Earth, Air, Fire & Custard Tom Holt

by Earth, Air, Fire

  Vicky grinned. 'How charmingly naive,' she said. 'Your trouble is, you don't think things through. I mean, I'm assuming you've figured out that Ricky is actually King Hring, which means he's over thirteen hundred years old. Yes?'

  Paul nodded glumly. 'Been trying not to think about that,' he admitted. 'Too weird for me. But yes, I suppose if you're going to take it to its logical conclusion, that's who he's got to be. I suppose he's been hanging around ever since, trying to keep out of everybody's way-'

  Vicky shook her head. 'Not everybody's,' she replied. 'Just that's.' She nodded curtly towards the sword lying on the floor. 'The thing about a living sword is,' she said, 'once it's drawn in anger, it's got to finish the fight, otherwise it can't rest easy. Now everything was fine until Theo bloody Van Spee interfered: we'd had the duel, Ricky and I lost but that's the rub of the green, and at least the fight was over. But then Theo stuck his oar in. The duel was interrupted, he whisked Ricky away from the island by magic, brought him here, even got him a job as a junior clerk; and Ricky worked hard, eventually got made a partner. All completely wrong, of course. It left both of us - my sword, and hers - stranded, marooned in mid-obligation. 'We had to finish the fight; but Ricky didn't want to - for obvious reasons: he was the one who was supposed to lose - and his opponent .. .' Suddenly she grinned without the slightest trace of levity. 'What do you suppose came of his opponent?'

  Paul sighed. 'That'd be me, right?'

  'That'd be you, yes.'

  'What?' Sophie yelled. 'You mean to say he's thirteen hundred years old too?'

  'In a sense.' Paul had a nasty feeling that Vicky was enjoying this. 'What actually happened was, as soon as the duel was interrupted there was a breach in normality, for want of a better word. Stuff had gone wrong, and that called into existence an avenger. It's automatic, it just happens that way. It's like the screw-up comes to life and turns into a person.'

  Paul took a deep breath. 'Mr Laertides.'

  'Excellent.' Vicky clapped her hands together, like a little girl. 'Frank Laertides. Of course, the timescale is completely screwy. The duel happened thirteen centuries ago; but Van Spee chose to fuck everything up thirty years ago. So, he went back thirteen hundred and seventy years from his own time, did the screwing-up, substituted Tyving - that's me - for that stupid clunky old axe - Rosie Tanner - and came back home. Meanwhile, thirteen hundred years ago, the screw-up makes Frank Laertides suddenly come to life. But he can't just fast-forward through thirteen centuries to catch up with Theo and kick his arse. No, Frank had to go the long way round. More than that; in order to fix Theo's fuck-up, he had to restage the duel, and of course that would be difficult if Ricky's opponent, King Hroar, had conked out from extreme old age back in the early ninth century AD. Which means, not only did Frank have to wait around kicking his heels for thirteen hundred years, he had to bring King Hroar with him.' She smiled, almost affectionately. 'Just as well, really, that Frank's a very resourceful guy. Or you wouldn't be alive now, for one thing.'

  Long, long silence. 'You mean,' Paul said slowly, 'he brought me with him?'

  'That's right.' Vicky nodded gravely. 'Now you're getting it. And yes, that does mean that technically, you're thirteen hundred and something-odd years old. There's a word for it-'

  'Well-preserved?' Paul suggested.

  'Undead,' Vicky corrected him. 'Which accounts for a lot of things that must've seemed a bit odd to you, come to think of it. Like, how you've been able to pop in and out of the Land of the Dead like a commuter catching the bus; why you found the Portable Door when you first arrived here; why Ricky shot you with a crossbow a few months back-'

  'No, that was an accident,' Paul protested. 'Well, a misunderstanding-'

  'Balls,' Vicky replied. 'Deliberate; he wanted to kill you so you'd never be able to fight the duel, and he could make it look like it was a misunderstanding, all part of the Countess Judy fiasco. But you didn't die, because you're undead. Was Ricky pissed off, or what? It also explains,' Vicky went on, 'how come your mother and-' She frowned. 'How your mother and father were able to sell you to the firm to pay for their retirement. I'm surprised you didn't wonder about that, because strictly speaking, selling people isn't all that legal these days.'

  Paul shrugged. 'I assumed it was, well, magic and stuff, so the rules didn't apply.'

