‘Come, come, my dear,’ said the King, attempting to defuse the situation, ‘she is only a child.’
‘A child who is vain, spoilt and unworthy to rule,’ said the Queen. ‘We will not leave this kingdom in safe hands if the Princess is allowed to continue her ways. So,’ concluded the Queen, ‘are you prepared to greet Miss Strange, Princess?’
The Princess looked at her parents in turn.
‘I would sooner eat dog’s vomit than—’
‘ENOUGH!’ yelled the Queen in a voice so loud that everyone jumped.
‘Leave us,’ she said to the people in the room, and the royal retinue, well used to being able to make themselves scarce at a moment’s notice, all made for the door.
‘Not you,’ she said to the royal poodle cleaner-upper who had been quizzed earlier.
‘My dear …’ began the King when the servants had left, but his entreaties fell upon deaf ears. The Queen’s fury was up, and instead of holding his ground he cowered in front of her.
And that was when I felt a buzzing in the air. It was subtle, like a bee in fog at forty paces, but it meant only one thing – a spell was cooking. And if that was so, it could only be from the ex-sorcerer, Queen Mimosa.
The Princess crossed her arms and stared at her mother.
‘You will do as you are told, young lady,’ said the Queen in a measured tone, ‘or you will not be in a position to do anything at all.’
‘Do your very worst!’ spat the Princess, her face curled up into an ugly sneer. ‘I will not be ordered about like a handmaiden!’
The Queen, very slowly and deliberately, pointed her index fingers at the Princess. These were the conduits of a sorcerer’s power, and when brought out or pointed anywhere near you, it was time to run, or beg, or duck for cover. The King must have seen this before, for he winced as a powerful surge of wizidrical energy coursed from Queen Mimosa’s fingers. There was a thunderclap, several drapes fell from the walls, and all the window glass suddenly decreased in size by a tenth and fell out of the frames with an angry clatter.
This wasn’t the spell, of course, just the secondary effect. When the peal of thunder had receded into the distance, I tried to figure out what spell had been cast, but nothing seemed to have changed.
The Princess changed
I looked at the King, who was as confused as me, then at the Queen, who was blowing on her fingers as sorcerers are wont to do after a particularly heavy spelling bout. She seemed quietly confident, and not unduly worried – something had happened, I just wasn’t sure what.
That was when I noticed the Princess, who had such a look of confusion on her face it was hard to describe. She stared at her hands as though they were entirely alien to her. The King had noticed her odd behaviour, too.
‘My little Pooplemouse?’ he said. ‘Are you quite well?’
The Princess opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. She tried again and looked as though she was going to cough up a toad or something, which is not as odd as it might sound, as that was often a punishment bestowed upon disobedient children by their mother-sorcerers.
The Princess opened her mouth again and this time found her voice.
‘Begging your pardon, Your Majesties, but I don’t half feel peculiar.’
‘My dear,’ said the King, addressing the Queen, ‘you have given our daughter the voice and manners of a common person.’
‘My nails!’ came a voice behind us. ‘And these clothes! I would not be seen dead in them!’
We turned around. The servant who had been ordered to remain had broken strict protocol and spoken without being spoken to first, one in a very long list of sackable offences. The Queen caught the servant’s eye and pointed to her reflection in the mirror. The servant looked, then shrieked and brought her raw hands up to her face.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I’m so plain and ugly and common! What have you done, Mother?’
‘Yes,’ said the King, ‘what have you done?’
‘A lesson to show our daughter the value of something when you have lost it.’
‘That’s our daughter?’ asked the king, staring at the servant, then at the Princess, who had started to pirouette in a mildly clumsy fashion in the centre of the room, listening joyfully to the faint rustle of the pink crinoline dress she was wearing. The Princess might not be enjoying being a servant, but the servant didn’t seem too bothered about being a princess.
‘You haven’t—?’ said the King.
‘I most certainly have,’ replied Queen Mimosa. ‘The Princess has swapped bodies with the lowliest servant in the household.’
The Princess looked aghast.
