by Tom Holt
Oh, Benny thought. “Everyone,” he said, in as level a voice as he could manage, “keep perfectly still.”
“Wasp?”
“Not as such, no.”
Two dozen dragons’ teeth emerged from the shadows at the edges of the cavern. Benny and Turquine slowly raised their hands. One of the dragons’ teeth came forward, took the dynamite away from Benny and stowed it in a sort of knapsack thing. Reluctantly, Buttercup let go of the S-shaped hook and stepped backwards. “Well, don’t look at me,” she said, and raised her hands.
“Mind out, mind your backs, coming through.” Someone was elbowing his way through the ranks of dragons’ teeth. It proved to be a short, fat young man, thin on top and smiling, wearing a sort of pin-stripe monk’s habit. “Let me through, please, I’m a lawyer. Right, then. You’re Benny, right?”
Benny looked at him. “Yes. Who are you?”
“My card.” The young man gave him a little rectangle of pasteboard. “John the Lawyer,” he said. “I work for your uncle.”
“Ah, right.” Benny frowned. “You’re here to read us our rights or something?”
John laughed. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t take me very long,” he said. “No, I’m just here to see to it that these gentlemen don’t kill you by mistake. I’m also authorised to make this lady and gentleman a very substantial cash offer, provided they go a long way away and stop making trouble. You are, of course, completely at liberty to refuse, but if you do…” he paused and smiled. “Have either of you made a will, by any chance? If not, I can do that for you right now, very sensible thing to do at any time, but in your current circumstances, I should say it’s essential.”
Buttercup looked at him. “Get stuffed,” she said.
“Mphm.” John nodded affably. “I’ll take that as a no. Is that in respect of the will, the offer of settlement, or both?”
He had something in his hand, Benny noticed; a sort of grey, flat something, roughly the size and shape of a mobile phone. His phone, the one he’d lost in the woods. He realised he was staring at it, and looked away.
“How about you?” John the Lawyer had moved away from Buttercup and was now obtrusively in Benny’s space. “Of course the settlement offer doesn’t apply to you and the need for a will isn’t nearly as urgent as it is for your friends, but I always say to clients, it’s never too early to think about testamentary dispositions and tax-efficient estate planning.”
Benny felt something sliding into his hand. It was a revolting feeling, like a spider running across his face. He kept perfectly still.
“Well, no need to decide right this minute, think about it and get back to me any time. Now then, Sir Turquine, isn’t it? How about you?”
Buttercup and Turquine were looking at John; hard to know what, if anything, the empty eye sockets of the Teeth were pointed at, but Benny decided to risk it. He glanced down at the phone in his hand, and on the screen he saw—
50/50 on suing Ur uncle Urside? Ur friends go free. Deal? Yes/No
He looked up. John looked back at him and grinned.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Benny said. “Yes, I’m definitely interested.”
“Splendid.” John the Lawyer smiled at him, then came across and took the phone from him. “In that case—” He pressed a button, put the phone to his ear, waited, then said, “Any time you’re ready.” Then he handed the phone back to Benny. “You three might care to hide behind something,” he added.
“You what?”
Same drill as before, only louder and much hotter; a fist of hot air sent Benny flying, and it was just as well that he hit a huge slab of dragon sirloin rather than the hard wall. It was snowing brick-sized chunks of rock, and the dragons’ teeth were just an untidy scatter on the floor. Oh, and there was now another hole in another wall, through which a column of terrifying looking monsters were rushing, led by an old man in a flat cap and a tall young man with a phone in one hand and a half-eaten slice of quattro stagione pizza in the other.
“Just to confirm.” John the Lawyer crawled out from under a large slab of dragon. “That is your phone, isn’t it?”
“What?” Benny’s eyes were glued to the advancing monsters. “Oh, yes, right. Yes, my phone.”
John nodded. “Thought so,” he said. “It was found in the young lady’s basket, and your uncle was kind enough to teach me how it works. Not at all magic, I gather.”
Benny turned and grabbed him two-handed by the throat. “Whose side are you on?”
“Mine, of course,” John said, gently but firmly removing Benny’s hands. “I’m a lawyer. Now then, do you know King Mordak?”
Mordak; the goblin. So these horrifying creatures were—“No. Look—”
“Then it’s high time you met. He’s your new best friend.” John moved smoothly past him and advanced on the biggest and ugliest of the goblins, hand extended. “Your Majesty,” he said. “Thank you so much for coming. My name is John the Lawyer, and this is Prince Florizel.”
Mordak’s face indicated that he felt about lawyers the way Benny did about goblins, which raised him considerably in Benny’s estimation. “You said there was something we needed to see,” he rasped, in a low voice that made Benny want to hide under the nearest bed. “Where is it?”
John smiled, apparently completely unfazed. Another advantage of his profession, presumably. “In just a moment, sir, if that’s all right.” He turned aside and smiled warmly at the old man in the cap. “Thanks ever so much,” he said. “It’s so nice when people are punctual.”
“My pleasure, sir,” the old man said, “and sorry about the mess. Art had to use C4, see, on account of gelignite isn’t stable coming through the transdimensional vortex. The wizard not arrived yet, then?”
