K evin Fortescue, Governor of China elect, met Thorgeir Storm-Shepherd at the Docklands stolport and drove him back to Gerrards Garth House. On the way, he made it known that he had been let into the secret of the company’s history. Thorgeir seemed surprised at this.
“Why?” he said.
“Mr…the boss said he thought I had a lot of potential. In fact, he’s-offered me China.”
“China?”
“I told him I’d give him my decision in the morning, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to take it. I think it would be a good move for me, career-wise. I’ve got the impression I’m stagnating rather in Accounts.”
Thorgeir made a mental note to water down the sorcerer-king’s mead with cold tea before leaving the country next time. He had the feeling that the sorcerer-king was due for a change of direction, career-wise. But it would not be prudent to let the feeling develop into an idea.
The sorcerer-king had come down to the lobby to meet him. “How was Japan?” he asked.
“Susceptible,” replied Thorgeir, “highly susceptible. And I did get the semiconductors after all. Just time before the helicopter arrived for a birdie on the last hole.”
“Good,” grunted the sorcerer-king. “No point in letting things slide just because there’s a crisis. You’ve met our new colleague?”
“Yes,” said Thorgeir. “What possessed you to do that?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“You said that about Copernicus, and look where that got us.”
“Anyway,” the sorcerer-king said, “he’ll come in handy. I’ve had an idea.”
Thorgeir knew that tone of voice. Sometimes it led to good things, sometimes not. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s like this.” The sorcerer-king reached for the mead bottle, and poured out two large glasses. “Our problem is quite simple, when you look at it calmly. Our enemy has reappeared.”
“How do you know that, by the way?”
The sorcerer-king explained about the late-night messages. Thorgeir nodded gravely. “So King Hrolf is back, and that dratted brooch. We could do one of two things. We could go and look for him, or we could wait for him to come to us.”
“This is meant to be a choice?”
“We could wait for him to come to us.” The sorcerer-king leant back in his chair and put the tips of his fingers together. “If he tries that, he will be at a certain disadvantage.”
“Namely?”
The sorcerer-king grinned. “One, he’s been asleep for over a thousand years, and things have changed. Two, there’s no way he can hope to understand the modern world well enough to endanger us without at the very least a three-year course in business studies and a postgraduate diploma in computers. We are talking about a man who had difficulty adding up on his fingers. Three, he has just crawled out of a mound, in clothes that were the height of fashion a thousand years ago but which would now be a trifle conspicuous. He is likely to be arrested, especially if he strolls into the market-square at Inverness and tries to reclaim his ancient throne. Four, just supposing he makes it and turns up in Reception brandishing a sword, his chances of making it as far as the lift are slim. Very slim. I don’t know if you’ve dropped into Vouchers lately, but I didn’t hire them for their mathematical ability.”
“Fair enough,” said Thorgeir patiently. “So?”
“So, since he’s not a complete moron, he’s not likely to come to us. So we have to go to him. But on whose terms?”
The sorcerer-king leant forward suddenly and fixed Thorgeir with his bright eyes. This had been a disconcerting conversational gambit a thousand years ago, but Thorgeir was used to it by now. After over a millennium of working with the sorcerer-king, he was getting rather tired of some of his more obvious mannerisms.
“Ours, preferably,” Thorgeir said calmly. “Explain.”
“His best chance,” said the sorcerer-king, “is to use the brooch again. He jams up our systems, blacks out our networks, and fuses all the lights across the entire world. Then he sends us a message—probably, knowing him, by carrier-pigeon—to meet him, alone, on the beach at Melvich for a rematch. Personally, I am out of condition for a trial by combat.”
Thorgeir nodded. He, too, had grown soft since his timber-wolf days. Apart from retaining a taste for uncooked mutton and having to shave at least three times a day, he had become entirely anthropomorphous. “We can rule that out, then,” he said. “I never did like all that running about and shouting.”
“Me neither. So we have one course of action left to us. We find him before he’s ready, and we kill him. That ought not to be difficult.”
“Agreed.”
The sorcerer-king poured out more mead. “In that case, where is he likely to be? He’s just risen from the grave, right? And he’s on foot. All we need to know is where he was buried, and we’ve got him. Simple.”
Thorgeir smiled, and drank some of his mead. Now it was his turn.
“Over the last thousand years,” he said, in a slow measured voice, “I, too, have been turning this problem over in my mind, and the big question is this. Given that King Hrolf was the greatest of the Vikings, and his companions the most glorious heroes of the northern world, how come there is no King Hrolf Earthstar’s Saga?”
