Jasper Fforde - The Song of the Quarkbeast

I pulled around to the front of the building, parked the car and turned off the engine. Lady Mawgon’s unfortunate accident dominated my thoughts – especially as this might mean postponing the bridge gig, which I was loath to do – it would make Kazam look weak and useless when we were trying to promote ourselves as strong and confident. Even if Perkins did get his licence, we would still have only five wizards to rebuild the bridge – and we needed six to be sure.

I sighed and gazed absently across the street. Situated on the opposite side of the road was the Quarkbeast memorial, Kazam’s tribute to a loyal friend and ally who gave his life to protect me, and contributed in no small measure to the success of the Big Magic. [21] Without the Quarkbeast there to save Jenny’s life with the sacrifice of his own, it is unlikely there would be any magic at all. I thought about him a lot, and although he often frightened small children and had been known to eat a bunny rabbit or two, he had been a steadfast companion until the end. I frowned. There seemed to be a corner missing out of the oolitic limestone plinth upon which the statue sat. I got out of the car and walked across for a closer look. I was right; something had gnawed a chunk out of the plinth. There was a section of broken tooth stuck in the stone and I tugged until it came free. It was a sharp canine, and was coloured the dull slate grey of tungsten carbide.

‘What have you found?’ asked Tiger, who had also developed an affection for the Quarkbeast, even though he’d known it only a short time. He had often been dragged around the park on the beast’s early morning walks – but in an affectionate, non-malicious, hardly-hurting-you-at-all sort of way.

‘Look,’ I said, dropping the tooth into his palm. ‘It looks like there’s another Quarkbeast in town.’

‘That’ll have the council in a lather – the present Beastcatcher is very pro-Quarkbeast and rarely favours extermination.’

This annoyed the council as they saw the role of the Beastcatcher as very much along the lines of pest control. The previous Beastcatcher had been much more popular, but sadly got himself eaten by a Tralfamosaur who took offence at being poked at with a stick.

‘This beast might not be staying,’ said Tiger, staring at the tooth. ‘Just paying its respects on its way through.’

A Quarkbeast is a small hyena-shaped creature that is covered in leathery scales and often described as: ‘One tenth Labrador, six-tenths velociraptor and three-tenths kitchen food blender.’ I held a special affinity for these creatures. Not just because I owed my life to one, but because they were one of the Ununited Kingdom’s surviving eight species of invented animals, all created by notable wizards in the sixteenth century when enchanted beasts were totally ‘the thing’. The Mighty Shandar created the Quarkbeast for a bet in 1783 and apparently won the wager, as nothing more bizarre has ever been created since. That didn’t stop them being uniquely dangerous, and a Quarkbeast was regarded with a great deal of suspicion by the authorities – hence the issue with the Beastcatcher. An abiding fondness for metal was one of their many peculiar habits, zinc most of all. In fact, the first obvious sign of a Quarkbeast in the neighbourhood was that all the shiny zinc coatings were licked off the dustbins – the beast equivalent of licking the icing off a cake.

I looked around cautiously, hoping to catch a glimpse of the small creature. There was no sign, so I walked back to the car.

‘Do you think the Quarkbeast could have been the pair of yours all the way from Australia?’ asked Tiger, doing up his seat belt.

‘Quarkbeasts come in pairs?’ asked Perkins, who, although quite expert in seeding ideas, was not so hot when it came to magicozoology.

‘They don’t so much breed as replicate ,’ I explained. ‘They divide into two entirely equal and opposite Quarkbeasts. But as soon as they do they have to be separated and sent a long way from each other – the other side of the globe, usually. If a paired positive and negative Quarkbeast meet, they are both annihilated in a flash of pure energy. It was said that Cambrianopolis was half destroyed when a confluence of paired Quarkbeasts came together and exploded with the force of ten thousand tons of Marzex-4. [22] A form of plastic explosive whose principal ingredient is heavily nitrated marzipan mixed with cayenne pepper. Easily shaped, it is manufactured by the Kingdom of Cumbria, which has the largest deposits of natural marzipan in the world. Luckily, Cambrianopolis is such a ruin no one really noticed.’

‘I heard it was an earthquake,’ said Perkins.

‘That’s usually the cover story. We can’t have people panicking like idiots as soon as they see a Quarkbeast. The general population is suspicious enough of magic as it is.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Why do Quarkbeasts search for their twin?’ asked Tiger.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Boredom?’

‘If it’s the pair of your Quarkbeast,’ said Perkins with growing confusion, ‘doesn’t that mean the new Quarkbeast is unlikely to explode?’

‘Exactly. Nothing to fear from this one.’

We drove off in silence, past the cathedral, out of the city walls and headed south into the Golden Valley and past Snodhill Castle with the Dragonlands beyond and down the escarpment to the small town of Clifford. There, on a bend in the river and set about with oak and sweet chestnut, was the place Tiger and I had called home for the first twelve years of our lives. It was as grim as we both remembered it, and Tiger and I glanced at each other as we drew up outside. Perkins took one look at the Sisterhood of the Blessed Lady of the Lobster and announced he would be staying in the car.

‘It’s not that bad,’ said Tiger defensively. ‘The foundlings are rarely made to share blankets these days, and gruel no longer has a consistency thinner than water.’

‘I wonder how they did that?’ I mused, since gruel’s primary ingredient was water. ‘I’ve always wanted to know.’

‘It must be hard to extract the nourishment out of water,’ agreed Tiger, ‘but they managed it somehow.’

‘I’ll leave you both to your trip down memory lane,’ said Perkins, staying resolutely on the back seat and hover-orbiting a pair of snooker balls around each other as a ‘tuning up’ exercise for his Magic Test. ‘I’ll see you guys later.’

We walked across the car park, up to the great doors, past the slot in the door for after-hours foundling deliveries, and into the quadrangle. I felt Tiger clasp my hand.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘no one’s taking you back. We’re owned by Kazam now. Everything’s fine.’

We walked across the quad, where open-air lessons were held in the summer, and from where we used to watch the shells as they were lobbed across the border from King Snodd’s artillery battery in the orchard to the Duke of Brecon’s small duchy across the river. Although an uneasy peace had once more descended between Brecon and Snodd and the guns were now silent, we had driven past a squadron of landships on our way in. The six-storey-high tracked vehicles had no special significance to me, but they did to Tiger, although he didn’t know it – Mother Zenobia had told me Tiger’s parents had been a husband-and-wife engineering team on a landship that vanished during the Fourth Troll Wars. Tiger would have been lost, too, had creche facilities not been removed from the landships in order to make room for extra munitions, so when his parents never returned he ended up on the steps of the orphanage. Mothers and fathers were a tetchy subject to foundlings, which was why he’d not yet been told what happened. The whole abandonment deal could devour you, so we usually left it until we felt we had the maturity to deal with it. My own parents would doubtless be traceable through my Volkswagen as I had been left on the front seat when abandoned, and although I was arguably mature enough to handle it, life was complicated enough.