigo if you stared too long.

  ‘You never thanked me for putting the hayrick under you, Prawns.’

  ‘I’m most grateful to you for not letting me fall to a painful death,’ said Tiger, knowing it was senseless to argue.

  ‘Good manners cost nothing,’ she grumbled. ‘Did Miss Shard pay up?’

  ‘The matter was concluded satisfactorily,’ I replied.

  ‘Hmm. Now, you are here to witness my attempt to hack into the Dibbles. You will not approach me and you will not talk. Do you understand?’

  Tiger and I weren’t sure whether that meant we couldn’t answer or not, so we played it safe and nodded vigorously.

  ‘Good. Primarily I will be trying to get into the root directory of the spell’s central core to reset the passthought.[19] From there I will attempt to switch the coils back on. You should make notes as I talk my way through it. I shall permit you to wish me good luck.’

  ‘Good luck, ma’am,’ I said, taking out my pocketbook and a pencil.

  She turned to an empty space in the room and raised her index fingers. After a pause, she drew her hands downwards and out, much like a conductor beginning a symphony. A blue-filled tear appeared in the air, as though a tent flap had been unzipped. She continued to move her hands as if conducting, and as she signalled to an imaginary percussion section, the randomly placed chairs in the room moved away from the tear and the chandeliers tinkled slightly. Lady Mawgon made a few flourishes as one might do to signal in the entire string section, then held one hand in the air as if sustaining a note from the bassoons, and peered closer into the rent. The tear had depth within, and coloured lights flashed to and fro as Lady Mawgon subtly moved her hands between the theoretical harp and kettle drums to probe the inner workings of the spell. It was a incantation of great complexity, and Tiger and I stared wide eyed. Spellbound, in fact. I’d worked around spells for years, but never actually seen one.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Lady Mawgon, speaking over her shoulder while signalling to an imaginary cello section to play pianissimo. ‘The enchantment is standard Wa’Seed on a RUNIX core. The secondary spells are off-the-peg Shandar that self-regulate the internal fields, but it seems Dibble added a few gatekeepers to thwart a hack, then set them orbiting the central core in all five directions at once so they couldn’t be unwoven.’

  ‘The Great Zambini was always cautious,’ I replied, risking her anger by breaking my silence. ‘He thought four GigaShandars of raw crackle lying around might tempt a fallen wizard with mischief on their minds.’

  ‘You might be right,’ said Lady Mawgon.

  There then followed about five minutes of hard spelling which was almost indistinguishable from the gesticulations of a conductor. Indeed, I am told the skills are interchangeable, and the myth about wands may originally have begun with a conductor’s baton.

  And then, just as Tiger and I were getting bored and thinking of other things to do, our ears popped as something happened.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, giving a rare smile, ‘I’ll just reset the passthought and we’re done.’

  She made a few more flourishes with her hands to an illusory woodwind section, and the rent closed.

  ‘There,’ she said triumphantly. ‘I’m surprised it was so easy. The coils will be full by this time tomorrow and we can run a test spell with them by Friday morning. Prawns, go and fetch Moobin so I can share the passthought.’

  Tiger hurried out and I congratulated her on the work.

  ‘I could have done it in my sleep ten years ago,’ she replied, ‘but I thank you for your praise. Why are you staring at me?’

  ‘You’re going grey,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been grey for years,’ she said, ‘and I’ve warned you against impertinence.’

  ‘No, no,’ I replied, ‘everything on you is going grey.’

  And so she was. Her black crinoline dress was now a charcoal colour, and lightening by the second. Lady Mawgon frowned, looked at her hands and then stared up at me with a wan smile.

  ‘Blast,’ she said in a resigned tone, and a few moments later she had turned entirely to stone.

  ‘Damn,’ I said.

  Turned to stone

  I’d never seen anyone turned to stone before, and after the initial shock had worn off, I ventured closer. Every single pore of her skin, every wrinkle, every eyelash was perfectly rendered in the finest alabaster I had seen. It felt odd being in such close proximity to Lady Mawgon, even if she was now a four-hundred-pound block of stone, and although getting turned to stone was bad news, it might have been worse. The really serious cases of petrification involved dolorite, marble, or worse, granite.

  Moobin laughed as he walked in, closely followed by Tiger.

  ‘Goodness, the old girl will never live this down. Dibble the Extraordinary lived up to his name – a stoning incantation as a gatekeeper. Well, well, never would have thought of it.’

  ‘You can change her back?

  ‘Child’s play. Although to be honest, it is a lot quieter with her like this.’

  ‘If I draw a moustache on her,’ added Tiger, ‘will she still have it on her when she changes back?’

