An Orc on the Wild Side

by Tom Holt

  “Yes.”

  “Typical.

  She paused and looked at him again. One thing she’d gathered from the self-made multimillionaires of her past acquaintance was that you can be quite smart and still look remarkably like a badly stuffed sheep. “What do you think?”

  “You’re not from round here, are you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “A human working for dwarves.”

  “Right. Almost as weird as a human working for Elves.”

  “A human female working for dwarves.”

  “Cooking, cleaning and tidying up. Woman’s work.”

  He gave her an odd look; rather as if he’d found a counterfeit coin in his small change, all wrong because it was pure silver rather the regulation silver plate. “So where are you from?”

  “A faraway place of which we know little. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

  “Try me.”

  “It’s just a village. Well, more like a hamlet, really. A few neglected cottages clustered round a narrow strip of green, where pigs and chickens wander aimlessly.”

  “Called?”

  “London.”

  He shook his head. “You’re right, it doesn’t ring a bell. Faraway, you said?”

  “You couldn’t begin to imagine.”

  “And you left there to come here.”

  She nodded. “To better myself. Seeking my fortune in the big city.”

  “Mphm. Well, don’t let me keep you.” He hesitated, then tried to poke the book through the bars of the door. It was too wide and wouldn’t go through. “Well,” he said. “Fancy that.”

  He didn’t actually grin, but she knew he’d known all along it wouldn’t go through. “No problem,” she said. “Open it about halfway through and try again. There,” she added, tugging it from his reluctant fingers. “Piece of cake.”

  Definitely respect in those pale blue, slightly piggy eyes. “Nice of you to stop by. Enjoy the book.”

  “I will. That’s what’s so desperately sad.”

  She left him lying on his back with his hands folded behind his head, the default attitude of long-term prisoners everywhere. On the way to the winch house, she read the whole of the chapter about conflicts of jurisdiction. Interesting.

  The oil was black and sticky and poured out of the jar at the pace of rush-hour traffic. It took her two hours with a fistful of wire wool to clean up the frying pan.

  “You know what,” Mordak said. “I’m not sure you should’ve put in quite so much cayenne pepper.”

  The beige goo bubbled and heaved, giving off clouds of foul steam that stank of ammonia and boiled cabbage. The Goblinmaker General gave him the sort of look that laymen who offer advice to experts so richly deserve, and said, “Mphm”.

  “Is it meant to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  They stood and watched for a long time while nothing ostensibly happened. On the surface, that is. Down there somewhere, seething away in the depths between the unspeakable thousand-year-old sediment and the fissured biscuit-hard crust of topscum, the miracle of parthenogenetic reproduction was in full swing. But with a difference—

  The original recipe, as handed down by the Old Ones and reverently transcribed on the back of an empty packet of candied teeth by Gror the First when the Realms were young, was perhaps the most closely guarded secret of the goblin race. Sure, everybody knew the main ingredients, because they saw them arriving in huge carts: slugs by the bushel, snails in towering clay jars, bale after bale of sun-dried puppy dogs’ tails from the vast, sprawling puppy dog ranches of the Ogain Mord. But the special blend of herbs and spices that acted as a catalyst and served to galvanise the goo into frantic, squirming life was known only to the king, the Goblinmaker and, for some reason, the Postmaster General. It was rumoured to include turpentine, mandragora, formic acid, rosewater, acetone and bicarbonate of soda, but mostly that was just ill-informed guesswork.

  A bubble, ten feet wide and high, welled up out of the exact centre of the goo, quivered soapily for a moment in the pale red torchlight and burst, spraying the faces of the bystanders with a fine beige mist. Mordak wiped his eyes, instinctively licked his lips, pulled a ghastly face and spat.

  “For crying out loud,” he whimpered. “It’s like treacle.” The Goblinmaker ignored him.

