The Great Troll War

Kevin sees it all

I wasn’t going to be a coward and have any of Sir Matt’s45 goons searching for me, so I told the receptionist at the hotel I would be in the ballroom. The moonlight spilled into the dark room as I entered, the Quarkbeast and Tiger at my side. True to form, Kevin Zip was already there, waiting for us.

‘Hello,’ he said, ‘I have an idea you need me here with you.’

‘Do you know why?’ I asked.

He smiled.

‘It’ll come to me.’

I turned to Tiger.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘if I don’t last the hour, you must give up the Quarkbeast. Just pop him behind the cold water tank in the loft and say it will take twenty-four hours to find him. With a bit of luck, the worriers will have found the real Princess by then, and we can have an adult in power again.’

‘But—’

‘Don’t argue with me on this, Tiger.’

He fell silent and I took off my coat, pulled on my leather gloves, drew out Exhorbitus and held the blade in front of me. It glowed a soft blue in the darkness, and faint sparkles moved across its highly polished surface.

‘You accept with gratitude,’ said Kevin to Tiger.

‘What do I accept with gratitude?’

‘You’ll find out.’

‘Tiger,’ I said, ‘I’m officially making you the Last Dragonslayer’s apprentice, so Exhorbitus will be yours when I’m gone.’

Exhorbitus had a unique anti-theft device: if anyone but a Dragonslayer or their apprentice touched it, they were vaporised. As my apprentice, Tiger would be the only person able to touch it.

He looked at Kevin Zip, then me and said: ‘I accept with gratitude.’

‘And Tiger?’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘Thanks for everything.’

‘Jen, there must be another …’

He didn’t get to finish as five of Sir Matt’s goons walked in. Leading them was the dangerous-looking wiry fighter with the wide-set eyes who didn’t look as though he’d be easily swayed by reason or threats. The Quarkbeast was sitting behind me, head cocked on one side, watching the proceedings.

‘Surrender the beast, Miss Strange,’ said the wiry fighter. He had two cutlasses, their scabbards criss-crossed upon his chest. They were short weapons, but deadly when used in pairs at close quarters: like being attacked with a pair of very large scissors.

‘You know what will happen if you …’

His voice had trailed off because Kevin Zip had spoken his very same words at precisely the same time.

‘My … my argument is not with you, Zip.’

Kevin, once again, said the words at precisely the same time, even with the hesitation. Zip’s maximum Prediction Event Horizon had been reducing since the HENRY took hold, which made his short-term future prediction astonishingly precise. In the brief pause that followed, I took up a defensive position and held Exhorbitus at readiness. I had sliced the top of the postbox earlier, so they knew what I and the sword could do.

‘Step aside,’ said the wiry man, ‘or by order of the King your life is forfeit – will you stop doing that?’

He was talking to Kevin, who was still mirroring his speech – even the pauses and the ‘will you stop doing that?’.

‘I can see events unfolding,’ said Kevin in a soft voice, ‘but the future is not fixed, and you can change it.’

‘Tricks,’ said the wide-spaced-eye man, ‘worthy only of a stage magician.’

Kevin said this with him too, also in unison. It was very clear to all present that this was not a trick, and there was an uneasy shuffling among the small group of men.

‘The King also stated,’ continued the wiry man to me, still trying very hard to ignore Kevin’s word-mirroring, ‘that your pretty young visage be untouched, so all would recognise your head when displayed on a pole. Now, where is the beast?’

I said nothing. This was Kevin’s show.

‘This is how it’s going to turn out,’ said Kevin, pointing a finger at the wiry man. ‘You will make the first move towards Jennifer and be the first one dead. The next to die will be the left-handed guy on the right, followed by the two dressed in leather, who will both be cleaved in half with one swipe. The tall one at the back has a kindly face, so Jennifer will spare him – he will simply have his sword arm sliced off cleanly at the shoulder.’

‘What about me?’ said a young man probably no older than eighteen, who was at the back.

‘When you see the first man die, you will wet yourself, drop your sword and run.’

They all exchanged nervous glances; it seemed a plausible scenario. The wiry warrior with the wide-set eyes took a deep breath.

