by Tom Holt
Fascinating.
“You haven’t got one.”
With one of those things, you can talk to the Other Place.
“Yes. All sorts of places. I tried ringing someone just now, back at that tall building, but the number was busy.”
Just to make sure I understand (purred the voice in his head). With one of these things, you could actually talk to people in the place you came from.
“I think so.”
And there’s one in the old wizard’s tower, where the stupid man and his stupid wife live. The offcomers. From the Other Place.
“They’re quite nice, actually. They gave me a cup of tea.”
Is that a fact. Listen to me. I need you to make that call. Do you understand?
Theo Bernstein thought for a moment; or at least something inside his head did his thinking for him, and had no trouble at all making a decision. “Sure,” Theo said. “I’m sure they won’t mind. They were nice people.”
“Hey,” said the monster. “What about me?”
“What about you?” Theo replied automatically; that is, he heard himself say the words, a split second before thinking, you can’t say that, it’s rude.
“Not talking to you,” the monster said. “I thought we were going to see King Mordak.”
“Later,” said Theo’s voice, much to Theo’s surprise. “Right now I’m busy.”
The monster growled. “What have you done with him?”
“What?”
“My friend. What have you done with my friend?”
Don’t worry about her (said the voice), she’ll keep till later. And we may not need her at all.
“Yes, but she’s got claws and—”
She’s just a kid. Come on. Time’s a-wasting.
Theo turned to walk away. The monster roared. “I want my friend. You bring him back right now.”
“I really think we ought to…”
Oh, for crying out loud, said the voice, and Theo felt his left hand lift and point at the monster’s head. From his fingertips, with their bitten nails and the little crescent-shaped scar he’d got from a rogue tin opener twenty years ago, the fingertips he knew so well and had hitherto had no reason to distrust, shot a bolt of red lightning. It hit the monster square in the chest, and for a split second she glowed, a bright orange colour, like hot steel. Then she dropped, just like your discarded clothes when you’re getting ready for bed.
Nuts, said the voice.
“You killed her.”
Me? No, I don’t think so.
“Yes, you did. You shot lightning at her.”
Not me. Come on, you’re supposed to be a scientist. Whose hand did it come out of?
“Mine, but—”
Yours, thank you. On account of, I don’t happen to have a hand. But don’t beat yourself up about it. You were a tad overgenerous with the sparky stuff, that’s all. Inexperience. You’ll get the hang of it soon enough. Comes with practice.
Theo stared at his hand as if he’d never seen it before. “I killed her.”
Yup. Still, it’s not the end of the world. Mordak made that one, he can make us another. If we decide we need one.
“Need? What are you talking about?”
A huge, practically invincible monster that does what it’s told, said the voice, always useful to have by one, but hardly indispensable. Not when I’ve got something much, much better.
Theo peered down at the monster without actually moving. He couldn’t see its face but it was very, very still, the way living things generally aren’t. “Better than her?”
Oh yes.
Theo looked up. There wasn’t a living thing to be seen. His whole head felt like a sore tooth, throbbing and nagging and obviously not right. “Really,” he said. “And what might that be?”
You.
There was far too much guilt in the world, according to John the Lawyer. His clients seemed to be plagued with it to a disproportionate extent, or at least the judges seemed to think so, and maybe it was catching, because now he was feeling guilty, too. What he was guilty of he wasn’t quite sure; doing his job, apparently, and doing it rather well—he could picture his old boss grinning sourly at that and muttering about how he’d get off lightly because it was definitely a first offence and there was practically no chance of reoffending. Elven humour, don’t you just love it?
So a client—an unusually appreciative client, who paid immediately and in full, therefore by definition a good client, and if a man is a good client, surely it stands to reason that he’s also a good person?—had hired him to get legal title to the goblins’ caverns, and he’d done that (a really neat, clever piece of work, really good work, and if work is really good, it can’t be bad, can it? See above) and now the same client wanted him to do the same for Elvenhome, followed by the halls of the Dwarf-Lords, followed by whatever was left, geography not being anyone’s strongest suit in the Realms—well, fair enough. He hadn’t robbed anyone or hit anyone over the head. He’d actually established a valid claim to Mordak’s kingdom, valid enough that Mordak had apparently accepted it, and if Mordak reckoned it was valid, who was anyone else to argue? Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with dragging the truth about who owned what out into the merciless glare of the Horrible Yellow Face. If he’d forged documents or suborned witnesses, that would’ve been wrong, but he’d done nothing of the sort. No, he’d found a little quibble, a dear little quibble curled up fast asleep in a nest of old cartographers’ surveys, and that was all he’d done. Nothing to feel guilty about there.
The phrase moral compass floated into his mind, and he blinked. Silly expression, he’d always thought, because it’s dead easy to banjax a compass, you just put it close to a great big chunk of metal—iron for the everyday sort, gold for the moral version—and it’ll point wherever you want it to. Besides, if something’s legally right, it must be morally right, too. And what’s the definition of legally right? Easy-peasy. It means, whatever you can kid a judge and jury into believing. And if I can kid a judge, stands to reason I can kid myself. Can’t I?
