The Eye of Zoltar

Perkins’ secret

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.’

I didn’t say anything. I wanted us to be together but I knew also, deep down, that he was right. He was the only chance we had.

‘I didn’t tell you earlier,’ he said, ‘but Ralph’s Genetic Master Reset wasn’t the only spell I’ve done that I had to burn some of my own life spirit to undertake – the rubberising spell took two years out of me. In fact,’ he said, dropping his gaze, ‘all spelling takes time off me. Every scrap of magic I’ve ever done has exacted a cost measured in weeks, months and years. Truthfully, how old do I look?’

‘I don’t want to hear this,’ I said.

‘You’ve got to, Jenny. How old?’

I stared at him for a moment.

‘Fifty?’

‘I’m sixty-one. Wizidrically induced ageing is kinder to the skin than sun and wind and years. I’m a fraud, Jenny. I can’t do magic – at least, not without shortening my life. You know how old I really am? How long I’ve been on the planet, I mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said as a nasty thought struck me.

‘I’m fourteen, Jenny. I’m not a wizard, I’m a Burner. A one-shot throwaway, and like all Burners, I’m here for one reason only – to shine brightly for a fleeting moment to help others in their time of need.’

I’d never met a Burner, but he was right: they typically lasted only two or three big spells before they had mined their own life spirit to nothing. Some of the finest magicians on the planet had been Burners, who did one fantastic feat of magic, then were gone.

‘No,’ I said, tears springing to my eyes, ‘no more magic. We can put you on other duties when we get back to Kazam.’

He shook his head sadly.

‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted,’ he said, ‘to be magically useful. Jenny, we have been charged to find the Eye of Zoltar, and protect the Princess at all costs. Moobin told me to undertake my duties with “all other considerations secondary”. Moobin wouldn’t have told me that if this quest wasn’t of vital importance.’

He was right. Moobin wouldn’t have taken the decision on his own, either.

‘The greatest sorcerers give everything to their craft, and at least this way I get to spend the rest of my life with you. My mind is made up, Jenny. It’s time you started treating me as what I really am – a useful resource to be expended wisely.’

I looked up at him and gave him a wan smile. I think I loved him more than ever at that particular moment. I’d be married in the fullness of time, and have children, and be widowed and marry again – but my heart, my true heart, the one that loves first and most strongly, would always belong to Perkins.

‘They always said you can’t make relationships within the magic industry,’ I said, wiping my eyes, ‘and some say that magic actively works to prevent it.’

‘Yeah,’ said Perkins, ‘that’s how I see it too.’

There was a pause.

‘“A resource to be expended wisely”?’ I repeated. ‘That’s really how you see yourself?’

He smiled.

‘A bit harsh, yes, but I was trying to make a point. Remember Kevin foresaw I would grow old in the Cambrian Empire? He was right – it’s just happening a bit more quickly than I thought.’

I sighed, pulled out my hair tie and rubbed my fingers through my hair. It was knotted and matted from the three days I’d gone without a bath. I’d been an idiot to think this was anything but a quest. Searches were nice and soft and cuddly and no one need be killed. A quest always demanded the death of a trusted colleague and one or more difficult ethical dilemmas. I’d been in denial. I’d been a fool.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘for dragging you into this.’

‘Nonsense,’ he replied, ‘I came of my own free will. Okay, it’s a serious downer that the Eye of Zoltar isn’t here, but at least we know that for sure. Ten minutes ago we didn’t even know that.’

‘Perhaps – but useless if we can’t get to tell anyone.’

‘Defeatist talk,’ said Perkins, jumping to his feet. ‘We can figure out the Shandar problem when we get home. Let’s kick those drones where it hurts and get you headed for home.’

‘I’m not sure that metaphor works with drones, who have no parts to hurt, but yes, let’s go – what plans do you have to disrupt the Hollow Men?’

‘I’m working on something,’ he said with a smile.

We started to walk towards the archway that led to the gates and the stairway back down, and I turned to take one last look at the large semicircular area, from where the giant Idris would once have considered the cosmos.

