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‘Lord Tenbury,’ said the King, ‘I think we owe it to the citizenry of Snodd to put on a good show. They have come to see a magical contest, and they shall. Release the wizards. I command it.’

Blix and Tenbury looked shocked at the turn of events, and exchanged desperate glances. There was a very good reason why they had nobbled Kazam. iMagic were rubbish and did not have a hope of winning. In a panic, Lord Tenbury did the first thing he could think of – he started patting his pockets in an absent-minded way.

‘If you are going to claim you’ve lost the keys to the city jail, Lord Chief Adviser,’ snarled the King in a low voice while smiling and waving to the crowd, ‘I will put your head on a spike and have dogs gnaw at your corpse.’

‘Here they are,’ said Lord Tenbury, suddenly finding the keys. ‘I will see to your instructions this moment.’

‘Happy now, pumpkin?’ said the King to Queen Mimosa.

‘I love it when you do the right thing, bunny-wunny,’ she said, tweaking his royal ear affectionately.

Queen Mimosa took her leave with the bickering Spoilt Royal Children while the King hung back for a moment.

‘If Kazam win,’ he said to both Blix and Tenbury, ‘I will have you both stuffed with sawdust while still alive and then use you for bayonet practice. Do you understand?’

He didn’t wait for a reply, and turned to me with such a hateful glare that I took an involuntary step backwards. But he made no comment, and turned to join his family, who were all present to view the contest – even his Useless Brother, the royal hanger-on cousins and his odd-looking mother, the Duck-faced Dowager Duchess of Dinmore.

The King stepped up to the royal microphone and gave a long rambling speech that made reference to how proud he was that the hard toil of a blindly trustful citizenry kept him and his family in the lap of luxury while war widows begged on the street, and how he thanked providence that he had been blessed to rule over a nation whose inexplicable tolerance towards corrupt despots was second to none.

The speech was well received and some citizens were even moved to tears. Once done, he ordered that the contest begin.

‘We’ll still thrash you,’ said Blix to me, ‘and if you’re worried about your darling boyfriend, he’s quite safe for the moment.’

My heart suddenly fell. Perkins had been rumbled.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘No? Here.’

And he passed me the left-handed conch that we’d given Perkins.

‘If any harm comes to him,’ I said between gritted teeth, ‘I will hold you personally responsible.’

‘Oh, oh, I’m so frightened,’ replied Blix sarcastically. ‘Now piss off. Haven’t you got some wizards to spring from jail?’

‘I’ll be back with help,’ I said. ‘You’ll be thrashed. And just for the record, he’s not my boyfriend.’

Blix laughed and had his first two stones fitted even before Lord Tenbury’s car arrived to take us to fetch Moobin and the others.

Bridge building

‘So which two do you want released?’ asked Lord Tenbury as soon as we had arrived outside the city jail, a large stone building to the north of the city which was known ironically as the ‘Hereford Hilton’, much to the annoyance of the real Hereford Hilton, which coincidentally was only two doors down, something that worked to the advantage of the prisoners when pizza deliveries were misdirected.

‘I was under the impression His Majesty specifically requested all were to be released,’ I pointed out.

‘Then you understand little of the role of Lord Chief Adviser. My duty is to serve my King the best way I can and interpret his orders as I see fit. Two sorcerers. Choose now.’

I could see it was the best deal I was going to get, and every second spent arguing was a second wasted.

‘The Wizard Moobin,’ I said without hesitation, ‘and . . . Patrick of Ludlow.’

Lord Tenbury relayed the orders to the jailer, told us we could make our way back to the bridge and was gone. After waiting half an hour, in which I had serious doubts that Tenbury would keep his word, the pair of them emerged blinking into the daylight. They had their lead finger-cuffs removed and within a few seconds we were in a taxi heading back towards the bridge.

‘Well done,’ said Moobin, brushing the dirt, earwigs and other prison detritus from his jacket.

‘Don’t thank me,’ I said, annoyed with myself that I had done so little, ‘thank Queen Mimosa.’

‘She’s an ex-sorcerer herself,’ he said. ‘I think she has a soft spot for us. Who else do we have on the team?’

‘You two are it.’

Team Kazam were going be severely underpowered. I told them what had happened since they had been imprisoned. That Mawgon was still stone, her passthought unbroken; that Perkins had been captured during an attempt to uncover a missing vision; that the Moose had turned out to be semi-self-aware and was the agent behind the ‘infinite thinness’ spell, and that Zambini hadn’t really been much help – although it had been good to see him.

‘The Moose drawing power from a ring?’ said Moobin incredulously. ‘From a band of gold, the single most boringly non-reactive metal on the planet?’

‘Zambini was surprised too.’

‘Well, it’s not important right now,’ he said as the taxi dropped us as close as it could to the south bridge abutment. ‘We’re going to have to wing it a bit and break a few rules. The future of Kazam is in the balance and we have to work together if we’re to have any chance of survival. Now listen carefully . . .’

As Tiger took the cab back to Zambini Towers to put the plan in motion, Moobin, myself and Patrick surveyed the wreckage of what had once been a stone bridge with five arches supported by four piers. iMagic had already had an hour’s start, and the bridge piers on their side were already cleared of old rubble and three feet above the level of the river. The stones were moving about the site steadily, to many ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the onlookers. It took a moment for us to be seen by the audience, but when they did there was a sudden hush and then a cheer. Blix’s past history of hasty, substandard wizidrical building work had spread about the town, and severely dented his popularity. As the cheer echoed around the area, Patrick lifted ten pieces of cut stone from the river bed simultaneously, then moved them in a long procession to be stacked for later insertion in the bridge.

The crowd went wild at this, and the scoreboard, which was offering up-to-the-second live betting odds, had us up from ‘1000: 1’ against to ‘500:1’ against. Not great, but an improvement. I saw Patrick hold on to a crowd barrier for support after his exertions. He would not have attempted such a feat without Moobin requesting it – the purpose was to make the iMagic team nervous. It worked. Two stones that were about to be placed dropped with a heavy splash into the river as the iMagic team momentarily lost concentration.

‘Patrick will need continuous food if he does most of the heavy lifting,’ said Moobin, exercising each of his index fingers in readiness, ‘and check to see how Tiger is getting on.’

I needed no second bidding. I called a street urchin out of the crowd and deputised him on to the Kazam team in order to keep Patrick and Moobin supplied with constant water and food, and told him to find a seamstress to repair their clothes ‘on the fly’ as continuous heavy spelling unravels stitching.[40]

‘To battle,’ said Moobin as he walked across the scaffolding footbridge that ran parallel to the stone bridge. He lifted stones from the rubble with a relaxed movement of his hands, and sorted them into categories of dressed, rubble and ornate, ready to be put back into the bridge. It was mostly bravado. As with Patrick, it took a lot more power then he made out. If they tried to keep it up like this they’d be exhausted long before our half of the bridge was finished.

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40

No one knows why – it just does. Shoelaces untie them-selves almost immediately, which explains the almost universal use of loafers among sorcerers. ‘Anti-spell’ clothing is of man-made cloth with welded seams, and looks terrible. Most sorcerers simply change clothes hourly when working.