after seventy-six hours of eye-popping concentration by Lady Chumpkin of Spode, who apparently lost three stone in weight with the effort.’
‘Will we win the bridge contest?’ asked Tiger.
‘Without a doubt,’ I said, with not quite as much certainty as I could have wished.
Zambini Towers
We’d had lunch, congratulated Perkins and were now gathered in the Palm Court. The only member of the ‘inner sanctum’ of licensed sorcerers absent was Patrick of Ludlow, who was busy moving an oak for a wealthy client eager to alphabetise his arboretum.[26]
Lady Mawgon and Monty Vanguard were still there, exactly the same as when we left. It would take ten or twenty years before a thin coating of lichen would make them look any different, although they might need a dusting by Tuesday week.
‘Goodness,’ said Perkins, who’d not seen a spell gone so badly wrong before. ‘Have we attempted a Magnaflux Reversal?’
‘Several times.’
‘Has anyone asked the Mysterious X?’ suggested Half Price. ‘Since he’s less of a who and more a what, he might have a different take on the problem.’
This was entirely true. Because of Mysterious X’s nebulous state of semi-existence, we often gave him small jobs to do, such as retrieving cats stuck up trees, and it could persuade pianos into tune by glaring at them. The fact that he didn’t have a licence didn’t bother us, as there was little tangible evidence to say X even existed at all.
‘I could speak to it,’ volunteered Tiger. ‘I think it quite likes me – I’m the only one who can give X its weekly degauss[27] without it causing trouble.’
‘Go on, then,’ said Wizard Moobin, and as Tiger hurried off, he passed the Transient Moose, who had just reappeared in the doorway, and watched us all in his usual laconic manner.
‘Let’s talk about the bridge contest,’ I announced. ‘Let’s suppose we can’t get Lady Mawgon back or use the Dibbles to help us – what problems do you think we might have?’
‘We’re still five to their three,’ said Moobin. ‘Blix is about on a par with me and a powerful levitator, but both Tchango and Dame Corby are less powerful than the Price brothers. Patrick is a solid plodder and can be trusted to get any heavy stone into position. We can keep Perkins in reserve and still beat them comfortably.’
They then talked about crackle allocations and technical stuff like that, and although half my attention was on the meeting, my mind always tends to wander a bit during technical discussions, which are, to be frank, boring. Wizards in general don’t make good conversation. They are always reluctant to talk about how fantastic the conjured thunderstorm actually was – the size of the tempest and the bright flashes of lightning, the fearsome and towering storm-clouds and suchlike – but go into almost excruciating detail about the strands of spell that went into it. It would be like meeting Rembrandt only for him to talk about nothing but the wood of his brush handles.
As I looked around the room in a bored manner my gaze fell upon the Transient Moose. I narrowed my eyes. For as long as anyone could remember the Moose had simply stood around doing not very much at all. As I watched he faded from view, but not to another part of the hotel as he usually did, but to where Lady Mawgon was rooted to the spot in her calcite splendour. The Moose stared at the alabaster, shook his antlers and then vanished.
‘Did you see that?’
‘See what?’ asked Moobin, who had just launched into a long and tedious discussion about Zorff’s 6th Axiom.
‘The Moose. He was examining Lady Mawgon as though he were . . .
‘The Moose was written with Mandrake Sentience Emulation Protocols,’ [28] said Full Price, ‘and like a Quarkbeast it shows considerable
I opened my mouth to answer, but then noticed Tiger waving at me from the door of the Palm Court. I excused myself and hurried over, glad of a distraction.
‘Problems?’
‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Patrick of Ludlow just phoned. He said he’s run into oversurge issues moving the oak in the arboretum and wanted a wizard to go down and help sort things out.’
‘If it’s an oversurge issue why not take Perkins?’ said Moobin when I asked him whether he could help. ‘He should know what it’s like to absorb crackle rather than use it.’
Perkins agreed wholeheartedly as he was keen to begin his new career as a sorcerer, so a few minutes later myself, Perkins and Tiger were walking out the door towards my parked car. Tiger was carrying a partially inflated bin-liner as this was the way Mysterious X travelled when outside Zambini Towers. When you are nothing more than an inexplicable energy field of unknown origin, even a light breeze has a dispersing effect which can be quite unsettling.
‘Can you drop us off at the zoo?’ asked Tiger. ‘I kind of get the idea that Mysterious X
That was how the Mysterious X communicated. Not by words, but by ideas that popped into your head. Perkins had spent many hours consulting with him on the powers of suggestion – or, if you didn’t believe in Mysterious X, Perkins had been sitting in a room, mumbling to himself.
‘I never thought X was big on zoos,’ I said as we climbed into my car, ‘but then again, the Buzonji cub is
Shifting oaks
I dropped Tiger and the Mysterious X at Hereford Zoo. While disappointingly having neither elephants nor penguins, it was saved from ignominy by possessing several animals that were not created by evolution, but by magic. Back in the days of almost unbridled power, Super Grand Master Sorcerers would attempt to outdo one another in their creation of weird and wonderful beasts. Of the seventeen known ‘non-evolutionary’ creatures, only eight were still represented by live specimens. Of those, Hereford Zoo had an unprecedented four. They had the only captive breeding pair of Buzonji, which is a sort of six-legged okapi; two species of Shridloo, a desert and dessert – one being the edible variety. The only captive Tralfamosaur also had its home here, and was now in a more secure compound after it ate the last Beastcatcher. A Frazzle named Devlin completed the small collection – it was not just the only specimen living outside its natural habitat in the wetlands of Norfolk, but also the only one glad to be doing so. They used to have a Quarkbeast, but it kept on frightening people, so was removed from display.
‘Here’s some money for a taxi home,’ I said, ‘and remember to get a receipt – and don’t let the cabby charge you extra for X.’
Tiger assured me that he wouldn’t and asked for a sixpence for an ice cream. I bid him goodbye and then took the main road towards Colonel Bloch-Draine’s country estate at Holme Lacy.
‘So what’s an oversurge?’ asked Perkins as we drove out of Hereford.
‘The art of magic is all about channelling the wizidrical energy that swirls invisibly around us. It usually takes skill and concentration to gather and focus the required power, but in some instances the opposite can happen, and the wizidrical energy comes in too thick and fast to be used safely.’
‘Like an overflowing bath where you can’t switch off the taps or take the plug out?’
‘Something like that. It’s unpredictable so pretty useless, like the wasted heat in a steam engine, so what you have to do is redirect the crackle elsewhere, like a safety valve. It can be quite fun, apparently – spelling anything just to use up the power. Showers of toads, levitation – whatever takes your fancy.’
