The Great Troll War

And I walked out of the door feeling hot and annoyed.

The Troll

I walked out the back of the hotel and to the car park. I wasn’t annoyed because of what they said, I was annoyed because it was very likely true. I had felt the power channel through me when I held up Exhorbitus back in the Dragonlands the day I slayed the last Dragon, and it had felt as though every cell in my body was being pulled apart. Pain I would never want to feel again. But there had been something else, too – I felt that my purpose, my destiny, was not yet fulfilled.

There was more for me to do. D’Argento had been right: my destiny, like hers, was inextricably linked with Shandar’s.

I opened the bootlid of my Beetle, pulled out the dipstick, cleaned it, put it back in, then looked at it again. The oil was clean and perfect and filled exactly to the line. It had been the same since I’d started work at Zambini Towers, soon after leaving the orphanage. The tyres had always remained the same pressures, too, and never wore out. Tiger said it was because I was still running cross-plys over radial tyres,31 but I had a better idea: secretly, the sorcerers at Zambini Towers had been helping me out with a few simple car maintenance spells as they knew I earned almost nothing. Although I did still have to put fuel in the car, it never returned less than a hundred miles to the gallon – an impossible feat.

I busied myself thus, attempting to hide from the serious by undertaking the banal. I kept a dustpan in the boot and swept up the small bits of twisted metal left by the Quarkbeast in the footwells. He would insist on chewing metal when riding in the car, no matter how many times I asked him not to. I think he was a nervous passenger.

Tiger walked up.

‘Any news from Feldspar?’ I asked.

‘Not yet. The Princess wanted me to come and check on you.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, which is what people who aren’t fine always say. ‘I’m going to wander up into town. If you need me, come up and find me.’

He left and I wandered out of the car park and up towards the main part of the town, absently staring into store windows as I went. There was a shop selling spares for the many steam engines that still pumped water out of the mine workings in the area, and another which sold tourist trinkets made out of tin and fossilised scones. There was even a museum dedicated to Richard Trevithick,32 and a pasty shop that boasted proudly that it held the record for the largest pasty in the world, a monster that tipped the scales at almost six tons, and looked like a beached whale that had overindulged in a tanning booth.

I reached Chapel Street, then spotted a familiar figure making a call from a telephone box outside the Co-Op. It was Sir Matt Grifflon, and close by were his small group of hangers-on, which included the shabby curate in the oversized bishop’s hat. The minstrels were singing what sounded like the Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner Song, but had changed the words to something about how Sir Matt ‘married the frumpy Princess and made the Kingdoms a better place by his wise and not-at-all corrupt leadership’, but they soon stopped when they saw me.

‘Everything okay?’ I asked them.

They all looked shifty, then pushed the ornamental hermit out in front to quote some more of his meaningless aphorisms, presumably to confuse/impress me.

‘Complexity,’ he said in a grand tone, ‘is the second cousin of needfulness.’

‘I have absolutely no idea what that means,’ I told him, ‘and I strongly suspect that you don’t either.’

‘Oh,’ he said, then, in an equally grand and expansive manner: ‘Why dig a hole in the garden, when potatoes grow wild in Finland?’

‘Nope,’ I said, ‘that’s actually even more pointless and unintelligible.’

‘Damn,’ said the ornamental hermit, ‘how about: “Every journey starts with the first step”?’

‘Better,’ I said, ‘but still so hopelessly open ended as to be utterly meaningless.’

‘Hello, Jessica,’ said Sir Matt, suddenly noticing me and stepping out of the phone box, while indicating for one of his valets to take the receiver. ‘Come to apologise, have you?’

‘Not even close,’ I said, ‘and it’s Jennifer.’

‘Same thing. Look, you and I should come to an agreement of some sort. I will be King of the Greater Kingdoms soon, and it makes sense for you to back me up on this, what with having the ear of the Dragons and Head Mystician and stuff. Just advise the little princess that I’m the one for her, get her to cancel the whole silly jumping off a building lark, and there could be a little something in it for you.’

‘That’s very generous,’ I said sarcastically. ‘What were you thinking of? A lounge suite? A set of steak knives?’

‘No,’ he said, blinking twice, ‘I was thinking more along the lines of giving you … Wales.’

‘Wales?’

Yes, it’s a small country to the west of here about the size of … Wales. How about it?’

‘Wales is about the size of Wales?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it exactly the size of Wales?’