An Orc on the Wild Side

by Tom Holt

  It sounded difficult, but with the Eye telling her what to do at each stage it turned out to be easy. She dipped the empty skull in the water and lifted it out again, being careful to keep it as level as possible, as the Eye had told her. A lot of water ran out through the eye sockets, but there was still more than enough left in it for her to see her face in. And then the Eye.

  “It works!”

  “Of course,” the Eye said. “Everything I tell you is true. Hadn’t you realised that?”

  She smiled at it. “Sorry,” she said. “I forgot.”

  “I forgive you,” the Eye said solemnly. “Now then, over that way a bit there’s a huge great big tree. Can you see it?”

  There was one tree significantly bigger than all the others. “I think so.”

  “Well, when you get there you’ll see it’s hollow in the middle, and there’s a hole just big enough for you to squeeze through. Let’s go over there, and then we can get inside it and the Elves won’t see you.”

  It was specially nice to have a friend who was so wise and clever.

  “Are there lots of bears?” she asked, when she was snuggled down inside the hollow tree with the skull balanced carefully on her lap. “I like them a lot.”

  “I’m afraid not,” the Eye said sadly. “The Elves drive them away.”

  “Oh.”

  “But there are lots of other nice things to eat. There’s dwarves, and the Children of Men. And Elves, too, of course. They’re a bit bony and you’ve got to take care not to get an ear stuck in your throat, but actually they’re not at all bad.”

  “I think they’re very bad,” she said gravely. “They chase away the bears and kill goblins.”

  The Eye beamed at her. “That’s true,” it said. “But they’re not bad, as such. It’s just that they don’t understand.”

  “Oh.”

  “And they don’t understand because they’ve never had things explained to them. Not properly. They only do nasty things because they don’t know any better.”

  “I see,” she said. “So why doesn’t anybody tell them?”

  The Eye gleamed, and she heard laughter. “Why indeed? But, actually, I did try.”

  “And they wouldn’t listen?”

  “I know,” said the Eye. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? But, no, they thought they knew best. It’s such a shame. They’d be so much happier if they knew the truth.”

  She sighed. “You’re such a nice person,” she said. “If I tried to tell someone something and they wouldn’t listen, I’d get all mad at them. But you’re so forgiving and kind and nice.”

  “I try to be. And I’d do it all again, if I could.”

  “What, explain to them?”

  “To them, and the dwarves and the Men, and every living thing. But not having a body—” The Eye sighed. “It makes it so difficult.”

  “I think it’s rotten, you not having a body.”

  “It’s sweet of you to say that.”

  She paused. A thought had just come into her head, and although it was a bit scary, she realised she didn’t mind. “Would you be able to use my body?” she said. “You can have it if you like. Really.”

  The Eye laughed. “Silly,” it said. “Where would you go?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t know. But I don’t care. You deserve it much more than me.”

  The Eye was silent, and a small, red, burning tear detached itself and fizzled in the water like a small nugget of sodium. “That’s such a nice offer,” said the Eye. “But I couldn’t. And, anyway, it doesn’t work like that. I’d have to have a body made for me specially. I can’t just put someone else’s on, like a pair of shoes.”

  She felt rather stupid; because, of course, if it was as easy as that, the Eye would’ve seen to it ages ago. “Oh well,” she said. “So how can we make you a body? What does it have to be made out of?”

  “Ah.” The Eye dimmed slightly. “That’s where it gets awkward. As a matter of fact, they could make me a body where you’ve just come from, the same way they made you, out of a sort of beige gooey stuff.”

  “That’s great. Let’s go and get them to do it, right now.”

  “They wouldn’t.” The Eye didn’t sound angry or bitter. “King Mordak wouldn’t let them.”

  “Who’s—?”

  “The king of the goblins. Actually, you’ve seen him. He used to come and peer at you through a window in your door.”

  “Oh. Him.”

  “That’s right. He was the one who decided to have you made. But then he changed his mind and ordered them to kill you.”

  “But that’s silly.”