‘Perhaps that is so, but I have my orders, and I will carry them out. Others will follow when I am dead, and we will have the Beast, irrespective of blood spilt. Your call.’

I respected him for his words. Not only because he was taking us all seriously, but because he knew this might be the final minute of his life, and however misguided the order that brought him here, he was willing to carry it out. He had his ideology, and I had mine – and we would both defend it with our lives. He and I were true warriors both.

‘You brought this fight to me,’ I said. ‘Leave now and you can save yourselves.’

‘Our positions are clear,’ said the wiry man. ‘All that remains is the outcome.’

There was silence in the ballroom. No one stirred, and I felt a deep inner calm fall across me, for Kevin had already given me the moves I was to make. But then, I had a doubt – my assailants would also know my moves, and anyway, we were now past Zip’s Prediction Horizon. What he had seen had not come to pass. I stared into the wide-set eyes of the warrior, and—

‘Quark.’

The Quarkbeast had moved between us and Sir Matt’s men and was staring at me with his large mauve eyes while wagging his tail in a doleful manner. I suddenly felt that he was telling me everything was okay, and that he’d take it from here.

‘What?’ I said, with a vague sense that this was the Quarkbeast speaking through the Mysterious X, and that he wanted to give himself up to avoid bloodshed.

‘You’re sure?’ I asked as the King’s guards exchanged nervous glances.

‘The Quarkbeast has told me he is surrendering to you,’ I said, and the Quarkbeast wagged its tail vigorously. The junior member, the one who would have wet himself and run, looked at the leader, who nodded, and the lad stepped forward and nervously placed a collar on the Quarkbeast. But instead of allowing himself to be led out, the Beast walked to a corner of the ballroom and sat down, dragging his would-be keeper along the floor behind him. Quarkbeasts are as strong as they are stubborn.

‘I think the Quarkbeast has decided that this is where he would like to be kept,’ I said, inwardly applauding the Quarkbeast’s guile and quick thinking, and thanking the Mysterious X for being the vector of communication, ‘until he is handed over.’

‘No,’ said the wiry fighter, ‘my orders are for him to be imprison—’

He was interrupted by one of the Quarkbeast’s razor-sharp scales, which had flown off his back with an explosive report and embedded itself with a thunk in a painting of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who although not actually Cornish, was thought engineery enough to be given honourable citizenship.

The wiry servant of Sir Matt stared at the Quarkbeast’s carbide-tipped scale, which was stuck right in the centre of Brunel’s forehead, then at me, then tipped his head in respect.

‘This is a favourable outcome, Miss Strange. I shall report to the King that we have the Beast in custody.’

‘He likes to chew anything metallic,’ I said as we turned to leave, ‘only not lead as it gets stuck between his teeth – and cobalt, which gives him the runs. He won’t harm you, and he’s fond of chess, so long as you play it without the knights. He doesn’t like knights.’

‘Who does?’ said Tiger, and he and Kevin followed me out of the ballroom, the guards busying themselves with ‘guarding’ the Quarkbeast.

‘Thank you, Kevin,’ I said once we were out of earshot. ‘I think you just saved those men’s lives.’

‘None of those men would have suffered so much as a cut,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t foresee any of that stuff. Your shoelace is undone. With your first swipe you would have lost your footing and been killed by the wiry guy at the front. After that it would have been Tiger, then me.’

I looked down at my shoelace, which was indeed undone.

‘You lied about what you could see?’

‘The future is soft and pliable, Jen,’ said Kevin with a smile, ‘but we do what we can to guide ourselves towards positive outcomes. But I only bought us time. It was the Quarkbeast who saved our lives.’ He smiled again. ‘Well, that’s me for now. If I hurry I’ve got time to catch Back to the Future III at the cinema.’

‘There’s a brilliant bit where the train time machine converts into a flying vehicle,’ said Tiger, then: ‘Oh, sorry, that was a bit of a spoiler.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Kevin, patting him on the shoulder, ‘when you can see the future, all you ever get are spoilers.’

We watched him walk away.

‘Well,’ said Tiger, ‘what do we do now?’

‘You do what you want,’ I said. ‘I’ve had about the longest day of my life. I will offer prayers for Feldspar and the crew of the Bellerophon, then I will be spark out asleep – hopefully for a good eight hours.’