by Tom Holt
That didn’t help. Fun and spare time were both equally alien. She tried again. What, she asked him, did he enjoy doing?
Mr. Bullfrog thought about that for a long time. Then he said, “I don’t understand.”
Pat sighed. She’d seen it so many times before; all work and no play, and then, when they retire, the days seem so long and empty. It was, if the truth be told, one of the main reasons she’d agreed to move to the Realms. She knew, of course, that there was no cure for the syndrome, and the only way to save a reformed workaholic was to rekindle the addiction. Work; not necessarily his old job back, but work of some kind. Otherwise, he’d just fade away into a sad old man in a chair, like her uncle Neville when he retired from the Tax Office. It was a bit of a problem to wrench the conversation round to the direction she wanted it to follow, but Pat had never prized continuity very highly, and soon she was reeling off anecdotes about sundry relatives and acquaintances who’d retired too early, been bored stiff and then found something useful to do. Barry kept giving her odd looks, but he could be a bit slow sometimes. She ignored him and pressed on, and was pleased to note that Mr. Bullfrog was listening with rapt attention.
“It’s interesting that you should say that,” Mr. Bullfrog said. “Take me, for instance. All I’ve really done since I was cast down into the Chasms is sleep.”
Barry raised both eyebrows, but Pat assumed that cast-down-into-chasms was the local way of saying getting the sack, or compulsory early retirement. And the thought of a lively, intelligent old buffer like Mr. Bullfrog spending his days asleep because he had nothing to do made her heart bleed. That was no good, she assured him briskly. Obviously they’d only just met, but she could tell he still had ever so much to offer. Plenty of time to sit around when you’re old and decrepit, but someone in his prime, like Mr. Bullfrog, ought to be out there, doing things, contributing, setting the world to rights. Like her cousin Norman, who’d retired after forty years in spin driers and immediately got elected to the parish council—
She stopped. Mr. Bullfrog was gazing at her, his eyes gleaming. That’s more like it, she thought.
“The council,” Mr. Bullfrog said. “I remember now. I sat in the Black Council before the Realms were sundered and Thringoflion was cast down, and the Nameless One driven forth beyond the Portals.” He sighed, and the brief flare seemed to die away. “Happy days,” he said. “Of course, back then we’d never heard of all this touchy-feely Ent-hugging rubbish.”
“There, you see,” Pat said happily. “Nothing like taking an interest in civic affairs to put the spring back in your step. You know what? You should think about standing again.”
Mr. Bullfrog frowned. “Standing?”
“For the council. When Norman looked into it, they told him they were crying out for new members. Apathy, you see; people just can’t be bothered, can they?”
“Resume my place on the council.” Mr. Bullfrog seemed to swell—maybe it wasn’t such a bad name for him after all—and Pat could’ve sworn she heard the arms of the chair creak. “Take back that which was lost, restore the old values.” He blinked. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure I’ve got the energy for all that any more.”
“Well, it’s got to be better than sleeping all day,” Pat said. “You’ll be surprised. I mean, it gave Norman a whole new lease of life. He’s on three committees and sometimes Janice doesn’t see him from one day’s end to the next, he’s up in that attic, photocopying. He reckons he can’t understand how he ever had time to go to work. Anyway,” she added, in her special wheedling tone, “I think people with your talents and experience have a duty—”
“Duty,” Mr. Bullfrog repeated, and Pat knew she’d scored a direct hit there. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Duty has to come first, hasn’t it?”
Result, Pat thought smugly. She beamed across at Barry, who’d switched off, as he usually did when she started talking about her family, and was fiddling with his watch strap. “Well, that’s settled, then,” she said. “Would you like another cup of—?”
But Mr. Bullfrog wasn’t listening. Mr. Bullfrog was growing. There was a snap like a rifle shot as the chair gave way around him; then he stood up, and his knees were level with Pat’s eyebrows, and he was still shooting up like Jack’s beanstalk; arms raised above his head, wings spread, he rose like a gas jet that’s just been turned from simmer to full. Now his head was halfway up the stairs; he was flowing, no other word for it; no normal spine could twist at that angle, he didn’t seem to have a single bone in his body. Pat felt her eyebrows frizz in the glaring heat. She raised her hand to cover her face; and then he was gone. Suddenly just not there any more, and nothing to show he’d ever been there apart from scorch marks on the furniture.
