‘So,’ said Kevin, ‘aside from princesses looking like handmaidens, what news?’
‘Lots. I’m looking for something called the Eye of Zoltar. Heard of it?’
‘Sure. It’s had Grade III legendary status for centuries.’
A Grade III legendary status meant that the Eye was ‘really not very likely at all’, which isn’t helpful, but better than Grade II: ‘No proof of existence’, and especially Grade I: ‘Proven non-existence’.
‘Grade III, eh?’ I said. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’
‘So were unicorns at one time,’ said Kevin, ‘and the coelacanth. And we all know they exist.’
Kevin then frowned deeply, looked at me again, and a cloud of consternation crossed his face.
‘Who precisely wants you to look for the Eye of Zoltar?’
I told him about the meeting with the Mighty Shandar and the options regarding the refund, and Kevin thought for a moment.
‘I need to make some enquiries. Call a Sorcerers’ Conclave for an hour’s time.’
I told him I would, and he dashed off without another word.
‘Kevin’s seen something in the future,’ said Tiger, ‘and I don’t think he likes it.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I noticed it too. And when clairvoyants get nervous, so do I.’
The Princess came back in, holding a roll of loo paper.
‘Do I fold it or crumple it before I … you know?’
Tiger and I looked at one another.
‘Don’t give me your silent-pity claptrap,’ said the Princess crossly, ‘it is a huge sacrifice to live without servants, a burden that you pinheads know nothing about. What’s more, this body is covered with unsightly red rashes and I think I may be dying. My stomach has a sort of gnawing feeling inside.’
‘Have you had it long?’
‘Since I’ve been in this hideous body.’
‘You’re hungry,’ I said simply. ‘Never felt that before?’
‘Me, a princess? Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘You’re going to have to trust that body when it starts telling you things. Let me have a look at the rash. Growing up in an orphanage tends to make you an expert on skin complaints.’
She made what I can only describe as a ‘hurrumph’ noise and I led her off grumbling in the direction of the Ladies.
Fortunately for the Princess and for Laura Scrubb, the rash was not bad and likely the result of sleeping on damp hay. After instructing her – and not assisting her – on the loo-paper problem, I took her down to the Kazam kitchens and introduced her to our cook, who was known by everyone as Unstable Mabel, but not to her face.
‘Where did you find this poor wee bairn?’ said Mabel, ladling out a large portion of leftover stew and handing it to the Princess. ‘She looks as though she has been half starved and treated with uncommon brutality. From the palace, is she?’
‘That’s an outrageous slur against a fine employer,’ said the Princess, shovelling down the stew. ‘I’ll have you know that the Royal Family are warm and generous people who treat their servants with the greatest of respect and only rarely leave them out in the rain for fun.’
Unstable Mabel, whose insanity did not stretch so far for her to be totally without lucid moments, looked at me and arched her eyebrow.
‘She’s the Princess, isn’t she?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
The Princess stopped mid-gulp, her manners apparently forgotten in her hunger.
‘How does everyone know it’s me?’
‘Because,’ said Mabel, who was always direct in speech and manner, ‘you’re well known in the Kingdom as a spoilt, conniving, cruel, bullying little brat.’
‘Right,’ said the Princess, getting out her piece of paper, ‘you’re going on the list too. Everyone on it will be flogged due to the disrespectful manner in which I have been treated. Name?’
‘Mabel … Spartacus.’
The Princess started to write, then stopped as she realised the ongoing Spartacus gag was doubtless a leg-pull.
‘You’re only making it worse for yourself,’ she scolded. ‘I hate every single one of you and can’t wait for the moment when I leave.’
And she gave us both a pouty glare and folded her arms. Mabel turned to me.
‘Can I make a suggestion?’ she said.
‘Yes, please.’
‘Take her down to the orphan labour pool and have her allocated to sewer cleaning duties for twenty-four hours. She’ll have to live outside for a couple of days afterwards due to the stench that no amount of scrubbing will remove, but it might teach her some humility.’
