The Song of the Quarkbeast: Last Dragonslayer: Book Two (16 page)

He didn’t know she was stone, which was a small plus in our favour.

‘She’s very talented, if a little severe. We’ll defeat you tomorrow, have no fear of that.’

He laughed.

‘With who? A cranky washed-up old has-been and a winsome newbie who can barely levitate a brick? No. You’ll be thrashed. Why don’t you concede now and save the magic industry a lot of embarrassment?’

‘The future of magic is not negotiable.’

‘You’re wrong, and what’s more, it’s not your decision to make. Here’s the deal for you to take back to Kazam: concede before midnight tonight, and I will ensure that all those hopeless ex-sorcerers at Zambini – I mean, “all those venerable past masters” – are looked after in a five-star nursing home until they croak. I will offer every licensed practitioner a job under my leadership or, failing that, two million moolah cash in return for surrendering their magic licences. What’s more, you and Tiger will be paid to do nothing until your indentured servitude is finished, at which point you will be granted full citizenship. Do we have a deal?’

‘Go to hell.’

‘Almost certainly,’ he replied with a smile, ‘but I’ll go there wealthy. I’ll expect an answer by midnight, yes?’

He smiled at me in a smug and triumphant manner, but something didn’t quite ring true.

‘That’s a very generous offer,’ I said, ‘for someone so utterly sure they will win. If you can thrash us as you claim, you can take what you want from the wreckage without spending a bean. Do we
worry
you, Blix?’

He smiled again, but not with quite so much confidence. He was scared of us.

‘Let’s just say,’ he added, recovering his composure, ‘that the magic industry has enough bad PR at present without petty infighting. If we’re to start selling magic as a benevolent force for good – as essential to daily life as the water in the tap and electricity in the plug – then we need to show we are responsible and upright citizens. Take the offer, Strange.’

I had no intention of accepting his offer.

‘We’ll see you at the bridge site tomorrow morning for the contest. Nine on the dot, wasn’t it?’

‘Nine it is.
Sandop kale n’baaa
, Miss Strange.’

‘
Sandop kale n’baaa
, Amazing Blix.’

And after staring at me for a moment, he turned on his heel and left. I walked into the convent and soon found what Blix had been up to. Mother Zenobia was sitting in her chair, stony features looking straight ahead. She had changed to stone for her afternoon nap, and Blix, presumably, had blocked her return. I was too late. Blix had won this round, too. I took a deep breath and prepared to leave.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ asked a tearful Sister Agrippa, who was Mother Zenobia’s attendant.

‘Put a sheet over her and give her the once-over with a feather duster every fortnight. Don’t use a vacuum cleaner in case you knock something off – she’d never forgive you when we get her back.’

I walked out of the convent with the saddening realisation that we were pretty much stuffed. With one potential sorcerer crossed from my list, my last hope was a woman who won an unprecedented six golds in the sorcery events at the 1974 Olympics. She was a sorcerer of undisputed skills, but also secretive, obstinate and prickly beyond measure. She was the Once Magnificent Boo.

Boo and the Quarkbeasts

You couldn’t work in the magic industry without knowing something about the Once Magnificent Boo. Indeed, when one considers the strange practitioners associated with the industry, it is often hard not to talk about anything else. Miss Boolean Champernowne Waseed Mitford Smith, to give her her full name, was an infant magic prodigy. At the age of five she was writing her own spells, was deemed ‘amazing’ by her tenth birthday, ‘incredible’ by her fifteenth, and ‘magnificent’ by the time she turned twenty. Her theory on ‘spell entanglement’ for multitasking was one of her most brilliant contributions, allowing for several enchantments to be done at the same time, a problem unsolved since the twelfth century. In short, she was doing stuff in her teens that the Mighty Shandar couldn’t perform until he was in his thirties, and she was tipped to become the Next Great Thing – a sorcerer of astonishing powers of the sort that crops up only every half millennia or so, and change the craft in new and exciting ways.

She never fulfilled that early promise, and not through her own fault. She was kidnapped in 1974 by anti-magic extremists and hadn’t done any magic since her release, and rarely socialised with those who did. No one knew quite why, nor were ever greeted with anything but a damp stony silence when asked. But she hadn’t totally forgotten her roots, and by way of the respect accorded to her, still carried the ‘Once Magnificent’ accolade.

