Jasper Fforde - The Song of the Quarkbeast

‘Is that Jennifer?’ said Mother Zenobia as we were shown into her office. ‘I can smell early Volkswagen upon you. A mix of burned oil, hot mud and six-volt electrics.’

‘It is, ma’am.’

‘And those footsteps behind you. Guarded and impertinent – yet full of inner strength to be fully realised. Master Prawns?’

‘Your servant, ma’am,’ said Tiger.

Mother Zenobia was not only old but completely blind, and had been since before most people on the planet had been born. She was sitting in an armchair in front of a fire, her gnarled fingers resting on the top of her cane, and her face so suffused with wrinkles that lost infant tortoises often followed her home. She clapped her hands and a novice entered, took orders for tea or cocoa, bobbed politely and then left again.

‘So,’ said Mother Zenobia after offering us a seat each, ‘is this a social visit, or business?’

‘Both,’ I said, ‘and please excuse my impertinence, Mother Zenobia, but our conversation must be strictly in confidence.’

‘May my ears be infested by the floon beetle if I murmur so much as a word, Jennifer. Now, what’s up?’

‘Lady Mawgon got herself changed to stone.’

A smile crossed Mother Zenobia’s features.

‘Silly Daphne. What was she trying to do?’

I explained about the storage coils, and what had transpired.

‘Not like Mawgon to get caught out by a gatekeeper,’ murmured Mother Zenobia when I had finished. ‘How is this to do with me? My sorcery days are long over.’

She held up her hands as if we needed proof. They were twisted with arthritis, her valuable index fingers bent and, for a sorcerer, almost useless.

I chose my words carefully. Moobin had said earlier that getting changed to stone was effectively suspended animation.

‘I thought perhaps great age in sorcerers might be less to do with spelling away old age than simply pressing the pause button.’

‘You are a highly perceptive young lady,’ replied Zenobia at length. ‘I do indeed change to stone every night in order to delay death’s cold embrace. Eight hours’ sleep over an eight-year lifetime is about twenty-six years,’ She continued. ‘Wasted time if you ask me, except for dreaming, which I miss. I’ve been rock during the winter months for the past seventy-six years as well, and when my last fortnight beckons I will be with you for an hour a year. I may last another century at this rate.’

She thought for moment.

‘Self-induced petrification has its drawbacks, though. Changing to limestone at night is no problem, but returning to life in the morning leaves minute traces of calcite in the fine capillaries of the retina.’

Tiger and I looked at one another. The secret of Mother Zenobia’s longevity was no more.

‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ she added. ‘It’s all strictly prohibited by the Codex Magicalis under “enchantment abuse”.’

‘Your secret is safe with us,’ I assured her. ‘So this is how the Great Zambini looks seventy when he is actually one hundred and twelve?’

‘Indeed,’ replied Mother Zenobia as the novice returned with the tea and cocoa, bobbed politely and then went out again, ‘but he could do it better than me. He turns to dolorite and thus has none of the sight difficulties I have with limestone. The really class acts turn themselves to granite, which has no side effects at all.’

‘The Mighty Shandar,’ I breathed, suddenly realising that he too must change himself to stone on a regular basis. ‘That would explain how he has lived for almost five centuries.’

‘Right again,’ said Zenobia. ‘It is said that his dynastic family of agents have instructions only to wake him for the best jobs. They say that the Mighty Shandar won’t get out of black granite for less than eight dray-weights of gold a day, and that he has not lived longer than a minute since 1783, the year he finished the Channel Tunnel.’

‘He could live almost for ever,’ I observed.

‘In theory you might,’ said Mother Zenobia. ‘Using petrification to suspend animation indefinitely is less dependent on the spell, and more a case of not letting things drop off. Pity those wizards from Ancient Greece missing either their arms, legs or heads. Come out of a two-millennium sleep missing an arm and you’d bleed to death within five minutes. Still,’ she carried on, ‘most of them would have been enchanted in RUNIX, and you’d not know how to get them back out anyway.’

‘Which brings me back to why we are here,’ I said. ‘The gatekeeper of which Lady Mawgon fell foul was written in RUNIX, and we wanted to know how you might reverse that, given your expertise in these matters.’

‘My spell is written in ARAMAIC-128,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘which allows for perfectly timed depetrification. You need to find someone who is expert in RUNIX. What about the Great Zambini?’

This suggestion offered at least a possibility. I told Mother Zenobia about Zambini’s possible appearance the next day, and she nodded sagely.

‘I hope it works out. Bored now. Go away. Drink your cocoa.’

So we did, and drank a little more quickly than was good for us, and it made our eyes water. We left Mother Zenobia soon after, and with our semi-burned tongues, walked back towards the car. I now knew how Zenobia, Shandar and Zambini had lived for so long, but it didn’t really help us.

‘We really need to find the Great Zambini this time,’ I said.

‘Is it likely?’ asked Tiger, who had been on several Zambini searches, and knew the pitfalls.

‘If past attempts are anything to go by we have two chances: fat and thin.’

We walked outside and found Perkins peacefully asleep on the back seat, the paintwork of the beetle slowly turning from blue to green to black and then back to blue again. He was ready.

We partly retraced our route back towards Hereford, but instead of going straight ahead by the grave of the unknown tattooist at Dorstonville, we took the four-lane processional avenue that led towards the King’s modest eight-storey palace at Snodhill. The castle covered an area of six square acres, with many of the Kingdom’s administrative departments scattered among its two hundred or so rooms. A roof of purple slate topped the stone building, and the eighteen towers were capped with conical towers, each home to a long pennant that fluttered elegantly in the breeze.

After making our way through three sets of drawbridges, each with their own peculiar brand of pointless and overlong security procedures, we eventually made it to the Inner Bailey, where we parked the car outside the Interior Ministry. I told Tiger to wait for us there, and I walked us to the correct desk, as I came in here quite a lot, usually to submit the endless forms and paperwork that bedevilled modern sorcery.

‘Hello, Miss Strange,’ said the receptionist, ‘here to submit more paperwork?’

‘Magic licence,’ I replied, nodding towards Perkins. ‘We have an appointment to see the King’s Useless Brother.’

She stared at us both over her spectacles for a moment, consulted the diary and then pointed us towards the uncomfortable bench to wait. The one with cushions was reserved for those of higher birth, and was today crammed with bewigged aristocracy, who, by their refusal to sit on the citizens’ bench, made themselves trebly uncomfortable.

Perkins and I talked through the application process. I was more nervous than I thought I’d be, probably because we were one sorcerer down for the foreseeable future, and Perkins was going to have to prove himself pretty fast if we still wanted to do the bridge gig on Friday.

‘How do you think I’m going to do?’ he asked.