  Vicky shook her head. 'Not at all. The rules didn't apply because they only cover living human beings; a category,' she added sweetly, 'into which you do not fall. Now then,' she went on, 'I hope that makes everything lambently clear?'

  Paul tried not to snigger, but with indifferent success. 'Absolutely,' he said. 'The good thing is,' he went on, 'I'm getting to where I can just ignore a lot of this stuff, at least in the short term. So, I'm undead, and presumably 'Wurmtoter is, too.'

  'Yes.'

  'And let's get this absolutely straight. If we go back to that island and fight a duel to the death, your stupid magic sword against mine, things will go back to how they're supposed to be, and it'll all be all right again?'

  'Yes. 'Well,' Vicky said, with a slight frown, 'not entirely.

  Strictly speaking, if two of the Undead fight, it's a duel to the Undeath. But in real terms-'

  'Fine.' It was as though someone had just switched Paul on at the mains. He jumped up, and the other him moved simultaneously, like a semi-detached shadow. 'Let's do it, then. No time like the present, right?'

  "Well, again, it's not actually the-' Paul pulled a horrible face, and Vicky stopped herself. 'All right,' she said. 'I get the message. The finer points are completely wasted on you, aren't they?'

  'Yes.' Paul waited for a moment, then said: 'All right, how do we get there? I mean, I'm assuming that it's something to do with living swords transcending the dimensions, and no, I really don't want a lecture on the theoretical basis of how it works. Do I have to press a button, or pull a lever, or what?'

  'No need.' Vicky smiled at him; and behind her, a flock of startled ducks clattered noisily off the misty surface of the water and flew away, their resentful quacking echoing back from the rocky cliffs of the distant fjord. 'We're here.'

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  'Hello, Paul.'

  Paul swung round. Ricky 'Wurmtoter was leaning against the pointy end of a small boat, drawn up on the beach. In his right hand, he held a long, slim sword that glittered blue in the uncertain light. 'With his left he was raising a cigar to his lips.

  'Not terribly good for you, apparently,' he went on, having blown a stream of blue smoke out through his nose. 'But I thought, in the circumstances, what the hell.'

  'You used to smoke them in bed,' Vicky put in, over Paul's shoulder. 'That's so revolting.'

  Ricky frowned. 'Clint Eastwood does it,' he said. 'And he's a hero.'

  Vicky's eyes flickered upwards, just for a second. 'Of course, there's no hurry,' she said. 'Time has no meaning here, blahdyblahdy. It's just that if I'm around Ricky for more than three minutes, I tend to throw up. So, if we could get to the sword-fighting-'

  With a frown, Ricky straightened up. Maybe it was a trick of the light or the terrain, but he'd never looked taller, broader, more intimidating or (as he did stylish little backflips with the living sword) more annoying. He had the languid grace of a panther, and his hair was perfect.

  Paul, on the other hand - 'Just a moment,' he said, and glanced round for his other self, who wasn't there. Ricky, Vicky and Sophie, all present. Also, holding the swirly brown sword, himself but not in duplicate. Someone had blundered.

  'Just you and me,' Ricky said. He sounded bored, as though he was playing himself in repertory, his hundredth Wednesday matinée. 'Let's finish this,' he added inevitably.

  'Excuse me.'

  Three of them looked round and stared at the fourth: Sophie, who was scowling. 'Excuse me,' she repeated, 'but nobody's finishing anything till someone's told me exactly what it is I'm supposed to do. Only, apparently I'm essential to all this crap, and I've got this sick feeling that this is the moment my who
le life's been leading up to, but nobody's had the simple good manners to tell me-'

  'Nothing,' Vicky snapped. 'You don't have to do anything -just shut your face, stay still and don't interfere. Just being here's enough, that's all.'

  'Oh, really?' Sophie seemed less than convinced. 'And I should believe you, the enemy. Right.'

  'She's telling the truth, actually,' Ricky put in. 'All that's needed is for the two halves of the sword to be present at the same time, and that sets the magic going.'

  'That's it?' Sophie sounded almost disappointed. 'So, I could be reading a book, doing the crossword-'

  Ricky nodded. 'Sure,' he said. 'It's totally straightforward. All it takes is for the guy to have the sword, and the girl to be there, in a direct line of sight. And she's got to be in love with him, of course, but-'

  Sophie protested loudly; Vicky yelped and threw a piece of seaweed, but missed. Ricky, smirking, did a triple over-the-wrist backflip and rounded it off with a little flourish. The other Paul still wasn't there.

