by Tom Holt
“Came from Reality A42c, yes. My home.”
Mordak peered at him. “You sent them here?”
“Dear God, no. That was that odious little man who was hanging round just now, apparently. I’d heard someone had got hold of a YouSpace portal and was up to no good with it, but honestly, I didn’t make this mess. I’m the one who’s got to clear it up, that’s all.”
Mordak picked a fibre of troll fillet out of his teeth with a splinter of shinbone. “That’s the spirit,” he said. “Duty first and all that. So what’s this Rexit thing?”
Theo looked very sad indeed. “Short for Exit from Reality. Apparently,” he said, “when the folks in Reality A42c realised they were part of a multiverse comprising an infinite number of alternative realities, it made them feel uncomfortable. Not sure why,” he added, “but there you are, and I suppose there’s worse crimes than being parochial. Anyway, there was a lot of fuss about it, some people saying it was good to be part of something big and huge and wonderful, and some people saying, next thing you know, they’ll all be over here, taking our jobs. And so they decided to have a referendum about it, and now Reality A42c is leaving the multiverse, for good.”
“Ah.”
“Quite. It wasn’t the result anyone expected, but that’s democracy for you. And what that means in practice is, I can set up YouSpace portals on every street corner, and people can stare into doughnuts till they’re blue in the face, and nobody can get into or out of A42c ever again.” He shrugged. “No great loss as far as the rest of the multiverse is concerned, except they’re going to have to amend all the textbooks to read ‘infinite number of universes minus one’. All a bit silly, really.”
“But good for us,” Mordak said. “No more weirdos from your Realm coming over here trying to throw us out of our homes.”
“There’s that, yes.”
“That’ll do me.” He chewed a fingernail—his own, for a change—and asked, “What about those humans in the old wizard’s tower, and the other lot down the old abandoned mine. Can they go back?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ah well. Talking of which, you look like shit. Are you feeling all right?”
Theo gave him a feeble grin. “I think so. That’s what’s worrying me.”
“Ah. Only, I was thinking, presumably you can’t go home either.”
“Oh, that. No big deal, believe me. Truth is, I made a bit of a hash of things back in A42c, so I’m really not welcome there any more. That was one of the reasons they chose me to come over here and announce the result of the vote. And don’t come back, they added. Screw them, I say.” Theo massaged the front of his head thoughtfully. It hurt—rather like the way your face hurts after you’ve had a tooth out, and the anaesthetic’s worn off, and you start exploring the blood-and-jelly cavity with the tip of your tongue. It’s gone, he thought. “Oh, and by the way. I think I owe you an apology.”
Mordak gave him a sideways look. “It’s a weird thing,” he said, “but I don’t often get apologies from humans. Still, I’m always up for a new experience. What did you do?”
“I sort of killed one of your people. Sorry.”
Shrug. “Humans kill lots of goblins,” he said. “And vice versa. Stuff happens. We believe that when we die we go to a vast, dark city where the derelict streets are alive with rats and strange creatures jump out on us from dark corners, and either we eat them or they eat us. So dying’s not so bad, really. Of course, your lot think that’s just some crazy myth.”
Theo shook his head. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s real all right. I’ve been there, for conferences, and to see the Yankees play at home. And we have similar beliefs where I come from. Similar-ish.” He frowned. “But I really am sorry about your goblin. She wasn’t really doing me any harm. I don’t know what came over me,” he added. “Though I have a sort of an idea.”
“Hang on. She wasn’t—?”
“Yes, I’m pretty sure it was a female. I remember thinking, good heavens, they have female goblins in this reality.”
“Had,” Mordak said. “She was the only one.”
“Ah.”
“I created her. I thought it would be a good idea.”
Theo nodded slowly. “And was it?”
“I don’t know, she didn’t really last long enough for me to find out. She was bigger and stronger than the bog-standard goblins, and smarter, and she learned stuff amazingly fast. So, probably no, not a good idea at all. Ah well.” He stopped and peered at Theo, who was looking thoughtful. “What?”
“What made me kill her,” Theo said slowly, “was this sort of thing that suddenly popped into my head.”
“I get them,” Mordak said. “My secretary calls them ideas. She thinks I shouldn’t have them.”
“It was more than that,” Theo said. “It was like a presence.”
“What, birthdays and winter solstice and stuff?”
“Like there was someone else inside my head,” Theo said. “And now it’s gone. It was there a while ago, when I went into the tower. I even bashed my head and knocked myself out, just to get it to shut up.”
“Maybe you killed it.”
“I don’t think so. Not the killable type, really. It’s hard to describe, but when I try and think what it was like, I get this image in my mind of a huge staring red eye.”
Mordak blinked twice. “Oh,” he said.
“Rings a bell?”
“Oh yes.”
At the foot of the tower, currently in deep shadow, was a shallow pool of dank, muddy water, left over from the last torrential rains. On its surface a reflection shivered in the slight breeze; an odd thing, because there was nothing for it to be a reflection of.