“There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
He realised that he didn’t know her name. So he asked her.
“Um.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“No, halfwit, um as in, that’s a difficult question and I’m not sure how to answer it.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I’m assuming I had a name once. But if I ever did, it’s a very long time ago and I’ve forgotten it.”
John nodded thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, “maybe you should get a new one.”
“That thought had crossed my mind, believe it or not. But I can’t think of one.”
“Ah.”
She sat down in what John liked to think of as the client’s chair, although so far his one and only client hadn’t sat in it; but the day would come when he had a whole string of clients, proper ones, not mysterious polite prompt payers who asked him (nicely) to do outrageous things. And when that day came, that was the chair they’d sit on.
“You need the right name if you’re going to be a supermodel,” she said. “Memorable, sophisticated, distinctive, all that sort of guff. It probably ought to sound a bit Elvish, but not so as to put people off, if you know what I mean, and of course there’s a lot of people who don’t like the Elves very much, so—”
“I know,” John said. “My client, for a start.”
“Oh, him.” She pursed her lips. “I was thinking about that.”
“Me, too.”
“I was wondering,” she said, “about all this evicting people business. You realise King Mordak actually went quietly?”
John nodded. “I was there.”
“What happened?”
“Two weird men showed up with a box.”
“And?”
“Mordak gave in.”
The wraith gave a low whistle. “Some box.”
“So I gather. Magic of some sort.”
“Elvish?”
John shook his h
ead. “Doubt it,” he said. “Apparently, it’s capable of killing a huge number of people without damaging property in the process. That doesn’t sound very Elvish to me.”
The wraith clicked her tongue. “Not Elvish,” she said firmly. “Sounds like pretty Dark stuff. Only, that’s impossible.”
“Not according to the two weird guys. And Mordak believed them.”
The wraith shook her head. “I know about this stuff, remember? Basically, there’s your Elvish magic, and then there’s the Dark kind. And if it’s Dark, then I’d know about it. But I never heard of anything like that before. And if it was Dark, it’d belong to Mordak, on account of him being the Dark Lord.”
John scratched his head. “You lost me.”
She sighed. “All the magic in the Realms belongs to somebody, right? And you can forget the humans and the dwarves, they sometimes use magic products but they don’t make any themselves. So, either it’s Elvish or it’s Dark. And the Elves don’t do that kind of stuff, and we haven’t got anything like that, so obviously, it’s not possible. Therefore—”
John’s eyes had gone very wide. “Therefore,” he said, “it must come from somewhere else.”
“Oh, do try and keep up,” she said. “All the magic, I said. Unless,” she added sardonically, “you’re suggesting there’s another Realm somewhere that somehow managed to escape detection all these years.”
“I don’t know. Maybe there is.”
“Oh, come on. Something like a country, people would be bound to notice it.”
John stood up. “Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe it’s, I don’t know, really hard to get to. All I know is, as soon as the weird guys told Mordak about that box, he just sort of gave in. And if there’s no power in the Realms that could make him do that—” He made a sort of feeble gesture and sat down again. “And don’t look at me like that. It’s just simple logic.”
She pursed her lips. “Mind you,” she said.
“What?”
“Those crazy humans. The ones who took over the old wizard’s tower. Mordak and that snotty Elf were talking about them. Rumour has it, they’re not from around here.” She looked at him with a sort of grudging respect. “I think Mordak was worried about them.”
“My client’s a human,” John said quietly.
“So?”
“And I don’t think he’s from around here either. He talks funny.”
“All humans talk funny. It’s the teeth.”
“Also,” John went on, “you get this weird feeling that he’s not actually there, if you see what I mean. And it’s starting to make sense,” he added, his eyes widening. “Well, it is.”
“To you, maybe.”
“Just suppose,” John said, “for the sake of argument, that there is a Somewhere Else. And suppose that under normal circumstances you can’t get there from here, and vice versa. But suppose one of the Somewhere Elsers found a way to get here.”
She gave him a blank look. “Why?”
“I don’t know, do I? Maybe it’s really horrible where they come from. Or there’s a drought or a plague or an infestation of dragons. Or maybe—” John paused. Think, he told himself. Why would I break through into Somewhere Else, almost certainly at considerable inconvenience and expense? “Maybe,” he said, “he’s found a really good way of making a lot of money.”
“Ah,” said the wraith. “Now you’re talking.”
“Making a great deal of money,” John went on excitedly, “by getting hold of huge tracts of prime real estate for practically nothing.”
“Not a bad way of going about it, I’ll give you that.”
“And then selling it—no, hold on, that doesn’t work. He’s planning on evicting everybody who lives here. And if everybody leaves…”
The wraith’s eyes flashed. “Selling it,” she said triumphantly, “to other Somewhere Elsers. Well, of course, it must be that,” she went on, as John gave her a sideways look. “That explains the crazy humans Mordak was all upset about. They’re the first wave of settlers. They really aren’t from around here. They’re from—” She paused, searching desperately for the right words. “Somewhere else. Which proves it. You’re right. That must be it.” She stopped and looked at him. “What?”
