An Orc on the Wild Side

by Tom Holt

  But Mordak shook his aching head. “It’s ambiguous,” he repeated.

  “Ambiguous my ear tips. She who should never have been born will rise up among the chosen people. And what have you got down in the cellars right now? The one and only ever female goblin. I know you have severe issues with two plus two, but surely you get it.”

  Mordak selected a dry roasted ear from the small dish on the table in front of him; not too hard, not too wrinkled and furry. The green ones were his favourite. “You’re jumping to conclusions,” he said with his mouth full. “Really, I’m surprised at you, a smart lady like you. Conclusions,” he added loudly, before she could get started, “that aren’t warranted by the available data.”

  About the only way to get her to be quiet for a moment, he’d learned the hard way, was to bombard her with syllables. It always took her a split second to get over the shock of finding that he knew words that long.

  “For example,” he went on, “the prophecy says, the chosen people. A prophecy, mark you, concocted by Elves. Surely, if an Elvish prophecy wanted you to think goblins, it’d say something like evil little bastards. Chosen people’s got to mean your lot, surely.” He looked at her and narrowed his eyes. “She who should never have been born,” he said. “An Elf. Hm.”

  She knew he was kidding. “Prophecies are like that,” she said, “you know that perfectly well. They’re supposed to be totally misleading while telling nothing but the truth.”

  “Mphm. Out of interest, why is that?”

  “I don’t know, do I?”

  “Because they’re exclusively composed by Elves? No, there has to be some other reason. Anyway, you’ve got to admit, when you see chosen people, you don’t immediately think of goblins. Well, do you?”

  Her fists were clenched into little hard knots. “Of course you don’t. That’s the point. Look, will you stop trying to score points off me and look at it constructively?”

  That one went home, just below the sore spot caused by all the oh-come-ons. Yes, he admitted, I’m arguing with her because I can, which is no good reason. And also because—

  “I don’t want to execute Bolgette,” he admitted. “It seems so unfair, somehow.”

  “Bolgette?” For a moment he thought she was about to explode. “You’ve given it a name?”

  He shrugged. “Bolg after my revered predecessor, because we used a bit of his adrenal gland to get her bump-started, so to speak, and ette because that shows she’s a she. I think it’s a nice name.”

  “I’m starting to get seriously worried about you.”

  “All right, then, the experimental prototype female goblin. Killing her just for the sake of a maliciously obscure prophecy strikes me as excessive.”

  She looked at him. “It’s the Evil thing to do,” she said.

  “Yes,” he snapped, “the Old Evil thing to do, exactly what dear old Bolg would’ve done. Nasty, violent and stupid.” He made himself calm down. One does not yell at Elves, because if one does they’ve won. “You should go down and take a look at her some time. She’s magnificent. Oh, don’t do all that,” he added, as Tinituviel raised an eyebrow and smirked. “It’s true. She’s three times as tall and at least five times as strong, reactions like lightning, and the way she’s learned stuff without any prompting at all, she must have so much brain it’s a wonder it doesn’t dribble out of her ears. With a hundred thousand more like her, I could build an army worthy of Snordor. I could win.”

  He’d shocked her; and he hadn’t meant to say it, not out loud. One of the implicit terms of their unwritten contract was that she worked for him on the strict assumption that Evil could never win. He had a nasty feeling he’d just signed Bolgette’s death warrant.

  “All right,” he said, “maybe you’re right, maybe that’s what the prophecy means by she-who-should-never. And when it says chosen people, I guess that means from our perspective. Though,” he added, “chosen is still going it a bit strong. The people I got lumbered with would be closer to the mark, if you ask me.”

  She was giving him that serious look, the one that usually came before, you’ve simply got to do this paperwork now. “I think you’ve got a choice,” she said.

  He hadn’t been expecting that. “Me?”

  “Yes,” she said, “you. Think about it. Evil always loses, you said it yourself. But, just before it loses, it reaches a point where anyone would think it’s inevitably going to win. And then, from the quarter where you’d least expect it, the smelly stuff hits the fan or the ring hits the molten lava, and suddenly it’s all over bar the interminable singing. I think we’re building up to just such an event.”

