An Orc on the Wild Side

by Tom Holt

  “As I understand it, his work was unsatisfactory,” the Keeper said. “Nominally he was dismissed because he failed to reach his quota of billable hours, but I gather the real reason was, he approached his work in an unElvish manner. He thought,” the Keeper added with a shudder, “outside the box.”

  “Oh. That’s a bad thing?”

  “Of course. Otherwise, why have boxes?”

  Mordak nodded. “Find him,” he said. “Right now.”

  The filthy bit of old rag that served John the Lawyer as an office door was hurled aside, and an Elf came in. Because the lintel was low and Elves aren’t, he had to stoop a little, which meant he entered John’s office ear-points first; the dim light of the oil lamp sparkled on them, just for a moment. “You,” said the Elf. “Are you the lawyer?”

  John looked up. “Yes.”

  “You can’t spell.”

  “Actually I can, but the sign writer can’t.”

  “Then you’re a pathetic copy editor. You’re coming with me.”

  John frowned. “Am I?”

  “If you know what’s good for you. You’ve been sent for.”

  Not so very long ago, John would’ve been on his feet and halfway to the door. But things change, and so do people. Partly it was the short, glorious time he’d spent not working for Elves, and being paid real money. Also, he’d recently gained a number of insights into how the Realms really work, none of which had done much to bolster his opinion of the Elder Race. There was also the fact that directly behind him, where the Elf couldn’t see her, was an entity who could bounce any Elf off the walls and use his ears as a tin opener, and she was on his side. “Paying work?”

  The Elf glared at him. “I forgot, you’re human. Yes, paying work.”

  “Mphm.” John smiled. “My rates are two hundred Elvish floons an hour, plus disbursements.”

  “Two hundred fl—” The Elf stared at him as though he’d just found half of him in an apple. “Don’t be absurd. We could get a real lawyer for that.”

  John’s smile didn’t even flicker. “And so you shall,” he said, “as soon as you give me my two hundred floons retainer. Oh, don’t look at me like that, I really don’t need to see what the back of your throat looks like. Payment on account. It’s standard Elvish business practice.”

  “Yes, but you’re not—”

  “Look,” John said. “What’s the real difference between you and me, leaving aside manners and personal charm? You’re immortal, I’m not. And if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to spend what’s left of my mayfly existence earning money, so either pay up or shove off. I don’t mind which. One would be nice, the other one would be even nicer. Just make your mind up, please.”

  “Two hundred floons?”

  “That’s right. Who says really, really old people have bad memories?”

  The Elf ground his teeth. “Will you take a cheque? Only I haven’t—”

  “Of course. I trust people. Even your lot.” He took the scrap of parchment from the Elf’s long, elegant fingers, scanned it and handed it back. “Who’d have thought it, you forgot the signature. That’s better, thank you. Now, you said something about a job you wanted doing?”

  The Elf stormed out. John rose to follow him, then looked back. “Coming?”

  “Me?” said the wraith.

  “If you’re not too busy or anything. Only, I don’t trust that lot further than I can sneeze them out of a blocked nostril, and it’d be handy to have some, well, muscle. In case things get fraught.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. A wraith. The nameless terror against which even the mightiest Elven hero fears to stand. No offence,” he added quickly.

  “None taken. Do you think all this has got something to do with the Somewhere Else place?”

  John shrugged. “Must have. Or else why would they want me?”

  She got up. “Elves have newspapers, don’t they?”

  “Oh, yes,” John said.

  “And magazines.”

  “Those, too. Last time I looked, there were slightly more Elvish magazines than Elves.”

  “Splendid. In that case, there’s bound to be modelling work, if only I could get to meet some editors.”

  John pursed his lips. “Have you ever seen an Elf paper?”

  “No. We weren’t supposed to.”

  “No pictures,” John said. “Just lots and lots of long words meaning ‘inferior’. Definitely no models.”

