‘Will it harm her?’ I asked. ‘Being stone, I mean?’
‘Not in the least,’ he replied, ‘as long as we keep Lady Mawgon away from a sandblaster and no one borrows part of her to mend the front portico of Hereford cathedral, she’ll not know even one second has passed.’
And that was when an idea struck me. An idea that might explain something that had been confusing me for a while – how the Great Zambini and Mother Zenobia both managed to live beyond the century with only a small level of decrepitude, in Zenobia’s case to well over a hundred and fifty.
‘Can I be excused?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
‘Of course,’ replied Moobin, ‘but let’s keep this top secret. This is something only the five of us need know about.’
‘Six,’ said Tiger, for the Transient Moose had suddenly appeared, and was staring at Lady Mawgon with a detached interest.
‘Six, then. No sense in panicking the residents, hmm?’
I quickly fetched some card and a felt pen from the office and placed a sign outside the entrance of the Palm Court that read: ‘Closed for Redecoration’.
‘What now?’ asked Tiger as we walked through the lobby.
‘We’re going to visit Mother Zenobia.’
He gave a shudder.
‘Do I have to come?’
‘Yes.’
‘She frightens me.’
‘She frightens me, too. Think of it as character-building. Go and find your tie, polish your shoes and fetch the Youthful Perkins. The convent is in the same direction as the castle. We’ll take him to his Magic Licence Application afterwards. I’ll meet you both outside in ten minutes.’
Quarkbeast & Zenobia
* * *
I kept my Volkswagen in the garages beneath Zambini Towers, where it shared a dusty existence with several dilapidated Rolls-Royces and a Bugatti or two, remnants of when the retired sorcerers had money and power. Aside from the Dragonslayermobile,1 which was also kept here, mine was the only working car, and since the Kingdom of Snodd granted driving licences not by age but by who was mature enough to be put in charge of half a ton of speeding metal, no male under twenty-six or wizard ever possessed a driving licence. Because of this I was compelled to add ‘taxi service’ to my long list of jobs.
I pulled around to the front of the building, parked the car and turned off the engine. Lady Mawgon’s unfortunate accident dominated my thoughts – especially as this might mean postponing the bridge gig, which I was loath to do – it would make Kazam look weak and useless when we were trying to promote ourselves as strong and confident. Even if Perkins did get his licence, we would still have only five wizards to rebuild the bridge – and we needed six to be sure.
I sighed and gazed absently across the street. Situated on the opposite side of the road was the Quarkbeast memorial, Kazam’s tribute to a loyal friend and ally who gave his life to protect me, and contributed in no small measure to the success of the Big Magic.2 I thought about him a lot, and although he often frightened small children and had been known to eat a bunny rabbit or two, he had been a steadfast companion until the end. I frowned. There seemed to be a corner missing out of the oolitic limestone plinth upon which the statue sat. I got out of the car and walked across for a closer look. I was right; something had gnawed a chunk out of the plinth. There was a section of broken tooth stuck in the stone and I tugged until it came free. It was a sharp canine, and was coloured the dull slate grey of tungsten carbide.
‘What have you found?’ asked Tiger, who had also developed an affection for the Quarkbeast, even though he’d known it only a short time. He had often been dragged around the park on the beast’s early morning walks – but in an affectionate, non-malicious, hardly-hurting-you-at-all sort of way.
‘Look,’ I said, dropping the tooth into his palm. ‘It looks like there’s another Quarkbeast in town.’
‘That’ll have the council in a lather – the present Beastcatcher is very pro-Quarkbeast and rarely favours extermination.’
This annoyed the council as they saw the role of the Beastcatcher as very much along the lines of pest control. The previous Beastcatcher had been much more popular, but sadly got himself eaten by a Tralfamosaur who took offence at being poked at with a stick.
‘This beast might not be staying,’ said Tiger, staring at the tooth. ‘Just paying its respects on its way through.’
