The Outsorcerer's Apprentice

by Tom Holt

  “Buttercup, I don’t think you should—”

  “Shh. It’s saying something.”

  She waited. It said it again. It said, “Hello?”

  Turquine’s hand flew to the dagger hanging from his belt, but Buttercup gave him a furious look and he froze. “Hello?” said the voice. “Benny?”

  Buttercup and Turquine looked at each other, eyes wide. “Should it be doing that?” Turquine whispered.

  “How should I—?”

  “Well, it’s your pencil case.”

  “Hello? Benny? Are you there? Stop pissing around and pick up.”

  Before she could stop him, Turquine had snatched the slate from her hand. “Hello,” he said.

  “Benny?”

  “Yes,” Turquine said, in a loud, slightly high voice. “Reveal yourself.”

  Dead silence; but somehow Buttercup knew the voice was still in there somewhere. And then words came bursting into her head; she grabbed back the slate and said, “Benny’s not available right now, can I take a message?”

  Another pause; then, “Who the hell are you?”

  Buttercup’s lips were shaping the first syllable of her name, but Turquine clapped his hand over her mouth. “No,” he hissed, “don’t tell it, you mustn’t,” and she knew immediately that he was right. She nodded, and he took his hand away. “Who shall I say called, please?” she said.

  An even longer pause; then the voice said, “Oh hell,” and there was a buzzing noise, then silence. They waited, and the lights on the slate went out.

  Buttercup looked up at Turquine, who’d gone white as snow. “That was close,” she said. “Just as well you had the sense to—”

  He shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “I think we got away with it. Now, first chance we get, that thing goes down a very deep well.”

  “I guess.” She looked at him again. “It could be useful.”

  “Really? What the hell for?”

  “Well, it’s got to be something to do with the wizard, right? I think that was his voice, just then. Coming out of the slate.”

  “He talks through a little glass-fronted box? Surely not.” Turquine shook his head. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

  “I think,” Buttercup said, “he uses that thing to talk to people from a long way away. I think Florizel had it because he talks to the wizard with it. And that’s why he’s been acting so weird.” She frowned, striving to remember. “I saw him talking to it. I think the wizard uses the box to make Florizel do really weird stuff.” She lowered her voice. “You know, with food.”

  Turquine shuddered. “Then we’d better make it a very, very deep well, hadn’t we? I don’t know about you, but my life’s complicated enough already without that bastard grooming me into doing pervy stuff with egg whites.”

  Buttercup was still and quiet for a moment. Then she said, “No, we’ll keep it. It’s got to be useful. We can use it to get to the wizard. After all, if it’s a special magic thing and he’s lost it, he’s going to want it back.”

  “You said Florizel lost it.”

  “Stop being so logical, I can’t think when you do that. All right, we go to Florizel, we say, you can have your box back if you take us to the wizard. There,” she added firmly, “that’s settled. Well?”

  Turquine looked at her, and she could see the little wheels going round and round. “Yes,” he said, “why not? But I’m warning you, one cheep out of that thing about six ounces of plain flour, and it’s getting a swimming lesson.” He paused, and took a deep breath. “Buttercup.”

  “Yes?”

  “What are the other two things?”

  She gave him a look of exasperated affection. “Well,” she said, “one of them’s health.”

  “Health?”

  “Exactly. If you haven’t got your health, what have you got? That’s what I always say.”

  “Oh for crying out—”

  “Come on.”

  Gordon looked at the phone in his hand, then put it back in his pocket. Well now, he thought.

  A man’s voice, slightly half-witted; reveal yourself! Actually, amend that; he wasn’t half-witted, he was scared. There’s a difference. Then a generic phone-answering female who’d said the name, Benny. That shot a hole in his initial hypothesis–that Benny had dropped his phone in the street and some druggie had picked it up; unless the druggie had a quick-thinking girlfriend who worked in a call centre. But why answer it at all, in that case?