He paused, for greater dramatic effect, and took a cigar from the box on the desk. Having lit it, he resumed.
“And, for that matter, why are the sagas of all the other heroes of northern Europe so reticent about the greatest event of the heroic age, namely our defeat and overthrow? You’d have thought one of them might have seen fit to mention it.”
The sorcerer-king frowned. With the exception of the latest Dick Francis or Jeffrey Archer, he rarely opened a book these days, and he had never been a great reader at the best of times.
“There is no record of the final resting-place of King Hrolf Earthstar,” said Thorgeir. “If there had been, I’d have bought the place up and built something heavy and substantial over it five hundred years ago. There is no trace or scrap of folk tradition in Caithness about King Hrolf or the Great Battle or anything else; just a lot of drivel about Bonnie Prince Charlie. The only clue is a single place-name, Rolfsness, which happens to be the site of a certain battle.”
“There you are, then,” said the sorcerer-king.
“There you aren’t. I’ve been back hundreds of times. If there had been anything there, I’d have felt it. And there is no record whatsoever of what became of Hrolf Earthstar while we were floating around as disembodied spirits. He just vanished off the face of the earth. For all I know, he could have sailed west and discovered America.”
“You think he’s in America?”
Thorgeir closed his eyes and counted up to ten. “No, I think he’s probably somewhere in Europe. But where in Europe I couldn’t begin to say.”
The sorcerer-king smiled. “You’d better start looking, then, hadn’t you?” he said, and poured himself another drink.
“Those people,” said Hildy, “were from television.”
“What’s that?” asked one of the heroes.
Hildy racked her brains for a concise reply. “Like a saga, only with lights and pictures. By this time tomorrow, everyone in the country will know we’re here.”
The King frowned. “That could be serious,” he said. “We can’t have that.”
“But how can we stop it?”
“That’s easy.” The King stood up suddenly. “Where do you think they’ve gone?”
“Back the way they came, probably to Lairg. They’ll want to get the film off to London as quickly as possible. But—”
“We can’t make any mistake about this. Kotkel!”
From a small pouch in his pocket, the wizard took a couple of small bones and threw them in the air. As they landed, he stooped down and peered at them intently. Then he pointed towards the south and made a noise like a buzz-saw.
“They went that way,” the King translated.
Hildy had never been fond of driving, and at speeds over thirty miles an hour her skill matched her enthusiasm. But somehow the van stayed on or at least close to the road as they pursued the camera crew along the narrow road to Lairg, and caught up with them in a deserted valley beside a river.
“What do we do now?” Hildy asked as the van bumped alarmingly over a cattle-grid.
“Board them,” suggested Angantyr. “Or ram them. Who cares?”
“Certainly not,” Hildy shouted.
“Stop here,” the King said. “Brynjolf!”
“Not again,” pleaded the shape-changer. “Last time I sprained my ankle.”
No sooner had Danny Bennett realised that the second van had suddenly stopped for no reason than he became aware of a huge eagle, apparently trying to smash the windscreen. The driver swore, and braked fiercely, but the bird merely attacked again, this time cracking the glass. The senior sound-recordist, who had done countless nature programmes in his time, was thoroughly frightened and tried to hide under his seat. The eagle attacked a third time, and the windscreen shattered. The driver put up both his hands to protect his eyes, and the van veered off the road into a ditch.
When Danny had recovered from the shock of impact, he tried to open his door, but a man in a grey suit with a helmet covering his face opened it for him and showed him the blade of a large axe. If this was the Milk Marketing Board, they were probably exceeding their statutory authority.
“Who are you?” Danny said.
“Bothvar Bjarki,” said the man with the axe. “Are you going to surrender, or shall we fight for a bit?”
“I’d rather surrender, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Be like that,” said Bothvar Bjarki.
The camera crew were rounded up, while Starkad, apparently without effort, pushed the two vans into a small clump of trees and covered them with branches. The King had found a hollow in the hillside which was out of sight of the road, and the prisoners were led there and tied up securely. Meanwhile, at Hildy’s direction, Starkad and Hjort found the cans of film and smashed them to pieces. When Hildy was satisfied that all the film was destroyed, the heroes got back into their vans and drove away.
As the sound of the engine receded in the distance, the assistant cameraman broke the silence in the hollow.
“Reminds me of the time I was in Afghanistan,” he said. Danny Bennett asked what had happened that time in Afghanistan.
“We got tied up,” said the assistant cameraman.
“And what happened?”
