‘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 tungsten 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.
‘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
‘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.’
