An Orc on the Wild Side

by Tom Holt

  (“How does it work, exactly?” Barry asked the engineer, a rather standoffish man with strangely pointed ears.

  “Simple,” the engineer replied. “Down in the basement it gets very hot. The heat boils water in a big kettle thing. The water gives off steam. The steam turns a big wheel round and round, very fast.”

  Barry pointed out that he had a degree in engineering from Imperial College London.

  “The big wheel turns a thing called a turbine,” the engineer went on, “which gives off electricity, and the electricity runs along the inside of copper wires and makes all your machines go. Pretty basic stuff, in fact.”

  “Yes, quite. But what are you using for a heat source in the first place?”

  The engineer looked past him and changed the subject.)

  They were mildly disconcerted when they found a load of perfectly preserved skeletons in chainmail armour in what they’d already decided was going to be the guest bathroom. But the armour was hardly rusty at all, and Barry pointed out that it’d look great hanging on the walls of the breakfast room. They contacted the agent about the bones. He asked them if they had a dog.

  The heated indoor pool was a breeze; there was one already. The water was a sort of greenish colour, and bubbled, and there was a big sort of palm tree thing growing on an island in the middle. Pat said she could’ve sworn she saw its fronds wave, but Barry pointed out that they were several hundred feet down and there was no draft, so she must’ve been imagining it. They also found a little wooden boat drawn up at the water’s edge. Just think, Pat had said, we can go boating on the lake without having to leave the house. Barry didn’t reply. He was sure he’d caught a glimpse of a pair of very pale green eyes, watching him from the shadows. But if Pat could imagine waving fronds, he could imagine green eyes. He put it out of his mind, went back upstairs and had a drink.

  The only thing about the new place Barry and Pat Lushington found really annoying was the plumbing. It worked all right, but there were these awful noises—loud clanking and thumping deep down in the basement, like somebody beating a huge drum. They called out the plumber and told him what the problem was; he went bright green, made some excuse about being late for another job and left. Pat’s theory was that he was afraid of the dark, but Barry said no, he’s a dwarf, that’s impossible. Spiders, probably. Or confined spaces.

  He sent in his bill for the call-out charge, though. It was addressed to “the executors of Mr. and Mrs. B. Lushington”. Weird mistake to make, Barry thought, but what can you expect from a species that don’t even use Excel?

  Ms. White wasn’t her real name. Neither were any of the others she’d worked under and answered to over the last few years—Neige La Blanche was her favourite, it had class, though it was obviously too much for the bank and the electricity company, who insisted on writing to Nigel La Blanche, which wasn’t the same thing at all. Every single one of the various permutations was, of course, just the same thing translated into a different language. Obvious, really, but fortuitously the police and revenue authorities in several jurisdictions hadn’t figured it out yet. So that was all right.

  Who, or what, is Ms. White? Well, for one thing, she really is a seriously good cook. It used to be nothing more than a hobby; a useful one, since quite a few of her gentlemen also enjoyed a proper home-cooked meal at the end of a hard day at the bank or on the set or wherever, but really only something she did to unwind and remind herself that she was a human being and not an exquisite artefact (with ever such a lot of moving parts). The thought that one day she might achieve the Big Score, the one that’d set her up for life, through her work in the kitchen rather than the bedroom had never occurred to her until that momentous day when she—

  But let’s not go there yet. Two weeks ago she’d found a book. It was huge and heavy, bound in what she feared was probably trollskin, and written in runes and sadly faded, foxed, pierced with arrow holes and permeated with dark brown stains, and she’d come across it lying in an inch of dust on the tomb of King Groin under the Mountain in a ghastly sort of box room on one of the upper levels. She’d homed in on it because it was a book, and she liked reading, and it was the first and only book she’d come across in this dump. And it was fabulous. Just what she needed.

  Take six orc livers. She frowned. Not likely, she muttered under her breath, but calves’ liver would do just as well, and she could get some next time she went to the Lidls in Hobbiton. Fourteen ounces of oatmeal, two roc’s eggs—she looked again, to make sure it wasn’t a misprint. But orcs don’t lay eggs, they have that disgusting beige goo. What was a roc? No idea, though some faint, far-distant memory suggested big. All right, make that two dozen ordinary eggs, what else?

  The Red Household Management Book of Khored-Zûn was a treasure, no doubt about it. When she’d first started housekeeping for the Heirs of Snorin, naturally she’d stuck to what she knew, which meant human cuisine, in all its many-splendoured permutations. In retrospect, that had been a bad idea and she’d been lucky to survive it. Quite by chance, early on she’d hit on the one area where the Venn diagrams of human and dwarf cuisine kiss, if not actually intersect, namely breakfast. Give them a lorry driver’s fry-up three times a day, she’d discovered, and they’re happy.