(And not just the hunchbacked, warthog-tusked goblins, either; there were equally terrifying short men with huge beards and axes. One of them was offering the tall young man a slice of cake from a battered tin box. Good cake, too, judging by how quickly the young man ate it.)
“He should be here any moment now,” John replied. “I rang him just before we–ah, here he is. Over here, sir, if you’d be kind enough.”
Benny swung round, and his heart nearly stopped as he saw his Uncle Gordon, with an escort of a dozen dragons’ teeth, coming through the hole in the far wall. The Teeth tried to unshoulder their rifles, but there simply wasn’t time; they were engulfed in a sea of goblins. Ten seconds later, the thigh bone was disconnecka from the knee bone, the knee bone was disconnecka from the leg bone, and only infinite patience and the latest edition of Gray’s Anatomy would ever make sense of them again.
Mordak made a sound like two elephants disagreeing about politics, lifted his axe and advanced towards Uncle Gordon. A second later, Benny was horrified to realise he’d jumped up on the goblin’s back with his arms round his throat. Wondering how he’d got there, he let go, slid to the ground and said, “Please don’t hurt him, he’s my uncle.”
Mordak turned and glared at him. “So what?”
“He’s my uncle. Don’t hurt him. Besides, he can do magic.”
He’d made a valid point. What with goblins, dwarves, dragon carcasses and Buttercup, the cavern was getting quite crowded. If Uncle Gordon started casting anti-personnel spells, he’d die quickly but by no means alone.
“Instead,” John the Lawyer said, easing smoothly between them, “let’s negotiate.”
“Let’s not,” Mordak said. “That bastard tried to kill me.”
“Quite,” John said. “So, instead of just killing him, let’s make him suffer. Why just disembowel when you can litigate?”
Uncle Gordon laughed. “Sure,” he said. “See you in court. You haven’t got anything on me.”
John cleared his throat. It wasn’t a particularly loud noise, even when amplified by the cavern’s rather bizarre acoustics, but the dwarves and goblins fell silent and turned to look at him. “Actually,” he said, “that’s not entirely true. Gordon Gulbenkian, please accept this as formal
notice that I shall be bringing an action against you for negligence, nuisance, breach of statutory duty, environmental pollution, attempted genocide and six thousand, nine hundred and forty-one separate violations of health and safety legislation. Without prejudice,” he added pleasantly. “How do you plead?”
Gordon gave him a long, cool look. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Really? Cast your mind back. When you first came here, there were no such things as dwarves and goblins, were there?” He paused for an answer; none came and he went on: “I checked the Elven records. No goblins, no dwarves, just the Elves and a few humans they kept as pets.” He stopped, aware that his voice had changed. Then he went on as before. “Then you made a discovery. Under the mountain, you discovered a mineral; nothing of any interest to anyone here, but back where you come from, extremely valuable. Thanks to that extremely clever phone device you lent me, I was able to find out a bit about it; information from your side of the divide, not ours. I’m still not quite sure I understand what it is your people want it for, but naturally occurring plutonium is quite rare where you come from, isn’t it? Rare, and valuable, and really rather dangerous. According to your clever machine, if you get too close to it, it does nasty things to you. If you’re around it for any length of time, it kills you. Isn’t that right?”
Gordon opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“Elves, of course, are tougher than humans,” John went on, “as they never tire of reminding us. So when you hired Elves to dig up the shiny yellow rocks for you, they didn’t die straight away, like men would’ve done. But it did do nasty things to them; so nasty that the other Elves didn’t want anything more to do with them, so the miners took to living down here, in the caves. And, three thousand years later, here they still are, though properly speaking, they aren’t really Elves any more. The mountain Elves got shorter and started growing beards, and the woodland Elves–well, I personally think Mordak and his people have a distinguished, commanding appearance, and you might care to argue that the extra eyes and the claws and so forth are actually useful developments and an improvement rather than a genetic mutilation. I’d venture to suggest, however, that a court might not agree. The grossly reduced lifespan issue is also somewhat moot, since because of the dwarf-goblin wars, very few goblins and dwarves ever live long enough to die of radiation poisoning. Since you deliberately started those wars, however, you may feel it wouldn’t help your case too much to take that point in front of the judge. I don’t know. Up to you.” He smiled. “Well? Is that more or less how it happened?”
A loud sobbing noise made Benny look round, and he saw a short, bearded man with a gold crown on top of his helmet being led away in tears. Then he glanced at King Mordak and instinctively backed away three paces.
“Is that right?” Mordak asked, in a surprisingly quiet, calm voice. “Well? Yes, you, in the blue nightie, I’m talking to you.”
Gordon shrugged. “I’m not admitting anything,” he said. “But in any case it’s all academic. All this stuff happened thousands of years ago. If your lawyer friend there was any good at his job, he’d know that there’s such a thing as a statute of limitations, even in this godforsaken armpit of a reality. Sorry, boys, but you can’t sue me, you’re out of time.”