A Quarkbeast is a small hyena-shaped creature that is covered in leathery scales and often described as: ‘One tenth Labrador, six-tenths velociraptor and three-tenths kitchen food blender.’ I held a special affinity for these creatures. Not just because I owed my life to one, but because they were one of the Ununited Kingdom’s surviving eight species of invented animals, all created by notable wizards in the sixteenth century when enchanted beasts were totally ‘the thing’. The Mighty Shandar created the Quarkbeast for a bet in 1783 and apparently won the wager, as nothing more bizarre has ever been created since. That didn’t stop them being uniquely dangerous, and a Quarkbeast was regarded with a great deal of suspicion by the authorities – hence the issue with the Beastcatcher. An abiding fondness for metal was one of their many peculiar habits, zinc most of all. In fact, the first obvious sign of a Quarkbeast in the neighbourhood was that all the shiny zinc coatings were licked off the dustbins – the beast equivalent of licking the icing off a cake.
I looked around cautiously, hoping to catch a glimpse of the small creature. There was no sign, so I walked back to the car.
‘Do you think the Quarkbeast could have been the pair of yours all the way from Australia?’ asked Tiger, doing up his seat belt.
‘Quarkbeasts come in pairs?’ asked Perkins, who, although quite expert in seeding ideas, was not so hot when it came to magicozoology.
‘They don’t so much breed as replicate,’ I explained. ‘They divide into two entirely equal and opposite Quarkbeasts. But as soon as they do they have to be separated and sent a long way from each other – the other side of the globe, usually. If a paired positive and negative Quarkbeast meet, they are both annihilated in a flash of pure energy. It was said that Cambrianopolis was half destroyed when a confluence of paired Quarkbeasts came together and exploded with the force of ten thousand tons of Marzex-4.3 Luckily, Cambrianopolis is such a ruin no one really noticed.’
‘I heard it was an earthquake,’ said Perkins.
‘That’s usually the cover story. We can’t have people panicking like idiots as soon as they see a Quarkbeast. The general population is suspicious enough of magic as it is.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Why do Quarkbeasts search for their twin?’ asked Tiger.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Boredom?’
‘If it’s the pair of your Quarkbeast,’ said Perkins with growing confusion, ‘doesn’t that mean the new Quarkbeast is unlikely to explode?’
‘Exactly. Nothing to fear from this one.’
We drove off in silence, past the cathedral, out of the city walls and headed south into the Golden Valley and past Snodhill Castle with the Dragonlands beyond and down the escarpment to the small town of Clifford. There, on a bend in the river and set about with oak and sweet chestnut, was the place Tiger and I had called home for the first twelve years of our lives. It was as grim as we both remembered it, and Tiger and I glanced at each other as we drew up outside. Perkins took one look at the Sisterhood of the Blessed Lady of the Lobster and announced he would be staying in the car.
‘It’s not that bad,’ said Tiger defensively. ‘The foundlings are rarely made to share blankets these days, and gruel no longer has a consistency thinner than water.’
‘I wonder how they did that?’ I mused, since gruel’s primary ingredient was water. ‘I’ve always wanted to know.’
‘It must be hard to extract the nourishment out of water,’ agreed Tiger, ‘but they managed it somehow.’
‘I’ll leave you both to your trip down memory lane,’ said Perkins, staying resolutely on the ba
ck seat and hover-orbiting a pair of snooker balls around each other as a ‘tuning up’ exercise for his Magic Test. ‘I’ll see you guys later.’
We walked across the car park, up to the great doors, past the slot in the door for after-hours foundling deliveries, and into the quadrangle. I felt Tiger clasp my hand.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘no one’s taking you back. We’re owned by Kazam now. Everything’s fine.’
