The Great Troll War полностью

I gently closed the lobby door and carried on up the tower, but this time more cautiously, one hand on the hilt of Exhorbitus. My caution was unnecessary: the first floor was empty. I went to the window and looked out onto a landscape bathed with the long shadows of the setting sun. It was the end of a very long day by now, the dawn trip to the Spellsucker radio mast with the Dragons feeling like weeks before, the memory relegated to misty forgetfulness by the drama of the rest of the day’s events.

The window, I noted, was sealed tight shut and made of thick glass, but with nothing else to see here I worked my way upwards, exploring the floors as I went, which wasn’t so very hard as each floor was pretty much open plan, a square space around the central core that carried the elevators, stairs and service shafts. I noted that the building was strengthened by more steel girders that were criss-crossed by bracing bars, some of which were in awkward places and needed to be stepped across.

I carried on trudging up the steel stairs as outside it turned from day to dusk to night. Most floors were empty, but others were notably in use: four floors were allocated to Hollow Men and Women storage – rows upon rows of shelves upon which were placed parcels of folded clothes wrapped in cellophane, ready to leap into life at Shandar’s command. Three more floors were made over to market gardening and another two seemed to have been converted into a double-height library, with a dizzying collection of books contained upon oak shelves, and a reading area of plush green leather armchairs in front of a crackling fire. By the time I reached the thirty-ninth floor, Quarking noises from above told me I was closer to something more relevant. I quietly opened the fortieth-storey door and, once I’d ensured no one was about, crept in and found myself in a floor entirely devoted to Quarkbeasts. The creatures were all held in their own sumptuous living quarters, fully equipped with all the things Quarkbeasts really like, which generally revolved around chewing on a zinc-plated anchor link while sprawled on a large sofa sipping rusty water and watching TV.

I looked around the individual rooms cautiously and could see that our theories regarding Shandar and the Quarkbeasts were correct – each Quarkbeast was housed in a room next to his or her identical yet opposite twin, and a shared door between their quarters could open when required and the Quarkbeast, naturally curious, would meet their twin – and being entirely opposite to one another, would cancel each other out with a staggeringly large release of raw wizidrical energy. But instead of leaving North Devon as simply a smoking hole in the ground, the energy of all those simultaneously conjoining Quarkbeasts would be channelled through large silicon-coated steel funnels in the ceiling that led up a long vertical shaft that disappeared into the gloom high above – presumably to where the Mighty Shandar would be waiting to receive all that extra power.

I had a scout around and found that all Quarkbeasts except one were present – mine. After finding the room destined for him, I felt a cold shudder of revulsion go through me. The recent loss of Feldspar and the Bellerophon and the damage that had been wrought by Shandar’s assistance to the Trolls bubbled to the surface. I felt hot, and twitchy, and all of a sudden I didn’t really care what happened to me or who knew I was here. I headed straight to the main passenger elevator and pressed the call button.

I didn’t have to wait long for the car to arrive, and the doors opened to reveal … Miss D’Argento, surrounded by a half-dozen Hollow clerks who were so startled by my sudden appearance that they spontaneously collapsed into six neat piles of clothes, the papers they were carrying now scattered in the air like a ticker-tape parade. If Miss D’Argento was surprised to see me, she didn’t show it. She merely raised a jet-black eyebrow.

‘Miss Strange,’ she said, inclining her head in greeting.

‘Miss D’Argento,’ I said.

There was a pause, until she asked:

‘Which floor?’

‘All the way up,’ I told her.

She leaned across and pressed a button marked ‘Control Deck’.

‘What are you hoping to do?’ she asked as the lift rose. ‘Shandar’s power will soon be without limit, and no one will be able to withstand his might.’

I looked at her for a moment.

‘They all say that,’ I said, ‘every single despot who ever tried to take what was not theirs by force. And you know what? They always end up ignominiously defeated, vanquished by events they can’t predict, from a quarter they don’t expect.’

‘I don’t think you understand the Mighty Shandar well enough,’ said D’Argento, who seemed no longer to refer to herself in the third person, to my great relief, ‘nor of what he is capable, nor his plans.’

She was right. Zambini had sent a message to the effect that his plans were ‘bigger and bolder’ than anything we could dream up. But that didn’t matter right now.