Jasper Fforde - The Song of the Quarkbeast

And after shaking my hand, he left.

I wasn’t alone for long. The Prince dropped by with his day’s schedule, and I could see he wasn’t happy.

‘Pizza deliveries again ?’ he said in exasperation. ‘When do we do some proper carpeteering?’

‘Maybe sooner than you think,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got a task for you.’

His Royal Highness Prince Omar Smith Arkwright Ben Nasil was one of our carpeteers, which might have been a noble and exciting profession were it not for an incident one wintry night when Brother Velobius and his two passengers died when their Turkmen Mk18C ‘Bukhara’ broke up in mid-air owing to rug fatigue. For safety reasons, the Civil Aviation Authority had introduced strict rules that made it almost impossible to make magic carpet flight profitable. Limited top speed, navigation lights – and worst of all, a ban on passengers. All we could do were deliveries.

‘Here’s the thing,’ I said. ‘Kevin has foretold the Great Zambini returning tomorrow afternoon at 16.03 and fourteen seconds.’

‘Let me guess,’ said the Prince, ‘Kevin knows when but not where?’

‘That’s about the size of it. We need Zambini back, Nasil, [16] Despite being of royal stock, the prince insisted he be treated as a civilian. We liked him a lot for it. so stick to Zipp like a limpet. If he has a vision about where Zambini might show up, I want you to come and find me immediately.’

He said he wouldn’t fail me, made some comment about needing to take his carpet off the flightline next month for some remedial patchwork, and we said goodbye.

‘Is he really a prince?’ asked Tiger, who had just returned.

‘Second in line to the Duchy of Portland,’ I told him. ‘What’s the deal with Moobin?’

‘He said come up any time. He said you’d be impressed.’

This worried me as Moobin liked a challenge, and was quite used to risking life and limb on weird experimental stuff that he described as ‘important, cutting-edge stuff’ but we saw more as ‘just being a nuisance’.

‘Let’s do it.’ I sighed. ‘It’s not like things could get more weird this morning.’

We walked towards the elevators.

‘I hope he doesn’t blow himself up again,’ I said.

‘Or make himself attractive to badgers,’ added Tiger, reminding us of the time Zambini Towers had been inundated with winsome, lovelorn black-and-white mustelids when a badger-repellent spell had gone badly wrong. Explosions and badger attraction aside, Moobin was easily our favourite sorcerer as he was probably the most normal. He was in his mid-forties but looked a lot younger, and although more powerful than Mawgon, lacked precise control and often surged – the word for a sudden burst of wizidrical energy just when you didn’t want it. Just before the Big Magic he had nearly blown us all to pieces when he turned lead into gold, then blew up another laboratory while trying to invent a spell that reversed the effects of laboratories blowing up.

We took the elevator to the third floor, which involved simply saying the floor number and then stepping into the empty lift shaft. You fell to the floor you had requested and had to step smartly out before you fell back down again. Unskilled users had been known to get stuck for some time oscillating back and forth – on one occasion, for three days.

We found Moobin in his room, which was actually three rooms knocked into one. He used it for sleeping and tinkering, which explained the vast amount of apparatus lying about, none of which I understood, but all of which looked dangerously complicated, and hastily mended.

‘Jennifer!’ he remarked excitedly when he saw me. ‘How did the finding job go this morning?’

‘It depends on your viewpoint. Did you hear that the Amazing Blix is attempting to accolade himself “the All Powerful”?’

Moobin laughed.

‘His arrogance will be his undoing. Right, then,’ he continued, clapping his hands together, ‘to work. What’s the Holy Grail of the Mystical Arts?’

I never saw him so excited as when he was experimenting, and excitement made his wild hair look wilder, and his unkempt manner of dress that much more shabby. He looked less like a person, in fact, and more like an unmade bed with arms and legs.

‘Invisibility?’ I asked incredulously, for not even the Mighty Shandar had ever achieved that. As far as we knew, no one had, although entire lives had been spent in the attempt.

‘Okay,’ said Moobin, ‘what’s the slightly-less-than-Holy Grail?’

‘Moving cathedrals?’ suggested Tiger.

‘Levitation,’ sniffed Moobin, ‘nothing more.’

‘Flying without a carpet or aeroplane under you?’ I asked.

‘Okay, even- slightly -less-than-Holy Grail?’

‘Teleportation?’ I said.

‘ Exactly !’ replied Moobin excitedly. ‘The physical shifting from one place to another more or less simultaneously. The current record stands at eighty-five miles.’

‘The Great Zambini in his youth,’ I said to Tiger, ‘over sixty years ago.’

‘My personal best,’ announced Moobin grandly, ‘is thirty-eight feet, and I’m going to try and increase that to . . . seventy.’

‘I see,’ I said, wondering what could possibly go wrong, and thinking of eight possibilities almost immediately, which ranged from the destruction of two city blocks, through several stages of varying destructiveness to nothing more innocuous than liquifying the earwax of those in the immediate vicinity – the usual knock-on effect of a teleportation. In fact, the purpose of the original enchantment had been precisely that – ear cleaning. Spooky instantaneous transportation was simply found to be a fortuitously useful side effect. The wizard who wrote the original spell in 1698 had been beta-testing it as ‘An Improved & Much Sanitary Method of Ear Cleansing’ when he found himself inexplicably on the street outside. Much research followed and the range and accuracy greatly increased, but the earwax issue had remained. You could always hear better at the end of a jaunt than at the beginning.

‘Not only will I teleport seventy feet,’ continued Moobin dramatically, ‘but I will also travel through a sheet of three-millimetre plywood on the way.’

Tiger and I looked at one another doubtfully. Moobin’s last attempt to pass through solid objects had ended with a broken nose and a bruised knee.

‘I’ve been working with silk, paper and cardboard,’ he said, in an attempt to reassure us as he led us into the corridor outside, ‘and it’s time to move on up.’

‘And you’re no longer leaving your clothes behind?’ I asked, referring to an earlier and mildly embarrassing episode.

‘Not at all,’ said Moobin, who hadn’t been the one embarrassed, ‘I had been eating nougat earlier – I should have known better.’

Owing to its status as a former hotel, Zambini Towers was not short on long corridors, and in the one outside his room, Moobin had hung a large sheet of plywood from a light fixture. He drew a cross on the floor about two yards in front of the ply, handed Tiger a pocket Shandometer to measure peak wizidrical output, then gave me a tape measure to hold.

‘Call out when I get to seventy feet, will you?’

And he walked off past the sheet of ply and into the darkness while I watched the tape pay out.

‘Can’t he teleport around the ply?’ asked Tiger.

‘Curved teleporting is not possible.’ I told him. ‘Magic’s effect only works in straight lines. A teleportation around a corner means taking the shortest route through whatever the corner is made of. Passing through the rock and soil of the planet on a straight-line journey through the earth from here to Singapore takes a lot of wizidrical energy – it makes carpet travel a lot more crackle-efficient than transcontinental teleportation.’