The Eye of Zoltar

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.’