At Kazam I found out that magic had not much to do with black cats, cauldrons, wands, pointy hats and broomsticks. No, those were only in the movies. Real life was somewhat different. Magic is weird and mysterious and a fusion between science and faith, and the practical way of looking at it is this: magic swirls about us like an invisible fog of emotional energy that can be tapped by those skilled in the Mystical Arts, and then channelled into a concentrated burst of energy from the tips of the index fingers. The technical name for magic was ‘the variable electro-gravitational mutable subatomic force’, but the more more usual term was ‘wizidrical energy’, or, more simply, ‘crackle’.
So there I was, assistant to the Great Zambini, learning well and working hard, when Zambini disappeared – quite literally – in a puff of smoke. He didn’t return, or at least, not for anything but a few minutes at a time and often in random locations, so I took over the running of the company, aged fifteen. Okay, that
I now look after forty-five barely sane sorcerers at Kazam, only six of whom have a legal permit to perform magic. If you think wizards are all wise, sage-like purveyors of the Mystical Arts with sparkling wizidrical energy streaming from their fingertips, think again. They are for the most part undisciplined, infantile, argumentative and infuriating, and their magic only works when they
So that’s me, really. I have an orphaned assistant named Tiger Prawns to help me, I am Dragon Ambassador to the world – of which more later – and I also have a pet Quarkbeast, which is at least nine times as frightening as the most frightening thing you’ve ever seen.
My name is Jennifer Strange. Welcome to my world.
Now: let’s find that Tralfamosaur.
Myself, Tiger and those forty-five sorcerers all lived in a large, eleven-storey, ornate former hotel named Zambini Towers. It was in a bad state of repair and even though we had some spare magic to restore it to glory, we decided we wouldn’t. There was a certain
When the call came in I was standing in the shabby, wood-panelled lobby of Zambini Towers.
‘There’s a Tralfamosaur loose somewhere between here and Ross,’ said Tiger, waving a report that had just been forwarded from the police. They’d taken the call but had passed it on to the zoo, who passed it on to Mountain Rescue, who passed it back to the police, who then passed it on to us when the zoo refused it a second time.
‘Anyone eaten?’ I asked.
‘All of two railway workers and part of a fisherman,’ said Tiger, who was only just twelve and, like me, a foundling. He was stuck here for four years and after that he could apply for citizenship, or earn it fighting in the next Troll War, which probably wouldn’t be far off. Troll Wars were like Batman movies: both are repeated at regular intervals, feature expensive hardware, and are broadly predictable. The difference being that during the Troll Wars, humans always lost – and badly. In Troll War IV eight years ago, sixty thousand troops were lost before General Snood had even finished giving the order to advance.
‘Three eaten already?’ I repeated. ‘We need to get Big T back to the zoo before he gets hungry again.’
‘How long will that be?’ asked Tiger, who was small in stature but big on questions.
I swiftly estimated how much calorific value there was in a railway worker, and matched that to what I knew of a Tralfamosaur’s metabolism with a rough guess at how much of the fisherman had been consumed, and came up with an answer.