Jasper Fforde - The Eye of Zoltar

‘Do you think that horrible servant will get my body pregnant?’ she asked as we trotted down the steps. ‘I’ve heard about you girl orphans having no morals and having babies for fun and selling them to buy bicycles and fashion accessories and onions and stuff.’

‘We think of nothing else,’ I said with a smile.

Tiger and the Quarkbeast were still playing chess when we got back to the car.

‘Who’s she?’ said Tiger as we walked up.

‘Guess.’

‘From the look of her,’ said Tiger, ‘an orphan servant, probably bought for indentured servitude within the palace and used for menial scrubbing duties or worse. Here,’ he added, fishing in his pocket, ‘I’ve got some nougat somewhere I was keeping for emergencies – and you look as though you could do with a bit of energy.’

He handed her the nougat, which was mildly dusty from where it had sat in Tiger’s pocket. The Princess ignored it, and him.

‘I smell of dog poo, carbolic soap and mildew,’ she said, sniffing a sleeve of her maid’s uniform in disgust, ‘and I can feel a bogey in my left nostril. Remove it for me, boy.’

‘Holy cow!’ said Tiger. ‘It’s the Princess.’

‘How did you know that?’ asked the Princess.

‘Wild stab in the dark.’

‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Princess.

‘Hold it yourself,’ said Tiger, sticking out his tongue.

‘I dislike that ginger nitwit already,’ said the Princess. ‘I’m going to start a list of people who have annoyed me so they can be duly punished when I am back in my own body.’ She rummaged in her pockets for a piece of paper and a stub of pencil. ‘So, nitwit: name?’

‘Tiger … Spartacus.’

‘Spart-a-cus,’ said the Princess, writing it down carefully.

‘If anyone finds out you’re the Princess,’ I said after having a worrisome thought, ‘I’d give it about an hour before we have to fight off bandits, cut-throats and agents of foreign powers. For now, you’ll take the handmaiden’s name. What is it, by the way?’

The Princess seemed to see the sense in this.

‘She doesn’t have a name. We called her “poo-girl” if we called her anything at all.’

I told her to take the orphan ID card out of her top pocket.

‘Well, how about that,’ said the Princess, reading the card. ‘She does have a name after all, but it’s awful: Laura Scrubb, Royal Dog Mess Removal Operative Third Class, aged seventeen. Laura Scrubb ? I can’t be called that!’

‘You are and you will be,’ I said, ‘and that’s the Quarkbeast.’

‘It’s hideous,’ said the Princess. ‘In fact, you all are. And why is there a disembodied hand attached to the steering wheel?’

‘It’s a Helping Hand ™,’ explained Tiger, ‘like power steering, only run by magic.’

‘Magic? How vulgar. I am so very glad I inherited no powers from my mother.’

I reversed the Royale out of the parking place and headed back towards town. The Princess, once past her fit of indignation at how hideously unsophisticated we all were, spent the time staring out of the window.

‘I’m not allowed past the castle walls,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a billboard advertising toothpaste.’

‘Doesn’t it come ready squeezed on to your toothbrush every morning and evening?’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘Really? So how does it get from the tube to the toothbrush?’

I didn’t have time to answer as a car had swerved in front of us. I stamped on the brakes and recognised it immediately: a six-wheeled Phantom Twelve Rolls-Royce, with paintwork so perfectly black you felt as though you could fall into it. There was only one person I knew who was driven around in the super-exclusive Phantom Twelve, and I was certain that this was not a chance encounter.

An impeccably dressed manservant in dark suit, white gloves and dark glasses climbed out of the Phantom Twelve, walked across and tapped on the window.

‘Miss Strange?’ he said. ‘My employer would like to discuss a matter that concerns you both.’

We were stuck in the middle of a roundabout.

‘What, here?’

‘No, miss. At Madley International Airport. Follow us, please.’

The Rolls-Royce pulled away and we followed. The car would contain Miss D’argento, an agent, like me. But she wasn’t any ordinary agent – she didn’t look after film stars, singers, writers or even sorcerers. She didn’t even look after careless kings who found themselves temporarily without a kingdom and needed a public relations boost. No, she was the agent for the most powerful wizard either living, dead or, in his case, otherwise: the Mighty Shandar.

The Mighty Shandar

The trip to the Kingdom’s international airport did not take long, but instead of going to the main departures terminal we were led into a large maintenance hangar that contained a Skybus 646 cargo aircraft which was emblazoned with Shandar’s logo – a footprint on fire. The rear of the cargo aircraft was open, and a large wooden crate was being unloaded by a forklift. I parked the Bugatti and watched as Miss D’argento alighted elegantly from the rear door, held open by the manservant.

The D’argentos were what was termed a ‘Dynastic Agency’ in that they had been looking after the business interests of the Mighty Shandar ever since his appearance as a featured ‘Sorcerer to Watch’ in the July 1572 edition of Popular Wizarding . As far as anyone can tell, there have been eleven D’argentos in the employ of the Mighty Shandar, and all but one female. Miss D’argento was perhaps a year or two older than me – about eighteen – and was dressed as perfectly elegantly as a socialite twice her age.

I climbed out of the car and waited for the forklift truck to deliver the crate in front of us. While this happened, I noticed several other henchmen dotted around the hangar. They were all dressed in black suits, dark hats, white gloves and large sunglasses. I peered at the one closest to us. There was no flesh in the small gap between where his glove ended and his shirt cuff began. It was an empty suit, animated by magic. Usually you can tell a drone by their mildly jerky and decidedly unhumanlike movements, but these ones were top class – at a distance you’d never know at all.

‘Notice anything odd about the henchmen?’ whispered Tiger.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘drones.’

‘Drones?’ asked the Princess.

‘Watch and listen,’ said Tiger.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Strange,’ said Miss D’argento in a cultivated voice, her high heels click-clicking on the concrete floor as she approached us, ‘congratulations on winning The Magic Contest. I reported it to the Mighty Shandar, who expressed admiration for your fortitude.’

I nodded towards the closest drone.

‘They move well for the non-living.’

‘Thank you,’ said D’argento. ‘Shandar does us all proud.’

‘And from purely professional interest,’ I added, ‘are you running them on an Ankh-XVII RUNIX core?’

‘You know your spells,’ said Miss D’argento with a smile. ‘We run them with the Mandrake Sentience Emulation Protocols disabled to make them less independent. Make no mistake, they are twice as dangerous as real bodyguards for they fear no death.’

She wasn’t kidding. Pharaoh Amenemhat V of the Middle Kingdom was said to have attempted to expand Egypt along the Mediterranean with an unstoppable drone army of sixty thousand. They got as far as what is now Benghazi before Amenemhat V was killed in battle.

I told Tiger and the Princess to wait in the car while the forklift placed the crate in front of us and then reversed away. Almost immediately, several of the lifeless drones unlatched the crate and wheeled the two sections apart to reveal the Mighty Shandar.