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five, Lional. At the rate you're going every wizard in the world is going to have "Former advisor to the King of New Ottosland" on his credentials.' Then, as Lional's face collapsed into displeasure, she added, 'All right, all
right]
I'll find you another one!'
    'And quickly. It's very important.'
    'Yes, quickly, I promise. But for the love of Saint Snodgrass,
please
don't fire or offend him until I've finished dealing with the Kallarapi!'
    Lional smiled. It was like watching the sun break free of lowering storm clouds. 'For you, sister dear, whom I love as life itself? Of course.
Anything
for you.'
    She'd never been able to resist Lional's smile, not even after he'd decapitated one of her dolls or torn the ears off her favourite stuffed donkey. 'Thank you. Now can I go?'
    'You are excused, Prime Minister,' Lional said grandly, still smiling, and waggled his fingers. 'Ta ta!'
    Marching out of the audience chamber, head whirling with dread premonitions of lurking obstacles yet to be discovered, Melissande throttled a shriek of frustration.
    Prime minister? Prime
minister?
Whatever had she done to deserve this? And what had possessed her to accept the appointment? She'd only had the job five minutes and already she had a migraine.
    If only she'd said yes to finishing school ...
    But it was too late now and regrets were pointless. She was Princess Melissande, Prime Minister of New Ottosland, and the Kallarapi were coming.
    Time to get to work.
     

CHAPTER FOUR

    For two endless days Gerald lurked in his cramped bedsit, trying to work out what
exactly
had happened at Stuttley's. Trying to recreate that incredible sensation of transformation, of incandescent power welling up and thundering through him. All he did was give himself an incipient hernia. He couldn't even trust his Third Grade incants to work reliably. His power trickled, it sputtered, it sulked and wouldn't play.
    Depressed, defeated, he gave up trying to recreate the miracle and instead fretted about Reg's continued absence. He'd gone from worry to anger and back again so many times he was permanently dizzy. She'd never stayed away this long before. Something must have happened. She was lying in a ditch somewhere, injured and delirious. Dying. Or she'd been captured by a travelling circus and imprisoned in a cage, forced to do tricks for food.
     
    Or she just got sick of your ineptitude and flew off to greener pastures.
    Whatever the reason, the result was the same. Reg was gone, he had no way of finding her, and he was turning into a crazy person staying cooped up in his tiny room. He needed to get out. Needed fresh air. A change of scenery.
    And after that he needed to look his current predicament square in the face, accept it, and start the disheartening business of finding yet another job. Somewhere that had never even heard of Stuttley's Staff Factory.
    If there was such a place.
    Oh lord,
he thought, sitting on the edge of his horrible bed with his head in his hands.
Wliat I need is a drink. Two drinks. Lots and lots of drinks, and sod the dwindling bank balance . . .
    He went down to the club's public gallery. One glance through the doors and he nearly ran back upstairs. At the far end of the genteely shabby room, gathered around the sooty fireplace toasting crumpets and scoffing pastries, sat the appalling Errol Haythwaite and his equally appalling friends.
    Thanks to the good fortune of being born into the stratosphere of wizarding society, the ineffably smug little group had risen swiftly to the top of the profession, leaving their less-favoured colleagues behind like so much skim milk. Like cream, they were smooth and lumpless and rich.
    Like cream,
he reminded himself,
they cause bloat, spots and apoplexy.
    Excruciatingly aware that to this group he wasn't so much the skim milk as the nasty bits at the bottom of the bottle once the skim milk had been fed to the cat, Gerald sidled further into the gallery, hoping to be overlooked. But just as he took his