The Song of the Quarkbeast

  Just then, the separate sheets of thin wood veneer that made up the plywood fell neatly into three thin and very flappy pieces.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Moobin, ‘I appear to have picked up the glue from the plywood as I passed through. How did that happen?’

  He wasn’t asking any of us, of course, he was simply confused. But that was what research and development was like. Full of semi-triumphs and perplexing unforeseen consequences, such as the whole violent hiccuping thing when conjuring up fire – or the propensity for fillings to fall out of bystanders’ mouths when attempting to tease a rainstorm out of a cloud.

  ‘The Transient Moose can teleport almost without thinking,’ muttered Moobin, faintly annoyed, ‘and go around corners.’

  ‘But he’s a spell himself,’ observed Tiger helpfully, ‘and presumably has zero mass, so it must be easier.’

  ‘Probably,’ replied Moobin gloomily. ‘I wish he’d let me have a closer look.’

  The Wizard Moobin had recently become fascinated by the Transient Moose, and had fired a few spell-probes into it to discover just what particular enchantment was keeping it going. The probes had learned little except that the original sorcerer was possibly Greek and the Moose was most likely running Mandrake Sentience Emulation Protocols,1 which didn’t help, as nearly all spells that made something appear lifelike were run under Mandrake.

  It wasn’t just curiosity. The Mystical Arts were arcane, secretive and, once a specific spell was discovered, rarely shared. Ancient wizards went to their graves with the really groovy stuff still locked inside their heads. Some wrote it down in big leather-bound books, but most didn’t. It would be very valuable indeed to find out not only how the Moose managed to live so long and teleport so effortlessly, but how it could do it on an average crackle consumption of only 172.8 Shandars a day.

  ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ said Moobin, ‘so long as someone hasn’t already swiped the hot water.’

  ‘Oops,’ said Tiger.

  ‘What, again?’ asked Moobin.

  ‘I was covered in mud.’

  ‘Have you been thinking about the bridge gig?’ I asked, changing the subject. I had yet to see a detailed plan or risk assessment.

  ‘I’m working on it,’ Moobin said, ‘although with the Dibble Coils stuck on standby we’ll need all of us if we’re to do it in a day.’

  ‘Lady Mawgon is going to try to get them back online this morning.’

  ‘The old bat’s going to try and hack the Dibble?’ replied Moobin with a smile. ‘Rather her than me.’

  He nodded his head thoughtfully. Hacking into a well-cast spell was not for the faint-hearted. Wizards guarded their work jealously, and would often leave traps for busybodies attempting to copy their work. We watched as Moobin went back into his room, mumbling to himself as his feet made sticky footprints on the oak flooring.

  ‘Right, then,’ I said, checking my watch, ‘time to see Lady Mawgon – don’t mention the fact we took no payment for the finding gig.’

  * * *

  1 A Mandrake Sentience Emulation Protocol is a clever piece of spelling that gives the appearance of life without something actually being alive – ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties all use Mandrake, and if woven well, they are very lifelike.

  Hacking the Dibble

  * * *

  ‘What in heck are Dibble Storage Coils?’ asked Tiger as we made our way back downstairs. He still had a good decade’s worth of learning to do, and only two years in which to do it. I had to teach him most of it, and some of the stuff I needed to impart I hadn’t even learned myself.

  ‘It’s a spell designed by Charles Dibble the Extraordinary,’ I explained. ‘In the days when wizidrical power was falling, the Great Zambini looked at several ways to store what crackle there was. Dibble the Extraordinary wasn’t so much a practising sorcerer, but one who wrote spells for those who were. He wrote the entire mobile phone network incantation for ElectroMagic, Inc. back in the forties and then committed his energies to wizidrical storage devices. He was long retired when Zambini had him build the coils. Simply put, they transform the building into something akin to a huge rechargeable battery.’

  Tiger looked around, as if wondering how he could have missed something so important.

  ‘Where are they?’

  I waved my hand in the direction of the building at large.

