The Great Troll War

Breaking the Spaniel Barrier

There is no standardisation of measurement in the UnUnited Kingdoms. In Wales, for example, distance is measured in Coracles. A KiloCoracle is a thousand Coracles, a MicroCoracle one thousandth of a Coracle, and so forth. Because of this, measurements across the Kingdoms are often arbitrarily chosen so everyone has a vague idea of magnitude – weight is in apples, distance in telephone boxes and speed by comparison to animals. Subterrains in pre-dug tunnels were measured in Spaniel Speed.

As soon as the jars were glowing green with a full load of wizidrical power, the captain ordered ‘Full Ahead Both Engines’ and we were away, the communications officer alerting by radio any Subterrains in the tunnels to pull into a siding as they were on a ‘Code Red: Vital War Business’.

This part of the journey was the most exciting as at least you could feel that we were moving along. We had to stop once to reconsolidate a tunnel owing to a partial collapse, then again to move past another Subterrain taking Eat List refugees down to Free Penzance. I chatted to a few off-duty ratings and learned the Subterrain was crewed entirely by women as men were considered bad luck.39 There had been loud grumblings of doom from the older earth-lags when Feldspar arrived as they considered him an omen of bad fortune. I had explained to them that he was only male by virtue of his default to a gender pronoun, and they then wanted to know why he was defaulted to male and not female or even nothing at all, for which I had no good answer. The crew calmed down, however, when the captain told them of the unique nature of the mission, and promised extra grog rations.

Time passed quickly, and after several hours we had made the journey – or at least, as far as we could go without digging a fresh tunnel.

‘We’re a mile from the building,’ said the chief navigator to the captain as we walked in, having been summoned to the bridge. ‘Open country, possibly sheep pasture.’

‘Good. Depth?’

‘Thirty-two feet keel to greenside,’ said a rating.

‘Constanza?’ said the captain, addressing the geo-navigator.

‘Twenty-one feet of soft Permian breccia, then soil,’ she said, staring at an instrument bolted to a bulkhead.

‘Okay, then,’ said the captain. ‘Periscope up.’

There was a mild shimmering sensation as the periscope bored its way up through the rock. To avoid giving the sub’s position away, the viewing head of the periscope could be disguised in many ways, depending on the area in which it was surfacing: a stone on a beach, a discarded crisp packet in a lay-by, a single shoe on a motorway or a duck in a pond. On this occasion, the periscope would be camouflaged as a fly agaric toadstool – chosen specifically because the red and white head is well known to be poisonous and would not be touched. The subterfuge was necessary. Because of its slow getaway speed, a Subterrain was vulnerable to attack – the most effective countermeasure being an earth-harpoon attached to a small car with a steel hawser. You’d soon know where the Subterrain was headed as it dragged the car through hedges and houses as it moved.

‘Okay,’ said the captain as she stared into the periscope and clicked the magnification to full, ‘see what you make of that.’

I looked into the twin viewing eyeholes of the periscope and could now see the large skyscraper that was incongruously sprouting out of farmland in Devon. Although I’d not seen the original Chrysler Building I knew it well enough from pictures as I was a big fan of Art Deco and had several scrapbooks containing pictures of notable buildings. This facsimile was every bit as beautiful as the original, the decorative tiles and burnished steel shining in the sun, the geometric patterns and automobile motifs quite lovely to behold. The tower was also indicative of just how much magic Shandar had at his fingertips: if he could build something like this as a base of operations, then it would have been with magical power he had to spare; like the loose change you find down the back of the sofa.

I moved the periscope around. There were Hollow Men in abundance guarding the building but no Trolls as far as I could see. Having studied Colin’s aerial photographs, we knew there was a small entrance on the side facing away from us that gave direct access to the M5 motorway and Exeter Airport, where Shandar’s fleet of Skybus aircraft had been moving in and out, presumably with the Quarkbeasts he was so keen to harvest. When I had seen enough, I thanked the captain.

‘Periscope down,’ she called, and there was a soft whirring sound as it retracted.

The captain called for Full Ahead Both and the Subterrain started to shake as the main cutters bit into the rock. I asked Feldspar whether we should send a homing snail but it had been less than four hours since we left Colin and Tiger and they would not yet be heading home.

‘We’ll be under the building in eight hours,’ said the captain. ‘We can probably manage twice the speed of mole in this stratum, more if we hit a softer section. Go and relax.’

It was good advice. Nothing happened very fast in the Subterrain Service. A battle between opposing fleets of Subterrains had occurred only once, during a totally unnail-biting three weeks in the winter of 1953. The slow progress of the engagement ensured that it was, descriptively and literally, the most boring battle in the history of warfare.

I went for a wander around the large craft, partly out of curiosity, partly out of not wanting to play poker with Feldspar, as he had suggested. There were torpedo rooms fore, aft and amidships, as turning the craft was not an easy manoeuvre. All torpedoes were designed like corkscrews and travelled very slowly, but that wasn’t much of an issue as other Subterrains would be similarly slow to take avoiding action, and buildings couldn’t take any avoiding action at all.