  'Let's start,' Ricky said.

  'No, but-' Paul got no further. The sword in his hand was tugging at his fingers, like a small child who's just sighted chocolate. He wanted to stay exactly where he was, wait a bit, give his alter ego a bit more time to show up, but apparently he didn't have that option. Unfortunate. He heard Sophie behind him insisting 'I am not-' and then his left foot plunged forward, his right foot slid across, and he was advancing, purposeful, menacing and for some obscure reason sideways, like Tyson reincarnated as a crab.

  Ricky was doing much the same sort of thing, though ever so much more convincingly. 'Sorry,' he muttered. Then he darted forward and swung his sword from the shoulder, his arm shooting out like a hinged flail.

  Whatever happened next - Paul was rather foggy about it, partly because he had his eyes shut a lot of the time - seemed to go on for absolutely ages. As for Paul, dragged along behind the sword as it lunged, cut, parried, riposted, counterthrust, he felt a bit like a small, frail policeman trying to arrest a huge, drunk Marine in the middle of a fight. Luckily, nothing he did seemed to matter in the slightest. The sword knew exactly what it wanted to do and seemed to regard him as an annoying but trivial handicap. It was bewildering, humiliating, exhausting and scary, and the closest thing to it in his narrow range of experiences was using Windows for the first time.

  Not for one moment, however, did Paul have the slightest doubt as to how it was going to end, magic sword or no magic sword. Sooner or later - he tried to think back and remember, the last time, the time before that, whether dying had hurt very much. Part of him still hadn't given up hope yet; Mr Dao's voice in the back of his mind, death has no jurisdiction. The rest of him could point out to their shared heart's content that that had obviously been a reference to the other Paul, the one he'd let in through the door in Benny Shumway's office, the one he'd planned to bring along here so that Ricky could kill him, only that had gone wrong somehow. He tried consoling himself with the thought that at least one of him was probably going to make it, and that in that case it was all as broad as it was long, surely. The trouble was, though, that he knew himself too well to be able to lie to himself convincingly. But it didn't matter, not now, and for all he knew he might turn out to be a born bridge player, or very good indeed at basket-weaving, assuming Mr Dao forgave him and let him join in after all.

  In the middle of all this, he heard someone talking to him. He was rather surprised to discover that it was Ricky Wurmtoter.

  'This isn't working,' Ricky was saying.

  'Excuse me?' Paul panted, as his sword passed within a millimetre of Ricky's jugular vein.

  'Not bloody working,' Ricky gasped back. 'Too evenly matched. Cancelling each other -' Ricky lunged, Paul sidestepped and hacked at his collarbone as he sailed past; Ricky's sword somehow got there in time to parry '- out. Completely screwed. We'll be doing this for ever and ever. Really ever and ever. Don't you understand?'

  'Why start now?' Paul replied. But, wretchedly, he could see what Ricky was driving at. It was the swords' fault; they seemed to have forgotten all about the poor miserable life forms dangling off their hilts, as they worked out thirteen hundred years of pent-up frustration. The fight had subtly changed in the last few seconds. The swords weren't trying to cut flesh any more, they weren't aiming themselves at Ricky's head or Paul's guts. Instead, they were slamming into each other, edge to edge, flat to flat, in a series of savage parries, each sword trying to batter the other one to death; only, Paul intuitively recognised, that was a mug's game, because neither of them was capable of being broken or even scratched. An internal review board inside Paul's head delivered its minority report: This is silly. But nobody who mattered wanted to know. Vicky had been right after all; a fight to the undeath. Give him Mr Dao and infinite nothingness any day.

  'Ricky,' he muttered.

  'What?'

  'Think of something.'

  'What?'

  'You're the fucking professional. Think of something.'

  Ricky shook his head. 'Can't,' he said. 'Mind's a blank, sorry. How about you?'

  A shower of sparks fell across Paul's cheek. They stung. 'Nothing' he replied. 'I think we're stuck like it, just like my mum used to warn me.'

