Jasper Fforde: The Great Troll War

About the Author

Also by Jasper Fforde

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Where We Are Now

Princesses

The Sorcerer’s Conclave

Sir Matt Grifflon

The Mighty Shandar

Troll Defence

The Troll

Dinner

Moll the Troll

This HENRY totally sucks

Aboard the Bellerophon

Breaking the Spaniel Barrier

Inside Shandar’s Tower

Wedding bells

King Mathew Speaks

The Meeting

Kevin sees it all

The Worriers

Cloud Leviathan

Colin and the Princess

The One True Monarch

Molly Reveals Herself

Humans v. Trolls

We say goodbye

The Mighty Shandar

Jupiter and Beyond

Epilogue

Footnotes

Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Times bestseller list with The Eyre Affair in 2001. Since then he has written another fifteen novels, including the Number One Sunday Times bestseller One of our Thursdays is Missing , and the Last Dragonslayer series, adapted for television by Sky.

Fforde lives and works in his adopted nation of Wales.

The Thursday Next Series

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

First Among Sequels

One of Our Thursdays is Missing

The Woman Who Died a Lot

The Nursery Crime Series

The Big Over Easy

The Fourth Bear

Shades of Grey

Early Riser

The Constant Rabbit

The Dragonslayer Series

(for young adult readers)

The Last Dragonslayer

The Song of the Quarkbeast

The Eye of Zoltar

The Great Troll War

Jasper Fforde

www.hodder.co.uk

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Jasper Fforde 2021

The right of Jasper Fforde to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: © Jo Wilson

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978 1 444 79995 8

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

For my eldest great-grandchild.

Sorry about the state of the planet.

We knew what we had to do – we just didn’t.

There was no excuse.

Trolls. I was staring at one just then. He was about twenty feet tall, dressed in a loincloth, a pair of leather boots and on top of his unusually small head was a dead goat. I’m not a massive expert on Trolls, but apparently they wear rotting animals in the same way as humans wear perfume: to disguise their smell and make them more attractive. To each other, obviously. I like to think myself fairly broad-minded but even I would have to admit Trolls are pretty loathsome in manner, looks and eating habits.

So who am I? Jennifer Strange. S-T-R-A-N-G-E. Rhymes with ‘Grange’. Y’know, the sixteen-year-old who was running Kazam, the House of Enchantment?

No?

Then how about this: I was the Last Dragonslayer.

Right, her . The kid with the Dragons.

The Troll was holding a large club that was once the rear axle of a truck, and it looked as though he not only knew how to use it, but already had. His skin was rough, had the colour of mouldy bread and boasted an impressive display of intricate tattoos. Some were geometric and purely for decoration, but others were more practical: owing to a long mistrust of pen and paper, the left Troll leg is reserved for a part of their written history, and the right for recipes, to-do lists and bawdy limericks. But no fools when it comes to data integrity, Trolls back themselves up, just in case – they have often been observed with identical tattoos.

That the Trolls were here at all was due to Troll War V, which had been going for only two weeks but already had a clear winner: the Trolls. They had flooded out of Trollvania and rampaged rapidly southwards with little resistance from the various Republics, Duchies, Social Collectives, Fiefdoms, Principalties and privately run City States of the UnUnited Kingdoms. The rapid invasion was due to a favourable tactical advantage: they were indifferent to us. Hating humankind would have been easier to counter as at least there could be some sort of debating position between our species. What led you to hate us so much? How do we arrange some sort of peaceful coexistence? Will you please stop eating us? None of those questions meant much to the Trolls. They can’t be swayed by reason or compassion or compromise for they regard humans as little more than vermin: an annoying pest that can outgrow the boundaries of their own environment in as little as nine centuries. Some humans think of rabbits in the same way: nuisances who damage the land, breed without conscience and are good only for the pot. The only difference between rabbits and humans as far as Trolls are concerned is that they can’t wear us as a hat – although many have tried with varying degrees of success. In any event, there’s little sense arguing with a Troll.

I had been in the Cambrian Empire when they invaded, searching for the Eye of Zoltar, 1 1 See The Eye of Zoltar, Jennifer’s third adventure. a fiery jewel with magical properties that the Mighty Shandar had tasked us to obtain in return for not killing the last two Dragons, something he had been contracted to do several centuries before. You’ll hear more about Shandar later. All you need to know right now is that he’s the most powerful sorcerer that has ever lived – and also turning out to be the least scrupulous.

I’d returned with the Eye and also Once-Magnificent Boo, who we had rescued from being ransomed. Addie, who had been our guide in the Cambrian Empire and in which capacity we owed her our lives, saw us safely to Cornwall, and made good on her promise to protect the Princess on the journey. She then returned to her village to fight the Troll. She had been reluctant to leave us, but the Princess had insisted.

‘What’s the Troll doing?’ asked Princess Shazine of Snodd, who was standing next to me.

‘Imagining us both inside a pie,’ I replied.

‘With white sauce, asparagus and badger’s paws, I imagine,’ said Tiger Prawns, who was also present. He was an orphan like me, only younger – ten, I think – and had a Moral Worth Index that was certainly in the top ten per cent. He had been due to take over from me the running of Kazam, the last house of enchantment, which is a sort of home for barely-sane sorcerers. But all those plans were upset by the Troll invasion: in what was likely a preemptive measure to stop us using magic against the Trolls, the head offices of Kazam at Zambini Towers were destroyed by a single and very powerful thermowizidrical blast, killing several dozen sorcerers, destroying countless volumes of spells and reducing the building to rubble. As soon as it was safe to do so, the dragons and surviving sorcerers headed to Troll-free Cornwall with Tiger Prawns among them. We’d joined him in Penzance a week later. That was five days ago and we’d spent the time trying to figure out a strategy of resistance and had so far not come up with much – I was due to convene a meeting later that morning.