Wizard Moobin looked up abruptly.

‘Do you think so?’

‘Rubbish,’ returned her sister, ‘don’t listen to her – she’s one spell short of a curse.’

‘I was more powerful in the rewiring job yesterday,’ Moobin said thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps the surge has sustained for a bit longer.’

This, I mused, was possible. The background wizidrical power was subject to periodical fluctuations. There were, however, more practical matters to consider.

‘I hate to be a stickler for regulations,’ I said, ‘but you’re going to have to fill out a form B2-5C for this. I know we’re in the Towers, but we should stay on the safe side. We’d better do a P3-8F as well, just in case.’

‘P3-8F?’ queried Moobin. ‘I haven’t heard of that one before.’

‘Experimental spells resulting in accidental damage of a physical nature,’ put in the younger Karamazov sister, who, despite the repeated lightning strikes, could still have moments of lucidity.

‘I see,’ replied Moobin, turning to me. ‘If you fill them in, I’ll sign them.’

I left him to tidy up and walked downstairs to the ground floor, where I met Tiger and the Quarkbeast as they returned. Tiger had a graze on his nose, his clothes were scuffed and he had some twigs in his hair.

‘If he starts to run you have to drop his leash as soon as possible.’

‘I know that now.’

‘Did he drag you far?’

‘It wasn’t the distance,’ replied Tiger, ‘it was the terrain. What’s going on?’

‘Wizard Moobin experienced a surge,’ I said as we entered the offices in the Avon Suite. I sat down at my desk and pulled the Codex Magicalis towards me to make sure I didn’t need to fill out any more paperwork. ‘Something’s going on. Yesterday they finished the rewiring in record time, and this morning Moobin turned lead into gold.’

‘I thought the power of magic was diminishing?’

‘It is, in general. But every now and again it surges upwards and they can all do things they haven’t been able to do for years. The problem is that surges usually herald a slump, and if you couple this with what Kevin Zipp told us yesterday, we could find ourselves unemployed pretty soon.’

‘The death of a Dragon? You think that might actually happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘but there’s a reason Kazam is based in the Kingdom of Hereford. We’re twenty miles away from the Dragonlands, and while a link between Dragons and magic has never been fully proved, there’s more than enough anecdotal evidence to connect the two. In any event,’ I added, ‘I think we need to find out more.’

‘By the way,’ said Tiger, ‘is the Quarkbeast allowed to chew corrugated iron before breakfast?’

‘Only galvanised,’ I replied without looking up, ‘the zinc keeps his scales shiny.’