‘Unless you’re not in an armoured car,’ said Perkins.
‘But everyone is,’ said Addie simply. ‘Take the next left and continue on for about twenty miles.’
The half-track was neither fast nor quiet, so to conserve fuel and our eardrums I drove as slowly as practical, and we spent the time taking in the spectacular local countryside. The nation was utterly unspoilt. There were almost no modern buildings, shopping malls or fast-food joints, and no advertising hoardings, electricity pylons or other modern contrivances. Once away from the almond groves, broadleaf forests covered much of the lowlands, and the small houses dotted haphazardly about were constructed of stone with riveted steel roofs, and all were in some manner fortified.
‘What’s a Somnubuvorus?’ asked the Princess, who had been reading Enjoy the unspoilt charms of the Cambrian Empire without death or serious injury.
‘It looks like a cross between a baobab and a turnip,’ explained Addie, ‘and about the size of a telephone box. It’s actually not a plant at all, but a fungus that releases puffs of hallucinogenic spores into the breeze. Anyone who inhales them suddenly becomes convinced that being near the Somnubuvorus will enlighten and enrich them with hard-hitting and devastatingly relevant social and political commentary. Then, of course, you are soon overcome with a sense of listlessness and torpidity, and fall fast asleep.’
‘It sounds like what would happen if you weaponised French cinema,’ I observed.
‘Yes, pretty much, only French cinema doesn’t secrete enzymes from its roots and dissolve you while you sleep.’
‘Yag,’ said the Princess, and returned to the book.
I had a thought.
‘Why did the gunners shoot down Col— I mean, that Dragon just before we left?’
‘That’s easily explained,’ said Addie. ‘Emperor Tharv deplores mankind’s need to defy gravity so he’s banned all aerial traffic above his Empire. But because he wants to be equitable and just in all matters, he thinks that it would be unfair if birds, bats, insects and so forth were allowed to fly – so he banned them, too.’
‘And that included Dragons?’
‘Right. But here’s the real issue: Emperor Tharv comes from a long line of dangerously insane rulers, and the greatest difficulty in taking over from the previous dangerously insane ruler is to demonstrate that you are as crazy, or even crazier. When Emperor Tharv took over from his father, he declared that he would train an entire legion of killer elephants to invade the rest of Wales.’
‘I heard something about the killer elephant story.’
‘It was just sabre-rattling. Firstly, elephants don’t make good deranged killers, being generally good natured, and secondly, the idea fell foul of the “Killer Elephant Non-Proliferation Treaty”, so Tharv simply banned all flying instead. The high jump and pole-vault are illegal, pogo sticks and skipping are banned, and even jumping off chairs and tables is frowned upon.’
‘But that’s absurd,’ said Perkins. ‘Are you saying that geese and pigeons and bees and and bats and Dragons and stuff can’t fly in the Empire?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘And how does he expect to enforce that?’
Addie shrugged.
‘He can’t obviously, except—’
‘Except what?’
‘Except … have you seen anything that flies since you arrived?’
I thought about this, and looked around. Now she mentioned it, I didn’t think I had.
‘Right,’ said Addie, ‘weird, isn’t it? We’ve got a lot of jeopardy here in the Empire, but not many things that flap.’
We all fell silent as we considered this.
‘If there are no aeroplanes in Cambria,’ said Perkins, pointing towards two lorries that had stopped in the road for their drivers to chat, ‘what about them?’
The lorries were painted with the pale blue logo of Skybus Aeronautics, and as we watched the one heading into the Empire lumbered forward with a grinding of gears while the one heading out accelerated rapidly away.
‘Aircraft components,’ said Addie. ‘Emperor Tharv may not support flying, but he does apparently have an aircraft component factory somewhere in the Empire.’
‘It doesn’t sound a very consistent policy, does it?’
Addie shrugged.
‘Perhaps not. But as insane as he is, he does okay for us. Do you get free healthcare and child support in your country?’
