An Orc on the Wild Side

by Tom Holt

  “I don’t know. Magic, a secret weapon. But that’s silly,” he added. “That’s only in stories, surely.”

  She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Keep this to yourself, but the other day Mordak went out with the entire goblin army, and came back a few hours later, and they were all a bit quiet and subdued. And all there.”

  John frowned. “Implying?”

  “That they went somewhere to fight someone, and decided not to. To give you a bit of context,” she added, “according to the manual, provided the objective is achieved, acceptable losses for goblin generals are set at ninety-nine per cent. But they didn’t fight. Thought it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Now, don’t you find that just a little bit disturbing?”

  John put his hands to his head. “This is all a bit far-fetched, isn’t it? Secret weapons, and an evil overlord who’s more evil than the evil overlord. There’s got to be a simpler explanation than that.”

  “Really. So what about the prophecy?”

  “What prophecy?”

  Who could it possibly be, Barry Lushington wondered, at this time of night?

  He struggled into his dressing gown and lumbered blearily up the stairs to the front door. As strongly advised by the agent, he drew back the little sliding panel in the door and peered through it before drawing back the bolts. Nobody to be seen. Muttering something about bloody kids, he turned away. As he did so, three powerful blows made the door shiver in its frame.

  “All right,” he yelled, shooting all six bolts and unlatching the massive chain. “And don’t make such a bloody awful row, you’ll wake her up and then—” He stopped. Nobody there.

  “Lushington.”

  It was a deep voice, and grim. “Hello?” Barry said. “Look, stop playing silly buggers. Who is it?”

  A dark shape materialised in the doorway, visible only as a darker black against the sky. “I have come.”

  “You what?”

  “You sent for me. Many weary miles have I travelled, by dark and perilous roads. Stand back.”

  Barry glanced up at the silhouetted head, then down. He caught sight of a big canvas bag hanging from a shrouded arm. The handle of a screwdriver poked out from under the flap. The penny dropped. “Oh,” he said. “You’re the pl—”

  Lightning fast, a hand shot out and covered his mouth. “Not so loud,” the voice hissed, and Barry found himself being nudged backwards. The stranger shut the door and shot the bolts, then drew back his hood, to reveal a gaunt, weather-beaten face with startlingly bright blue eyes. “The plumber,” he said, with a crooked smile. “Yes, many have called me that, and many other things beside. I am Araldor son of Araldite, and I have come at the turning of the tide.” He dropped his bag on Barry’s foot and looked round, his bright eyes piercing the shadows. “What seems to be the problem?”

  Barry shifted his foot and flexed his toes. “Isn’t it a bit late to be making calls?”

  Araldor threw his cloak over his shoulder, revealing a dark green boiler suit and a toolbelt studded with pale white gemstones. “It is later than you think,” he said grimly. “I heard rumours, far away in the North. About an untimely knocking.”

  Barry nodded. “The pipes,” he said. “It’s driving Pat spare. She can’t get to sleep because of it.”

  “She would do well not to sleep too soundly,” Araldor replied softly. “Show me the way.”

  It took nearly half an hour to get from the front door to the area they’d somewhat arbitrarily christened the cellar (“after all,” Pat had pointed out, “the whole place is a bloody cellar, isn’t it?”), where the seething tangle of pipework seemed to be most heavily concentrated. “First there’s a sort of banging,” Barry explained, “then this godawful clanking, and then it stops for a bit, and then there’s this ghastly sort of booming noise, followed by loads and loads of little taps and gurgles. Pat reckons it must be an air pocket somewhere.”

  Araldor shook his head. “There are worse things than air pockets in the dark places of the earth,” he said darkly. Then he stopped dead in his tracks, dropped to his knees and pressed his ear to the flagstones. He stayed there, completely motionless, for about thirty seconds, then stood up abruptly and threw back his cloak (he seemed to enjoy doing that) to reveal the haft of an adjustable wrench protruding from his tool belt. He seemed to notice that Barry was staring at him, and drew the spanner. The haft was intact, but it was broken off about an inch short of where the head should have been.