  ‘The coils are not coils you can see – they are more like a constantly circulating field of negative wizidrical energy that can absorb, store and then discharge vast amounts of crackle on command. The applications are endless, from boring holes in solid rock to making something from nothing. We have the capacity to hold four GigaShandars.’1

  ‘And what could a GigaShandar actually do?’ asked Tiger, who was almost permanently inquisitive.

  ‘It’s a million Shandars, or if you prefer to use the older imperial measurements, about twenty-six cathedral miles, which is enough crackle to. . .’

  ‘. . . move a cathedral twenty-six miles?’

  ‘You learn fast. Yes, or move twenty-six cathedrals one mile each – or a medium-sized church five hundred miles, or, if you like, take a cricket pavilion all the way to Melbourne.’

  ‘Would there be any point to that?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘So a capacity of four GigaShandars is enough to move one cathedral – hang on – one hundred and four miles?’

  ‘Pretty much, although moving cathedrals cross-border by magic would be a bureaucratic nightmare. The paperwork would swamp you before you’d even got as far as Monmouth.’

  Tiger went silent for a moment.

  ‘I’m sensing there’s a reason why cathedral-moving is not on our rate sheet.’

  ‘You sense right. Dibble died while servicing this enchantment twenty-six years ago and he left it in “standby” mode and passthought protected, so what we have now is a very, very big battery and no charger. It didn’t matter when the crackle was negligible because we didn’t have a hope of doing any big jobs. But now the power of magic is on the rise, we really need the Dibble back online if we’re to do any serious magic, like digging canals or laying railway track or building henges or something.’

  ‘I get that,’ said Tiger, ‘kind of. But don’t you think they should be called “Zargon Coils” or “Znorff Inverters” or something groovy rather than “Dibble”?’

  ‘Isn’t “Dibble” groovy?’

  ‘No, not really. It’s more . . . dorky.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ I replied, ‘but real life isn’t like that. Dibble invented them, so Dibble they are.’

  We walked across the lobby and into the Palm Court. In the heyday of the Majestic Hotel, this would have been an exotic indoor garden of tropical plants, tall palms and limpid pools with lily pads and koi carp. Scattered around would have been small tables filled with gossiping nobility taking tea, while waited upon by attentive waitresses.

  No longer.

  The room had not been used for entertaining or growing tropical plants for years, and many of the glass panes in the bell-shaped roof were either cracked or missing. Buckets lay scattered about into which water dripped during rainstorms, and the marble floor was stained and uneven. In the centre of the room was a large and very dry fountain. Standing next to it was Lady Mawgon. She had changed out of her usual black crinolines and into her even blacker ones, which showed she meant business. Her clothes were so black, in fact, that they were simply a dark Lady Mawgon-shaped hole in the world, and it could give one vertigo if you stared too long.

  ‘You never thanked me for putting the hayrick under you, Prawns.’

  ‘I’m most grateful to you for not letting me fall to a painful death,’ said Tiger, knowing it was senseless to argue.

  ‘Good manners cost nothing,’ she grumbled. ‘Did Miss Shard pay up?’

  ‘The matter was concluded satisfactorily,’ I replied.

  ‘Hmm. Now, you are here to witness my attempt to hack into the Di
bbles. You will not approach me and you will not talk. Do you understand?’

  Tiger and I weren’t sure whether that meant we couldn’t answer or not, so we played it safe and nodded vigorously.

  ‘Good. Primarily I will be trying to get into the root directory of the spell’s central core to reset the passthought.2 From there I will attempt to switch the coils back on. You should make notes as I talk my way through it. I shall permit you to wish me good luck.’

  ‘Good luck, ma’am,’ I said, taking out my pocketbook and a pencil.