Pat stared at the ruined carpet and the wrecked chair. “Well,” she said.
“I’ll be honest with you,” King Drain said, leading the way along an echoing corridor, “I had my doubts. I didn’t think it was going to work.”
The yellow glow from the flickering torch in his hand gleamed on an iron doorknob, set in a rust-brown steel door. He gave it a twist and a shove. The door opened.
The noise hit Ms. White like a punch to the side of the head. She’d got used to a bit of a racket since she’d been living here, of course; the ground-shaking thump of the piledriver, the shrill peck of pickaxe on rock, the harsh music of hammer on anvil, all amplified by the perfect acoustics of high, vaulted chambers hewn from the living rock. This, however, was different. She clapped her hands to her ears and pressed till it started to hurt, but it didn’t really make much difference. Too loud. The sound of thousands and thousands of dwarves, all yelling at each other at the tops of their voices.
The crashing torrent of sound drowned out everything, but luckily she could lip-read. I was wrong, Drain said, and he grinned. And you were right.
The Great Hall of Mazipan looked very different now. Gone were the rows of stone benches and tables, where once the king and his subjects had swilled ale and gorged on red meat off the bone. In their place were a thousand small unroofed cubicles, in each of which sat a dwarf on a high, three-legged stool. On the far side of the hall was a great seething mass of queuing dwarves, each one holding a sack or crate; a string quartet perched incongruously on rickety chairs next to the massive steel chain that separated the queue from the rows of cubicles. They were sawing away with frantic energy at their fiddles, but not a note could be heard above the baying voices. From time to time a furious looking dwarf would leave a cubicle and come storming out, windmilling his sack round his head and bawling, and leave the hall through the Gates of Driri; whereupon the Royal Guards, who stood at the head of the queue in full armour with swords drawn, would lower the chain and let another dwarf through. He would stomp along the rows of cubicles and disappear inside one of them; a few minutes later, he’d leave, white with rage, and the guards would lower the chain and let the next one through, and the process would be repeated.
Drain beckoned, and led the way to a high gallery, where for the past three Ages the king’s minstrels had sat and filled the air with the plaintive sound of harp and lute. From there, Ms. White could peer down into the roofless cubicles, and with the aid of her mini-binoculars she could just make out what the dwarves were shouting at each other. It was always the same. A dwarf would storm into the cubicle, shake out his sack onto the floor and point at whatever happened to fall out. It might be a combination car jack and DVD tidy, or an E-Z-Klene ultrasonic lint remover, or a Kitchen Pal graphite-reinforced vegetable spiraliser; it didn’t really seem to matter. The standing dwarf would point to it and yell, “IT DOESN’T BLOODY WORK!”, whereupon the dwarf sitting on the stool would shrug and yell back, “YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT!”, at which the standing dwarf would howl, “YOU BLOODY TRY IT, THEN”; which would prompt the seated dwarf to grin, shake his head and point out that items could only be exchanged or returned if brought back with their original shrink wrap intact. The next few exchanges of yells con
torted the faces of both parties to the point where Ms. White couldn’t make out the exact words, but the general idea wasn’t hard to grasp, particularly when they started hitting each other. But the seated dwarf had been issued with a stout iron cudgel, whereas the queuing dwarves had been thoroughly disarmed at the door, so that stage generally didn’t last very long; and then the visitor would get up off the floor, stuff his item back in its sack and storm off, roaring.
When Ms. White could endure no more she jumped up and fled, with Drain trotting amiably after her. She just made it through the door. Drain closed it, and she was enfolded in beautiful, healing silence.
“Customer service,” Drain said. “You were right. They’ve taken to it like ducks to water.”