  ‘It’s not funny,’ I said, even though I, too, had mixed feelings. ‘I’d be happier to have her back in one piece as soon as p
ossible.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Moobin, and after taking a deep breath, he drew himself into the ‘hard spelling’ posture, pointed both index fingers at her and let fly.

  Nothing happened.

  He stood up, relaxed, then tried again.

  Still nothing happened.

  ‘That’s odd,’ he said at last. ‘Did she change to stone quickly?’

  ‘About ten seconds.’

  ‘Oh dear. Wait here a moment.’

  And he ran out the door.

  ‘She still looks kind of frightening, doesn’t she?’ said Tiger.

  She did, even though her features were not trapped in the more usual Mawgon look of scowling displeasure. Rather she wore the resigned smile she had given when she had realised that the long-dead Dibble had outwitted her.

  ‘Still,’ said Tiger, ‘it proves what I always thought.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That she does wear roller skates under her dress.’

  I looked down, and just peeking out from the soft white folds of her gypsum prison was the shape of a roller-skate wheel pressed against the hem of her dress.

  ‘Holy cow!’ said Half Price as he walked in, accompanied by Full Price and Wizard Moobin. ‘I’ve never seen her looking so stony before.’

  ‘She’s certainly stuck between a rock and a hard place,’ added Full Price with a giggle. ‘Did you try the standard Magnaflux Reversal?’

  ‘I tried it twice,’ said Moobin, ‘not a flicker.’

  ‘Let me try,’ said Half, and let fly in a similar manner to Moobin, with similar negative results.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Full?’

  His brother tried and failed also, and they all suddenly looked a lot more serious, and went into one of those wizidrical discussions where I generally understood one word in eight. After ten minutes of this, they all let fly together, but all that happened was that the room grew hot and clammy, and our clothes let out a size.

  ‘Did she say anything before she went?’ asked Moobin, doing his belt up a notch.

  ‘Only that the coils were taking on power,’ I replied, ‘and that the spell was written in RUNIX.’

  ‘No one writes in RUNIX any more,’ said Full Price. ‘It’s an archaic spell language that was big in the fourth century before we moved over to ARAMAIC. Half, who’s our RUNIX expert?’

  ‘Aside from Lady Mawgon?’

  ‘Yes, obviously.’

  ‘Monty Vanguard always had an interest in old spell languages.’

  Moobin told Tiger to fetch Vanguard. He nodded and ran off. The atmosphere, which earlier had all been a bit jokey and silly, was now deathly serious.

  ‘But the Fundamental Spell Reversibility Rule still applies, yes?’ I asked.

  ‘Totally,’ agreed Moobin, ‘there’s no spell cast that can’t be unravelled if you know precisely how it was written – it just may take a while to figure out.’

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘If we work lunchtimes, about six to seven years.’

  ‘Years?’ I echoed in some alarm. ‘The bridge gig starts on Friday. We’ve got less than forty-eight hours!’

  ‘Life is short, magic is long, Jennifer.’

  ‘That’s not helpful.’

  ‘Having a spot of bother?’ asked a dapper white-haired man in impeccable dress and a thin moustache. This was Monty Vanguard, one of our spellers. Long in retirement, he spent his days putting together the thousands of lines of spell necessary to bring medical scanners back online.

  Moobin explained the problem at length, and Monty Vanguard smiled.

  ‘So you young blades have got your fingers burned and need an oldster to help you out, hmm?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Monty opened the rent in the air just as Mawgon had done, and after donning his glasses, looked around inside the enchantment.

  ‘I get it,’ he said after a while. ‘Do we have the passthought?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll reset it. Are you sure we want Lady Mawgon back? I mean she’s—’

  He didn’t get to finish his sentence as he too was turned to alabaster. But not slowly, like Mawgon, but instantly. It was his bad luck that he had been blinking at the time, and instead of looking elegant and dignified in stone, he had that annoying half-closed-eye look that makes one a bit, well, dopey.

  ‘Okay,’ said Full Price after a pause, ‘that didn’t turn out so well. What now?’

  No one had any suggestions so we stood there for a moment, staring at Monty and Lady Mawgon.

  ‘Will it harm her?’ I asked. ‘Being stone, I mean?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ he replied, ‘as long as we keep Lady Mawgon away from a sandblaster and no one borrows part of her to mend the front portico of Hereford cathedral, she’ll not know even one second has passed.’

  And that was when an idea struck me. An idea that might explain something that had been confusing me for a while – how the Great Zambini and Mother Zenobia both managed to live beyond the century with only a small level of decrepitude, in Zenobia’s case to well over a hundred and fifty.