“Someone came and untied us,” replied the assistant cameraman. “Mind you, that time we were doing a report for ‘Newsnight’.”
Danny had never worked for ‘Newsnight’, and people had been known to die of exposure on Scottish hillsides. He pulled on the rope around his wrists, but there was no slack in it. A posthumous BAFTA award, he reflected, was probably better than no BAFTA award at all, but awards are not everything.
“If I can raise my wrists,” he said to the assistant cameraman, “you could chew through the ropes and I could untie you.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” said the cameraman. “You could shut your bloody row and we could get some sleep while we’re waiting to be untied.”
“But perhaps,” Danny hissed, “nobody’s going to come and untie us.”
“Listen,” said the assistant cameraman fiercely, “I dunno what union you belong to, but my union is going to get me a great deal of money from the Beeb for being tied up like this, and the longer I’m tied up, the more I’ll get. So just shut your noise and let’s get on with it, all right?”
Danny’s head was beginning to hurt. He closed his eyes, leant back against the assistant cameraman (who was starting to snore) and tried to make some sense of what was happening to him.
The men had been partially disguised as Vikings, with helmets and shields and swords; but they had been wearing grey suits, which tended to spoil the illusion. They had, as he had expected, destroyed the film; but that was all. Not even an attempt to warn him off. Only the barest minimum of physical violence. And then there was that girl—Hildy Frederiksen, beyond doubt. Who was she working for, and what lay behind it all? And where in God’s name had they got that incredible bird from?
The obvious clues pointed at the CIA. Whatever they do in whichever part of the world, they always wear grey suits. They buy them by the hundred from J.C. Penney or Man at CIA. That would tie in with the Kennedy connection—at last, after all these years, they were trying to silence him—but the Viking motif was beyond him, unless it was something to do with that tiresome ship. Or perhaps they were in fact wearing protective clothing (the nuclear power station angle) made to look like Viking helmets. In which case, why? Unless they were all going on to a fancy-dress party afterwards. The more he thought about it, the more inexplicable it seemed; and the more baffled he became, the more convinced he was that something major was going on. All the great conspiracies of history have been bizarre, usually because of the incompetence of the leading conspirators. As the long hours passed, he traced each convoluted possibility to its illogical conclusion, but for once no pattern emerged in his mind. At last he fell asleep and began to dream. He seemed to hear voices coming from a small pool of light hovering overhead.
“Seventy-five to me, then,” said one voice, “plus the repique on your declaration, doubled. Your throw.”
Danny sat up. He wasn’t dreaming.
“Six and a four. I take your dragon, and that’s forty-five to me. Four, five, six,—oh, sod it, go to gaol.”
The rest of the crew were asleep. Danny sat absolutely still. The hair on the back of his neck was beginning to curl, and he found it hard to breathe.
“Trade you Hlidarend for Oslo Fjord and seventy points,” said the first voice. “That way you’ll have the set.”
“No chance,” said the second voice. “Up three, down the serpent four five six, and that’s check.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is.”
The voices were silent for a while, and Danny swallowed hard. Perhaps it was just the bump he had suffered when the van crashed.
“Good idea, that,” said the first voice.
“Brilliant,” replied the second voice sarcastically. “You don’t imagine we’re going to get away with it, do you?”
“Why not?”
“Because he’ll notice we’re not there, that’s why. And he’s not going to be pleased.”
The first voice sniggered. “He’ll be miles away by now. And the rest of them. They’re going to Inverness. He won’t be able to reach us from there.”
“Where’s Inverness?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. But it sounds a very long way away to me.”
The second voice sighed audibly. “You and your ideas,” it said.
“Well, what choice did we have?” replied the first voice irritably. “I don’t know about you, but I didn’t fancy having copper wire twisted round my neck and being linked up to that perishing brooch. Last time, my ears buzzed for a week.”
“He’ll be back. Just you wait and see.”
Another silence, during which Danny thought he could hear a rattling sound, like dice being thrown.
“Well,” said the second voice, “we’d better make ourselves scarce anyhow. No good sitting about here.”
“Just because I’m winning…”
“Who says you’re winning?”
The voices subsided into a muted squabbling, so that Danny could not make out the words. He longed for the voices to stop, and suddenly they did.
The reason for this was that Prexz had just caught the vibrations from an underground cable a mile or so away to the south. He had no idea what it might be, but he was hungry, and it seemed irresistible.
“Put the game away, Zxerp,” he said suddenly. “I can feel food.”
But Zxerp didn’t answer. “I said I can feel food,” Prexz repeated, but Zxerp glowed warningly at him.