Frustrating, thought the Eye. So very near; that other Realm, tantalisingly close and crammed with infinite opportunity, where (by the sound of it) a Quintessence of Evil could really have made something of itself, fulfilled its true potential, a place that sounded like it was specially designed for evil to feel at home in; and then, at the very last moment, the way through had been shut, so firmly and suddenly that if the Eye had had lashes, they’d have been caught in the door—
Story of my life, the Eye thought sadly. You get within an ace of the finishing line and some furry-footed bastard thwarts you. Oh well. Onwards and upwards.
The reflected eye swivelled on the pool’s grubby meniscus. Well, if it couldn’t have the Other Place, it’d have to make do with this one. The glimpse of the Other Place made everything here seem tawdry and provincial, but that only made the Eye more determined. If it couldn’t have what it really wanted, what it deserved, then it was going to have to make do, wasn’t it, and woe betide anybody who got in its way this time.
It remembered the body it had occupied, briefly, before the Somewhere-Else human. Now that had been some body. For strength, stamina and speed of reflexes there was nothing to compare with it in the Realms, unless you counted a certain person we don’t talk about, and there’s an awful lot to be said for brute strength; also a surprising amount of brain capacity, most of it currently unused, so moving in would be easy, plenty of room for all its stuff, walk-in wardrobes and everything. Now, if that body was still available—
No, wait, the stupid human killed it. The Eye thought about that. Killed, yes; but a little patching up here, a rewiring job and a bit of duct tape there, maybe a certain degree of hearing loss and a slight tendency to yawn uncontrollably after meals, but she’d do, at least to be going on with. In fact, she’d do very nicely. The Eye had never been a girl before, not for any significant length of time. It might be fun.
The Eye rippled a little, stirring the water on which its two-dimensional image lay. Not a Dark Lord, a Dark Lady; cool. It reached out into the nebulous, tentative element it inhabited—the interface between light and darkness, the gaps between the photons, the places shadows go when you aren’t looking—until it found what it was looking for. Inert, but not quite cold, and no physical or mechanical damage; definitely a viab
le fixer-upper. And they’d been friends, right up to the very last moment (which could easily be erased), so she’d be ever so glad to have him back.
No big deal, then. Something that could be achieved in the blink of an Eye.
There was a soft splash, and the water of the pool swelled and rose up to accommodate the mass of an object that had landed in it, after falling some considerable distance. For the record, it was Terry Barrington’s laptop, hurled from a high window as punishment for not working any more. The water gurgled, the laptop sank and settled down into the three-inch-thick bed of silt at the bottom of the pool.
When you’ve quite finished, muttered the Eye, as it waited for the surface of the water to calm down enough to hold a coherent reflection. It recognised the strange rectangular thing; the fool in the tower had used it to see the Other Place—the place that was now closed off, lost for ever. The thought didn’t improve the Eye’s temper. Somebody is going to pay for all this, it resolved. Somebody is going to catch it hot. Lots of somebodies. Everybody.
The water settled. The Eye blinked, and was gone.
Tinituviel was feeling ever so slightly guilty. Which, she assured herself as she picked her way through the tangled briars at the edge of the greenwood, was silly, because after all, Mordak was a goblin. True, she’d somehow managed to tolerate him during the time she’d been working for him (an Elf working for a goblin: enough said) and maybe he wasn’t quite like other goblins, but even so. It was high time she made her mind up about where her loyalties really lay.
The tips of her ears, where the upper flange of the lobe swoops upwards towards the point, were burning. She knew what that meant, and ears never lie. She scowled.
The whole purpose of the exercise (she told herself) had been to exercise a restraining and civilising influence on Goblinkind by insinuating herself into the very nerve centre of goblin power—that and earning five times what she’d have got doing the same work in Elvenhome, assuming she could ever have got such a plum job back home, which with her résumé she couldn’t; but that was just an incidental benefit, and, boy, had she earned every last cartwheel-sized gold piece, putting up with all that ignorance and crass stupidity, and the smell—
And now (she picked a trailing strand of briar carefully out of her hair), the moment things started getting a bit awkward, what was the first thing Mordak had done? Taken his entire horde off to invade Elvenhome. Well, not actually invade; before she’d made her strategic withdrawal, she’d heard Mordak telling the assembled host precisely what he planned to do to any goblin who drew a bowstring or levelled a spear without a direct order from him, and it did occur to her to wonder whether the High Elf would have made a similar speech, had the position been reversed. But that was apples and oranges, of course, because Elves are nothing like goblins. If goblins charge into Elf turf, it’s indefensible aggression. If Elves do it, it’s a surgical pre-emptive strike. All the difference in the world. Of course.
Elves can’t get lost in the greenwood, any more than fish can drown in water; even so, she realised that she wasn’t exactly precisely 110 per cent sure where she was. She stopped and looked round for a landmark. Then she remembered. Over there somewhere was the old wizard’s tower, where the ghastly new humans had moved in, and over there was where the two even ghastlier humans had demonstrated the Vickers weapon. So: she had in fact come the right way, but the way she’d come was the indirect right way rather than the direct right way, and if she wanted to get back on the direct right way it’d probably be a good idea, an even better idea, to retrace her steps half a mile or so—
She saw something lying at the foot of a tree. It looked depressingly like a dead body. Drat, she thought, it’s started already.
