The Song of the Quarkbeast tld-2 Page 7

  ‘Quarkbeasts come in pairs?’ asked Perkins, who, although quite expert in seeding ideas, was not so hot when it came to magicozoology.

  ‘They don’t so much breed as replicate,’ I explained. ‘They divide into two entirely equal and opposite Quarkbeasts. But as soon as they do they have to be separated and sent a long way from each other – the other side of the globe, usually. If a paired positive and negative Quarkbeast meet, they are both annihilated in a flash of pure energy. It was said that Cambrianopolis was half destroyed when a confluence of paired Quarkbeasts came together and exploded with the force of ten thousand tons of Marzex-4.[22] Luckily, Cambrianopolis is such a ruin no one really noticed.’

  ‘I heard it was an earthquake,’ said Perkins.

  ‘That’s usually the cover story. We can’t have people panicking like idiots as soon as they see a Quarkbeast. The general population is suspicious enough of magic as it is.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Why do Quarkbeasts search for their twin?’ asked Tiger.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Boredom?’

  ‘If it’s the pair of your Quarkbeast,’ said Perkins with growing confusion, ‘doesn’t that mean the new Quarkbeast is unlikely to explode?’

  ‘Exactly. Nothing to fear from this one.’

  We drove off in silence, past the cathedral, out of the city walls and headed south into the Golden Valley and past Snodhill Castle with the Dragonlands beyond and down the escarpment to the small town of Clifford. There, on a bend in the river and set about with oak and sweet chestnut, was the place Tiger and I had called home for the first twelve years of our lives. It was as grim as we both remembered it, and Tiger and I glanced at each other as we drew up outside. Perkins took one look at the Sisterhood of the Blessed Lady of the Lobster and announced he would be staying in the car.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ said Tiger defensively. ‘The foundlings are rarely made to share blankets these days, and gruel no longer has a consistency thinner than water.’

  ‘I wonder how they did that?’ I mused, since gruel’s primary ingredient was water. ‘I’ve always wanted to know.’

  ‘It must be hard to extract the nourishment out of water,’ agreed Tiger, ‘but they managed it somehow.’

  ‘I’ll leave you both to your trip down memory lane,’ said Perkins, staying resolutely on the back seat and hover-orbiting a pair of snooker balls around each other as a ‘tuning up’ exercise for his Magic Test. ‘I’ll see you guys later.’

  We walked across the car park, up to the great doors, past the slot in the door for after-hours foundling deliveries, and into the quadrangle. I felt Tiger clasp my hand.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘no one’s taking you back. We’re owned by Kazam now. Everything’s fine.’

  We walked across the quad, where open-air lessons were held in the summer, and from where we used to watch the shells as they were lobbed across the border from King Snodd’s artillery battery in the orchard to the Duke of Brecon’s small duchy across the river. Although an uneasy peace had once more descended between Brecon and Snodd and the guns were now silent, we had driven past a squadron of landships on our way in. The six-storey-high tracked vehicles had no special significance to me, but they did to Tiger, although he didn’t know it – Mother Zenobia had told me Tiger’s parents had been a husband-and-wife engineering team on a landship that vanished during the Fourth Troll Wars. Tiger would have been lost, too, had creche facilities not been removed from the landships in order to make room for extra munitions, so when his parents never returned he ended up on the steps of the orphanage. Mothers and fathers were a tetchy subject to foundlings, which was why he’d not yet been told what happened. The whole abandonment deal could devour you, so we usually left it until we felt we had the maturity to deal with it. My own parents would doubtless be traceable through my Volkswagen as I had been left on the front seat when abandoned, and although I was arguably mature enough to handle it, life was complicated enough.

  ‘Is that Jennifer?’ said Mother Zenobia as we were shown into her office. ‘I can smell early Volkswagen upon you. A mix of burned oil, hot mud and six-volt electrics.’

  ‘It is, ma’am.’

  ‘And those footsteps behind you. Guarded and impertinent – yet full of inner strength to be fully realised. Master Prawns?’

