‘Hanging on to the Leviathan for dear life, the small Australopithecine was soon thousands of feet in the air …’
THE EYE OF ZOLTAR
Book Three of The Last Dragonslayer Series
Jasper Fforde
www.hodder.co.uk
Also by 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
www.hodder.co.uk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Also by Jasper Fforde
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Where we are now
Zambini Towers
Tralfamosaur Hunt Part 1: Bait and Lure
Tralfamosaur Hunt Part 1: Chase and Capture
Angel Traps
Audience with the King
The Princess changed
The Mighty Shandar
The Remarkable Kevin Zipp
Sorcerers’ Conclave
The Dragons
To the border by Royale
The Cambrian Empire
Colin’s fall
Addie Powell
Addie explains
Flesh-eating slugs
The Empty Quarter
It’s an Australopithecine
At the Claerwin
Speaking on the conch
The naval officer’s tale
A deal with Curtis
Slow boat to the Land of Snodd
Leviathans explained and some tourists
A brush with death
The name’s Gabby
The old Dragonlands
The morning feeding
Friends reunited
Llangurig
The handmaiden’s tale
Trouble with gravediggers
The fast-track trial
To the foot of the mountain
The Mountain Silurians
Cavi homini
Cadair Idris
Perkins’ secret
The sky pirate’s tale
Sky Pirate Bunty Wolff
The plan
Battle of the Hollow Men
The last stand
We become sisters
Negotiations in Cambrianopolis
Heading home
Aftermath
Acknowledgements
About the Author
For Ingrid, Ian, Freya and Lottie
‘I don’t do refunds’
The Mighty Shandar
Where we are now
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.