Denny had got the new passwords in his spare time – not to use them of course (he had promised) but just out of idle curiosity.
Tamar was amused when Denny reluctantly admitted that he could get them into Valhalla as soon as they liked.
‘Well,’ she had mocked. ‘It seems that your integrity won’t stand up to much scrutiny after all.’
‘Shut up!’ said Denny, but mildly, ‘or I’ll send you to Milton Keynes.’
‘Do they have Dwarfs there?’ asked Cindy innocently.
Denny looked sharply at her. Sometimes he felt her dumb blonde routine was a bit over-acted really. He knew damn well that she was not that stupid.
‘No, he said flatly, ‘just gnomes.’ He heard Cindy smother a laugh.
Their eyes met, and Denny shook his head reprovingly, but he was smiling. ‘Have it your own way,’ she read in his eyes. ‘But I know better.’
He tapped at the computer. ‘Sure you want to do this?’ he asked, bringing up the file.
‘Yes,’
‘No.’
Tamar looked at Stiles in surprise. ‘I thought you liked Dwarfs?’ she said.
‘’Tisn’t the Dwarfs,’ he muttered.
‘Viking’s‘re okay,’ said Denny, who had once met some and got on famously with them.
S’not that either,’
‘Look,’ said Tamar, who exercised her very own brand of morality, ‘it isn’t breaking the rules if we’re doing it.’
Stiles looked dubious about this.
‘And you don’t have to have a drink if you’d rather not,’ added Cindy brightly, demonstrating a degree of insight that Tamar, at least, would not have thought she had in her. She was apparently right anyway. Stiles looked unaccountably relieved at this summation.
‘You won’t be there that long anyway,’ she added.
‘That’s right,’ said Tamar. ‘Just in – get the dwarfs – out again.’
Denny slid out of the chair. ‘Anyone not going to Valhalla stand back from the computer.’ he said.
Tamar stepped forward with Stiles and pressed, “Enter”. ‘All aboard,’ she said, and they vanished.
* * *
‘Are you sure this is the right place?’
‘Looks right,’ said Tamar. ‘See, large mountain over there, large mountain over there, absolutely bloody enormous mountain over there.’
‘I see,’ said Stiles dryly. ‘But there are, as far as I can see, and not to put too fine a point on it, no Vikings – or Dwarfs either,’ he added.
‘They’re all inside getting drunk,’ said Tamar authoritatively.
‘Inside where?’
‘Um,’ said Tamar, scanning the skyline.
‘Anyway, I thought they battled all day and drank all night.’
‘Pure hearsay,’ said a voice from behind them. A deep, booming voice that could only belong to a man with more testosterone in him than a football team locker room.
Tamar’s spine prickled. She turned round cautiously. ‘Hog?’ she gasped.
‘Djinn,’ said the Viking pleasantly. If he was surprised to see her, he was hiding it well.
‘We don’t fight every day,’ he went on as if nothing at all surprising had happened at all. ‘We aren’t barbarians you know. At least, not anymore.’ He said this rather sadly.
Stiles stares at him. Taking in the large hairy chest, the huge untamed beard, the goatskin jerkin and the horned helmet.
‘Really?’ he said.
‘Oh no, we’ve evolved, so they tell me. I don’t know, fifteen hundred years dead, and suddenly we find out that we’ve been doing it all wrong. It’s a sad day when a proud warrior meets his descendants and finds out that they make furniture. I mean what kind of a job is that for a race of conquerors?’
‘So, you two know each other then?’ said Stiles in a frantic effort to change the subject. It was embarrassing watching fifteen stone of hairy Viking with tears dripping down his nose.
‘Jack, this is Hogswill the Hairy Backed,’ said Tamar wearily. ‘We used to hang out – well I was in a bottle most of the time but it was still quite an education. ‘Hog, this is Jack – stop blubbering will you – he’s a po-lice-man. That means he asks difficult questions and always knows when you are lying. Where are the dwarfs?’
