The Great Troll War (The Last Dragonslayer Chronicles Book 4) by Jasper Fforde

Author:Jasper Fforde [Fforde, Jasper]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781444799934
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2021-09-08T22:00:00+00:00

Wedding bells

I pushed opened the main door to the hotel, hoping to tell the Princess and everyone else what had happened as soon as I could, but there didn’t seem to be anyone about. The ops room was locked although I could still hear people working inside, and while yesterday the reception area had been busy with clerks moving about with reports and paperwork and suchlike, there was little movement in the hotel at all. It seemed a little eerie – and worrying.

‘Where is everyone?’ I asked the man on the main desk.

‘They’re at the wedding,’ he said, grinning with an annoying level of royalty-based rapture. ‘I would have liked to go but I couldn’t move my shift. How was your day?’

‘It could have gone better. Room 266, please.’

He handed me a message from my pigeonhole. It was from William of Anorak, and he’d come to the conclusion that since he had no factoids about Trolls, someone must have stolen them from his head – and maybe that’s what Shandar had been up to: fogging any memories over how to stop them.

‘Bad news?’ asked the receptionist.

‘Not unexpected,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it a little late in the day for a wedding?’

‘The city runs a twenty-four-hour Harry and Sally marriage service,’ he replied, handing me my key, ‘because when you realise you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of that life to start with them as soon as possible. Also, I think the Princess said there was some constitutional urgency in it.’

‘Which princess?’ I asked, although only reluctantly, as royal weddings were, along with tapioca, boy bands and celebrity biographies, things in which I had zero interest. ‘The tall gawky-looking one or Jocaminca?’

‘No, no, the Princess – you know, the uncrowned Queen of all the Kingdoms – your friend – the one with the funny skin rashes.’

I suddenly had a very nasty feeling.

‘Who … is she marrying?’

The receptionist grinned fit to burst.

‘Why, Sir Matt Grifflon, of course. Such a lovely couple. I’ve managed to reserve a dozen commemorative plates; they’re going to become collector’s items one day – do you want to buy one? Actually, I think I’ve over-ordered so can let you have five at the extra-special price of anything you want to give me.’

I hurried across to Penzance’s cathedral, a neo-industrial design built entirely of red brick, oak beams and riveted iron, the material of choice of Cornish architects, who were more used to designing mine workings and engine sheds than ecclesiastical architecture.

The crowds were about twenty deep outside the cathedral, but I pushed my way to the main doors with some difficulty, as it seemed that almost everyone had over-bought commemorative plates and now wanted to sell them on. I confronted a guard who tried to stop me getting in by saying something threatening, and I, in return, said something so frightening back that he shrank in horror and let me past.

The interior of the packed cathedral was filled with the

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