Jasper Fforde - The Song of the Quarkbeast

‘Do you think Blix will try and sabotage Perkins’ application?’ asked Tiger, rubbing his damp hair with a towel as he walked in.

‘I wouldn’t put it past him. Samantha “Pretty-but-dim” Flynt has failed to get her licence for three years running, and Perkins’ success would really piss them off.’

‘Cadet Flynt couldn’t find her foot without tattooed arrows running down her leg,’ said Tiger, ‘and failed her basic practical skills test. I don’t know why they bother.’

‘Hopeless she might be,’ I said, ‘but she’s dazzlingly pretty and Blix thinks that a physically attractive sorcerer would be good for business.’

‘She’d certainly be unique in that respect,’ remarked Tiger. Sorcerers were not known for their good looks.

‘In any event, we should be on our guard as regards Blix. I wouldn’t trust him farther than Patrick of Ludlow could throw him.’

Patrick, it should be noted, was our ‘Heavy Lifter’. His speciality was moving objects, which was mostly used for removing illegally parked cars for the city’s clamping unit. He had a heart of gold and was as gentle as a lamb, despite his power and odd-looking appearance.

‘I’d like to see Patrick try, though.’

‘Me, too. Hello, Hector.’

I was talking to the Transient Moose, who had suddenly materialised in the office over by the water cooler and was now staring into space and thinking grand Moosian thoughts. The Moose was a practical joke perpetrated by a sorcerer in the long distant past. No one knew what the joke had been, who did it, or even whether it was funny or not. The spell that kept him going was skilfully woven and surprisingly resilient. His joke complete, he had very little to do and most of eternity in which to do it, so he consequently looked painfully bored as he appeared and disappeared randomly about Zambini Towers. Despite my speaking to him on many occasions, he had not replied – and since he was a large North American herbivore, I didn’t really expect him to.

The Transient Moose stared at us both for a moment, gave a doleful sigh and then faded from view.

‘You didn’t give that Phantom Twelve girl the ring, did you?’ asked Tiger.

He knew me quite well by now. Despite being only twelve, he was pretty switched on. Foundlings generally are.

‘No – and I’m sorry you had to risk your neck because of it.’

He shrugged and gave me a smile.

‘It was quite fun, actually. Except the bit where I went down the well – and got shot into the air. Do I tell the others we’re five grand poorer because of you?’

‘Better not.’

I sifted through the mail for anything that looked desperately urgent – bills mainly – and then checked the level of the Background Wizidrical Radiation using a device called a Shandargraph. Unlike the hand-held Shandarmeter which measured local magical energy, the Shandargraph gave one an idea of broad trends of wizidrical energy over time – a bit like measuring atmospheric pressure. You could not only tell when a spell was being cast, but how powerful and where. I looked at the long ribbon of paper that was slowly emerging from the machine and noted that our morning’s misadventure was dutifully recorded – fourteen MegaShandars, six miles away to the east. I could even see where it peaked as Full Price tried to keep the well open. The spells undertaken by iMagic in Stroud were also apparent. Our workloads seemed relatively equal, although I knew for a fact Blix would have the Truly Bizarre Tchango Muttney levitate a truck somewhere on the other side of town and hold it there for twenty minutes to make us think they had more work on than they actually did.

iMagic were troublesome, but not a real threat. With only Blix, Tchango and Dame Corby ‘She Whom the Ants Obey’, iMagic had only three sorcerers to our five. We also had two flying carpeteers [12] 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. and one decent precog, of which they had none. But on the upside, they didn’t have thirty-six barely sane ex-sorcerers to feed, and they also had a secondary income: Dame Corby was the heiress to the Corby Trouser Press empire, and yearly dividends were apparently still robust, despite the invention of drip-dry garments.

I picked up one of the two remaining self-cleaning cups from the draining rack and poured myself tea from the never-ending teapot, then took some milk from the perpetually half-empty enchanted milk bottle in the fridge.

‘Hello, Jennifer,’ said a voice from the sofa, and a very rumpled-looking figure sat up and scratched himself.

‘Good morning, Kevin,’ I said, handing him a cup of tea and a biscuit from the never-ending supply in the biscuit tin. ‘All well?’

Kevin was a lean man whose thirtieth birthday had passed unannounced two decades before. Despite his dishevelled appearance, with tatty clothes that would have been rejected by the most desperate Troll War widow charity shops, he was clean-shaven and his finely cut hair was immaculate. He looked, in fact, like a yuppie in tramp fancy dress.

‘As well as ever,’ he replied with a yawn.

The reason Kevin always slept fully dressed on the sofa when he had a perfectly good bedroom was because he had foreseen that he would die in his bed, and reasoned that if he stayed away from it he wouldn’t die. That might sound daft until you consider that the Remarkable Kevin Zipp was our precognitive, a breed of sorcerer who had turned their attention to shuffling through the millions of potential futures and occasionally picking out a winner. But as with all oracles, his visions could be vague and misleading. The time he foresaw ‘killer aliens from Mars’, it actually turned out to be about ‘millers named Alan in cars’, which isn’t the same thing at all. And when he predicted the ‘reign of a matron named Grace’ we actually got a ‘rain of meteors from space’. Despite this, his strike rate was a respectable 73 per cent, and since the Big Magic, improving still.

‘Anything for us?’ I asked, as quite often Kevin had dazzling visions that he never told anyone about as he couldn’t see their relevance.

‘A few,’ he replied, taking a sip of tea. ‘Something about Vision Boss, and the price of elevators is set to fall.’

‘Fall?’

‘Or rise. One of the two. Perhaps both.’

‘Vision Boss?’ I asked, fetching the Visions Book, in which we logged every vision, notion and foresightment our precognitives ever had. ‘You mean like the chain of spectacle shops “Should have gone to Vision Boss”?’ [13] The first slogan they used was: ‘Boss-eyed? You need Vision Boss!’ but it was not well received, and hastily withdrawn.

‘Not sure. It might have referred to the Boss of Visions – the greatest precog ever.’

‘Sister Yolanda of Kilpeck [14] 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. has been dead over twelve years,’ I said, writing it in the Visions Book anyway. ‘Got hit by a tram on the High Road.’

‘Yes,’ said Kevin sadly, ‘didn’t see that coming.’

‘Why would you be thinking of her?’

‘I don’t know. Oh, and I had another vision about the Great Zambini.’

I was suddenly a lot more interested.