‘I hate all of you,’ said the Princess. ‘I hate your lack of consideration, lack of compassion and the meagre respect you show your obvious betters. If you don’t take me home right now I will hold my breath until I turn blue, and then you’ll be sorry.’
I stared at her for a moment.
‘No need for that,’ I said with a sigh, taking my car keys from my pocket. ‘I’ll just apologise to the King and the Queen and tell them their daughter is beyond my help, and probably anyone else’s. You can live out your spoilt life without effort, secure in the depths of your own supreme ignorance, and die as you lived, without purpose, true fulfilment or any discernibly useful function.’
She opened her mouth but shut it again and said nothing. I carried on:
‘You don’t need me to drive you home, Princess. You know where the door is and you can walk out of it any time you want – but I’d like you to appreciate that Laura Scrubb, the orphan with whom you are not even worthy to share skin disorders, cannot walk out of a door to anywhere until she’s eighteen, and even then it’s to a life of grinding poverty, disappointment, back-breaking toil and an early death, if she’s lucky.’
The Princess was silent for a moment, then pulled up a sleeve and looked at Laura’s rash.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’m staying. But only because I choose to do so for educational reasons, and not because any of your words meant anything to me, which they didn’t.’
‘Good,’ I said, ‘and you’ll choose to do what I tell you rather than endlessly complaining and putting people on your list?’
The Princess shrugged.
‘I might choose to do that, yes.’
I stared at her and she lowered her eyes, took the list out of her pocket and tore it into tiny pieces.
‘Pointless anyway,’ she grumbled, ‘what with everyone called Spartacus.’
And she chuckled at the joke. It showed she had a sense of humour. Perhaps she might become bearable, given time.
‘Okay, then,’ I said, ‘let’s get you into some clean clothes and out of that terrible maid’s outfit.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, with a resigned sigh, ‘I’d like that.’
I led her up to my bedroom, found some clothes about the right size and told her not to come down until she had showered and washed her hair.
She fumbled with the buttons on her blouse uselessly until I helped her.
‘Hell’s teeth, Princess, did you not do anything for yourself at the palace?’
‘I did my own sleeping,’ she said after a moment’s thought, ‘usually.’
I gathered up her tatty clothes as she took them off, then chucked them in the recycling. As I left to alert everyone to the Sorcerers’ Conclave I heard her scream as she mishandled the mixer on the shower.
Sorcerers’ Conclave
The sorcerers were all convened in the Kazam main offices an hour later. Wizard Moobin was there, as was Lady Mawgon, Full and Half Price, Perkins, Prince Nasil, Dame Corby ‘She whom the ants obey’ and Kevin Zipp, who was busy scribbling notes on the back of an envelope.
They all listened to what I had to say, from D’argento’s appearance to Shandar’s offer of a deal. Find the Eye of Zoltar, or he’d kill the Dragons, and us too if we tried to stop him. I didn’t tell them about the Princess as they’d all guess soon enough.
‘Zoltar?’ said Perkins wh
en I mentioned it. ‘Anyone we know?’
‘Zoltar was the sorcerer to His Tyrannical Majesty Amenemhat V,’ said Moobin, ‘and was ranked about third most powerful on the planet at the time. He turned to the dark Mystical Arts for cash, as we understand it, and was killed in an unspeakably unpleasant way not long after Amenemhat V himself.’
‘And the Eye?’ I asked. ‘I’m thinking it wasn’t a real one.’
‘It was a jewel,’ said Dame Corby, reading from the Codex Magicalis. ‘It says that Zoltar liked to use a staff, the top of which was adorned “with a mighty ruby the size of a goose egg”. Cut with over a thousand facets and said to dance with inner fire, the ruby was always warm to the touch, even on the coldest night. It is said that the Eye worked as a lens to magnify Zoltar’s huge power. After Zoltar’s death the Eye changed hands many time but not without mishap – lesser wizards “were changed into lead” when they attempted to harness its huge power.’
‘Changed to what?’ said Perkins.
‘Lead,’ said Dame Corby. ‘You know, the heavy metal?’
‘Oh,’ said Perkins.
‘Does it say what happened to the Eye?’ I asked.
Dame Corby turned over the page.