“That’s awful.”
“Is it?”
“You don’t think so?”
She shrugged. “Maybe I’m not the best person to ask,” she said. “Not that I was ever, you know, on the policy-making side of things. Still, I can’t see what the problem is, from your perspective.”
“My—?”
“That’s right. The Somewhere Elser is poised to take over the Realms, and you work for him. Which puts you on the winning side. That’s good, surely.”
John sighed. “Put like that, it does sound eminently reasonable,” he said.
“Right. So it’s a bit rough on the goblins and the Elves. So what? The goblins are the bad guys, by definition, and the Elves—”
John remembered his old boss. “Quite,” he said. “And the dwarves, too, don’t forget. Mind you, last time I had anything to do with them, they slung me in prison.”
“Well, there you are, then. Screw them.”
“Absolutely,” said John. “And it’s not like any of them have ever done anything for me. I mean, where were the goblins and the dwarves when I was desperately trying to make my quota of billable hours? Beating a path to my door with a wide selection of complex legal issues? I don’t think so.”
“Exactly.”
“Even so.”
Their eyes met. “It sucks, doesn’t it?” said the ex-wraith.
“Yup,” said the lawyer.
“And someone’s got to do something about it, haven’t they?”
“I guess so.”
Pause. “I’m guessing,” said the wraith, “that this is a situation where writing a strongly worded letter to someone probably isn’t going to cut it.”
“Probably.”
“Oh, nuts.” She gave him a sad look. “And the bad guys have a box even Mordak’s scared of.”
“And lots and lots of money.”
The wraith gave him a strange look. “And there’s something else they’ve got, don’t forget. Something really important and vital to the success of their plans.”
John looked blank. “Really?”
“You bet.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “What?”
“The finest legal representation money can buy,” she said.
John shook his head. “No, actually. Which is weird, because with all that money you’d have thought they could have afforded—”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “The best.”
John smiled weakly. “It’s really sweet of you to say that, but—” He stopped short, and stared at her. “Gosh,” he said. “You really think so?”
“They chose you, didn’t they?”
“Yes, but—”
“Well, then.”
“Gosh.” John lifted his head and looked at her. “You do mean me, don’t you? Only—”
“You clown,” said the wraith, not unkindly.
“Right.” John sagged back in his chair. “In which case, we’ve got a classic conflict of interests scenario, which means I really ought to advise my client to take independent—”
“No,” said the wraith patiently, “what we’ve got is a classic sneaking round behind someone’s back and stabbing him in it scenario.” She hesitated. “You’re OK with that, presumably.”
“I don’t know. On the one hand—”
“You’re OK with that.”
John nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Sorry. It’s just, it’s come as a bit of a shock. The idea that I’m actually as good at being a lawyer as I always thought I was. A bit hard to come to terms with, actually. You see, I always knew it, kind of deep down, but my boss—”
She looked at him, and he realised he didn’t need to explain. On the one polar opposite, you see, there’s Evil, with a capital E; and on the other, there’s Elv
es, like John’s old boss, with their pointy ears and relentlessly unerring knack of making everyone who wasn’t one of them feel precisely a sixteenth of an inch tall. Just because you’re not Evil doesn’t mean you’re nice. Far from it.
He looked at her. And conversely, he thought…
“Fine,” he said. “Now, what are we going to do?”
Ms. White looked at the doughnut. She took care to focus on the sides and edges rather than the middle, because when you’re doing multidimensional teleportation with a van Goyen interface, it’s rather important to have a clear idea in your mind of where you want to end up; not just a place and time, because (according to multiverse theory) there’s a very-very-nearly-infinite number of alternative realities crowding round every conceivable intersection of time and space. You can’t just think, a quarter past twelve last Tuesday, the Starbucks opposite the bank on North Street; good heavens, no. Try that and you could find yourself in the quarter-past-twelve Starbucks in the reality where you put on the blue socks rather than the beige, or your spouse or your boss put on the blue socks instead of the burgundy, or where some guy in Penang put on the blue socks, and each of that very-very-nearly-infinite number of alternatives could be significantly, critically, fatally different. She’d read all about that sort of thing in a very big book, the day before she made her first trip through the doughnut, and landed up here. No, the drill was, you had to load your mind with every last scrap of information you possessed or could safely extrapolate about your destination, so as to reduce the variables and guide the vortex towards the infinitesimal gap in your chosen continuum that you created when you so rudely left it. Crossing your fingers helps, too, but nobody knows why.
“Oh well,” Ms. White said aloud. “Here goes nothing.”
She closed her eyes, repositioned her entire body to line up with where the hole in the doughnut might reasonably be expected to be, and opened them again. “Oh,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
Because standing directly in front of her, masking her view of the eye of the doughnut with his not inconsiderable bulk, was a fat Englishman she’d met once on somebody’s yacht. His name, she remembered, was George, and he’d given her the YouSpace device.
“Not so fast,” said George. “And where do you think you’re going?”