  “Not silly. He’s scared.”

  “What of?”

  “You, of course. Because you’re bigger and stronger and smarter and prettier than he is. And that’s why he wouldn’t let them make me a new body. He’d be afraid that his people would like me more than him. Sort of like jealousy, but worse.”

  She sighed. People seemed to have so many stupid ideas in their heads, which made everything difficult and complicated and bad. “I’m sure if you talked to him and explained, he’d see you’re not like that at all. He’d see how nice you are.”

  “I don’t think so,” the Eye said sadly. “The trouble is, when people are full of jealousy and fear and hate, they don’t listen properly. You can explain till you’re blue in the face and they don’t hear what you’re telling them. They won’t let themselves listen. It’s very sad.”

  “Well, then,” she said. “I’ll go back there, and I’ll make them make you a new body. And if King Mor—”

  “Mordak.”

  “If he tells them they can’t, I’ll eat him. That’ll serve him right for being so stupid.”

  The Eye was silent for a long time. Then it said, “You’re a true friend, you know that?”

  “So are you. You’re my best friend. I’d do anything for you.”

  The Eye grew thinner. “It’d be very dangerous. They might try to hurt you. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said happily. “I’m bigger and stronger, and smarter. And you’re really clever, you could tell me what to do.”

  “Well.” The Eye seemed to hesitate. “I suppose we could sneak in the back way. I could tell you how to do that. I was here when they built this place, I know all the secret ways in and out. You could take me to Mordak, and then I could talk to him. Just talk, that’s all. Try and make him see sense.”

  “I’d like that,” she said. “It’d be fun.”

  “I don’t know,” the Eye demurred. “I don’t like the idea of you risking getting yourself hurt on my account. That wouldn’t be very friendly.”

  “Oh, please. I want to.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “All right,” she conceded. “But don’t think too long. And when you’ve thought, say yes.”

  The Eye twinkled at her. “We’ll see,” it said, and vanished.

  “For the last time,” Tinituviel hissed in his ear as they climbed the narrow pass between the twin peaks of Gluvien, “you can’t do this. It’ll never work. It’ll go disastrously wrong. I’m warning you, it’ll all end in tears. And don’t you dare say I didn’t warn you.”

  Below them, the mountainside fell away steeply to the plain below. In the middle of it, black as night and impossibly tall and thin, stood the Tower of Snorfang.

  The very sight of it made the mind rebel. How could anything so tall and narrow stay upright? The slightest puff of wind ought to blow it over, in accordance with the basic laws of leverage. And what could it possibly be made of? Nobody knew, but it was deathly cold to the touch; rest your hand on it, and all the skin would be stripped off your palm. And who would build a tower with no windows and no door?

  All that was known for sure was that it was very, very old. There were those among the Wise who believed that it was older than the Realms themselves; that it had been there before Above was separated from Below, a perpendicul
ar line drawn at random in the void with a ruler, and that the molten lava had lapped and eddied around its base, cooled by its icy touch to form the Earth. Some said that it wasn’t even a part of the Realms; inside it was another Somewhere entirely, and that its square-sided tube held more space and time than everything that was outside it. For Mordak, it had always been there, a baffling, uncomfortable anomaly; neither good nor evil, friend nor foe, completely familiar yet utterly strange. It was impossible to imagine the landscape without it, but it was absolutely and definitively out of place, an intrusion; something you caught sight of out of the corner of your eye but took pains never to look at directly; like the Horrible Yellow Face, except that the Face was painfully bright and crushingly hot, whereas the Tower was bitter cold, and light seemed to fall into it and not come out again. The sight of it drained him, as though something had stuck a tube down his throat and started to suck. It had always been empty, of course. Nobody and nothing could live there. He’d always thought of it as a stone variety of pitcher plant. Anything that went in there would be slowly digested, nourishing the stones, until it was entirely consumed.

  He forced himself to look at it. A movement on the upper battlements caught his eye, and he frowned. “What flags are those?”