Thirty-three years after her kidnapping she was still in Hereford, working as a magic licence adjudicator, and Beastmaster to the Crown. More importantly to me, she was also running the only rescue centre for Quarkbeasts in the northern hemisphere. This was in Yarsop, a small village just off the Great West Road that led to the border with the Duchy of Brecon, and that’s where I ended up a short drive later.

Once Magnificent Boo’s house was unremarkable, and indeed, I had to recheck the address as past experience with sorcerers suggested that they usually lived in eccentrically built thatched hovels, full of junk and with owls and stuff hanging around outside. Not this house, which was one of a pair sitting at the end of a gravel drive with weeping willows and flower beds all neatly laid out in a way that was a picture of unmystical normality. I opened the gate and crunched down the drive.

I pressed the doorbell and Once Magnificent Boo answered. Her white hair was tied back and more neat, but her eyes were still as dark as pitch, and I shivered as a cold rush of air escaped from the house. She took one look at me, snorted, and shut the door in my face.

I didn’t leave. She knew I was there so it didn’t make any sense to ring again, so I simply waited. Eight minutes ticked past and eventually the door reopened.

‘There’s no business for you here, Miss Strange.’

I took a deep breath.

‘A Quarkbeast once chose me for companionship.’

‘Yes; and your reckless custodianship led to its death.’

This was true, and something that had preyed on my conscience these past two months. It had been a risky time in my life, and I’d made no effort to stop the Quarkbeast following me into danger.

‘For which I will never cease to be ashamed,’ I said softly. ‘I miss him greatly. Did you hear that a wild Quarkbeast was wandering around Hereford at present?’

‘The colonel was here,’ she said shortly, ‘asking questions on how to trap one.’

I told her about his plans for Quarkbeast-hunting holiday breaks for people with a lot more money than sense – and Blix’s involvement.

‘They have no idea what they’re meddling with,’ said Boo.

‘Is there a way to stop him?’ I asked.

She narrowed her eyes, thought for a moment and then opened the door wide.

‘Come in but be warned: ask me to help you by doing some M-word and I’ll punch you in the eye. Understand?’

‘Yes.’

I stepped in and was immediately struck by the ordinariness of the interior. Of her past life as potentially one of the all-time greatest sorcerers ever, there was hardly any evidence at all. From the interior I could discern only that she was obsessed with Quarkbeasts to a degree that was probably unhealthy, played croquet for the county, and liked to cross-stitch cushions.

‘Nice place you have,’ I said.

‘Adequate for my needs,’ she replied, seemingly less unfriendly now we were in her house. ‘Which Quarkbeast was yours?’

I took a picture from my shoulder bag and showed her.

‘The photographer was trembling with fear when he took it,’ I explained, ‘so it’s a bit blurred.’

‘Hmm,’ said Once Magnificent Boo as she took the picture to a desk, where she opened a book full of Quarkbeast illustrations. It wasn’t just a rescue centre – she was studying them. She pulled out a picture and showed it to me.

‘Was that yours?’

I stared carefully at the picture.

‘No.’

She turned to the large Florentine mirror above the mantelpiece and held up the picture so I could see the same picture
but in mirror image
, and I felt a tear spring to my eye with the sudden recognition.

‘That’s him.’

‘Not him,
it
,’ corrected Once Magnificent Boo, scribbling in a notepad. ‘Quarkbeasts are genderless. You had Q27. Is this the beast you saw in town?’

She showed me the photograph I had given her of my Quarkbeast, but reflected in the mirror.

‘Yes, that’s him.’

‘Then we’ve got the pair of your Quarkbeast sniffing around – Q28. It took him two months to get here from Australia, which was to be expected. Quarkbeasts aren’t strong swimmers.’

‘It swam twelve thousand miles?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. It only swam
eight
thousand miles – the rest would have been overland at a fast trot.’

‘That’s quite a migration.’

‘Quarks are remarkable beasts. Do you want to see some?’

‘Yes, please.’

We walked out of the back door, which I noted had been broken recently and hastily repaired, and into a paddock at the back, where four Quarkbeasts were happily sunning themselves.

‘Quark,’ said the one closest.

‘Quark,’ said another.

‘Quark,’ said the third.

‘Quark,’ came the muffled call of one that was inside the pen.

