The Song of the Quarkbeast

It’s the stone at the top of an arch that holds it all together. Oddly enough, an arch is held up by the very force that should make it collapse – gravity.

26

Arboretum: it’s a sort of tree garden. Putting the trees in alphabetical order is quite pointless. A better use of his money would be supporting the Troll War widows’ fund.

27

Put simply, it means demagnetising, a problem to which the Mysterious X is prone given his strange, semi-charged particle existence. A good degaussing for X is like delousing for a dog – they don’t like it much, but it’s good for them in the long run.

28

Lucy ‘The Honourable’ Mandrake, 1642–1734 was one of the ‘Four greats,’ and it is thanks to her work on MSEPs that magicians are able to make something appear to be alive. Up until this point, wizards could only create inanimate objects. Mandrake’s unveiling of her groundbreaking Protocols at the 1732 World Magic Expo came with a demonstration of a shower of toads, each one of them apparently alive, but not. The ‘Shower of Toads’ spell is still regarded as a watershed of wizidrical knowledge and understanding – and despite its utter pointlessness, often copied.

29

Unusual and realistic cloud shapes were the usual method by which bursts of wizidrical energy could be detected. The cloud shape above the experimental forty-megaton wizidrical detonations in the Cambrian Empire was a staggeringly realistic rendition of an Amanita phalloides, coincidentally one of the major ingredients of the potion that built the device.

30

Despite the grand title, the mid-Wales-located Cambrian Empire is a ramshackle collection of warlords nominally controlled by the Cambrian potentate Tharv the Bountiful. The empire has almost no economy or government, but despite its lawless nature, visitors are shockingly well-treated, and the crime figures of the nation are the lowest in the unUK.

31

Jennifer must have imagined this; it’s not possible to hear the sonic boom from within the craft making it.

32

Flying carpet wear is measured in footfall-hours, and it was later calculated that the transonic jump was the equivalent of being walked on continually for eight years in the lobby of a busy hotel.

33

LZ: landing zone. The Prince served in the Portland Light Rug for six years, and although he rarely mentioned his military service, he often used military terminology. ‘EVAC’ means ‘evacuation’

34

Fireball – a sort of marker flare that glows deep black in the daylight and bright white at night.

35

Visions were not allocated code numbers until late 1973, something that had been long overdue. The main reason was to enable precogs to calculate an official strike rating, and thus a logical scale of payment.

36

It’s the fear of open spaces. Jennifer never did find out what the Moose thought she meant.

37

A Snodd delicacy often served at open-air gatherings. Real ‘roadkill pizza’ these days is rare as demand far outstrips supply, but the alternative is still baked in the traditional way – on asphalt under a sunlamp.

38