  The Elf had much better eyesight. “Not flags,” she said. “Washing.”

  Perfectly true; as they got closer, Mordak could see for himself. Someone had slung a washing line between the two arched black horns that projected from the topmost rampart, and had hung out sheets, pillowcases and a dozen pairs of socks. “You’re right,” he said. “There is someone living there.”

  “I told you, didn’t I?”

  Mordak bit his lip. “Yes, you did. I just couldn’t believe it, that’s all. I mean, who on earth could possibly survive five minutes inside that thing?”

  She shrugged. “Humans.”

  Mordak sighed. Ever since he’d been elected Dark Lord and sat on the Iron Throne, he’d tried to understand the Four Races—really understand; figure out how their minds worked, instead of merely what they tasted like. Elves hadn’t been all that difficult. When you’re a bit better than most people at most things, it’s not just easy but practically inevitable to get to thinking you’re better than everybody at everything, and after a while you simplify that a little and you just know that you’re the best. Dwarves had taken a little bit more figuring out; proud, mean, clever, stupid, indomitable, pig-headed, brave, greedy, loyal, treacherous, basically just plain folks. Goblins—other races had enormous trouble getting under the skins of goblins (though generations of weaponsmiths had tried to make it simpler for them), but surely they were the most straightforward of the lot; work hard, play hard, and fun is a dish best eaten raw. Just a bunch of overgrown kids, really. Humans, though; he’d despaired of ever understanding them, until finally he’d made the connection, struck the spark that illuminated everything. Humans, alone of the Races, have a unique ability to believe things that are patently untrue, even when the facts are pulling their heads back by the hair and yelling in their faces. They see what they want to see, believe what they want to believe, lie to themselves all the time and ignore anything that doesn’t suit them. This makes them impossibly strong and incredibly dangerous. A human can walk on water, believing there’s a bridge where there isn’t one. A human can walk through a wall just by disapproving of it. A human can live in the Tower of Snorfang simply by pretending it’s an ordinary house. In the end, it came down to simple optics. A goblin can see in the dark. An Elf can see a single snowflake half a mile away. A dwarf can gauge a thousandth of an inch by eye, and distinguish between ten thousand minute variations of ore-bearing quartz by tiny differences in colour. But the human can turn a blind eye to anything at all.

  Mordak was now standing as close as he’d ever been in his life to the foot of the Tower. The urge to turn and run was almost unbearably strong; if it wasn’t for the Elf, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to take one more step. He also knew that the Elf had it in her to speak the Seven Words of Power, and there was no death so horrible that he wouldn’t embrace it joyfully rather than hear them; I told you, but you wouldn’t listen. That, of course, was why he’d brought her.

  “Go on, then.”

  She glared at him. “I’m not knocking. This is all your idea, you do it.”

  “I’m ordering you to knock on that wall.”

  “In that case, I quit.”

  Two more Words of Power he’d forgotten about. He sighed. “Don’t be such a fusspot,” he said. Then he reversed the spear he carried in his right hand and slammed the butt against the wall. Twice he pounded it against the unyielding stone, and then it snapped like a carrot.

  He shivered. “That’s cold,” he said.

  “Shh. Look.”

  Incredibly thin parallel lines of glowing red fire shot up from the ground, then made right angles to meet at the top. Noiselessly, a door swung open. A bald, middle-aged human stuck his head out at them and said, “Yes, what is it?”

  Tinituviel opened her mouth, then closed it again. Mordak stabbed her viciously in the small of the back with his elbow. She stumbled forward half a pace but still couldn’t speak.

  “Hold on,” the man said. “I know you, don’t I?”

  Tinituviel nodded, mostly because behind her back, Mordak had a pawful of her hair.

  “You’re from the council.”

  “Mphm. I mean mm.”

  The man sighed. “If it’s about the damn barbecue licence, we’ve decided not to bother.”