  “The wrench that was broken,” he said. “Not much use, I dare say. But the day will come when it shall be reforged anew. Where’s the stopcock?”

  “No idea,” Barry confessed. “Excuse me asking this, but you’re, um, human, aren’t you?”

  That got him a cold stare. “Thirty generations ago my forefathers came out of the West on seven white ships, if that’s what you mean.” He turned away, following one particular pipe with the tips of his long, lean fingers. He closed his eyes and muttered something under his breath in a strange language, edging along a foot at a time as he did so. Then he opened his eyes and lunged to the floor. “Behold,” he said, “the stopcock of Maured-Zharam.” He pushed aside the remains of an old wooden crate to reveal a small, rusty handwheel.

  “Only,” Barry persevered, “you’re the first, um, human we’ve met since we’ve been here, and I was wondering. Are there many more of us, I mean you. I mean, um, humans?”

  A look of infinite sadness filled Araldor’s eyes. “The race of the Children of Men grows weak,” he said. “Few now remain of the line of those who once crossed the Western seas before the Realms were sundered. Yet hope remains while hearts are true. Looks like your whole system needs draining.”

  “Oh,” Barry said. “That doesn’t sound very good.”

  “Fear not.” Araldor’s hand slammed between Barry’s shoulder blades, and for a moment his vision blurred. “The day will come when all these pipes shall burst, and the joints that were soldered shall fail, and every sink shall be blocked and every toilet shall back up, and the floodwaters shall rise until all the caverns of Khizar-Zhalad are overwhelmed and the Chasm of Khazhkhem shall be as a running river. But today is not that day. The day shall come when the seas shall arise and the rivers overflow their banks, and a gull might fly all day from the peak of Mount Orodrhos and never find a place to perch dryfoot, but today is not that day, not while gaskets still hold and brave hand may yet grasp pipe wrench. The day will come—oh snot.”

  In his enthusiasm, he’d kicked his tool bag down one of the open manholes. They stood and listened as it fell—clank, clank, clank against the sides of the shaft. Then, an impossibly long time later, they heard a distant splash.

  Barry looked at him. “That’s a long way down, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to have to drain all that?”

  Araldor didn’t seem to be listening to him. A rapt look covered his motionless face. Then, from far below, came an ominous thump.

  Barry was nodding. “That’s how it usually starts,” he said. “You just listen.”

  “Shh.”

  More banging; then that eerie shrieking noise that always set Pat’s teeth on edge. Then a repeating tattoo of dull thuds. “The pipes’ll start quivering in a minute,” Barry said, only to get Araldor’s hand over his mouth again. Sure enough, they heard a succession of loud bangs, and the pipework began to shake.

  Araldor let go of him and stood up. His eyes were open very wide. “What day is it today?” he asked.

  “What? Oh, right. Thursday.”

  “Thursday.” Araldor was halfway to the stairs. “Very sorry, got my days mixed up, I’m due at another job a long, long away away. I’ll drop by later this week, maybe early next. I can see myself out. Good luck.” There was a clatter of heavy boots on the stairs, and Barry was alone.

  Ah well, he thought. Plumbers, eh?

  The banging was getting louder, worse than he’d ever heard it before. He winced. There was no way Pa
t was going to be able to sleep through that lot, and if she didn’t get her eight hours he was in for a long, weary day. He gazed mournfully at the manhole the plumber had accidentally kicked his tool bag down, and noticed that it was glowing with a faint orange light.

  Funny, he thought; because the fall of the tool bag had proved how deep the hole was, so even if there’d been a torch in the bag and it had somehow got switched on, surely the beam wouldn’t reach that far up. Also, was it his imagination or was it getting a bit warm?

  A horrible thought crossed his mind: mineshafts, canaries, natural gas deposits. If the fool had contrived to start a fire down there—he panicked for a moment, until a mental image of himself sitting at the laptop paying the insurance premium filled his mental screen. They were covered. So that was all right.