  ‘Can I be excused?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Moobin, ‘but let’s keep this top secret. This is something only the five of us need know about.’

  ‘Six,’ said Tiger, for the Transient Moose had suddenly appeared, and was staring at Lady Mawgon with a detached interest.

  ‘Six, then. No sense in panicking the residents, hmm?’

  I quickly fetched some card and a felt pen from the office and placed a sign outside the entrance of the Palm Court that read: ‘Closed for Redecoration’.

  ‘What now?’ asked Tiger as we walked through the lobby.

  ‘We’re going to visit Mother Zenobia.’

  He gave a shudder.

  ‘Do I have to come?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She frightens me.’

  ‘She frightens me, too. Think of it as character-building. Go and find your tie, polish your shoes and fetch the Youthful Perkins. The convent is in the same direction as the castle. We’ll take him to his Magic Licence Application afterwards. I’ll meet you both outside in ten minutes.’

  Quarkbeast & Zenobia

  I kept my Volkswagen in the garages beneath Zambini Towers, where it shared a dusty existence with several dilapidated Rolls-Royces and a Bugatti or two, remnants of when the retired sorcerers had money and power. Aside from the Dragonslayermobile,[20] which was also kept here, mine was the only working car, and since the Kingdom of Snodd granted driving licences not by age but by who was mature enough to be put in charge of half a ton of speeding metal, no male under twenty-six or wizard ever possessed a driving licence. Because of this I was compelled to add ‘taxi service’ to my long list of jobs.

  I pulled around to the front of the building, parked the car and turned off the engine. Lady Mawgon’s unfortunate accident dominated my thoughts – especially as this might mean postponing the bridge gig, which I was loath to do – it would make Kazam look weak and useless when we were trying to promote ourselves as strong and confident. Even if Perkins did get his licence, we would still have only five wizards to rebuild the bridge – and we needed six to be sure.

  I sighed and gazed absently across the street. Situated on the opposite side of the road was the Quarkbeast memorial, Kazam’s tribute to a loyal friend and ally who gave his life to protect me, and contributed in no small measure to the success of the Big Magic.[21] I thought about him a lot, and although he often frightened small children and had been known to eat a bunny rabbit or two, he had been a steadfast companion until the end. I frowned. There seemed to be a corner missing out of the oolitic limestone plinth upon which the statue sat. I got out of the car and walked across for a closer look. I was right; something had gnawed a chunk out of the plinth. There was a section of broken tooth stuck in the stone and I tugged until it came free. It was a sharp canine, and was coloured the dull slate grey of tung
sten carbide.

  ‘What have you found?’ asked Tiger, who had also developed an affection for the Quarkbeast, even though he’d known it only a short time. He had often been dragged around the park on the beast’s early morning walks – but in an affectionate, non-malicious, hardly-hurting-you-at-all sort of way.

  ‘Look,’ I said, dropping the tooth into his palm. ‘It looks like there’s another Quarkbeast in town.’

  ‘That’ll have the council in a lather – the present Beastcatcher is very pro-Quarkbeast and rarely favours extermination.’

  This annoyed the council as they saw the role of the Beastcatcher as very much along the lines of pest control. The previous Beastcatcher had been much more popular, but sadly got himself eaten by a Tralfamosaur who took offence at being poked at with a stick.

  ‘This beast might not be staying,’ said Tiger, staring at the tooth. ‘Just paying its respects on its way through.’

  A Quarkbeast is a small hyena-shaped creature that is covered in leathery scales and often described as: ‘One tenth Labrador, six-tenths velociraptor and three-tenths kitchen food blender.’ I held a special affinity for these creatures. Not just because I owed my life to one, but because they were one of the Ununited Kingdom’s surviving eight species of invented animals, all created by notable wizards in the sixteenth century when enchanted beasts were totally ‘the thing’. The Mighty Shandar created the Quarkbeast for a bet in 1783 and apparently won the wager, as nothing more bizarre has ever been created since. That didn’t stop them being uniquely dangerous, and a Quarkbeast was regarded with a great deal of suspicion by the authorities – hence the issue with the Beastcatcher. An abiding fondness for metal was one of their many peculiar habits, zinc most of all. In fact, the first obvious sign of a Quarkbeast in the neighbourhood was that all the shiny zinc coatings were licked off the dustbins – the beast equivalent of licking the icing off a cake.

  I looked around cautiously, hoping to catch a glimpse of the small creature. There was no sign, so I walked back to the car.

  ‘Do you think the Quarkbeast could have been the pair of yours all the way from Australia?’ asked Tiger, doing up his seat belt.