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It looked set to become even hotter by the afternoon, just when the job was becoming more fiddly and needed extra concentration. But the fair weather brought at least one advantage: dry air makes magic work better and fly farther. Moisture has a moderating effect on the Mystical Arts. No sorcerer worth their sparkle ever did productive work in the rain – which probably accounts for why getting showers to start was once considered easy, but getting them to stop was nigh-on impossible.

A taxi or minibus would have been a needless extravagance, so the three sorcerers, myself and the beast were packed into my Volkswagen for the short journey from Hereford to King’s Pyon. The well-proportioned ‘Full’ Price was driving, Lady Mawgon was in the passenger seat and I was in the back with Wizard Moobin and the Quarkbeast, who sat panting in between the two of us. We were three-fifths of our way through an uncomfortable silence as we showed our passes to the sentry and drove from the walled city and into the suburbs. The silence was not unusual. Despite the three of them being our most versatile sorcerers, they didn’t really get along. It wasn’t anything particularly personal; sorcerers are just like that – temperamental, and apt to break out into petulant posturing that took time and energy to smooth over. Running Kazam Mystical Arts Management was less about spells and enchantments and more about bureaucracy and diplomacy – working with those versed in the magical Arts was sometimes like trying to herd cats. The job at King’s Pyon was too big for Price and Moobin alone, so I’d had to coax Lady Mawgon into making up the shortfall. She thought this sort of work beneath her, but like all of them, was realistic. Kazam was almost broke, and we badly needed the cash.

‘I do wish you would keep your hands on the wheel,’ said Lady Mawgon in an aggrieved tone as she shot a disapproving glance at Full Price, who was steering by spell. The wheel was turning by itself, while Price’s arms were folded neatly in front of him. To Lady Mawgon, who in better days had once been Sorceress to Royalty, open displays of magic were the mark of the guileless show-off, and the hopelessly ill bred.

‘I’m just tuning up,’ replied Full Price indignantly. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t need to.’

Both I and Wizard Moobin looked at Lady Mawgon, eager to know how she was tuning up. Moobin had prepared for the job by tinkering with the print of the Hereford Daily Eyestrain. Since leaving the office twenty minutes before he had filled in the crossword. Not unusual in itself since the Eyestrain’s crossword is seldom hard, except that he had used printed letters from elsewhere on the page and dragged them across using his mind alone. The crossword was now complete and more or less correct – but it left an article on Queen Mimosa’s patronage of the Troll War Widows Fund looking a trifle disjointed.

‘I am not required to answer your question,’ replied Lady Mawgon in a haughty tone, ‘and what’s more, I detest the term “tuning up”. It’s Quazafucating, and always has been.’

‘Using the old language makes us sound archaic and out of touch,’ replied Price.

‘It makes us sound as we are meant to be,’ replied Lady Mawgon, ‘of a noble calling.’

Of a once noble calling, thought Moobin, inadvertently broadcasting his subconscious on an alpha so low even I could sense it. Lady Mawgon swivelled in her chair to glare at him. I sighed. This was my life.

Of the fifteen sorcerers, movers, soothsayers, shifters, weathermongers and carpeteers at Kazam, Lady Mawgon was certainly the oldest, and probably the most powerful. Like everyone else she had seen her powers fade dramatically over the past three decades or so, but unlike everyone else, she’d not really come to terms with the failure of the Mystical Arts to be relevant in everyone’s lives. In her defence, she had fallen farther than the rest of them, but this wasn’t really an excuse: the Sisters Karamazov could also claim once-royal patronage, and they were nice as apricot pie. Mad as a kettle of onions the pair of them, but pleasant nonetheless.

I might have felt more sorry for Mawgon if she hadn’t been so difficult all the time. She had an intimidating manner that made me feel small and ill at ease, and she rarely if ever missed an opportunity to put me in my place. Since Mr Zambini’s disappearance, she’d got worse, not better.

‘Quark,’ said the Quarkbeast.

‘Did we have to bring the beast?’ asked Full Price, who had never really got along with it.

‘It jumped in the car when I opened the door.’

The Quarkbeast yawned, revealing several rows of razor-sharp fangs. Despite his placid nature, you never argued with a Quarkbeast, just in case.

‘I would be failing in my duty as acting manager of Kazam,’ I began cautiously, ‘if I didn’t mention how important this job is. Mr Zambini always said that we needed to adapt to survive, and if we get this right we could possibly tap a lucrative market that we badly need.’

‘Humph!’ said Lady Mawgon, irritated by my words, true as they may have been.

