The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde Read Free Book Online Page A

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.’
    ‘I’m sure we can come to some arrangement,’ I said, trying to act how Mr Zambini might. Some work we did at a loss, either simply to keep the sorcerers busy, or to give us a presence in the marketplace. We needed the public to see us working in order to gain their trust and promote wizardry as simply a way of life. The last thing we needed was for the fifteenth-century view of sorcerers to spring to the fore, and for the citizenry to regard