We walked across the quad, where open-air lessons were held in the summer, and from where we used to watch the shells as they were lobbed across the border from King Snodd’s artillery battery in the orchard to the Duke of Brecon’s small duchy across the river. Although an uneasy peace had once more descended between Brecon and Snodd and the guns were now silent, we had driven past a squadron of landships on our way in. The six-storey-high tracked vehicles had no special significance to me, but they did to Tiger, although he didn’t know it – Mother Zenobia had told me Tiger’s parents had been a husband-and-wife engineering team on a landship that vanished during the Fourth Troll Wars. Tiger would have been lost, too, had creche facilities not been removed from the landships in order to make room for extra munitions, so when his parents never returned he ended up on the steps of the orphanage. Mothers and fathers were a tetchy subject to foundlings, which was why he’d not yet been told what happened. The whole abandonment deal could devour you, so we usually left it until we felt we had the maturity to deal with it. My own parents would doubtless be traceable through my Volkswagen as I had been left on the front seat when abandoned, and although I was arguably mature enough to handle it, life was complicated enough.
‘Is that Jennifer?’ said Mother Zenobia as we were shown into her office. ‘I can smell early Volkswagen upon you. A mix of burned oil, hot mud and six-volt electrics.’
‘It is, ma’am.’
‘And those footsteps behind you. Guarded and impertinent – yet full of inner strength to be fully realised. Master Prawns?’
‘Your servant, ma’am,’ said Tiger.
Mother Zenobia was not only old but completely blind, and had been since before most people on the planet had been born. She was sitting in an armchair in front of a fire, her gnarled fingers resting on the top of her cane, and her face so suffused with wrinkles that lost infant tortoises often followed her home. She clapped her hands and a novice entered, took orders for tea or cocoa, bobbed politely and then left again.
‘So,’ said Mother Zenobia after offering us a seat each, ‘is this a social visit, or business?’
‘Both,’ I said, ‘and please excuse my impertinence, Mother Zenobia, but our conversation must be strictly in confidence.’
‘May my ears be infested by the floon beetle if I murmur so much as a word, Jennifer. Now, what’s up?’
‘Lady Mawgon got herself changed to stone.’
A smile crossed Mother Zenobia’s features.
‘Silly Daphne. What was she trying to do?’
I explained about the storage coils, and what had transpired.
‘Not like Mawgon to get caught out by a gatekeeper,’ murmured Mother Zenobia when I had finished. ‘How is this to do with me? My sorcery days are long over.’
She held up her hands as if we needed proof. They were twisted with arthritis, her valuable index fingers bent and, for a sorcerer, almost useless.
I chose my words carefully. Moobin had said earlier that getting changed to stone was effectively suspended animation.
‘I thought perhaps great age in sorcerers might be less to do with spelling away old age than simply pressing the pause button.’
‘You are a highly perceptive young lady,’ replied Zenobia at length. ‘I do indeed change to stone every night in order to delay death’s cold embrace. Eight hours’ sleep over an eight-year lifetime is about twenty-six years,’ She continued. ‘Wasted time if you ask me, except for dreaming, which I miss. I’ve been rock during the winter months for the past seventy-six years as well, and when my last fortnight beckons I will be with you for an hour a year. I may last another century at this rate.’
She thought for moment.
‘Self-induced petrification has its drawbacks, though. Changing to limestone at night is no problem, but returning to life in the morning leaves minute traces of calcite in the fine capillaries of the retina.’
Tiger and I looked at one another. The secret of Mother Zenobia’s longevity was no more.
‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ she added. ‘It’s all strictly prohibited by the Codex Magicalis under “enchantment abuse”.’
‘Your secret is safe with us,’ I assured her. ‘So this is how the Great Zambini looks seventy when he is actually one hundred and twelve?’
‘Indeed,’ replied Mother Zenobia as the novice returned with the tea and cocoa, bobbed politely and then went out again, ‘but he could do it better than me. He turns to dolorite and thus has none of the sight difficulties I have with limestone. The really class acts turn themselves to granite, which has no side effects at all.’
‘The Mighty Shandar,’ I breathed, suddenly realising that he too must change himself to stone on a regular basis. ‘That would explain how he has lived for almost five centuries.’
‘Right again,’ said Zenobia. ‘It is said that his dynastic family of agents have instructions only to wake him for the best jobs. They say that the Mighty Shandar won’t get out of black granite for less than eight dray-weights of gold a day, and that he has not lived longer than a minute since 1783, the year he finished the Channel Tunnel.’
