The Eye of Zoltar

The steps were finely hewn, but were annoyingly large. About the same as those in a house but multiplied by a factor of two – which made the going hard, but made me think they had been cut for giants, which would at least confirm the legend that the mountain was not a mountain at all, but a viewing platform for the giant Idris, who would have climbed these stairs in ancient times to study the heavens and philosophise about life and existence.

I wasn’t the only person who found it hard going.

‘It would make Idris about twelve feet tall,’ panted Wilson, ‘a good size.’

‘But still one third the size of a Troll,’ said Perkins.

‘Is an ogre bigger or smaller than a giant?’ asked the Princess.

‘Human, ogre, giant, Troll,’ I said, reciting the order of magnitude of the bipedal species, ‘but there’s sometimes a bit of overlap.’

‘Ah,’ said the Princess, ‘good. That always puzzled me.’

The climb was hard work and in several places the stairway had broken away so we had to scramble across an empty patch where a precipitous drop led to the ground far below. The path took us up in a zigzag fashion so our view of the drones’ manufacturing facility hove in and out of viewpoint as we climbed to the summit. From our lofty viewpoint the facility’s use was no easier to divine, and after a while we had climbed so high that it looked like a few boxes, and we paid it no more heed. There was plenty of fresh water streaming out of the rock, which we all agreed was about the best that any of us had tasted, and even though the edges to the side of the path were vertiginous in the extreme, none of us felt at all nervous and instead experienced a certain sense of mountain elation, a sort of magic that glowed from the rock, a lingering after-effect of the giant Idris.

There were two rockfalls as we climbed up. One was a small torrent of rocks dislodged by a stream as it cascaded down, with gravel, small stones and weed, but the second was larger and potentially fatal. A large section of rock dislodged from above and came bouncing down the mountain, so we pressed ourselves flat against the rock face and watched as the boulders hit the face above us and actually bounced farther out, leaving us unscathed. The path did not come off so well, and another large chunk was torn out of the stairway. I looked up when the rocks stopped, and for a fleeting moment saw a figure that looked like Curtis peering down, and none of us were in any doubt it was he who had deliberately caused the rockfall. We spent the rest of the journey with at least one person keeping an eye out for any other skulduggery, but there were no more attempts on our lives.

We stopped for a bite at two, and then struck off with renewed vigour for the summit, eventually finding ourselves moving into the cloud at about four in the afternoon. The air felt damp and clammy, and fine droplets of water began to form on our clothes. There was not a shred of vegetation to be seen anywhere, and pretty soon the rocks themselves seemed to ooze water like leaky sponges. A few minutes later a pair of large stone gateposts loomed out of the cloud, with a pair of once ornate and now very rusty gates collapsed between them. We climbed over, the small group now subdued and quiet. Although we were still in cloud and visibility was poor, we knew we had reached the summit. We walked along a rock-cut walkway, under an archway and entered a paved semicircular area about a hundred yards in diameter. Around this semicircle were delicately carved reliefs of strange creatures battling with men in ancient armour, and in the centre, right next to the cliff edge where a slip would have one tumbling into space, was a chair carved from solid rock. The seat was at least five feet from the ground – it was a chair for a giant.

‘The Chair of Idris,’ said Addie, ‘where he would have sat and considered questions of existence, and stared into the heavens.’

‘This would once have been a full circle,’ said Wilson, looking around. ‘Half of this area has already fallen away.’

‘In a few years the chair will go too,’ came a familiar voice, ‘so count your blessings you have witnessed even this.’

Curtis walked out of the grey fog towards us, grinning. He had shown little remorse when Ignatius died, treated Ralph like an animal once he had devolved and left us to die in the Empty Quarter. He had also kidnapped the Princess, sold her in Llangurig and then tried to kill us with a rockfall. I should have hated him, but somehow, given the circumstances, I hardly felt anything at all. He would not escape back to civilisation either; the drones would cut him down before he’d gone twenty paces. It struck me as ironic that he knew nothing of his fate, but was the only one of us who vaguely deserved it.