“There’s a man over there listening to us,” he whispered.
“Why didn’t you say?”
“I’ve only just noticed him, haven’t I?”
Prexz cleared his throat and turned his glow up a little. “Excuse me,” he said.
“Yes?” replied Danny.
“Would you happen to know anything about a cable running under the ground about a mile from here and going due north?”
“I would imagine,” Danny replied, his heart pounding, “that it has something to do with the nuclear power station on the coast.”
“Nuclear Power?” Prexz said. “Stone me. Did you hear that, Zxerp? Nouvelle cuisine.”
The two pools of light rose up into the air and seemed to dance there for a moment.
“By the way,” said Prexz, “if the wizard comes looking for us…”
“The wizard?”
“That’s right, the wizard. If he comes looking for us, you haven’t seen us.”
“Before you go,” whispered Danny faintly, “do you think you might possibly untie these ropes?”
“Certainly,” said Prexz. As he did so, Danny was aware of a terrible burning sensation in his hands and arms. “Is that all right?”
“That’s fine, thank you,” Danny gasped. Then he fainted.
“What a strange man,” Prexz said. “Right, off we go.”
The Dow up three—that won’t last—early coffee down, tin’s still a shambles, and soon they’ll be giving copper away with breakfast cereal. Who needs to buy a newspaper to learn that?
Thorgeir had adapted splendidly to most things in the course of his extremely long life, but the knack of reading the Financial Times on a train still eluded him. How one was supposed to control the huge unruly pages was a complete mystery. He was sorely tempted to get the boss to buy up the damned paper, just to make them print it in a smaller format. With a grunt, he retrieved the news headlines. Earthquake in Senegal, elections in New Zealand, massive archaeological find in Scotland.
Massive archaeological find in Scotland. Like a raindrop trickling down a window, his gaze slid down the pink surface and locked on to the small paragraph. At Rolfsness, in Caithness; archaeologists claim to have unearthed a ninth-century Viking royal ship-burial. Unprecedented quantities of artefacts including treasure, armour and weapons. Gold prices, however, are unlikely to be affected.
His fellow-passengers saw the small thin-faced man go suddenly white as he read his FT, and assumed that he had failed to get out of cocoa before the automatic doors closed. Thorgeir tossed the paper down on the seat beside him, and fumbled in his briefcase for his radiophone.
“Have you seen it?” he said. “In the paper?”
“What are you going on about, Thorgeir?” said the sorcerer-king, his voice faint and crackly at the other end.
“Front page of the FT.”
“Hang on, I’ve got that here.” Thorgeir could picture the sorcerer-king retrieving the paper from the early-morning mess on his desk.
“The news section, about a third of the way down.”
“You’ve called me up to tell me about the Chancellor?”
“Stick the Chancellor; it’s the bit below that.”
When the sorcerer-king panicked, he tended to do so in Old Norse, which is a language admirably suited to the purpose, if you are not in any hurry. Thorgeir listened impatiently for a while, then interrupted.
“Who have we got in archaeology?”
There was silence at the other end of the line. Twelve hundred years he’s managed without a Filofax, reflected Thorgeir. The moment he gets one, nobody knows where they are any more. Marvellous.
“In Scotland?”
“Preferably.”
“There’s a Professor Wood at St Andrews. What do you want an archaeologist for, anyway? I’m going over to Vouchers.”
Thorgeir frowned. “No, don’t do that,” he said quietly. “Get Professor Wood. It says in the paper he’s in charge of this dig at Rolfsness. Tell him I’ll meet him there.”
“I’m still going over to Vouchers.”
“You do whatever you like. By the way, where’s this train I’m on going to? I’ve forgotten.”
“Manchester.”
“Thanks.” Thorgeir switched off the phone and consulted his train timetable. He was feeling excited now that the enemy had been contacted, although he still could not imagine how he had overlooked something as obvious as a ship-burial on his many visits to that dreary place. Then it occurred to him that any wizard with Grade III or above would have been able to conceal the traces of life in such a mountainous and isolated spot from any but the most perceptive observer, and King Hrolf’s wizard had been a top man. Pity they hadn’t headhunted him back in the 870s. What was that wizard’s name? Something about the pot and the kettle.