Living quarters were by necessity quite cramped, but the galley was Michelin-starred, and the food astonishingly good. The chef gave me a butterscotch parfait which melted on my tongue. Farther aft was the engine room, where two large in-line diesels ran on recycled vegetable oil, which made the whole sub, and everyone in it, smell very much like a fish and chip shop.

I moved on past the storeroom and came to the room where we’d entered the Bellerophon and sat on some sacks of potatoes near the escape pod. I took the photograph I’d discovered in the Beetle’s glovebox out of my pocket and stared at it for some time in silence. I turned the picture over and looked again at a pencilled note in Zambini’s hand that read: ‘The Assetts’, with the date of my induction into the orphanage. It had to be me. I paused then turned the picture back over and wondered who exactly he had been referring to as assets: Zambini, Zenobia, the Quarkbeast, me – even the car? I was just about to put the photo away when something caught my eye. There was a small hand pressed against the rear window, as though a child were inside on the back seat. I could just see the top of their head too, and they had bunches. Most likely a girl. If this were the day of my induction, then the mystery child had not been inducted at the same time. I had been the only one that week.

I took a deep breath, placed the picture back in my pocket and returned to the captain’s cabin, where Feldspar eventually persuaded me to play poker. As we played, we talked about the enduring mysteries of the Troll: why they had never invaded until now, what did they eat when not eating humans, and crucially, their numbers. All the Troll Wars had been started by humans, usually through fear, a need to try out weaponry or even, as the Princess suggested, to keep the orphan-based economy supplied with free labour. On the issue of size, the estimated number of the invading forces was around two million, but given Trollvania was mostly rock and heather and without visible structures of any sort, it was difficult to see where they came from.

‘Caves?’ suggested Feldspar.

‘They’d all be pasty and squinty and looking like mole-rats if that were the case,’ I said. ‘As far as I can see they’re all very tanned and healthy looking.’

‘Molly might know.’

‘I asked her,’ I said. ‘Numerical values don’t mean much to them.’

‘Counting is overrated,’ said Feldspar. ‘I know that you have an above-average number of legs, and I can know that without doing any counting at all.’

‘I have two legs,’ I said. ‘That’s the average number, surely?’

‘Someone, somewhere, is missing a leg,’ he said, ‘perhaps both. Which changes the average. You have the mode of human legs – that occurring most often in a data-set. The average number of legs on a human is somewhere around 1.99999 recurring, but without counting everyone and their legs, which is both futile and time-wasting, we’ll never know for sure.’

‘That’s true,’ I said, ‘but if I asked all the Dragons on the planet whether they liked rice pudding, and fifty per cent said they didn’t, that wouldn’t really be very helpful, would it?’

‘It would be correct,’ said Feldspar, who hated rice pudding, ‘but yes, statistically it’s a little meaningless – when you hear about percentages as the result of a survey, it’s always a good idea to find out the size of the sample. Flush,’ he added, laying down his cards, ‘queen high.’

‘Zambini always said that with surveys it’s useful to find out who paid for it before accepting the findings,’ I replied, also laying down my cards. ‘Pair of nines.’

After several hours of pointless speculation over the Trolls, more chat about hard numbers versus ratios and me losing all the money in my pockets, we were summoned back to the control room.

‘We’re almost there,’ said the captain. ‘Chief geologist?’

The geologist looked up from her Ground Penetrating Sonar screen and told us that Shandar’s building carried on beneath the soil for a good seventy or eighty feet – the normal depth of foundations for a building this size – so the captain ordered us to dive and we felt the sub pitch down as we bored deeper into the rock. Ninety minutes and a game of Scrabble and mug of cocoa later, the geo-navigator reported that the sub-basements were guarded by six feet of reinforced cement and two-inch-thick steel plate.

‘Problems?’ I asked.

The captain replied no, as they had something called a ‘thermic lance’ for just such an eventuality, and had just given the order to halt the main engines when I felt the craft lurch oddly. A warning klaxon went off somewhere and the geologists rapidly consulted their instruments.

‘Speak to me, Number Two,’ said the captain.

‘Exterior temperature is rising,’ she said, twiddling a few knobs and staring at some dials.

‘What?’

‘Twenty-five degrees under the hull and rising.’

‘Impossible! Sensor error?’

‘They’re all reading the same, ma’am.’

‘Explanation?’

‘Working on it now, ma’am.’

I could sense by the urgency in the captain’s voice that this was not something they had experienced before. I looked across at Feldspar, who stared back at me and shook his head resignedly. This felt like magic. The navigation officer pressed a few buttons and the Ground Penetrating Sonar, more usefully directed forward or upward, was now looking directly below, and it seemed as though there was something large beneath us – and quite hot. The craft lurched again and pitched downward. I grabbed hold of a bulkhead to steady myself as several pencils and a coffee mug slid off the navigation table to land with a clatter on the floor.

‘We’re descending,’ said the helmswoman, ‘deck to topside one twenty feet and increasing.’

‘Permission to fire seismic charges, Captain,’ said the chief geologist.

‘Granted.’

