by Tom Holt
He turned away and was about to go back the way he’d come when he heard graunching noises, as of a key being turned in a rusty old lock. The door had opened a crack, and a nose was sticking out.
“Hello?” said the nose.
“Um,” Benny said.
The door opened enough to reveal the nose’s face. It was old, bald apart from a few wisps of white hair that really shouldn’t have bothered, and decorated with a pair of spectacles with the thickest lenses Benny had ever seen. “Yes?”
“What?”
“Does he want something?”
“Excuse me?”
“Does he want something?”
Ah, Benny thought, one of those conversations. He was about to back away when a vestigial remnant of his inner hero nudged him sharply and said, go on, ask him. “Actually, yes,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to have found a phone, would you?”
A blink, grotesquely magnified. “What’s a foan?”
Shucks. “Small grey sort of box thing, about so long and so wide, glass on one side.”
“Like a picture frame.”
“I guess so, a bit. Why, have you found one?”
“No,” said the bald man. “He’d better come inside.”
Benny was about to point out that he was actually rather busy and in a hurry, but a stick-thin arm shot out and grabbed his wrist in a surprisingly strong grip, and he found himself being hauled through the door before he could resist. He heard a clang, and a repeat of the graunching noise. “This way,” the bald man said, and vanished into the shadows.
“Um, excuse me,” Benny called out, but all he could hear was footsteps pattering away into the distance. He examined the door; locked, and the key not in the keyhole. Damn, he thought, and plunged into pitch darkness.
He went quite some distance, with nothing but the ring of his own footsteps for company, until he collided with an invisible barrier. He groped for it and found it was another door, this time unlocked. He opened it and went through into the blinding glare of a single candle, stuck in the mouth of an empty beer bottle.
“Welcome,” the bald man said.
He was sitting in a chair, the only one in the huge chamber. Behind him, on all four walls, were huge floor-to-ceiling highly polished brass plates, which amplified the candle’s flicker into a blazing light show; and on the plates, so small he could barely read them, were hundreds of thousands of names. He squinted and read the closest ones. He recognised them at once—
Stardollars Coffee
Orinoco.com
Fleabay
Anglo-Latvian Petroleum plc
Booble inc
“Welcome,” the bald man repeated, “to the registered office. We,” he added, after a short pause, “are the Chairman. We can spare him two minutes.”
“Um, thank you,” Benny said. “But really, I ought to be—”
“Would he,” the bald man said, leaning forward and peering at him so hard that Benny was afraid the glare through those lenses would set him on fire, “like a job?”
“Um.”
“Of course he would,” the Chairman said. “Well, let’s see, we think we’ll start him off as CEO of Booble Holdings inc. It’s a nice straightforward job, nothing much to it.”
“Excuse me,” Benny said gently, “but I think you’ll find Booble’s already got one.”
“Oh no.” The Chairman shook his head. “Trust us, we know. We’re the Chairman.”
“Um, really,” Benny said, backing away a pace or two. “I mean, they’re the biggest dot-com company in the world, I don’t see how they’d manage without someone running things.”
“Ah.” The Chairman laughed, revealing four teeth. “He’s thinking of Booble inc. We’re talking about Booble Holdings inc. The shell company.”
Benny wasn’t quite sure why he was arguing the toss with a man who looked like the Before photo in an advert for resurrection. But he said, “That’s the same thing, surely.”
“Oh no.” The Chairman shook his head, dislodging a carefully placed wisp of hair, which floated off and hung down over one ear. “Completely separate. Chinese walls. Got to be. Otherwise—” he stopped and looked carefully round. “Otherwise, they could get through, see?”
“No, not really.”
“Got to be separate,” the Chairman went on, rubbing his bony hands together. “All of them, all of our companies, all separate, all safe. Safe, in here, with us. This is the registered office.”
Benny took a deep breath. “You’re sure you haven’t seen a phone? It’s a LoganBerry XP—”
“He brought them all here,” the Chairman went on, sucking the tips of three fingers. “For us to keep them safe, from them, safe, separate, all our beautiful companies. They’re all ours, of course,” he added, suddenly throwing his arms wide. “All our companies, safe, in here, separate, with us.”
