The Song of the Quarkbeast

by Jasper Fforde

  ‘They’ve got a replacement,’ said someone close by. ‘Jimmy Nuttjob will be setting himself on fire and then be fired high above the rooftops from an air cannon while yelling “God Save the King”.’

  ‘Probably hoping for a knighthood,’ said his friend.

  ‘Definitely – but there must be easier ways to do it,’ replied the first man.

  We worked our way to the front, where the barriers had been erected to keep the crowds from any passive spelling, and Tiger and I showed our IDs to the police on duty. We were permitted to pass, and moved towards a small gaggle of people standing right on the edge of the bridge’s north abutment, close to where the royal observation box had been built.

  ‘Ah!’ said Blix. ‘The defenders approach.’

  He was standing with the rest of iMagic’s staff: a weaselly character in ill-fitting clothes named Tchango Muttney, the well-dressed Dame Corby, who wore far more jewellery than was good for her, and Samantha Flynt, who was fantastically pretty, but not that bright. I knew this because she had put her pretty floral dress on back to front. Perkins, I noticed, was not with them, but Colonel Bloch-Draine was, and he nodded a gruff greeting in my direction.

  ‘No sorcerers to help you?’ asked Blix sarcastically.

  ‘Won’t be much of a contest, will it?’ I said.

  ‘On the contrary,’ replied Lord Tenbury, who was hovering close at hand, ‘the best contest requires only a winner – not necessarily any competition.’

  ‘And how do you think the crowd will react when they find that the potential winner has no opposition?’

  ‘The people will not riot,’ said Tenbury confidently. ‘After all, a one-sided contest should be cosily familiar to any resident who has ever voted in a Kingdom of Snodd election.’4

  We stopped talking because a colourful parade was approaching from down the street. There was a shiny brass band, several horsemen, and a retinue of hangers-on before the Royal Family arrived in a gilded open-top carriage. Everyone, including me, knelt before our monarch as the carriage stopped and a handy duke offered himself to be used as a step. The King and Queen were accompanied by the two Spoilt Royal Children, His Royal Petulantness the Crown Prince Steve, who was twelve, and Her Royal Odiousness Princess Shazza, who was fifteen. As their accolades suggested, they were horribly spoiled and spent much of their time stamping their feet and wanting things. No governess ever lasted longer than twenty-six and three-quarter minutes.

  As soon as they had descended from the carriage, a deafening alarum sounded from thirty buglers all dressed traditionally as badgers, and the royal family walked slowly up to where we stood, waving at the citizenry while one of their footmen tossed coin vouchers into the crowd. They used to throw coins until the King discovered that his ungrateful subjects were spending the cash in non-Snodd-owned shops. The ‘Alms Vouchers’ are redeemable only in Snoddco’s, the well-known and wholly substandard superstore.

  ‘Ah!’ said the King. ‘Lord Tenbury and our Court Mystician. Good to see you both. I trust we are to see some sport this morning, hmm? Brave of you to turn up, Miss Strange.’

  Since we had been spoken to, protocol dictated we could now stand. I couldn’t help noticing that Queen Mimosa was looking around for something. I took a deep breath.

  ‘I would be failing in my duty,’ I said nervously, ‘if I did not lodge a formal complaint over the fairness of this contest.’

  ‘Your displeasure is noted, Miss Strange,’ said the King. ‘We will glance at your complaint some time next year. Shall we proceed?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said the Queen, staring at me. ‘Are you Jennifer Strange?’

  ‘A foundling, my dear,’ said the King in an unsubtle aside, ‘unsuitable for a queen’s conversation.’

  ‘Shut up, Frank. Miss Strange, where is the Kazam team?’

  There was a deathly hush.

  ‘Let us take our seats, my dear,’ said the King, ‘I feel the—’

  ‘Your team, Miss Strange?’

  ‘In prison, Your Majesty,’ I said, curtsying, ‘awaiting a hearing on Monday.’

  ‘I see.’

  Queen Mimosa glared at the King, who seemed to shrink under her withering look.