  Hypothesizing in the absence of data, he rebuked himself. He took his phone out again, and selected the nasty little app he’d had put on Benny’s phone without telling him, the one that allowed him to track where Benny was, to within five feet. It came up blank. So; no reception–except that couldn’t be right, could it, because he’s just called Benny’s phone and had a response. That made no sense.

  No, worse than that, far worse. It did make sense, in one very particular context.

  Gordon winced and closed his eyes. The idiot.

  Allow that possibility into the frame of reference, and a plausible hypothesis was much easier to come by. If Benny was where he thought he might be, and he’d dropped his phone and a perfect stranger had picked it up, then it was entirely likely that it could fall into the hands of (a) someone who’d never seen or heard of a phone before (b) someone who spent her life answering phones; and they could be standing right next to each other. Entirely possible.

  The idiot. The clown.

  He got up and went to his bedroom, where, among the shoeboxes in his closet, one special shoebox was carefully hidden-in-plain-sight. He opened it. Empty.

  “You moron,” he roared, and drop-kicked the empty box across the room.

  Then, with a plunk and a soft tinkle as it rolled round on its rim for a moment or so, the penny dropped. Benny and the laws of Newtonian physics. Of course. You’d have to be blind not to see it straight away—

  —Because someone who’s been spending time in another reality, a universe very different from our own (see multiverse theory), would inevitably be changed by the experience right down to the subatomic level. Just as people going abroad can get stomach upsets from funny food or foreign water, the laws of alien physics can get into your bloodstream, right down into the areas of the brain that process mathematics. It’s a bit like suddenly switching from base ten to base eight without realising it; the same sums give different answers, and the new answers are just as right as the old ones were. That would explain why Benny could do the same calculations as all the scientists at Harvard and MIT combined, get a radically different answer and still be right. It was a phenomenon that Gordon was well aware of; more than that, it made him a great deal of money, because if you did the sums a certain way, identical ten-gram pure gold coins worth $400 over here were worth a thousand times that over there; so he had no excuse, he should’ve picked up on it straight away. Even so. The idiot.

  Suddenly, Gordon felt very tired. There comes a point where the hassle outweighs the buzz, where the money stops mattering and just becomes a way of keeping score, where you realise that you aren’t running the business, the business is running you, like a dog on one of those extending leads. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt like this, but always he’d told himself: I can’t stop now, there’s people out there, on both sides of the line, depending on me–people who need their coffee stirrers, whole societies who’ve grown to be entirely dependent on me, and I can’t just abandon them or there’d be chaos—He’d said it so many times he wasn’t sure any more whether he believed it, or whether he’d taught himself to believe it; when he stopped and looked at it objectively, he realised he didn’t have the faintest idea what would happen if the wizard simply disappeared and left them all to get on with it. For him, it had been five years; for them, close to four thousand, and any society that stays basically the same for four thousand years must be functional, at the very least, and if you arbitrarily rip away its support mechanisms, surely there’d be Armageddon… and then the exam-question
proviso: would your answer be different if you weren’t making a fortune out of it? Hypothetical question, because what possible incentive did he have for stopping?

  Answer: because his idiot nephew had strayed over there, and Benny wasn’t fit to be let out on his own in Orpington, let alone in a realm where dragons were real and goblin recipe books had whole sections headed 1001Mouthwatering New Ways With Human. Not only that; given that the mechanisms that drove economy and society over there had all been carefully socio-engineered over centuries (local time), what would the effect on them be of a gormless halfwit with good intentions and a spanner?

  Oh hell, Gordon thought. And it’s big over there; world-size, in fact. Just for fun, he’d calculated its circumference once, based on astronomical observation and magically obtained geostatistical data, and had been mildly stunned to find it was a third again bigger than real-life Earth. And the stupid boy could be anywhere.