‘Changed hands many times – traditional reports of a curse, death to all who beheld it, ba-da-boom-ba-da-bing, usual stuff. It was definitely known to be in the possession of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1552, and was said to be instrumental in maintaining the might and power of the Ottoman Empire. It was thought to have been on one of the trains that T. E. Lawrence derailed on the Hejaz railway in 1916. It was suggested Lawrence may have owned the Eye until he died in a motorcycle accident in 1935 but nothing was found in his effects. No one’s heard of the Eye after that.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Kevin Zipp, ‘and I’ll relate to you a conversation I had with an ex-sorcerer named Able Quizzler a few years back.’
Everyone leaned closer.
‘Quizzler was part of the team that did the early spelling work for levitating railways,’ said Kevin, ‘but when I met him he was scratching a living doing voiceover work for I-speak-your-weight machines. He told me how he had spent the last forty years attempting to find the Eye of Zoltar, and with it restart his sorcery career. He had almost given up when he heard stories of a vast, multifaceted ruby that seemed to dance with inner fire, was warm to the touch and gave inexplicable powers to those skilled enough to tame it – and changed the unworthy to lead.’
‘The metal lead?’ said Perkins, who was having trouble grasping this.
‘Yes, the metal lead.’
‘And where was this?’ asked Lady Mawgon, who suddenly seemed interested.
‘The Eye of Zoltar was apparently seen around … the neck of Sky Pirate Wolff.’
Up until now everyone had been hanging on Kevin’s every word, but as soon as he mentioned Wolff, everyone sighed and threw up their arms in exasperation.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ said Moobin sceptically, ‘if there is a tall story kicking around, then fourteen pence to a pound Captain Wolff will be at the bottom of it.’
I knew of Captain Wolff, of course – everyone did. She was a mythical figure, also of Grade III ‘really not very likely at all’ status, who had more wild stories attached to her than almost anyone on the planet. She was blamed for many acts of aerial piracy but never caught, and sightings of her were sporadic, sketchy and prone to exaggeration. It was said that she had tamed a Cloud Leviathan personally, which is a bit like saying you rode a Zebricorn into battle after catching one. The Leviathan, an aircraft-sized flying creature of obscure origins, was seen only rarely, and photographed just once, about eight years before. The photograph was front-page news in the world’s newspapers and downgraded the Leviathan’s legendary status from Grade IV, ‘not very likely, to be honest’, to a Grade V: ‘okay, some basis in fact, but still partly unexplained’.
It was also speculated that Sky Pirate Wolff’s hideout was in the legendary Leviathans’ Graveyard, the place where Cloud Leviathans go to die, reputedly located somewhere on the misty heights of the mountain known as Cadair Idris. The facts were all a bit hazy, but if Wolff were somehow real, this is how she’d want it – and Wolff’s skill at taming a Leviathan would explain the ease with which she could apparently capture entire jetliners on the wing, the loss of the liner Tyrannic and even the capture and destruction of Cloud City Nimbus III, where every man and woman was made to walk the plank – it rained Cloud City citizens for weeks, some say.
‘Sky Pirate Wolff doesn’t exist,’ said Moobin. ‘It’s more likely the Tyrannic was lost at sea, no one knows what happened to Nimbus III, and as for pirates boarding jetliners, it’s more probable the scallywags stowed themselves aboard inside the wheel-wells.’
There then started an argument about whether the legendary pirate existed or not, whether it was safe or even possible to hide oneself in wheel-wells, and the wisdom of chasing after Grade IV legends and half-truths told by Able Quizzler, an old man driven insane by a quest that had dominated his life.
‘Okay, okay,’ I yelled above the arguing, ‘let’s all just calm down. Kevin, finish your story, please.’
‘Last time we spoke, Able Quizzler told me that the Eye of Zoltar was within his grasp. I think it’s a lead worth pursuing.’
‘When and where was this?’ asked Lady Mawgon.
‘Six years ago, in a place called Llangurig. But I trust Able. We go back a while.’
Everyone went quiet.
