Jasper Fforde - The Song of the Quarkbeast

The moolah is the unit of currency in the Kingdom of Snodd. One hundred Herefordian washers = 1 moolah, which is roughly equivalent to the spondoolip, at 2007 exchange rates.

The technical term is a Canis mnemonicus , or ‘mnemonic hound’. The ability of dogs to find things has a long tradition, and was exploited quite early on by sorcerers.

The correct term for this is ‘sarcoluminescence’ and it efficiently converts emotion to power, one of the central pillars of magic. It is one of the first spells to be taught to trainees.

Conch: the shell of a sea snail that lends itself well to medium-range communication. Giant clams have been used (and still are) for transcontinental message transmission. Toddlers’ shoes have a range of about sixty yards, but are a lot lighter to carry than conches, and not as delicate.

Since carpets cover the whole floor and rugs only a part of it, a ‘flying carpet’ is misnamed. Translated from the Persian – from where all flying rugs originate – as a ‘flying carpet’ in the seventeenth century, the term has become so entrenched that common usage has them now as carpets. A carpeteer is correctly called a Rugeteer, or, if you’re French, a Tapisigator.

The first slogan they used was: ‘Boss-eyed? You need Vision Boss!’ but it was not well received, and hastily withdrawn.

Sister Yolanda’s strike rate was the best ever at an astonishing 92 per cent. But then she only made two hundred and twenty-five in her sixty-seven years, which may explain it. Most precogs spew them out by the dozen, daily.

Constuff is a contraction of ‘Consolidated Useful Stuff PLC’, the Ununited Kingdom’s leading purveyor of cheap and shoddy goods. They are so large they actually own a country – Constuffia – which is full of factories where poorly paid labourers toil ceaselessly in order to make the unUK the leading exporter of cheap and shoddy goods. A recent initiative to throw the goods straight into landfill and avoid costly transportation costs has been enthusiastically embraced.

Despite being of royal stock, the prince insisted he be treated as a civilian. We liked him a lot for it.

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.

A thousand MegaShandars is equal to one GigaShandar, and a thousand GigaShandars is one TeraShandar; 28.2 TeraShandars is the estimated total wizidrical power discharged throughout the history of magic – the equivalent of taking Hereford’s cathedral to the moon and back, and still having enough left over to take it around the earth ten times.

Very like a password, but infinitely more complex. To share a passthought you really need to have witnessed the event or emotion the passthought was based on.

An armoured Rolls-Royce covered in copper spikes that was used by Jennifer when she was the Last Dragonslayer.

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.

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.

A mixture of levitation and juggling. Although not of any huge practical use, it is a measure of a practitioner’s skill. To levitate one or ten objects is easy; to make them all do different things when in the air takes considerable power and concentration. The Mighty Shandar could reputedly also do Blix’s trick but with bison. Remarkable to behold, but what the bison thought about it was not recorded. Owing to constraints within the ARAMAIC-128 notation required in the enchantment, thirty-two objects is the maximum anyone can work with.

Colin is the smaller of the two if you ever meet. At the time of the events surrounding the bridge gig they were spending a fortnight in Washington, DC, reading the entire literary output of mankind at the Library of Congress, in order to better understand the species. They thought it ‘in general a charming read, but tending towards monotony’. This is the principal reason they do not feature in this story.

It’s the stone at the top of an arch that holds it all together. Oddly enough, an arch is held up by the very force that should make it collapse – gravity.

Arboretum: it’s a sort of tree garden. Putting the trees in alphabetical order is quite pointless. A better use of his money would be supporting the Troll War widows’ fund.

Put simply, it means demagnetising , a problem to which the Mysterious X is prone given his strange, semi-charged particle existence. A good degaussing for X is like delousing for a dog – they don’t like it much, but it’s good for them in the long run.

Lucy ‘The Honourable’ Mandrake, 1642–1734 was one of the ‘Four greats,’ and it is thanks to her work on MSEPs that magicians are able to make something appear to be alive. Up until this point, wizards could only create inanimate objects. Mandrake’s unveiling of her groundbreaking Protocols at the 1732 World Magic Expo came with a demonstration of a shower of toads, each one of them apparently alive, but not. The ‘Shower of Toads’ spell is still regarded as a watershed of wizidrical knowledge and understanding – and despite its utter pointlessness, often copied.

Unusual and realistic cloud shapes were the usual method by which bursts of wizidrical energy could be detected. The cloud shape above the experimental forty-megaton wizidrical detonations in the Cambrian Empire was a staggeringly realistic rendition of an Amanita phalloides , coincidentally one of the major ingredients of the potion that built the device.

Despite the grand title, the mid-Wales-located Cambrian Empire is a ramshackle collection of warlords nominally controlled by the Cambrian potentate Tharv the Bountiful. The empire has almost no economy or government, but despite its lawless nature, visitors are shockingly well-treated, and the crime figures of the nation are the lowest in the unUK.

Jennifer must have imagined this; it’s not possible to hear the sonic boom from within the craft making it.

Flying carpet wear is measured in footfall-hours, and it was later calculated that the transonic jump was the equivalent of being walked on continually for eight years in the lobby of a busy hotel.

LZ: landing zone. The Prince served in the Portland Light Rug for six years, and although he rarely mentioned his military service, he often used military terminology. ‘EVAC’ means ‘evacuation’

Fireball – a sort of marker flare that glows deep black in the daylight and bright white at night.