The Eye of Zoltar

‘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 when 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.’