Jasper Fforde - The Song of the Quarkbeast

I thought for a moment.

‘There was an enchanter over in France who experimented with high-end clear-air teleportation. He started from Paris and reappeared two and a half thousand feet over Toulouse.’

‘That must have been unexpected.’

‘On the contrary, it was planned – but his parachute failed to open and he fell screaming to his death in a very undignified manner. The power of magic began to wane soon after, and no one tried it again.’

‘Isn’t that greater than Zambini’s record?’

‘It’s not official if you don’t survive it.’

‘I can recommend hayricks for soft landings,’ Tiger replied thoughtfully. ‘Sorcery isn’t really straightforward at all, is it?’

Tiger had been with Kazam only two months, and he was still trying to get his head around the limiting practicalities of magic. Most people thought you just wave your hands and sim-sallah-bim, but it was a lot more complex than that. Sorcery was not so much doing what you wanted to do, but doing what you could do – or ingeniously finding a way around the physical limitations of the craft.

The tape measure continued to pay out, and when it had reached the correct distance I called out and Moobin stopped.

‘Okay, here we go, then,’ came Moobin’s confident voice from the other end of the corridor. ‘Seventy feet and through a three-millimetre sheet of plywood.’

I nodded to Tiger, who had lifted the cover from one of the many ‘Magiclysm’ alarms dotted about the building. In the event that Moobin’s spell went squiffy, Tiger would press the red button and the sprinklers would trip, spraying water over the interior of the building and quenching any spells. Wednesday morning was traditionally the spell test day, and many of the residents wore gumboots and raincoats indoors on that day, just in case.

We waited in silence. Magic was odd stuff, and the powers of sorcery are more often found in those who can obsess to a degree that would be considered faintly undesirable in society. You had to focus every synapse in your mind to the exclusion of everything else and fire the magic out of your index fingers. That’s why observers remained quiet when spelling was afoot. Break the concentration and whoever was casting the spell would have to start again. It’s like interrupting poetry. It just isn’t done.

We heard a few grunts from the darkness beyond the sheet of ply, then a pause while nothing happened. There was another pause, more grunts, and then nothing happened again. It was just when nothing was about to happen for the third time that there was a faint ‘pop’ from the other end of the corridor as the air rushed in to fill the hole in the air where Moobin wasn’t, and a half-second later he reappeared in front of us, the air he had displaced hitting us a moment later as a faintly discernible shock-wave.

‘Ta-da!’ said Moobin, staring at his feet where he had appeared, directly above the white cross. ‘Seventy feet, and through a sheet of three-millimetre plywood. Tomorrow I’ll try six-millimetre ply, then chipboard.’

‘Impressive. I’ll mark it up in the records ledger tonight.’

‘It’s also a new personal best,’ continued Moobin excitedly, ‘and if those heathen scum over at iMagic aren’t also doing teleport work, it makes me the best teleporter on the planet. Why are you both staring at me?’

‘You look like you’ve been glazed,’ I said, putting out a hand to touch him, ‘like a doughnut.’

Just then, the separate sheets of thin wood veneer that made up the plywood fell neatly into three thin and very flappy pieces.

‘Oh dear,’ said Moobin, ‘I appear to have picked up the glue from the plywood as I passed through. How did that happen?’

He wasn’t asking any of us, of course, he was simply confused. But that was what research and development was like. Full of semi-triumphs and perplexing unforeseen consequences, such as the whole violent hiccuping thing when conjuring up fire – or the propensity for fillings to fall out of bystanders’ mouths when attempting to tease a rainstorm out of a cloud.

‘The Transient Moose can teleport almost without thinking,’ muttered Moobin, faintly annoyed, ‘ and go around corners.’

‘But he’s a spell himself,’ observed Tiger helpfully, ‘and presumably has zero mass, so it must be easier.’

‘Probably,’ replied Moobin gloomily. ‘I wish he’d let me have a closer look.’

The Wizard Moobin had recently become fascinated by the Transient Moose, and had fired a few spell-probes into it to discover just what particular enchantment was keeping it going. The probes had learned little except that the original sorcerer was possibly Greek and the Moose was most likely running Mandrake Sentience Emulation Protocols, [17] A Mandrake Sentience Emulation Protocol is a clever piece of spelling that gives the appearance of life without something actually being alive – ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties all use Mandrake, and if woven well, they are very lifelike. which didn’t help, as nearly all spells that made something appear lifelike were run under Mandrake.

It wasn’t just curiosity. The Mystical Arts were arcane, secretive and, once a specific spell was discovered, rarely shared. Ancient wizards went to their graves with the really groovy stuff still locked inside their heads. Some wrote it down in big leather-bound books, but most didn’t. It would be very valuable indeed to find out not only how the Moose managed to live so long and teleport so effortlessly, but how it could do it on an average crackle consumption of only 172.8 Shandars a day.

‘I’m going to have a shower,’ said Moobin, ‘so long as someone hasn’t already swiped the hot water.’

‘Oops,’ said Tiger.

‘What, again?’ asked Moobin.

‘I was covered in mud.’

‘Have you been thinking about the bridge gig?’ I asked, changing the subject. I had yet to see a detailed plan or risk assessment.

‘I’m working on it,’ Moobin said, ‘although with the Dibble Coils stuck on standby we’ll need all of us if we’re to do it in a day.’

‘Lady Mawgon is going to try to get them back online this morning.’

‘The old bat’s going to try and hack the Dibble?’ replied Moobin with a smile. ‘Rather her than me.’

He nodded his head thoughtfully. Hacking into a well-cast spell was not for the faint-hearted. Wizards guarded their work jealously, and would often leave traps for busybodies attempting to copy their work. We watched as Moobin went back into his room, mumbling to himself as his feet made sticky footprints on the oak flooring.

‘Right, then,’ I said, checking my watch, ‘time to see Lady Mawgon – don’t mention the fact we took no payment for the finding gig.’

‘What in heck are Dibble Storage Coils?’ asked Tiger as we made our way back downstairs. He still had a good decade’s worth of learning to do, and only two years in which to do it. I had to teach him most of it, and some of the stuff I needed to impart I hadn’t even learned myself.

‘It’s a spell designed by Charles Dibble the Extraordinary,’ I explained. ‘In the days when wizidrical power was falling, the Great Zambini looked at several ways to store what crackle there was. Dibble the Extraordinary wasn’t so much a practising sorcerer, but one who wrote spells for those who were. He wrote the entire mobile phone network incantation for ElectroMagic, Inc. back in the forties and then committed his energies to wizidrical storage devices. He was long retired when Zambini had him build the coils. Simply put, they transform the building into something akin to a huge rechargeable battery.’