The Song of the Quarkbeast: Last Dragonslayer: Book Two (6 page)

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 carpeteers
¹
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 Kilpeck
³
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.

‘As soon as you get an
inkling
of a location let me know,’ I told him again, and after asking Tiger to fetch Kevin some breakfast and the daily papers, I went and stared at the work schedule for the next few days. Wednesday and Thursday were straightforward, but all of Friday had been kept clear for the bridge job, and the project had been much in our thoughts recently. There was only one interesting bridge to speak of in Hereford, and that was the twelveth-century stone arched bridge. Or rather, that
had
been the most interesting bridge until the structure, weakened by neglect and heavy winter floods, had collapsed three years before. Now it was a pile of damp rubble, with only the remains of piers and abutments to indicate what had once been there.

‘We need to rebuild the bridge without any hiccups, don’t we?’ said Tiger, noticing that I was staring at old photographs of the bridge.

‘Yes indeed,’ I replied. ‘Moving out of home improvements and into civil engineering projects could put Kazam firmly on the map. It’ll be a good PR exercise, and we need to increase our standing within the community. I just hope Moobin knows what he’s doing. He says he’s got the rebuild planned, but I think his definition of “plan” might be more along the lines of “make it up as we go along”.’

Tiger snapped his fingers.

‘Didn’t Full Price say Moobin wanted us to witness an experiment he’d got cooking?’ he asked.

‘He did. Better go and see when he wants us. When you get back you can fill out the B1-7g forms for this morning’s work – but not Perkins’ involvement, remember.’

He nodded and trotted out of the door. A few minutes later I heard him yell as he fell up the lift shaft.

There was a knock at the door and I turned to see a small man in a sharp suit holding a briefcase. He looked vaguely familiar.

‘My name is Mr Trimble,’ announced the man, ‘of Trimble, Trimble, Trimble, Trimble and Trimble, attorneys-at-law.’

He handed me a business card.

‘We’ve met before,’ I said coldly, ‘when you were representing the Constuff Land Development Agency.’
⁴

‘That was one of the
other
Trimbles,’ he said helpfully. ‘That’s me there,’ he added, pointing to the second Trimble from the left. ‘Donald was disbarred; a most unsavoury episode.’

‘I see,’ I replied. ‘My name is Jennifer Strange, acting general manager of Kazam. Would you like a seat?’

Mr Trimble took the proffered chair, and got straight to the point.

‘I have wealthy and influential clients,’ he said, ‘and they have a proposal for Kazam.’

I didn’t like the sound of this, but at least Trimble was being honest – and I had five thousand moolah to earn back.

‘Oh, yes?’ I replied suspiciously. ‘What sort of proposal?’

Mr Trimble took a deep breath.

‘My clients would like Kazam to reanimate the mobile telephone network.’

It wasn’t the first time we had been asked to switch the network back on, and wouldn’t be the last. Mobile phones had been one of the first things to go when the drop in wizidrical power required the slow switch-off of services that ran, essentially, on magic. Mobiles and computers hadn’t been possible since 1993, colour televisions since 1999 and GPS navigation since 2001. The last electromagical device to be switched off was the microwave oven in 2004, and that was only because aircraft radar used the same electromagical principle. The only magical technologies of any size still running were north-pointing directional compasses and the spell that kept bicycles from falling over – both of which were so old that no one knew how to switch them off anyway.

‘We’ve been approached by BellShout, N
₂
O and VodaBunny about this before, I said, ‘and our answer is the same: all in good time. The mobile phone network will be active just as soon as we have brought back those electromagical technologies that have priority – medical scanners, and then microwave ovens.’

‘Will that take long?’

I shrugged.

‘A while. When the electromagical spells were shut down no one made a hard copy of the spell, so much is having to be rewritten – when you consider that a yo-yo has over two hundred lines of spell-text to make it work and a photocopier over ten thousand, you get an idea of the complexity of the task. Besides,’ I added, ‘the switch-off gave us an opportunity to reconsider the direction magic will take. We’ll not make the same mistake we made last time. Licensing the power of magic to individuals and companies placed sorcery in the hands of the unscrupulous. Magic belongs in the hands of all – or none.’

