The Last Dragonslayer (3 page)

‘No.’

‘Me neither. But I was always frightened that she would.’

And he gave a nervous laugh. There was a pause, and he thought for a moment. I could see there were hundreds of questions going around in his head, and he really didn’t know where to start.

‘What happened to the Great Zambini?’

‘It’s plain “Mr Zambini” these days,’ I told him, ‘he hasn’t carried the accolade “Great” for over ten years.’

‘You don’t have it for life?’

‘It’s based on power. See the one dressed in black over there?’

‘The grumpy-looking one?’

‘The
dignified
-looking one. Sixty years ago she was Master Sorceress the Lady Mawgon, She-Who-the-Winds-Obey. Now she’s just plain Lady Mawgon. If the background wizidrical power falls any farther, she’ll be plain Daphne Mawgon and no different to you or me. Watch and learn.’

We stood there for a moment.

‘The fat one looks as though he’s playing a harp,’ said Tiger, with a lot less respect than he should have shown.

‘He’s the once-venerable Dennis Price,’ I told him testily, ‘and you should learn to hold your tongue. Price’s nickname is “Full”. He has a brother called David, but we all call him “Half”.’

‘Whatever his name, he
still
looks like he’s playing an invisible harp.’

‘We call it
harping
because the hand movements that precede the firing of a spell look like someone trying to play an invisible harp.’

‘I’d never have guessed. Don’t they use wands or something?’

‘Wands, broomsticks and pointy hats are for the storybooks. Can you feel that?’

The faint buzz of a spell was in the air. A mild tingling sensation, not unlike static electricity. As we watched, Price let fly. There was a crackle like scrunched Cellophane, and with a tremor, the entire internal wiring of Mr Digby’s house, complete with all light switches, sockets, fuse boxes and light fittings, swung out of the house as a single entity – a three-dimensional framework of worn wiring, cracked Bakelite and blackened cables. It hung there in midair over the lawn, rocking gently. After a moment, Full Price nodded to Lady Mawgon and then relaxed. The network of wires – which closely resembled the shape of the house – simply hovered a couple of feet above the ground. Price had managed to do something in an hour that trained electricians would have taken a week to do – and he hadn’t even touched the wallpaper or plasterwork.

‘Well held, Daphne,’ said Price.

‘I’m not holding it,’ said Lady Mawgon, ‘I wasn’t ready. Moobin?’

‘Not I,’ he replied, and they looked around to see who else might be involved. And that’s when they saw Tiger.

‘Who’s this little twerp?’ asked Lady Mawgon as she strode up.

‘The seventh foundling,’ I explained, ‘Tiger Prawns. Tiger, this is Full Price, Wizard Moobin and Lady Mawgon.’

Price and Moobin gave him a cheery ‘hello’ but Lady Mawgon was less welcoming.

‘I shall call you F7 until you prove yourself worthy,’ she remarked imperiously. ‘Show me your tongue, boy.’

Tiger, who to my relief was quite able to be polite if required, bowed politely and stuck out his tongue. Lady Mawgon touched the tip of his tongue with her little finger, and frowned.

‘It’s not him. Mr Price, I think you’ve just
surged
.’

‘You do?’

And they then fell into one of those very long and complex conversations that enchanters have when they want to discuss the arts. And since it was in Aramaic, Latin, Greek and English, I could understand only one word in four – to be honest, they probably did too.

‘Tongue in, Tiger.’

When they had decided that it might indeed have been a surge of wizidrical power, such as happens from time to time, they drank some tea out of a thermos, nibbled a doughnut and talked some more, then began the delicate work of replicating the worn-out wiring with an identical model hanging in the air next to it, only from new wires, switches and fuse boxes. They would then reinsert the new wiring into the old house, separate out the copper from the waste for recycling – and then do it all again for the plumbing, both domestic water and central heating.

‘I have to go back to Zambini Towers,’ I said. ‘Will you be okay here on your own?’

They said they would, and after nodding to the Quarkbeast, who jumped in the back of my Volkswagen, we left them to get on with it.

‘So what are my duties?’ asked Tiger as soon as we were on our way.

‘Did you do any laundry at the Sisterhood?’

He groaned audibly.

