The Eye of Zoltar (28 page)

‘See that bundle of drone clothes over there?’ he called.

‘Yes?’

‘Watch.’

He took another six steps and the bundle of clothes sprang into life like a jack-in-the-box. Since the clothes were stacked in the vertical order in which they hung on the body, there seemed to be a slick liquidity about the movement. Stack of lifeless clothes one moment, lethal killing machine the next. The drone drew a sword that had been buried up to its hilt in the ground and brandished it menacingly.

Perkins stopped and backed away, and almost as quickly the drone dropped back into a pile of clothes again, the string retying itself neatly, the sword dropping to the ground harmlessly.

We had all been watching, and although expected, the display was still chilling. There were dozens of drone clothes-packs dotted around, blocking our passage back to Llangurig, and safety.

‘Any ideas?’ asked Wilson as soon as Perkins had rejoined us.

‘Not a single one,’ said Perkins, ‘but we’re alive so long as we don’t try to leave the mountain.’

‘I’m not staying here my entire life,’ said the Princess. ‘I’ve a kingdom to inherit.’

‘And I’ve booked a group to go Elephino-watching next month,’ said Addie.

‘Drat,’ said Wilson, ‘and I was
so
hoping for a significant end to my life.’

‘I’ve an idea,’ I said, and brought out the homing snail. It seemed strange to think that our lives might rely on a snail fetching help, but it was pretty much our best and only hope. Sure, we could wait for Colin to derubberise, but then we’d need a further six months for his wing to heal from the anti-aircraft shell. Six months was a long time to scratch a living stuck at the base of Cadair Idris. The rations in the half-track would last us a week, tops, and quite where we’d find enough food to feed Colin during the winter I had no idea – I didn’t even know whether he
could
fly again. Rescue seemed the best hope, always assuming Moobin and the rest could reach us and then get us out.

I opened a can of Spam and fed it to the homing snail, who guzzled it down greedily. He’d need every bit of energy if he were to break out of this. I wrote out a note.

Dear Moobin

Surrounded by Hollow Men, little chance of escape. Have Rubber Colin, aim to climb Cadair Idris, Shandar up to no good, need help soonest, listening out on the conch at all times.

URGENT

Jennifer

I double-taped the message to the shell, then put the snail on the ground and removed its hood. It looked around for a moment, tasted the air, and was off like a bullet back across the open ground.

A drone sprang to life and made a wild running dive for the snail. It missed, but there was another drone and it too made a wild grab. But the snail, no slouch itself, jinked and the drone missed it. Within a second two dozen other drones popped up, each of them making a grab for the escapee. The snail dodged another three, but that was it. There was a squeal as it was caught, and then a sickening crunch. Their job done, the drones collapsed into piles of clothing again and all was quiet.

I felt Perkins put his hand on my shoulder.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we’ve still got the conch. We’ll monitor it constantly. Moobin and Tiger and the others must be as keen to contact us as we are them.’

I agreed, and after we had loaded as much food as we could from the half-track into our knapsacks, I taped a note explaining what had happened to Colin’s hand. If we didn’t return he should know what happened, and be warned about the drones. With nothing else to delay us, we began the long climb up the mountain.

The steps were finely hewn, but were annoyingly large. About the same as those in a house but multiplied by a factor of two – which made the going hard, but made me think they had been cut for
giants
, which would at least confirm the legend that the mountain was not a mountain at all, but a viewing platform for the giant Idris, who would have climbed these stairs in ancient times to study the heavens and philosophise about life and existence.

I wasn’t the only person who found it hard going.

‘It would make Idris about twelve feet tall,’ panted Wilson, ‘a good size.’

‘But still one third the size of a Troll,’ said Perkins.

‘Is an ogre bigger or smaller than a giant?’ asked the Princess.

‘Human, ogre, giant, Troll,’ I said, reciting the order of magnitude of the bipedal species, ‘but there’s sometimes a bit of overlap.’

‘Ah,’ said the Princess, ‘good. That always puzzled me.’

