The Song of the Quarkbeast: Last Dragonslayer: Book Two (17 page)

‘Of course.’

I suddenly had an idea.

‘They use magic to copy themselves, don’t they?’

‘You learn fast,’ she replied. ‘They do, but since they require a whopping 1.2 GigaShandars for a successful separation they can’t do it alone. They need a sorcerer of considerable power to channel the energy. They can store power, too, just like fireflies – only unlike fireflies, which transmit it out as light immediately, Quarks can store it for a day or two.’

‘Patrick surged yesterday. There was a Quarkbeast close by.’

‘Pat’s a sweet man, but he doesn’t have the skill to channel that amount of power. Since Zambini vanished, no one has. Quark division is unlikely, but if it happens, we have plans in hand. See that vehicle over there?’

She pointed to a riveted titanium box about the size of small garden shed that was mounted on the back of a rusty E-type Jaguar fitted with blue lights and sirens.

‘Yes?’

‘Quarkbeasts have to be separated within a thousand seconds of dividing or they may merge again with devastating results,’ said Boo. ‘I’m the Kingdom’s Beastcatcher, so I have full emergency vehicle status. If you think a pair are about to conjoin, call 999 and yell “Quarkbeast” in a panicked, half-strangled cry of terror. They’ll put you straight through.’

I took a deep breath. It was now or never. I looked behind me to make sure there were no sharp objects close by.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Boo.

‘I’m going to ask you something, and you’re going to punch me in the eye, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t hurt myself on the way down.’

She glared at me with her inky-black eyes, and a coldness suddenly washed around me as though someone had opened a tomb. I closed my eyes.

‘I need help,’ I said. ‘Magic is in dire straits.’

I winced, expecting the blow to fall, but it didn’t. After a few seconds I opened my eyes to find that Once Magnificent Boo had walked away and was dropping a truck gearbox into the beasts’ compound, where they would gnaw off the soft aluminium casing and use the harder cogs for nesting.

‘Magic is
always
in dire straits,’ said Boo, ‘it’s the nature of magic. But that part of my life has finished. I can do nothing for you. I haven’t cast a single spell since the anti-magic extremists dumped me in that roadside rest area thirty-three years ago.’

‘But Blix wants to control Kazam and commercialise magic,’ I pleaded. ‘We can’t let it happen.’

She took several steps closer in a menacing fashion and I backed away until I had my back pressed against a water butt. She looked at me with her empty eyes and spoke in a low voice that seemed to reverberate inside my head.

‘And who’s better qualified to decide what’s best for Magic? Blix or Zambini?’

‘Zambini.’

‘Are you sure? The right way, the wrong way – it’s all regulation. Maybe magic shouldn’t be regulated at all. Maybe it should take its own path, like the Quarkbeast, unfettered by our meddling. Perhaps magic needs to be used for evil before it can take the right course for good, and if so, Zambini’s need to control it is as damaging as Blix’s. The only thing that separates the pair of them is their viewpoint and dress sense.’

This was true; Zambini was a shabby dresser, and Blix was always well turned out.

‘With respect, you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘Zambini’s nothing like Blix. He’s kind and good and honest and—’

‘Missing?’

‘Okay, yes, but Blix is no friend to the right and true direction of magic, and I need help to defeat him.’

She took another step towards me and was now so close that I could feel her breath on my face and see every detail of her face. From the fine capillaries in her eyes to the broken blood vessels on the side of her nose. Her eyes were very black – it looked as if she had just massive pupils and no iris at all.

‘I can’t help you. I can’t help
anyone
any more.’

‘Is there nothing I can do or say to persuade you to help us?’

‘
Nothing
.’

The Once Magnificent Boo turned back to the Quarkbeasts and continued to feed them, so I thanked her, said goodbye and returned to my car.

I drove back into town in a despondent mood. I was disappointed but not surprised that Boo had rejected my request, and with it had ended any realistic hope of winning the contest. I would have to think very carefully about either taking Blix’s offer to concede the contest, or come up with another plan, and quickly.

And that was when a large black Daimler 4x4 with tinted windows pulled in front of me. I stamped heavily on the brakes and skidded to a halt.