‘Llangurig is well inside the Cambrian Empire,’ observed Moobin, ‘in a region notorious for bandits, wild beasts, emulating slime mould and other perils. It’s too dangerous.’
‘So is fighting Shandar,’ I said. ‘Where’s the harm in travelling to Llangurig to see if I can find Quizzler? After all, the refund isn’t due for another month – and I could negotiate for Boo’s release at the same time.’
This had an effect on the gathering, but before we could discuss it further there was a whooshing of wings and some brief bickering, and two dark shapes flew by the window.
‘That’s just what we need,’ said Lady Mawgon, ‘a couple of infants.’
And with a clattering at the window, two Dragons attempted to get in at the same time. They elbowed each other petulantly, breaking the window frame and panes of glass as they did so.
‘Hey!’ I said in my loudest voice, and they suddenly went silent. I was about the only one who could control them.
‘Cut it out, you two – what happened to that bit where Dragons were creatures of great dignity, learning and wisdom?’
‘Sorry, what did you say?’ said Colin, removing one of his iPod earbuds. ‘I was listening to the Doobie Brothers.’
The Dragons
The two Dragons I found myself vaguely responsible for were called Feldspar Axiom Firebreath IV, and Colin. They were each the size of a pony, and were decidedly reptilian in appearance, manner and gait. They had long jaws with serrated teeth, ornate head frills, a long barbed tail and explosively flammable breath. Their wings were a triumph of design in that when they were unfolded they took up the entire room and were as translucent as tissue paper, but when folded fitted neatly into dimples on their backs. They had muscular arms and legs, both of which carried sharp talons that needed to be clipped often as they would otherwise damage the hotel’s parquet flooring.
But despite their appearance, which was both elegant and terrifying in equal measure, they acted like particularly dumb teenage brothers, only with an IQ immeasurably higher, and better taste in clothes and friends.
‘Welcome home,’ I said. ‘Were you impressed by all that learning?’
‘Good in parts,’ said Colin thoughtfully, ‘but generally inclined to repetition.’
‘That’s it?’ said Wizard Moobin. ‘Our entire intellectual output dismissed in a sentence?’
‘We can discuss human literary output further if you’d like,’ said Feldspar, ‘but we’d only get as far as Aristotle bef
ore you’d do that thing where you stop working and fall apart. What’s it called again?’
‘Dying?’
‘That’s it. But your output isn’t all boring. We thought that a few humans were actually really smart, but they were too rare to be of any real use, and rarely became leaders where they could actually change things.’
‘And,’ added Colin, ‘I was a little disappointed over all that killing.’
Colin was a strict pacifist, and as much a vegan as any Dragon ever could be.
‘There is quite a lot of it in our history,’ I conceded.
‘I knew how much before I went,’ said Colin, ‘I was just unprepared for the range of ridiculous excuses you lot use in its justification. It’s somewhat bizarre to learn that many of you think that other humans are somehow different enough to be hated and killed, when in reality you’re all tiresomely similar in outlook, needs and motivation, and differ only by peculiar habits, generally shaped by geographical circumstance.’
‘We’re not all bad,’ I said, suddenly finding myself defending my own species.
‘No,’ agreed Colin, ‘some of you are hardly rubbish at all, and a few – there are always a few – are quite exceptional. Mind you,’ he added, ‘you can always take solace in the fact that humans are generally better than Trolls.’
‘Better than Trolls?’ said Lady Mawgon scornfully. ‘Praise indeed.’
‘Generally better,’ repeated Colin, in case she had misunderstood.
We all fell silent, and Feldspar looked around the room carefully.
‘Is this a Sorcerers’ Conclave?’ he asked, and I nodded.
‘It’s about the Mighty Shandar,’ said Moobin, and he outlined the refund issue, and how finding the Eye of Zoltar might help.
‘I thought he might want to kill us,’ said Colin in a matter-of-fact manner, ‘most do. We’ll defend ourselves as well as we can, but it won’t be much of a fight – neither of us will be full-grown and at Peak Magic for at least another century, perhaps two.’
‘… which is why we need to find the Eye,’ I said, ‘heard of it?’
The Eye of Zoltar Page 6