‘We all need to be in tune and ready to hit the ground running,’ I added, directing the comment at Lady Mawgon. ‘I told Mr Digby we’d all be done by six this evening.’

They didn’t argue. I think they knew the score well enough without me spelling it out. In silent answer, Lady Mawgon tapped the Volkswagen’s fuel gauge and it rose from half to full. Despite her sulky demeanour, she was well tuned.

I knocked on the door of a red-brick house at the edge of the village, and a middle-aged man with a ruddy face answered.

‘Mr Digby? My name is Jennifer Strange of Kazam, acting manager for Mr Zambini. We spoke on the phone.’

He looked me up and down.

‘You seem a bit young to be running an agency.’

‘Indentured servitude,’ I answered brightly, trying to sidestep the contempt that most free citizens had for people like me. I had been brought up by the Sisterhood, who were not really up with the times, and still thought Mystical Arts Management was a worthy and gainful career. I was almost sixteen years old, and still had four years of unpaid work before I could even think of leaving.

‘You still look too young, indentured or not,’ replied Mr Digby, who wasn’t so easily put off. ‘Where’s Mr Zambini?’

‘He’s indisposed at present,’ I replied. ‘I have assumed his responsibilities. May we get started?’

‘Very well,’ replied Mr Digby sullenly as he fetched his hat and coat, ‘but we agreed you’d be done by six, yes?’

I said that this was so, and he handed me his house keys and left, after nodding a suspicious greeting to Mawgon, Price and Moobin, who were standing next to the Volkswagen. He took a wide berth to avoid the Quarkbeast, climbed into his car and drove away. It was not a good idea to have civilians about when sorcery was afoot. Even the stoutest incantations carried redundant strands of spell that could cause havoc if allowed to settle on the general public. Nothing serious ever happened; it was mostly rapid nose hair growth, oinking like a pig, that sort of stuff. It soon wore off, but it was bad PR – and the threat of litigation was never far from our thoughts.

‘Right,’ I said to the three of them, ‘over to you.’

The three mages looked at each other. Of the fifty-two Mystical Artisans at Kazam, most were retired or too insane to be of any practical use. Thirteen were capable of working, but of these, only seven had current licences. When one worked, they worked to support four others.

‘I used to conjure up storms,’ said Lady Mawgon with a sigh.

‘So could we all,’ replied the Wizard Moobin.

‘Quark,’ said the Quarkbeast.

I moved away from where the three sorcerers were discussing the best place to start. None of them had rewired a house by sorcery before, but by reconfiguring a few basic spells it was decided that such a project could be done, and with relative ease – so long as the three of them pooled their resources. It was Mr Zambini’s idea to move into the home improvement market. Charming moles from gardens, resizing stuff for the self-storage industry and finding lost things was easy work, but it didn’t pay well. Rewiring, however, was quite different. Unlike conventional electricians, we didn’t need to touch the house in order to do it. No mess, no problems, and all done in under a day.

I sat in my Volkswagen to be near the car phone. Any calls to the office would be directed through to here. I wasn’t just Kazam’s manager, I was also the receptionist, bookings clerk and accountant. I had to look after the fifty-two sorcerers in my charge, deal with the shabby building that housed them all, and fill out the numerous forms that the Magical Powers (amended 1966) Act required when even the tiniest spell was undertaken. The reasons why I was doing all this were twofold: first, I’d been part of Kazam since I was ten, and knew the business inside out. Second, no one else wanted to.

The phone rang.

‘The Kazam Agency,’ I said in my jolliest tone, ‘can I help you?’

‘I hope so,’ said a timid teenager’s voice on the other end. ‘Do you have something to make Patty Simcox fall in love with me?’

‘How about flowers?’ I asked.

‘Flowers?’

‘Sure. Cinema, a few jokes. Dinner, dance, Bodmin aftershave?’

‘Bodmin aftershave?’

‘Sure. You do shave?’

‘Once a week now,’ replied the teenager. ‘It’s becoming something of a drag. But listen, I was thinking it would be easier—’

‘We could do something, but it wouldn’t be Patty Simcox. Just a bit of her, the most pliable part. It would be like having a date with a tailor’s dummy. Love is something that it’s really better not to mess with. If you want my advice, you’d do better to try the more traditional approach.’

The phone seemed to go dead but he was just digesting my thoughts.

‘What sort of flowers?’

