The Great Troll War

Shandar seemed more relaxed now I had agreed to his terms and the question marks over my compliance had at last been lifted. He shook my hand warmly.

‘So glad you could make it, my dear,’ he said as a team of Hollow Men heaved the blast doors closed behind us. ‘Don’t think me suspicious, but you were once a formidable opponent so I want to make trebly sure there are no tricks up your sleeve or well-laid plans in your mind. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about now? For I will insist on searching you – mind, body and luggage.’

Just me being here was the plan, but I suppose he was right to be suspicious.

‘I have a Pollyanna Stone,’ I said, digging it out of my pocket. ‘I used it to conjure up who I thought were my parents in times of stress.’

‘Family are overrated,’ said Shandar. ‘When you need them they’re not there, and when you don’t want them they’re on your back wanting part of Cumbria or a castle or a pet Leviathan or something.’

The Mighty Shandar’s family were now assumed casualties of his Soulectomy. Wagging tongues said they were turned to stone and used as garden ornaments.

‘You are to surrender the stone and anything else with an enchantment attached,’ he said. ‘It’s a wise precaution, I think you will agree. Where is Exhorbitus?’

‘I gave it to Tiger.’

I didn’t tell him, I just left it in his bedroom with a note.

‘Just as well you did,’ said Shandar, ‘for I would have had to destroy it. There will be no magic in Shandar’s Tower aside from mine.’

I handed over the Pollyanna Stone and Shandar crunched it to powder between thumb and forefinger, the residual wizidrical energy fizzing out as orange sparks.

He put out his hand to touch my head, fingertips glowing a bluish colour.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Knock yourself out.’

He placed his fingertips on my temple. I had thought it would feel creepy, but because I was made of the better parts of him, it felt weirdly as though I were touching my own head, only with thick gloves. I could also feel his mind inside mine, teasing and looking, searching and ferreting, as though drawers were being pulled out and the contents dumped on the floor in a search for well-laid plans or magical contraband, similar to the early-morning raids the nuns used to pull on us back at the orphanage. As Shandar delved I had little flashbacks of the past couple of weeks as he teased the information from my head, but I feared nothing. There was no plan; I had agreed to his deal, and was quite willing to keep my side of it.

‘Nothing sinister there,’ he said, ‘but I can feel the goodness that was once mine – it comes across as old fashioned and stale, like listening to the tiresome and idealistic rants of a naive youth. I can also sense you despise me. A couple of hundred years will bring you around to my way of thinking. I’m really quite endearing when you get to know the better of the worst parts of me.’

‘I’ll have to take your word for it.’

He ran his hands over my small amount of luggage, and then the Volkswagen.

‘Any spells hidden anywhere? A sorcerer miniaturised and hiding in the glovebox? A Dibble Jar full of crackle waiting to do me some mischief?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘I still need to be cautious,’ he said. ‘There are always a few naysayers who want to rain on your parade when you contemplate galactic domination.’

He gently laid his fingertips on the Beetle’s bonnet, and there was a low humming noise. Shandar paused, like a tuner listening to a piano. He moved down the rear panel, then reached right under the car in the area of the engine and pulled out a small Bovril jar that had been tightly stoppered with red wax.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

‘You’ve just been inside my head,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know – and you know I don’t know.’

He sniffed it delicately, then covered it with both his hands.

‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘a timed thermowizidrical explosive device, due to go off in twenty-six minutes and eight seconds. Written in ARAMAIC V3.4, to give a low wizidrical signature. It looks like one of Monty’s. I will concede he’s a good spell-writer. If he’d been able to do magic as well, he may even have been relevant. It’s a little crude, though. A bomb? I thought they would have been more imaginative.’

‘Powerful enough to start a chain reaction?’ I asked.

‘No – it would just have taken a sizeable chunk out of the tower and enough to topple it. Your friends just tried to kill you,’ he continued with a smirk. ‘Funny how people turn on their chums when they get desperate, isn’t it?’

‘I would only be collateral damage in the assassination of a tyrant,’ I replied. ‘They would have happily accepted the same fate, even if engineered by me. And I would have,’ I added, fixing him with my best steely gaze.

‘You pompously self-righteous people are all the same,’ he said, ‘horribly—’

‘Pompous and self-righteous?’ I suggested.

‘I was going to say “disgustingly smug”. And I’m not a tyrant. In fact, I’m probably the least tyrannical person you know.’

He didn’t go on to explain why he thought this, or even why he thought I should believe it. He then crushed the explosive device in his hands, and the stored wizidrical energy flooded into his body.

‘Happy now?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said, continuing his search in and around my Beetle, ‘for if I wanted to assassinate someone, I would place two weapons – one hard to find, and the other almost impossible.’

He was right, and eventually found the second, which had been suspended inside a glass jar filled with water – always a good way to cloak wizidrical energy. It was well concealed, too – Shandar had to actually reach through the metal to retrieve it.