  ‘Are you meaning to tell me that you have imprisoned the entire Kazam team in order to guarantee a victory?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said the King, ‘it was entirely coincidental. They were all brigands and villains and scallywags and lawbreakers. Is that not so, Court Mystician?’

  ‘Up to a point, Majesty, yes, I think we are agreed on that.’

  ‘One of their number attacked the castle last night,’ added Lord Tenbury, ‘and caused considerable damage to the palace.’

  ‘Poppycock,’ said Queen Mimosa. ‘I saw the whole thing. A single unarmed carpet rescued someone from the High North Tower. Any damage was done by your own gunners.’

  ‘And they will be roundly punished, along with the sorcerers we have in custody. I think I have shown considerable restraint – I could have put them all to death, but instead I showed mercy – like you tell me to, pumpkin.’

  ‘The charges are quite serious, my Queen,’ said Tenbury, but Queen Mimosa raised a finger and he stopped. I noticed, too, that all the courtiers and hangers-on had taken a pace backwards and were finding something else to do. Queen Mimosa moved closer to her husband and lowered her voice.

  ‘Listen here, you inbred, pompous little twit,’ she said. ‘I didn’t arrange with Mother Zenobia to have the bridge rebuilt in aid of the Troll War Widows’ Fund to have you hijack it for your own money-grabbing agenda. Release the Kazam sorcerers immediately, or I will make life so unpleasant that you will wish to have been born a foundling.’

  ‘We will discuss this later, my dear.’

  ‘We are discussing it now,’ she said with a look of thunder that would have impressed Lady Mawgon, ‘and do you doubt for even one second that I would not do as I say?’

  The King took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks. He looked around at the ten thousand or so subjects who were eagerly awaiting the start of the contest. It looked to me as though the King knew only too well that Queen Mimosa could make his life very unpleasant indeed.

  ‘Lord Tenbury,’ said the King, ‘I think we owe it to the citizenry of Snodd to put on a good show. They have come to see a magical contest, and they shall. Release the wizards. I command it.’

  Blix and Tenbury looked shocked at the turn of events, and exchanged desperate glances. There was a very good reason why they had nobbled Kazam. iMagic were rubbish and did not have a hope of winning. In a panic, Lord Tenbury did the first thing he could think of – he started patting his pockets in an absent-minded way.

  ‘If you are going to claim you’ve lost the keys to the city jail, Lord Chief Adviser,’ snarled the King in a low voice while smiling and waving to the crowd, ‘I will put your head on a spike and have dogs gnaw at your corpse.’

  ‘Here they are,’ said Lord Tenbury, suddenly finding the keys. ‘I will see to your instructions this moment.’

  ‘Happy now, pumpkin?’ said the King to Queen Mimosa.

  ‘I love it when you do the right thing, bunny-wunny,’ she said, tweaking his royal ear affectionately.

  Queen Mimosa took her leave with the bickering Spoilt Royal Children while the King hung back for a moment.

  ‘If Kazam win,’ he said to both Blix and Tenbury, ‘I will have you both stuffed with sawdust while still alive and then use you for bayonet practice. Do you understand?’

  He didn’t wait for a reply, and turned to me with such a hateful glare that I took an involuntary step backwards. But he made no comment, and turned to join his family, who were all present to view the contest – even his Useless Brother, the royal hanger-on cousins and his odd-looking mother, the Duck-faced Dowager Duchess of Dinmore.

  The King stepped up to the royal microphone and gave a long rambling speech that made reference to how proud he was that the hard toil of a blindly trustful citizenry kept him an
d his family in the lap of luxury while war widows begged on the street, and how he thanked providence that he had been blessed to rule over a nation whose inexplicable tolerance towards corrupt despots was second to none.

  The speech was well received and some citizens were even moved to tears. Once done, he ordered that the contest begin.

  ‘We’ll still thrash you,’ said Blix to me, ‘and if you’re worried about your darling boyfriend, he’s quite safe for the moment.’

  My heart suddenly fell. Perkins had been rumbled.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘No? Here.’

  And he passed me the left-handed conch that we’d given Perkins.

