Jasper Fforde - The Song of the Quarkbeast

And so she was. Her black crinoline dress was now a charcoal colour, and lightening by the second. Lady Mawgon frowned, looked at her hands and then stared up at me with a wan smile.

‘Blast,’ she said in a resigned tone, and a few moments later she had turned entirely to stone.

‘ Damn ,’ I said.

I’d never seen anyone turned to stone before, and after the initial shock had worn off, I ventured closer. Every single pore of her skin, every wrinkle, every eyelash was perfectly rendered in the finest alabaster I had seen. It felt odd being in such close proximity to Lady Mawgon, even if she was now a four-hundred-pound block of stone, and although getting turned to stone was bad news, it might have been worse. The really serious cases of petrification involved dolorite, marble, or worse, granite.

Moobin laughed as he walked in, closely followed by Tiger.

‘Goodness, the old girl will never live this down. Dibble the Extraordinary lived up to his name – a stoning incantation as a gatekeeper. Well, well, never would have thought of it.’

‘You can change her back?

‘Child’s play. Although to be honest, it is a lot quieter with her like this.’

‘If I draw a moustache on her,’ added Tiger, ‘will she still have it on her when she changes back?’

‘It’s not funny,’ I said, even though I, too, had mixed feelings. ‘I’d be happier to have her back in one piece as soon as possible.’

‘Very well,’ said Moobin, and after taking a deep breath, he drew himself into the ‘hard spelling’ posture, pointed both index fingers at her and let fly.

Nothing happened.

He stood up, relaxed, then tried again.

Still nothing happened.

‘That’s odd,’ he said at last. ‘Did she change to stone quickly?’

‘About ten seconds.’

‘Oh dear. Wait here a moment.’

And he ran out the door.

‘She still looks kind of frightening, doesn’t she?’ said Tiger.

She did, even though her features were not trapped in the more usual Mawgon look of scowling displeasure. Rather she wore the resigned smile she had given when she had realised that the long-dead Dibble had outwitted her.

‘Still,’ said Tiger, ‘it proves what I always thought.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That she does wear roller skates under her dress.’

I looked down, and just peeking out from the soft white folds of her gypsum prison was the shape of a roller-skate wheel pressed against the hem of her dress.

‘Holy cow!’ said Half Price as he walked in, accompanied by Full Price and Wizard Moobin. ‘I’ve never seen her looking so stony before.’

‘She’s certainly stuck between a rock and a hard place,’ added Full Price with a giggle. ‘Did you try the standard Magnaflux Reversal?’

‘I tried it twice,’ said Moobin, ‘not a flicker.’

‘Let me try,’ said Half, and let fly in a similar manner to Moobin, with similar negative results.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Full?’

His brother tried and failed also, and they all suddenly looked a lot more serious, and went into one of those wizidrical discussions where I generally understood one word in eight. After ten minutes of this, they all let fly together, but all that happened was that the room grew hot and clammy, and our clothes let out a size.

‘Did she say anything before she went?’ asked Moobin, doing his belt up a notch.

‘Only that the coils were taking on power,’ I replied, ‘and that the spell was written in RUNIX.’

‘No one writes in RUNIX any more,’ said Full Price. ‘It’s an archaic spell language that was big in the fourth century before we moved over to ARAMAIC. Half, who’s our RUNIX expert?’

‘Aside from Lady Mawgon?’

‘Yes, obviously.’

‘Monty Vanguard always had an interest in old spell languages.’

Moobin told Tiger to fetch Vanguard. He nodded and ran off. The atmosphere, which earlier had all been a bit jokey and silly, was now deathly serious.

‘But the Fundamental Spell Reversibility Rule still applies, yes?’ I asked.

‘Totally,’ agreed Moobin, ‘there’s no spell cast that can’t be unravelled if you know precisely how it was written – it just may take a while to figure out.’

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘If we work lunchtimes, about six to seven years.’

‘Years?’ I echoed in some alarm. ‘The bridge gig starts on Friday. We’ve got less than forty-eight hours!’

‘Life is short, magic is long, Jennifer.’

‘That’s not helpful.’

‘Having a spot of bother?’ asked a dapper white-haired man in impeccable dress and a thin moustache. This was Monty Vanguard, one of our spellers. Long in retirement, he spent his days putting together the thousands of lines of spell necessary to bring medical scanners back online.

Moobin explained the problem at length, and Monty Vanguard smiled.

‘So you young blades have got your fingers burned and need an oldster to help you out, hmm?’

‘Something like that.’

Monty opened the rent in the air just as Mawgon had done, and after donning his glasses, looked around inside the enchantment.

‘I get it,’ he said after a while. ‘Do we have the passthought?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll reset it. Are you sure we want Lady Mawgon back? I mean she’s—’

He didn’t get to finish his sentence as he too was turned to alabaster. But not slowly, like Mawgon, but instantly. It was his bad luck that he had been blinking at the time, and instead of looking elegant and dignified in stone, he had that annoying half-closed-eye look that makes one a bit, well, dopey.

‘Okay,’ said Full Price after a pause, ‘that didn’t turn out so well. What now?’

No one had any suggestions so we stood there for a moment, staring at Monty and Lady Mawgon.

‘Will it harm her?’ I asked. ‘Being stone, I mean?’

‘Not in the least,’ he replied, ‘as long as we keep Lady Mawgon away from a sandblaster and no one borrows part of her to mend the front portico of Hereford cathedral, she’ll not know even one second has passed.’

And that was when an idea struck me. An idea that might explain something that had been confusing me for a while – how the Great Zambini and Mother Zenobia both managed to live beyond the century with only a small level of decrepitude, in Zenobia’s case to well over a hundred and fifty.

‘Can I be excused?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

‘Of course,’ replied Moobin, ‘but let’s keep this top secret. This is something only the five of us need know about.’

‘Six,’ said Tiger, for the Transient Moose had suddenly appeared, and was staring at Lady Mawgon with a detached interest.

‘Six, then. No sense in panicking the residents, hmm?’

I quickly fetched some card and a felt pen from the office and placed a sign outside the entrance of the Palm Court that read: ‘Closed for Redecoration’.

‘What now?’ asked Tiger as we walked through the lobby.

‘We’re going to visit Mother Zenobia.’

He gave a shudder.

‘Do I have to come?’

‘Yes.’

‘She frightens me.’

‘She frightens me, too. Think of it as character-building. Go and find your tie, polish your shoes and fetch the Youthful Perkins. The convent is in the same direction as the castle. We’ll take him to his Magic Licence Application afterwards. I’ll meet you both outside in ten minutes.’

I kept my Volkswagen in the garages beneath Zambini Towers, where it shared a dusty existence with several dilapidated Rolls-Royces and a Bugatti or two, remnants of when the retired sorcerers had money and power. Aside from the Dragonslayermobile, [20] An armoured Rolls-Royce covered in copper spikes that was used by Jennifer when she was the Last Dragonslayer. which was also kept here, mine was the only working car, and since the Kingdom of Snodd granted driving licences not by age but by who was mature enough to be put in charge of half a ton of speeding metal, no male under twenty-six or wizard ever possessed a driving licence. Because of this I was compelled to add ‘taxi service’ to my long list of jobs.