The Last Dragonslayer Part 4

'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 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.

'Lots of parents lost in the Troll Wars,' I said. 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 s.h.i.+mmer 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 gla.s.s and pressed the large red b.u.t.ton.

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 gla.s.sware, 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 pa.s.sed 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 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 possible. 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 that one before.' 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 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.' 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 diminis.h.i.+ng?'

'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?'

'I don't know,' I replied, 'but there's a reason Kazam is based in the Kingdom of Hereford. We're twenty miles away from the Dragonlands, and while a link between Dragons and magic has never been fully proved, there's more than enough anecdotal evidence to connect the two. In any event,' I added, 'I think we need to find out more.'

'By the way,' said Tiger, 'is the Quarkbeast allowed to chew corrugated iron before breakfast?'

'Only galvanised,' I replied without looking up, 'the zinc keeps his scales s.h.i.+ny.'

There was an excited buzz in the breakfast room that morning, and not just because Unstable Mabel had agreed to cook waffles. The talk was about Moobin's accomplishment and how everyone's power seemed to have increased. Although they had all gone off to try the 'lead into gold' gag for themselves, no-one else had succeeded, leading me to believe that Moobin had managed it only because he was the sole person up that morning, and the battery of wizidrical power that was Zambini Towers had been available to him and him alone.

Aside from the brief excitement, there seemed to be little going on that morning. I had a job for Full Price to divine the position of a wedding ring that had been flushed accidentally down the loo, and another tree-moving job that the Green Man and Patrick of Ludlow could handle. I sorted through the mail. There were a few cheques so at least I could speak to the bank manager again. There was also a letter that carried the official seal of the Hereford City Council, and it informed me that our contract to clean the city's drains would not be renewed. I called my contact at the council to try to find out why.

'The fact is,' said Tim Brody, who was acting a.s.sistant deputy head of drains, 'that Blok-U-Gon, the well-known and TV-advertised industrial drain unblockers, have undercut your price, and we have a budget to think of.'

'I'm sure we can come to some arrangement,' I said, trying to act how Mr Zambini might. Some work we did at a loss, either simply to keep the sorcerers busy, or to give us a presence in the marketplace. We needed the public to see us working in order to gain their trust and promote wizardry as simply a way of life. The last thing we needed was for the fifteenth-century view of sorcerers to spring to the fore, and for the citizenry to regard those at Kazam with loathing and mistrust.

'Listen,' I said, 'a drain cleared by magic is the best way. It doesn't smell, no fuss, you don't have to be embarra.s.sed by what you blocked it up with, and besides, I offer a good guarantee. If it blocks again within twenty-four hours we redo the job for free and charm the moles from your garden or your face: the choice is yours. I even do the form B1-7Gs for you. Besides, it's traditional traditional.'

'It's not just the cost, Jennifer. My mother used to be a sorceress so I've always tried to use you guys. The problem is that King Snodd's useless brother has recently bought a five per cent share in Blok-U-Gon, and, well, you see?'

'Oh,' I said, realising that this was bigger than both of us, 'right. Thanks for your time, Tim. I'm sure you did your best.'

I hung up. Although King Snodd IV was in general a fair and just ruler who seldom put people to death without good reason, he was not averse to making edicts that were of financial benefit to him and his immediate family. There was nothing I could do. He was the King, after all, and, indentured servitude or not, I and all those who held Hereford nationality were loyal subjects of the Crown.

'We just lost the drain unblocking contract to King Snodd's useless brother,' I said.

'I don't know about his useless brother, but Mother Zen.o.bia took us all to see King Snodd on Military Hardware Parade Day,' remarked Tiger thoughtfully.

'What did you think?'

'The lands.h.i.+ps were impressive.'

'I meant about the King.'

He thought for a moment.

'Shorter than he looks during the weekly TV address.'

'He does the address sitting down.'

'Even so.'

But Tiger was right.

'The six-foot-tall Queen Mimosa doesn't help him,' I observed. 'She used to work here thirty years ago when she was plain Miss Mimosa Jones. Mr Zambini said she could pollinate plants over seven times more efficiently than bees. A good little earner, he said, given Hereford's fruit exports. But then Prince Snodd took an interest, proclaimed his undying love and she renounced her calling to be the princess, later Queen. Mr Zambini was sad to lose her, but the bees were relieved to be back to full employment.'

'She's very beautiful,' said Tiger.

'And witty and wise,' I added, 'what with all the stand-up comedy she does, and the Troll Wars Widows charity.'

'Quark.'

The door to the office cracked open and a large man with a sharp suit and a fedora put his head round the door. He soon noticed the Quarkbeast. Hard not to, really.

'Does he, er... bite?'

'Never deeper than the bone.'

He jumped.

'My joke, Mr... ?'

The large man looked relieved and entered. He removed his hat and sat in the chair I offered him while Tiger was dispatched to fetch a cup of tea.

'My name is Mr Trimble,' announced the man, 'of Trimble, Trimble, Trimble, Trimble and Trimble, attorneys-at-law.'

He handed me a card.