The Great Troll War

If all this was true, the time of action was right now.

I got up from the table, and with Shandar amusing himself by manoeuvring the tower, I walked down the stairwell from the control deck, out of sight of him, D’Argento and any of the Hollow staff. Colin had told me how he had spoken to the Mysterious X, so I closed my eyes and imagined myself back in the lobby of Zambini Towers, standing at reception, the old oak growing to the ceiling, the delightful shabbiness. I then imagined myself shouting as loudly as possible the following words: ‘If you can hear this, answer by sending a single charged particle through one of the light receptors on my retina, because when you speak to me, Shandar hears. Everything you’ve put in my head so far he’s picked up.’

In an instant there was a small white flash in the periphery of my vision. The Mysterious X was listening. I imagined myself shouting again, but this time, it was my plan. It was simple and audacious, was in two parts, and required the Mysterious X to tap into my life-force to harvest the energy he needed. I had to hope he could, because I now contained a lot of power: I knew from both Perkins and Wizard Moobin’s early passing that if a sorcerer runs out of wizidrical energy there is always somewhere else to go: your own life-force. Because essentially, all magic was life-force, the power of human emotion – love, anger, sadness, jealousy, grief. Perkins could tap into a lot of power because he was young, Moobin less so because his time on Earth was already up. I had more in reserve than either of them. I had life immortal, and I could trade that for potentially limitless amounts of wizidrical energy.

Annoyingly, so could Shandar. But unlike me, he wouldn’t actually want to. He needed his immortality to live for ever: I only needed mine to defeat him. Which kind of gave me the edge – so long as the Mysterious X could spell strongly enough and the unexpected help was both real, and actually helpful.

There were two flashes in my eye to show X understood my plan, and my heart began to beat faster as I felt the Nebulous Entity go to work weaving and spelling inside me. I felt stronger, more powerful, more confident. A buzz started at my shoulder and then worked its way down my arm until I could feel my fingertips start to tingle. I pointed at the nearest Hollow Man and he turned to brown paper in an instant and fluttered to the floor. I smiled to myself, and walked back upstairs to the control deck.

‘What do you think?’ asked the Mighty Shandar. The Chrysler Building was now moving slowly around Ganymede, sixty miles out. The view was spectacular, but that wasn’t foremost on my mind right now.

‘Impressive,’ I said.

‘Indeed,’ replied Shandar, staring at me with a look of surprise on his face, ‘and so are you. How did you smuggle a sorcerer on board?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I can feel you radiating wizidrical energy like a hot stove,’ he said. ‘Who gave you that power?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I replied. ‘The stars are not your destiny and you will not spread your tyranny into the galaxy. This all ends right now.’

He seemed unimpressed by my threat.

‘Better Angels are an overrated commodity,’ he murmured. ‘I shall take them back and bestow them upon someone more willing to embrace my will.’

He pointed a finger towards me and I instinctively put out the flat of my open palm to stop him. I felt pressure on my hand, holding back his power, and then in an instant he had overcome me and I was hanging upside down about eight feet up, my arms tightly behind my back, a soft sphere of sparkling blue light around me. I was trapped.

‘Well, well,’ said Shandar, moving towards me. ‘Looks like we may have to bring our once cosy relationship to a premature close. That’s a shame, Jennifer, dear, because once I had properly assimilated your heart and mind to me and my cause, you would have been a dazzlingly good ambassador and a delightfully compliant wife. It wasn’t just my Better Angels I needed to use – it was yours. A righteous person utterly corrupted would have been an awesome diplomatic weapon, but it is of no matter – I will simply retrieve what is mine, take what is yours and abandon you on Ganymede. A Jennifer Strange but with all the very best bits taken out. You will live life eternal in isolation as an embittered angry wretch, a twisted knot of hate, anger and jealously.’

His pretence of charm had all but vanished. I was a threat, this was business, and in business he was ruthless. He pointed a finger at me and I felt my insides begin to move and shift, along with a curious draining feeling as he began to draw out the Better Angels – his, and mine. I started to feel not anger and fear but petty jealousies in that D’Argento was better looking than me, had better clothes and more money, and I wanted that stuff too, and would steal it from her when I got the chance. I stopped breathing and felt myself collapse inwards as my vision began to fade. I think I saw Shandar laughing, and then, quite abruptly, the pain stopped, and all jealousies vanished as the Better Angels snapped back inside me, the blue sphere vanished and I fell out of the air to land, fortuitously, on an armchair, but in an untidy heap. By the time I had got up, Shandar had dropped to his knees and his mouth was wide open, face contorted in pain. Behind him, Miss D’Argento was holding the Eye of Zoltar in a pair of blacksmith’s tongs and pressed hard on the small of his back. The Eye, suitably reversed, was doing what it did best: absorbing and then focusing wizidrical energy. Only this time it was taking it out of Shandar, and the energy was streaming in a narrow beam out of the window and to the surface of Ganymede.