‘
‘But he’s a spell himself,’ observed Tiger helpfully, ‘and presumably has zero mass, so it must be easier.’
‘Probably,’ replied Moobin gloomily. ‘I wish he’d let me have a closer look.’
The Wizard Moobin had recently become fascinated by the Transient Moose, and had fired a few spell-probes into it to discover just what particular enchantment was keeping it going. The probes had learned little except that the original sorcerer was possibly Greek and the Moose was most likely running Mandrake Sentience Emulation Protocols,[17] which didn’t help, as nearly all spells that made something appear lifelike were run under Mandrake.
It wasn’t just curiosity. The Mystical Arts were arcane, secretive and, once a specific spell was discovered, rarely shared. Ancient wizards went to their graves with the really groovy stuff still locked inside their heads. Some wrote it down in big leather-bound books, but most didn’t. It would be very valuable indeed to find out not only how the Moose managed to live so long and teleport so effortlessly, but how it could do it on an average crackle consumption of only 172.8 Shandars a day.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ said Moobin, ‘so long as someone hasn’t already swiped the hot water.’
‘Oops,’ said Tiger.
‘What, again?’ asked Moobin.
‘I was covered in mud.’
‘Have you been thinking about the bridge gig?’ I asked, changing the subject. I had yet to see a detailed plan or risk assessment.
‘I’m working on it,’ Moobin said, ‘although with the Dibble Coils stuck on standby we’ll need all of us if we’re to do it in a day.’
‘Lady Mawgon is going to try to get them back online this morning.’
‘The old bat’s going to try and hack the Dibble?’ replied Moobin with a smile. ‘Rather her than me.’
He nodded his head thoughtfully. Hacking into a well-cast spell was not for the faint-hearted. Wizards guarded their work jealously, and would often leave traps for busybodies attempting to copy their work. We watched as Moobin went back into his room, mumbling to himself as his feet made sticky footprints on the oak flooring.
‘Right, then,’ I said, checking my watch, ‘time to see Lady Mawgon – don’t mention the fact we took no payment for the finding gig.’
Hacking the Dibble
‘What in heck are Dibble Storage Coils?’ asked Tiger as we made our way back downstairs. He still had a good decade’s worth of learning to do, and only two years in which to do it. I had to teach him most of it, and some of the stuff I needed to impart I hadn’t even learned myself.
‘It’s a spell designed by Charles Dibble the Extraordinary,’ I explained. ‘In the days when wizidrical power was falling, the Great Zambini looked at several ways to store what crackle there was. Dibble the Extraordinary wasn’t so much a practising sorcerer, but one who wrote spells for those who were. He wrote the entire mobile phone network incantation for ElectroMagic, Inc. back in the forties and then committed his energies to wizidrical storage devices. He was long retired when Zambini had him build the coils. Simply put, they transform the building into something akin to a huge rechargeable battery.’
Tiger looked around, as if wondering how he could have missed something so important.
‘Where are they?’
I waved my hand in the direction of the building at large.
‘The coils are not coils you can see – they are more like a constantly circulating field of negative wizidrical energy that can absorb, store and then discharge vast amounts of crackle on command. The applications are endless, from boring holes in solid rock to making something from nothing. We have the capacity to hold four GigaShandars.’[18]
‘And what could a GigaShandar actually do?’ asked Tiger, who was almost permanently inquisitive.
‘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 . . .
‘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