  Even so. He looked round for a bucket or something. Pretty pointless, as the water all came from that stupid pond-come-reservoir eight levels up, and there was no way he was going to spend the rest of the night trotting up and down all those stairs; he’d give himself a coronary. He sat down on the fattest of the pipes and wiped his forehead. The banging was so loud he couldn’t hear himself think. And why does everything have to happen in the middle of the night?

  “Barry, it’s started again.” Pat was standing in the doorway, huddled in a pink towelling robe.

  “I’d gathered that.”

  “Bloody plumber.”

  “He was just here,” Barry told her. “He kicked a bag of tools down the hole. I think that’s what’s made it so bad.”

  Before she could contradict him, a tongue of flame shot up through the hole, roaring like a waterfall. The flames licked the roof, twelve feet up. “Oh, marvellous,” Pat said. “Well, don’t just sit there. Call the fire brigade.”

  “I don’t think there is one.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again. “I must’ve been mad,” she said. “I should never have let you talk me into coming here.”

  “Me talk you—”

  She wasn’t listening. Her mouth was wide open, her eyes were popping out of her head, and she was staring at the fiery red hand that was clawing for a handhold at the rim of the manhole. It was the size of an opened umbrella, and the fingers ended in jets of orange flame.

  “Barry,” she whispered. “Do something.”

  At another time, in a wildly different context, he’d have been touched by her faith in him. As it was, he could do nothing except watch as the fingers sank into the solid granite flagstone as if into butter. The stone bubbled and pooled where the fingertips dug in. Somewhere under their feet, not nearly far enough away, something bellowed.

  The floor shook, and dust fell from the roof. They could barely hear the banging and thumping now; the dominant noise was a terrifying creaking, suggesting strong materials under intolerable stress. Barry waved at Pat to back away slowly towards the doorway, but she stayed where she was, rooted to the spot, and he found he was, too. Cracks appeared in the floor, running like spilt liquid. When they were an inch wide there was a deafening crunch, and all around the manhole the flagstones abruptly gave way as a monstrous head and shoulders burst through in a cloud of grit and shattered masonry. The head had eyes—did it ever have eyes—and two dots for a nose, but the rest of it was shimmering red flame.

  Pat was transfixed by the sight. “So that’s what the brochure meant by underfloor heating,” she said.

  The monster hauled itself up through the broken floor. It had to crouch to stand upright in the high-vaulted chamber. Its body was all fire, and from its back sprouted great burning wings that stretched from wall to wall; and when it spoke, it was like the blast of an erupting volcano.

  “Look here,” it said. “Would you mind awfully keeping the noise down?”

  The she-goblin trudged through the woods, but there was nothing in them except stupid trees.

  She wasn’t sure how she knew about trees, but she did. She knew that they started as tiny seeds and grew up into great big plants, which could be cut down and turned into useful stuff, such as spear shafts and firewood, which was why they were tolerated. The information had been there all the time, at the back of her mind, and the only reason she hadn’t noticed it before was that she hadn’t needed it.

  Among the things not to be found in woods were food, water and mirrors, all of which she found she missed terribly. The further she went, the more she began to question her decision. True, if she’d stayed in the little room they would have killed her, but that would have been quicker than starving or parching to death out here. Another thing she didn’t like was the loneliness. Back home—she couldn’t help thinking of it in those terms—she got to see people, sometimes three or four in a single day. Here she was all alone, and she didn’t like that, not one bit.

  She leaned on a mature ash tree, which splintered and snapped three feet off the ground. She let it fall, then sat on it and stared at her feet. They were pretty feet, but what good was that if there was nobody to see them but herself?

  For a brief moment, just before she left the little room, she’d allowed herself to believe that she’d finally found some friends—the nice eye who talked to her in the mirror, and the nice invisible lady who’d gone to all that trouble to save her. But since she’d been in the woods, she hadn’t heard anything from either of them, so presumably they’d got tired of her and didn’t like her any more. That made her feel so sad that she really wished she was back in the little room. After all, if nobody likes you, what’s the point of being alive? Especially if you don’t even have a mirror.