  Pointy ears and snarky manner or not, you had to hand it to her. Smart. He could see it now, but only because she’d got there first. “Let me save you the bother,” he said. “The she-goblin makes me think—with good reason—that I can win. Under that impression, I spare her and ignore the prophecy. Therefore a key term of the prophecy is fulfilled, and ten minutes after that, the Nameless One is drinking his morning coffee out of the back of my head.” He paused. “That was what you were about to say, wasn’t it?”

  “Pretty much.” She looked at him, as if he was the small print in a contract. “Not bad.”

  He sighed. “Fine,” he said. “You win. No army worthy of Snordor for me. But killing her still seems a bit—”

  “Harsh?”

  “Oh, come on,” he quoted, though he couldn’t do it nearly as well. “You’re the Daughter of Light around here, for crying out loud. We don’t have to scrag the poor thing, we can just keep her locked up until all this aggravation’s over and done with.” She looked at him. “Can’t we?”

  She shook her head. “She’s a goblin,” she said. “Goblins don’t count. Well, they don’t,” she added quickly, before he could say anything. “It’s like feeling sorry for a biscuit. The whole purpose of a biscuit is to be eaten. The whole purpose of a goblin—”

  He sighed. She was right, of course. It wasn’t, but she was. “Fine,” he said. “Off with her head, then. Go on.”

  She nodded, then hesitated. “You don’t mean me personally?”

  He’d learned the unblinking stare from her, along with a lot of other things.

  “You don’t mean me personally.”

  “Well, let’s see,” he said. “From what I’ve gathered, she’s likely to make mincemeat of any detachment of less than a dozen goblins, and more than a dozen wouldn’t fit in her cell, they’d have to form an orderly queue outside the door. I could probably do it, but, as you keep telling me, I owe it to my people to stay out of fights if I can help it. You, on the other hand, are an Elven warrior princess, it says so on your CV.” He drew a sheet of parchment from a drawer and laid it on the table, the palm of his paw covering the writing. “Fifth-level archery, seventh-level longsword, distinction in unarmed combat and gracefully fighting dirty. Which reminds me,” he went on, “one of these days you really ought to get around to putting copies of your diplomas on the file. Obviously I believe you have all these qualifications, but you’re always saying the road to hell is paved with missing duplicate copies.”

  She’d gone a funny colour. “You know, on reflection, perhaps it’d be simpler all round if we just put something in her food.”

  Mordak grinned at her. “She eats goblins. Poison just won’t cut it. No pun intended. Sorry, but I think this is a case where the old cold steel is called for. And since you’re eminently qualified—”

  “I’d have to check my diary. I do have rather a lot of work piled up right now.”

  Enough fun for one day. “Or,” Mordak said, “I suppose we could call in a wraith.”

  “Yes, that’s a really good idea.” The words came tumbling out in a sort of heap. “How silly of me, I should’ve thought of it earlier.”

  “It’s all right,” Mordak said nicely, “it’s hard to think straight when you’re paralysed with fear. So they tell me,” he added, slipping the sheet of paper back into the drawer after sh
e’d had a chance to see it was blank. “All right, see to it, would you? Thank you so much,” he added, as the door slammed behind her.

  “Are you the plumber?” Pat Lushington asked.

  The newcomer frowned. “I don’t think so. Please may I use your telephone?”

  The thing about him was that he looked normal. That should have made him stick out like a sore thumb, in a neighbourhood where everyone who called at the front door was either an Elf, a dwarf, one of the half-witted local humans or a delivery man (and she knew both of them by sight; a very old man in a flat hat, and a beanpole teenager who never stopped eating). The newcomer was dressed in concrete-coloured slacks, a light blue short-sleeved shirt and white trainers, all perfectly clean and tidy; mid-thirties, good-looking in a gormless sort of a way; if he was on TV, he’d probably be playing a vet. Normal; therefore, in context, all wrong.