‘There’s that, and answering phones and general running around, but not any cooking. We have Unstable Mabel to do that for us. Stay out of her kitchen, by the way, she has a nasty temper and is a demon shot with a soup ladle.’

‘Can’t the sorcerers do their own laundry?’

‘They could, but they won’t. Their power has to be conserved to be useful.’

‘I’m not sure I want to be called F7 by the grumpy one.’

‘You’ll get used to it. She called me F6 until only a month ago.’

‘I’m not you. And besides, you still haven’t told me what happened to Mr Zambini.’

‘Ooh,’ I said, turning up the radio to listen to the
Yogi Baird Radio Show
. I liked the show but didn’t really need to listen to it. I just didn’t want to talk about Mr Zambini’s disappearance. At least, not yet.

Twenty minutes later we pulled up outside Zambini Towers, a large property that had once been the luxurious Majestic hotel. It was the second-highest building in Hereford after King Snodd’s Parliament, but was not so well maintained. The guttering hung loose, the windows were grimy and cracked, and small tufts of grass were poking out from the gaps between the bricks.

‘What a dump,’ breathed Tiger as we trotted into the entrance lobby.

‘We can’t really afford to bring it back to a decent state. Mr Zambini bought it when he was still Great and could conjure up an oak tree from an acorn in under a fortnight.’

‘That one there?’ asked Tiger, pointing at a sprawling oak that had grown in the centre of the lobby, its gnarled roots and boughs elegantly wrapped around the old reception desk and partially obscuring the entrance to the abandoned Palm Court.

‘No, that was Half Price’s third-year dissertation.’

‘Will he get rid of it?’

‘Fourth-year dissertation.’

‘Can’t you just
wizard
the building back into shape or something?’

‘It’s too big, and they’re saving themselves.’

‘For what?’

I shrugged.

‘To earn a crust. And what’s more, I think they prefer it this way.’

We walked through the lobby, which was decorated with trophies, paintings and certificates of achievements long past.

‘The shabbiness adds a sense of faded grandeur to the proceedings. And besides, when you don’t want to draw attention to yourself, it’s better to look a bit down at heel. Good morning, ladies.’

Two elderly women were on their way to the breakfast rooms. They were dressed in matching shell suits and cackled quietly to themselves.

‘This is the new foundling, Tiger Prawns,’ I said. ‘Tiger, these are the Sisters Karamazov – Deirdre and Deirdre.’

‘Why do they have the same name?’

‘They had an unimaginative father.’

They looked very carefully at Tiger, and even prodded him several times with long bony fingers.

‘Ha-ho,’ said the least ugly of the two, ‘will you scream when I stick you with a pin, you little piglet you?’

I caught Tiger’s eye and shook my head, to convey they didn’t mean anything.

‘Prawns?’ said Deirdre. ‘Is that a Mother Zenobia name?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ replied Tiger politely. ‘The Blessed Ladies of the Lobster often use crustacean names for the foundlings.’

The sisters looked at me.

‘You’ll educate him well, Jennifer?’

‘To the best of my ability.’

‘We don’t want another . . .
incident
.’

‘No, indeed.’

And they hobbled off, grumbling to one another about the problem with spaghetti.

‘They used to earn good money on weather prediction,’ I told Tiger as soon as they were out of earshot, ‘a skill now relegated to little more than a hobby after the introduction of computerised weather mapping. Don’t stand next to them out of doors. A lifetime’s work in weather manipulation has made them very attractive to lightning. In fact, Deirdre has been struck by lightning so many times it has addled her brain and I fear she might be irredeemably insane.’

‘Winsumpoop bibble bibble,’ said Deirdre as they vanished into the dining room.

‘This place is mad,’ remarked Tiger, ‘even when compared to the Sisterhood. I’m stuck for nine years with a bunch of lunatics.’

‘You’ll get used to it.’

‘I won’t.’

I was confident that he would. For all the shortage of funds, bad plumbing, peeling wallpaper, erratic incantations and dodgy spells, Kazam was
fun
. The sorcerers spent much of their time talking fondly about the good old days, and telling tales of past triumphs and disasters with equal enthusiasm. Of the days when magic was powerful, unregulated by government, and even the largest spell could be woven without filling out the spell release form B1-7G. When they weren’t reminiscing they spent their time in silent contemplation or practising weird experimental stuff that I was happier not knowing about.

