The Eye of Zoltar

The Empty Quarter

The Empty Quarter was exceptionally well named. It took up almost exactly a quarter of the Cambrian Empire and was, well, empty: an unspoilt tract of rolling upland roughly squarish in shape, and forty miles across. No one was mad enough to live here and for the most part the Quarter was simply thousands of acres of scrubby grass, hog-marsh, stunted oak and the occasional bubbling tar pit.

We moved off full of expectation, but after half an hour of driving had seen nothing more exciting than a distant herd of Buzonji and the fleeting glimpse of a Snork Badger’s corkscrew tail. We passed several armoured cars returning from a failed Tralfamosaur shoot, and were then overtaken by two off-road motorcycles which we re-encountered three miles up the road, the bikes twisted and mangled and with no sign of the riders.

‘We’ll probably never know,’ said Addie when Curtis asked her what happened. ‘Only half the missing are ever accounted for. Death certificates here in the Empire have a box marked “Non-Specific Peril-Related Fatality” – and it gets ticked a lot.’

‘It would be a good place to kill someone you don’t like and get away with it,’ said Curtis thoughtfully.

‘We think that happens too,’ said Addie, ‘but natural justice has a way of making good.’

We drove on, and on two occasions met armed road bandits about whom Addie seemed curiously unconcerned. She took one look at their clothes and general demeanour and told me to drive on and ignore them, which I did without incident. The third roadblock was somehow different, and Addie instructed me to slow down and stop.

‘These kidnappers are Oldivicians,’ explained Addie, ‘much more dangerous. Our tribe and theirs had a brief misunderstanding recently and things are still a little tender.’

‘How recently?’ asked Perkins.

‘Three centuries. Let me do the talking.’

We pulled to the side of the road and three armed men walked up with an arrogant swagger. They were dressed in the traditional woollen tweed suits of the Oldivicians, with leather boots and a flat cap. Like Addie, they also displayed a complex series of tattoos on the side of their faces to denote kinship, position and allegiance. They were armed with ancient-looking weapons, and wore twin bandoliers of cartridges criss-crossed across their torsos. It looked too as though they had already done some business that day – they had a downcast-looking prisoner already with them, sitting on a rock close to where their Buzonjis tramped the soil impatiently.

‘Hello, Addie,’ said the first bandit in a cheerful manner, ‘tour work good these days?’

‘Haven’t lost anyone for almost a month now, Gareth,’ she replied, ‘so not bad. How’s the kidnapping business?’

‘It’s rubbish to be honest with you, Addie,’ he said. ‘It’s got about and no real celebrities attempt to cross the Empty Quarter unless with bodyguards and loaded with heavy weaponry.’

‘We live in sorry, untrusting times. You going to let me pass?’

‘Perhaps. Have a look, Rhys.’

One of the other bandits stared at us while consulting a well-thumbed copy of Müller’s Guide to Kidnappable Personages, which I noticed was over three years old. I’d probably make next year’s edition. Luckily, he wouldn’t recognise the one person who was definitely in Müller’s – the Princess. Rhys stared at us all in turn, looked back at Gareth and then shook his head. But Gareth, it seemed, wasn’t convinced.

‘Anyone in there we should know about?’ he asked.

Addie shifted her stance to rest her hand on her dagger. Gareth noted this and changed his stance, too. His compatriots, through long practice, picked up on this. I even heard a safety catch release. The tension in the air seemed to have risen tenfold. Addie spoke next, and it was menacing in its softness.

‘The thing is, Gareth, that if you ask me if there’s anyone kidnappable with me, then I’m honour bound to answer, and then you’ll ask me to turn them over, and I’ll tell you that you’ll have to kill me before I’d do that, and my tribe and your tribe are in a blood feud but it’s our turn to kill one of yours, and if you kill me then an Oldivician will have killed two Silurians in a row, and that’s all-out war between our tribes and it’s last man standing. You want that?’

As they stared at one another in a dangerous manner, something odd happened. Ralph started glowing with a pale yellow light, and then floated a couple of feet out of the half-track. Everyone’s eyes were suddenly on him.

