The Outsorcerer's Apprentice

by Tom Holt

  The small part of him that really was Prince Florizel felt quite smug about that; told you it’d come back when it was hungry, assuming it’s the same hawk, but then, there can’t be an infinite number of goshawks in these parts, assuming it was a goshawk. The rest of him, outnumbering the Florizel bit by several hundred to one, froze in horror. The doughnut. The way home.

  He sat down on the gravel, too shocked to stand or move. His mind was racing, trying to remember the rules of the YouSpace device. For your convenience and ease of use, YouSpace can be accessed through the hole in the middle of any doughnut, fried onion ring or bagel; so, wherever you are, in practically any alternative reality in the multiverse, you’re never far from a handy, reliable portal back to your default universe. Fine. He remembered sitting on his bed, on the day when he’d first found the stupid thing, reading the book of instructions and drawing a glowing yellow line through the word practically with a highlighter pen. Practically every universe; in other words, there are universes (how couldn’t there be, in an infinite multiverse?) where there aren’t doughnuts with holes in them, fried onion rings or even bagels. That was why, on that fateful day, he’d stuffed the instructions back in their envelope, put the envelope back in the box, and shoved it away under his bed as far as his arm could reach. Too risky, he’d told himself. Find yourself in a doughnut-free continuum, you’d be screwed; stuck for ever, unable to get home. Then, later, when the tedium of revision had begun to gnaw his brain and he’d resolved to give the thing a try, he’d promised himself that he’d pay very, very close attention to safeguarding at least one doughnut at all times, to be on the safe side, to be sure. And now—

  Don’t panic, cried his inner Lance Corporal Jones. Well, indeed. All was very far from lost. All he had to do was go to the kitchens, find the cook and demand a doughnut. He was entitled to do that, being supreme ruler of the kingdom. And even if they couldn’t do doughnuts, they ought to be capable of a simple bagel. And if they couldn’t do bagels, any bloody fool can batter a bit of onion.

  Finding the kitchen turned out to be a challenge in itself. He knew it was in a separate building, because of the risk of fire. That narrowed it down to a choice of thirty-five. Thirty-fifth time lucky; he knocked on the door, waited for several minutes while nobody answered, remembered that he was the prince, damn it, opened the door and went in. Two dozen men and women stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at him.

  “Hello,” he said, in his best Florizel voice. “Which one of you’s the cook?”

  It was one of those I-am-Spartacus moments, and it went some way to explaining why the soup was always lousy. “Fine,” he said, selecting one at random. “I want you to make me some doughnuts. Please,” he added, before Florizel could stop him.

  The man, a huge creature with hair in his ears, looked at him. “Doughwhats?”

  Oh Christ. “They’re a sort of—” He hesitated. A sort of what, for crying out loud? Bread? Pastry? Now he came to think of it, he had no idea what was in a doughnut, or how you went about creating one. Flour, presumably. Maybe eggs. That was the total extent of his knowledge. Might as well show a builder a pile of stone blocks and expect to get a perfect replica of the Parthenon.

  “Bagels?”

  “You what?”

  “All right,” he said, trying to fight down the surge of panic in his insides. “How about a nice fried onion ring?”

  He’d said the wrong thing, apparently. The cook went white as a sheet, made a complicated sign with his fingers across his forehead, and started to back away, mumbling something under his breath. “Sorry,” Benny said quickly, “I didn’t mean to upset anyone, I didn’t—”

  The stares of the kitchen staff pierced him like arrows. Well, of course. He might not be expected to know that onions, or fried onions, were anathema and abomination in these parts, but Prince Florizel would know, of course he would. He cleared his throat and smiled. “Very good,” he said, “just testing. Carry on.” Then he left the kitchen, very fast.

  Practically every reality. Oh boy. He leaned against a handy wall and caught his breath. This is hopeless, he thought. No doughnuts, no bagels and especially no fried onion rings, not if you don’t want to end up with your head stuck on a pike somewhere. How am I going to get home? This is terrible.

  Think, he ordered himself.