  To create a female goblin, however, it soon became clear that they were going to have to go right back to square one and start again; no preconceptions, no fiddling around trying to save a buck by using stuff they’d already got in stock. Out went the slugs and snails. In their place came hundredweight sacks of sugar beet, barrels and crates of oregano, cumin, turmeric, caraway, fenugreek, garlic and cayenne pepper, and dried jalapenos in special lead-lined boxes. As to the third core ingredient required by the formula painstakingly compiled by the senior technical officer of the Goblin Institute for the Advancement of Science, there was a sharp difference of opinion between the Chief Science Officer and the Goblinmaker. The latter insisted on dried tails; you can’t make goblins without at least 40 per cent puppy dogs’ tails, he swore passionately, it wouldn’t be right, that’s what makes us what we are. The Science Officer, though sympathising to a considerable extent with this view, pointed to the blackboards that covered his office walls, each one crammed to bursting with tiny chalked formulae. The equations can’t lie, he pointed out. It’s All Things Nice, or forget the whole project. To which the Goblinmaker replied that if there was anything nicer in this world that a properly matured sun-dried Labrador tail with the hair still on, he’d never been told about it. Being goblins, they should’ve decided the issue with a duel to the death, but Mordak made them toss a coin instead.

  The Goblinmaker dipped the tip of his claw into the edge of the vat. It fizzed and dissolved. “It’s time,” he said.

  He, it should be noted, had lost the toss. Accordingly, a massive crane lifted a colossal iron bucket high into the air above the vat; a chain tightened, the bucket tilted. The Goblinmaker grabbed Mordak by the scruff of his neck and dragged him back out of the way of the splash, as forty-seven tons of axes, spears, scimitars, daggers, poisoned arrows and assorted body parts of mortal enemies burst through the crust and plunged into the deep goo. There was an explosion of effervescence, the sort you get when you add sugar to a fizzy drink, and beige suds flooded the floor. All things nice, goblin-style.

  “Don’t blame me if it all ends in tears,” the Goblinmaker said.

  The fizzing was dying down, and something strange was happening. Mordak took a long step backwards and made the Sign of the Claw on his forehead. “That can’t be right, surely,” he said.

  The Goblinmaker shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “I’ve never done this before.”

  The goo was changing colour, from beige to pink.

  The Science Officer, who’d been watching the proceedings from behind a large oak vat, cleared his throat. “It’s probably all that iron,” he said, “reacting isothermically with the—”

  “Oh be quiet,” snapped the Goblinmaker. The goo had started to glow. “I told you we should’ve stuck with tails, but would you listen?”

  Pink vapour, thick and cloyingly aromatic, rose from the meniscus of the goo. It, too, was faintly luminescent, like the unearthly light of the Dead Marshes at night, only pink. “I recognise that,” mumbled the Science Officer, “it’s Nuits d’Amour by Maison de Luthiel. Sorry,” he added quickly, as Mordak turned and looked at him. “No idea how I come to know that.”

  The Goblinmaker took a long stride forward, as close to the vat as he dared get, and peered through the clouds of billowing vapour. “You know something,” he said. “I think it’s working.”

  Mordak stared at him. “But it’s pink.”

  The Goblinmaker shrugged. “Perhaps it’s supposed to be. We just don’t know, that’s the thing. Maybe pink is, I don’t know, natural, in these circumstances.”

  “I wouldn’t go any closer if I were you,” muttered the Science Officer. �
��I don’t like the look of it one bit.”

  A fat drop of sweat ran down Mordak’s snout and landed on his projecting lower lip. “I say we pull the plug and start again with puppy dogs’ tails,” he said. “Nothing good ever came of pink, trust me.”

  “No,” the Goblinmaker said. “It’s working. He was right and I was wrong. This is—”

  A long crack suddenly appeared in the side of the vat. Mordak lunged forward and grabbed for the Goblinmaker’s sleeve, but too late. The vat gave way, and a pink tidal wave spurted through the fissure. The Goblinmaker tried to back away, slipped, lost his footing and went down. A fraction of a second later, he was completely engulfed. Mordak tried to go in after him, but the Science Officer grabbed his knees and wouldn’t let go. “Leave him,” he shouted, “there’s nothing we can do for him. We’ve got to get out of here, now!”