‘Well, what do you know?’ said Gareth with a smile. ‘You’ve got a sorcerer. They’re worth bundles. Grab him, lads.’

Perkins and I looked at one another as the bandits moved forward.

‘Ralph can’t be a sorcerer,’ I whispered, ‘we know all of them.’

They pulled the glowing Ralph out of the back of the half-track, holding him down by his shoelaces as if he were a helium balloon in a breeze. He was giggling stupidly and mumbling something about camels, and as we watched bright sparks started to fizz out of his ears. He then turned blue, then red, then green, then burped out a large iridescent bubble that burst to produce a flock of brightly coloured butterflies.

I glanced at Ignatius and Curtis, who were themselves now giggling stupidly at Ralph’s predicament, and I suddenly had a terrible thought.

‘Perkins,’ I said, ‘did you leave your bag in the half-track when we went to look at the slugs?’

Perkins hurriedly opened the leather suitcase that would have contained all his potions, balms and one-shot spells written on rice paper. It was, predictably enough, empty. Ralph, like Curtis, must have had a fondness for abusing magic and, finding some spells unattended, had consumed the lot.

Ralph was now beginning to stretch and flex in a peculiar manner, as though a pony were inside him trying to get out. I’d not seen anyone have a magic overdose, but I’d heard about it. The lucky ones turn themselves inside out, and die a horribly painful death. The unlucky ones get to turn themselves inside out for ever.

‘Fun’s over,’ said Gareth to Ralph, who was still floating in the air and now doing some rapid transformations between a piano, a walrus and a wardrobe and then back again, ‘give it a rest and come down here immediately.’

Ralph, predictably enough, ignored him.

‘Blast,’ said Perkins, thumping the side of the half-track with his fist, ‘I’m responsible for this.’

‘No, it’s hard cheese for the idiot whatsisname,’ said the Princess. ‘If he’s stupid enough to consume a bagful of unknown spells, then he can deal with the consequences.’

I looked at Perkins, and he looked back at me, and he sighed. With the skill of Mystical Arts comes a certain … responsibility.

He stood up.

‘It’s me you want,’ he said to Gareth the Bandit. ‘That bloody fool is suffering the symptoms of acute magic poisoning. Do what you want with me, but I need to help him before he bursts.’

Ralph responded by freeing himself from his captors and doing three somersaults in mid-air, braying like a donkey and then momentarily turning into a tiger and back again, all the time giggling uncontrollably. Ignatius and Curtis were laughing too, and cheering him on, and even some of the bandits were beginning to find it amusing. But just then Ralph’s foot expanded explosively to four times its normal size, shredding his boot and covering us with scraps of tongue, laces, leather lowers and man-made uppers. No one was laughing any more.

‘Go on, then,’ said Gareth.

Perkins stretched out an index finger and began to concentrate. Doing a standard Magnaflux Spell Reversal was tricky, but I knew he wasn’t planning on that – it would be too complex given that there were now thirty or forty spells coursing through Ralph’s body. No, he’d be trying the grandmaster of all the reversals: the rarely tried, personally draining and supremely risky Genetic Master Reset.

Ralph stopped giggling as his head swelled to twice its size and then back again, followed by a curious rippling of his skin that morphed his front into his back and then into his front again, which is a lot more unpleasant to behold than it is to describe. Even Ignatius and Curtis grimaced.

Ralph started to scream in pain. Not that ‘stubbed your toe’ sort of pain, but more a kind of ‘detached kneecap’ kind of pain, only with seven simultaneous childbirths, neuralgia and a tooth abscess all mixed in as well, for good luck. The sort you hope you never get to experience.

While Ralph screamed, his ear migrated across his face with a sound like tearing cloth and the tips of his fingers shot off and ricocheted dangerously about the small group, smashing a wing mirror and causing two of the bandits to duck for cover.

And that was when Perkins let fly.

There was a burst of energy from his fingertips and a cold fireball burst out from Ralph which then expanded to a sphere about thirty feet wide, paused for a moment in a wonderful display of crackling light, then collapsed rapidly to a ball of light that enveloped the still-screaming Ralph before vanishing in a twinkling of bright lights. There was a distant rumble and all was quiet. Ralph, such as we knew him, had gone.