‘In the tavern of course,’ said Hogswill, blinking rapidly in his nervousness. In his experience, only the Norns knew when a man was lying, and they were women. He eyed Stiles apprehensively as if expecting him to suddenly don a corset and start singing in a high falsetto voice. (Something actual women never do, but Hogswill was getting confused)
‘Of course they are,’ said Tamar. ‘Can you take us to them please?’
‘Please?’ thought Stiles.
Hogswill also seemed a little thrown off by Tamar’s good manners. Even as his slave, he remembered, she had tended to treat him with barely veiled contempt.
‘Well …’ began Hogswill nervously. ‘There are no women allowed see. ’Cept serving wenches o’ course.’
‘I’m not a woman,’ snapped Tamar, ‘I’m a Djinn. That’s different.’
‘Oh, is it?’ said Hogswill the not overly bright. ‘I suppose that’s all right then.’
‘What do you want with dwarfs then?’ he ventured as they trotted along.
‘We only want to borrow them for a while,’ said Tamar. ‘We need some fighting done.’
‘Fighting,’ said Hogswill dreamily. ‘They’re good you know,’ he added. ‘Fearsome little buggers, very handy with an axe.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Who are you fighting then?’ he asked.
‘Faeries,’ said Stiles, before he could stop himself, and immediately regretted it. He expected this giant to laugh heartily at this, but he did not. Instead, he stopped short in the road with his mouth hanging open and turned an interesting shade of putty.
He worked his mouth a few times without saying anything then he leaned down to Tamar and whispered hoarsely. ‘Älvor?’
Tamar nodded briskly. ‘That’s right,’ she said.
Hogswill gulped a few times to calm himself down.
‘Come back have they?’ he said eventually.
‘With a vengeance,’ said Stiles.
‘Ah, they always come with vengeance,’ said Hogswill knowingly. ‘Little bastards.’ He added with feeling. ‘Do they still steal babbies?’
‘Yes,’ said Tamar shortly.
‘Little bastards,’ repeated Hogswill.
‘You know,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘Me and the lads might like to help out too. I mean we’ve a bit of a score to settle if you know what I mean?’
‘You can’t,’ said Tamar flatly. ‘You’re human and you know what the – er – Älvor do to humans. We’ll just take the dwarfs thank you, as many as you can spare.’
Hogswill took off his helmet slowly and scratched his head.
‘I reckon …’ he said after a few minutes thought. ‘I reckon it ain’t so – exactly.’
‘What isn’t?’ said Tamar impatiently.
‘I mean ter say,’ he said ponderously, ‘I meantersay, we ain’t human anymore. I mean we was, but now we ain’t, if you see what I mean.’ He beamed, happy to have managed his delivery of this radical bit of metaphysical thought.
He thought some more. ‘I reckon it’s like this. When we’re here, we’re human, right? But if we was to go back, we’d be like ghosts. The living can’t hurt ghosts’
‘Hmm,’ said Tamar.
‘Anyway I reckon some of the lads ud like to try,’ he added hopefully.
‘Well okay, you ask them then,’ said Tamar. She leaned over to Stiles and whispered. ‘It can’t hurt to try,’
‘Here we are then,’ boomed Hogswill, suddenly.
* * *
The tavern did not look any better from the inside than it had from the outside, and from the outside it had looked like a shack.
‘Little brothers are in the far corner,’ said Hogswill helpfully pointing to a gloomy, shadow f
illed rats nest at the back of the tavern.
‘Thank you,’ said Tamar stiffly. ‘You go and ask them,’ she said to Stiles, ‘I’d better keep out of the way.’ But it was too late.
‘Snow White S’welp me,’ came a voice from the region of her knees, but it was said without rancour, apparently as a matter of form. It was Florid.
Florid Underdrawers the King of the Dwarfs bowed ironically to Tamar; so low that his nose was touching the floor.
‘And what can we do for you this time?’ he asked acerbically. ‘World need saving again?’
‘Yes,’ said Stiles, thinking he had better take a hand.
‘Jack Stiles?’ said the Dwarf delightedly. ‘Is that you?’
Stiles knelt down. ‘Hello Florid,’ he said. ‘How’s the afterlife treating you?’