  “Oh.” The wraith looked desperately sad for a moment, then brightened up. “In that case, things are going to have to change, aren’t they? I’ll just have to make them see that they’ll sell a lot more papers if they’ve got pictures of me wearing nice clothes in them. Come on,” she added briskly, “don’t just stand there. We’ve got networking to do.”

  John thought; I could explain, assuming she’d let me get a word in edgeways. But then she’ll be depressed and sad, and there’s enough unhappiness in the world as it is. Or I could just stand back and watch while she gets really mad at some needle-eared jerk of an editor, and then sue him for discrimination. Which won’t work, of course, but I bet she’ll like me for trying.

  Somehow a grin had crept onto his face. He wiped it off, but he could feel the afterglow spreading through him. I love my job, he thought, and ran after her.

  “Terry,” said Molly Barrington, looking up from her treasured, seven-week-old copy of the Daily Mail, “there’s a whole crowd of people outside our front door.”

  Terry Barrington scowled at her. He’d finally managed to get the back off his laptop (snot-nosed kids could fix these things, so it stood to reason he could) and he was gazing at all the weird shit inside like a Trobriand Islander in a nuclear power station. “We haven’t got a front door. We haven’t got a door.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Draw the curtains.”

  His wife gave him a look equally blended from compassion and contempt. “You do realise,” she said, “you’ve buggered up the warranty.”

  “Hardly matters out here, does it? Not like we can send the bloody thing back.” He turned it upside down, in the fond hope that it would help. “Bloody frontier spirit, that’s what we need. If it’s broken, fix it yourself.” He peered at the ants’ nest of teeming circuitry until his nose was an inch from the green plastic. It looked for all the world like the train set he’d had as a boy; that was the station, and that copper-coloured thing was the tracks, and all the rest of the gubbins must be points and signals. The only real difference was, when he was a boy he knew how all that stuff worked.

  “We haven’t got any curtains, remember,” Molly said; and, yes, he remembered just fine, because she’d been bringing the fact to his attention every hour on the hour for days.

  “When I’ve got five minutes,” Terry mumbled past the screwdriver lodged between his teeth. “Or get a man in.”

  “There aren’t any men.”

  Terry sighed. “You know what,” he said. “I wonder if we did the right thing coming here.”

  Curiously enough, the same thought had occurred to Molly once or twice recently. However, as her husband’s official loyal opposition, she knew her duty. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You love it here, you know you do.”

  “Do I really.”

  “Of course you do. I mean, think of what we’ve got here.”

  “Like?”

  Actually—“Well, for starters, what about that amazing view? You don’t see things like that out of the window in Putney.”

  “Which is why you’re always banging on to me about curtains. Yes, point taken.”

  Terry was a fair-minded man, and he was prepared to concede that it wasn’t entirely the Realms’ fault that his laptop had suddenly stopped working. Computers broke down back home, too. But back home you could get people to fix them. He tried to think what it could have been that he’d done that had buggered the stupid thing. It had been working just fine the last time he updated the blog (and, somehow, hi
s enthusiasm for that had waned a bit lately; wonder why). Since then, however, nothing; he turned it on and all that happened was, this stupid thing like a big red eye appeared in the middle of the screen and just sat there. Probably a virus, or else it was a bit of dust in the works. Pound to a penny, all it really needed was a good clean-up with a toothbrush.

  He noticed something; so unusual that it put all other thoughts out of his mind. His wife had stopped talking. “What?” he said.

  “What?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Molly was looking at him, and he knew her well enough to read her expression like a book (albeit in a language he didn’t understand, and which he was holding the wrong way up). She wanted to go home, too. But, since he’d said that that was what he wanted to do, she couldn’t possibly agree with him, not just like that. No, she had to find some way of agreeing with him against her will, so that doing what she also wanted to do would constitute an act of selfless martyrdom. She was ever so good at it. Long practice.

  “Do you really not like it here any more?”

  He thought about that. It didn’t take very long. “No,” he said.

