The Last Dragonslayer

  ‘Who’s the “Pointless”?’

  ‘It would be impolite of me to reveal, but you’ll probably figure it out for yourself.’

  ‘So those accoladed “Wizard” are the most powerful, yes?’

  ‘Not quite,’ I replied. ‘An accolade isn’t simply based on performance, but on reliability. Wizard Moobin isn’t the most powerful in the building, but he’s the most consistent. And to complicate matters further, a status is different to an accolade. Two wizards might both be status Spellmanager but if one has turned a goat into a moped and the other hasn’t, then they get to call themselves “Wizard”.’

  ‘A goat into a moped?’

  ‘You couldn’t do that. It’s just an example.’

  ‘Oh. So who decides who gets an accolade?’

  ‘It’s self-conferring,’ I replied. ‘The idea of any kind of organised higher authority – a “Grand Council of Wizards” or something – is wholly ridiculous once you get to know how scatty they can be. Getting three of them to spell together is possible – just – but asking them to agree on a new colour for the dining room almost impossible. Argumentative, infantile, passionate and temperamental, they need people like us to manage them and always have done. Two paces behind every great wizard there has always been their agent. They always took a back seat, but were always there, doing the deals, sorting out transport, hotel bookings, mopping up the mistakes and the broken hearts, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Even the Mighty Shandar?’

  ‘There is no record that he had one, but we’re usually the first to be written out of history. Yes, I’m almost certain of it. Imagine being the Mighty Shandar’s agent. No percentage, but the fringe benefits would be colossal.’

  ‘Would you get dental?’

  ‘Tusks if you wanted them. But back to accolades: the one thing sorcerers are good at is honour. You’d not award yourself an accolade that you didn’t deserve, nor shy from demoting yourself if your powers faded. They’re good and honest people – just a bit weird, and hopeless at managing themselves.’

  ‘So what about the one who accoladed themselves “Pointless”?’

  ‘They have self-confidence issues.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Tiger thought about this for a moment.

  ‘So what could a sorcerer do on the Spellmanager level?’

  I took a sip of hot chocolate.

  ‘Levitation of light objects, stopping clocks, unblocking drains and simple washing and drying can all be handled pretty well at the Spellmanager level. There’s no one below this status at Kazam except you, me, Unstable Mabel, the Quarkbeast and Hector.’

  ‘Hector?’

  ‘Transient Moose.’

  I nodded in the direction of the moose, who was leaning against one of the fridge-freezers with a look of supreme boredom etched upon his features.

  ‘Above this is a sorcerer. They can conjure up light winds and start hedgehog migrations. Sparks may fly from their fingertips and they might manage to levitate a car. The next rank is that of Master Sorcerer. At this level you might be expected to be able to create objects from nothing. A light drizzle could be conjured up, but not on a clear day. Sometimes a Master Sorcerer might be able to teleport, but not far and with little accuracy. Above this is the Grand Master Sorcerer. These gifted people can speak in eighteen different languages and can levitate several trucks at a time; they can change an object’s colour permanently and start isolated thunderstorms. They might be able to squeeze out a lightning bolt but not very accurately. Constructing box-girder bridges is a simple procedure requiring little effort. The final category is Super Grand Master Sorcerer. This is the “unlimited” category. A Super Grand Master Sorcerer can do almost anything. He or she can whistle up storms, command the elements and stop the tide. They can turn people to salt and levitate whole buildings. They can create spells and incantations that are so strong that they stay on long after they have died. They are also, supremely, incredibly, thankfully, rare. I’ve never met one. The greatest of all the Super Grand Master Sorcerers was the Mighty Shandar. It was said that he had so much magic in him his footprints would spontaneously catch fire as he walked.’

  ‘And the Mighty Shandar is where we get the base measurement of wizidrical power – the Shandar?’

  ‘That’s about the tune of it.’

  ‘But there are others, surely? Out there, doing normal jobs, who have this power?’

  ‘Several hundred, I imagine,’ I replied, ‘but without a licence to practise they’d have to be either very stupid or very desperate to start chucking spells around. The relationship between sorcerers and citizenry has always been strained, and only the food industry has more regulations. To perform magic of any kind you have to have a Certificate of Conformity – a licence to say that you are of sound mind and not possessed of a soul that could be turned to using Arts for evil. Once that particular hurdle has been crossed you have to be accredited to a licensed “House of Enchantment”. There are only two at present – Kazam and Industrial Magic over in Stroud. After that, each spell has to be logged on a form B2-5C for anything below a thousand Shandars, a B1-7G form for spells not exceeding ten thousand Shandars, and a form P4-7D for those in excess of ten thousand Shandars.’

  ‘That would be a seriously big spell,’ said Tiger.

