‘Berserkers have nothing to fear if they can control their anger, Jennifer. You would be surprised how many concealed Berserkers walk among the citizenry. You have a gift. Learn to use it wisely.’

‘So you planned all this?’

‘It was a grand plan, Jennifer, a plan forty decades in the making. When Shandar imprisoned us we knew that as individuals we could do nothing to unweave the strong magic. Dragons have always been renewed by death. Kill one and two rise in its place. Mu’shad Waseed didn’t know that but Shandar did. That’s why he didn’t want you to kill Maltcassion. A Dragon that dies of old age leaves no offspring.’

‘So any time in the past four hundred years a Dragonslayer could have killed a Dragon and added one more to the population?’

‘It wouldn’t have done much good. Two Dragons imprisoned instead of one? No; we needed to do more. We needed a spell to overcome all that Shandar had done and a little bit more besides. A spell of almost incalculable size and complexity. A spell that could release us and also recharge the power of wizardry, lest Shandar return to make good his promise to destroy the Dragons. He is an evil man, but an honourable one, and twenty dray-weights of gold is a sizeable chunk of change – and I’m not sure he’s the sort of Wizard who likes giving refunds.’

‘Big Magic.’

‘Precisely. But Big Magic is unpredictable stuff, and we were still without the vast quantity of raw wizidrical energy to make it work. Shandar cast the spell, so we would need more than the power of Shandar to undo it. Such a power is spread too thinly upon this planet to be useful – we needed to find a way to collect it.’

‘Like the grains of gold on the beach,’ I murmured, remembering Mother Zenobia’s words.

‘Just so. Valuable but essentially worthless since you can’t extract it. The power that comes closest to the energy that makes up what we call magic is human emotion. The power in one person is negligible, but a large group of people can generate an almost limitless amount of energy.’

‘Emotion? You mean like love?’

‘Powerful, I agree,’ conceded Feldspar, ‘but impossible to generate artificially. Avarice, on the other hand, is far more simple to create. All we needed to do was gather together a lot of humans and the tantalising possibility of something for nothing.’

‘The claims,’ I whispered. ‘The Dragonlands.’

‘Precisely. At eleven fifty-nine and fifty-five seconds there were eight million people staring anxiously at their watches, their hearts beating faster, the sweat raised on their brows in expectation of claiming enough land to retire. Greed is all powerful, greed conquers all. Greed channelled the Big Magic; greed set us free.’

‘But why leave so much to chance?’