  He flicked his phone into organiser mode and considered his schedule; then he laughed at himself, because time over there isn’t real time. He could spend as long as it took, and still be back punctually for his 3:46 meeting with the Shark Corporation. Then he reached into his other coat pocket, and took out a doughnut.

  Someone was waiting for him as he stepped through the portal on the other side.

  “Areweth,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  The tall, silver-haired Elf opened the large leather-bound book she was carrying. “Messengers from King Drain,” she said. “He wants to talk to you, urgent.”

  He headed off down the corridor. Arweth followed, her dagger-pointed heels clicking on the marble floor. “Also,” she went on, “there’s a letter from King Mordak you’ll want to read ASAP.”

  “I doubt it,” Gordon replied, without turning his head. “And?”

  “Human trouble. Rumours of a coup d’état brewing against Prince Florizel, they say he’s been dabbling in the unspeakable arts. Also, there’s a renegade knight and some village girl trying to set up a free-market economy.”

  That made him stop dead. “Say that again.”

  She turned two pages and found the place. “They’ve bought a large quantity of groceries in one village and they’re proposing to sell them in another village where prices are dearer.”

  “A male and a female? In business?”

  “According to our sources, yes.”

  “Together? Equal partners?”

  “It would appear so. Also note the rank disparity between a knight and a commoner.”

  He didn’t have time for this. Even so: “What’s a knight doing fooling around with cabbages and stuff? He should be out slaying dragons.”

  “My thoughts precisely,” Areweth said. “Hence the need to draw it to your attention. Also, a human lawyer working for an old-established mumble law firm is investigating your origins, with particular reference to the ground plans of this facility.”

  “Dear God.” He frowned, then asked, “An old-established what law firm?”

  “Elven,” Areweth said, loud and clear. “Regrettably I have to say, the partners in the firm are of the Elder Race. The lawyer in question is, however, entirely human.”

  “And what was that about a coup?”

  “So far, only at the disgruntled muttering in taverns stage. However, any form of treasonable activity is so rare that I felt it necessary—”

  “Yes, quite.” He turned his back and looked at her. “Bloody hell. I’m away for two minutes—”

  “You have in fact been absent for several days.”

  “—And the whole place goes to hell in a handcart. Don’t any of you people know the meaning of the word initiative?”

  “Initiative,” she repeated. “A term used in human politics to denote a brief burst of undirected activity designed to give the illusion of decisive and substantive action. Would you like us to do that? I’m sure it can be arranged.”

  Elves, he thought. “No,” he said. “I want you to get off your bony arse and deal with it. Find this knight and feed him to something. Same goes for the lawyer.”

  “Understood. And Prince Florizel?”

  “Get rid of him. Replace—No, hang on.” Gordon frowned. “What did you say he’s supposed to have been doing?”

  “Obscene things with food,” Areweth replied. “Also, his ability to talk to unicorns has given rise to a certain amount of ribald humour, but that’s not the primary—”

  “Unicorns. He’s been talking to unicorns.”

  “Allegedly.”

  “And the unspeakable food thing.” Gordon was talking to himself. “That means with holes in the middle.”

  “Apparently he burned down the palace kitchen trying to cook something disgusting. Given the nature of human cuisine, I’d have said that was par for the course, but—”

  “Get me his file,” Gordon snapped. “Meanwhile, don’t do anything about him until I say so, understood?”

  “Perfectly. There’s no need to—”

  “And get on with those other two, the knight and the lawyer. I want them jumped on hard, but don’t be obvious about it.”

  “Of course.”

  She clip-clopped away, and Gordon stumped up the stairs of the North Tower to his office. Prince Florizel, he thought; talking to unicorns and trying to make a doughnut. Well, at least the idiot hadn’t made himself hard to find.

  He remembered something about a letter, and found it on his desk. Easy to tell which one was from King Mordak. Other species made their parchment from sheepskin. Among goblins, however, the saying about reading someone like a book is distressingly non-metaphorical.

  King Mordak to the wizard; greetings.

