‘What are you doing out here?’ I asked Gabby. ‘You don’t look as though you’re on holiday.’
‘I collect information on death likelihood for a major player in the risk management industry.’
‘Can you explain that in simple terms?’
‘Everything we do has an element of risk to it,’ he said, ‘and by identifying the potential risk factor of everything humans do, we can decide where best to deploy our assets to avert that risk.’
‘You work for an insurance company?’
‘Our data is used in the insurance industry,’ he said, ‘but we also freelance. As you can imagine, a place as dangerous as the Cambrian Empire offers a unique opportunity for studying risk. For example, if two people are confronted by a Tralfamosaur, which of them is more likely to be eaten first? The one who panics, the one who runs, the one who looks most dangerous or the one who looks the juiciest? There are many factors.’
‘I’m guessing “juiciest”.’
‘Yes, me too – it’s not a good example.’
‘You must know the Empty Quarter very well.’
‘I can’t stay away from this place,’ he confessed with a smile, ‘and studying people as they weigh up the risks involved in their various decisions is fascinating. Did you know that you are statistically more likely to die driving to the airport than you are on the flight you are going there to catch?’
‘You’ve never flown by JunkAir, clearly.’
‘There are always exceptions to the rule,’ conceded Gabby.
No traffic came our way in the next hour, except two Skybus lorries, presumably taking aircraft parts out of the Empire. The lorries swept past, ignoring our attempts to get a lift even if it was in the wrong direction, and were soon lost to sight. The day grew warmer, and we spoke less as we walked. Wilson, usually fairly voluble and optimistic, fell silent, and even Ralph, who had earlier dashed around like a mad thing, seemed to be keeping a keener lookout. With Llangurig now twenty-five miles or so away by road it was not possible to get there before darkness, and a night in the open seemed inevitable. Although Gabby was confident he could deal with most dangers during the day, he could not guarantee our safety at night. Calculating risk required one to be able to first accurately sense it, and there were, by current estimates, over sixteen life forms out here that could kill before you were even aware of them.
‘I think we should turn back,’ said Wilson when we stopped for a rest. ‘At least that way we’ll have somewhere to stay for the night, and it’s always possible a tourist party may chance along.’
He took off a boot and stared sadly at a blister, one of several.
‘That might not be for a week or more,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got Perkins, a half-track and a handmaiden to retrieve.’
There was a rubber Dragon and the Eye of Zoltar to consider, too.
‘We could cut across the Empty Quarter,’ said Gabby thoughtfully. ‘I know a Hotax trail that would take us direct to Llangurig past the Lair of Antagonista, the Dragon who once ruled these Dragonlands.’
‘Cut across the Empty Quarter on foot?’ asked Wilson in an incredulous tone.
‘Sure,’ replied Gabby. ‘The Dragon lived here so long that local animal memory evolved to include it – the Dragon’s been dead almost half a century, and still nothing goes near. I calculate the risk factor on sleeping near the old Dragon’s lair as no more than four per cent.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ I said, since Dragons held no real fear for me. ‘Ralph? What do you say?’
‘Yoof,’ said Ralph, staring at me curiously. His response might have meant ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or almost anything in between – but I felt I should ask him anyway.
‘What the hell,’ said Wilson with a shrug. ‘Lead on and let’s get it over with.’
And so it was agreed. About half a mile farther on we left the road to take a narrow path close to a roadside memorial to ‘An Unnamed Tourist’ who was ‘Dissolved but not forgotten’, but from the state of the half-buried headstone, probably was.
And after taking a deep breath and exchanging nervous glances, we struck off across the open country of the Empty Quarter.
The old Dragonlands
The Hotax path was easy to follow among the tussocky grass, but the going was slow. We encountered a jumble of boulders carved by the wind into curious and frightening shapes that had to be carefully negotiated, then gaping sinkholes, marshes and the occasional flaming tar pit littered with the charred bones of large herbivores.
We passed a herd of Elephino who were staring thoughtfully at their feet, as was their habit, then a Giggle Beetle migration, where a constant line of yellow-spotted carapaces stretched into the distance in both directions, chuckling constantly. We stepped across this, walked through a long-deserted village, then found an abandoned road, which was paved with large flat stones carved with curious markings.
‘This would have been the Dragon’s route to his lair,’ said Gabby as we picked up the pace on the grass-fringed flagstones. ‘In the pre-Dragonpact days when Dragons roamed freely and had the same prestige as kings and emperors.’
We followed the ancient roadway in a stop-start fashion all afternoon. On one occasion we had to wait for a half-hour while a herd of Tralfamosaur moved through, and another time we paused owing to a strange noise, only to discover it was a small herd of Honking Gazelle, so named because their call is indistinguishable from a car horn. Indeed, a herd all honking in unison sounds exactly like a traffic jam in Turin.
We stopped for a break near a spring of fresh water that bubbled out of the ground and tasted of liquorice – there was probably a seam of the stuff lying somewhere underfoot.
‘Anyone got anything to eat?’ I asked, since I had left everything – food, drink, conch, Helping Hand™, cash, Boo’s twenty-grand letter of credit – in the half-track.
No one had anything, although I noted that Gabby was carrying a full backpack, something he didn’t remove as he sat on a grassy bank.
Ralph, sensing we were hungry, disappeared and returned five minutes later with a dead slug the size of a rat and about as appetising. I knew slugs could be eaten if you were desperate, but ‘desperate’ in this context meant ‘perilously close to death’, and we weren’t quite there yet. Interestingly, since the flesh-dissolving enzyme was on the outside, it had to be turned inside out like a rubber sock and then eaten like a corncob. After our polite refusal, Ralph ate it himself.
We followed the road up a hill, crested the ridge and looked down upon a huge, dish-like depression in the ground about a mile in diameter. At the very centre of the depression was a large grass-covered dome, surrounded by a high wall that had partly collapsed. Nothing seemed to be growing near the abandoned lair and even from this far out there seemed to be a dark, almost oppressive feeling about the place. The breeze seemed to grow chillier, and high above, despite the grey overcast, a circle of clear blue sky could be seen directly above the grass-covered dome.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘we should be cautious. Long-unused spells may have recombined in unusual ways.’
As we walked, the strangeness of the redundant strands of magic did indeed manifest themselves in odd ways – the grass in the cracks between the paving stones seemed to shift underfoot as we walked, and once, when I looked back, the grass we had trodden upon had become nourished and healthier by virtue of our life-force. Stranger still, to either side of us and partially hidden by the scrubby grassland were what appeared to be statues carved from a reddish sandstone. One was human and three were Hotax – like a human only stockier, and with a broader, flatter head, I noted – but most were of animals. Several Buzonji, a Snork Badger, a pair of ground sloth and even Elephino, Honking Gazelle and a juvenile Tralfamosaur. They weren’t statues, of course, but real creatures enchanted to stone, and it wasn’t difficult to see the one factor that linked them alclass="underline" each was caught in the middle of an expansive yawn.