In the age of the supersonic airliner, a man can have breakfast in London and lunch in New York (if his digestion can stand it); but to get from Manchester to the north coast of Scotland between the waxing and the waning of the moon still requires not only dedication and cunning but also a modicum of good luck, just as it did in the Dark Ages. By the time Thorgeir had worked out an itinerary, the view from the train window had that tell-tale hint of First World War battlefield about it that informs the experienced traveller that he’s passing through Stockport. Thorgeir closed his briefcase and leant his head back against the cushions. Kotkel. Hrolf’s wizard was called Kotkel, and he had had quite a reputation around Orkney in the seventies. Winner for three years in succession of the Osca (Orkney Sorcerers’ Craft Association) for Best Hallucination. No slouch with a rune, either.
“That’s all I needed,” groaned Thorgeir.
Telephone wires were humming all over Britain, for they had just had to shut down the nuclear reactor on the north coast of Scotland. There was, it had been decided, no need to evacuate the area; there was no danger. It was just that someone had contrived to mislay the entire output of electricity from the plant for just over half an hour. Even the lights had gone out all over the building.
“Has anyone,” the controller kept asking, “got a fifty pence for the meter?” The senior engineers led him away and got him an aspirin, while his deputy made another attempt to get through to Downing Street.
No one had yet got around to checking the underground cable that ran due south from the plant, which was where the fault actually lay. It lay on its back, its eyes closed, and it was singing softly to itself.
“For ye defeated,” it sang,—
“King Hrothgar’s army, And sent them home, To think again.”
The fault’s companion was scarcely in a better state He had never even claimed to be able to hold his electricity, and he had very nearly been sick. It was just as well that he had not, or the entire National Grid would have been thrown into confusion. He gurgled, and went to sleep.
“Prexz,” said the fault, “I just thought of something.”
Prexz moaned, and rolled on to his face, vowing never to touch another volt so long as he lived.
“How would it be,” Zxerp said, “how would it be if…”
“Don’t want any more,” mumbled Prexz. “Had too much already. Drunk. Totally drunk. Going to join Electronics Anonymous soon as I feel a little better.”
“Don’t be like that,” whined Zxerp.
“Think they put something in it at the generator,” continued Prexz. “Going to sleep it off. Shut up. Go away.”
“Wimp,” snarled Zxerp. “You’re no fun, Prexz. Don’t like you any more.”
Prexz had started to snore, sending clouds of undecipherable radio signals to jam up the airwaves of Europe.
“I don’t like it here,” said Zxerp. “I want to go home.”
No reply. Zxerp shook his head, which made him feel worse, and he fell heavily against the cable. There was nothing in it, and he was feeling terribly thirsty. He was also feeling guilty.
“Poor old wizard,” he said. “Always been good to us. Never a cross word in twelve hundred years. Prexz, shouldn’t we go and find the wizard? Shouldn’t have run away from the wizard like that. Not right.”
Zxerp started to cry, and negative ions trickled down the side of his nose, electrolysing it. At the government listening post in Cheltenham, a codes expert picked up his tears on the short-wave band and rushed off to tell his chief that the Russians had developed a new cipher.
Thorgeir heard about the closedown of the power station over the radio as he drove his hired car past Loch Loyal. The shock made him swerve, and he nearly ended up in the water.
He pulled over and examined an Ordnance Survey map, but that told him nothing he did not already know, and his own personal map, which was traced in blood on soft goat skin and was somewhat out of date. But a call to London on his radiophone told him all he needed to know, and he asked that a helicopter should be laid on to meet him at Tongue. He also enquired whether there was an equivalent to the Vouchers department at the company’s Glasgow office.
“Yes? Then, send a couple of them up. Tell them to bring plenty of vouchers.”
He pushed down the aerial so violently that he nearly snapped it off, and drove on towards the coast. As he turned a bend in the road beside a small clump of trees, he noticed and just managed to avoid a patch of broken glass in the middle of the carriageway. In doing so he stalled the engine, and while he was persuading it to start again his eye fell on the windscreen of a van among the trees. Someone had apparently been to the trouble of covering this van up with tree-branches. For some reason this seemed terribly significant, and Thorgeir went to investigate.
What he found was two vans with broken windscreens and a good deal of smashed camera gear. As he stood scratching his head, the wind carried back to him what sounded like an argument from the hill on the other side of the road. Something about due north having been over those hills there ten minutes ago, and it reminded someone of that time in Iraq.
Thorgeir looked at his watch. He had plenty of time before he was due to meet the helicopter, and he was starting to get a tingling sensation all down the side of his nose, where his whiskers had once been.
“Told you someone would come and find us,” croaked the assistant cameraman. “Just like that time in Cambodia.”
“That wasn’t Cambodia,” said the assistant sound-recordist, “that was Kurdistan.”