The climb was hard work and in several places the stairway had broken away so we had to scramble across an empty patch where a precipitous drop led to the ground far below. The path took us up in a zigzag fashion so our view of the drones’ manufacturing facility hove in and out of viewpoint as we climbed to the summit. From our lofty viewpoint the facility’s use was no easier to divine, and after a while we had climbed so high that it looked like a few boxes, and we paid it no more heed. There was plenty of fresh water streaming out of the rock, which we all agreed was about the best that any of us had tasted, and even though the edges to the side of the path were vertiginous in the extreme, none of us felt at all nervous and instead experienced a certain sense of mountain elation, a sort of magic that glowed from the rock, a lingering after-effect of the giant Idris.

There were two rockfalls as we climbed up. One was a small torrent of rocks dislodged by a stream as it cascaded down, with gravel, small stones and weed, but the second was larger and potentially fatal. A large section of rock dislodged from above and came bouncing down the mountain, so we pressed ourselves flat against the rock face and watched as the boulders hit the face above us and actually bounced farther out, leaving us unscathed. The path did not come off so well, and another large chunk was torn out of the stairway. I looked up when the rocks stopped, and for a fleeting moment saw a figure that looked like Curtis peering down, and none of us were in any doubt it was he who had deliberately caused the rockfall. We spent the rest of the journey with at least one person keeping an eye out for any other skulduggery, but there were no more attempts on our lives.

We stopped for a bite at two, and then struck off with renewed vigour for the summit, eventually finding ourselves moving into the cloud at about four in the afternoon. The air felt damp and clammy, and fine droplets of water began to form on our clothes. There was not a shred of vegetation to be seen anywhere, and pretty soon the rocks themselves seemed to ooze water like leaky sponges. A few minutes later a pair of large stone gateposts loomed out of the cloud, with a pair of once ornate and now very rusty gates collapsed between them. We climbed over, the small group now subdued and quiet. Although we were still in cloud and visibility was poor, we knew we had reached the summit. We walked along a rock-cut walkway, under an archway and entered a paved semicircular area about a hundred yards in diameter. Around this semicircle were delicately carved reliefs of strange creatures battling with men in ancient armour, and in the centre, right next to the cliff edge where a slip would have one tumbling into space, was a chair carved from solid rock. The seat was at least five feet from the ground – it was a chair for a giant.

‘The Chair of Idris,’ said Addie, ‘where he would have sat and considered questions of existence, and stared into the heavens.’

‘This would once have been a full circle,’ said Wilson, looking around. ‘Half of this area has already fallen away.’

‘In a few years the chair will go too,’ came a familiar voice, ‘so count your blessings you have witnessed even this.’

Curtis walked out of the grey fog towards us, grinning. He had shown little remorse when Ignatius died, treated Ralph like an animal once he had devolved and left us to die in the Empty Quarter. He had also kidnapped the Princess, sold her in Llangurig and then tried to kill us with a rockfall. I should have hated him, but somehow, given the circumstances, I hardly felt anything at all. He would not escape back to civilisation either; the drones would cut him down before he’d gone twenty paces. It struck me as ironic that he knew nothing of his fate, but was the only one of us who vaguely deserved it.

‘I’ve been up here two hours,’ he said. ‘The top of the mountain is not large and extends about as far as you can see in every direction. I’ve checked the lot. I’m sorry to say there is nothing up here but damp rock, ancient history and disappointment. There are a few human bones but nothing from a Leviathan, not even a tooth. It was a wild goose chase, Jenny. Addie was right after all – it’s all legends, hearsay, old wives’ tales. I should despise you for wasting my time, but hey, at least I got to climb Cadair Idris and see the giant’s chair.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘there is that.’

‘Hello, Laura,’ said Curtis as the Princess stepped out from behind the chair, ‘no hard feelings, eh?’

‘None,’ said the Princess. ‘I’ve never been kidnapped, knocked unconscious or sold before. It was very … educational.’

‘Well,’ said Curtis, checking his watch, ‘you’re all being very sporting over this. I confess I thought you’d be annoyed. But hey, I guess that’s the rough and tumble of the Cambrian Empire. The big adventure, y’know? Perhaps we should meet up for a drink or something when this is all over. Perhaps we’ll even get to laugh about it.’

‘Perhaps we will,’ I said, ‘but not together. Not you and us. Goodbye, Curtis.’

He suddenly looked uneasy. Wary, perhaps, of our apparent relaxed attitude to him and how he’d left us to almost certain death in the Empty Quarter.

