Jasper Fforde - The Great Troll War

So we ate, and chatted, and Shandar, now more relaxed, was saying that if he couldn’t get enough power from sucking the energy out of Proxima Centauri, we’d pop on over to Barnard’s Star and harvest that one too. He made it sound like nipping down to the corner store for another packet of crisps. But while he was talking, it suddenly made a lot more sense that Monty had left those crude and easily discovered thermowizidrical devices in my car. They were never going to detonate; they were always going to be found. They were simply diversions in case Shandar was suspicious about the lack of an attack. If he found those, he would look no further. And it worked. He didn’t. The real plan was much subtler – and given Monty, Boo and Mawgon knew Shandar would search my mind for any clues, anything they cooked up I couldn’t know anything about. They would have to trust me to figure out what they were up to.

And I’m quite good at figuring stuff out.

But they knew that, too.

‘What are you smiling about?’ asked Shandar.

‘Because I’m lucky.’

‘To be here with me now on this adventure?’

‘No, I’m thinking that even out here, I have friends. The sort that have your back and give you the tools to do the job you need to do. They understand you, they trust you, they take care of you, and they never give up, no matter how bad things appear.’

‘That’s a heart-warming little story,’ said Shandar, plopping his napkin on his plate as a Hollow waiter moved his chair so he could stand up, ‘but I have work to do. The tower is the size of six cathedrals, so manoeuvring it into Ganymede’s orbit will be a little like trying to reverse an ocean liner into the Panama Canal at top speed blindfolded – not for the faint hearted, and requiring skill, dexterity and a sound understanding of mass, gravity and converging velocities. Why not watch? You might learn something.’

‘I’ll watch from here while I finish my breakfast.’

Shandar nodded, then walked to the elegant wooden pulpit in the middle of the room, which looked as though it had been swiped from a cathedral somewhere. He raised his hands and I felt the tower move as he warped the space beneath us to shift the mass of the skyscraper towards the Jovian moon. I looked up to see D’Argento staring at me in an odd manner.

‘Something on your mind, Jenny?’ she asked.

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘I will answer as honestly as I can,’ she replied.

‘What do you get out of this?’

‘I get an opportunity,’ replied D’Argento thoughtfully, ‘to be in the right place at the right time, to assist a truly great person in their moment of triumph.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

She looked me straight in the eye.

‘I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.’

‘I think I’ll have some of the kedgeree after all,’ I said, and walked to the sideboard, where a Hollow waiter handed me a plate. I took a good spoonful – it smelled delicious – then walked off to a seat by the fire.

While Shandar and D’Argento were distracted – he placing the Chrysler Building into orbit around Ganymede, she flicking through the designs of suitable Evil Emperor costumes – I placed my hands on the brooch that Lady Mawgon had given me. When she had, she’d made up some stuff about how she wished she’d been more pleasant – probably also a diversion – but then crucially had given me the order that ‘I was to carry it with me always’. Not unusual, you might think, but it became more relevant when added to other events: when Once Magnificent Boo said goodbye she had added that ‘with eternal life must come limitless power’; and, crucially, the Quarkbeast communicated with me when I first came into the tower, even though he can only do that one way: through Mysterious X . I think it meant two things. Firstly, that the Mysterious X had snuck on board hidden among the atoms in Mawgon’s brooch, and secondly, that there was nothing particular about Ganymede that was important. The real message was this: We have your back – and whatever you do, don’t let him leave the solar system. There was something else, too. Zambini’s second message, the one I got through Molly: Help will come from an unexpected quarter.

If all this was true, the time of action was right now.

I got up from the table, and with Shandar amusing himself by manoeuvring the tower, I walked down the stairwell from the control deck, out of sight of him, D’Argento and any of the Hollow staff. Colin had told me how he had spoken to the Mysterious X, so I closed my eyes and imagined myself back in the lobby of Zambini Towers, standing at reception, the old oak growing to the ceiling, the delightful shabbiness. I then imagined myself shouting as loudly as possible the following words: ‘If you can hear this, answer by sending a single charged particle through one of the light receptors on my retina, because when you speak to me, Shandar hears. Everything you’ve put in my head so far he’s picked up.’

In an instant there was a small white flash in the periphery of my vision. The Mysterious X was listening. I imagined myself shouting again, but this time, it was my plan. It was simple and audacious, was in two parts, and required the Mysterious X to tap into my life-force to harvest the energy he needed. I had to hope he could, because I now contained a lot of power: I knew from both Perkins and Wizard Moobin’s early passing that if a sorcerer runs out of wizidrical energy there is always somewhere else to go: your own life-force. Because essentially, all magic was life-force, the power of human emotion – love, anger, sadness, jealousy, grief. Perkins could tap into a lot of power because he was young, Moobin less so because his time on Earth was already up. I had more in reserve than either of them. I had life immortal, and I could trade that for potentially limitless amounts of wizidrical energy.

Annoyingly, so could Shandar. But unlike me, he wouldn’t actually want to. He needed his immortality to live for ever: I only needed mine to defeat him. Which kind of gave me the edge – so long as the Mysterious X could spell strongly enough and the unexpected help was both real, and actually helpful.

There were two flashes in my eye to show X understood my plan, and my heart began to beat faster as I felt the Nebulous Entity go to work weaving and spelling inside me. I felt stronger, more powerful, more confident. A buzz started at my shoulder and then worked its way down my arm until I could feel my fingertips start to tingle. I pointed at the nearest Hollow Man and he turned to brown paper in an instant and fluttered to the floor. I smiled to myself, and walked back upstairs to the control deck.

‘What do you think?’ asked the Mighty Shandar. The Chrysler Building was now moving slowly around Ganymede, sixty miles out. The view was spectacular, but that wasn’t foremost on my mind right now.

‘Impressive,’ I said.

‘Indeed,’ replied Shandar, staring at me with a look of surprise on his face, ‘and so are you. How did you smuggle a sorcerer on board?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I can feel you radiating wizidrical energy like a hot stove,’ he said. ‘Who gave you that power?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I replied. ‘The stars are not your destiny and you will not spread your tyranny into the galaxy. This all ends right now.’

He seemed unimpressed by my threat.

‘Better Angels are an overrated commodity,’ he murmured. ‘I shall take them back and bestow them upon someone more willing to embrace my will.’

He pointed a finger towards me and I instinctively put out the flat of my open palm to stop him. I felt pressure on my hand, holding back his power, and then in an instant he had overcome me and I was hanging upside down about eight feet up, my arms tightly behind my back, a soft sphere of sparkling blue light around me. I was trapped.