  ‘Your servant, ma’am,’ said Tiger.

  Mother Zenobia was not only old but completely blind, and had been since before most people on the planet had been born. She was sitting in an armchair in front of a fire, her gnarled fingers resting on the top of her cane, and her face so suffused with wrinkles that lost infant tortoises often followed her home. She clapped her hands and a novice entered, took orders for tea or cocoa, bobbed politely and then left again.

  ‘So,’ said Mother Zenobia after offering us a seat each, ‘is this a social visit, or business?’

  ‘Both,’ I said, ‘and please excuse my impertinence, Mother Zenobia, but our conversation must be strictly in confidence.’

  ‘May my ears be infested by the floon beetle if I murmur so much as a word, Jennifer. Now, what’s up?’

  ‘Lady Mawgon got herself changed to stone.’

  A smile crossed Mother Zenobia’s features.

  ‘Silly Daphne. What was she trying to do?’

  I explained about the storage coils, and what had transpired.

  ‘Not like Mawgon to get caught out by a gatekeeper,’ murmured Mother Zenobia when I had finished. ‘How is this to do with me? My sorcery days are long over.’

  She held up her hands as if we needed proof. They were twisted with arthritis, her valuable index fingers bent and, for a sorcerer, almost useless.

  I chose my words carefully. Moobin had said earlier that getting changed to stone was effectively suspended animation.

  ‘I thought perhaps great age in sorcerers might be less to do with spelling away old age than simply pressing the pause button.’

  ‘You are a highly perceptive young lady,’ replied Zenobia at length. ‘I do indeed change to stone every night in order to delay death’s cold embrace. Eight hours’ sleep over an eight-year lifetime is about twenty-six years,’ She continued. ‘Wasted time if you ask me, except for dreaming, which I miss. I’ve been rock during the winter months for the past seventy-six years as well, and when my last fortnight beckons I will be with you for an hour a year. I may last another century at this rate.’

  She thought for moment.

  ‘Self-induced petrification has its drawbacks, though. Changing to limestone at night is no problem, but returning to life in the morning leaves minute traces of calcite in the fine capillaries of the retina.’

  Tiger and I looked at one another. The secret of Mother Zenobia’s longevity was no more.

  ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ she added. ‘It’s all strictly prohibited by the Codex Magicalis under “enchantment abuse”.’

  ‘Your secret is safe with us,’ I assured her. ‘So this is how the Great Zambini looks seventy when he is actually one hundred and twelve?’

  ‘Indeed,’ replied Mother Zenobia as the novice returned with the tea and cocoa, bobbed politely and then went out again, ‘but he could do it better than me. He turns to dolorite and thus has none of the sight difficulties I have with limestone. The really class acts turn themselves to granite, which has no side effects at all.’

  ‘The Mighty Shandar,’ I breathed, suddenly realising that he too must change himself to stone on a regular basis. ‘That would explain how he has lived for almost five centuries.’

  ‘Right again,’ said Zenobia. ‘It is said that his dynastic family of agents have instructions only to wake him for the best jobs. They say that the Mighty Shandar won’t get out of black granite for less than eight dray-weights of gold a day, and that he has not lived longer than a minute since 1783, the year he finished the Channel Tunnel.’

  ‘He could live almost for ever,’ I observed.

  ‘In theory yo
u might,’ said Mother Zenobia. ‘Using petrification to suspend animation indefinitely is less dependent on the spell, and more a case of not letting things drop off. Pity those wizards from Ancient Greece missing either their arms, legs or heads. Come out of a two-millennium sleep missing an arm and you’d bleed to death within five minutes. Still,’ she carried on, ‘most of them would have been enchanted in RUNIX, and you’d not know how to get them back out anyway.’

  ‘Which brings me back to why we are here,’ I said. ‘The gatekeeper of which Lady Mawgon fell foul was written in RUNIX, and we wanted to know how you might reverse that, given your expertise in these matters.’

  ‘My spell is written in ARAMAIC-128,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘which allows for perfectly timed depetrification. You need to find someone who is expert in RUNIX. What about the Great Zambini?’