‘Okay, then,’ he said, his voice cracking with the briefest tremor, ‘I’ll get going. I should make Llangurig by nightfall. So long.’

‘One more thing,’ I said, ‘I’ve taken the keys to the half-track, so you’re in the jeep.’

‘And if you touch our belongings,’ added Addie, ‘or try to sabotage the half-track or anything I will make it my sworn life’s duty to hunt you down.’

He looked at us all in turn. I think he got the message.

‘Jeep it is then,’ he said.

He turned hesitantly, thought of something, glanced at us again and then walked away and was lost to view in the swirling fog. We listened to his footsteps retreat after we lost sight of him, and heard a rusty clang as he climbed back over the fallen gates. We heard a few steps as he began the long descent, then no more.

‘So,’ said the Princess, ‘any ideas about this Eye of Zoltar thingy? I can’t see a Leviathans’ Graveyard anywhere.’

‘Nor a pirate hideout,’ added Wilson.

‘Me neither,’ I said, ‘but the answer is up here somewhere, I can feel it.’

I asked everyone to search the mountain top to see whether Curtis had missed anything. They all fanned out and I was left by myself next to Idris’ chair to think, for something didn’t add up. If the Mighty Shandar had gone to the trouble of protecting the area with hundreds of drones, then there had to be a secret up here that needed protecting. And with this amount of effort, a seriously good secret. All we had to do was find it.

Perkins was the first to return. He had found nothing except a rock-cut shelter, presumably to offer meagre comfort to any travellers caught up here in bad weather, and it seemed that weather here could be very bad indeed.

‘Bones and gristle and a few IDs,’ he said when I asked him whether there was anything inside, ‘and tattered remnants of luggage, a corroded radio and some water bottles. I also noticed that every surface slopes gently towards the edge of the cliff. A few good rainstorms and this place would be hosed down – almost like it’s self-cleaning.’

‘And the magic?’ I asked. ‘Can you feel it?’

He could, but it wasn’t the buzz of modern wizidrical energy, which is more like the humming of power lines, but the low, almost inaudible rumble of old magic.

‘I can feel it,’ he said, ‘but I can’t pinpoint it. Almost like it’s all around us.’

Addie returned next, then Wilson, followed ten minutes later by the Princess. They too had found nothing but damp rock and a few buttons, coins and shards of bone.

‘Are we done?’ asked the Princess. ‘This place gives me the willies.’

I looked at their faces in turn. Their fate was my responsibility. It was my expedition, my wish to come up here, my need to see what lay hidden at Cadair Idris.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m really sorry. There’s something up here, I know it. Something that explains all this – the Mighty Shandar, the facility down below, the drones, everything. Even the reason Kevin sent us all the way out here. Problem is, I just can’t see it. Quizzler must have found the Eye of Zoltar elsewhere, which isn’t so unbelievable; it was a legend that linked the Eye with Pirate Wolff, and only a half-legend that linked Woolf with the Leviathans’ Graveyard. And with all clues amounting to nothing, we’re done. We’ll head back as soon as we’ve had a break. You go below the cloud and dry out. I’m staying up here a few more minutes.’

‘I’m going to make some tea,’ said Wilson, practical as ever.

‘I’ll help you,’ said Addie. ‘I don’t like it up here. It all feels wrong. Princess? Come and help. I think Jenny and Perkins need to talk out our options.’

They left, and Perkins and I sat on a lump of carved stone. We said nothing for several minutes.

‘Addie was right,’ he said finally, ‘we need to talk. I’m your best and only chance of getting out of this mess. I can’t unspell the entire drone army, but I can probably disrupt them long enough to cover your retreat across the mile or so of open grassland.’

‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘We leave as one, or leave as none. No more spelling your life away, Perkins. Ordinary sorcery only. Promise me?’

‘If you had my powers you wouldn’t hesitate to use them,’ he said. ‘You’d give your life without batting an eyelid.’

‘This isn’t negotiable, Perkins. This is about
us
. Promise me?’

He bit his lip and sighed, then rested his hand on mine. I could feel him trembling.

‘I’m not what you think I am, Jenny, and there was never going to be an us. Not for long, anyway.’