Jasper Fforde - The Eye of Zoltar

‘Hanging on to the Leviathan for dear life, the small Australopithecine was soon thousands of feet in the air …’

THE EYE OF ZOLTAR

Book Three of The Last Dragonslayer Series

Jasper Fforde

www.hodder.co.uk

Also by Jasper Fforde

The Last Dragonslayer Series

The Last Dragonslayer

The Song of the Quarkbeast

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

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Jasper Fforde 2014

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.

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

ISBN 978 1 444 70729 8

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title Page

Also by Jasper Fforde

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Where we are now

Zambini Towers

Tralfamosaur Hunt Part 1: Bait and Lure

Tralfamosaur Hunt Part 1: Chase and Capture

Angel Traps

Audience with the King

The Princess changed

The Mighty Shandar

The Remarkable Kevin Zipp

Sorcerers’ Conclave

The Dragons

To the border by Royale

The Cambrian Empire

Colin’s fall

Addie Powell

Addie explains

Flesh-eating slugs

The Empty Quarter

It’s an Australopithecine

At the Claerwin

Speaking on the conch

The naval officer’s tale

A deal with Curtis

Slow boat to the Land of Snodd

Leviathans explained and some tourists

A brush with death

The name’s Gabby

The old Dragonlands

The morning feeding

Friends reunited

Llangurig

The handmaiden’s tale

Trouble with gravediggers

The fast-track trial

To the foot of the mountain

The Mountain Silurians

Cavi homini

Cadair Idris

Perkins’ secret

The sky pirate’s tale

Sky Pirate Bunty Wolff

The plan

Battle of the Hollow Men

The last stand

We become sisters

Negotiations in Cambrianopolis

Heading home

Aftermath

Acknowledgements

About the Author

For Ingrid, Ian, Freya and Lottie

‘I don’t do refunds’

The Mighty Shandar

Where we are now

The first thing we had to do was catch the Tralfamosaur. The obvious question aside from ‘What’s a Tralfamosaur?’ was: ‘Why us?’. The answer to the first question was that this was a Magical Beast, created by some long-forgotten wizard when conjuring up weird and exotic creatures was briefly fashionable. The Tralfamosaur was about the size and weight of an elephant, had a brain no bigger than a ping-pong ball and a turn of speed that allowed it to outrun a human. More pertinent for anyone trying to catch one, Tralfamosaurs weren’t particularly fussy over what they ate. And when they were hungry – which was much of the time – they were even less fussy. A sheep, cow, rubber tyre, garden shed, antelope, smallish automobile or human would go down equally well. In short, the Tralfamosaur was a lot like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but without the sunny disposition and winning personality.

And we had to capture it. Oh, and the answer to the ‘Why us?’ question was that it was our fault the rotten thing escaped.

Perhaps I should explain a bit about who I am and what I do, just in case you’re new to my life. Firstly, I’m sixteen, a girl, and an orphan – hey, no biggie, lots of kids don’t have parents here in the Kingdoms because of the huge number of people lost in the endless Troll Wars that have been going on these past sixty years. With lots of orphans around, there’s plenty of cheap labour. I got lucky. Instead of being sold into the garment, fast-food or hotel industries, I got to spend my six years of indentured servitude with a company named Kazam, a registered House of Enchantment run by the Great Zambini. Kazam did what all Houses of Enchantment used to do: hire out wizards to perform magical feats. The problem was that in the past half-century magic had faded, so we were really down to finding lost shoes, rewiring houses, unblocking drains and getting cats out of trees. It was a bit demeaning for the once-mighty sorcerers who worked for us, but at least it was paid work.

At Kazam I found out that magic had not much to do with black cats, cauldrons, wands, pointy hats and broomsticks. No, those were only in the movies. Real life was somewhat different. Magic is weird and mysterious and a fusion between science and faith, and the practical way of looking at it is this: magic swirls about us like an invisible fog of emotional energy that can be tapped by those skilled in the Mystical Arts, and then channelled into a concentrated burst of energy from the tips of the index fingers. The technical name for magic was ‘the variable electro-gravitational mutable subatomic force’, but the more more usual term was ‘wizidrical energy’, or, more simply, ‘crackle’.

So there I was, assistant to the Great Zambini, learning well and working hard, when Zambini disappeared – quite literally – in a puff of smoke. He didn’t return, or at least, not for anything but a few minutes at a time and often in random locations, so I took over the running of the company, aged fifteen. Okay, that was a biggie, but I coped and, long story short, I saved dragons from extinction, averted war between the nations of Snodd and Brecon and helped the power of magic begin to re-establish itself. And that’s when the trouble really started. King Snodd thought using the power of magic for corporate profit would be a seriously good wheeze, something we at Kazam weren’t that happy about. Even longer story short, we held a magic contest to decide who controls magic, and after a lot of cheating by the King to try to have us lose, he failed – and we are now a House of Enchantment free from royal meddling, and can concentrate on rebuilding magic into a noble craft one can be proud of.

I now look after forty-five barely sane sorcerers at Kazam, only six of whom have a legal permit to perform magic. If you think wizards are all wise, sage-like purveyors of the Mystical Arts with sparkling wizidrical energy streaming from their fingertips, think again. They are for the most part undisciplined, infantile, argumentative and infuriating, and their magic only works when they really concentrate, which isn’t that often, and misspellings are common. But when it works, a well-spelled feat of magic is the most wondrous thing to behold, like your favourite book, painting, music and movie all at the same time, with chocolate and a meaningful hug from someone you love thrown in for good measure. So despite everything, it’s a good business in which to work. Besides, there’s rarely a dull moment.