The geologist opened a spring-loaded access panel marked ‘Emergency Only’ and pressed four red buttons. There was a pause and we heard two pairs of muffled concussions. To figure out the nature of the rock strata, small charges are detonated and the return echoes studied to give an idea of the underlying geological structure. I figured the charges were used sparingly as they would give away the craft’s position.

‘Full astern both,’ said the captain, and a shudder ran though the craft – but with apparently no effect at all. The craft lurched again and pitched down more markedly, while at the same time several control panels fused in a flurry of sparks and we were plunged into darkness.

‘Captain,’ said the geologist once the red emergency lights had flickered on, ‘sensors indicate the heat below us is a … magma chamber, and we’re heading straight into it.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said the captain. ‘There’s not been any volcanic activity on this island for over fifty million years – the crust here is eighteen miles thick.’

The geologist switched the Ground Penetrating Sonar to the main screens so we could see what lay beneath. It seemed that Shandar had opened up a well that plunged down eighteen miles, and up this channel was rising a steady stream of molten rock, to pool in a large subterranean lake of magma beneath his skyscraper, into which we were now heading, out of control. It didn’t take an expert to realise that when we hit the magma lake, the most sophisticated underground weapon of war would be nothing but molten steel.

‘Deck to topside now two hundred and twenty feet,’ said the helmswoman. ‘Rate of descent now seventeen moles per second.’

‘How long until hull rupture?’ asked the captain.

‘Twelve minutes,’ said the second-in-command, looking at the dials and screens in front of her, ‘but,’ she added, ‘we’re only a minute inside the safe window for escape pod activation.’

‘Very well,’ said the captain, ‘tell the crew to stand down from duties; you are to update the log and fetch Last Letters from my safe. Miss Strange, with me.’

I followed her down the boat, the crew stepping aside to let us past and tipping their caps respectfully. We arrived at the aft cabin where we’d come in and walked to the escape pod hangared in the far bulkhead. The captain pulled a lever and the door popped open. The pod was about the size of a pillar box: there was room only for one. The lack of urgency among the rest of the crew meant only one thing: there was only the one pod. One was all that was needed – smallest out, pinpoint the stricken craft, call in an excavator or a group of miners, depending on depth. If that failed, the crew could fire torpedoes and climb out through the voids made by those. But with the exterior rock now the consistency of toffee and the temperature rising by the second, none of those options was possible.

‘But—’

‘The Subterrain Service was always a hazardous assignment, Miss Strange, and we knew that when we signed up.’ The captain smiled. ‘Listen, any sorcerer powerful enough to create a magma chamber for defence is quite outside my realms of expertise – but conversely, he’s well within yours.’

She stepped back as the second-in-command handed me the ship’s log and an envelope that contained the crew’s Last Letters. They both saluted and wished me the very best of luck. Already I could hear the crew singing a soft-ground shanty:

Proud subterraneans we be

and Terra is our nation

The subsoil is our dwelling place

the worms our destination

Feldspar had accompanied us. I said to him, ‘You can fit in here too, can’t you?’

‘I don’t think I’ll be opening that restaurant after all,’ he said. ‘Tell Colin I’m glad he’s the last Dragon and not me. He’ll be much better at it.’

‘I’m staying with you,’ I said.

‘If you do then our sacrifice has been for nothing,’ said Feldspar. ‘This is the only play, Jen.’

I opened my mouth to speak, but I had no good argument. He was right. It was the only play. I took a deep breath and turned to Captain Lutumba.

‘Thank you, Captain.’

She smiled.

‘It has a been a pleasure sailing with you, Miss Strange. Make us proud, make us matter.’

‘I will.’

‘And listen,’ added Feldspar, ‘kick Shandar’s butt big-time, right?’

‘You have my word.’

I took another deep breath and stepped into the escape pod.

‘Goodbye, Jen,’ said Feldspar. ‘Love you.’

‘Love you too,’ I said. My eyes began to fill with tears as the captain slammed the pod door shut. Almost instantly I felt the small craft shudder as it moved vertically out of the Subterrain, my feet growing hot from the small solid-fuel booster that was pushing me upwards, the revolving auger on the top of the craft cutting through the soft medium as it rose. A minute later and I felt the auger start to bite – but not to take me through the roots and turf into the fresh air of the Devon countryside as I had expected, but into something else: something hard. Sparks and hot metal drifted past the porthole as the carbide-tipped cutter bored deep into the barrier above me. In another minute or two the porthole cleared and I hastily unlatched the door and stepped out onto a smooth concrete floor. I grabbed my bag, sword, paperwork and storage jars as the escape pod sank slowly back into the ground. Within a minute it had disappeared from view and the concrete had self-repaired itself so perfectly there was no evidence the floor had even been breached.

I leaned against a packing case, sank to the floor and silently wept for the loss of not only a good friend, but the crew of the Bellerophon, who had so stoically accepted their fate – and now trusted me to make their sacrifice matter. I sighed and wiped the tears from my cheeks. If my resolve was not already cemented before this, it was now. I would defeat Shandar, no matter what it took.

I took a deep breath, calmed myself and looked around at the sub-basement in which I found myself. There was work to be done.