Benny looked at him. “It’s a tax thing, isn’t it?”
The Chairman let out a screech that went through Benny’s head like an ice pick. “No,” the Chairman yelled, scampering round and round in a tight circle, “mustn’t say it, not the T word, they’ll hear, it’s not safe. He mustn’t say the T word, not ever. Now then.” The Chairman seemed about to go from hysterical to calm in a heartbeat. He straightened up and went back to his chair. “We think we’ll also make him CEO of Orinoco Holdings and United Amalgamated Tobacco (2013) inc. Too much for us to do on our own, see, not as young as we were, got to look after them, got to keep them safe. Can he start straight away? There’s a handsome remuneration package, and benefits.”
“Really,” Benny said, “it’s terribly kind of you, but I do have to get out of here and find my phone.” He stopped. It was worth a try. “Benefits?”
“Oh, yes. Lovely benefits. He can have all the benefits he wants.”
“Private jet? Penthouse suite?”
“Naturally. Nothing too good for the CEO of Orinoco Holdings.”
“Expense account lunches?”
“Well, of course.”
“With maybe a, um, doughnut to follow?”
The Chairman started to cackle wildly. “Of course,” he screeched, “of course. All the doughnuts he can eat, of course he can. So long as he does as he’s told. So long as he keeps them separate, keeps them safe, he can stuff his face all day long, bless him.”
“Ah.” Benny managed to find a smile from somewhere. “Actually, I could really do with a doughnut right now, if you’ve got one handy.”
The Chairman turned his head sharply and gave him a grave stare. “Not now,” he said. “He can’t have his benefits now, what can he be thinking of? Only when He comes, when the wizard comes, to settle the accounts for the Great Reckoning. Then he can have his doughnuts, the horrible greedy creature, then he can have all his benefits, and they won’t be able to touch them, they’ll be deductible. When the wizard comes, he can have a bonus. But not till then.”
“Ah. Well, in that case—”
The Chairman was running his fingers over the names inscribed in the great brass plates. “He can start immediately,” he said. “And if he’s thinking of escaping, he can’t, because the door’s locked and we’ve got the key. Must keep the door locked, or they’ll get in.”
Bugger, Benny thought. Really don’t want to have to do this, but it doesn’t look like I’ve got a choice. He put his hand to the hilt of his sword and said, “Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer and it’s really nice of you, but I think I’ll go now, so if you’d be very kind and just unlock the door—”
The Chairman looked at him, then looked away again. If he’d noticed the hand on the sword hilt, he gave no sign of it. Damn, Benny thought, and he drew the sword.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m going to have to–ow, that hurt.”
The Chairman had moved so fast, Benny hadn’t really seen what he’d done; a punch, a kick, something of the sort. In any event, the sword was lying on the floor with the Chairman’s foot firmly on the blade, and Ben
ny’s hand felt like he’d just caught it in a car door.
The Chairman’s bright, horribly amplified eyes were staring at him. “So,” the Chairman said, “he’s one of them, after all. We should have known, he said the T word, of course he’s one of them. So, what are we going to do with him? Can’t let him go, he knows where to find us, it wouldn’t be safe, it wouldn’t be separate, no Chinese walls, nothing. Can’t let him go and bring them here, not to the registered office. So what will we do with him? What indeed?”
The Chairman rose from his chair and started walking towards him. Benny backed away as far as he could go, which wasn’t terribly far, and then said, “Just kidding.”
The Chairman kept on coming. “What did he say?”
“Actually, it was a test. The wizard sent me. To test your security. To make sure you’re keeping them safe. And separate, of course.”
The Chairman stopped. “The wizard?”
Benny nodded. “The wizard,” he replied. “My friend.” He turned up his smile to maximum beam. “Be—Florizel, he said to me, I’d like you to trot along down to the registered office and make sure everything down there’s safe and secure. And separate,” he added quickly. “I mean, he said, I’m sure there’s not a problem, I’d trust the Chairman with my life, but when it comes to keeping them safe, you can’t be too careful. Well, can you?”