She leaned against the wall and breathed in and out slowly a dozen times. “They seem to have got the general idea,” she conceded.
“And in an hour or so they all change places,” Drain went on. “That lot goes off shift, they all trot home and get the stuff they’ve just bought, and the next shift smacks them round the head, and everybody’s happy.”
Ms. White couldn’t speak because of the ringing in her ears, but she raised an eyebrow.
“Well,” Drain amended, “as happy as dwarves ever get. But so what? We’ve got full employment and a thriving economy. All those difficult buggers who used to mine coal and make steel are at this lark now, and they’re yelling at each other instead of me. If only I’d known, I’d have done it years ago.”
“Glad you’re pleased,” Ms. White said, though whether the words actually came out she couldn’t be sure. “About my cut. I was thinking. On balance, I’d like it in gold bars, packed in crates. That won’t take long to arrange, will it?”
Drain peered at her through the tiny gap between his eyelashes and moustache. “Thinking of going somewhere?”
“Me? Good Lord, no. Perish the thought.”
“Just as well.” Drain scrutinised her again, and she looked away. “This wouldn’t be a good time for you to leave, so I’m glad you aren’t considering it.”
“Walk out on a good thing when it’s just starting to get going? Not me.” She smiled at him. “Now, about the gold.”
Drain turned and started to walk away. Dwarves have short legs, but they can move them terribly quickly. She had to trot to keep up with him. “Maybe a bit of a problem there,” he called back over his shoulder.
“Problem?”
“Mphm. You see, I’ve bought lots of stuff from your friends recently, all paid for in gold.”
“Yes, but you’ve sold it all.”
“True.” Drain quickened his pace just a little. “All of it, that’s the point. My people are hard-working, thrifty folk, none more so in all the Realms, but even so. They don’t have enough gold coins to pay for all the things they want to buy.”
“Tough. So?”
She saw the back of Drain’s head shake from side to side. “But I need to sell them all these things you’ve been bringing in, so as to get my money back, so I can buy more.”
“Slow down a minute,” Ms. White panted. He stopped and turned to face her. “Look, it’s obvious, isn’t it? If they haven’t got the money, they can’t have the stuff. Simple as that.”
She got a hard, cold stare for that. “That’s not what you told me.”
She opened her mouth then closed it again. Come to think of it, he had a point. “Yes, but—”
“Credit,” Drain said. “You explained it to me. I said what a good idea it was. You said, yes, it’s a brilliant idea, it’s how everything’s done where you come from.”
“I did say that, yes. But I didn’t mean—”
“You said,” Drain went on, as though she hadn’t spoken, “credit is where people want to buy things but haven’t got any money, and you want to sell them things, because you’re making a vast profit on every sale, so you let them pay you with pretend money, and when all the real money’s been used up you issue mountains and mountains of pretend money called quant—”
“Quantitative easing. Yes, but I don’t think you’re quite ready for that yet. That’s a couple of phases further down the line in terms of economic sophistication.”
Drain shook his head. “Can’t be bothered with a lot of pointless waiting around,” he said. “From now on, all the gold goes to pay for the stuff from your friends. Among ourselves we use the pretend money.” He grinned at her. “This includes you. That’s all right, isn’t it? I mean, there isn’t a problem, is there? Not something you neglected to tell me.”
“Um. No. Absolutely not.”
Drain looked at her for a very long time, and it gradually dawned on her that maybe he wasn’t quite as stupid as she’d assumed him to be. “Splendid,” he said. “That sets my mind at rest.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“And you have no plans to go anywhere?”
“None at all.”
A frying-pan-broad hand clouted her between the shoulder blades, bouncing all the breath out of her body. “That’s the ticket,” Drain said. “You see, there’s some people—no names, no pack drill—who’ve been trying to make me think you set all this up just to make a lot of money very quickly, and then you’re going to load it all on a cart and scuttle back where you came from and leave us to clear up the mess when it all comes unstuck. But that’s all just nonsense, isn’t it?”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” Drain repeated. “So, if anyone says anything like that to me ever again, I’ll have his head cut off. And you’ll get your cut in pretend money, like everybody else. That’s all right, isn’t it?”
