Jasper Fforde - The Eye of Zoltar

Table of Contents

Hanging on to the Leviathan for dear life, the small Australopithecine was soon thousands of feet in the air

www.hodder.co.uk

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

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London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For Ingrid, Ian, Freya and Lottie

I dont do refunds

The Mighty Shandar

The first thing we had to do was catch the Tralfamosaur. The obvious question aside from Whats 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 werent 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 youre new to my life. Firstly, Im sixteen, a girl, and an orphan hey, no biggie, lots of kids dont 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, theres 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 didnt 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 thats 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 werent 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 isnt 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, its a good business in which to work. Besides, theres rarely a dull moment.

So thats 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 youve ever seen.

My name is Jennifer Strange. Welcome to my world.

Now: lets 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 wouldnt. 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.

Theres a Tralfamosaur loose somewhere between here and Ross, said Tiger, waving a report that had just been forwarded from the police. Theyd 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.