  Mordak was proud of what Tinituviel did then. He knew she was scared—petrified, more like, and with such good reason; these humans controlled the Tower of Snorfang and the Stone of Snordor and the appalling Vickers weapon, and their coming heralded the triumph of the Nameless One—but in spite of all that, she was an Elf to her core; and as soon as the human used that snotty tone to her, everything else, all her doubts and fears, were forgotten. She looked at him with those pale grey eyes down that ineffably long nose, and, sure enough, he wilted.

  “It’s not about that,” she said, and her voice would’ve split diamonds. “Are you the occupier of these premises?”

  A wary look came into the man’s eyes, as if he was sizing up the chances of saying no and getting away with it. “What about it?”

  Tinituviel narrowed the focus of her stare. Was it Mordak’s imagination, or were tiny plumes of smoke rising from the man’s face? “We have reason to believe that you are operating an unauthorised telemetric device from this address. You are not obliged to say anything,” she added, before he could speak, “but a refusal to answer questions will be construed as an admission of guilt.”

  “A what device?”

  She cleared her throat. “A telemetric device is any manufactured object designed to transmit or receive or capable of transmitting or receiving any message, signal, data or other communication, whether audible, visible or telepathic, including but not confined to speech, writing, numbers, images, prophetic visions, divine commands and overwhelming urges to drive the infidel into the sea. Well?”

  He gazed at her for a long time. Then he said, “Oh, you mean the desktop.”

  She couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about, but she gave no outward sign of it. “Are you in possession of one?”

  “Well, Molly’s got one, that’s my wife. We use it for ordering stuff online. You saw it the last time you were here.”

  Tinituviel breathed out slowly through her nose. “Please step aside,” she said.

  He moved a little, then stopped. “Hold on,” he said. “Who’s that?”

  “That?” For a moment, Tinituviel looked genuinely nonplussed. “Oh, him. He’s my assistant. He runs little errands for me, fetches, carries, that sort of thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “A goblin.” Well, she’d earned it. “Loyal little fellow. It’s amazing what they can be trained to do if you’re very, very patient.”

  The human peered round Tin
ituviel’s shoulder at him. “Is it safe?”

  “That depends.”

  “Ah.”

  “Let’s get back to the matter in hand, shall we?” she said crisply, and once again Mordak was filled with admiration. He’d expected at least ten minutes of the capable-of-performing-simple-tasks stuff, but here she was, denying herself the chance of a lifetime. “You admit that you’ve been operating a prohibited device without the proper authorisation.”

  The human scowled at her. “I didn’t know it’s not allowed,” he said. “Nobody told me.”

  “That’s no defence in law,” she said. “Now, this is a Form 377/68/2, and this is a B47A, and this is a 237-96P, and this is a 237-96P(1), I shall need three copies of each of them, on my desk, this time tomorrow, together with any written submissions you may choose to make in mitigation, bearing in mind that you are not entitled to rely on any evidence unless it’s been submitted in writing at least 28 days before the hearing, duly notarised.” She thrust the wadge of papers under his nose; he had a choice, taken them or suffocate. “Any questions?”

  “I can’t read any of this. It’s just squiggles.”

  “That,” she said icily, “is Old High Elvish. Naturally, your replies must be in Elvish, too. If you choose to use a translator, he or she must file an affidavit of accuracy, in triplicate, duly notarised. Should you wish to be represented by counsel at the tribunal, you’ll need to—”

  “Hang on. What tribunal?”

  She looked at him as if she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. “The tribunal, of course. At which your fate will be decided, by means of either a court case, ordeal by fire or trial by combat. Should you wish to appoint a champion to fight for you, you’ll need to file a Certificate of Cowardice with the registrar within forty-eight hours, accompanied by—”

  “Trial by combat?”

  She nodded. “I take it you’re not au fait with Elvish litigation.”

  “No, I bloody well am not.”

  She nodded. “Trust me,” she said. “Trial by combat is cheaper, quicker, fairer and considerably less traumatic. Or you could always opt for the ordeal by fire, which I’m told is considerably less painful than it looks. Though how anybody could possibly know—”