‘He wouldn’t have seen much in this low cloud,’ said Perkins, thinking pretty much the same as I.

And that was when we heard a rattle as several things struck the ground behind us. We turned instinctively to investigate, and saw a few human finger bones rolling on the ground. They hadn’t been there before. Perkins and I frowned at one another as an ulna dropped out of the foggy murk above us with a wristwatch still attached by some dried gristle. I picked it up. It wasn’t a watch, it was a wrist altimeter, such as a parachutist or aerialist might wear. There was something engraved on the back.

‘To Shipmate Fly-low Milo, the finest aerialist that ever there was,’ I read.

‘Sounds like pirate grammar to me,’ said Perkins. ‘They missed out everything but the “Arr”.’

‘No, that’s engraved on the strap, look here.’

‘Oh. Right. But what does it mean?’

We both looked up at the tendrils of fog drifting past.

‘The old magic we can sense is the cloud,’ I said. ‘There’s a reason the top of Cadair Idris is constantly swathed in cloud … it’s hiding something.’

I picked up a stone, and threw it upwards as high as I could. There was a noise as the stone hit something, and a second later we jumped aside as a small section of rotted aircraft wing complete with tattered canvas came wheeling out of the fog and crashed to the ground. There was something hidden above us. We couldn’t find Pirate Wolff’s hideout for the very simple reason that it wasn’t meant to be found. That’s the thing about pirates. It’s not wise to underestimate their cunning.

‘If there’s something up there there must be a way of accessing it,’ I said, looking around. ‘We need to find the highest point.’

After a brief scout around in the damp fog, we found it – the high seat back of Idris’ chair, one side of which was twenty feet above the hard stone ground, and the other a precipitous seven-thousand-foot drop through the fog to the valley floor below.

‘Give me a hand,’ I said, and Perkins helped me to climb on to the large stone seat. I looked around to see how to climb farther and found a useful handhold, then a foothold, and then another. The holds were impossible to see from below against the wet stone, but had been definitely cut for a purpose. I had soon climbed upon the seat back, a narrow rock ledge less than six inches wide. I made a mental note that if I were to fall, I would try to land on the safe side of the chair – and when I say ‘safe’ I’m speaking in purely relative terms: a painful drop twenty feet on to wet rock rather than a seven-thousand-foot fall to certain death below. I cautiously stayed low, and reached above my head into the cloud, which here seemed to be thicker and distinctly uncloud-like – more like smoke. My fingers touched nothing, so, with fortune favouring the bold, I stood upright on the narrow ledge, all vision vanishing as my upper body was enveloped by the fog. I was mildly disoriented and my foot slipped on the wet rock, but I regained my footing, my heart beating faster. I stood up straight and reached above my head, straining to touch something. I even stood on tiptoe, but nothing. I was about to give up and return to firm ground when Kevin’s last message rang out in my head:

You may have to take a leap of faith if you find yourself on the shoulders of a giant.

I was standing on Idris’ chairback, about as close to his long-dead shoulders as I was likely to be, and if this wasn’t a leap of faith, I wasn’t sure what was.

I made a small jump and reached above my head, but felt nothing, and when I landed my feet slipped. For a moment I thought I would fall, but then I regained my balance.

‘Come on, Jenny,’ I said to myself, ‘that was nothing like a leap.’

‘Perkins?’ I called out.

‘Yes?’ came a disembodied voice from below.

‘I’m going to leap.’

‘And trust in providence?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘something better – I’m going to trust in … Kevin.’

And I jumped. Lept, actually. Even today I can’t remember whether I jumped on the cliff side or the summit side, but reasoning it out later it must have been the cliff side. Without the certainty of death, the leap wouldn’t have worked.

Because it did work. I leapt as high and as far as I could and put out my hands, hoping to grab hold of something, and I did. But it wasn’t the rung of a ladder, or a rope. It was a human hand, and it grabbed me tightly around the wrist, held me for a moment and then hauled me up until I was safe. I looked around and blinked, open-mouthed. I had not expected to see what I could see, nor the identity of the person who had just saved me.