The Song of the Quarkbeast

The High North Tower

I slammed the Volkswagen into reverse as another Daimler screeched to a halt behind me. I opened the car door and tried to jump out, but in my hurry I’d forgotten to unlatch my seat belt, and was still struggling to extricate myself when four huge bodyguards dragged me out of the car, put a hood over my head and cuffs on my wrists and threw me into the back of their car.

‘Don’t hurt me,’ I said from the floor as the car sped off.

‘Then be a good girl and don’t struggle,’ came a patronising voice.

‘It’s not for my benefit,’ I told them, ‘it’s for yours. If I lose my temper, those of you still conscious in five minutes will be picking up the teeth of those who aren’t.’

There was a pause and I was then picked up and placed on a seat.

‘Comfy?’ came the same voice, this time tinged with a little more respect. It seemed they had been briefed not to underestimate me.

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Cuffs not too tight?’

‘No, they’re fine.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, really,’ I said in a sweet voice, just to unnerve him, ‘you’re most kind.’

The journey was not long, and from the sounds of creaking drawbridges and tyres on cobbles it didn’t take a genius to figure out where I was being taken. After a short time the car stopped and I was carried bodily up a long flight of steps. I was then laid on a soft bed and heard some hurried footsteps, a door slam, a lock turn, and then hurried steps down a stone staircase followed by another door, another lock turning, and then the whole thing repeated itself until I could no longer hear them.

After a few seconds my bonds and hood melted away into nothing. Proof, if any were needed, of Blix’s involvement.

As expected, I was in the High North Tower of the King’s castle at Snodd Hill. It was comfortable if a bit austere in the ‘medieval dreary chic’ style, similar to the Useless Brother’s office, and the large pile of provisions and bottled water clearly meant that I was to be here for some time – or at the very least, until after the contest. I tried the door to find it firmly locked, then looked out of the window. The High North Tower had been well if unimaginatively named, being a tower, to the north and, most pertinent to me, high. The room was circular and barely twenty feet across, and it sat precariously atop a long and mildly off-kilter column of crumbling stonework.

I wasn’t going to escape from here without a lot of help.

After a wait of almost two hours, the phone rang.

‘Pinocchio’s Pizzas?’ I replied, picking it up.

‘Oh, sorry, wrong number,’ came Blix’s voice before the phone went dead.

I smiled to myself as I replaced the receiver, then waited a couple of seconds before it rang again.

‘Hello, Blix,’ I said before he could say anything, ‘adding kidnapping to your long list of felonies?’

‘We prefer to think of it as “holidaying at the specific invitation of His Majesty”,’ replied Blix. ‘Open the top drawer of the bureau.’

I did so, and found an agreement for Kazam to concede the competition, and all the details that Blix had already outlined. The document had been prepared by a firm of solicitors in Financia and lodged with the Ununited Kingdoms’ Supreme Court, so even if King Snodd had wanted to rescind the deal, he couldn’t.

‘It’s all there,’ said Blix. ‘I knew my or the King’s word would not be good enough, so I made it official. Sign it and your holiday in the North Tower is over.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Then you’ll stay there until six Mondays from now, and we’ll have Kazam for nothing.’

‘Blix?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you in the castle watching the top of the North Tower at the moment?’

‘I might be.’

I ripped the phone from the wall, and tossed it out of the open window. It took almost five seconds to hit the ground.

I went and sat on the bed, glad of a quiet time to think. Oddly enough, the one thing that gave me any confidence that we’d win the contest was the fact that Blix was still nervous enough to want to do deals. I went over the events of the past few days as I attempted to find something I had missed that might help us. The answer had to be there.

I was stirred from my thoughts by the wail of an air-raid siren and the unmistakable crack of an artillery piece close by. I looked out of the window as the massed anti-aircraft defences of Snodd Hill Castle opened up as one, a cacophony of noise so loud I had to put my hands over my ears, and with the shells bursting so close that I could hear the shrapnel striking the tower. One piece of red-hot steel flew in the window and landed on the bed, where it began to smoulder; I used my handkerchief to pick it up and dumped it in the sink.

I ventured another look out and amid the din, smell of cordite and black bursts of flak that were drifting past my window, I saw something shoot past, the flak-bursts following it. The notion of the Kingdom being under attack was unlikely as the king currently had no enemies interested enough to attack him, and it was only when my name was called that I realised what was going on.

‘Jenny!’ came Prince Nasil’s familiar voice, as he whipped past on his carpet. ‘Can’t stop!’ he added as he went back past in the opposite direction, then yelled ‘Jump!’ as he tore past the third time, with two anti-aircraft shells exploding so close the tower shook and plaster fell from the ceiling.

I needed no further bidding. I shoved Blix’s concession agreement into my bag, waited until the Prince turned to make another pass, and then jumped out of the window.

I’d never fallen from a high tower before and would not hope to do so again, but after the initial sense of fear and rapid acceleration, the only thing I could feel was the air rushing past me. I could see the top of the tower move swiftly away from me as I fell, and didn’t see the Prince at all until he gently scooped me out of the air. With a flick of the carpet we were out of the range of the artillery, which stopped as quickly as it had begun.

‘Thanks for the rescue,’ I said, ‘but it might have been easier and safer to extract me at night.’

‘At night?’ echoed the Prince. ‘If we’d left it until then there would be no chance of seeing Zambini.’

