He didn’t answer. Instead, he clambered unsteadily to his feet and returned to his apartment, the door of which had been blown clean off its hinges and was now embedded in the wall opposite. I put my head around the door and stared at the devastation. A wizard’s room is also their laboratory, as all sorcerers are inveterate tinkerers by nature, and entire lifetimes are spent in pursuit of a specific spell to do a specific job. Even something as inconsequential as the charm for finding a lost hammer had taken Grendell of Cleethorpes an entire lifetime to weave in the twelfth century. A destroyed workshop often indicated several decades of important work lost in one short blast of uncontrolled wizardry. Magic can be strong stuff and bite the unwary.

I followed Wizard Moobin into his room and trod carefully through the jumbled wreckage. Most of his books had been destroyed and all the carefully laid-out glassware, retorts and flasks had been reduced to shards. But about this, Moobin seemed curiously unconcerned, nor was he worried that his clothes had been blown off him, and he was now dressed only in a pair of underpants and a sock.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked, but the wizard was far too busy searching for something to answer. I exchanged glances with Half Price, who had arrived at the door. He looked very similar to his elder brother, only smaller by a factor of two.

‘Wow!’ said the Youthful Perkins, who had also just arrived. ‘I’ve never seen a spell go critical before. What were you doing?’

‘I’m fine,’ Moobin muttered, turning over a broken tabletop. I picked up a fire extinguisher and put out a small fire in one corner of the room.

‘What happened?’ I asked again, and Moobin suddenly stood up from where he had been searching in a pile of smouldering papers and with shaking hand passed me a small toy soldier. It had only one leg, carried a musket and was very heavy. It was made of pure gold.

‘Yes?’ I asked, still in the dark.

‘Lead, used to be, was, like, at least. Then, well—’ exclaimed the Wizard excitedly, trying to find a chair undamaged enough to sit on.

‘You’re babbling,’ I told him.

‘Lead – now . . . gold!’ he said at last.

‘Way to go!’ said the Youthful Perkins enthusiastically. He had been joined by the Sisters Karamazov, who were jostling each other for the best view.

‘Lead into gold!?’ I repeated incredulously, knowing full well that such a spell requires a subatomic meddling that is almost unheard of below the status of Grand Master Sorcerer.

‘How did you manage to do that?’

‘That’s the interesting thing,’ replied Moobin, ‘I have no idea. Every morning I concentrate my mind on that lead soldier, summon up every Shandar in my body and let fly. For twenty-eight years nothing has happened; not a flicker. But this morning—’

‘Big Magic!’ yelled the younger Karamazov sister.