‘He could live almost for ever,’ I observed.
‘In theory you might,’ said Mother Zenobia. ‘Using petrification to suspend animation indefinitely is less dependent on the spell, and more a case of not letting things drop off. Pity those wizards from Ancient Greece missing either their arms, legs or heads. Come out of a two-millennium sleep missing an arm and you’d bleed to death within five minutes. Still,’ she carried on, ‘most of them would have been enchanted in RUNIX, and you’d not know how to get them back out anyway.’
‘Which brings me back to why we are here,’ I said. ‘The gatekeeper of which Lady Mawgon fell foul was written in RUNIX, and we wanted to know how you might reverse that, given your expertise in these matters.’
‘My spell is written in ARAMAIC-128,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘which allows for perfectly timed depetrification. You need to find someone who is expert in RUNIX. What about the Great Zambini?’
This suggestion offered at least a possibility. I told Mother Zenobia about Zambini’s possible appearance the next day, and she nodded sagely.
‘I hope it works out. Bored now. Go away. Drink your cocoa.’
So we did, and drank a little more quickly than was good for us, and it made our eyes water. We left Mother Zenobia soon after, and with our semi-burned tongues, walked back towards the car. I now knew how Zenobia, Shandar and Zambini had lived for so long, but it didn’t really help us.
‘We really need to find the Great Zambini this time,’ I said.
‘Is it likely?’ asked Tiger, who had been on several Zambini searches, and knew the pitfalls.
‘If past attempts are anything to go by we have two chances: fat and thin.’
We walked outside and found Perkins peacefully asleep on the back seat, the paintwork of the beetle slowly turning from blue to green to black and then back to blue again. He was ready.
* * *
1 An armoured Rolls-Royce covered in copper spikes that was used by Jennifer when she was the Last Dragonslayer.
2 Without the Quarkbeast there to save Jenny’s life with the sacrifice of his own, it is unlikely there would be any magic at all.
3 A form of plastic explosive whose principal ingredient is heavily nitrated marzipan mixed with cayenne pepper. Easily shaped, it is manufactured by the Kingdom of Cumbria, which has the largest deposits of natural marzipan in the world.
The King’s Useless Brother
* * *
; We partly retraced our route back towards Hereford, but instead of going straight ahead by the grave of the unknown tattooist at Dorstonville, we took the four-lane processional avenue that led towards the King’s modest eight-storey palace at Snodhill. The castle covered an area of six square acres, with many of the Kingdom’s administrative departments scattered among its two hundred or so rooms. A roof of purple slate topped the stone building, and the eighteen towers were capped with conical towers, each home to a long pennant that fluttered elegantly in the breeze.
After making our way through three sets of drawbridges, each with their own peculiar brand of pointless and overlong security procedures, we eventually made it to the Inner Bailey, where we parked the car outside the Interior Ministry. I told Tiger to wait for us there, and I walked us to the correct desk, as I came in here quite a lot, usually to submit the endless forms and paperwork that bedevilled modern sorcery.
‘Hello, Miss Strange,’ said the receptionist, ‘here to submit more paperwork?’
‘Magic licence,’ I replied, nodding towards Perkins. ‘We have an appointment to see the King’s Useless Brother.’
She stared at us both over her spectacles for a moment, consulted the diary and then pointed us towards the uncomfortable bench to wait. The one with cushions was reserved for those of higher birth, and was today crammed with bewigged aristocracy, who, by their refusal to sit on the citizens’ bench, made themselves trebly uncomfortable.
Perkins and I talked through the application process. I was more nervous than I thought I’d be, probably because we were one sorcerer down for the foreseeable future, and Perkins was going to have to prove himself pretty fast if we still wanted to do the bridge gig on Friday.
‘How do you think I’m going to do?’ he asked.
‘You’ll pass or my name’s not Jennifer Strange.’
‘Your name’s not Jennifer Strange.’