‘I’ve learned my lesson!’ she shrieked. ‘Turn me back, please! I will do anything – even shake hands with that hideous orphan person.’
She couldn’t even remember my name. But impressed from a technical viewpoint, I turned to the Queen.
‘Remarkable, ma’am. Where did you learn to do that?’
‘I studied under Sister Organza of Rhodes when a student,’ she said simply. ‘The good sister was big on the transfer of minds between bodies.’
‘Please turn me back!’ yelled the Princess again, throwing herself to her mother’s feet. ‘I will never blame the footmen for my own stealing or demand people are put to death.’
‘I may have to insist you change her back,’ said the King with uncharacteristic firmness.
‘I won’t ever make fun of our poor royal cousins for only having two castles,’ pleaded the Princess.
‘I can’t have a daughter with lank hair and a pallid complexion,’ added the King. ‘It might attract the wrong sort of prince.’
‘Our daughter needs to be taught a lesson,’ said the Queen, ‘for the good of the Kingdom.’
‘There are other ways to punish her,’ said the King, ‘and in this matter I will be firm. Return my daughter this instant!’
‘Yes,’ howled the Princess, ‘and I promise never to pour weedkiller in the moat again – I’ll even restock the ornamental fish with my own servant’s pocket money!’
‘That was you?’ said the King, turning on her suddenly. ‘My prized collection of rare and wonderful koi carp, all stone dead at a stroke? I had my fish-keeper stripped of all honours and sent to work in the refineries – and you said nothing?’
He turned to his wife and gave a short bow.
‘I suppose it might be for the best,’ he said wearily.
‘What?!?’ yelled the Princess.
‘Right,’ said the Queen, clapping her hands. ‘Miss Strange, I am entrusting you with our daughter’s further education. I hope she will learn something from the experience of having and being less than nothing.’
‘I won’t go,’ said the Princess. ‘I shan’t be made to wear old clothes and eat nothing but potatoes and scratchings and have to share toilets with other people and have no servants. I shall savagely bite anyone who tries to take me away.’
‘Then we shall have you muzzled and sent back to the orphanage,’ said the Queen, ‘and they will allocate you work in the refineries. It’s either that or going quietly with Miss Strange.’
These words seemed to have an effect upon her, and the Princess calmed down.
‘I shall hate you for ever, Mother,’ she said quietly.
‘You will thank me,’ the Queen replied evenly, ‘and the Kingdom shall thank both your father and me for delivering them a just and wise ruler when we die.’
The Princess said nothing. It was the servant-now-princess who spoke next.
‘This is a very beautiful room, like,’ she said. ‘I’d not really noticed before what with not being allowed to raise my eyes from the floor and all. Is that a painting of a great battle?’
‘That one?’ said the King, always eager to show off his knowledge. ‘It is of one of our ancestor’s greatest triumph against the Snowdonian Welsh. The odds were astounding: five thousand against six. It was a hard, hand-to-hand battle over two days with every inch won in blood a
nd sinew, but thank Snodd we were victorious. Despite everything, we were impressed by the fighting spirit of the Welsh – those six certainly put up a terrific fight.’
‘Look after her, won’t you?’ said the Queen in a more concerned tone. ‘I trust in your judgement to educate my daughter, and whatever happens, you will not find the Kingdom or myself ungrateful. Bring her back in a month or two and I will restore their minds to the correct bodies. Protect her, Miss Strange, but don’t cosset her. The future of the Kingdom may very well be in your hands.’
The Princess quietened down after a while as she realised her mother meant it, and we were shown from the hall.
‘No one is curtsying me,’ she said in a kind of shocked wonderment as we walked unobserved down a bustling corridor in the palace. ‘Is that what being common is like?’
‘It’s a small part of what being common is like,’ I told her.
‘Do you think that horrible servant will get my body pregnant?’ she asked as we trotted down the steps. ‘I’ve heard about you girl orphans having no morals and having babies for fun and selling them to buy bicycles and fashion accessories and onions and stuff.’
‘We think of nothing else,’ I said with a smile.
