‘I understand him perfectly,’ I said, ‘but you don’t. If you did, you’d be helping and not hindering.’
‘Our destinies are inextricably bound,’ she said. ‘I’ve known that for a long time, and learned it from someone wiser than you.’
I didn’t really understand D’Argento and Shandar’s relationship. She was too smart to simply be a minion, yet not outwardly evil enough to stand by his side. She was basically his agent – an employee. Insanely loyal or simply in it for the cash? I couldn’t tell – but people who stood on the right-hand side of tyrants usually ended up on the wrong side of history.
‘What’s your play?’ I asked her.
‘What’s yours?’ she retorted as the bell sounded and the lift doors opened. I made no answer and she stepped out of the elevator and indicated the room with a flourish.
‘Welcome,’ she said, ‘to the Tower of Knowledge.’
I stepped into the room. The doors slid shut behind me and I looked around.
Whatever the real Chrysler Building looked like inside, I was willing to bet good money it was nothing like this. The floor area was smaller than on the lower storeys as the building narrowed as it rose, but the room was still large and sumptuously furnished with leather armchairs and walnut tables and desks. To one side on a low dais a string quartet of Hollow musicians were neatly folded next to their instruments, and on the other side of the room a log fire blazed in a grate within an ornate fireplace. Centred on all the four walls were large semicircular windows, giving far-reaching views in all directions. Above our heads was the interior of the tower’s spire: an empty void of at least six storeys in height, with the distinctive triangular windows allowing a clear view of the dark sky outside.
I noticed a large aperture in the centre of the room, across which was placed a stainless steel grate. I walked across and peered into a vertical shaft which plunged into darkness far below, from where I could hear faint Quarking noises.
‘During the mass conjoining,’ said Miss D’Argento, who had walked with me, ‘the raw wizidrical energy will flow up this conduit, and will be absorbed and then focused by the Eye of Zoltar into every cell of his body. No one has ever been that powerful before. He will, quite literally, become—’
‘A living god?’ came a voice from behind us. I turned. It was the Mighty Shandar, and he looked younger and fitter than when he had appeared last in the Queens Hotel ballroom.
‘Practising your humility, Shandar?’
I purposefully left off the ‘mighty’ honorific. His eyebrow twitched and I saw D’Argento flick a nervous look towards me. A lesser mortal would have been vaporised into dust where they stood, but I was not frightened of him, and it was best he knew that.
‘There is a fine line between boldness and stupidity,’ he said, commenting either on the absence of the honorific or my sarcasm, but I wasn’t sure which. He snapped his fingers and the Hollow string quartet popped into life, picked up their instruments and began to play softly in the background.
‘D’Argento,’ said Shandar, ‘bring us coffee. Jennifer and I need to talk.’
D’Argento nodded respectfully and departed. We stared at one another for a few moments.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ I asked.
‘If it were that simple,’ he said, ‘I would have done it years ago, the first time I realised who you were, the moment I realised Zambini had put a plan in place, the moment I saw you for the threat you are.’
I thought about the photograph I found, the one of me at the orphanage, with ‘The Assetts’ written on the back. Me and the Quarkbeast. I had to know more.
‘Enlighten me.’
‘I shall not,’ he said, wagging a finger at me. ‘The supreme delight I will get from destroying you lies in the fact that you will
And he laughed.
My temper spiked and in an instant Exhorbitus was out and had sliced him cleanly in half. Or rather, that’s what I had intended – but Exhorbitus, who could change thought into immediate action, was still too slow. The instant before the blade struck him, Shandar had teleported to a position beside the fire, where he stared back at me laconically.
‘What do you think?’ he asked, indicating his creation, the tower.
‘Vulgar and ostentatious,’ I replied, taking two steps towards him. He effortlessly teleported to one of the windows, then another, each time accompanied by a faint ‘pop’ as the air rushed in to fill the area left empty by his departing form. If I were to beat him, it would not be with a blade. I calmed, and placed Exhorbitus back in its scabbard.
‘You’re already all-powerful,’ I said. ‘Why annihilate all those Quarkbeasts in the mass conjoining? What could you want that you do not already have?’
