The Eye of Zoltar

So that’s what we decided to do. We got back in the jeep and headed off over the open land towards the mountain. I say ‘open land’ but that was true only in that there were no trees. The road rose and fell with the contours, and then tipped into a shallow ravine where the river crossed our path.

Addie slowed to a stop when we reached the river, and we looked around at the morbid sight that met our eyes. We didn’t speak for some moments.

‘Holy cow,’ said Perkins finally.

Addie switched off the engine and we climbed out. It was a medium-sized river, stony and fast moving and no more than a couple of feet deep. But it wasn’t the river that we had stopped to see, it was the bones. There were, quite literally, thousands of them. All human, and in places piled so thick that they had clogged the river and raised the water level. There were vehicles, too. Some overturned by winter floods, others corroded to nothing and a few that looked as though they had been there less than a year.

‘I’m thinking we’ve just discovered what happened to everyone who headed this way,’ said Addie, ‘ambushed and massacred.’

‘Do you think the Mountain Silurians aim to kill us anyway?’ asked Wilson. ‘That they aim to kill us anyway?’

‘After all my financial advice,’ said the Princess, ‘that would be a pretty dismal thing to do.’

Addie had approached the river and knelt down to inspect the bones.

‘It won’t be the Siluri,’ said Addie, ‘they’re honourable people, if a little violent and not very sophisticated.’

She held up a cleanly sliced ulna, then a lower jaw cleaved neatly sideways.

‘No, these are random wounds by a swiftly wielded long sword. These people were overcome not by skill, but by numbers.’

‘Drones,’ I said. ‘Hollow Men.’

We looked around nervously, but there was nothing – just the babbling of the brook, the gurgle of water through rocks.

‘Over here,’ said Wilson, who was standing next to a Land Rover half submerged in the river. The canvas top and seats had rotted, and the keys were still in the ignition. In the back were rain-stained sketchbooks full of illustrations of the Cloud Leviathan, and notebooks packed with notes, observations, discoveries.

‘A scientific expedition,’ said Wilson. ‘All that learning. For nothing.’

Addie drew her dagger and looked around. We were in a dip in the ground. It was a bad place to stop and a good place to attack, depending on your perspective.

‘These were all attacked returning,’ I said quietly. ‘Look at the direction in which the vehicles are pointing.’

Everyone looked. All the vehicles were headed towards the road we had just come in on. All these travellers had discovered secrets out here – Leviathans, Hollow Men, even something about Sky Pirate Wolff and possibly the Eye of Zoltar – but the secrets had stayed secrets; dead men and women tell no tales.

‘You were right, Addie,’ said Perkins, ‘there is a hidden menace waiting for us out here. But even Hollow Men have to come from somewhere – and the closest place is that facility. Even if they started to march right now, we’d still have half an hour or more to get away.’

‘I think not,’ said the Princess, who had moved away from the group and was staring at the ground near a small grassy hollow. ‘We’re surrounded.’

We joined her, and she pointed to four swords that were buried up to their hilts in the ground.

But it wasn’t the swords alone that worried us. Positioned around them were four neat stacks of clothes tied up with string. There were trousers, shirts, pairs of shoes, gloves and jackets, ties and hats. All identical, all carefully folded and waiting to be conjured into life to do their master’s bidding. Drones.

‘All these people were killed by a small drone army, eager and willing to do one thing and one thing only,’ I said. ‘To stop anyone returning from Cadair Idris.’

‘It would explain why Geraint the Great wanted my entire plan for the Goat Marketing Board up front,’ said the Princess. ‘He knew that people never return.’

‘But why?’ asked Perkins. ‘What’s the secret?’

‘I’m only guessing here,’ I said, ‘but perhaps the facility we saw is a manufacturing facility for hollow suits for the drones to wear. Perhaps the magic is in the weave.’

‘If that was so,’ said Addie, ‘the lorries would come out heavier than they go in, but they don’t, they’re lighter on the way out.’

‘And yet the lorry you saw coming in, the heavy one, was empty?’ said Perkins.

‘I know,’ said Addie, ‘it doesn’t make any sense.’

‘I’ve got a feeling it won’t just be about Cloud Leviathans and Sky Pirate Wolff,’ I said, ‘it will be about drones, the Mighty Shandar and Skybus Aeronautics.’

Perkins looked around at the scene of the massacre.

‘And I’ve a nasty feeling that our enlightenment may be short lived.’

‘You say the jolliest things,’ said Wilson, ‘but we’re not dead yet. Let’s get going.’

Cadair Idris