  Look, it’s cooking. How hard can it be? Flour, eggs, water, a source of heat, a flat pan, butter. Any bloody fool can fry an onion.

  Amend that to practically any bloody fool, because he could think of one prime example of bloody stupidity who couldn’t, and he was wearing his shoes. It’s all very well to speak airily of rustling up a quick plate of doughnuts and a side of onion rings, but he knew his culinary limitations, and he was in enough trouble as it was without adding arson to the equation. Not me, then; someone else. There’s got to be someone in this kingdom who’d be prepared to cook me something with a hole in the middle without feeling the need to send for the Witchfinder General.

  Then it occurred to him that he didn’t actually know a lot of people in his kingdom; certainly not on could-you-do-me-a-small-favour terms. Most of the people he did know were court functionaries of one kind or another, politicians, precisely the sort of person who couldn’t be relied on to keep their minds open and their mouths shut if His Majesty came and asked them to do something unspeakably weird to an onion. Which left–well, two or three of the gardeners were all right, and the man who looked after the dogs, and the odd-job man. At least, he’d smiled at them a couple of times and said hello, and they’d smiled back instead of doing all that awful bowing and bobbing about. One of the women who did the laundry looked like she might be quite nice, except that she was stone deaf and just grinned when he spoke to her. Apart from that—

  Come on, he told himself (and he created a mental image of Uncle Gordon to say the words, to give them immediacy and impact), cooking is cooking, you’re a quantum physicist. If you can extrapolate the existence of the Higgs boson from observing the simulated collision of two protons, you can probably make a functional doughnut. Provided, of course, that you have a recipe—

  Of course. All he needed to do was Google “donut recipe” on his phone. He’d already established that, although he couldn’t make or receive real-life calls in this universe, he could access the internet, give or take a few inconsequential anomalies–all the semicolons became dollar signs, for instance, and any reference to Australia made it crash, but he could live with that, just about. A simple recipe, and he could—

  He’d lost his phone. He remembered realising that, back at Uncle’s house. He closed his eyes and cursed silently; and then it occurred to him that, although he’d discovered the loss back in real life, it must actually have taken place here, on this side. In which case, his phone had to be around here somewhere, and if he could only find it, assuming it hadn’t got trodden on by unicorns and the battery hadn’t gone flat, he could get the recipe, pay some poor old peasant woman a million gold coins to cook him one and get the hell out of here, back to where he belonged. If only.

  Right. A certain degree of confidence returned, because looking for misplaced articles was something he knew all about, from a lifetime’s bitter experience. He knew, better than anyone, that the Great Primordial Question, the starting point of every journey and the fountainhead of all wisdom, is where did you have it last? Now, then—

  The girl. The irritatingly bright girl who asked questions. He’d been using it, the time before last that he’d met her. She’d been interrogating him about something or other, and he’d said something to annoy her, and she’d deliberately stamped on his foot—

  Forget about that. The phone. He’d had it when he met her, and he couldn’t remember seeing it or using it after that. He tried to picture in his mind the spot where the meeting had taken place; in the forest somewhere, well, that’s a great help. No, wait. There had been a funny-looking tree—

  A funny-looking tree. In a forest. Well.

>   Yes, but it was something, a tiny scrap of straw to cling to. If he could find the tree, and if his phone was still there, and if it was still working, he stood a reasonable chance of getting home. If not, he’d be stranded here for ever and ever. Put like that, he didn’t have much choice. Funny-looking tree, here I come.

  “That’s a five and a three makes eight,” said King Mordak, sliding his counter across the squares with his foreclaw, “which means I pass Go, collect two hundred gobbos, thank you, and, yes, I think I’ll buy that. How much is it?”

  The first goblin-dwarf summit in three thousand years was at a crucial moment. King Drain opened his eyes, closed them again, wiped beer out of them and blinked. “Three hundred and fifty.”

  “That’s fine,” Mordak said. “Now, that means I’ve got all the black ones, so I think I’ll build three dungeons on Arak-Zigar and a Dark Tower on Arathloom.”