  She turned to an empty space in the room and raised her index fingers. After a pause, she drew her hands downwards and out, much like a conductor beginning a symphony. A blue-filled tear appeared in the air, as though a tent flap had been unzipped. She continued to move her hands as if conducting, and as she signalled to an imaginary percussion section, the randomly placed chairs in the room moved away from the tear and the chandeliers tinkled slightly. Lady Mawgon made a few flourishes as one might do to signal in the entire string section, then held one hand in the air as if sustaining a note from the bassoons, and peered closer into the rent. The tear had depth within, and coloured lights flashed to and fro as Lady Mawgon subtly moved her hands between the theoretical harp and kettle drums to probe the inner workings of the spell. It was a incantation of great complexity, and Tiger and I stared wide eyed. Spellbound, in fact. I’d worked around spells for years, but never actually seen one.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Lady Mawgon, speaking over her shoulder while signalling to an imaginary cello section to play pianissimo. ‘The enchantment is standard Wa’Seed on a RUNIX core. The secondary spells are off-the-peg Shandar that self-regulate the internal fields, but it seems Dibble added a few gatekeepers to thwart a hack, then set them orbiting the central core in all five directions at once so they couldn’t be unwoven.’

  ‘The Great Zambini was always cautious,’ I replied, risking her anger by breaking my silence. ‘He thought four GigaShandars of raw crackle lying around might tempt a fallen wizard with mischief on their minds.’

  ‘You might be right,’ said Lady Mawgon.

  There then followed about five minutes of hard spelling which was almost indistinguishable from the gesticulations of a conductor. Indeed, I am told the skills are interchangeable, and the myth about wands may originally have begun with a conductor’s baton.

  And then, just as Tiger and I were getting bored and thinking of other things to do, our ears popped as something happened.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, giving a rare smile, ‘I’ll just reset the passthought and we’re done.’

  She made a few more flourishes with her hands to an illusory woodwind section, and the rent closed.

  ‘There,’ she said triumphantly. ‘I’m surprised it was so easy. The coils will be full by this time tomorrow and we can run a test spell with them by Friday morning. Prawns, go and fetch Moobin so I can share the passthought.’

  Tiger hurried out and I congratulated her on the work.

  ‘I could have done it in my sleep ten years ago,’ she replied, ‘but I thank you for your praise. Why are you staring at me?’

  ‘You’re going grey,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been grey for years,’ she said, ‘and I’ve warned you against impertinence.’

  ‘No, no,’ I replied, ‘everything on you is going grey.’

  And so she was. Her black crinoline dress was now a charcoal colour, and lightening by the second. Lady Mawgon frowned, looked at her hands and then stared up at me with a wan smile.

  ‘Blast,’ she said in a resigned tone, and a few moments later she had turned entirely to stone.

  ‘Damn,’ I said.

  * * *

  1 A thousand MegaShandars is equal to one GigaShandar, and a thousand GigaShandars is one TeraShandar; 28.2 TeraShandars is the estimated total wizidrical power discharged throughout the history of magic – the equivalent of taking Hereford’s cathedral to the moon and back, and still having enough left over to take it around the earth ten times.

  2 Very like a password, but infinitely more complex. To share a passthought you really need to have witnessed the event or emotion the passthought was based on.

  Turned to stone

  * * *

  I’d never seen anyone turned to stone before, and after the initial shock had worn off, I ventured closer. Every single pore of her skin, every wrinkle, every eyelash was perfectly rendered in the finest alabaster I had seen. It felt odd being in such close proximity to Lady Mawgon, even if she was now a four-hundred-pound block of stone, and although getting turned to stone was bad news, it might have been worse. The really serious cases of petrification involved dolorite, marble, or worse, granite.

  Moobin laughed as he walked in, closely followed by Tiger.

  ‘Goodness, the old girl will never live this down. Dibble the Extraordinary lived up to his name – a stoning incantation as a gatekeeper. Well, well, never would have thought of it.’

  ‘You can change her back?

  ‘Child’s play. Although to be honest, it is a lot quieter with her like this.’

  ‘If I draw a moustache on her,’ added Tiger, ‘will she still have it on her when she changes back?’

  ‘It’s not funny,’ I said, even though I, too, had mixed feelings. ‘I’d be happier to have her back in one piece as soon as possible.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Moobin, and after taking a deep breath, he drew himself into the ‘hard spelling’ posture, pointed both index fingers at her and let fly.