We stared at one another for a few moments. It was a view that the Great Zambini had embraced, and almost everyone at Kazam.

‘Well,’ said Mr Trimble, ‘would you take it to your sorcerers anyway? I’d like to report back to my clients that the refusal was unanimous.’

I agreed I would speak to them, and Mr Trimble rose to fetch his hat, which had automatically made its way to the hatstand, part of a self-tidying spell that ran throughout the building.

‘I’m most grateful to you for your time,’ he said. ‘The executives at BellShout will be very happy to talk if you change your position.’

And after shaking my hand, he left.

I wasn’t alone for long. The Prince dropped by with his day’s schedule, and I could see he wasn’t happy.

‘Pizza deliveries
again
?’ he said in exasperation. ‘When do we do some proper carpeteering?’

‘Maybe sooner than you think,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got a task for you.’

His Royal Highness Prince Omar Smith Arkwright Ben Nasil was one of our carpeteers, which might have been a noble and exciting profession were it not for an incident one wintry night when Brother Velobius and his two passengers died when their Turkmen Mk18C ‘Bukhara’ broke up in mid-air owing to rug fatigue. For safety reasons, the Civil Aviation Authority had introduced strict rules that made it almost impossible to make magic carpet flight profitable. Limited top speed, navigation lights – and worst of all, a ban on passengers. All we could do were deliveries.

‘Here’s the thing,’ I said. ‘Kevin has foretold the Great Zambini returning tomorrow afternoon at 16.03 and fourteen seconds.’

‘Let me guess,’ said the Prince, ‘Kevin knows when but not where?’

‘That’s about the size of it. We need Zambini back, Nasil,
⁵
so stick to Zipp like a limpet. If he has a vision about where Zambini might show up, I want you to come and find me immediately.’

He said he wouldn’t fail me, made some comment about needing to take his carpet off the flightline next month for some remedial patchwork, and we said goodbye.

‘Is he really a prince?’ asked Tiger, who had just returned.

‘Second in line to the Duchy of Portland,’ I told him. ‘What’s the deal with Moobin?’

‘He said come up any time. He said you’d be impressed.’

This worried me as Moobin liked a challenge, and was quite used to risking life and limb on weird experimental stuff that he described as ‘important, cutting-edge stuff’ but we saw more as ‘just being a nuisance’.

‘Let’s do it.’ I sighed. ‘It’s not like things could get more weird this morning.’

¹
Since carpets cover the whole floor and rugs only a part of it, a ‘flying carpet’ is misnamed. Translated from the Persian – from where all flying rugs originate – as a ‘flying carpet’ in the seventeenth century, the term has become so entrenched that common usage has them now as carpets. A carpeteer is correctly called a Rugeteer, or, if you’re French, a Tapisigator.

²
The first slogan they used was: ‘Boss-eyed? You need Vision Boss!’ but it was not well received, and hastily withdrawn.

³
Sister Yolanda’s strike rate was the best ever at an astonishing 92 per cent. But then she only made two hundred and twenty-five in her sixty-seven years, which may explain it. Most precogs spew them out by the dozen, daily.

⁴
Constuff is a contraction of ‘Consolidated Useful Stuff PLC’, the Ununited Kingdom’s leading purveyor of cheap and shoddy goods. They are so large they actually own a country – Constuffia – which is full of factories where poorly paid labourers toil ceaselessly in order to make the unUK the leading exporter of cheap and shoddy goods. A recent initiative to throw the goods straight into landfill and avoid costly transportation costs has been enthusiastically embraced.

⁵
Despite being of royal stock, the prince insisted he be treated as a civilian. We liked him a lot for it.

Wizard Moobin

We walked towards the elevators.