  “Snot.”

  Drain was taking it pretty well, all things considered, given that things weren’t exactly going his way. After forty-six hours of play, Mordak had all the green ones, the blue ones, the red ones, the yellow ones and now the black ones, while Drain had the Sewers of Snoria and the Waterworks. Still, as Mordak kept reminding him, there was still everything to play for.

  “My go.” Drain glugged a big mouthful of beer and shook the dice. “Two anna one. Bollocks.”

  Mordak counted on his claws. “All right,” he said. “That’s the Enchanted Groves of Plorien with three dungeons and a tower, so that’s one thousand, three hundred gobbos.”

  Drain hiccuped and fumbled with his money. “I only got nine hundred.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Mordak said, “I’ll take the Sewers of Snoria and your return-unexpectedly-from-the-dead-free card, and we’ll call it quits.”

  “Righto,” said Drain. “Your go.”

  Mordak left the dice where they lay. “Let me get you another drink,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure. Great beer, this.”

  “It should be,” Mordak said pleasantly, filling his cup. “It’s from the plunder we took when we stormed your fortress at Gorm’s Deep and slaughtered the entire garrison.”

  “Ah,” said Drain. “That’d explain it.”

  “And that cup,” Mordak went on, “is the garrison commander’s head. Right, here we go, oh look, double six.”

  Three moves later, Drain’s head slid forward onto his beard-cushioned chest, and he began to make a noise like the death of hemp sacking. Mordak waited a little while, then carefully tugged on the string around the dwarf’s neck, on which hung the Great Seal. Mordak melted a little sealing wax by breathing on it, blobbed it at the foot of a long, densely written scroll of parchment, then applied the seal. Job done.

  Having put everything back where it should be, Mordak leaned back in his chair (the ribcages of his enemies creaked ominously under the strain) and sighed deeply. No doubt about it, war was easier. That, presumably, was why nobody had bothered trying peace for a thousand years. War, however, didn’t work. Whether peace would be any better was anybody’s guess, but it had to be worth a try.

  To pass the time, he read through the treaty that Drain had just unconsciously put his seal to. There was going to be hell to pay when the terms were announced, from both sides. When he’d first come up with this plan, he’d intended to screw the dwarves to the floor and give nothing in return; fortunately, wiser counsels had prevailed. Instead, he’d put in six key concessions on the goblin side, the sort of things he’d have resisted fang and claw if they’d done real negotiations. Nobody on either side would believe for one moment that Mordak would’ve included anything like that in a forgery. Besides, Drain would have to be able to tell his people he’d won something, or they’d shred him and crown someone else. The four really key key concessions, on the dwarf side, were all that really mattered; everything else he could live with. And so, he reflected with pride, could about thirty thousand goblins, ditto dwarves, who otherwise wouldn’t have had the option.

  Even so. All this not-fighting made his skin crawl and his scalp itch. It wasn’t right. Or, rather, it wasn’t natural (and it was that distinction, so recently recognised, that kept him awake at night) and he couldn’t help wondering what had got into him lately. Thoughts seemed to explode inside his head, suddenly and devastatingly; they took his mind hostage and dragged it away to strange places where everything was bewilderingly different, and when at last they let it go and it wandered home, there was still that lingering doubt–St’k’hm syndrome, the head-shrinkers called it, the phenomenon whereby the hostage becomes emotionally attached to and dependent on his captors. Well, maybe. Goblins weren’t in the habit of hearing voices inside their heads–other people’s heads, yes, because a suitably adapted enemy’s skull makes a super-duper loudspeaker–and there were times when he wondered if he wasn’t going, you know, a bit odd. But he’d secretly consulted a leading Elf nerve specialist, who’d told him that he was perfectly normal, for a goblin (the question he’d asked was, Am I sane or am I crazy?, and the Elf had grinned as he replied; but that, of course, was perfectly normal for an Elf); so that was all right.

  Drain’s snoring turned into a sequence of grunts, which culminated in a ferocious snort, which woke him up. Mordak quickly rolled up the treaty and tucked it away under his chair out of sight, then grabbed the beer jug. “Refill?” he said.