  This suggestion offered at least a possibility. I told Mother Zenobia about Zambini’s possible appearance the next day, and she nodded sagely.

  ‘I hope it works out. Bored now. Go away. Drink your cocoa.’

  So we did, and drank a little more quickly than was good for us, and it made our eyes water. We left Mother Zenobia soon after, and with our semi-burned tongues, walked back towards the car. I now knew how Zenobia, Shandar and Zambini had lived for so long, but it didn’t really help us.

  ‘We really need to find the Great Zambini this time,’ I said.

  ‘Is it likely?’ asked Tiger, who had been on several Zambini searches, and knew the pitfalls.

  ‘If past attempts are anything to go by we have two chances: fat and thin.’

  We walked outside and found Perkins peacefully asleep on the back seat, the paintwork of the beetle slowly turning from blue to green to black and then back to blue again. He was ready.

  The King’s Useless Brother

  We partly retraced our route back towards Hereford, but instead of going straight ahead by the grave of the unknown tattooist at Dorstonville, we took the four-lane processional avenue that led towards the King’s modest eight-storey palace at Snodhill. The castle covered an area of six square acres, with many of the Kingdom’s administrative departments scattered among its two hundred or so rooms. A roof of purple slate topped the stone building, and the eighteen towers were capped with conical towers, each home to a long pennant that fluttered elegantly in the breeze.

  After making our way through three sets of drawbridges, each with their own peculiar brand of pointless and overlong security procedures, we eventually made it to the Inner Bailey, where we parked the car outside the Interior Ministry. I told Tiger to wait for us there, and I walked us to the correct desk, as I came in here quite a lot, usually to submit the endless forms and paperwork that bedevilled modern sorcery.

  ‘Hello, Miss Strange,’ said the receptionist, ‘here to submit more paperwork?’

  ‘Magic licence,’ I replied, nodding towards Perkins. ‘We have an appointment to see the King’s Useless Brother.’

  She stared at us both over her spectacles for a moment, consulted the diary and then pointed us towards the uncomfortable bench to wait. The one with cushions was reserved for those of higher birth, and was today crammed with bewigged aristocracy, who, by their refusal to sit on the citizens’ bench, made themselves trebly uncomfortable.

  Perkins and I talked through the application process. I was more nervous than I thought I’d be, probably because we were one sorcerer down for the foreseeable future, and Perkins was going to have to prove himself pretty fast if we still wanted to do the bridge gig on Friday.

  ‘How do you think I’m going to do?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ll pass or my name’s not Jennifer Strange.’

  ‘Your name’s not Jennifer Strange.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re a foundling. You don’t know what your name is.’

  ‘It could be Jennifer Strange,’ I said, unconvincingly, ‘as a sort of coincidence.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem very likely.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But listen, you’re going to pass, right?’

  And I took his hand and squeezed it, and smiled at him, and he smiled back.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Miss Strange?’ said the secretary again. ‘The King’s Useless Brother has become bored and will see you early.’

  Perkins and I straightened our clothes and followed the secretary into a high-ceilinged room decorated in the ‘medieval dreary chic’ style that was then very much in fashion. A lot of stone, tapestries on the walls and a stylish cold draught that caught you in the small of the neck like the onset of pneumonia.

  Sitting behind a large desk that was full of shiny executive desk toys was the King’s Useless Brother: a thin, weedy man with a constantly dripping nose that he dabbed with annoying regularity with a handkerchief.

  ‘Good afternoon, Your Gracious Uselessness,’ I said, bowing low. ‘I am Jennifer Strange of the Kazam House of Enchantments. I humbly beg to set before you an application for my client Perkins Archibald Perkins to be licensed to commit enchantments in the worthy Kingdom of Snodd.’

  ‘Eh?’ he said, so I said the same thing again, only this time much more slowly. When I had finished he thought for a moment and then said:

  ‘You want a magic licence?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you just say so? All that “gracious this” and “humbly beg” makes my head spin. I wish people would say what they want rather than hiding it in long words. Honestly, if we got rid of any word longer than eight letters, life would be a lot more understandable.’