  ‘Bigger than you and I will ever see. The last P4-7D job was signed off in 1947, when they built the Thames Tidal Barrage. There was a lot more power about in those days, but even so it took a consortium of twenty-six sorcerers, and the wizidrical power peaked at 1.6 MegaShandars. It was said metal grew too hot to touch within a twenty-mile radius, and children’s sandpits turned to glass. They evacuated the local area for a job that size, naturally.’

  Tiger blinked at me in wonder. Magic wasn’t generally talked about. Despite the obvious advantages, it was still regarded with suspicion by most people. Re-inventing sorcery as a useful commodity akin to electricity or even the fourth emergency service was something Mr Zambini had been most keen on.

  ‘What if someone did?’ he asked. ‘Commit an act of illegal sorcery, I mean?’

  I took a deep breath and stared at him.

  ‘It’s about the only thing the twenty-eight nations of the Ununited Kingdoms agree upon. Any unlicensed act of sorcery committed outside the boundaries of a House of Enchantment is punishable by . . . public burning.’

  Tiger looked shocked.

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘an unwelcome legacy from the fourteenth century. Highly unpleasant. And that’s why you, me, we, everyone, has to be extra diligent when filling out the forms. Miss something or forget to file it and you’re responsible for a good friend’s hideous punishment. We lost George Nash four years ago. A lovely man and a skilled practitioner. What he couldn’t tell you about smoke manipulation wasn’t worth knowing. He was doing a routine earthworm charming and his B1-7G form wasn’t filled in. Someone’s eye wasn’t on the ball.’

  Tiger tilted his head on one side.

  ‘That’s why you don’t talk about her, isn’t it?’

  Tiger was smart. Mother Zenobia had sent us the best.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the fifth foundling’s name isn’t spoken under this roof.’

  We both sat in silence for a moment, the only sound the panting of the Quarkbeast, the chewing of the Transient Moose and the occasional sip, from us, of hot chocolate.

  Tiger, I guessed, was probably thinking the same as me. About being a foundling. We were left outside the Convent of the Blessed Ladies of the Lobster before we were even old enough to talk. We didn’t know our true birth dates, and our names weren’t the ones we were born with. I think that’s why Tiger had guessed that the fifth 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 mean
t 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.

  ‘Lots of parents lost in the Troll Wars,’ I said.

  ‘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 . . . gold!’ he said at last.

  ‘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, ‘I have no idea. Every morning I concentrate my mind on that lead soldier, summon up every Shandar in my body and let fly. For twenty-eight years nothing has happened; not a flicker. But this morning—’

  ‘Big Magic!’ yelled the younger Karamazov sister.

  Wizard Moobin looked up abruptly.

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Rubbish,’ returned her sister, ‘don’t listen to her – she’s one spell short of a curse.’

  ‘I was more powerful in the rewiring job yesterday,’ Moobin said thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps the surge has sustained for a bit longer.’

  This, I mused, was possibl
e. The background wizidrical power was subject to periodical fluctuations. There were, however, more practical matters to consider.

  ‘I hate to be a stickler for regulations,’ I said, ‘but you’re going to have to fill out a form B2-5C for this. I know we’re in the Towers, but we should stay on the safe side. We’d better do a P3-8F as well, just in case.’

  ‘P3-8F?’ queried Moobin. ‘I haven’t heard of that one before.’

  ‘Experimental spells resulting in accidental damage of a physical nature,’ put in the younger Karamazov sister, who, despite the repeated lightning strikes, could still have moments of lucidity.

  ‘I see,’ replied Moobin, turning to me. ‘If you fill them in, I’ll sign them.’

  I left him to tidy up and walked downstairs to the ground floor, where I met Tiger and the Quarkbeast as they returned. Tiger had a graze on his nose, his clothes were scuffed and he had some twigs in his hair.

  ‘If he starts to run you have to drop his leash as soon as possible.’

  ‘I know that now.’

  ‘Did he drag you far?’

  ‘It wasn’t the distance,’ replied Tiger, ‘it was the terrain. What’s going on?’

  ‘Wizard Moobin experienced a surge,’ I said as we entered the offices in the Avon Suite. I sat down at my desk and pulled the Codex Magicalis towards me to make sure I didn’t need to fill out any more paperwork. ‘Something’s going on. Yesterday they finished the rewiring in record time, and this morning Moobin turned lead into gold.’

  ‘I thought the power of magic was diminishing?’

  ‘It is, in general. But every now and again it surges upwards and they can all do things they haven’t been able to do for years. The problem is that surges usually herald a slump, and if you couple this with what Kevin Zipp told us yesterday, we could find ourselves unemployed pretty soon.’

  ‘The death of a Dragon? You think that might actually happen?’