The High North Tower

I slammed the Volkswagen into reverse as another Daimler screeched to a halt behind me. I opened the car door and tried to jump out, but in my hurry I’d forgotten to unlatch my seat belt, and was still struggling to extricate myself when four huge bodyguards dragged me out of the car, put a hood over my head and cuffs on my wrists and threw me into the back of their car.

‘Don’t hurt me,’ I said from the floor as the car sped off.

‘Then be a good girl and don’t struggle,’ came a patronising voice.

‘It’s not for my benefit,’ I told them, ‘it’s for yours. If I lose my temper, those of you still conscious in five minutes will be picking up the teeth of those who aren’t.’

There was a pause and I was then picked up and placed on a seat.

‘Comfy?’ came the same voice, this time tinged with a little more respect. It seemed they had been briefed not to underestimate me.

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Cuffs not too tight?’

‘No, they’re fine.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, really,’ I said in a sweet voice, just to unnerve him, ‘you’re most kind.’

The journey was not long, and from the sounds of creaking drawbridges and tyres on cobbles it didn’t take a genius to figure out where I was being taken. After a short time the car stopped and I was carried bodily up a long flight of steps. I was then laid on a soft bed and heard some hurried footsteps, a door slam, a lock turn, and then hurried steps down a stone staircase followed by another door, another lock turning, and then the whole thing repeated itself until I could no longer hear them.

After a few seconds my bonds and hood melted away into nothing. Proof, if any were needed, of Blix’s involvement.

As expected, I was in the High North Tower of the King’s castle at Snodd Hill. It was comfortable if a bit austere in the ‘medieval dreary chic’ style, similar to the Useless Brother’s office, and the large pile of provisions and bottled water clearly meant that I was to be here for some time – or at the very least, until after the contest. I tried the door to find it firmly locked, then looked out of the window. The High North Tower had been well if unimaginatively named, being a tower, to the north and, most pertinent to me, high. The room was circular and barely twenty feet across, and it sat precariously atop a long and mildly off-kilter column of crumbling stonework.

I wasn’t going to escape from here without a lot of help.

After a wait of almost two hours, the phone rang.

‘Pinocchio’s Pizzas?’ I replied, picking it up.

‘Oh, sorry, wrong number,’ came Blix’s voice before the phone went dead.

I smiled to myself as I replaced the receiver, then waited a couple of seconds before it rang again.

‘Hello, Blix,’ I said before he could say anything, ‘adding kidnapping to your long list of felonies?’

‘We prefer to think of it as “holidaying at the specific invitation of His Majesty”,’ replied Blix. ‘Open the top drawer of the bureau.’

I did so, and found an agreement for Kazam to concede the competition, and all the details that Blix had already outlined. The document had been prepared by a firm of solicitors in Financia and lodged with the Ununited Kingdoms’ Supreme Court, so even if King Snodd had wanted to rescind the deal, he couldn’t.

‘It’s all there,’ said Blix. ‘I knew my or the King’s word would not be good enough, so I made it official. Sign it and your holiday in the North Tower is over.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Then you’ll stay there until six Mondays from now, and we’ll have Kazam for nothing.’

‘Blix?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you in the castle watching the top of the North Tower at the moment?’

‘I might be.’

I ripped the phone from the wall, and tossed it out of the open window. It took almost five seconds to hit the ground.

I went and sat on the bed, glad of a quiet time to think. Oddly enough, the one thing that gave me any confidence that we’d win the contest was the fact that Blix was still nervous enough to want to do deals. I went over the events of the past few days as I attempted to find something I had missed that might help us. The answer
had
to be there.

I was stirred from my thoughts by the wail of an air-raid siren and the unmistakable
crack
of an artillery piece close by. I looked out of the window as the massed anti-aircraft defences of Snodd Hill Castle opened up as one, a cacophony of noise so loud I had to put my hands over my ears, and with the shells bursting so close that I could hear the shrapnel striking the tower. One piece of red-hot steel flew in the window and landed on the bed, where it began to smoulder; I used my handkerchief to pick it up and dumped it in the sink.

I ventured another look out and amid the din, smell of cordite and black bursts of flak that were drifting past my window, I saw something shoot past, the flak-bursts following it. The notion of the Kingdom being under attack was unlikely as the king currently had no enemies interested enough to attack him, and it was only when my name was called that I realised what was going on.