I gave him some tips and the addresses of a few good restaurants. He thanked me and hung up. I looked across to where Wizard Moobin, Lady Mawgon and Full Price were sizing up the house. Sorcery wasn’t about mumbling a spell and letting fly – it was more a case of appraising the problem, planning the various incantations to greatest effect, then mumbling a spell and letting fly. The three of them were still in the ‘appraising’ stage, which generally meant a good deal of staring, tea, discussion, argument, more discussion, tea, then more staring.

The phone rang again.

‘Jenny? It’s Perkins.’

The Youthful Perkins was the youngest sorcerer at Kazam. He’d been inducted during a rare moment of financial stability and was serving a loose apprenticeship. His particular talent was shifting, although he wasn’t very good at it. He’d once morphed himself into something vaguely resembling a raccoon but then got stuck and had to stay that way for a week until it wore off. It had been very amusing, but not to him. Because we were of a similar age, we got on fairly well, but not in a boyfriend–girlfriend kind of way.

‘Hey, Perkins,’ I said, ‘did you get Patrick off to work in time?’

‘Just about. But I think he’s back on the marzipan again.’

This was worrying. Patrick of Ludlow was a Mover. Although not possessed of the sharpest mind, he was kind and gentle and exceptionally gifted at levitation, and earned a regular wage for Kazam by removing illegally parked cars for the city’s clamping unit. It took a lot of effort – he would sleep fourteen hours in twenty-four – and the marzipan echoed back to a darker time in his life that he didn’t care to speak of.

‘So what’s up?’

‘The Sisterhood sent round your replacement. What do you want me to do with him?’

I’d forgotten all about him. The Sisterhood traditionally supplied Kazam with a foundling every five years. Sharon Zoiks had been the fourth, I had been the sixth, and this new one would be the seventh. We didn’t talk about the fifth.

‘Pop him in a taxi and send him up. No, cancel that. It’ll be too expensive. Ask Nasil to carpet him up. Usual precautions. Cardboard box, yes?’

‘Usual precautions,’ replied Perkins, and hung up.

I watched the three sorcerers stare at the house from every direction, apparently doing nothing. I knew better than to ask them what was going on or how they were doing. A moment’s distraction could unravel a spell in a twinkling. Moobin and Price were dressed casually and without any metal for fear of burns, but Lady Mawgon was in traditional garb. She wore long black crinolines that rustled like leaves when she walked, and sparkled like distant fireworks in the darkness. During the Kingdom’s frequent power cuts, I could always tell when it was she gliding down one of Zambini Tower’s endless corridors. Once, in a daring moment, someone had pinned some stars and a moon cut from silver foil to her black dress, something that sent her incandescent with rage. She ranted on at Mr Zambini for almost twenty minutes about how ‘no one was taking their calling seriously’ and how could she ‘be expected to work with such infantile nincompoops’. Zambini spoke to everyone in turn, but he probably found it as funny as the rest of us. We never discovered who did it, but I reckoned it was Full Price’s smaller twin, Half. He once turned the local cats blue for a joke, which backfired badly when the cops got involved.

With little else to do except keep an eye on the three sorcerers, I sat down in the car and read Wizard Moobin’s newspaper. The text that he had moved around the paper was still fixed, and I frowned. Tuning spells like these were usually temporary and I would have expected the text to drift back to its original position. It takes almost twice as much energy to fix something as it does to change it, so most wizards saved their energy and the spell would unravel in time, like an unsecured plait. Sorcery was like running a marathon – you needed to pace yourself. Sprint too early and you could find yourself in trouble near the finishing line. Moobin must have been feeling confident to tie off the end of the spell. I leaned over and tapped the fuel gauge of the Volkswagen, which stayed resolutely at ‘full’. Looked like Lady Mawgon was having a good day too.

‘Quark.’

‘Where?’

The Quarkbeast pointed one of his razor-sharp claws towards the east as Prince Nasil streaked past a good deal faster than he should have. He banked steeply, circled the house twice and came in for a perfect landing just next to me. He like to carpet standing up, a little like a surfer, much to the disdain of our only other carpeteer, Owen of Rhayder, who sat in the more traditional cross-legged position at the rear. Nasil wore baggy shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, too, which didn’t go down with Lady Mawgon.

‘Hi, Jenny,’ said Nasil with a grin as he handed me a flight log to sign, ‘delivery for you.’

On the front of the carpet was a large Yummy-Flakes cardboard box, and it opened to reveal an eleven-year-old boy who seemed tall and gangly for his age. He had close-curled sandy-coloured hair and freckles that danced around a snub nose. He was wearing what were very obviously hand-me-down clothes and stared at me with the air of someone recently displaced, and still confused over how they should feel about it.