The Song of the Quarkbeast

everything that Zambini had told me – from the so-called ‘Ann Shard’ being the Mighty Shandar’s agent, to the worthlessness of rings as a conduit of power, to Blix being one of the few people able to work in RUNIX, to Once Magnificent Boo’s disfigurement.

‘Ouch,’ said Perkins, looking at his own fingers.

I then told them that Zambini thought magic might have an intelligence and would ‘find a way’ to let us win if it had a mind to.

‘That’s like saying electricity has free will,’ said Perkins, ‘or gravity.’

‘Gravy has free will?’ said Tiger, who hadn’t been listening properly. ‘That explains a lot. I knew it didn’t like me.’

‘Not gravy, gravity.’

‘I’m not sure I buy that.’

‘Me neither,’ I replied, ‘but he’s the Great Zambini, so we can’t reject the idea totally out of hand. He wasn’t out of ideas about his own predicament, either. Here.’

I handed him the old envelope covered in Zambini’s handwritten notes.

‘He thinks these observations may help us crack the spell.’

‘And he said the Mighty Shandar cast it?’

I nodded.

‘Not good,’ said Perkins after studying the notes for a while. ‘It seems Zambini is locked into a spell with a passthought on auto-evolve: one that changes randomly every two minutes. One moment it’s all about swans on a lake at sunset, the next about spoonbills in the Orinoco delta, and the very act of entering the passthought changes the passthought. We can’t crack Mawgon’s and it’s static, so what hope with one that changes?’

We were all silent for a while.

‘Did you see any Trolls?’ asked Tiger.

‘Two of them. They think we’re vermin.’

‘We don’t like them much, either.’

‘No, they really think we’re vermin – a pest that needs eradicating. They’re entirely indifferent to humans. We’re to them as rabbits are to us – only more destructive and less cuddly.’

‘Oh,’ said Tiger, who, being a Troll War orphan, had an interest in Trolls. ‘Then the invasions are even more of a waste of life, cash, time and resources then we had suspected?’

‘It looks that way.’

I took a deep breath and looked at my watch. It was quarter past eleven. Blix’s concession offer ran out at midnight.

‘Did you talk to the residents about taking Blix’s offer?’

Perkins reached into his top pocket and pulled out a notebook.

‘They may be a bit odd, but they’re quite forthright in their views.’

He consulted his notes.

‘I could only speak to twenty-eight of them. Monty Vanguard is stone, Mysterious X and the Funny Smell in Room 632 are nebulous at best, the Thing in 346 made a nasty noise when I knocked on the door, and the Lizard Wizard just stared at me and ate insects.’

‘He does that,’ I said.

‘I’m not totally convinced the Thing in Room 346 is a sorcerer at all,’ remarked Tiger, ‘nor the Funny Smell.’

‘Who’s going to go and find out? You?’

‘On reflection,’ mused Tiger, ‘let’s just assume they are, for argument’s sake.’

‘So anyway,’ continued Perkins, ‘the residents have without exception poured scorn on Blix’s offer and announced they would sooner descend into confused old age and die in their beds while subsisting on a diet of rotten cabbage, weak custard and dripping.’

‘Isn’t that what they’re doing already?’ asked Tiger.

‘Which shows their commitment to things continuing as they are,’ I said.

‘Right,’ agreed Perkins, ‘but nearly all of them said they would also trust in the judgement of Kazam’s manager.’

‘That’s not good,’ I said, ‘Zambini is still missing.’

‘They didn’t mean Zambini,’ said Perkins, ‘and even though half of them don’t know your name and refer to you as “the sensible-looking girl with the ponytail” they’re all behind you.’

There were over two thousand years of combined experience in the building, and that wealth of knowledge had approved of what I did. All of a sudden, I felt stronger and more confident thanks to their trust. But it didn’t solve our immediate problems.

‘What about you?’ I said to Perkins. ‘Are you going to take the two million moolah?’

Perkins looked at me with a frown.

‘And miss all this craziness? Not for anything. I’m astonished you even had to ask.’

‘Thank you.’

We said nothing for several moments.

‘We found out where the “infinite thinness” enchantment was coming from,’ said Tiger, ‘though not who might have cast it.’

He rose and went across to my desk and passed a pocket Shandarmeter across the small terracotta pot. The needle on the gauge showed a peak reading of two thousand Shandars. We didn’t know how the enchantment that protected the old building worked nor who was casting it, but this was the source.

I picked the ring out of the pot. It was utterly plain and unremarkable – just large. I had a thought and picked up the phone.

‘Are you calling Blix?’ asked Perkins.

‘No – the Mighty Shandar’s agent. We need to find out more.’

I dialled the number the so-called ‘Ann Shard’ had given me, and after two rings it was answered.

‘Miss D’Argento?’ I said. ‘It’s Jennifer Strange.’

‘I can see my impertinent yet wholly necessary subterfuge took a modicum of cerebral activity to divine,’ she announced in her odd Longspeak, ‘but in this pursuit you were proved correct.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It took you a few days to figure out I wasn’t Ann Shard.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

There was a pause before she carried on.

‘Is this communication to impart knowledge about the geographical whereabouts regarding my client’s mother’s ring?’

‘We haven’t got it, if that’s what you mean, but yes, it is about the ring: what’s so special about it and why did the Mighty Shandar want it found?’

‘There is nothing special about it,’ she said simply, ‘you have my word on that.’

‘And Shandar’s reason for wanting it found?’

‘We have many clients,’ said Miss D’Argento in a mildly annoyed tone, ‘and we never betray their confidence.’

Zambini was right; it had been Shandar. If there wasn’t at least some truth in it, she would have simply laughed or dismissed it out of hand.

‘Is there anything else?’ asked Shandar’s agent. ‘Miss D’Argento is really most frightfully busy.’

She was talking about herself again.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The next time Shandar wakes from granite, tell him that we’ll be after him once Zambini is freed – and he will be, mark my words.’

‘Goodbye, Miss Strange. We’ll meet again, I’m sure.’

And the phone went dead. I relayed what she had said to the others, but none of it seemed to help much, except to perhaps confirm what we suspected – that the Mighty Shandar was keeping a watchful eye on events here in the Kingdom of Snodd, and that if Shandar was behind Zambini’s disappearance, then it was going to be trebly tough getting Zambini back.

‘Hullo, Jennifer,’ said a voice from the sofa, ‘did my vision work out?’