“We started in Iraq,” replied the senior cameraman. “That’s the bloody point.”
“Thank you,” gasped Danny Bennett to the stranger. He was hoarse from arguing. For a long time, he had thought that he had imagined the sound of a car engine. “We’ve been wandering round in circles all day. That fool of a cameraman’s got one of those compasses you buy at filling stations, and we’d been walking for hours before we realised that it was being attracted by his solar calculator.”
“Are those your vans up there?” said the stranger.
“Yes.” Suddenly, Danny seemed to notice something about his rescuer and recoiled violently.
“What’s up?” said the stranger.
“Sorry,” Danny said. “It’s just that suit you’re wearing.”
“My suit?” The stranger looked affronted.
“It’s a very nice suit,” Danny said. “It’s just that it’s grey. But it’s not from Marks and Spencer.”
“I should think not,” said the stranger irritably. “Brooks Brothers, this is. OK, the lapels are a bit on the narrow side, but—”
“It’s a long story,” Danny said. “And you’d probably think I was mad.”
“I already think you’re mad,” said the stranger, smoothing out the creases on his sleeve, “so what have you got to lose?”
So Danny told him. He explained about the ship-burial, the first attack, the second attack, the eagle and the men in the grey suits. The stranger seemed entirely unsurprised and utterly convinced by it all; in fact he seemed so interested that Danny was on the point of telling him about his President Kennedy theory when the stranger interrupted him.
“Was there an old man with them, by any chance? Very old indeed, with a horrible squeaky voice?”
“Yes,” Danny said, “I think so.”
“And what about the others?” The stranger described the men in grey suits. Danny nodded feebly.
“Do you know them, then?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. They and I go way back.”
Danny dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands. “Who are they, then?”
The stranger grinned in a way that reminded Danny of an Alsatian he had been particularly afraid of as a boy. “I don’t really think you want to know,” he said. “Not in your present state of mind.”
“Yes, I do,” Danny said urgently. “And what has Hildy Frederiksen got to do with it?”
The stranger raised an eyebrow. “Who’s Hildy Frederiksen?”
“The archaeologist. The one who found the burial. She’s with them.”
“You don’t say.” The stranger had stopped grinning. “Listen,” he said, taking hold of Danny’s sleeve.
“Yes?”
“Who do you think those men are?”
Danny blinked twice. “Are they from the CIA?”
“In a sense. You’re a TV producer, Mr…”
“Bennett, Danny Bennett.”
“I envy you, Mr Bennett. You’ve stumbled on to something big here. Really big.”
“Have I?”
The stranger nodded. “This is once-in-a-career stuff. If I were you, I’d forget all about that ship-burial and get after the men in the grey suits.”
“Really?” The roof of Danny’s mouth felt like sandpaper.
“Just don’t quote me, that’s all. The road’s over there. It was good meeting you.” The stranger started to walk away.
“So you don’t think I’ve gone crazy, then?” Danny called after him.
“No,” replied the stranger.
“I didn’t tell you about the little blue lights, did I?”
The stranger stopped and turned round. Strange-shaped ears that man has, Danny thought. Almost pointed.
“Tell me about the little blue lights,” said the stranger.
“If you must hum,” said Prexz, “hum quietly.”
“I’m not humming,” Zxerp replied, “you are.”
“No, I’m not. And do you mind not shouting? I feel like I’ve got a short just above my left eye.”
“It must be that cable, then,” replied his companion. “Humming.”
“Will you shut up about that cable?”
Prexz closed his eyes and resolved to keep perfectly still for at least half an hour. If that didn’t work, he could try a brief electric storm.
“Prexz.”
“Now what?”
“It’s not the cable. It’s coming from up there.”
Prexz opened his eyes. “You’re right,” he said. “And it isn’t a humming. More like a buzzing, really.”
“I don’t like it, Prexz. Shouldn’t we take a look?”
“Please yourself,” grunted Prexz. He lay back against the cable and dozed off. Zxerp tried to follow his example, but the buzzing grew louder. Then it stopped. After a moment, another sound took its place. Prexz sat upright with a jerk.
“It’s that perishing wizard,” he groaned.
“It’s not, you know,” whispered Zxerp. “Do you know who I think that is?”
The two chthonic spirits stared at each other in horror as the summons grew louder and louder, until they could resist it no longer. Something seemed to be dragging them up to the surface. As they emerged into the violent light of the sun, they were seized by strong hands and copper wire was twisted around their necks. They were trapped.