  ‘If any harm comes to him,’ I said between gritted teeth, ‘I will hold you personally responsible.’

  ‘Oh, oh, I’m so frightened,’ replied Blix sarcastically. ‘Now piss off. Haven’t you got some wizards to spring from jail?’

  ‘I’ll be back with help,’ I said. ‘You’ll be thrashed. And just for the record, he’s not my boyfriend.’

  Blix laughed and had his first two stones fitted even before Lord Tenbury’s car arrived to take us to fetch Moobin and the others.

  * * *

  1 It’s the fear of open spaces. Jennifer never did find out what the Moose thought she meant.

  2 A Snodd delicacy often served at open-air gatherings. Real ‘roadkill pizza’ these days is rare as demand far outstrips supply, but the alternative is still baked in the traditional way – on asphalt under a sunlamp.

  3 These actually are camel’s ears. They are considered an ‘acquired taste’, which is shorthand for ‘extremely nasty’.

  4 Elections are neither free nor fair in the Kingdom of Snodd. In fact, there is only a yes box to tick against the only two questions: Do you feel King Snodd is doing a swell job? and: Would you like him to continue to do so? Any ballot papers not having both boxes ticked are destroyed as ‘spoiled’.

  Bridge building

  * * *

  ‘So which two do you want released?’ asked Lord Tenbury as soon as we had arrived outside the city jail, a large stone building to the north of the city which was known ironically as the ‘Hereford Hilton’, much to the annoyance of the real Hereford Hilton, which coincidentally was only two doors down, something that worked to the advantage of the prisoners when pizza deliveries were misdirected.

  ‘I was under the impression His Majesty specifically requested all were to be released,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Then you understand little of the role of Lord Chief Adviser. My duty is to serve my King the best way I can and interpret his orders as I see fit. Two sorcerers. Choose now.’

  I could see it was the best deal I was going to get, and every second spent arguing was a second wasted.

  ‘The Wizard Moobin,’ I said without hesitation, ‘and . . . Patrick of Ludlow.’

  Lord Tenbury relayed the orders to the jailer, told us we could make our way back to the bridge and was gone. After waiting half an hour, in which I had serious doubts that Tenbury would keep his word, the pair of them emerged blinking into the daylight. They had their lead finger-cuffs removed and within a few seconds we were in a taxi heading back towards the bridge.

  ‘Well done,’ said Moobin, brushing the dirt, earwigs and other prison detritus from his jacket.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ I said, annoyed with myself that I had done so little, ‘thank Queen Mimosa.’

  ‘She’s an ex-sorcerer herself,’ he said. ‘I think she has a soft spot for us. Who else do we have on the team?’

  ‘You two are it.’

  Team Kazam were going be severely underpowered. I told them what had happened since they had been imprisoned. That Mawgon was still stone, her passthought unbroken; that Perkins had been captured during an attempt to uncover a missing vision; that the Moose had turned out to be semi-self-aware and was the agent behind the ‘infinite thinness’ spell, and that Zambini hadn’t really been much help – although it had been good to see him.

  ‘The Moose drawing power from a ring?’ said Moobin incredulously. ‘From a band of gold, the single most boringly non-reactive metal on the planet?’

  ‘Zambini was surprised too.’

  ‘Well, it’s not important right now,’ he said as the taxi dropped us as close as it could to the south bridge abutment. ‘We’re going to have to wing it a bit and break a few rules. The future of Kazam is in the balance and we have to work together if we’re to have any chance of survival. Now listen carefully . . .’

  As Tiger took the cab back to Zambini Towers to put the plan in motion, Moobin, myself and Patrick surveyed the wreckage of what had once been a stone bridge with five arches supported by four piers. iMagic had already had an hour’s start, and the bridge piers on their side were already cleared of old rubble and three feet above the level of the river. The stones were moving about the site steadily, to many ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the onlookers. It took a moment for us to be seen by the audience, but when they did there was a sudden hush and then a cheer. Blix’s past history of hasty, substandard wizidrical building work had spread about the town, and severely dented his popularity. As the cheer echoed around the area, Patrick lifted ten pieces of cut stone from the river bed simultaneously, then moved them in a long procession to be stacked for later insertion in the bridge.