  Also, he knew about phones. “You’re not from round here,” she said.

  “I don’t think so. But I really do need to make a call.”

  Euphemism for toilet facilities? He had that air of desperation about him. But he was a man, and the foothills of the mountains in which stood the Great Gate of what Pat had resolved henceforth to call Mariposa were full of shady crevices, and a few hundred yards further down was the forest, offering an outstanding choice of trees. In which case, she could only assume he wanted to use the telephone. Odd.

  “Well,” she said, “we haven’t got a landline because they can’t connect one up through the whatsit, though that’s not what they told us when we came here. A landline, high-speed broadband and cable TV, they said. Now it’s, oh, well, we’re hoping to have all that in place within the next two years, going forward. Honestly, it’s been like that with everything. If we’d known what we were letting ourselves in for, we’d have stayed where we were. And you try and get a plumber. Forget it.”

  “OK,” the newcomer said, with a twisted smile. “I should be able to manage. I seem to have forgotten everything else.”

  There was something about him that made her feel uneasy. “Are you feeling all right?” she said.

  “Yes and no. Look, I hate to be a pest, but do you have a phone of any sort? It’s quite important.”

  She sighed. After all, the indications were that he was a fellow citizen of the Civilised World, with a faint accent that was either Scottish or New Zealand, and a shirt made of polyester cotton rather than thirty thousand interlocking steel rings. On that basis he was probably One of Us, and deserved her help. “I suppose you could use my mobile,” she said. “But you’ll have to climb up the Gimbrill Stair and stand on the Ramparts of Mazhad-Bazhan. It’s the only place you can get a signal.”

  The Gimbrill—sorry, the historic Gimbrill Stair, although what had actually happened there to earn it that sobriquet nobody had ever seen fit to tell her, and she was quite sure she’d rather not know anyway—consists of a hundred and nine spiral stone steps, and brings you out, panting and admiring the pretty twinkling lights just behind your eyelids, on the pinnacle of a windswept crag. She’d been tempted to say, through that doorway, turn left, you can’t miss it and let him find his own way, but the thought of a perfect stranger wandering about the place wasn’t one she was comfortable with. He proved to be in pretty good shape, at any rate; he was hardly puffed at all after the abominable climb.

  He knew how to use a mobile phone; but all to no avail. “No answer,” he said sadly and handed it back to her. “Just voicemail.”

  “Aren’t you going to leave a message, after all that?”

  He gave her a tragic look. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  Pat Lushington’s heart wasn’t marble. “Come and have a cup of tea,” she said. “You look ever so sorry for yourself.”

  His reaction to the decor in the morning room (she refused to think of it as the Treasury of Zharad-Püm, no matter how historic it might be) was interesting. He seemed not to notice. Now the locals all reacted with horrified fascination, while One of Us would be vividly reminded of Home. But the newcomer might as well have been sitting in a field for all the interest he took.

  The tea, though, seemed to go down very well. “Thank you,” he said. “Can I have some more?”

  “Help yourself,” she said, and he got up and operated the teapot as to the manner born. “I have to say, the local water’s pretty good, it makes a lovely cup of tea. It must be extra soft, or is it extra hard, I can never remember.”

  The newcomer thought for a moment. “I’d imagine it’d be pretty hard,” he said, “since it drains through all that limestone. I think I take sugar. Is there any?”

  She pointed out the sugar bowl. “You think you take sugar.”

  He nodded. “It feels like I do. But I don’t actually know.” He added a heaped spoonful, stirred and sipped. “Now I do. Yes. One sugar in tea. Well, that’s something.”

  From a few stray shards of data she’d picked up along the way, she was beginning to piece together a working hypothesis. “You’ve got whatsit,” she said. “Am-thingy.”

  “Amnesia?”

  “That’s the one. You’ve lost your memory.”

  He beamed at her. “I rather think so, yes.”

  “You poor thing. When did that happen?”

  Gentle smile. “Trick question?”

  “What? Oh, I see. Well, did you have a fall or something? Bang your head, that sort of thing.”