The Chairman peered up at him out of his bug-like eyes. “Prove it,” he hissed. “He must prove it. Or we’ll eat him.”
“Um, there’s a bit of a problem with that,” Benny said frantically, “on account of, how am I supposed to prove what was said in a private conversation in a secure environment with absolutely nobody else present? Love to help, can’t be done. Looks like you’re just going to have to take my word for it.”
The extraordinary hissing noise suggested that the Chairman didn’t think much of that. “We’ll know,” he said, and started creeping forward again. “We’ll know when we smell him, oh yes. We’ll know if he’s been with the wizard any time in the last month, we always know. And if he’s been telling the truth we’ll let him go, and if he hasn’t, we’ll gobble him up, maybe with artichoke hearts, baby new potatoes and a dry Chablis.” He stopped; his nose was an inch from Benny’s chin. Snff, snff, like one of those dogs at airports.
“Look,” Benny said, “about the job offer. On mature reflection—”
“Ah.” The Chairman smiled, and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “We apologise. We are so sorry to have doubted him. We hope he will forgive us and let the wizard know that everything is in order here.”
“Oh yes,” Benny said, having a little trouble with his throat. “Really separate and safe. I’ll be sure to tell him.”
“How very kind.”
“Please, don’t mention it.”
“We’ll unlock the door now,” the Chairman said, “and he can go back and tell the wizard, and maybe the wizard will be pleased and send us more companies to keep safe.”
“You know, I’m almost certain he will.”
“More and more companies,” the Chairman purred. “To keep them safe from them. Until one day, who knows, all the little companies will be here, all the dear little companies, and we will watch over them and keep them separate, and the T word will have no dominion. One day,” he said, moving his glasses to wipe away a tear. “Perhaps.”
“Entirely possible,” Benny said, stepping round him to retrieve the sword. “Now, if you could just get the key.”
A moment later he was on the threshold. He stepped out into the cold, quiet tunnel, and the door started to close behind him. Then it stopped, and the Chairman’s nose appeared once more.
“You know,” he said, in a higher, marginally saner voice than before, “you remind me of him a little. You have the same ears. Goodbye.”
The door slammed shut, and there was that graunching noise again, and Benny was alone in the tunnel. He looked back at the door for some considerable time, because it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that last assertion; then he walked back up the way he’d come to the triple fork.
The pale amber beams of the Horrible Yellow Face slanted down through the high branches of the willow grove, blazing a lattice of golden light on the red and brown leaf mould. The glow reminded Mordak of the shining stones, which only yesterday had been the whole raison d’être of his people, and which he’d deliberately turned away from. He grunted, swung his billhook and took his doubts and fears out on a sapling.
Leading from the front is the goblin way, and there had been no question in his mind–they could do this. If a bunch of supercilious high-cheekboned ponces could do it, the Children of Groth could do it better, faster and with infinitely more style. You cut off a bit of twig, you split it and twist the strips into a basket. Piece of ear.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t turning out quite the way he’d anticipated. The sapling was ridiculously springy; you hit it with the billhook and it sort of bounced out of the way, then bounced back and smacked you in the face. When eventually you’d managed to chomp your way through it, assuming the hook hadn’t sprung off and cut deep into your ankle, when you came to split it, the result was usually shredded bark and splinters. So far, the Children of Groth had levelled two acres of coppice, and nothing to show for it apart from blisters, a couple of dozen severed digits that’d take days to grow back, and a certain amount of ill humour.
I will persevere, Mordak told himself through gritted teeth. I’ll do this if it kills me.
Pause for thought and a surreptitious look round at his subjects. I’ll do this, and one of them’ll kill me, he amended; unless I can get the hang of it and show them, and I really need to do that quite soon, or else there’s going to be—
“ ’Scuse me, sir.”
He froze his slash in mid-swing and looked up, and saw the old human bodyguard, who was watching him with a look on his face. Mordak bared his fangs. “What?”
