The Great Troll War

Shane James Alexandar was a child magical prodigy. By the time he was six he could levitate pianos and charm badgers from their burrows in broad daylight. He’d conjured up his first house by the time he was ten, and by his fifteenth birthday had demonstrated an eighty-foot free teleport, then a world record. By the time he was eighteen he had mastered arboreal transformation, weather manipulation and the transmutation of matter. He passed out First in Class from Sorcerer College and was awarded the ‘Mighty’ honorific eight years later when he spelled up the Quarkbeast, winner of the coveted ‘Most Terrifying Beast’ prize at the 1592 ‘Wizard of the Year’ awards.

His dazzling career encompassed almost every aspect of the mystical arts, finally culminating in dealing with the Dragon Question,23 for which he was paid enough24 to retire twenty times over. He was so key to the industry that the unit of wizidrical energy had been named after him, and there were few who considered him anything but the finest exponent of the wizidrical arts. After the Dragons were dealt with his reputation began to tarnish as he became known as a sorcerer who would do pretty much anything if the price was right, ethical or not. By the time he was middle aged he was more of a loner, and rarely sought the companionship or counsel of his peers.

‘Miss Strange,’ he said cordially, ‘you are looking well.’

‘And yourself, sire,’ I returned, ‘you look barely a day over ninety.’

‘You will treat His Mightiness with the proper respect,’ growled Miss D’Argento.

‘It’s okay,’ said Shandar, ‘I think Miss Strange intended it as compliment.’

He was right. It was. Shandar was actually somewhere in his mid-four-hundreds and this was highly unusual. The magical holy grail of Eternal Life had remained stubbornly beyond the reach of sorcerers. The oldest wizard to ever live in a continuously human form had finally clocked out at an impressive 173 years and nine days. Others had achieved greater longevity by spending their weekends as tortoises or lobsters but Shandar had achieved his old age by simply turning himself to stone, a spell that had been invented to avoid income tax by outliving the current tax regime or waiting for the paperwork to be lost, as it inevitably was.

‘So,’ I said, ‘how may we serve you?’

‘Straight to the point?’ he replied. ‘I admire that. So here it is: no doubt you have seen that the Trolls are currently in complete possession of these islands. You may already have surmised that I had something to do with it.’

We all knew it was him, but the confirmation made my temper rise, and I could feel I was not alone – the tension in the room rose markedly.

‘You murdered my friends,’ I said in a quiet voice, ‘innocents, sorcerers, your own. Everything that the Sorcerer’s Charter holds to be true and just – you rejected.’

‘The Charter does not recognise forward thinking; it is rooted in the old ways. And they were not friends of mine, Miss Strange – but I will meditate upon their loss, in time. To business: you will have seen that I have shortened Zip’s predictive powers, set up a HENRY Spellsucker and interfered with Price and Mawgon’s telepathic shout-out. As things currently stand you have only two sorcerers, no wizidrical power for them to use, and less than forty people militarily trained, eighteen swords and four firearms.’

‘Nineteen swords,’ I said, ‘if you count Exhorbitus, but let’s not quibble.’

‘I … exactly. The point is, you are poorly placed to resist the Troll, and the next step is up to you. They can rule for thousands of years with humans as little more than edible staff, or they can be gone by Monday teatime. I can make that happen, or I can leave them to their impressive levels of culinary invention.’

‘We understand the threat,’ I said slowly. ‘What do you want?’

Horse-trading was a little below him, so he signalled for Miss D’Argento to step in.

‘It’s very simple,’ she said. ‘His Mightiness wants the Eye of Zoltar he asked you to secure and … your Quarkbeast.’

This was worrying. If you were foolish enough to let two identical yet opposing Quarkbeasts conjoin, they would generate huge amounts of wizidrical energy – always to the ‘Criticality’ level discussed earlier, usually with enough power to take out a good-sized city block. But as I sat there staring at them both, I realised that if you could focus that energy – such as through the Eye of Zoltar – then you could use it to enrich yourself with some very powerful magic. With a sense of growing unease I thought I understood what he was up to. Not what he actually wanted to do, but a methodology to his demands: he was after power – and lots of it. This was a tricky situation, and in moments like this you needed time to figure out how to find yourself another, bigger chunk of time – and maybe, just maybe, you could find a solution in that.

Or just more time.