  She could also readily understand why King Groin had chosen to be buried with The Book, rather than the usual ironmongery and bling that dwarvish custom dictated. As far as she was aware, there was nothing like it in dwarvish culture, about which she’d learned ever such a lot since she came through the—And that was odd, because the dwarves really did enjoy their food, and it was only silly pride and dwarfismo that made them stuff themselves with porridge instead of nice things. Cooking is cissy, they’d tell you to your face, we’re above such things (figuratively speaking), food’s just fuel to keep you going at the coalface or on the battlefield. Like hell it was. Knock them up something tasty and watch the almost sublime look of joy spread across their craggy little faces. But try and get them to admit it? No chance. A dwarf café typically had two choices of plat du jour: salted porridge or salted porridge with extra salt. No wonder the poor dears were so bad-tempered.

  Beat the eggs together with the icing sugar. She frowned. She could use an iron spoon—no wooden spoons under the Mountain; wood came from forests and forests are crawling with Elves, so we avoid them and anything derived from them. A typical dwarf spoon weighed three pounds and doubled as a ladle for pouring molten bronze. On the other hand, say what you like about the dwarves, when it came to metalwork anything they couldn’t make wasn’t worth having. The problem was convincing them to make it for you. Make me an egg whisk would be an invitation to give her a blank stare and a less than courteous refusal. If she wanted an egg whisk made, she’d have to draw it out, precisely to scale, with the gearing ratios of the flywheel clearly marked and the appropriate alloys for the various components written at the bottom, with the right SDE numbers. Then you’d just say make me one of these and they’d do it, no questions asked. Trouble was, she was hopeless at drawing and couldn’t do long division, let alone gearing ratios. So, an iron spoon it’d have to be. Damn.

  It was a book that had got her into this in the first place, let’s not forget that. Her favourite book of all time, though whether she could ever bring herself to read it again she wasn’t sure, not now that she’d seen what she’d seen and found out that large parts of it were, well, sort of true. To be precise, it had been a poem in her favourite book. To be exactly precise, one line from that poem—

  Seven for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone.

  So it stood to reason there were seven dwarf-lords. Seven dwarves. Now that rang a bell.

  Seven presumably very rich dwarf-lords, since her favourite book of all time was for ever banging on about gold and treasures stored deep in the roots of mountains; and when she’d first read that, when she was twelve, she hadn’t taken much notice, because dwarves were rich the same way heroes are brave and Elves are wise and goblins are nasty
, what the philologists call a fixed epithet. But time passed and she pursued her chosen career, and met a lot of very rich men who she never really liked much, if truth be told, and who had certain characteristics in common with dwarves but not good ones. And then someone—someone’s poor, long-suffering wife—had called her a cheap little gold-digger, and she’d suddenly thought about the dwarves and laughed. And not long after that she’d stumbled on It, and since then, everything—

  Add the grated auroch’s cheese, fry lightly until golden brown. The sort of men she’d always associated with require women for three things, and she was good at two of them, and of those two she knew which she preferred. But it would be nice if she could get her hands on a spatula that she could actually lift.

  Marinade the bat goujons in a mixture of oil and balsamic vinegar. Hmm. You could get bat easily enough—walk down any Level Three gallery without a hat on and at least one of the little horrors would obligingly tangle itself in your hair—but for some reason she felt the recipe would probably taste nicer if she substituted guinea fowl, which she’d got from the Lidls in Hobbiton. Balsamic vinegar was no problem; the dwarves didn’t actually have any, but dwarvish homemade bindweed wine was indistinguishable in taste and had the extra merit of killing all known bacteria stone dead. Oil—well, it was a dwarvish book, and when they said oil, they weren’t referring to anything that involved olives, sunflower seeds or oilseed rape. She sighed and set off for the winch sheds. Plenty of oil there, in big steel cans.

  The dwarves didn’t stare at her any more, for which she was quietly grateful. She was used to being stared at, came with the territory in her previous line of work, but not shuddered at. It had taken her a while to get her head around the idea that to these people she was perfectly hideous (tall, slim, soft skin, beardless) and although on one level it was rather refreshing not to be ogled at, peered down or peeked up at, there were self-image issued involved which at some point she was going to have to deal with. Crepe hair and spirit gum, maybe.

  Instead of staring, these days they tended to look just past her, or off to one side, or (if they happened to be standing on something at the time) over her head. Even the king, bless him, and he was completely besotted, ever since she’d persuaded him he could lose weight by eating fried onion rings in batter. They might avoid looking at her but they took extreme care not to bump into her in the corridors; also mildly insulting, if you stopped to think about it. The sensible thing, therefore, was not to think about it at all.

  To get from the kitchens to the shed which housed the mechanism for winding the winch that hauled the ore up from the face, you had to go along a quarter-mile of gallery, down two flights, along another quarter-mile and up four flights, across the swaying rope bridge that crossed one of the many bottomless chasms so beloved by dwarvish interior designers and through the Hall of Factory-Reconditioned Columns (waste not, want not); third on the right leads you down nine flights to the winch house.

  She’d been walking for quite some time, not recognising anything she saw around her, when it occurred to her that she might just possibly have taken the second on the right (which led to Armoury #674) or the third on the left, which led to the dungeons. She pressed on another hundred yards or so. The passageway got narrower and lower, and then she came to a door.