Tamar sighed. Jack had a rapport with the Dwarfs that was entirely beyond her comprehension. To her, they were smelly, bad tempered drunken little buggers. To him, they were compadrés, buddies, just some of the lads – only smaller and with a much larger drinking capacity.
Florid was herding Stiles enthusiastically towards the other Dwarfs, leaving Tamar standing alone and feeling terribly exposed. She was drawing curious looks from the drinkers to which she reacted with her famous thousand kilowatt stare. Stiles looked back anxiously at her, but she smiled reassuringly at him. The mission was all that mattered.
She heard the shouts of greeting from the dwarf table, and above the ruckus she heard Stiles say. ‘What’s everybody drinking then?’
It was that sort of thing, she thought, that made him popular. He seemed to know, instinctively, just the right thing to say. Good old Jack, everybody’s best mate. Even she liked him, and, apart from Denny, she hardly liked anybody.
A Viking came up behind her and said something muffled in which she could just make out the words “comely wench”
‘Oh, no!’ she thought. ‘I’m not being “comely wenched” by anyone.’
This was, after all, only the dark ages by default. She moved slightly and somehow the Viking ended up on the floor bubbling in agony. Tamar folded her arms and pursed her lips in a pose universally recognized by men as “I’m not in the mood”. Several formerly interested Vikings averted their eyes and shuffled round in their chairs back to their drinks.
There was a chorus of exclamations from the corner and then a muffled argument started.
‘He’s told them,’ she thought. ‘Now they’ll argue about it for two hours until Florid tells them they’ve got to do it.’
She was painfully familiar with the Dwarf version of democracy. Florid was only supposed to be nominally in charge; that is, he ruled with the helpful suggestions of at least thirty Dwarfs, all with opposing opinions, and then he told them what they had to do, and they did it. Which made him actually in charge, in Tamar’s book. But Dwarfs like to have their say, it made them feel better apparently. It was a democratically run dictatorship.
This time it was different. Tamar was surprised when Florid presented himself to her after only ten minutes, bowed (this time without a trace of irony) and said. ‘We will help,’
And that, apparently, was that. Within twenty minutes Florid had gathered an impressive army of five hundred grim faced Dwarfs.
‘They hardly argued about it at all,’ Stiles told her. ‘And when Florid pointed out that even if they died, they could still come back here, it was pretty much settled.’
‘He didn’t have to order them or anything?’
‘Oh I think he would have, but he didn’t have to. They really hate Faeries.’
‘Doesn’t everybody?’
‘Not like this.’ said Stiles somberly. ‘This is something different.’
‘Good,’ said Tamar. ‘Then I made the right call.’
A tentative hand tapped Tamar on the shoulder. She turned round.
‘Er, are you the Djinn?’ said a rather fresh faced youth with bulging muscles that would have made Cindy swoon, and a worried expression.
‘That’s me,’ said Tamar wondering what on earth he wanted. He did not seem the “comely wench” type. For one thing, she was sure he would not even know what to do with a comely wench if he had one.
‘Only we were wondering where you wanted the army,’ he said.
‘You were saying,’ said Stiles.
Tamar recovered fast. ‘Fall in with the dwarfs,’ she said. ‘Shoulder to shoulder – everyone must be touching. ‘I’ll handle the transportation.
‘Will they all fit in the living room?’ said Stiles.
‘They’d better,’ said Tamar. ‘EVERYBODY READY?’ she bellowed. ‘Close file.’
~ Chapter Fifteen ~
Denny was sitting stretched out in an armchair; eyes half closed, pondering things. So he was not very pleased to be interrupted, but as it was a young woman who looked extremely nervous, he forced himself to be courteous.
‘I was just wondering …’ she began.
‘Yes?’
‘Um …’
She twisted her hands around each other, and her eyes swivelled nervously around the room.
‘Well?’ he said as kindly as possible.
‘Do you think I’m pretty?’
Oh no, not this again, ‘CINDY!’
Cindy hurried into the room. Denny wearily indicated the young woman who was gazing at Denny with embarrassing adoration.
‘She’s been “Faeried”,’ he said. ‘Sort her out will you? Thanks.’