  Drain squinted at him through bleary red eyes. “What?”

  “More beer?”

  Drain frowned, and winced. “Maybe not,” he said, and reached a shaking hand towards the dice. “Whose go is it?”

  Mordak shook his head. “Game’s over.”

  “It is?”

  “Yup. You won, remember?”

  “Did I?” Drain rubbed his eyes with two peach-stone knuckles. “Course I did. Right.”

  “And we’ve sealed the treaty,” Mordak went on, “and had a nice drink, and it’s probably time you were getting back, before your lot start to fret.”

  Drain nodded. “Load of bloody worrywarts is what they are,” he said. Then he pulled a doubtful sort of face. “Did we seal the treaty?”

  “Oh yes.” Mordak produced it from under his chair. “There you are, look. Your seal, right next to mine.”

  Drain groped under his breastplate for his glasses and stuck them on his nose. “So it is,” he said. “Right. Good. Glad that’s settled. Um, did I—?”

  “Drive a hard bargain? I should bloody well say so.” Mordak did his best synthetic scowl. “I’m going to be in so much trouble when my lot get wind of this. Still, so long as you and I understand each other, what can they do?”

  Drain shrugged. “Kill you, I guess.”

  “Well, yes, there’s that.” He closed his hand tight around the scroll. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  Drain snatched the scroll from him and put it on the table, next to the game board. “Don’t you dare,” he growled. “Don’t even think about backing out now.” Then he hiccuped, and sat back in his chair, holding his head in his hands.

  “All right,” Mordak said, “if that’s the way you feel, I guess I’ll just have to deal with the consequences and to hell with it. I’ll see to it you get your copy in the morning.”

  Drain groaned, stood up and sat down again. “You’d better,” he whimpered. “And keep the bloody room still, can’t you? How’s a dwarf supposed to stand up if the stupid room keeps wobbling about?”

  “It’ll stop in a minute,” Mordak replied. “It’s just minor seismic activity. Earthquake,” he translated.

  “Oh, one of those. Fair enough.” Drain closed his eyes for a moment. “Good game, that. Where’d you get it?”

  “It’s a human game originally, I think,” Mordak said. “I had my people tinker with it a bit, but basically—”

  “Clever bastards, the humans,” Drain growled. “You know what? Once we’ve done the Elves, we ought to do the humans, too. I don’t trust clever bastards.”

  Indeed. And there, Mordak
reflected, in a nutshell is the problem with this whole coalition. The dwarves are savages and their leader is an idiot. On the other hand, the legacy of centuries of free collective bargaining between the dwarf miners’ union and the mine owners was the best trained, equipped and experienced army in the whole of the known world. So the choice was; have these people as your enemies, or make them your friends and stab them in the back later. The humans had a word for it: politics.

  “Splendid idea,” Mordak said, “I’ll make a note of it.”

  “Good man.” The dwarf straightened his knees and rose slowly but surely to his feet. “Good man. And no hard feelings, eh?”

  “No hard feelings.”

  “That’s the spirit. Good game, too.” He staggered a few steps towards the door, swayed, stopped, looked back. “Here, Mordak.”

  “Hmm?”

  “You sure I won?”

  “Would I lie to you about a thing like that?”

  When he’d finally gone, Mordak unrolled the treaty scroll on the table, smoothed it out and read it from beginning to end. He winced five times, and closed his eyes twice. How can it be, he asked himself, that you can have something that nobody wants, that makes everybody on both sides very angry, but which is quite obviously the right thing to do? The world can’t possibly work like that, can it?

  His left hand was itching like mad; he rubbed it, but it didn’t seem to help. There was a small red swelling in the web of skin at the base of the sixth and seventh claw. He knew what that was all about; another one about to come through. No big deal, except that goblins tend to get their blood claws in early adolescence, and Mordak was a hundred and six. Still, late claw development was by no means unheard of. He put some sulphur-paste-and-mercury cream on it to take the swelling down, and forgot about it.