foundling was the one responsible for George Nash. There is no greater insult among foundlings than to refuse to acknowledge the one thing that you value more than anything else—your name.
‘Did you ever try to find out?’ asked Tiger.
He meant my parents.
‘Not yet,’ I replied. Some of us built them up and were disappointed, others built them down so they wouldn’t be. All of us thought about them.
‘Any clues?’
‘My Volkswagen,’ I replied. ‘It was abandoned with me in it. I’m going to find out its previous owners when I become a citizen. You?’
‘My only clue was a weekday return to Carlisle and a medal,’ replied Tiger, ‘placed in my basket when I was left outside the convent. It was a Fourth Troll Wars campaign medal with a Valour clasp.’
We sat in silence for a moment.
‘
‘Yes,’ said Tiger in a quiet voice, ‘lots.’
I stretched and stood up. It was getting late.
‘Good first day, Tiger, thanks.’
‘I didn’t do much.’
‘It’s what you didn’t do that matters.’
‘And what didn’t I do?’
‘You didn’t run away screaming, or try to fight me, or make peculiar demands.’
‘I like to think the Prawns are like that,’ he said with a smile, ‘loyal and dedicated.’
‘How about fearless?’
He looked at the Quarkbeast.
‘We’re working on that.’
I saw him up to his room and asked whether he needed anything, and he said he was just fine, and everything was 100 per cent faberoo as he had his own room and that was the best thing ever, even if it was enchanted. I went down to my own room and brushed my teeth, then climbed into my pyjamas and got into bed, taking the precaution of laying out a blanket on the floor with a pillow, just in case. I then had another thought and took down the poster of Sir Matt Grifflon as it made me seem a little undignified. I rolled up the picture of the Kingdom’s premier heart-throb and placed it in the cupboard.
I had read for only a few minutes when the door opened and Tiger tiptoed in, snugged up in the blanket I had laid out and sighed deeply. He’d never slept on his own before.
‘Goodnight, Tiger.’
‘Goodnight, Jenny.’
The Magiclysm
I didn’t sleep well that night. It wasn’t my fault; there was something in the air. Sorcerers tend to transmit their emotions when excited, upset, anxious or confused, and it permeates through the building like smelly drains. I’d taken to sleeping under an aluminised eiderdown, but it hadn’t helped—and was quite possibly a practical joke played by Wizard Moobin, who thought giving duff advice to juniors funny. For years he’d maintained that the Three Degrees were a triumvirate of sorceresses who specialised in reducing the temperature to just above absolute zero.
Tiger had gone by the time I awoke. The Quarkbeast too, so I imagined it had shown him the usual route for its morning prowl—in unused back alleys and the wasteground behind the papermill, where its fearsome appearance wouldn’t send anyone into traumatic shock. I knew the Quarkbeast well, and it sometimes frightened even me. It is said that the only thing a Quarkbeast looks good to is another Quarkbeast, but they never gather in pairs, for obvious reasons.
I had a quick bath, dressed, and stepped out of my room. I was on the third floor, sandwiched between the room shared by the Sisters Karamazov and Mr Zambini’s suite. I walked down the corridor and noted a sharp sensation in the air, very similar to the tingling that precedes a spell. The lights flickered in the corridor and my bedroom door, which I had closed, slowly swung open. I felt the building shimmer and the tingling sensation grew stronger and then, one by one, the light bulbs fell from their fittings, bounced on the carpet and then rolled to the far end of the corridor. Beneath my feet I could feel the floorboards start to bend and one of the many cats we have in the building shot across the floor and leaped out of the open window. I needed no further warnings. Zambini had briefed me about a Magiclysm, although I had never witnessed one. Without hesitation I ran to the alarm positioned next to the lift, broke the glass and pressed the large red button.
The klaxon sounded in the building, warning all those within to use whatever countermeasures they could, and almost immediately the misters filled the entire hotel with the fine dampness of water, which felt like stepping inside a cloud. Water is an ideal moderator and is about the only thing that can naturally quench a spell that is about to go critical. I paused and a few seconds later there was a tremendous detonation from somewhere on the fifth floor. The tingling and vibrations abruptly stopped and I turned to see a cloud of plaster and dust descend the stairwell. I switched off the alarm and ran up the stairs—lifts, even enchanted ones, should never be used in an emergency. I found Wizard Moobin lying in a heap on the fifth-floor landing.
‘Moobin!’ I exclaimed as the dust began to settle. ‘What on earth happened to you?’
He didn’t answer. Instead, he clambered unsteadily to his feet and returned to his apartment, the door of which had been blown clean off its hinges and was now embedded in the wall opposite. I put my head around the door and stared at the devastation. A wizard’s room is also their laboratory, as all sorcerers are inveterate tinkerers by nature, and entire lifetimes are spent in pursuit of a specific spell to do a specific job. Even something as inconsequential as the charm for finding a lost hammer had taken Grendell of Cleethorpes an entire lifetime to weave in the twelfth century. A destroyed workshop often indicated several decades of important work lost in one short blast of uncontrolled wizardry. Magic can be strong stuff and bite the unwary.
I followed Wizard Moobin into his room and trod carefully through the jumbled wreckage. Most of his books had been destroyed and all the carefully laid-out glassware, retorts and flasks had been reduced to shards. But about this, Moobin seemed curiously unconcerned, nor was he worried that his clothes had been blown off him, and he was now dressed only in a pair of underpants and a sock.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked, but the wizard was far too busy searching for something to answer. I exchanged glances with Half Price, who had arrived at the door. He looked very similar to his elder brother, only smaller by a factor of two.
‘Wow!’ said the Youthful Perkins, who had also just arrived. ‘I’ve never seen a spell go critical before. What were you doing?’
‘I’m fine,’ Moobin muttered, turning over a broken tabletop. I picked up a fire extinguisher and put out a small fire in one corner of the room.
‘What happened?’ I asked again, and Moobin suddenly stood up from where he had been searching in a pile of smouldering papers and with shaking hand passed me a small toy soldier. It had only one leg, carried a musket and was very heavy. It was made of pure gold.
‘Yes?’ I asked, still in the dark.
‘Lead, used to be, was, like, at least. Then, well—’ exclaimed the Wizard excitedly, trying to find a chair undamaged enough to sit on.
‘You’re babbling,’ I told him.
‘Lead—now...
‘Way to go!’ said the Youthful Perkins enthusiastically. He had been joined by the Sisters Karamazov, who were jostling each other for the best view.
‘Lead into gold!?’ I repeated incredulously, knowing full well that such a spell requires a subatomic meddling that is almost unheard of below the status of Grand Master Sorcerer.
‘How did you manage to do that?’
‘That’s the interesting thing,’ replied Moobin, ‘