  “Would you be happier if we went home?”

  “Yup.”

  Now the sigh, followed by the making-the-supreme-sacrifice look. “You’re wasting your time doing that, you know. Probably you’ve ruined it completely.”

  He decided she could have that one for free. Also, given that one of the little silvery signal boxes had just come away in his hand, she was probably right. Diplomacy, he thought. “Forget it,” I said. “I know how much you like it here. It’s what you always wanted, a place like this.”

  With fifty-seven flights of stairs, hideous monsters for neighbours and the sort of toilet that had made such a significant contribution to the spread of the Black Death; quite. “Yes,” she said, managing to look him straight in the eye without bursting into flames; he admired her for that. “But if you’re not happy here—”

  “Nah, I’m just being selfish. I couldn’t take it all away from you.”

  Neat, he thought. Now he had the moral high ground, and everything ghastly that happened to them henceforth would be her fault. On those terms, he wouldn’t mind particularly if they did stay. “Besides,” he went on, “we’ll never get our money back on this dump.”

  “Money isn’t everything.”

  Wash your mouth out with soap and water, he thought but didn’t say. What she didn’t know, because for some reason he’d neglected to tell her, was that shortly before they’d left the Old Country, he’d been telling Benny Tisbury all about it in the golf club bar, and Benny had said how wonderful it sounded, and he and Pam were looking for a little place somewhere now that Antibes was so full of grockles off the cruise ships, so if ever they got sick of it and thought of selling… “You’re right,” he said. “That’s very true.”

  “And if you really don’t like it here any more—”

  He glanced down at his disembowelled laptop. If it really was fucked up beyond all hope of recovery, that would mean no more blog, therefore nothing for him to do all day except all the jobs Molly wanted him to do when he’d got five minutes. A man couldn’t be expected to live like that.

  “I don’t mind where we live so long as you’re happy,” he said. He waited. “I said, I don’t mind where we live—”

  She wasn’t listening. “Those people,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I think they want to talk to us.”

  Terry peered over her shoulder. “Probably canvassers,” he said. “Ignore them, they’ll go away. Like I was saying, I really don’t mind where—”

  “Make them go away, Terry, they’re scaring me. I don’t want that sort of person hanging round our house.”

  Terry went a sort of pale magnolia. “If we just keep quiet and pretend we aren’t home, they’ll give up soon enough. They’ll think we’re down the shops or out for a—”

  Something heavy and metallic clanged against the wall of the tower, which had perfect acoustics, like a bell. Molly screamed. Oh, for crying out loud, Terry thought. “Probably just kids,” he said hopefully, and headed for the stairs.

  If we were back home, he told himself, as he clattered down the unending spiral, we could call the police. Who wouldn’t turn up till the next day, admittedly, and when they did all they’d do would be to point out how thin his back offside tyre was getting; but at least there was someone you could turn to, who was nominally on your side. He mumbled the door-opening spell, stuck his head out, drew a deep breath and contorted his face into a furious expression.

  “What’s the big idea, disturbing people at this—oh, it’s you.”

  The amiable idiot human who’d come to use their phone smiled weakly at him. “Hello,” he said. “Me again.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve remembered my name,” said the human. “Theo Bernstein. Can I use your phone again?”

  Terry lowered his voice. “Who are that lot?”

  Theo glanced over his shoulder, then back again. “No idea,” he said. “They sort of followed me here, or else they were coming this way anyway and I just happened to be ahead of them. Odd-looking lot, aren’t they?”

  Terry sighed. “You’d better come in,” he said. “Keep your voice down, Molly’s got one of her heads

  “I’m very sorry to hear that. Which one?”

  “We’ve decided we’re going home,” Terry said. “Hang on. What did you say your name was?”

  “Theo Bernstein.”

  “I’ve heard of you. You’re a scientist.”

  “Yes.”

  “You blew up the—”

  “Yes.”

