At least he seemed to be right about its not being far. Five minutes later, just as the other boy’s swallowing was getting quite desperate, the cab squealed to a stop with a great yell of “Woa there!” from the driver up above, and the door beside Cat was pulled open. Cat blinked out into grey light upon a dirty pavement and a row of old, old houses as far as he could see in both directions. We must be in the outskirts of London, he thought. While Cat puzzled about this, the driver said, “Two blondie lads, just like you said, governor.”

The person who had opened the door leaned round it to peer in at them. They found themselves face to face with a smallish elderly man in a dirty black gown. The peering round brown eyes and the brown whiskery face, full of lines and wrinkles, were so like a monkey’s that it was only the soft black priestly sort of hat on the man’s head that showed he was a man and not a monkey. Or probably not. Cat found, in some strange way, that he was not sure of anything.

The monkey’s flat mouth spread in a grin. “Ah yes, the right two,” the man said, “as ordered.” He had a dry, snapping voice, which snapped out, “Out you get then. Make haste now.”

While Cat and Tonino obediently scrambled out to find themselves in a long street of the old tumbledown houses – all slightly different, like cottages built for a town – the man in the black gown handed up a gold coin to the driver. “Charmed to take you back,” he muttered. It was hard to tell if he was speaking to himself or to the driver, but the driver touched his hat to him anyway with great respect, cracked his whip and drove away, squealing and clattering. The cab seemed to move away from them up the tumbledown street in jerks, and each jerk seemed to make it harder to see. Before it quite reached the end of the street, it had jerked out of sight entirely.

They stared after it. “Why did that happen?” Tonino asked.

“Belongs to the future, doesn’t it?” the monkey-like man snapped. Again, he might have been talking to himself. But he seemed to notice them then. “Come along now. No stupid questions. It’s not every day I hire two apprentices from the poorhouse and I want you indoors earning your keep. Come along.”

He turned and hurried into the house beside them. They followed, quite bewildered, past an unpainted front door – which closed with a slam behind them – into a dark, wooden hallway. Beyond this was a big room which was much lighter because of a row of filthy windows looking out on to bushes. As the monkey-man hurried them on through it, Cat recognised the place as a magician’s workshop. It breathed out the smell of magic and of dragon’s blood, and there were symbols chalked over most of the floor. Cat had a tantalising feeling that he should have known what most of those symbols were supposed to do, and that they were not quite in any order he was used to, but when he thought about this, the symbols meant nothing to him.