Tiger and the Quarkbeast were still playing chess when we got back to the car.
‘Who’s she?’ said Tiger as we walked up.
‘Guess.’
‘From the look of her,’ said Tiger, ‘an orphan servant, probably bought for indentured servitude within the palace and used for menial scrubbing duties or worse. Here,’ he added, fishing in his pocket, ‘I’ve got some nougat somewhere I was keeping for emergencies – and you look as though you could do with a bit of energy.’
He handed her the nougat, which was mildly dusty from where it had sat in Tiger’s pocket. The Princess ignored it, and him.
‘I smell of dog poo, carbolic soap and mildew,’ she said, sniffing a sleeve of her maid’s uniform in disgust, ‘and I can feel a bogey in my left nostril. Remove it for me, boy.’
‘Holy cow!’ said Tiger. ‘It’s the Princess.’
‘How did you know that?’ asked the Princess.
‘Wild stab in the dark.’
‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Princess.
‘Hold it yourself,’ said Tiger, sticking out his tongue.
‘I dislike that ginger nitwit already,’ said the Princess. ‘I’m going to start a list of people who have annoyed me so they can be duly punished when I am back in my own body.’ She rummaged in her pockets for a piece of paper and a stub of pencil. ‘So, nitwit: name?’
‘Tiger … Spartacus.’
‘Spart-a-cus,’ said the Princess, writing it down carefully.
‘If anyone finds out you’re the Princess,’ I said after having a worrisome thought, ‘I’d give it about an hour before we have to fight off bandits, cut-throats and agents of foreign powers. For now, you’ll take the handmaiden’s name. What is it, by the way?’
The Princess seemed to see the sense in this.
‘She doesn’t have a name. We called her “poo-girl” if we called her anything at all.’
I told her to take the orphan ID card out of her top pocket.
‘Well, how about that,’ said the Princess, reading the card. ‘She does have a name after all, but it’s awful: Laura Scrubb, Royal Dog Mess Removal Operative Third Class, aged seventeen. Laura Scrubb? I can’t be called that!’
‘You are and you will be,’ I said, ‘and that’s the Quarkbeast.’
‘It’s hideous,’ said the Princess. ‘In fact, you all are. And why is there a disembodied hand attached to the steering wheel?’
‘It’s a Helping Hand™,’ explained Tiger, ‘like power steering, only run by magic.’
‘Magic? How vulgar. I am so very glad I inherited no powers from my mother.’
I reversed the Royale out of the parking place and headed back towards town. The Princess, once past her fit of indignation at how hideously unsophisticated we all were, spent the time staring out of the window.
‘I’m not allowed past the castle walls,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a billboard advertising toothpaste.’
‘Doesn’t it come ready squeezed on to your toothbrush every morning and evening?’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
‘Really? So how does it get from the tube to the toothbrush?’
I didn’t have time to answer as a car had swerved in front of us. I stamped on the brakes and recognised it immediately: a six-wheeled Phantom Twelve Rolls-Royce, with paintwork so perfectly black you felt as though you could fall into it. There was only one person I knew who was driven around in the super-exclusive Phantom Twelve, and I was certain that this was not a chance encounter.
An impeccably dressed manservant in dark suit, white gloves and dark glasses climbed out of the Phantom Twelve, walked across and tapped on the window.
‘Miss Strange?’ he said. ‘My employer would like to discuss a matter that concerns you both.’
We were stuck in the middle of a roundabout.
‘What, here?’
‘No, miss. At Madley International Airport. Follow us, please.’
The Rolls-Royce pulled away and we followed. The car would contain Miss D’argento, an agent, like me. But she wasn’t any ordinary agent – she didn’t look after film stars, singers, writers or even sorcerers. She didn’t even look after careless kings who found themselves temporarily without a kingdom and needed a public relations boost. No, she was the agent for the most powerful wizard either living, dead or, in his case, otherwise: the Mighty Shandar.
