The Eye of Zoltar
Authors: Jasper Fforde
‘Hanging on to the Leviathan for dear life, the small Australopithecine was soon thousands of feet in the air …’
Book Three of The Last Dragonslayer Series
Jasper Fforde
The Last Dragonslayer Series
The Last Dragonslayer
The Song of the Quarkbeast
The Thursday Next Series
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten
First Among Sequels
One of Our Thursdays is Missing
The Woman Who Died a Lot
The Nursery Crime Series
The Big Over Easy
The Fourth Bear
Shades of Grey
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Jasper Fforde 2014
The right of Jasper Fforde to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 70729 8
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
Table of Contents
Tralfamosaur Hunt Part 1: Bait and Lure
Tralfamosaur Hunt Part 1: Chase and Capture
Slow boat to the Land of Snodd
Leviathans explained and some tourists
Negotiations in Cambrianopolis
For Ingrid, Ian, Freya and Lottie
‘I don’t do refunds’
The Mighty Shandar
The first thing we had to do was catch the Tralfamosaur. The obvious question aside from ‘What’s a Tralfamosaur?’ was: ‘Why us?’. The answer to the first question was that this was a
Magical
Beast, created by some long-forgotten wizard when conjuring up weird and exotic creatures was briefly fashionable. The Tralfamosaur was about the size and weight of an elephant, had a brain no bigger than a ping-pong ball and a turn of speed that allowed it to outrun a human. More pertinent for anyone trying to catch one, Tralfamosaurs weren’t particularly fussy over what they ate. And when they were hungry – which was much of the time – they were even
less
fussy. A sheep, cow, rubber tyre, garden shed, antelope, smallish automobile or human would go down equally well. In short, the Tralfamosaur was a lot like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but without the sunny disposition and winning personality.
And we had to capture it. Oh, and the answer to the ‘Why us?’ question was that it was our fault the rotten thing escaped.
Perhaps I should explain a bit about who I am and what I do, just in case you’re new to my life. Firstly, I’m sixteen, a girl, and an orphan – hey, no biggie, lots of kids don’t have parents here in the Kingdoms because of the huge number of people lost in the endless Troll Wars that have been going on these past sixty years. With lots of orphans around, there’s plenty of cheap labour. I got lucky. Instead of being sold into the garment, fast-food or hotel industries, I got to spend my six years of indentured servitude with a company named Kazam, a registered House of Enchantment run by the Great Zambini. Kazam did what all Houses of Enchantment used to do: hire out wizards to perform magical feats. The problem was that in the past half-century magic had faded, so we were really down to finding lost shoes, rewiring houses, unblocking drains and getting cats out of trees. It was a bit demeaning for the once-mighty sorcerers who worked for us, but at least it was paid work.
At Kazam I found out that magic had not much to do with black cats, cauldrons, wands, pointy hats and broomsticks. No, those were only in the movies. Real life was somewhat different. Magic is weird and mysterious and a fusion between science and faith, and the practical way of looking at it is this: magic swirls about us like an invisible fog of emotional energy that can be tapped by those skilled in the Mystical Arts, and then channelled into a concentrated burst of energy from the tips of the index fingers. The technical name for magic was ‘the variable electro-gravitational mutable subatomic force’, but the more more usual term was ‘wizidrical energy’, or, more simply, ‘crackle’.
So there I was, assistant to the Great Zambini, learning well and working hard, when Zambini disappeared – quite literally – in a puff of smoke. He didn’t return, or at least, not for anything but a few minutes at a time and often in random locations, so I took over the running of the company, aged fifteen. Okay, that
was
a biggie, but I coped and, long story short, I saved dragons from extinction, averted war between the nations of Snodd and Brecon and helped the power of magic begin to re-establish itself. And that’s when the trouble
really
started. King Snodd thought using the power of magic for corporate profit would be a seriously good wheeze, something we at Kazam weren’t that happy about. Even longer story short, we held a magic contest to decide who controls magic, and after a lot of cheating by the King to try to have us lose, he failed – and we are now a House of Enchantment free from royal meddling, and can concentrate on rebuilding magic into a noble craft one can be proud of.
I now look after forty-five barely sane sorcerers at Kazam, only six of whom have a legal permit to perform magic. If you think wizards are all wise, sage-like purveyors of the Mystical Arts with sparkling wizidrical energy streaming from their fingertips, think again. They are for the most part undisciplined, infantile, argumentative and infuriating, and their magic only works when they
really
concentrate, which isn’t that often, and misspellings are common. But when it works, a well-spelled feat of magic is the most wondrous thing to behold, like your favourite book, painting, music and movie all at the same time, with chocolate and a meaningful hug from someone you love thrown in for good measure. So despite everything, it’s a good business in which to work. Besides, there’s rarely a dull moment.
So that’s me, really. I have an orphaned assistant named Tiger Prawns to help me, I am Dragon Ambassador to the world – of which more later – and I also have a pet Quarkbeast, which is at least nine times as frightening as the most frightening thing you’ve ever seen.
My name is Jennifer Strange. Welcome to my world.
Now: let’s find that Tralfamosaur.
Myself, Tiger and those forty-five sorcerers all lived in a large, eleven-storey, ornate former hotel named Zambini Towers. It was in a bad state of repair and even though we had some spare magic to restore it to glory, we decided we wouldn’t. There was a certain
charm
about the faded wallpaper, warped wood, missing windowpanes and leaky roof. Some argued that this added a certain
something
to the surroundings that made it peculiarly suitable for the Mystical Arts. Others argued that it was a fetid dump suitable only for demolition, and I kind of sat somewhere between the two.
When the call came in I was standing in the shabby, wood-panelled lobby of Zambini Towers.
‘There’s a Tralfamosaur loose somewhere between here and Ross,’ said Tiger, waving a report that had just been forwarded from the police. They’d taken the call but had passed it on to the zoo, who passed it on to Mountain Rescue, who passed it back to the police, who then passed it on to us when the zoo refused it a second time.
‘Anyone eaten?’ I asked.
‘All of two railway workers and part of a fisherman,’ said Tiger, who was only just twelve and, like me, a foundling. He was stuck here for four years and after that he could apply for citizenship, or earn it fighting in the next Troll War, which probably wouldn’t be far off. Troll Wars were like Batman movies: both are repeated at regular intervals, feature expensive hardware, and are broadly predictable. The difference being that during the Troll Wars, humans always lost – and badly. In Troll War IV eight years ago, sixty thousand troops were lost before General Snood had even finished giving the order to advance.
‘Three eaten already?’ I repeated. ‘We need to get Big T back to the zoo before he gets hungry again.’
‘How long will that be?’ asked Tiger, who was small in stature but big on questions.
I swiftly estimated how much calorific value there was in a railway worker, and matched that to what I knew of a Tralfamosaur’s metabolism with a rough guess at how much of the fisherman had been consumed, and came up with an answer.
‘Three hours,’ I said, ‘four, tops. Which sorcerers are on duty right now?’
Tiger consulted a clipboard.
‘Lady Mawgon and the Wizard Moobin,’ he replied.
‘I’ll help out,’ said Perkins, who was standing next to me. ‘I haven’t been terrified for – ooh – at least a couple of days.’
Perkins was Kazam’s youngest and newest graduate, having had a licence for less than a week. He was eighteen, so two years older than me, and while not that powerful magically, showed good promise – most sorcerers didn’t start doing any really useful magic until their thirties. More interestingly, Perkins and I had been about to have our first date when the call came in, but that was going to have to wait.