‘No.’
‘We do. And even though the Cambrian Empire boasts the lowest life expectancy in the Kingdoms what with all the civil war and jeopardy tourism and stuff, at least we get to live our short lives in a varied fashion: full of interest, fun and adventure. Which would you prefer? A short life as a tiger or a long one as a rabbit? I’m with the tiger.’
‘We’re in broad agreement,’ I replied after giving the matter some thought. ‘The only place where we part company is that I think everyone should have the choice to be a tiger or a rabbit – or anything in between.’
Flesh-eating slugs
We stopped for lunch at one of the many tea rooms that dotted the roadside, each one of them designated, by mutual consent, a neutral area where even rival warlords could stop and have a cup of tea and a currant bun without risking a dagger between the shoulder blades. The lunch was excellent – simple, yet tasty – but the meal was marred by Curtis and Ignatius’ brash behaviour – they thought it amusing to talk loudly, flick food at one another and generally act like the complete idiots they were. We apologised as we left, and were told cheerily that ‘youthful high spirits’ were generally tolerated, but if we set foot inside the café again, Curtis and Ignatius would both be ‘tied inside a sack and beaten with sticks’.
We were back on the road within ten minutes.
‘Hello,’ said Ignatius, who had clambered to the front of the half-track to talk to us.
‘I’m not listening to anything but an apology,’ I said.
‘It was only a little food fight,’ he said with a grin, ‘barely worthy of the name.’
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
‘There’s a slug farm coming up,’ he said, pointing to his copy of Ten animals to avoid in the Cambrian Empire, ‘and I thought we should stop and have a look.’
I looked at Addie, and she nodded.
‘They’re quite amusing in a gooey kind of way,’ she said, ‘and who knows? With a bit of luck he’ll be eaten by one.’
‘Oh, come on!’ said Ignatius with a smile. ‘I’m not that bad.’
Addie stared at him in a ‘Yes you are’ kind of way and he smiled sheepishly and rejoined his friends in the back. We took the next turning on the right, and parked in a dusty car park alongside a half-dozen armoured tour buses. Addie told us to go on ahead without her as she’d seen flesh-eating slugs many times. Ralph said he’d not come either, as he had a peculiar allergy to ‘anything without legs, such as cats.’
‘Cats have legs,’ said the Princess.
‘They do, don’t they?’ agreed Ralph in a confused manner, but declined to join us anyway. So myself, Perkins, the Princess, Curtis and Ignatius trooped into the farm.
After paying the entry fee we walked down between circular concrete pits, each containing about a dozen slugs the size of marrows. They were the colour of double cream, had grooves along their bodies, and were covered by a slimy gel that smelt of rotting flesh. The slugs had no eyes, a single mouth with razor-sharp fangs, and atop their small heads were an array of antennae of varying size and function that waved excitedly as we walked past. They were, in a word, repulsive, and if any creature had ‘avoid’ stamped all over it, the flesh-eating slug was it.
‘Woh,’ said the Princess, ‘that is so gross.’
‘It’s about the only placemat design that we are already agreed upon,’ said Ignatius excitedly, producing a camera from his bag. ‘You may be interested to know that we only ever do six designs in a set of placemats.’
‘Is that a fact?’ I sai
d.
‘Yes. Although the average seated meal is only 3.76 persons, you might be forgiven for thinking that four designs might suffice, but no. A dinner of six is not unusual, and by employing numerous focus groups and conducting market research, we have discovered that while repetition of placemat design is acceptable in a group larger than six, in any group smaller than six it is not. Thus, six designs. Clever, eh?’
‘Where’s the nearest Somnubuvorus?’ said the Princess. ‘I want to throw myself into it.’
‘The nearest what?’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Laura, stop antagonising the nitwits.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said the Princess, doing her best curtsy yet. The matter was soon forgotten and we joined the crowd milling around one of the feeding troughs. The slug farmer was giving a talk.