  ‘Except you wouldn’t have been able to say “understandable”,’ pointed out Perkins.

  The King’s Useless Brother thought carefully and counted on his fingers.

  ‘How right you are!’ he announced at length. ‘What were we talking about?’

  ‘A magic licence application?’

  ‘Of course. But tell me one thing before we look at the application.’

  ‘Yes?’ I asked, expecting to be quizzed about Perkins’ fitness to serve, and whether he would uphold the noble calling with every atom of his being, that sort of thing.

  ‘How can you be called Perkins Perkins?’

  ‘My father’s name was Perkins, and I’m named after him. It’s like Adam Adams or David Davies.’

  ‘Or William Williams,’ I added.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Someone I just made up.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Useless Brother, sniffing. ‘Right. What happens now?’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘I explain exactly why Mr Perkins should receive a licence, and upon your approval, we turn to appendix F of the Magic Enactments Licensing Act of 1867 and conduct one spell each from Group “A” through to Group “G”. Afterwards, once opposition voices are heard, Mr Perkins performs his Great Feat. You then decide upon the merits of the case and stamp the application into authority . . . or not.’

  ‘Stamp?’

  His attention, which had been drifting somewhat, was suddenly renewed.

  ‘I have a number of stamps for all different purposes – look.’

  He jumped off his chair and opened a cupboard behind the desk. It was full of rubber stamps. Big ones, small ones, each elegantly made and presumably to enact some sort of legislation for which the Useless Brother had been made responsible.

  ‘This is the one we will use today,’ he said, selecting a large and ornately handled rubber stamp that was the size of a grapefruit. ‘It carries two colours on a single stamp, which is a remarkable achievement, don’t you think? Now, where do I stamp it?’

  Perkins and I looked at one another. This was turning out to be much easier than we had thought.

  ‘Don’t you want to see Cadet Perkins perform his Great Feat at the very least?’ I asked. ‘Or even have the adjudicator present?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll be fine,’ said the King’s Useless Brother dismissively, staring at the stamp lovingly. I shrugged. The stamp
made it all legal, and we’d be fools to pass up such an easy opportunity.

  ‘Just here,’ I said, passing the application across the table.

  ‘This is the bit I like,’ said the bureaucrat excitedly, ‘there’s nothing quite like the satisfying thump of a rubber stamp on paper. The sound of freedom, don’t you think?’

  And so saying, he opened a jewel-encrusted pad, reverentially inked the stamp, brought it up above his head, paused for a moment and—

  ‘One moment, sire.’

  Two men had just walked in. The most important of them was Lord Tenbury, one of the King’s most trusted advisers, and the Useless Brother’s business partner. He was a man dressed in the robes of high office and wore a finely combed grey beard and hair that framed his piercing eyes, also grey. I had met him on a number of occasions and he always left me with the impression that he was an iron fist in a kid-leather glove. Pleasant on the surface, but too smart and savvy for it to be possible to get much past him, and loyal to the Crown through and through – and not averse to making a few sacks of cash on the side.

  ‘My Gracious Lord,’ exclaimed Tenbury in an exasperated tone. ‘What did we say about stamping things when I’m out of the room?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the Useless Brother, looking bored, ‘but she seemed so nice and that person there has the same name as his last name.’

  ‘Perkins,’ said Perkins helpfully.

  ‘I see,’ said Tenbury, looking at us both suspiciously. ‘And why are you here before your allotted time?’

  ‘We were invited in,’ I said.

  ‘That’s true,’ said the Useless Brother. ‘It gets very lonely in here sometimes with no stamping to do.’

  ‘You could always look out of the window.’

  ‘Of course I can’t, silly,’ scolded the Useless Brother. ‘If I did that all morning I’d have nothing to do in the afternoon.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Tenbury with a sigh, ‘have we seen the mandatory magic demonstrations or heard opposition statements?’