The Great Troll War
- Автор: Ффорде Джаспер
- Серия: The Last Dragonslayer #4
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Hodder & Stoughton
- ISBN: 9781444799958
- Жанр: Фэнтези
Электронная книга - «The Great Troll War». Краткое содержание книги:
‘A living god?’ came a voice from behind us. I turned. It was the Mighty Shandar, and he looked younger and fitter than when he had appeared last in the Queens Hotel ballroom.
‘Practising your humility, Shandar?’
I purposefully left off the ‘mighty’ honorific. His eyebrow twitched and I saw D’Argento flick a nervous look towards me. A lesser mortal would have been vaporised into dust where they stood, but I was not frightened of him, and it was best he knew that.
‘There is a fine line between boldness and stupidity,’ he said, commenting either on the absence of the honorific or my sarcasm, but I wasn’t sure which. He snapped his fingers and the Hollow string quartet popped into life, picked up their instruments and began to play softly in the background.
‘D’Argento,’ said Shandar, ‘bring us coffee. Jennifer and I need to talk.’
D’Argento nodded respectfully and departed. We stared at one another for a few moments.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ I asked.
‘If it were that simple,’ he said, ‘I would have done it years ago, the first time I realised who you were, the moment I realised Zambini had put a plan in place, the moment I saw you for the threat you are.’
I thought about the photograph I found, the one of me at the orphanage, with ‘The Assetts’ written on the back. Me and the Quarkbeast. I had to know more.
‘Enlighten me.’
‘I shall not,’ he said, wagging a finger at me. ‘The supreme delight I will get from destroying you lies in the fact that you will never know what it is you could have done. But the people you failed, the people you left behind, I’ll make sure they know how absolute was your blundering stupidity. The name of Jennifer Strange will be synonymous with complete and utter failure.’
And he laughed.
My temper spiked and in an instant Exhorbitus was out and had sliced him cleanly in half. Or rather, that’s what I had intended – but Exhorbitus, who could change thought into immediate action, was still too slow. The instant before the blade struck him, Shandar had teleported to a position beside the fire, where he stared back at me laconically.
‘What do you think?’ he asked, indicating his creation, the tower.
‘Vulgar and ostentatious,’ I replied, taking two steps towards him. He effortlessly teleported to one of the windows, then another, each time accompanied by a faint ‘pop’ as the air rushed in to fill the area left empty by his departing form. If I were to beat him, it would not be with a blade. I calmed, and placed Exhorbitus back in its scabbard.
‘You’re already all-powerful,’ I said. ‘Why annihilate all those Quarkbeasts in the mass conjoining? What could you want that you do not already have?’
‘I have plans far bigger and bolder than you could possibly imagine,’ he said. ‘You will never find out what I am going to do until I have done it.’
‘We’re working on that,’ I said, wondering whether the team back in Penzance had managed to find a fantasy author with a suitably aberrant imagination, ‘but really,’ I added, ‘centuries of planning to give yourself, what, two TeraShandars of power? It’s big enough to achieve world domination, but not enough to keep it.’
He smiled.
‘Who did your maths? That Full Price nincompoop, or the perpetually moody Lady Mawgon? “She who no-one obeys”.’
‘It’s more?’
‘Considerably more. You don’t total the power of each conjoinment, you multiply them. The power available to me is roughly two raised to the power of sixty-three.’
He placed the figures in the air as smoke so I could better understand them.
263
‘Doesn’t look like much, does it?’ he said. ‘But when you consider that the notable Carl Sagan42 calculated that two raised to the power of eighty was likely the number of elementary particles in the universe, I think you will agree I will have more crackle on tap than I’d really know what to do with.’
‘More skyscrapers in North Devon?’ I asked.
‘You’re very sarcastic, aren’t you?’
‘I learned it from a friend,’ I said, thinking of Tiger.
‘It’s not skyscrapers I want to build,’ he said after a moment’s thought, ‘it’s enlightenment.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘The acquisition of knowledge follows broadly established lines: research, collation, evaluation, testing, modification and conclusion. These can all be done by others and deposited in libraries. Terrific if you’re a specialist, but if you are looking for a broader and fuller understanding of exactly what all this is here for and how and why it works, then you will need an all-encompassing overview, a full and complete understanding of an almost infinite host of subjects. A lifetime is not long enough to do that.’
‘I don’t disagree with that,’ I said, ‘so far.’
‘In the pursuit of knowledge,’ he continued, ‘humans fight, regimes fall and knowledge is lost, forgotten or warped for political gain. With a clear objective and time enough in which to do it, I can achieve full enlightenment. If you stop to think for a moment, Jenny, I’m actually making the greatest possible contribution to human knowledge. I call it “The Everything Project”.’
There was a pause in the conversation as D’Argento reappeared and handed Shandar a coffee, and me a banana milkshake, my favourite.
‘All the great unanswered questions of the world will be answered,’ I said, recalling Yolanda of Kilpeck’s prediction of what would happen when the Quarkbeasts came together.
‘Correct,’ said Shandar. ‘The Quota of fully Quorumed Quarkbeasts will allow me to become what will be known as “the Shandarian Oracle”.’
He paused for a moment.
‘But to ultimately know everything I need to transcend the boundaries imposed by human biology. When the Quarkbeasts conjoin I will have the power to achieve immortality. An eternal life to answer the Eternal Question. Better still, I will have enough spare power to bestow it on others. Like the loyal Miss D’Argento, for instance – and you.’
‘You’re offering me eternal life so I can help you figure out the riddles of the universe? That’s quite an offer.’
‘The best you’ll ever get,’ he said. ‘Give me your Quarkbeast, and live a life eternal at my side, learning all there is to know about everything.’
‘That’s all I have to do?’
‘Pretty much – oh, and you have to be my friend, stop all this hating and occasionally help me out in times of need.’
I thought for a moment. Not about his offer, which would have massive strings attached – but what he was actually up to. There was more to this, and it certainly reeked of world domination – but we’d already discounted that. There was something more.
‘Tell me your plans and I’ll give you an answer.’
‘Give me your Quarkbeast and after the conjoining I’ll tell you everything.’
‘Why not just take it?’
He paused.
‘It’s … not as easy as that.’
‘But all this Troll mass murder is?’
‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ he said, ‘I simply allowed the Trolls to express themselves in an openly geographical manner. It’s not my place to instruct the Trolls as to their eating habits, any more than you can insist I be vegetarian.’
‘So you’re okay with all that “being eaten alive” stuff?’
‘Of course,’ he said, mildly puzzled that I should ask. ‘Looking at it objectively, there is no difference between Trolls eating humans and humans eating sheep. Thinking otherwise strikes me as actually a little hypocritical, wouldn’t you agree?’