The Song of the Quarkbeast

The surge

It was a surge. A burst of almost unprecedented violence, but oddly, only through Patrick and Moobin – the iMagic sorcerers were unaffected. With the two of them caught unawares, the heavy blocks of masonry that Patrick and Moobin were moving suddenly flew high in the air. One fell on the road bridge two hundred yards away, where we could hear the sound of cars braking and colliding, and another fell into the river. Two others, each a quarter of a ton, were thrown so high in the air that they disappeared from sight.[41]

Moobin swore as he tried to control the surge. He described it later as like being in a car with no brakes and the throttle jammed full on while trying to negotiate the St Nigel’s Day parade without hitting anyone. To absorb the raw energy that was now entering his body, he pointed his fingers at the river and in an instant the water had changed to a cheap German white wine and receded in both directions, revealing a lot of mud and more shopping trolleys than I thought existed in the world.

I looked across at Patrick. He, too, was struggling to do something with the massive surge, and had switched his attention to what he usually did – lifting cars for the city’s clamping unit. All cars within a 250-yard radius were violently lifted three feet into the air and then, when this wasn’t enough to absorb the power, he began moving them all to the car pound[42] two miles away.

I bit my lip. An oversurge of this power generally ended only in one way – when the power overcame the sorcerer completely and caused them to physically burst. It would be painful, and very messy.[43] I watched them with growing concern as random spells began to bubble up from Patrick and Moobin’s subconscious as the increased power started to invade their thoughts. There was a brief shower of toads, dogs started barking and everyone in the crowd who had curly hair found it had straightened. The river turned from cheap wine to an expensive 1928 Château La Tour, every watch in the local postal district reset itself to midday and the clouds above the city started to form into farmyard-animal shapes.

Just when I thought our sorcerers could take no more, the surge stopped. The wine river washed back, the cloud shapes and toads vanished, and in the distance we could hear Patrick’s cars fall with expensive-sounding crunches. Moobin and Patrick fell to their knees, their index fingers purple with bruises that had spread across their hands to their forearms. It would be painful to spell for weeks.

I ran up to Moobin as the crowd started to murmur in an excited fashion. Blix’s team – minus Blix himself, who was nowhere to be seen – were staring at us, open mouthed. They’d never seen anything like it either.

‘Check the chain,’ muttered Moobin, ‘make sure everyone’s okay.’

Tiger and I dashed back down the daisy-chain to see whether anyone had burst. The first link was Margaret O’Leary, who was standing on the corner by a sideshow tent, where the Two-Headed Boy had popped his heads out of the tent flap to witness the event.

‘What in Shandar’s name was that?’ she said. ‘I just channelled more power in thirty seconds than I’ve expended in a lifetime.’

‘Has Blix been past you?’

‘No.’

We moved on to the next in the chain, who was Bartleby the Bald. He was in much the same state as O’Leary – in shock, but okay. We worked our way back to Zambini Towers and were relieved to find that although the sorcerers were hot and sweaty and bruised with the effort, none had dared break the chain, and for good reason. If they’d tried, they would have borne the full brunt of the power themselves – the only safe option was to hope those at the end could safely expel the extra power.

‘You check the Moose,’ I said to Tiger. ‘I’ll look in on Lady Mawgon.’

I put my head round the door of the Palm Court, but Mawgon was unchanged. Wherever the power was coming from, it wasn’t the power stored in the Dibble Coils – they remained as resolutely full and unhacked as before.

‘Jenny!’ came Tiger’s voice. ‘In here!’

I dashed through to the lobby, where Tiger was kneeling next to a blackened moose-shaped hole burnt into the carpet. There were similar burned shapes on each of the four walls, too – of neat moosian front, back and side elevations, and a perfect moose-shaped plan view hole burned through the ceiling and three storeys up. It was so neat you could see the delicate splay of his antlers.

‘He said it was the only way to stop the surge,’ said Ex-Weathermonger Taylor Woodruff IV, who was standing close by, ‘by taking the full force internally. He said he was sorry if it messed up your bridge building.’

Tiger and I stood in silence in the empty corridor, musing on the once Transient Moose’s passing. He had frazzled every single line of the spell that made up his existence and vanished in a brief blast of energy. I picked up the small pot with the ring in it. It still didn’t make any sense. Not to me, not to anyone – certainly not to Tiger, who hated unanswered questions more than anyone.

‘Look,’ he said, showing me the readout from the Shandargraph. There were multiple peaks from what we had just seen outside, but also another drain, sustained over thirty-seven seconds, and peaking at 1.2 GigaShandars. The range and direction were the same as Moobin and Patrick’s; up around the old bridge somewhere.

‘Was that Blix?’ asked Tiger.

‘If it was he didn’t use it on the bridge,’ I said, looking at my watch. It had been reset to midday in the surge, and now read five minutes past.

‘1.2 GigaShandars?’ queried Tiger. ‘Isn’t that the power drain requirement of a—’

‘It is,’ I replied, not far behind him. ‘Call 999 and mutter “Quarkbeast” in a panicky voice. I need Once Magnificent Boo at the bridge as soon as possible.’

‘You think—?’

‘I do. The Quarkbeast has just divided.’