The Mighty Shandar
The trip to the Kingdom’s international airport did not take long, but instead of going to the main departures terminal we were led into a large maintenance hangar that contained a Skybus 646 cargo aircraft which was emblazoned with Shandar’s logo – a footprint on fire. The rear of the cargo aircraft was open, and a large wooden crate was being unloaded by a forklift. I parked the Bugatti and watched as Miss D’argento alighted elegantly from the rear door, held open by the manservant.
The D’argentos were what was termed a ‘Dynastic Agency’ in that they had been looking after the business interests of the Mighty Shandar ever since his appearance as a featured ‘Sorcerer to Watch’ in the July 1572 edition of Popular Wizarding. As far as anyone can tell, there have been eleven D’argentos in the employ of the Mighty Shandar, and all but one female. Miss D’argento was perhaps a year or two older than me – about eighteen – and was dressed as perfectly elegantly as a socialite twice her age.
I climbed out of the car and waited for the forklift truck to deliver the crate in front of us. While this happened, I noticed several other henchmen dotted around the hangar. They were all dressed in black suits, dark hats, white gloves and large sunglasses. I peered at the one closest to us. There was no flesh in the small gap between where his glove ended and his shirt cuff began. It was an empty suit, animated by magic. Usually you can tell a drone by their mildly jerky and decidedly unhumanlike movements, but these ones were top class – at a distance you’d never know at all.
‘Notice anything odd about the henchmen?’ whispered Tiger.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘drones.’
‘Drones?’ asked the Princess.
‘Watch and listen,’ said Tiger.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Strange,’ said Miss D’argento in a cultivated voice, her high heels click-clicking on the concrete floor as she approached us, ‘congratulations on winning The Magic Contest. I reported it to the Mighty Shandar, who expressed admiration for your fortitude.’
I nodded towards the closest drone.
‘They move well for the non-living.’
‘Thank you,’ said D’argento. ‘Shandar does us all proud.’
‘And from purely professional interest,’ I added, ‘are you running them on an Ankh-XVII RUNIX core?’
‘You know your spells,’ said Miss D’argento wi
th a smile. ‘We run them with the Mandrake Sentience Emulation Protocols disabled to make them less independent. Make no mistake, they are twice as dangerous as real bodyguards for they fear no death.’
She wasn’t kidding. Pharaoh Amenemhat V of the Middle Kingdom was said to have attempted to expand Egypt along the Mediterranean with an unstoppable drone army of sixty thousand. They got as far as what is now Benghazi before Amenemhat V was killed in battle.
I told Tiger and the Princess to wait in the car while the forklift placed the crate in front of us and then reversed away. Almost immediately, several of the lifeless drones unlatched the crate and wheeled the two sections apart to reveal the Mighty Shandar.
But it wasn’t a flesh-and-blood Shandar, it was Shandar as he spent most of his time these days: stone. Every fold in the fabric of his clothes, every pore in his skin, every eyelash was perfectly preserved in glassy obsidian. This was how the Mighty Shandar could still be a power to be reckoned with four centuries after his birth, for in stone, you don’t age.
But spending time in petra was not without dangers. The world is littered with sorcerers who have turned to stone for some reason, only to have an arm, leg or head fall, or be knocked or sawn off. Those that return to life generally bleed to death before they can be saved. But given the right storage facilities and barring erosion, accidental damage or mischief, a sorcerer could live hundreds of thousands of years without a second of their own life having passed.
‘The Mighty Shandar celebrates his four hundred and forty-fourth birthday next year,’ said Miss D’argento, ‘yet in his own personal life he is only fifty-eight. He doesn’t get out of stone for anything less than a million an hour, and at current life-usage rates will live to 9,356.’
She looked at Shandar’s features, unclipped a feather duster from inside the crate, and flicked some dust from the statue.
‘He spent the entire seventeen and eighteenth centuries turned to stone,’ continued Miss D’argento proudly, ‘but that was mainly for tax purposes. Four generations of my family never spoke to him at all.’
‘You must be very dedicated.’
‘Dedication does not even begin to describe our commitment to the Mighty Shandar,’ said D’argento, ‘but enough chit-chat. Read this.’