  True; the flood level was rising, groping for their toes with outriders of fizzing pink foam. “It’s expanding,” Mordak yelled. “Is it meant to—?”

  “Who gives a damn? Come on.”

  They scrambled up the steps, slammed the door behind them and shot all six bolts. Then they caught their breath and looked at each other. For a long time neither of them spoke. Then Mordak said, “This never happened, right?”

  “What never happened?”

  “Good man.”

  The Science Officer wasn’t listening. He was staring at the door, from under which a creamy pink pool was rapidly spreading out into the passageway. “Oh, nuts,” he said. “That isn’t good.”

  Mordak thought quickly. “The best thing,” he said, “would be to evacuate this entire level, then divert the main sewer and flood it good and proper. Anything else down here, do you know?”

  The Science Officer scowled in thought. “State archives,” he said, “Treasury Department offices. Armoury. Crown jewels. Oh, and most of the gold reserves.”

  The goo was eating away at the foot of the door. Mordak quickly snatched his feet out of the way. “Nothing we can’t do without, then,” he said. “Which way’s the exit?”

  The door shattered into splinters. A torrent of foaming pink goo swept them both off their feet and washed them away. Mordak grabbed the Science Officer by one cauliflower ear and stuck out his other arm, so that his claws scraped the wall as they were carried bodily by the current down the passageway. The Science Officer started squealing; definitely conduct unbecoming a goblin under any circumstances, but the only reason why Mordak wasn’t doing exactly the same thing was that his mouth was full of the loathsome sweet pink goo. The flood was shooting them inexorably towards a ventilation duct, down which the pink stuff was gurgling away into the bowels of the earth; we can fit through that easily, Mordak calculated, but only after our heads are snapped off like carrots. Oh well.

  And then his trailing claw lodged in something, which turned out to be an iron ring, fitted to a door in place of the more conventional lifter-type latch. Hooray for unconventionality.

  “Your Majesty.”

  He could barely hear the Science Officer over the roar of the pink flood. “What?”

  “I think you were right. Too much cayenne pepper.”

  In spite of everything, Mordak smiled. “Shut your face,” he said, not unkindly, and hung on grimly, ring in one paw, ear in the other, waiting to see what happened next.

  Secretary Tinituviel—in Elvish, her name meant the soft tinkling of silver bells, melodious but unceasing, somewhere in the back of one’s head—was worried about the egg whisk.

  She’d interviewed the scouts, who repeated what they’d said before. Out back of one of the new human dwellings on the south bank of the Mouthwash, just down the road from the dark Tower of Snorfang, they’d come across a shiny new trash can. Inside it, among other wonders too bizarre to contemplate, they’d found the Machine. They had no idea what it was but felt it was their duty to bring it back for the boss to see. They had no idea how to find out whether it was loaded or not, so they brought it home in a bucket of water, just in case.

  Right, Tinituviel had said. What other wonders?

  You don’t want to know, the scouts had told her, they’re too bizarre to—well, if you insist. There were bags, wrought of some shining white fabric that was smoother than silk, thinner than gossamer, of a weave so fine that you could neither see nor feel the weft; most remarkable of all, moisture (there were lots of wet, sticky things in the trash can) didn’t seem to soak into it, but, rather, was repelled, as by the finest oilcloth. There were perfect cylinders of fine steel, like helmets but no bigger than a goblin’s handspan, closed at one end, roughly cut open at the other. There were small trays made of—here the scouts fell to arguing among themselves, one claiming that it must be some sort of fungus, the other plumping for a kind of inedible bread; anyway, it was white and light as a feather, and if you bent it, it snapped like a dry twig; and wrapped round these trays were shreds of an unearthly transparent substance, soft and pliable, the colour of slug trail, like very thin sheets of dry water; yes, well, we told you it was too bizarre to contemplate but, no, you had to know best.

  “And you found all this,” Tinituviel asked, “in the trash?”

  Yes, because in the same receptacle were apple cores and chicken bones and potato peel and a sort of gravelly breakfast cereal stuff that tasted tantalisingly of cat. Evidently all stuff they’d slung out, as being of neither use nor value; all that and this machine. The trash can hadn’t even been padlocked, showing how trusting these humans were.