  He frowned again. “Not that I’m aware of,” he said, “and I haven’t got any unexplained bumps and bruises, no blurred or double vision, drowsiness or nausea. Of course, if it’s transient global amnesia or dissociative fugue, you don’t need a bash on the bonce to get those. Basically, though, yes. The first thing I can remember is waking up on the mountainside about a mile and a half north of here, and apart from a load of useless information about science, history and the arts, the only thing in my head is a phone number, which I just tried calling, but no reply.” He smiled. “And there you have it. You now know as much about me as I do.”

  Pat looked at him closely for a while. “Actually,” she said, “rather more.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. For a start, I can tell you for sure you visited a branch of Marks & Spencer within the last three months and bought a pair of trousers.”

  He blinked. “Marks & Spencer,” he said. “A large British-based chain store specialising in clothing.”

  She nodded. “And you sound like you could be English. Or Scottish. Or from New Zealand, or possibly South Africa. Maybe Canada. I don’t think you’re American,” she added reassuringly.

  He considered that. “So possibly I’ve spent a lot of time in more than one of those places. Which would give me a sort of fifty-seven-varieties accent.”

  “See? Aren’t we doing well?”

  “It’s a start,” he conceded. “Where is this, by the way?”

  “Ah.”

  “Ã,” he repeated. “That’s what it’s called.”

  She shook her head. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m not in any particular hurry if you’re not.”

  “Well.” She poured herself some more tea. “It all started when my husband and I—my husband’s Barry and I’m Pat, Pat Lushington.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Anyway,” she went on, “we were at this party, office bash, Barry’s work, and some people we knew a bit were telling us all about this amazing new scheme, like moving to France or the Algarve, only your money goes much, much further, and it doesn’t rely on the cheap air fares because transportation is basically free. Well, we were desperate to get out of London, and Barry’s always wanted to retire early and write his blessed novel, and the kids are settled, so we thought, well, why not? And here we are.”

  “That’s wonderful. Only you haven’t said where here is.”

  She gave him a slightly cold look. “I was coming to that. Apparently it’s all to do with something called multiverse theory.”

  The newcomer s
at up straight in his chair. “You mean the one that says that a generic prediction of chaotic inflation is an infinite ergodic universe, which, being infinite, must contain Hubble volumes realising all initial conditions.”

  “Um.”

  “From which it follows that there’s an infinite multiverse containing an infinity of Hubble volumes which may or may not operate under the same physical laws as each other, depending on whether you agree with Tegmark or Wheeler and Smolin, though also see Everett and Feynman. That multiverse theory?”

  A moment or so passed before she replied. “Probably,” she said. “I really wouldn’t know, I’d have to ask Barry. But anyway, this multiverse theory means you can zap across from our universe to a different one where property prices are ridiculously low, and still get a phone signal and the UK newspapers. Well, a couple of days late, but it’s not like there’s anything much in them these days anyhow.”

  The newcomer nodded. “A van Goyen portal,” he said. Then he added, “Isn’t that all still highly theoretical?”

  She shrugged. “Search me. Anyhow, here we are, and it’s really quite nice once you get used to it, the locals aren’t too bad and anyway they keep themselves to themselves, and we order in pretty much everything via the Net, and if you place your order before 11 a.m. local time you’ve got a fairly good chance of getting it within forty-eight hours, except for fresh milk, which is a pain, so we use the long-life milk, which is OK in tea and coffee, because you wouldn’t want to touch the local stuff, trust me, Barry had a tiny splosh of it in his Jamaican Blue Mountain and that was the last I saw of him for the next three days. And, of course, you can’t get a plumber no matter what you do. Not even a Pole.”

  He nodded, waited a moment, then said, “You still haven’t told me where we are.”

  “What? Oh, right. I think it’s called the Realms. I don’t suppose it means anything, Like, there was a new estate down the road from us in Tottenham and they called it The Elms but there wasn’t a tree for miles, I think the local youths dug them all up and sold them on eBay. But we don’t have any trouble like that round here, thank goodness.”