The penny dropped.

‘Kevin knows where the Great Zambini is going to reappear?’

‘Not precisely – but close enough. Somewhere near the Troll Wall.’

My heart fell.

‘The Troll Wall is almost fifty miles long!’

‘If we head up there now, we can home in when Kevin has a more accurate fix.’

This was undoubtedly true, as Kevin’s predictions of Zambini’s return had been uncannily accurate – just too late to be of any real use. I looked at my watch. We had less than an hour to go before Zambini was due back.

‘We’ll never make it,’ I said as we flew through the ballroom windows and slid to a halt on the shiny floor.

‘We have a plan,’ said the Prince, and I looked up. Perkins, Owen of Rhayder, Kevin Zipp and Tiger were all staring at me.

‘I’m all ears,’ I said as Tiger handed me two jumpers, some thermal leggings, a heavy leather flying jacket and then a flying helmet.

‘It’s a straight-line flight of two hundred and eighty miles to the Troll Gates at Stirling,’ said Owen, referring to a blackboard upon which a diagram had been hastily drawn, ‘and if we leave in five minutes we have only thirty-two minutes to get there. That’s an average speed requirement of five hundred and twenty-five miles per hour.’

I saw the problem immediately.

‘Even by moving at the carpet’s top design speed of five hundred miles per hour,’ I murmured, ‘we would still be . . . two and a half minutes too late.’

But Owen and the Prince were already ahead of the curve.

‘Precisely,’ said the Prince, ‘that’s why we need to push the carpets up to over seven hundred and sixty miles per hour during the flight to give us any hope of getting there in time.’

I looked at them both in turn.

‘You intend to go . . . supersonic?’

‘Trust us,’ said Owen with a smile, ‘it’s faintly possible that we know what we’re doing. Get prepared. We’ll be rugging off in two minutes.’

Owen and the Prince went to rewrite a few lines of the carpet’s source spell-code, and I turned back to Tiger and Perkins, who handed me a large pink seashell.

‘You’ll be out of range with a toddler’s shoe so we’re going to conch.’

He held a pair of left- and right-handed conches together for a moment, whispered a spell and then gave one to me.

‘Can you hear me?’ he said, and his voice echoed out of the shell, clear as a bell. In fact, I heard him slightly before he spoke, which created an odd reverse echo.

‘How did it go with Once Magnificent Boo?’ asked Tiger.

‘Not well. She’s doesn’t want to help us, and I got the feeling she’d hit me quite hard if I asked why she stopped doing any magic. But it sounded like something pretty unpleasant.’

‘It figures that she knew Zambini and Blix well,’ said Tiger as he showed me a photograph, ‘they were all on the unUK Olympic sorcery team in 1974.’

The photo showed the three of them when much younger, all posing after winning gold for the prestigious ‘400 Meters Turning into a Mouse Relay’ event. Boo was in the middle of the photo and grinning broadly while Blix and Zambini were standing on either side. Unlike Boo’s smile, theirs looked somewhat strained.

‘They were the best of friends,’ said Tiger, ‘and inseparable until Boo was kidnapped. Zambini was away when it happened so Blix negotiated the ransom. Blix and Zambini fell out big time, and have been at each other’s throats ever since. That’s about it.’

‘Past history of petty infighting doesn’t help us,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Did you discover the source of the thinness enchantment?’

‘Not yet, but the spell’s holding up well. Blix’s sorcerers have been out there attempting to get in all afternoon, but however much power they use to attempt to break the enchantment, the spell uses even more to stop them.’

‘Let’s hope it stays that way,’ I said, digging Blix’s concession document from my bag and handing it to Perkins.

‘As acting senior wizard you can sign this without my consent,’ I told him, explaining exactly what it was. ‘You should ask the retired sorcerers, too. I can’t make this decision alone, and what’s more, shouldn’t have to. We’ve got until midnight tonight. Nothing on Lady Mawgon or the passthought, I presume?’

‘Nothing,’ said Perkins, ‘except the Dibbles are at full capacity and occasionally venting into the atmosphere.’

‘I saw the cloud shapes as we flew over.’

Perkins’ eyes opened wide as he read the document.

‘Two million moolah if I agree never to spell again?’

‘All that moolah must be worth a fortune,’ remarked Tiger.

I looked at the Prince, who nodded that they were ready. This was it.

‘If I don’t make it back,’ I said to Perkins, ‘you’re to take over as acting manager in my place.’

Tiger gave me a hug, and Perkins looked as though he wanted to.

‘Break a leg,’ he said.

I walked over to where Owen and the Prince were making last-minute adjustments to the hemp backing of Owen’s carpet.

‘You’re sure about this?’ I asked.

‘Not at all,’ said Owen as he handed the Prince and me parachutes while he strapped one on himself, ‘but we need the Great Zambini back, and this is the best chance we’ve had so far.’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’ I asked, giving them both a nervous smile.

I put on the heavy woollen flying jacket and then the parachute with Tiger’s help, then stepped on to the front of the carpet, sat cross-legged and pulled the goggles down over my eyes. The Prince jumped on the back, raised the carpet into the hover, turned it around and then sped out of the open windows with Owen in close formation behind. I just caught a glimpse of the many assorted police cars and military vehicles that had surrounded Zambini Towers before we were off and away, heading for Trollvania.