Jasper Fforde - The Great Troll War

It didn’t stop him being a massive twat, though. I’d avoided him for a week afterwards. But even in the seventy-seven storeys of the tower this was tricky as he would often teleport in to where I happened to be, as if by accident, and want to talk about how terrific he was and how fantastic were his plans.

I’d be hard pressed to find a fortnight I enjoyed less.

I was in the observation room staring out of the port, still in my pyjamas even though it was past ten. I hate to admit it, but I was thinking about myself. I was feeling self-pity, and that was worrying, because I’d always viewed it as a wasteful, destructive emotion. I had been surrendered by my parents to be brought up as a countermeasure, my personality inextricably bound to a rejected group of emotions. My lot, my destiny, my purpose, was to simply dilute the more violent impulses of a megalomaniacal idiot.

How successful I would be in controlling Shandar’s worst excesses was yet to be seen, but was also something of an ethical dilemma: do you give tacit support to a tyrant to ensure he murders less than he would have? And could you ever justify that position?

So here I was, stuck on a replica New York skyscraper with a sorcerer of almost infinite powers heading off to who-knows-where. Shandar had to be stopped, yet I had nothing in the plans chest. What could someone who had zero magic do against someone who had enough power to achieve immortality, travel to the stars and even rewrite the laws of physics?

There was a knock at the door.

‘Good morning, Miss Strange,’ said Blousie, who was now my official maid. She’d been matching herself to my personality over the past few weeks to make our social engagement easier, and oddly, she was turning out to be like Tiger – mildly sarcastic with an odd sense of humour.

‘Hello,’ I replied. ‘What news?’

‘His Supreme Mightiness would like to have a chat,’ she said. ‘He’s on the control deck.’

‘What does he want to talk about?’ I asked.

‘His favourite subject, I imagine,’ said Blousie, ‘himself.’

Shandar fancied himself as a living god, but I disagreed. There were six basic qualities to being a deity: omniscience, omnipresence, empathy, humility, guidance and forgiveness. The only one he had on the list was the second – and only a bit of that. Which gave him about a ten per cent pass rate. Not even an ‘E minus’ – I’d got a higher grade for baking back at the orphanage. But I think he was after another god-like attribute, which wasn’t on the list at all: the unswerving adulation of a large group of zealously committed followers.

‘Will you go?’ asked Blousie. ‘I’m meant to convey your message back to Miss D’Argento.’

‘Tell her I’ll be ten minutes.’

I always told them that but often took half an hour – or didn’t turn up at all. I went back to the observation port, where Jupiter was looming large and dominant. When the planet first hove into view, Shandar had summoned me to the control deck and asked me to describe what I felt about the gas giant, as the rejected Better Angels of his Nature had included his sense of natural beauty and aesthetics. A successful Tyrant, he argued, must be able to destroy beautiful things without hesitation if it furthers their cause. I described Jupiter as best as I could, but no words could do it justice. From here we could easily see the colourful gaseous clouds that swathed the planet and the Great Red Spot, a perpetually raging storm the size of Earth. We couldn’t actually see the clouds moving, but occasionally an aurora would crackle around the poles, shimmer for a while and then die down. It was spectacularly beautiful.

The Earth and Moon had shrunk rapidly in size as we’d pulled away, until they were distant, then small, then dots, then almost impossible to differentiate from anything else on the velvety backdrop of stars. There were eight days of apparent emptiness – Mars was on the other side of the sun, and couldn’t be seen – then Jupiter began to loom larger and larger until it dominated our view. But there was no enjoyment to be had in any of it. My friends, although safe, were now far behind, and our task, to vanquish Shandar, had failed. He would travel to the stars, he would do all that he set out to do. His centuries of planning and preparation had been time extremely well spent.

I watched as the largest of Jupiter’s moons moved into the periphery of my vision: Ganymede. It looked a little like our moon, grey and pocked with craters, but with a grooved surface and polar caps. Why, precisely, the Quarkbeast had suggested that the view from Ganymede was something to behold, I wasn’t sure. But then I had a thought. Maybe the message wasn’t in the message. Maybe the message was the fact that I had received a message at all .

I had a quick shower, dressed and made my way to the control deck, the nerve centre of Shandar’s ambitions. The steel-clad spire with serried ranks of triangular windows had been replaced by a large transparent dome which gave a better view than from my observation deck, and the lack of any reflections on the polished crystal gave a seamless ringside seat to view the cosmos. The sun was a quarter of the size I had been used to, but still too bright to look at with the naked eye. As we watched, it set behind the planet and the thin corona around Jupiter’s edge became a lively myriad of colours. The lights on the control deck dimmed and as our eyes became accustomed to the dark, the billions of stars in the Milky Way became clearly visible.

‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ said D’Argento, who had been trying very hard to make friends. She’d told me all about her time with Shandar since the age of sixteen, one of the dynastic family agents who had looked after the sorcerer for centuries. I had not been interested.

‘The sun seen through the plumes of the marzoleum plant back home used to wobble and shimmer quite beautifully,’ I said, ‘and the views I saw in the Cambrian Empire were something really quite special.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning you don’t need to come four hundred million miles to find something of beauty.’

Shandar teleported in next to me. Too close, in fact, and I took a step back so he wasn’t in my personal space.

‘The stars are our destiny,’ he said, sounding terribly grand. He did this a lot now, and reminded me a little of Grifflon’s ornamental hermit – full of faux wisdom.

‘They’re your destiny,’ I said, ‘not mine.’

‘I spared six billion souls on your account, Jenny,’ he said. ‘I delayed my plans thirty-seven years to accommodate your feelings, so a little bit of gratitude might be in order. Brunch?’

I looked at the dinner table. It was the only place to eat in the tower, and he insisted that D’Argento and I always dined with him. It was Shandar who chose the topics of conversation, and for the most part dominated it. Things he had done, spells he had cast, the beasts he had created. He spoke of the Dragonpact from his viewpoint, as it seemed it was less about ‘freeing mankind from the loathsome worm’ but ridding himself of a dangerous adversary – and how it would have worked perfectly, if not for my tiresome meddling. He talked about his future plans, too, in more detail. They were quite ruthless, and as he talked I often felt my concentration lapse, then wander to happier times. Hide and seek in the orchard back at the orphanage, in a place free of the Sisterhood’s attention; my early times at Zambini Towers under Zambini’s wise counsel; the search for the Eye of Zoltar. Tiger, the Princess, Perkins. Boo, Mawgon, Wizard Moobin. All fine people.

‘I want you to both have a look at these ideas for my Emperor of Everything costume,’ said Shandar once we were seated, pointing to a pile of notebooks on a sideboard. ‘It’s either long robes in crimson or something more like leathery armour – both have their advantages.’