  “Stone me. Can you fix computers?”

  “No.”

  Terry shrugged. “Well,” he said, “probably just as well you don’t try, bearing in mind what happened with that hadron collidy thing, no offence. We want to sell this place.”

  Theo gave him a winning smile. “Can I use your phone, please?”

  “What? Oh, yes, right. This way.”

  Theo tapped in the number, waited, then grinned. “It’s ringing,” he said, but Terry had wandered off. He waited, and heard a voice. “Hello,” he said, “I’m Theo Ber—”

  The voice spoke to him. His expression changed. The grin faded. He nodded a couple of times and said, “I see, yes.” Then he cut the call and put the phone back neatly where he’d found it. He looked round. No sign of his host, who wasn’t going to like this. Still, that wasn’t his fault. Well, not entirely. “Mr. Barrington,” he called out. “Mr. Barrington, I need to talk to you.”

  No sign of anyone. He was about to go down the stairs when a stab of pain in the exact centre of his head dropped him to his knees.

  What does that mean?

  “I don’t know,” Theo said aloud.

  Don’t mess with me, said the voice in his head. I know you’re lying. Tell me.

  The pain was almost more than he could bear, but Theo managed a grin. “Think about it,” he said. “You’re inside my brain, with access to all the stored information, and you’re asking me questions.”

  What does it mean?

  “It means I could really use an aspirin,” Theo said. “And either I’m telling the truth, or there’s a part of my brain you can’t get into. And the bitch of it is,” he added with enormous pleasure, “you have no way of knowing which. Now, can I please have the use of my legs back?”

  You know what? You’re no fun at all. I was better off with the she-goblin. At least she appreciated me.

  “Yes,” Theo said. “It’s a pity you made me kill her. I wish you hadn’t done that. I don’t like killing anything.”

  You’re weird.

  “Not where I come from,” Theo said firmly. “Came from,” he amended, and there was a slight hitch in his voice. “Though actually, to be fair, we do just as much killing as you do here, otherwise we’d starve to death. We just try hard not to think about it.”

&
nbsp; Came from?

  “Slip of the tongue. Tenses are a bitch.”

  What are you hiding from me?

  Theo beamed. “Search me,” he said. “Oh, sorry, you’ve done that. No idea.”

  A moment passed, during which Theo had the oddest sensation of something scrabbling about inside his head. He even fancied he could hear the scrape of claws on a hard surface. That’s not possible.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  But you managed it anyway.

  “Not me,” Theo relented. “A very clever friend of mine did it for me, bless him. And in his reality, it was possible. Feasibility tourism, it’s a wonderful thing.”

  Part of your mind is sealed off. I can’t get in. You can’t get in.

  “No, but it’s like Radio 3, it’s nice to know it’s there if I ever did want it.”

  And the message you just received. It spoke to—

  “Yes. I was tempted to listen in. But eavesdropping on yourself is such bad manners.”

  For a second or so, Theo couldn’t feel the presence in his mind, though he knew it was still there. You won’t get away with this.

  “What’re you going to do? Force your way in? If you do that, you’ll kill me, and then I’ll be no use to you.” He smiled. “I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you that, you know as well as I do. Reminds me of a reality I was in a while ago where they were all telepaths. Kept finishing each other’s sentences. It was like everyone was married to everyone else.”

  All right, said the voice, and its tone had changed. What do you want?

  “Excuse me?”

  How much? Name your price.

  Theo sighed. “You’re not very good at this, are you? Look it up if you don’t believe me. There is nothing I want. I’m not for sale.”

  Pause, while the voice did just that. Then, you’re lying.

  “Excuse me?”

  There is something you want.

  “News to me if there is.”

  You want to go home.

  “Oh, that.”

  But you can’t.

  “Do forgive me, sloppy thinking, I don’t know what’s got into me. What I should have said is, there’s nothing I want that I can have.”

  Yes, you could. Anything. Just let me into the locked room.