  All that changed in the twinkling of an eye, when she tripped on a tree root, went tumbling down a steep bank and ended up sitting up to her waist in water. Moving water; there was a sort of long trench full of the stuff, and it gurgled along ever so fast. It tasted funny, not like the nice nourishing green water with bits on the top that she was used to. Worse than that; it didn’t taste of anything at all, which she was sure couldn’t be right. But it stopped her feeling thirsty, and that was a real step forward.

  But it did make her feel wet, so she scrambled out, shook herself and sat down on the bank with her back to a tree while she dried herself off with a big handful of leaves. And then she noticed something that took her breath away, and she sat and stared at it.

  The trench full of moving water was a mirror. Not as good as the one she’d made by polishing up the steel bars, but much bigger, so that she could see her head, shoulders and upper body all in one go, rather than piecemeal. A quick, anxious glance reassured her that she was still as pretty as ever, in spite of her tribulations. What a marvellous thing! A water-mirror. Who’d have thought it?

  Well, she’d had a drink and seen her reflection, and two out of three wasn’t bad. The warm sun slanting down between the trees—warm relative to the small room, at any rate—made her feel deliciously sleepy. She closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, she saw an animal drinking from the river. A moment later it saw her, but a moment can make an awful lot of difference. It tasted even nicer than the funny little food-bringing creatures, and there was considerably more of it. Also, it came wrapped in a warm, furry rug that was just the right size to cover her from her chin to her toes. She’d been, she realised, far too hasty in the matter of woods. Woods were just fine.

  After she’d finished eating she washed her face and hands. That spoilt the reflection for a while, and she waited for it to come back. It did, which was nice, and then it went blurry, and was replaced by a familiar sight.

  “Hello,” she said joyfully. “Where did you get to?”

  “Nowhere,” replied the Eye. “But you’ve forgotten what I told you. I haven’t got a body any more. I had to wait till you found something you could see me in. But I’ve been with you all the time.”

  “Oh, I am glad,” she said. “I thought you’d stopped liking me.”

  “Perish the thought,” said the Eye. “I thought we’d agreed we’d be together for ever and ever.”r />
  Happiness spurted into her heart like blood from a cut artery. “I thought so, too,” she said.

  “Friends for ever.”

  “Friends for ever.”

  In fact, woods were more than just fine. Woods were perfect.

  “Just as well I caught up with you when I did,” the Eye said. “You know, you shouldn’t be sitting around here like that.”

  “I shouldn’t?”

  “No, it’s not safe. There’s Elves in this wood, hundreds of them. If they find you, they’ll shoot you with arrows and you’ll die.”

  She sat bolt upright. “That’s awful. Why?”

  “Simply because you’re a goblin.”

  She remembered what she’d been told earlier. “Jellersy?”

  “Worse than that,” the Eye said gravely. “Hate. All Elves hate all goblins and want to kill them. To be fair, it’s the same the other way round, too.”

  She frowned. “I’m a goblin and I don’t hate anybody. And I don’t even know what an Elf is.”

  “You’re different.” The Eye glowed at her. “Special. But I’m afraid the Elves don’t know that. They wouldn’t even realise how pretty you are. It’d just be twang, whiz, thunk, another one bites the dust.”

  She shivered from head to toe. “The World is a strange place,” she said.

  “It is that.” The Eye paused, and she could see something was bothering it. “It doesn’t have to be, but it is.”

  That sounded interesting. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll explain. But not now. Like I said, you shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous.”

  “But if I go away from here I’ll have to leave the running-along mirror. And then we won’t be able to talk to each other.”

  The Eye winked. “That’s not a problem. Here, get hold of the bear’s skull.”

  “The what?”

  “The thing you just ate is called a bear,” the Eye explained. “Get its head, scoop out the grey gooey stuff and fill it with water. Then you can carry it round with you wherever you want to go, and we can carry on talking and you’ll be safe.”