‘Jenny!’ came Prince Nasil’s familiar voice, as he whipped past on his carpet. ‘Can’t stop!’ he added as he went back past in the opposite direction, then yelled ‘Jump!’ as he tore past the third time, with two anti-aircraft shells exploding so close the tower shook and plaster fell from the ceiling.

I needed no further bidding. I shoved Blix’s concession agreement into my bag, waited until the Prince turned to make another pass, and then jumped out of the window.

I’d never fallen from a high tower before and would not hope to do so again, but after the initial sense of fear and rapid acceleration, the only thing I could feel was the air rushing past me. I could see the top of the tower move swiftly away from me as I fell, and didn’t see the Prince at all until he gently scooped me out of the air. With a flick of the carpet we were out of the range of the artillery, which stopped as quickly as it had begun.

‘Thanks for the rescue,’ I said, ‘but it might have been easier and safer to extract me at night.’

‘At night?’ echoed the Prince. ‘If we’d left it until then there would be no chance of seeing Zambini.’

The penny dropped.

‘Kevin knows where the Great Zambini is going to reappear?’

‘Not
precisely
– but close enough. Somewhere near the Troll Wall.’

My heart fell.

‘The Troll Wall is almost fifty miles long!’

‘If we head up there now, we can home in when Kevin has a more accurate fix.’

This was undoubtedly true, as Kevin’s predictions of Zambini’s return had been uncannily accurate – just too late to be of any real use. I looked at my watch. We had less than an hour to go before Zambini was due back.

‘We’ll never make it,’ I said as we flew through the ballroom windows and slid to a halt on the shiny floor.

‘We have a plan,’ said the Prince, and I looked up. Perkins, Owen of Rhayder, Kevin Zipp and Tiger were all staring at me.

‘I’m all ears,’ I said as Tiger handed me two jumpers, some thermal leggings, a heavy leather flying jacket and then a flying helmet.

‘It’s a straight-line flight of two hundred and eighty miles to the Troll Gates at Stirling,’ said Owen, referring to a blackboard upon which a diagram had been hastily drawn, ‘and if we leave in five minutes we have only thirty-two minutes to get there. That’s an average speed requirement of five hundred and twenty-five miles per hour.’

I saw the problem immediately.

‘Even by moving at the carpet’s top design speed of five hundred miles per hour,’ I murmured, ‘we would still be . . . two and a half minutes too late.’

But Owen and the Prince were already ahead of the curve.

‘
Precisely
,’ said the Prince, ‘that’s why we need to push the carpets up to over seven hundred and sixty miles per hour during the flight to give us any hope of getting there in time.’

I looked at them both in turn.

‘You intend to go . . .
supersonic
?’

‘Trust us,’ said Owen with a smile, ‘it’s faintly possible that we know what we’re doing. Get prepared. We’ll be rugging off in two minutes.’

Owen and the Prince went to rewrite a few lines of the carpet’s source spell-code, and I turned back to Tiger and Perkins, who handed me a large pink seashell.

‘You’ll be out of range with a toddler’s shoe so we’re going to conch.’

He held a pair of left- and right-handed conches together for a moment, whispered a spell and then gave one to me.

‘Can you hear me?’ he said, and his voice echoed out of the shell, clear as a bell. In fact, I heard him slightly
before
he spoke, which created an odd reverse echo.

‘How did it go with Once Magnificent Boo?’ asked Tiger.

‘Not well. She’s doesn’t want to help us, and I got the feeling she’d hit me quite hard if I asked why she stopped doing any magic. But it sounded like something pretty unpleasant.’

‘It figures that she knew Zambini and Blix well,’ said Tiger as he showed me a photograph, ‘they were all on the unUK Olympic sorcery team in 1974.’

The photo showed the three of them when much younger, all posing after winning gold for the prestigious ‘400 Meters Turning into a Mouse Relay’ event. Boo was in the middle of the photo and grinning broadly while Blix and Zambini were standing on either side. Unlike Boo’s smile, theirs looked somewhat strained.

‘They were the best of friends,’ said Tiger, ‘and inseparable until Boo was kidnapped. Zambini was away when it happened so Blix negotiated the ransom. Blix and Zambini fell out big time, and have been at each other’s throats ever since. That’s about it.’