  The crowd went wild at this, and the scoreboard, which was offering up-to-the-second live betting odds, had us up from ‘1000: 1’ against to ‘500:1’ against. Not great, but an improvement. I saw Patrick hold on to a crowd barrier for support after his exertions. He would not have attempted such a feat without Moobin requesting it – the purpose was to make the iMagic team nervous. It worked. Two stones that were about to be placed dropped with a heavy splash into the river as the iMagic team momentarily lost concentration.

  ‘Patrick will need continuous food if he does most of the heavy lifting,’ said Moobin, exercising each of his index fingers in readiness, ‘and check to see how Tiger is getting on.’

  I needed no second bidding. I called a street urchin out of the crowd and deputised him on to the Kazam team in order to keep Patrick and Moobin supplied with constant water and food, and told him to find a seamstress to repair their clothes ‘on the fly’ as continuous heavy spelling unravels stitching.1

  ‘To battle,’ said Moobin as he walked across the scaffolding footbridge that ran parallel to the stone bridge. He lifted stones from the rubble with a relaxed movement of his hands, and sorted them into categories of dressed, rubble and ornate, ready to be put back into the bridge. It was mostly bravado. As with Patrick, it took a lot more power then he made out. If they tried to keep it up like this they’d be exhausted long before our half of the bridge was finished.

  ‘Surprised to see me, Blix?’ said Moobin as they met in the middle.

  ‘It won’t make any difference,’ Blix sneered back, ‘the team are on a roll.’

  It certainly appeared that way. iMagic were now starting on their first arch.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  They parted to continue their work while I hurried off to see how Tiger was doing.

  Zambini Towers is located in the tight network of streets near the cathedral, and was no more than a three-minute jog from the bridge. By the time I got there Tiger was already organising the retired sorcerers, wizards and enchanters into teams to transfer the wizidrical power from the housebound Transient Moose all the way down to the bridge.

  To accomplish this we placed two sorcerers at each street corner from the Towers to the bridge. One index finger of a sorcerer would pick up the crackle, and the other would send it on to the next. It was what was known as a daisy-chain, and the residents were all fully aware of how it worked – and were in teams of two only so that they could relieve one another when they got tired, and have someone to remind them what they were meant to be doing.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I asked.

  ‘Almost done,’ replied Tiger, ‘but you need to spe
ak to the Moose yourself – he just stares blankly at me.’

  I found the Moose in the lobby, gazing at the spreading boughs of the oak tree that was growing there.

  ‘Was this here yesterday?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s been there for almost twenty years,’ I replied.

  ‘Well I never. What can I do for you?’

  The thinness enchantment was no longer required as the contest had begun, and it didn’t take long to convince the Moose to channel the power from the small terracotta pot towards the bridge – or to be more precise, to Edgar Znorpp at the front entrance, who would then pass it across to Roger Limpet waiting on the street outside – and from him to Julian Shedmaker on the corner.

  ‘Just say when,’ replied the Moose with a carefree toss of its antlers, ‘and Moobin and Patrick will be able to draw as much power as I can extract from that pot.’

  ‘Will you be all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Never better,’ he replied, ‘and thanks for asking.’

  I told Tiger to stand by for my signal, then visited all our retired sorcerers on the way to the bridge to check they were set and ready. It would take only a minor lapse in concentration on the part of one to break the chain. Margaret O’Leary was last in line, and chosen specifically because she was the least bonkers and the best liar in case anyone asked what she was up to.

  ‘Don’t let it flow to the iMagic team by accident,’ I said, and she assured me she would not. I signalled to Moobin and Patrick, who were watching me, then spoke to Tiger through the conch to instruct the Moose to start channelling.

  I saw Margaret stiffen slightly as the power started to flow through her. Her plait unravelled, and both earrings fell from her ears. She didn’t even notice.

  ‘Wow,’ she said with a smile, ‘that’s good crackle. Can I pinch some to deal with a few grey hairs?’