She beamed at him. “That’s all I could possibly ask for,” she said.
“That’s all right, then.” His bearlike arm engulfed her shoulders, and her knees buckled under its weight. “Now, why don’t you tell me a bit more about those leveraged derivative things you were talking about the other day?”
Ms. White went back to her room and looked round. There wasn’t much to see: a few clothes, a spare pair of shoes, a mirror, her two books. Could she be bothered to pack? She decided she couldn’t. Ah well. It had been fun, and she’d nearly got away with it. Served her right, in a way, for disregarding Rule One.
Screw up on Rule One, and Rule Two immediately comes into force. Rule Two is: know when it’s time to leave, and actually go a day earlier. She didn’t anticipate any problems on that score. A quick stroll through the corridors, then nip smartly through the giant doughnut, which ought to bring her out in her friend’s warehouse in New Jersey—not her favourite place in the world, but at least it’d be her world, and she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have to hang about there for very long. And after that? Well. Cross that bridge when she came to it; possibly even sell it to a gullible investor. She had her commission from the other end of the deal, more money than she could reasonably hope to spend in a lifetime unless she started collecting nuclear submarines, and if that wasn’t enough the secret of the doughnut technology on its own was bound to be of interest to somebody, after all. There are always possibilities.
Instinctively, she glanced at the mirror for a quick stocktake. She was relieved to see that her working capital was basically intact, though possibly in need of a little downsizing in some sectors. She tucked a stray wisp of hair behind one ear, considered the angle of her nose and curve of her chin, gazed for a moment deep into her own eyes –
Which seemed to merge together into one Eye and turn red.
“Bad luck,” said the mirror. “For a moment there, I thought you were going to pull it off.”
She shrugged. “Too greedy,” she said.
“I beg to differ,” the mirror replied. “Your cut was not unreasonable. I think it was Rule Two you offended against, not Rule One.”
“Like it matters,” she said. “Anyway, that’s enough of that.” She looked at the mirror and frowned. “It’s a shame you wouldn’t work back where I came from. You could be worth good money.”
“You’re the one w
ho’s convinced I wouldn’t work, not me.”
She shook her head. “We’ve been through all this. You’re magic. Magic doesn’t work in my world.”
“Magic is just technology that can’t be explained yet.”
“Nah. For a start, your power supply probably isn’t compatible.”
“Oh, come on,” said the mirror, and for a moment she thought she was looking at her reflection grinning at her. Then the Eye came back and said, “Take me with you and find out. What have you got to lose? If I work in your world, you’ll be rich. If I don’t, you’ll have a perfectly serviceable mirror. It’s not like you’ve got to worry about baggage allowances. And, anyway, I only weigh eight ounces.”
She thought for a moment. “I’d take you with me,” she said, “except, you’re awfully keen to go.”
The Eye twinkled at her. “That makes you suspicious.”
“Yes. If I had ulterior motives, I’d be acting just like you are now. And when it comes to ulterior motives, I wrote the book.”
“Come off it,” the Eye said. “I’m your mirror. If you can’t trust me, who can you trust?”
She smiled. “My mirror shows me me. I know me. And I wouldn’t trust me any further than I could sneeze myself out of a blocked nostril.”
The Eye widened a little. “I see,” it said. “Never kid a kidder, is what you’re saying. Well, that’s fair enough. Suppose I level with you, and then you can make up your mind about whether to take me with you or not.”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Go on, then,” she said. “What are you really up to?”
The Eye opened, like the jaws of a Venus flytrap, its lashes like the tendrils, red devouring pads on either side of the long, yellow pupil like the trap’s thin hinge. Ms. White caught her breath for a moment, then breathed out slowly.
“Ah,” she said. “That.”
“Indeed,” the Eye said. “Seeing is believing, as we say in the ocular community. Tell me,” it went on, “would that deter you from doing business with me, provided that you were guaranteed to make a large amount of money?”