‘I’ll show you to your room.’

We walked down the corridor to where the elevators had once been. They had not worked for as long as anyone could remember, and the ornate bronze doors were wedged open, revealing a long drop to the sub-basements below.

‘Shouldn’t we take the stairs?’ asked Tiger.

‘You can if you want. It’s quicker to just shout out loud the floor you want, and hop into the lift shaft.’

Tiger looked doubtful so I said ‘TEN’ and stepped into the void. I fell upwards to the tenth floor and stepped out as soon as the fall was over. I waited for a moment, then peered down the shaft. Far below I could see a small face staring up at me.

‘Remember to shout “TEN”,’ I called down, ‘it’s a lot quicker than the stairs.’

There was a terrified yell as he fell towards me, and this turned into a laugh as he stopped outside the elevator entrance. He struggled for a moment to get out, missed his moment and fell back to the ground floor again with a yell. He didn’t get out there either, and fell back up to the tenth floor, where I grabbed his hand and pulled him in before he spent the afternoon falling backwards and forwards – as I had done when I first got here.

‘That was fun,’ he said, trembling with a mixture of fear and excitement. ‘What if I change my mind halfway?’

‘Then you go to whatever floor you want. It’s falling fast today. Must be the dry air.’

‘How does it work?’

‘It’s a standard Ambiguity enchantment – in this instance, the difference between “up” and “down”. Carpathian Bob left it to us in his will. The last spell of a dying wizard. Powerful stuff. You’ll be in Room 1039. It’s got an echo but, on the plus side, it
is
self-cleaning.’

I opened the door to his room and we walked in. The room was large and light and, like most of Zambini Towers, shabby. The wallpaper was stained and torn, the woodwork warped and unsightly damp patches had appeared on the ceiling. I watched as Tiger’s face relaxed into a smile, and he blinked away the tears. At the convent, he would have been used to sharing a dormitory with fifty other boys. To anyone else, Room 1039 would have been a hovel – to the foundlings of the Sisterhood, it was luxury. I walked across to the window and removed the cardboard covering a broken pane to let in some fresh air.

‘The tenth floor is fully teenager compliant,’ I said, ‘nothing will ever be out of place.’

To demonstrate, I moved the blotter on the desk slightly off kilter, and a second or two later it realigned itself. I then dug a handkerchief from my pocket and threw it on the carpet. As soon as it hit the floor it fluttered off to the top drawer of the bureau like a butterfly, folding itself as it went.

‘Don’t ask me how it works or who cast it, but be warned: enchantments have no intelligence. They follow spell sub-routines without any form of discretion. If you were to fall over in here you’d find yourself tidied away into the wardrobe, as likely as not on a coat hanger.’

‘I’ll be careful.’

‘Wise words. You can use the self-tidying feature, but don’t
overuse
it. Every spell is a drain on the power that runs through the building. If
everyone
were untidy, the speed of magic would slow dramatically. A handkerchief would self-fold in an hour, and the perpetual teapot would run dry. The same is true of the elevator. Play with it for too long and it’ll slow down and stop. I was stuck between floors once when Wizard Moobin was trying out one of his alchemy spells. Think of Zambini Towers as a giant battery of wizidrical power, constantly on trickle charge. If used a lot, it will soon run out. Used sparingly, it can go on all day. Is this room okay?’

‘Do people knock when they want to use the bath?’ he asked, staring into the marble-and-faded-gilt bathroom.

‘Every room has its own bathroom,’ I told him.

He looked at me, astonished that such extravagance not only existed, but would be offered to him.

‘A bed, a window, a bedside light
and
a bathroom?’ he said with a grin, ‘It’s the best room I’ll ever have!’

‘Then I’ll leave you to settle in. Come down to the Avon Suite on the ground floor when you’re ready and I’ll tell you what’s what. Don’t worry if you hear odd noises at night, the floor may be covered with toads from time to time, stay out of the second sub-basement and never,
never
, ask to go to the thirteenth floor. Oh, and you mustn’t look back if ever you pass the Limping Man. See you later.’