Quarkbeast, climbed into his car and drove away. It was not a good idea to have civilians about when sorcery was afoot. Even the stoutest incantations carried redundant strands of spell that could cause havoc if allowed to settle on the general public. Nothing serious ever happened; it was mostly rapid nose hair growth, oinking like a pig, that sort of stuff. It soon wore off, but it was bad PR—and the threat of litigation was never far from our thoughts.
‘Right,’ I said to the three of them, ‘over to you.’
The three mages looked at each other. Of the fifty-two Mystical Artisans at Kazam, most were retired or too insane to be of any practical use. Thirteen were capable of working, but of these, only seven had current licences. When one worked, they worked to support four others.
‘I used to conjure up storms,’ said Lady Mawgon with a sigh.
‘So could we all,’ replied the Wizard Moobin.
‘Quark,’ said the Quarkbeast.
I moved away from where the three sorcerers were discussing the best place to start. None of them had rewired a house by sorcery before, but by reconfiguring a few basic spells it was decided that such a project could be done, and with relative ease—so long as the three of them pooled their resources. It was Mr Zambini’s idea to move into the home improvement market. Charming moles from gardens, resizing stuff for the self-storage industry and finding lost things was easy work, but it didn’t pay well. Rewiring, however, was quite different. Unlike conventional electricians, we didn’t need to touch the house in order to do it. No mess, no problems, and all done in under a day.
I sat in my Volkswagen to be near the car phone. Any calls to the office would be directed through to here. I wasn’t just Kazam’s manager, I was also the receptionist, bookings clerk and accountant. I had to look after the fifty-two sorcerers in my charge, deal with the shabby building that housed them all, and fill out the numerous forms that the Magical Powers (amended 1966) Act required when even the
The phone rang.
‘The Kazam Agency,’ I said in my jolliest tone, ‘can I help you?’
‘I hope so,’ said a timid teenager’s voice on the other end. ‘Do you have something to make Patty Simcox fall in love with me?’
‘How about flowers?’ I asked.
‘Flowers?’
‘Sure. Cinema, a few jokes. Dinner, dance, Bodmin aftershave?’
‘Bodmin aftershave?’
‘Sure. You do shave?’
‘Once a week now,’ replied the teenager. ‘It’s becoming something of a drag. But listen, I was thinking it would be easier—’
‘We
The phone seemed to go dead but he was just digesting my thoughts.
‘What sort of flowers?’
I gave him some tips and the addresses of a few good restaurants. He thanked me and hung up. I looked across to where Wizard Moobin, Lady Mawgon and Full Price were sizing up the house. Sorcery wasn’t about mumbling a spell and letting fly—it was more a case of appraising the problem, planning the various incantations to greatest effect,
The phone rang again.
‘Jenny? It’s Perkins.’
The Youthful Perkins was the youngest sorcerer at Kazam. He’d been inducted during a rare moment of financial stability and was serving a loose apprenticeship. His particular talent was shifting, although he wasn’t very good at it. He’d once morphed himself into something vaguely resembling a raccoon but then got stuck and had to stay that way for a week until it wore off. It had been very amusing, but not to him. Because we were of a similar age, we got on fairly well, but not in a boyfriend–girlfriend kind of way.
‘Hey, Perkins,’ I said, ‘did you get Patrick off to work in time?’
‘Just about. But I think he’s back on the marzipan again.’
This was worrying. Patrick of Ludlow was a Mover. Although not possessed of the sharpest mind, he was kind and gentle and exceptionally gifted at levitation, and earned a regular wage for Kazam by removing illegally parked cars for the city’s clamping unit. It took a lot of effort—he would sleep fourteen hours in twenty-four—and the marzipan echoed back to a darker time in his life that he didn’t care to speak of.
‘So what’s up?’
‘The Sisterhood sent round your replacement. What do you want me to do with him?’
I’d forgotten all about him. The Sisterhood traditionally supplied Kazam with a foundling every five years. Sharon Zoiks had been the fourth, I had been the sixth, and this new one would be the seventh. We didn’t talk about the fifth.
‘Pop him in a taxi and send him up. No, cancel that. It’ll be too expensive. Ask Nasil to carpet him up. Usual precautions. Cardboard box, yes?’
‘Usual precautions,’ replied Perkins, and hung up.
I watched the three sorcerers stare at the house from every direction, apparently doing nothing. I knew better than to ask them what was going on or how they were doing. A moment’s distraction could unravel a spell in a twinkling. Moobin and Price were dressed casually and without any metal for fear of burns, but Lady Mawgon was in traditional garb. She wore long black crinolines that rustled like leaves when she walked, and sparkled like distant fireworks in the darkness. During the Kingdom’s frequent power cuts, I could always tell when it was she gliding down one of Zambini Tower’s endless corridors. Once, in a daring moment, someone had pinned some stars and a moon cut from silver foil to her black dress, something that sent her incandescent with rage. She ranted on at Mr Zambini for almost twenty minutes about how ‘no one was taking their calling seriously’ and how could she ‘be expected to work with such infantile nincompoops’. Zambini spoke to everyone in turn, but he probably found it as funny as the rest of us. We never discovered who did it, but I reckoned it was Full Price’s smaller twin, Half. He once turned the local cats blue for a joke, which backfired badly when the cops got involved.
With little else to do except keep an eye on the three sorcerers, I sat down in the car and read Wizard Moobin’s newspaper. The text that he had moved around the paper was still fixed, and I frowned. Tuning spells like these were usually temporary and I would have expected the text to drift back to its original position. It takes almost twice as much energy to fix something as it does to change it, so most wizards saved their energy and the spell would unravel in time, like an unsecured plait. Sorcery was like running a marathon—you needed to pace yourself. Sprint too early and you could find yourself in trouble near the finishing line. Moobin must have been feeling confident to tie off the end of the spell. I leaned over and tapped the fuel gauge of the Volkswagen, which stayed resolutely at ‘full’. Looked like Lady Mawgon was having a good day too.
‘Quark.’
‘Where?’
The Quarkbeast pointed one of his razor-sharp claws towards the east as Prince Nasil streaked past a good deal faster than he should have. He banked steeply, circled the house twice and came in for a perfect landing just next to me. He like to carpet standing up, a little like a surfer, much to the disdain of our only other carpeteer, Owen of Rhayder, who sat in the more traditional cross-legged position at the rear. Nasil wore baggy shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, too, which didn’t go down with Lady Mawgon.
‘Hi, Jenny,’ said Nasil with a grin as he handed me a flight log to sign, ‘delivery for you.’
On the front of the carpet was a large Yummy-Flakes cardboard box, and it opened to reveal an eleven- year-old boy who seemed tall and gangly for his age. He had close-curled sandy-coloured hair and freckles that danced around a snub nose. He was wearing what were very obviously hand-me-down clothes and stared at me with the air of someone recently displaced, and still confused over how they should feel about it.