If a war had broken out between the goblins and the Elves it definitely wasn’t her fault, and if it wasn’t her fault it wasn’t her business either; so she’d be entirely justified in ignoring it and walking away, reasonably fast. On the other hand—it wasn’t lost on her that she was now out of a job, and, like all her race, what she really wanted to do more than anything else in the whole world was to write for the newspapers. An exclusive report on the very first engagement of the war would be worth good money to the editor of the Beautiful Golden Face. Cautiously she edged forward, and bent down to peer.
Not an Elf, that was for sure. But apparently not a goblin, either. For a start, it was twice the size of any goblin she’d ever seen, and it looked—well, not completely different, but different enough to be going on with. She considered the mouth and the claws, and the hair. Then she made the connection. Mordak’s idiotic female-goblin project.
She nudged the corpse with her toe. Ah well. It had been a silly idea from the outset, and obviously it had come to nothing. Presumably the poor thing had finally succumbed to massive genetic impossibility and simply stopped working. The only remarkable thing was that it had lasted long enough to grow this big.
Just another goblin; even so. She knelt down beside it. It had changed a lot since the last time she’d seen it—bigger, taller, bulkier, but also somehow less goblin, if that made any sense at all. Ah well. Just another of Mordak’s good-ideas-at-the-time, and just because he always failed miserably didn’t necessarily mean that he was always completely wrong to try.
Was it—she—actually dead? She looked dead all right, but you can’t always tell with goblins, among whom looking not just dead but badly decomposed is an essential fashion statement. She didn’t seem to be breathing, but goblins can hold their breath for a ridiculously long time, just possibly because of the smell of other goblins. And bear in mind that this one was the prototype, about whom virtually nothing was known. Tinituviel stood up and looked round until she found the broad, fleshy leaf of a marshmallorn tree. She wrapped this carefully round the toe of her shoe, then gave the slumped body a sharp kick in the ribs.
Elves have exceptional reflexes. She just managed to whisk her ankle out of the way in time.
Right, then. “Get up,” she said.
The she-goblin opened her eyes and gazed at her. “You kicked me.”
“Purely for your own good. I wanted to see if you’re dead or not.”
“You’re an Elf.”
Tinituviel sighed. Bred in the bone, obviously. So typical of goblins to have such deeply rooted knee-jerk prejudices. “What are you doing out here?” she said.
The she-goblin thought for a moment. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I was in a small room for a long time, and then a strange lady brought me outside, and then my friend—” She stopped. “My friend.”
“You’ve got a friend? Good heavens.”
“He killed me,” the she-goblin said, and just for a split second Tinituviel felt something which, if applied to any other creature in the Realms, could have been mistaken for pity. “He said he liked me, and then he found a human, and he liked the human more than me, so he—”
“Human?”
The she-goblin nodded. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would my friend like the human more than me? He’s skinny and weak and he hasn’t got claws, he couldn’t even remember his name till my friend did something to inside his head. I don’t understand. Why doesn’t my friend like me any more?”
Tinituviel gave her what she fondly imagined was a comforting smile. “Because you’re horrible,” she said. “But that’s not your fault, you were born like it.”
“Oh.” The she-goblin thought for a moment. “Will you be my friend?”
“No,” said Tinituviel. “Not for all the bylines in Elvenhome. However,” she went on, as the she-goblin made a really horrible snuffling noise, “I might just make a supreme effort and try and like you a little tiny bit, if you tell me all about this friend of yours and the human. They sound interesting.”
So the she-goblin told her, and the more she heard the more thoughtful Tinituviel became. And when the whole sad story was over, she said, “And this human. What did you say his name was?”
“Theo Bernstein.”
“That’s right. There was something important he was supposed to do in there, but it hadn’t worked. And my friend wanted him to go back there and try again.”
The old wizard’s tower; so she’d been right after all. What she’d been right about she wasn’t absolutely sure, but that didn’t matter particularly. “You haven’t seen two other humans? A little old one and a young thin one who eats all the time?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s something, I suppose. This human, the one your friend liked more than you.” She described the crazy man she’d met earlier, when she was trying to catch up with the goblins, before she—well, whatever. “That him?”
The she-goblin somehow managed to look even more stupid than she usually did. “It could be. I don’t know. I’ve only ever seen one human. But it does sound like him.”
“The lunatic.”
“I don’t think he was mad,” the she-goblin said. “Or, at least, not until my friend got inside his head.” She remembered something. “He’d lost his memory. And my friend found it for him.”
Tinituviel sighed. Clearly she was going to have to go to the old wizard’s tower, and although Elves are afraid of nothing, well, virtually nothing, absolutely nothing apart from scary things, it did seem a distinct possibility that the situation might get a bit vexed, possibly even violent. Which was fine, just so long as the violence happened to other people. In which case, the company of someone with the biggest shoulders and sharpest teeth in the Realms might not be quite so irksome after all. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said briskly. “I think we’re going to be best friends for ever. I really like you.”
“You didn’t a moment ago.”
“Well, I changed my mind, you half-witted freak, I can change my mind if I want to.” She paused and breathed out through her nose. Sweetness and calm. “You want to be friends or not?”
