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.