  Please accept this letter as formal notice of revocation of the contract between us regarding the supply of shining yellow stones. The United Goblin Federation has ceased mining operations and will henceforth be exploring new opportunities in other sectors. Hoping this finds you well.

  M. R.

  Gordon stared at the letter for a minute and a half, his mouth moving soundlessly. Then he grabbed the little silver bell and shook it ferociously until the clapper flew out and bounced off the wall. An Elf appeared, looking smug.

  “Get me the goblin ambassador,” Gordon yelled. “Right now.”

  The Elf cleared his throat. “The goblins have closed their embassy and withdrawn their diplomatic staff. If you look in your in-tray, you’ll find a full report—”

  “Go away.”

  “With pleasure.”

  Gordon sank back in his chair and caught his breath. No wonder Drain wanted to see him, now that he reckoned he had a monopoly of supply. Over my, no, let’s be sensible, over his dead body. But Mordak, suddenly quitting the mining business; what the hell was all that about? Why was everything suddenly falling to pieces all around him? What could possibly…?

  One thing about having a nephew like Benny; if something goes wrong, you never have to stop and wonder who’s to blame. What exactly Benny had done this time he wasn’t yet sure; that he’d done it, there could be no doubt. He picked up the silver bell and shook it, then remembered that it wasn’t working any more. One damn thing after another.

  “Elf!” he yelled, and, sure enough, an Elf appeared. “Was there something?”

  “Get me Prince Florizel.”

  The Elf frowned. “By get,” he said, “do you mean invite him to make an appointment to call on you, demand his attendance or abduct him by force?”

  “Yes,” Gordon said. “Quickly.”

  The Elf said nothing. Elves saying nothing are the most eloquent entities in the Multiverse. When he’d gone, Gordon threw a stapler at the door he’d just closed, but it just wasn’t the same.

  Here be dragons. Well, yes, Benny thought, rolling up the map and reaching for another. Tell me something I don’t know.

  The next one was hardly more helpful. Apart from here be dragons, it was depressingly short on useful information: place names, geographical features, that sort of thing. The artwork was superb, n
eedless to say. The margins were richly decorated with gorgeously gilded and illuminated drawings of weird and wonderful creatures (drawn, Benny was quite sure, from the life), and the mountains were little mountains rather than brown fried-egg shapes, and the forests were thousands of beautifully drawn little trees, no two the same, and such settlements as were shown consisted of a dozen or so dear little houses, with proper roofs and tiny wisps of smoke coming out of the chimneys–GPS, Benny remembered with a pang of unbearable nostalgia, what I wouldn’t give right now for a functional satnav. Or, come to that, my phone.

  The royal map room was famous throughout the known world for the size and quality of its collection. In practice, that meant it had nine maps, two of them almost but not quite identical, all of them exquisite, all of them useless. Number six, for example, had the mountains of Nawn sweeping down to the sea, whereas number five had them in the middle of the Very Big Desert–you could just make them out, if you were paying close attention–peeping out from under the tail of a particularly fine dragon. None of them had a scale, let alone a gazetteer; if you didn’t know where the place you were looking for was, there was no point trying to look for it, which Benny couldn’t help but feel was missing the point; unless these maps were like the aerial photographs of their houses that people buy to hang on the wall, to remind themselves You Are Here in moments of existential doubt. Of the Cradle of All Goblins, there was no trace. Well, duh. He wanted to find out where something was and he’d tried looking on a map. How dumb is that?

  Lateral thinking, he told himself. In a society where the last place you’d look for geographical information is a map, where would you look?

  Five minutes later, he found what he’d been looking for: a street urchin, standard issue, wearing a too-big hand-me-down jacket and ragged trousers, munching an apple he’d just stolen from a market stall. Perfect.

  “Excuse me,” Benny said. The boy didn’t seem to have heard him. Well, of course not. You don’t hear polite if you’re a street urchin. “Hey, you.”