It was quite an emotional moment, and although their calls were subtly different and none of them looked like mine, they all looked as if they
might
be, which is a bit odd and unnerving.

‘That’s Q3,’ said Boo, pointing to a mangy-looking specimen who was missing most of its back-plates. ‘I rescued it from a Quarkbaiting ring. A very cruel sport. Over there is Q11, which got run over on the M50 and was dragged for six miles. You can still see the eight grooves its claws made in the road all the way to the Newent exit from the Premier Inn. Q35 is the one in the iron filings wallow. It was captured alive in the jam and biscuit section of the Holmer Road Co-op. The beast with the missing teeth is Q23. I got it from the zoo after they thought it was frightening the public too much. I had them all registered as dangerous pets. Legally, no one can touch them – not even the colonel.’

She looked at me for a moment, then opened a cardboard box that contained tins of dog food. She picked them up with her gloved hand and tossed them toward the Quarkbeasts, which crunched them up eagerly, tin and all.

‘What do the neighbours think about having them here?’ I asked, since the four of them looked so intimidating that only those well acquainted with the species would be relaxed in their company.

‘They’re okay about it – they think it keeps burglars at bay. It doesn’t.’

She indicated the broken back door.

‘Last Tuesday night. Did the beasts let out a single Quark? Not a bit of it.’

‘Take much, did they?’ I asked, stalling as I tried to figure out a way to raise the ‘can you help us?’ issue without getting punched in the eye.

‘Money, jewellery, that kind of stuff. I thought of leaving a Quarkbeast in the house at night, but, well, there are some things you baulk at doing, even to burglars.’

She was right. No one deserves a savaging by a Quarkbeast – or even being surprised by one when you’re off doing a spot of innocent villainy.

‘Do they like it here?’

‘They
seem
happy, but since they’re running on Mandrake Sentience Emulation Protocols to make us think they’re real, we can’t ever know for sure.’

‘So what is Q28 doing in town?’ I asked. ‘If its twin is dead, it can’t be looking for him, surely?’

The Once Magnificent Boo stared at me intently.

‘Are you ready to be confused?’

‘It’s how I spend most of my days at Zambini Towers.’

‘Then here it is: Quarkbeasts breed by creating an exact mirror copy of themselves – and since the Mighty Shandar created only one Quarkbeast, every Quarkbeast is a copy of every other Quarkbeast, only opposite.’

‘I was blown back to front yesterday,’ I said. ‘Is that the same thing?’

‘No, and if I were you, I should stay that way. It will save your life.’

‘Right. But wait a minute,’ I said, looking at the picture of Q26, the one that paired to give mine, ‘if Q27 is the mirror of Q26 and Q28 is the mirror of Q27, then why don’t Q26 and Q28 look the same? Alternate generations must be identical, yes?’

‘No. It’s more complicated than that. They create identical copies of themselves in six different flavours:
Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top
and
Bottom
. All are opposite and equal, but all uniquely different and alike at the same time.’

‘I don’t understand any of this,’ I said, feeling increasingly lost.

‘I still have problems with it after twenty years,’ confessed Boo. ‘The complexities of the Quarkbeast are fundamentally unknowable. But here’s the point: there can only ever be thirty-six completely unique yet identical Quarkbeasts, and as soon as the combinations are fulfilled, they will come together and merge into a single Quota of fully Quorumed Quarkbeasts.’

‘What will happen then?’

‘Something
wonderful
. All the great unanswered questions of the world will be answered. Who are we? What are we here for? Where will we end up? And most important of all: can mankind actually get any stupider? The Quarkbeast is more then an animal, it’s an
oracle
to assist in mankind’s illusive search for meaning, truth and fulfilment.’

‘Really?’

‘Don’t take my word for it – it was foreseen by Sister Yolanda of Kilpeck.’

Yolanda was a good precog. If she said enlightenment would be attained when there was a full thirty-six Quarkbeast Quota, there was a good chance it would.

‘When will this quota happen?’

‘Good question. The last near-Quota was two months ago. For eight minutes there were thirty-four Quarkbeasts in existence. When yours died it dropped to thirty-three. By the end of the week there were twenty-nine. We’re down to fifteen at the moment. The colonel needs to be stopped. Quarkbeasts shouldn’t be messed around with, and never held against their will. Can I rely on you to do what you can to ensure it remains free?’