There had been other changes, too. All the clerks and analysts working to find a solution to the Troll menace had been assigned to other duties and Colin’s job as ‘Minister for Good Ideas & Kingdom Unification’ had been given to someone ‘less scaly’. The fencers, marksmen and worriers had all been stripped of any power and relevance, and the only people united against the New Order and currently at liberty were Boo, Tiger, Monty, myself and Colin – and the ‘at liberty’ part might change any second, as Sir Matt – I couldn’t bring myself to refer to him as ‘King’ – had commanded we attend a meeting in an hour.
‘Where is Colin, by the way?’ I asked.
‘In mourning. He said he needed to fly out of sight of land and tread air for an hour or two to gather his thoughts and contemplate life as the only remaining Dragon.’
We fell silent for a moment.
‘Monty,’ said Boo, ‘we made a mistake. The Quarkbeast mass conjoinment will liberate far more juice than we thought.’
‘How … much more?’
‘263 TeraShandars.’
Boo had to repeat it.
‘That’s … that’s more wizidrical energy than the world has seen since magic even
‘By a large margin,’ said Boo.
‘He wanted to achieve immortality when we spoke,’ I said. ‘D’you actually think he could?’
Monty thought about it carefully.
‘He’d have to dump ARAMAIC and RUNIX spell languages and restart work on SIMSALLABIM.’
‘I’ve never heard of that,’ said Tiger.
‘It’s a radically different spell-code,’ said Monty, ‘that’s been worked on sporadically down the centuries. It’s essentially a self-learning artificially intelligent spell language where you tell it what you want to achieve, and it runs itself backwards to a workable spell.’
‘That makes
‘That’s exactly what it means,’ said Boo. ‘With SIMSALLABIM up and running, all Shandar has to do is want something – and it shall become so.’
We talked on and I mentioned D’Argento’s revelation that Shandar had undertaken a ‘self-soulectomy’. This interested Boo and Monty, as a soul can’t be destroyed outside of a host, and the freshly removed Better Angels of his Nature had to have been sealed in a porcelain jar and then hidden.
‘How would we find them?’ asked Tiger.
‘Zambini was the finest proponent of finding lost things,’ said Monty. ‘In laboratory conditions he once located a lost sock seventy-six miles away buried under six inches of concrete. Mind you,’ he said, ‘that was twenty years ago when there was more crackle about.’
‘Even if we found his Better Angels,’ I said, ‘what could we do with them?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Boo. ‘As you might imagine, soulectomies are quite rare – I’ll have to look into it.’
We lapsed into silence after that, still unsure of Shandar’s ultimate plan. They, like me, didn’t really go for Shandar’s ‘Everything Project’. It was too noble. There
I gave Monty and Boo the Dibble Jars full of crackle, and while I took another sip from my hot chocolate they said they’d see what could be done with them. Things had looked really bad this morning when I left, but right now, with an idiot in charge, a tyrant about to become all-powerful, and Feldspar gone, things looked a great deal worse.
His Supreme Royal Highness King Mathew of all the Kingdoms, defender of the free and rightful ruler of all that anyone might survey, anywhere, didn’t waste much time once he had assumed power. He at once dissolved all Conclaves, cancelled all outstanding plans and strategies that the Princess or I might have instigated, and at once convened a King’s Court which I, as Court Mystician, was invited to attend – but I suspected really only to be fired.
‘Thank you all for gathering,’ said King Mathew as soon as we were assembled in the Queens Hotel ballroom, ‘and my wife the Queen and I thank you for the kind notes of congratulations on our nuptials and the many pledges of allegiance and IOUs regarding presents which we have seen fit to embrace rather than publicly ridicule, as we first thought we might.’
No one said anything, so he continued.
