Jasper Fforde - The Great Troll War

We drove the mile into Penzance, the Quarkbeast sitting in the back, staring at his paws mournfully. He didn’t like Trolls any more than the rest of us, but stayed well hidden as Trolls didn’t look at a Quarkbeast and see the most terrifying creature on earth: a three-way split between a labrador, a velociraptor and a liquidiser with all the safety features removed; a creature with razor-sharp fangs, a coat of carbide-tipped steel scales that could explosively detonate off his back and embed themselves in concrete. No, the Trolls saw a Quarkbeast as a sporting opportunity: put them in a ring with three bears, two rhinos, a hyena and six dozen enraged, adrenaline-fuelled badgers – then take bets on how long the Quarkbeast took to despatch them all. 7 7 According to most betting offices this would be somewhere between fifteen and twenty-six seconds. Despite their fearsome looks, Quarkbeasts only ever attacked when they, or a loved one, were threatened. They usually felt guilty about it for years afterwards, with lots of sighing, mournful looks and overwhelming feelings of self-loathing. There were never any winners when it came to Quarkbaiting.

On the way back into Penzance we chatted about recent events, and Tiger related his escape to the Princess, who hadn’t heard the story yet. She had warmed to him since they first met, when her initial instinct was to have him beheaded for impudence.

‘Myself, Moobin, the Quarkbeast, the Mysterious X and Monty Vanguard were giving X his annual gaussing 8 8 ‘Gaussing’ is the manner by which you might place a magnetic field onto something. It’s really not that vital to know, although to the Mysterious X, whose particles do not have any bonds to keep them in place, it’s vital. Maybe. in the basement,’ said Tiger, ‘as the weak electromagnetic force holding its particles together needed a bit of a boost to keep them all in one vaguely coherent location. The human equivalent would be like watching your right foot drift off your leg and sail quietly out of the window. Although,’ he added, ‘that was only what we thought it wanted as no one is sure whether the Mysterious X exists or not. He communicates mainly by giving you vague ideas that sort of pop into your head unannounced.’

‘Ah-ha,’ said the Princess, who was still trying to get her head around the somewhat strange residents of Kazam.

‘We were trying to coax him back into his Kilner jar when the air started to tingle and a thermowizidrical detonation wiped out Zambini Towers. The explosion left the building as nothing but a pile of rubble half turned to glass and killed thirty-seven residents instantly. It might have been worse if it had gone critical.’

‘What’s not critical about thirty-seven dead?’ asked the Princess.

‘“Criticality” is the term we use to describe the effect of a runaway thermowizidrical detonation,’ I said, ‘where every spell turns in on itself and annihilates itself and the next in a devastating chain reaction.’

‘Even the simplest Worm Charm contains enough energy to take out a medium-sized house if you can tap right into the core of the spell,’ added Tiger. ‘Sorcerers always build in safeguards, but anyone who sets off a thermowizidrical detonation is dicing with destruction the likes of which you will never want to witness. If the attack on Zambini Towers had achieved criticality then most of Hereford would be a smoking hole in the ground – palace included.’

‘That would not be good,’ said the Princess. ‘Go on.’

‘We were trapped in the cellar but decided to lay low, as this was clearly a magic attack by a sorcerer of considerable power. We could hear someone looking for survivors – Trolls, we learned later – but even that stopped after an hour. We waited until after dark when the Dragons came to dig us out, then we were ferried on the carpets all the way down here while Moobin dug the Button Trench and put out the request for buttons on the low-alpha as Full Price put out a similar call for marksmen and women, warriors and expert fencers to make their way here.’

‘Full Price is a sorcerer?’ asked the Princess.

‘“Full” is a nickname,’ I said. ‘His brother was known as “Half Price” and they were easy to tell apart – the nicknames weren’t subtle.’

‘Half died in the attack,’ said Tiger in a quiet voice, ‘but we did finally hook up again with Kevin Zip – if he hadn’t been kidnapped at the time, we might have been prewarned and saved more sorcerers.’

‘The Remarkable Kevin Zip is our finest precognitive,’ I explained, changing down a gear as we drove across the swing bridge on the harbour front at Penzance. ‘He can shuffle through the millions of possible futures and latch on to the one most likely to occur. He’s rated the third-best there has ever been.’

‘Does he tell how this all turns out?’ asked the Princess.

‘Precognition is more of a craft than a science,’ I said, which was basically a shorthand admission that: ‘no, he almost certainly doesn’t’.

After driving past the Penzance Lido in bright sunshine and along the promenade in low cloud and drizzle – weather is very changeable in Cornwall – we parked behind the Queens Hotel, the base of our operations.

About six thousand people had taken refuge in the far tip of Cornwall, about a quarter of whom belonged on the Hive Memory ‘Eat List’, me included as of twenty minutes ago. The survivors were a mixed bag, and despite having many courageous individuals who favoured fighting over ending up as sapien en cocotte, we had no armoured vehicles, no artillery and only the weapons that the displaced had managed to carry with them. Annoyingly, bullets just tend to bounce off a Troll’s thick hide and make them more violent and hungry – neither of which generally ends well for humans.

I’d consulted my go-to person for all matters on everything, a friend named William of Anorak, and he was desperately frustrated when it came to answering, as, unusually for him, he had few fascinating Troll facts at his fingertips. He told me he’d call me back if he found anything, then reeled off all the citrus fruits, first by size, then in alphabetical order.

Without any anti-Troll strategy so far, the only two weapons we had that could possibly make a difference were Colin and Feldspar, the Dragons – but even with sound logistical support, it would be only those two youngsters against several million Trolls. Annoyingly, little more than an hour after the Button Trench was dug, a Spellsucking incantation started up which effectively hoovered all the wizidrical energy out of the air, rendering us magically powerless. Technically speaking a Hex Energy Neutralising Reversal Yieldiser, it was more often known by the acronym HENRY. 9 9 The name of a popular brand of vacuum cleaners are called ‘Henry’ for precisely this reason. This and the attack on Zambini Towers pointed a finger at the culprit: the Mighty Shandar. It takes a very powerful sorcerer indeed to spell up a Spellsucker or a thermowizidrical detonation. If there were a solution to the Troll invasion, it wouldn’t be magically based until we could take out the HENRY.

Anyway, the Troll invasion reeked of the Mighty Shandar’s assistance.

‘What’s the plan?’ asked Tiger as we climbed out of the VW Beetle.

‘Yes,’ said the Princess, ‘what is the plan?’

‘I don’t yet have one,’ I admitted. ‘Tiger, weren’t you running some numbers on the possibility of success when the Trolls inevitably cross the Button Trench?’

Tiger had indeed run the numbers – he was good with numbers.

‘93.7 per cent chance of success,’ he said.

‘That’s not so bad,’ said the Princess.