“Do please excuse the liberty, sir, and I really don’t mean to criticise, but there’s, um, there’s an even better way of doing that, sir, if you’ll just allow me to show you.”
Another furtive survey; nobody was watching. “Be my guest,” Mordak grunted, and handed him the billhook.
The old man smiled, took the hook and proceeded to harvest an armful of neatly severed saplings in the time it’d take Mordak to eat a pickled nose. “Sort of like that, sir,” the old man said, straightening his back with a grimace. “More a sort of diagonal motion, if you follow me, and as close to the ground as you can make it. You try it, sir, see how you get on.”
Amazing. Goblins have a proverb; the worst thing a king can say is, I never expected that. Mordak had never thought he’d see the day when he learned something useful from a human. True, forty-eight hours before he never thought he’d see the day when goblins made baskets, except for the purely decorative kind woven from the ribs of their enemies. “Yes, that’s much better,” Mordak said. “Um, thank you.”
“’Scuse me, sir? Bit deaf in this ear.”
“Thank you.”
The old man smiled, and Mordak got the distinct impression that he’d just passed some kind of test. “My pleasure, sir. Well, I’ll leave you to it, don’t want to get in the way of the good work.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Again not wanting to sound cheeky and push myself forward where I’m not wanted, but purely out of interest, there’s a slightly different way of doing the splitting, too.”
“You don’t say.”
“Oh yes, sir, believe it or not. I could show you some time, maybe, when you can spare five minutes.”
“It just so happens I have five minutes right now,” Mordak said. “So, what’ve you got?”
Once the lesson was over and he was absolutely sure he’d learned it, Mordak spent an hour practising, to make perfect, after which his back ached like never before and his right arm felt as though he’d been holding up the cavern roof with it. Never mind. He took a long, satisfied look at the neat pile of willow strip
s he’d built up, then stomped across to the middle of the glade, climbed up onto a fallen tree and yelled “Listen up!”
The goblins stopped work and looked at him. He put on his most terrifying royal scowl, counted to five under his breath, puffed out his chest like a frog and addressed his people.
They were all, he told them, useless. A bunch of globs straight out of the spawning vat could do better; damn it, dwarves could do better, blindfold in the dark with clamshell gauntlets on. It made him sick to his stomachs to watch them. Well, he couldn’t bear it any longer, so he’d better show them how to do it. First, you hold your billhook in your right hand like this—
Much later, when they were gathering up the split withies and loading them on carts, Mordak reflected on greatness. So far, five goblin kings had been accorded the honour of being called The Great; Mog, Uzak, Blung, Azmak and Groon. Mog had started the war with the dwarves, and his bleached skull still decorated the guest bathroom in Drain’s winter palace at Hazad-Gloom. Uzak had slaughtered the Elves at the battle of Hoon, and all they’d ever found of him was one tattered sock. Blung had won a civil war; so, subsequently, had Azmak; Azmak’s successor Groon had had their skulls made into a condiment set–Blung was salt, Azmak was pepper, and in due course Groon joined them as salad dressing. That sort of thing, in goblin eyes, constituted greatness. If anyone remembered the name Mordak in a hundred years’ time, assuming there were any goblins left by then, it’d be as Mordak the Basket-Weaver, or Mordak the Big Girl’s Blouse. And quite right, too, he reflected. The purpose of goblins is to fight, hurt people and die. Surviving, prospering, being happy; a simple case of the wrong tool for the wrong job, like trying to drive in a nail with a rose.
So, he thought, what has got into me?
They’d finished loading the carts, and now they were sitting round a roaring campfire of minced-up brash, roasting squirrel kebabs and passing round a big jug of malted milk. They seem happy, Mordak said to himself; and the voice inside him said, exactly, that’s the point, goblins aren’t meant to be happy, any more than the sky is meant to be green. A green sky or a happy goblin may have a certain superficial attractiveness, but they’re both inherently wrong. Goblins can’t function on contentment, it’s lacking in certain essential vitamins absolutely required to sustain goblinity. A bit like celery; you can eat celery all day every day and still die of starvation. Goblins need protein.