  Nothing happened.

  He stood up, relaxed, then tried again.

  Still nothing happened.

  ‘That’s odd,’ he said at last. ‘Did she change to stone quickly?’

  ‘About ten seconds.’

  ‘Oh dear. Wait here a moment.’

  And he ran out the door.

  ‘She still looks kind of frightening, doesn’t she?’ said Tiger.

  She did, even though her features were not trapped in the more usual Mawgon look of scowling displeasure. Rather she wore the resigned smile she had given when she had realised that the long-dead Dibble had outwitted her.

  ‘Still,’ said Tiger, ‘it proves what I always thought.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That she does wear roller skates under her dress.’

  I looked down, and just peeking out from the soft white folds of her gypsum prison was the shape of a roller-skate wheel pressed against the hem of her dress.

  ‘Holy cow!’ said Half Price as he walked in, accompanied by Full Price and Wizard Moobin. ‘I’ve never seen her looking so stony before.’

  ‘She’s certainly stuck between a rock and a hard place,’ added Full Price with a giggle. ‘Did you try the standard Magnaflux Reversal?’

  ‘I tried it twice,’ said Moobin, ‘not a flicker.’

  ‘Let me try,’ said Half, and let fly in a similar manner to Moobin, with similar negative results.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Full?’

  His brother tried and failed also, and they all suddenly looked a lot more serious, and went into one of those wizidrical discussions where I generally understood one word in eight. After ten minutes of this, they all let fly together, but all that happened was that the room grew hot and clammy, and our clothes let out a size.

  ‘Did she say anything before she went?’ asked Moobin, doing his belt up a notch.

  ‘Only that the coils were taking on power,’ I replied, ‘and that the spell was written in RUNIX.’

  ‘No one writes in RUNIX any more,’ said Full Price. ‘It’s an archaic spell language that was big in the fourth century before we moved over to ARAMAIC. Half, who’s our RUNIX expert?’

  ‘Aside from Lady Mawgon?’

  ‘Yes, obviously.’

  ‘Monty Vanguard always had an interest in old spell languages.’

  Moobin told Tiger to fetch Vanguard. He nodded and ran off. The atmosphere, which earlier had all been a bit jokey and silly, was now deathly s
erious.

  ‘But the Fundamental Spell Reversibility Rule still applies, yes?’ I asked.

  ‘Totally,’ agreed Moobin, ‘there’s no spell cast that can’t be unravelled if you know precisely how it was written – it just may take a while to figure out.’

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘If we work lunchtimes, about six to seven years.’

  ‘Years?’ I echoed in some alarm. ‘The bridge gig starts on Friday. We’ve got less than forty-eight hours!’

  ‘Life is short, magic is long, Jennifer.’

  ‘That’s not helpful.’

  ‘Having a spot of bother?’ asked a dapper white-haired man in impeccable dress and a thin moustache. This was Monty Vanguard, one of our spellers. Long in retirement, he spent his days putting together the thousands of lines of spell necessary to bring medical scanners back online.

  Moobin explained the problem at length, and Monty Vanguard smiled.

  ‘So you young blades have got your fingers burned and need an oldster to help you out, hmm?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Monty opened the rent in the air just as Mawgon had done, and after donning his glasses, looked around inside the enchantment.

  ‘I get it,’ he said after a while. ‘Do we have the passthought?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll reset it. Are you sure we want Lady Mawgon back? I mean she’s—’

  He didn’t get to finish his sentence as he too was turned to alabaster. But not slowly, like Mawgon, but instantly. It was his bad luck that he had been blinking at the time, and instead of looking elegant and dignified in stone, he had that annoying half-closed-eye look that makes one a bit, well, dopey.

  ‘Okay,’ said Full Price after a pause, ‘that didn’t turn out so well. What now?’

  No one had any suggestions so we stood there for a moment, staring at Monty and Lady Mawgon.