Jasper Fforde - The Last Dragonslayer

The klaxon sounded in the building, warning all those within to use whatever countermeasures they could, and almost immediately the misters filled the entire hotel with the fine dampness of water, which felt like stepping inside a cloud. Water is an ideal moderator and is about the only thing that can naturally quench a spell that is about to go critical. I paused and a few seconds later there was a tremendous detonation from somewhere on the fifth floor. The tingling and vibrations abruptly stopped and I turned to see a cloud of plaster and dust descend the stairwell. I switched off the alarm and ran up the stairs—lifts, even enchanted ones, should never be used in an emergency. I found Wizard Moobin lying in a heap on the fifth-floor landing.

‘Moobin!’ I exclaimed as the dust began to settle. ‘What on earth happened to you?’

He didn’t answer. Instead, he clambered unsteadily to his feet and returned to his apartment, the door of which had been blown clean off its hinges and was now embedded in the wall opposite. I put my head around the door and stared at the devastation. A wizard’s room is also their laboratory, as all sorcerers are inveterate tinkerers by nature, and entire lifetimes are spent in pursuit of a specific spell to do a specific job. Even something as inconsequential as the charm for finding a lost hammer had taken Grendell of Cleethorpes an entire lifetime to weave in the twelfth century. A destroyed workshop often indicated several decades of important work lost in one short blast of uncontrolled wizardry. Magic can be strong stuff and bite the unwary.

I followed Wizard Moobin into his room and trod carefully through the jumbled wreckage. Most of his books had been destroyed and all the carefully laid-out glassware, retorts and flasks had been reduced to shards. But about this, Moobin seemed curiously unconcerned, nor was he worried that his clothes had been blown off him, and he was now dressed only in a pair of underpants and a sock.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked, but the wizard was far too busy searching for something to answer. I exchanged glances with Half Price, who had arrived at the door. He looked very similar to his elder brother, only smaller by a factor of two.

‘Wow!’ said the Youthful Perkins, who had also just arrived. ‘I’ve never seen a spell go critical before. What were you doing?’

‘I’m fine,’ Moobin muttered, turning over a broken tabletop. I picked up a fire extinguisher and put out a small fire in one corner of the room.

‘What happened?’ I asked again, and Moobin suddenly stood up from where he had been searching in a pile of smouldering papers and with shaking hand passed me a small toy soldier. It had only one leg, carried a musket and was very heavy. It was made of pure gold.

‘Yes?’ I asked, still in the dark.

‘Lead, used to be, was, like, at least. Then, well—’ exclaimed the Wizard excitedly, trying to find a chair undamaged enough to sit on.

‘You’re babbling,’ I told him.

‘Lead—now... gold !’ he said at last.

‘Way to go!’ said the Youthful Perkins enthusiastically. He had been joined by the Sisters Karamazov, who were jostling each other for the best view.

‘Lead into gold!?’ I repeated incredulously, knowing full well that such a spell requires a subatomic meddling that is almost unheard of below the status of Grand Master Sorcerer.

‘How did you manage to do that?’

‘That’s the interesting thing,’ replied Moobin, ‘ I have no idea . Every morning I concentrate my mind on that lead soldier, summon up every Shandar in my body and let fly. For twenty-eight years nothing has happened; not a flicker. But this morning—’

‘Big Magic!’ yelled the younger Karamazov sister.

Wizard Moobin looked up abruptly.

‘Do you think so?’

‘Rubbish,’ returned her sister, ‘don’t listen to her—she’s one spell short of a curse.’

‘I was more powerful in the rewiring job yesterday,’ Moobin said thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps the surge has sustained for a bit longer.’

This, I mused, was possible. The background wizidrical power was subject to periodical fluctuations. There were, however, more practical matters to consider.

‘I hate to be a stickler for regulations,’ I said, ‘but you’re going to have to fill out a form B2-5C for this. I know we’re in the Towers, but we should stay on the safe side. We’d better do a P3-8F as well, just in case.’

‘P3-8F?’ queried Moobin. ‘I haven’t heard of that one before.’

‘Experimental spells resulting in accidental damage of a physical nature,’ put in the younger Karamazov sister, who, despite the repeated lightning strikes, could still have moments of lucidity.

‘I see,’ replied Moobin, turning to me. ‘If you fill them in, I’ll sign them.’

I left him to tidy up and walked downstairs to the ground floor, where I met Tiger and the Quarkbeast as they returned. Tiger had a graze on his nose, his clothes were scuffed and he had some twigs in his hair.

‘If he starts to run you have to drop his leash as soon as possible.’

‘I know that now.’

‘Did he drag you far?’

‘It wasn’t the distance,’ replied Tiger, ‘it was the terrain. What’s going on?’

‘Wizard Moobin experienced a surge,’ I said as we entered the offices in the Avon Suite. I sat down at my desk and pulled the Codex Magicalis towards me to make sure I didn’t need to fill out any more paperwork. ‘Something’s going on. Yesterday they finished the rewiring in record time, and this morning Moobin turned lead into gold.’

‘I thought the power of magic was diminishing?’

‘It is, in general. But every now and again it surges upwards and they can all do things they haven’t been able to do for years. The problem is that surges usually herald a slump, and if you couple this with what Kevin Zipp told us yesterday, we could find ourselves unemployed pretty soon.’

‘The death of a Dragon? You think that might actually happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘but there’s a reason Kazam is based in the Kingdom of Hereford. We’re twenty miles away from the Dragonlands, and while a link between Dragons and magic has never been fully proved, there’s more than enough anecdotal evidence to connect the two. In any event,’ I added, ‘I think we need to find out more.’

‘By the way,’ said Tiger, ‘is the Quarkbeast allowed to chew corrugated iron before breakfast?’

‘Only galvanised,’ I replied without looking up, ‘the zinc keeps his scales shiny.’

There was an excited buzz in the breakfast room that morning, and not just because Unstable Mabel had agreed to cook waffles. The talk was about Moobin’s accomplishment and how everyone’s power seemed to have increased. Although they had all gone off to try the ‘lead into gold’ gag for themselves, no-one else had succeeded, leading me to believe that Moobin had managed it only because he was the sole person up that morning, and the battery of wizidrical power that was Zambini Towers had been available to him and him alone.

Aside from the brief excitement, there seemed to be little going on that morning. I had a job for Full Price to divine the position of a wedding ring that had been flushed accidentally down the loo, and another tree-moving job that the Green Man and Patrick of Ludlow could handle. I sorted through the mail. There were a few cheques so at least I could speak to the bank manager again. There was also a letter that carried the official seal of the Hereford City Council, and it informed me that our contract to clean the city’s drains would not be renewed. I called my contact at the council to try to find out why.

‘The fact is,’ said Tim Brody, who was acting assistant deputy head of drains, ‘that Blok-U-Gon, the well-known and TV-advertised industrial drain unblockers, have undercut your price, and we have a budget to think of.’