‘… the slug’s mucus – or slime – can be used in all manner of products from meat tenderisers to skin exfoliant to paint stripper to battery acid, and an adult slug can ooze almost a gallon a day, if kept moist. Any questions before feeding time?’
One of the other tourists put up their hand.
‘Is it true that enriched slug slime is part of Emperor Tharv’s secret chemical weapons stockpile?’
‘That was always conjecture and never proved,’ said the farmer, ‘but knowing Tharv, almost certainly.’
‘Can we wrestle them?’ asked a stupid-looking young man who turned out to be Curtis.
‘This is a farm,’ said the slug farmer testily, ‘not a circus. If you want to fight one, then go to an official slug-wrestling salon, or ever easier, find a slug. They sleep until midday, usually in the damp shade of limestone outcrops. Any more questions? No? Okay, then let’s feed them.’
The farmer went on to explain that keeping intelligent slugs in captivity denied them the stimulation of hunting prey for themselves, so they made them do tricks for their supper. For the next five minutes we watched the slugs balance balls on their antennae, play a passable rendition of the Beer Barrel Polka on descant recorders and then do synchronised backflips, to sporadic applause. The show finished with an entire pig carcass being chucked into a trough containing a dozen slugs. The pig was devoured in a little under thirty seconds and with such uncontrolled ferocity that when the pig was nothing but bones, there were only ten slugs left.
‘That often happens,’ said the farmer sadly.
We walked back outside once the show was over. I bought Mother Zenobia some skin exfoliant for her feet, while the Princess wrote a postcard to her parents.
‘I was disappointed not to see someone being devoured,’ said Ignatius as we returned to the car park, ‘or lose a foot at the very least.’
‘If you cover yourself in lard first you can wrestle them quite easily,’ remarked Curtis, reading from a leaflet, ‘and make a fortune in prize money.’
‘Anyone eaten?’ asked Addie as we climbed back into the half-track.
‘No one even got nibbled, worse luck,’ grumbled Ignatius. ‘Are you okay, Ralph? You look a little … strange.’
‘It’s nothing, dude,’ said Ralph, who did look unusual – drunk, almost, ‘probably the altitude. I’ll be fine.’
‘Did you do anything to him?’ I asked Addie once I’d climbed into the driver’s seat.
‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I went to the loo and when I got back he was sweating and muttering about anchovies.’
‘Mule fever?’ I asked.
‘No, probably just Empty Quarter nerves.’
I looked at Ralph again; he seemed to have relaxed somewhat, although I could see his pupils contract and dilate quite rapidly several times a second.
We drove for another half-hour and presently came across the dormant marker stones that marked the extent of what had once been Dragonlands. There was a large and very chewed sign that read:
DANGER
Empty Quarter
Remain Vigilant or Remain Here
The Empty Quarter
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 kil
l 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.’
They pulled the glowing Ralph out of the back of the half-track, holding him down by his shoelaces as if he were a helium balloon in a breeze. He was giggling stupidly and mumbling something about camels, and as we watched bright sparks started to fizz out of his ears. He then turned blue, then red, then green, then burped out a large iridescent bubble that burst to produce a flock of brightly coloured butterflies.
I glanced at Ignatius and Curtis, who were themselves now giggling stupidly at Ralph’s predicament, and I suddenly had a terrible thought.
‘Perkins,’ I said, ‘did you leave your bag in the half-track when we went to look at the slugs?’
Perkins hurriedly opened the leather suitcase that would have contained all his potions, balms and one-shot spells written on rice paper. It was, predictably enough, empty. Ralph, like Curtis, must have had a fondness for abusing magic and, finding some spells unattended, had consumed the lot.
Ralph was now beginning to stretch and flex in a peculiar manner, as though a pony were inside him trying to get out. I’d not seen anyone have a magic overdose, but I’d heard about it. The lucky ones turn themselves inside out, and die a horribly painful death. The unlucky ones get to turn themselves inside out for ever.