  'Theo Van Spee,' Ricky grunted, as the feedback from a particularly violent clash vibrated right down Paul's arm into his elbow. 'He might be able to do something. But he wouldn't. He must be laughing like a drain right now.'

  'Why?' Paul said, as his sword slammed itself against the other sword's cutting edge and bounced off like a squash ball. 'I thought-'

  'We're here. Stuck. In the bloody past. He's back home, in our time, and nobody's ever coming back to sort him out, because we'll be here for ever. He's won.' Ricky pulled a horrible face, his clean, sharp, aftershave-commercial features contorted into something both inhuman and surprisingly ordinary. 'You have no idea how much I hate him, the bastard. It's all been his fault, right from the-'

  Paul wasn't listening; because he understood. It had all dropped into place, like the last bit of the jigsaw, which you thought all along was a bit of left-hand sky, but when you turn it over you realise it's the last chunk of right-hand sea, or the sky tricksily reflected in the surface of the pond.

  Well, all was an exaggeration, but he understood a lot of it, even including Audumla the Great Cow of Heaven. Annoyingly, there simply wasn't time to digest most of it - he could see it all, like the view from a tower, but he only had a microsecond or so, the fragment of time while the sword was recoiling sideways after a savage but fruitless hack, so he concentrated on the most relevant bit.

  Of course the fight could end; Ricky was being dim, or deliberately not taking the point. It just needed- 'Ricky,' he said.

  'What?'

  'Do you trust me?'

  - A great leap of faith, on the part of both of them. The. swords belted each other, bounced. Sparks flew. Paul's elbow hurt like buggery.

  'Yes,' Ricky said. 'Yes, actually I do. You and about two other people, and one of them's dead.'

  'Great,' Paul said. 'Now listen. Next time the swords bash into each other-'

  Well, not the next time, because they were at it again, pounding into each other like two seas meeting. The time after that.

  'The next time,' Paul repeated, 'let go. All right?'

  'What?'

  Another opportunity missed. This time, Ricky's sword tried to chop off the crosspiece from Paul's hilt. No dice. Boing.

  'Just let go of the fucking sword, all right? And I'll do the same. If we aren't holding them, they can't fight. Or if they can, we can leave them to it and go home. Looks like they don't really need us, anyway.'

  Crash, bounce, sparks. 'You sure that'll work?' Ricky, a thirteen-hundred-year-old professional dragonslayer (and lieutenant colonel of the Riders of Rohan) asking him if he thought it'd work. That was the funniest thing yet.

  'Yes,' Paul said, and then he repeated, 'Trust me. OK?'

  'OK. On three.'


  A glittering curve slicing through air, as the sword Skofnung and the sword Tyrving raced towards each other, edge to edge. 'Three,' Paul shrieked, and let go.

  In that moment, there was a great deal he wanted to say. He wanted to apologise: to Sophie, for leaving her, now that it was pretty well settled that she loved him too, without philtre, without outside interference, possibly because of the sword and thirteen centuries of carefully seeded destiny and Custardspace and related dogshit, but completely and for ever. And to Ricky, of course, because when he'd said, 'Do you trust me?' he'd been plotting Ricky's death, cold-blooded and calculating as any accountant figuring out how to reduce a tax bill. And possibly to a wide selection of other people whom he'd generally let down, disappointed, not done the right thing by: his mother, Uncle Ken, possibly Mr Tanner's mum though that was pushing it a bit. And to himself, of course, because he'd just thrown away his life in a quixotic gesture, only for the sake of fixing some fuck-up in the space-time continuum that he couldn't even understand. Quixotic? Absolutely the right word for it. Quixotic as two short planks.

  Meanwhile, Ricky's sword slipped through Ricky's suddenly relaxed fingers and flew through the air towards Paul who watched it come at him. At the same time Paul watched his own sword hurtling straight at the little hollow where Ricky's neck snuggled down onto the collarbone. For some reason (Newton or Einstein would know why; possibly also Galileo) Skofnung got there first, winning the race by a nanosecond, and Paul watched the needle-sharp steel disappear into Ricky's throat, just south of his Adam's apple. So; did that mean Skofnung had won the fight, and if so, what implications would that have for the Canadian banking industry? Fuck, Paul thought, I can't remember which way round- Then he remembered, that thing he'd forgotten about whether dying hurts. Yes, but not for very long.

  'You,' said Mr Dao, 'have got a fucking nerve.'