Cindy bustled the young woman unwillingly from the room. ‘You’ll thank me later,’ she told her. ‘Besides he’s attached and you don’t want to mess with her, believe me!’
It had happened to all of them in the past few weeks. In fact, it seemed to be happening all over the house. But it was happening to Denny an awful lot. Women all over the house seemed to be making a beeline for him. He had occasionally wondered what it was like to be a chick magnet. As it turned out, it was horribly unsettling. Denny had no illusions about himself; women tended to look past him to see if he had a better-looking friend. He suspected the Queen was behind it, but he could not think of a single reason, sheer malice apart, why she would be doing this to him.
It was not just the lovey dovey stuff of course. They were also dealing with random fights every day and people who believed they could fly or that they were a rabbit or something. It was like running a rehab centre, with electro shock therapy as a mandatory treatment.*
*[It had been discovered, after much experimentation and several instances of second-degree burns, that an actual bolt of lighting was not necessary to lift the Faerie enchantment. A fairly mild electric shock would do the trick].
Just when it seemed to be settling down, a fresh influx of people would arrive, and it seemed that they brought the Faeries enchantment in with them – like a virus – and it would start all over again.
And every day more people turned up. Word had got around; it was safe here, at least safer than anywhere else. At least the Faeries themselves could not get in. It occurred to Denny that the Faeries were sending people here who were enchanted, just to disrupt things. The sensible thing would be to just close the doors for good, but how could they turn them away when they had nowhere else to go? Another problem was that they were running out of space. Soon it would be standing room only.
Very soon, in fact.
It was very lucky for Denny really that when five hundred heavily armed dwarfs and two thousand, three hundred and seventy seven Viking warriors landed in his living room that he was not actually there. Only a few minutes earlier and he would most definitely have been human sushi.
They did just about fit, mainly because dwarfs are … well, dwarf sized, and the Viking warriors, as Hogswill had predicted, turned up as ghosts, and ghosts do not take up any room at all in a physical sense. But it was still a tight squeeze and frankly, in their current surroundings, they made a fearsome sight.
Tamar acted fast. Before they even had time to catch their breath she managed to teleport a
ll the dwarfs into the grounds. The Vikings, as spirits, could not be moved in this way since teleportation relies on the astral plane and they were already there in a manner of speaking (although they were on the physical plane as well, at least visually) and they just had to drift through the walls after them as best they could.
Denny, who was in the garden at the time got a front row view of possibly the weirdest sight he had ever seen; and that, in his case, was really saying something.
First, he saw the aforementioned five hundred dwarfs appear suddenly on the lawn, in the flowerbeds, in the pond and one in a tree. They were all bickering loudly and waving their axes menacingly. ‘’Ere, give us some room.’ ‘Watch what you’re doin’ with that axe,’ etc.
As incredible as this sight was, it was nothing to what came next, as spectral Viking warriors began drifting slowly through the walls in ones and twos, until all the available space between the Dwarfs was filled.
‘Bloody hell!’ said Denny, impressed. ‘An army of the dead.’
* * *
Once Tamar got going, generally speaking, there was no stopping her. The last time she had built an army she had made it from golems – any three dimensional image of a human being with life breathed into it magically can be a golem – and she had made the golems from anything and everything she could think of. Scarecrows, shop dummies, even cigar store Indians had been pressed into service alongside the more conventional statues and terracotta warriors.
Now she was talking excitedly about enlarging this army. ‘Trolls,’ she said. ‘Trolls are pretty vicious and too stupid to be enthralled by Faerie magic. You need to have a mind before it can be controlled.’
‘No trolls,’ said Denny patiently. ‘Too dangerous to the general population.’
‘Gnomes?’
‘Too small to be any use,’ said Denny firmly. ‘Besides, aren’t they just a form of Faerie? Could we really trust them?’
‘Well. Witches then,’ she tried. ‘Witches aren’t susceptible to Faerie magic.’
Denny guardedly conceded that actually witches might not be a bad idea. ‘They were the ones who sorted the Faeries out the last time weren’t they?’ he said thoughtfully.
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