The Song of the Quarkbeast

The Transient Moose stared at us both for a moment, gave a doleful sigh and then faded from view.

‘You didn’t give that Phantom Twelve girl the ring, did you?’ asked Tiger.

He knew me quite well by now. Despite being only twelve, he was pretty switched on. Foundlings generally are.

‘No – and I’m sorry you had to risk your neck because of it.’

He shrugged and gave me a smile.

‘It was quite fun, actually. Except the bit where I went down the well – and got shot into the air. Do I tell the others we’re five grand poorer because of you?’

‘Better not.’

I sifted through the mail for anything that looked desperately urgent – bills mainly – and then checked the level of the Background Wizidrical Radiation using a device called a Shandargraph. Unlike the hand-held Shandarmeter which measured local magical energy, the Shandargraph gave one an idea of broad trends of wizidrical energy over time – a bit like measuring atmospheric pressure. You could not only tell when a spell was being cast, but how powerful and where. I looked at the long ribbon of paper that was slowly emerging from the machine and noted that our morning’s misadventure was dutifully recorded – fourteen MegaShandars, six miles away to the east. I could even see where it peaked as Full Price tried to keep the well open. The spells undertaken by iMagic in Stroud were also apparent. Our workloads seemed relatively equal, although I knew for a fact Blix would have the Truly Bizarre Tchango Muttney levitate a truck somewhere on the other side of town and hold it there for twenty minutes to make us think they had more work on than they actually did.

iMagic were troublesome, but not a real threat. With only Blix, Tchango and Dame Corby ‘She Whom the Ants Obey’, iMagic had only three sorcerers to our five. We also had two flying carpeteers[12] and one decent precog, of which they had none. But on the upside, they didn’t have thirty- six barely sane ex-sorcerers to feed, and they also had a secondary income: Dame Corby was the heiress to the Corby Trouser Press empire, and yearly dividends were apparently still robust, despite the invention of drip-dry garments.

I picked up one of the two remaining self-cleaning cups from the draining rack and poured myself tea from the never-ending teapot, then took some milk from the perpetually half-empty enchanted milk bottle in the fridge.

‘Hello, Jennifer,’ said a voice from the sofa, and a very rumpled-looking figure sat up and scratched himself.

‘Good morning, Kevin,’ I said, handing him a cup of tea and a biscuit from the never-ending supply in the biscuit tin. ‘All well?’

Kevin was a lean man whose thirtieth birthday had passed unannounced two decades before. Despite his dishevelled appearance, with tatty clothes that would have been rejected by the most desperate Troll War widow charity shops, he was clean-shaven and his finely cut hair was immaculate. He looked, in fact, like a yuppie in tramp fancy dress.

‘As well as ever,’ he replied with a yawn.

The reason Kevin always slept fully dressed on the sofa when he had a perfectly good bedroom was because he had foreseen that he would die in his bed, and reasoned that if he stayed away from it he wouldn’t die. That might sound daft until you consider that the Remarkable Kevin Zipp was our precognitive, a breed of sorcerer who had turned their attention to shuffling through the millions of potential futures and occasionally picking out a winner. But as with all oracles, his visions could be vague and misleading. The time he foresaw ‘killer aliens from Mars’, it actually turned out to be about ‘millers named Alan in cars’, which isn’t the same thing at all. And when he predicted the ‘reign of a matron named Grace’ we actually got a ‘rain of meteors from space’. Despite this, his strike rate was a respectable 73 per cent, and since the Big Magic, improving still.

‘Anything for us?’ I asked, as quite often Kevin had dazzling visions that he never told anyone about as he couldn’t see their relevance.

‘A few,’ he replied, taking a sip of tea. ‘Something about Vision Boss, and the price of elevators is set to fall.’

‘Fall?’

‘Or rise. One of the two. Perhaps both.’

‘Vision Boss?’ I asked, fetching the Visions Book, in which we logged every vision, notion and foresightment our precognitives ever had. ‘You mean like the chain of spectacle shops “Should have gone to Vision Boss”?’[13]

‘Not sure. It might have referred to the Boss of Visions – the greatest precog ever.’

‘Sister Yolanda of Kilpeck[14] has been dead over twelve years,’ I said, writing it in the Visions Book anyway. ‘Got hit by a tram on the High Road.’

‘Yes,’ said Kevin sadly, ‘didn’t see that coming.’

‘Why would you be thinking of her?’

‘I don’t know. Oh, and I had another vision about the Great Zambini.’

I was suddenly a lot more interested.

‘You did?’

‘He’s going to reappear.’

This was good news indeed. The Great Zambini had vanished eight months earlier while conducting a simple dematerialisation during a children’s party, and we had been trying to get him back ever since. Because Kevin and Zambini knew each other well, his predictions over Zambini’s appearances were always correct – just too late for us to do anything useful with them.

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon at 16.03 and fourteen seconds.’

‘Do you know where?’

‘Not a clue – but he’ll be there for several minutes.’

‘That’s not so very helpful,’ I pointed out. ‘There’s an awful lot of “where” in the unUK, and a minute isn’t exactly bags of “when” in which to find him.’

‘Precognition is not an exact science,’ grumbled Kevin defensively. ‘In fact, I don’t think it’s a science at all. But I may know more nearer the time.’

‘Can you predict when you might know?’ I asked hopefully.

‘No.’

I allocated each vision a unique code – RAD094 to RAD096 – and then asked him to hang around the office and call me the second he knew more. The last time this happened, Kevin had us all staking out a village in the weekends-only Duchy of Cotswold, where Zambini reappeared for a full fifty-seven seconds before vanishing again. Despite fifteen of us dispersed around the village with eyes peeled, we missed Zambini when he turned up in a jam cupboard belonging to a Mrs Bishop. He must have been confused as to where he was, but not so confused that he couldn’t manage to consume an entire pot of best loganberry. And that was the problem with Zambini. He was rattling around the Now like a ping-pong ball, doing pretty much the same as the Transient Moose, but on a much broader geography, and with shorter visits. Moobin thought that Zambini must have corrupted his vanishing spell as he disappeared, but we’d not know for sure until we got him back – if we did.

‘As soon as you get an inkling of a location let me know,’ I told him again, and after asking Tiger to fetch Kevin some breakfast and the daily papers, I went and stared at the work schedule for the next few days. Wednesday and Thursday were straightforward, but all of Friday had been kept clear for the bridge job, and the project had been much in our thoughts recently. There was only one interesting bridge to speak of in Hereford, and that was the twelveth-century stone arched bridge. Or rather, that had been the most interesting bridge until the structure, weakened by neglect and heavy winter floods, had collapsed three years before. Now it was a pile of damp rubble, with only the remains of piers and abutments to indicate what had once been there.

‘We need to rebuild the bridge without any hiccups, don’t we?’ said Tiger, noticing that I was staring at old photographs of the bridge.

‘Yes indeed,’ I replied. ‘Moving out of home improvements and into civil engineering projects could put Kazam firmly on the map. It’ll be a good PR exercise, and we need to increase our standing within the community. I just