  “Thank you,” Tinituviel had said, then remembered she was an Elf. “Go away, I’m busy.” The scouts bowed low and backed away, muttering something under their breath in an obscure goblin dialect she found it expedient to let people believe she didn’t understand. Ever since then she’d sat silently multitasking, the egg whisk lying on the desk in front of her.

  Who were these people?

  Just humans, that was all. Crass, ignorant; marginally prettier than goblins, most of them, but looks aren’t everything, and in all other departments there wasn’t a lot between them. Except that goblins were often brave, intermittently loyal and solidly based around a handful of core values (nasty, but core) which as often as not they’d rather die than betray. Humans, as had often been observed, would sell their own grandmothers, although only other humans would be foolish enough to buy them, even with an extended warranty. Above all, though, humans were dumb. To them, the white heat of technology meant burning their fingers on a tinderbox. Human inventions? Human achievements in the field of technology? Name one. Right. Knew you couldn’t.

  And yet humans had built this extraordinary egg whisk. The other stuff the scouts had talked about was probably fantasy, the products of overheated goblin imagination—transparent clingy filmy stuff, for crying out loud, who could possibly believe in that? But the whisk was something she could see and touch, she had no choice but to believe in it. And if they could make that, just think of the weapons they’d be capable of producing. Or had already produced.

  Um.

  Advanced military hardware is (wait for it) a two-edged sword. You can get hold of it and use it on your enemies. Or your enemies can get hold of it and use it on you. You have two alternatives only, and inertia isn’t one of them. Oh damn, she thought, I’m going to have to do something. And quickly, before someone else does it. And sneakily, of course. Goes without saying.

  Well? The first thing she needed was solid, reliable information. No use, in that case, sending more goblin scouts, she needed observations from someone with a brain larger and marginally less dense than a walnut. A dwarf? Since Mordak’s epoch-making Treaty of Bad-Tempered Tolerance with King Drain, there were a few dwarves on the payroll—moderately smart, no, make that cunning, and sending a dwarf to investigate the possibility of new and deadly forms of weapon was like asking a cat to babysit fledgling sparrows. It had to be an Elf; an Elf, furthermore, with energy, intelligence, resourcefulness and the determination to see the mission through.

&
nbsp; “Oh damn,” she said aloud.

  Still, she’d defined the parameters herself, and there was only one candidate, who was currently wearing her underwear. She sighed and reached for a scrap of paper.

  Mordak—

  Gone out. Back later. May be some time. Don’t whatever you do attempt to file anything, make appointments or answer letters. Do NOT move anything that we may conceivably want to find ever again.

  T.

  Experience had taught her that the best way of slipping quietly out of the palace was to go up to the fourteenth level, ride back down to the seventeenth level on the service elevator, cut across through the Museum of Cultural Artefacts and take the back stairs direct to the East Gate. As she paused for breath on the level twelve landing she heard some sort of commotion on the far side of the massive steel door. She hesitated. If there was a problem, she ought to stay and sort it out, before Mordak made a mess of it that she would have to clear up later. But that would take time, and that was a commodity which she suspected was in short supply if she wanted to get to the whisk-makers before anyone else. She shrugged and carried on up the stairs, and in due course emerged into the sunlight.

  There was, of course, a sentry on duty outside the East Gate. He was covered from head to foot in black cloth, apart from his eyes, which were in there somewhere behind two two-inch-thick discs of smoked glass held together with wire. Goblins don’t like sunlight much.

  “You,” she said. “Get me a horse.”

  The sentries all knew her, by sight and by the sting of her extensive vocabulary. “Sorry, miss. No horses. Not till Tuesday.”

  She rolled her eyes. “What?”

  “No horses, sorry, ma’am. Wolves and flying lizards only, till Tuesday.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, your ladyship, some id—somebody thought it’d be a good idea to save money by amalgamating the royal messenger service and the household cavalry. Have ’em share the same stables, that sort of thing.”

  She knew that. She’d forged Mordak’s signature on the order. “Well?”