The Eye of Zoltar

‘Okay,’ I said, as soon as we had given Ignatius a minute’s silence as a vague sort of respect, ‘this is where we are: Addie went to rescue Perkins last night and told me that if she didn’t return she was dead. It’s now nine o’clock. I say we leave it until midday before assuming the worst. After that, we head off towards Llangurig. Any objections?’

There weren’t any, of course, and we settled down to wait.

Leviathans explained and some tourists

It rained in the morning for about half an hour, but we sheltered under the awning attached to the half-track. At eleven o’clock two Tralfamosaurs moved through the camp, so we climbed the poles until they were safely past. The morale of the small group was not high. Despite the fact that none of us had liked Ignatius and his demise had tipped Addie’s guaranteed 50 per cent survival rate in our favour, a member of our group had still died, and somewhere he would be mourned. Curtis was being unbearably smug as he thought he had one over on me, so was best avoided. I’d told the Princess about his visit the previous evening. She again suggested she kill him, which I again refused. So with neither of us talking to Curtis and Ralph not talking very well, Wilson was about the only person we could all turn to for a chat. He was in a good mood, and spent the time writing up his birdwatching notes in a blue exercise book.

I looked over his shoulder and noticed that aside from the odd pigeon and a wren or two, the ‘birds I’ve seen this week’ page was almost completely blank.

‘Not much luck seeing birds, then?’ I asked. ‘Tharv’s ban must be working.’

‘The absence of birds has nothing to do with him,’ said Wilson. ‘Birds have a hard time living out here. The successful ones either learn how to burrow like sand martins, puffins or blind mole-sparrows, or have a huge turn of speed like the swift or Falcon X-1. Anything else that flaps is otherwise … devoured.’

‘By what?’

‘The Cloud Leviathans,’ said Wilson as though it were obvious. ‘The beasts swoop low across the land ingesting huge volumes of air along with everything that’s in it. The air is then compressed in the Leviathan’s muscular chambers, and when the run is over, the beast swallows the flying creatures and vents the compressed air through pressure ducts on its undersides, assisting with extra lift at the end of a feeding run.’

‘Sort of like whales in the ocean?’ asked Curtis.

‘Absolutely,’ said Wilson. ‘Leviathans have been known to swallow flocks of starlings more than ten thousand strong, and are suggested as the reason behind the passenger pigeon extinction in North America. It’s the reason birds migrate, too – to avoid being eaten. I’m not surprised at the lack of birds. Since Cloud Leviathans are about the size of a smallish passenger jet, they can get pretty hungry.’

‘How does it fly with such ridiculously small wings?’ asked the Princess, holding up a blurry photograph she’d found in a copy of Ten Animals to Avoid in the Cambrian Empire. The creature was sort of like a stubby plesiosaur, with four seemingly inadequate-sized paddle-shaped wings, and a large mouth on the underneath of a broad, flat head.

‘No one’s ever studied them at length,’ said Wilson, ‘firstly because they are rare – fewer than five, it’s suggested – and secondly because they have a chameleonic skin that allows them a limited invisibility. No one has ever seen a body, far less a skeleton, hence the theory of a legendary graveyard – somewhere they all go to die.’

‘Do you think it’s likely Sky Pirate Wolff trained one?’ I asked.

Wilson thought for a moment.

‘It’s always possible, of course, and I’ve heard the stories about aerial piracy, the destruction of Cloud City Nimbus III and the RMS Tyrannic, but I’m fairly sceptical. As the Princess noted, it doesn’t look like a good flyer, so how could it support the weight of a team of pirates?’

We all fell silent after that, and I considered Sky Pirate Wolff, and whether she existed or not – if not, then the Eye of Zoltar might not exist either, but I was not necessarily here to find the Eye, but to ask Able Quizzler what he knew – something I could still do, even with our current difficulties.

On the dot of twelve and with Addie and Perkins not returned, I decided we should leave. I wrote what we were doing on a sheet of paper and left it taped to the bottom of Addie’s pod pole. Wilson suggested he take the wheel and after some grinding of gears we departed along the the compacted dirt road marked ‘Llangurig and the North’, to which the Cambrian Tourist Board had helpfully added: ‘32% chance of being devoured, but good scenery with ample picnic spots’.