  It wasn’t in front of her. It was set into the wall, and it had a little grille at the top. She peered through and saw someone lying on a heap of grubby looking straw, reading a book by the guttering light of a tallow candle.

  Doing what?

  She banged on the door with her balled fist. The figure on the bed looked up; male but no beard. A fellow human.

  “Excuse me.”

  The man peered at her, then marked his place with a wisp of straw. “My God,” he said.

  “Excuse me,” she repeated, “but what’s that you’re reading?”

  He was staring at her; not the way the dwarves used to, before they gave up. A bit like old times, in fact. “Are you real?” he said.

  For his part, he probably didn’t get stared at much. He was young, about her age, maybe a year younger; short, square, heading rapidly towards podgy, with the first tidemark of a receding hairline. “The book,” she said.

  “What? Oh, right. You wouldn’t like it.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “Whatever.” He wriggled round so his back was to her and went on reading.

  She counted to five under her breath, then yelled, “Hey!”

  “Pack that in,” he said without moving, “or you’ll wake the guards.”

  “What’s the damn book?”

  He looked at her over his shoulder and grinned. “Pay me twopence and I’ll tell you.”

  “Get lost.”

  “That would be hard. It’s a small cell, and perfectly square.”

  “What’s the book?”

  He got up, walked to the cell door and held up the spine so she could read it. Luvien and Tinoriel on Environmental Law.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “You can owe me the twopence,” he said.

  “I’ll give you sixpence for it.”

  That stopped him. “You’re interested in Elvish law?”

  “No, but it’s a book and I’m desperate. Is it any good?”

  “Weak on plot but the characters are fully realised. Two shillings.”

  More than she earned in a month. “What’s it about?”

  He looked at the book, then back at her. “It’s about seven hundred pages, give or take. You give, I take. Two bob.”

  “Couldn’t I just borrow it?”

  “Of course. A shilling and ninepence.”

  She frowned at him through the bars. “You’re a lawyer,” she said.

  “Lucky guess. My name’s John. John the Lawyer.”

  “What are you doing that side of the bars?”

  “Ah.” He shrugged. “Slight error of judgement on my part.”

  “Really.”

  “Mphm. I issued proceedings against King Drain for nuisance, damage to property and release of a noxious substance under the Rule in Rylands v Fletcher.”

  “Um.”

  “And made the mistake of trying to save threepence by serving the summons personally. That was a week ago. But they were quite nice about it. Let me keep the book.”

  She hesitated. She wasn’t sure she liked him very much, but he was a fellow human, incarcerated in the dungeons of the dwarf-king. “I’ll talk to King Drain,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll let you go if I ask him nicely.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  She blinked. “Say what?”

  “Don’t do that.” He calmed down a bit. “Look, all the time I’m in here, I can bill the client at my standard hourly rate for languishing in jail. Fivepence an hour, plus two farthings a day for candles. It’s a really sweet thought, but I’m way behind on my target for the month and I could do with the billable hours.”

  She counted to ten under her breath, then smiled. “Yes,” she said, “you’re a lawyer.”

  He nodded. “A human lawyer,” he said, “in a region where the profession is traditionally dominated by Elves. I’m hoping I can spin this gig out for a month, so long as some idiot doesn’t come along and spring me.”

  She widened her smile. “Here’s the deal,” she said. “Sixpence for the book and I won’t go to King Drain and beg him on bended knee to release my long-lost cousin John.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  He peered at her. “Are you sure you want to read about Flangábrithil’s doctrine of privity of contract?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Actually, it’s rather interesting. Suppose a party X contracts with a party Y to deliver a specified quantity of goods to a certain point on or before a specified date—”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said. “That’d be boring. I want to read about it.”

  “Ninepence.”


  “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll have you out of there before you know what hit you.”

  Definitely a grudging respect in his eyes as he backed away a step. “Tell you what,” he said. “You can have the rotten book. Something tells me you’re as sharp as my senior partner’s ears. That,” he added, “is meant to sound like a compliment but is in fact ambiguous.”

  “Take your word for it.” She took her purse from her sleeve and scrabbled for coins. “You wouldn’t happen to have change for a florin, would you?”

  “I said, take the book. Free of charge. Gift.”

  “But then you’ll be stuck in that horrible cell with nothing to read.”

  “I can amuse myself with mental arithmetic. Five times twenty-four times seven—”

  “Eight hundred and forty,” she said quickly. “That’s seventy shillings. Three pounds ten.” Her eyes widened. “You’ve made three pounds ten shillings just lying on a heap of straw.”

  “Languishing,” he corrected her. “You’re good with numbers, then.”

  “Am I?” She shrugged. “I suppose I am.”

  “What do you do around here?”

  “I’m the cook.”

  He whistled. “The one everybody’s been talking about back in Elvenhome.”

  A slight shiver ran down her spine. “Really. What have they been saying?”

  “You make a wicked apple charlotte.”

  Which was true. “And?”

  He shrugged. “And what’s a competent domestic servant doing working for these semi-literate barbarians when she could be making nearly twice as much waiting tables at the Marshmallorn Tree?”

  “That’s what they’re saying, is it?”