For perhaps two seconds, Mordak was perfectly still and quiet. Then he roared and surged forward like a tidal wave, and nobody seemed interested in stopping him. Gordon sprang back, fumbling in the pocket of his robe. “Look out!” someone shouted–later, Benny was seriously upset to realise it’d been him–and a goblin soldier grabbed the thing that Gordon had pulled out; a small, round item of patisserie, with a hole in the middle. Gordon swerved sharply, kicked a goblin in the solar plexus and jumped over him, heading for the north wall of the cavern, where the fifty-foot giant doughnut—
—Had been. But it wasn’t there any more. Instead, there were just crumbs and a wall, against which the tall young man was leaning, chewing rhythmically and looking slightly guilty.
“Good boy, Art!” the old man yelled. “There, see,” he told the world in a loud, happy voice. “Told you he’d make himself useful eventually.”
Gordon stared in horror at the wall for a moment, then spun round to face the advancing phalanx of goblins. There was nowhere left to run, and Benny couldn’t bear to watch. He was about to turn away when a movement caught his eye; Uncle was standing on one foot, rolling up his left sock, scrabbling for—
The goblins must’ve seen it too; they charged, and the first goblin to reach him was quick enough to knock the emergency backup Cheerio out of Gordon’s fingers. It flew through the air, only inches from Gordon’s nose. He had just enough time to stare at it, through it, and yell, “So long, idiots”; and then he vanished.
Some time later, when the cavern was almost empty, John the Lawyer said, “Damn.”
Buttercup gave him a friendly smile. “It’s all right,” she said. “We all make mistakes.”
John shook his head. “A proper lawyer wouldn’t have forgotten about the statute of limitations,” he said sadly. “A proper Elf lawyer. Ah well.” He yawned, and stretched his arms. “You know, I don’t think I’m really cut out for a career in the legal profession. I reckon I might go into local government instead. You can be just as nasty, but you don’t have to keep getting things right all the time.”
Benny cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “if you want, I can give you a job.”
Turquine, who’d been lying on the floor with his feet up on a dragons’ tooth ribcage, looked up sharply. “Him? Oh come on.”
“Why not?” Benny said. “He’s smart, and his heart’s sort of in the right place, and he did save us all from Uncle’s soldiers.”
John made a vague, bashful gesture. “Motivated by pure greed, I assure you.”
“Yes,” Benny said, “but to be honest, I don’t think any of us have exactly covered ourselves in glory over all this. I know I haven’t, that’s for sure. If it hadn’t been for me barging in here without allowing for base theory distortion—”
The old man coughed gently. “As formulated by Sonderberg and Chen, sir? Bless ’em,” he added indulgently. “Course, young Art helped them a lot with that, back in the day. Put ’em on the right lines, so to speak. Sorry, sir, you were saying.”
Benny stared at him for a moment, then went on, “Anyway, the way I see it, this mess is just as much my fault as my uncle’s, and someone’s going to have to sort it out, and it’s not the sort of thing you can fix with a few magic spells and a happy-ever-after, it’s going to need solid hard work for a very long time. Really, I don’t think there’s any moral high ground, just a few low lying ethical foothills. If you want the job, you can have it.”
“Thank you,” John said. “Doing what?”
Benny shrugged. “Running things,” he said. “Making sure everything works. One thing Uncle was right about, you people can’t just go back to how things were. So instead, I guess you’ll just have to carry on doing all the outsorcery stuff, or else a lot of people are going to starve. The difference will be, though, you’ll get to keep the money, instead of Uncle grabbing it all for himself.”
Turquine shook his head. “The portal thing,” he said. “It’s gone. He ate it.” The young man blushed, and unwrapped a Snickers bar. “So we’re cut off—”
“Not really, sir,” the old man interrupted, “meaning no disrespect, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Me and Art, sir, we can rig something up, if you’d like us to. I mean to say, patisserie’s not really our line, strictly speaking, but it can’t be all that different from metadimensional field inversion, and we’re dab hands at that.”
“Just so long as I don’t have to watch,” Buttercup said crisply.
“And just to make sure you don’t make any careless mistakes in the accounts,” Benny went on, “I’d like Buttercup and Turquine to keep an eye on them for me. If that’s all right.”
“Sure,” Turquine said. “Sh
e’s got a marvellous head for figures.”
“Sweetheart.”
“So she can do the sums,” Turquine said, “and I can do the bashing-people’s-heads-in if the sums don’t add up. Though I’m sure they will,” he added graciously. “Won’t they?”
A wistful look flitted over John’s face, and then he nodded. “Yes, why not?” he said. “After all, money isn’t everything. It’s helping people that matters most in the long run. What?” he added. “Why are you all looking at me like that?”
“Nothing,” Benny said quickly. “Anyway, I’m glad that’s settled. I’d like to think, after all the mess my uncle and I made, there’ll be someone here to clear it up and make things run properly.”
Buttercup frowned a little. “You’re going back, then.”
Benny nodded sadly. “I have to,” he said. “I’d better talk to my uncle. Otherwise, he’ll come storming back here casting spells and sowing dragons’ teeth, and everything’ll be ten times worse.”
“You think you can stop him?” Buttercup asked.
“I think so, yes. He’d give it up, for me, if I make him see that’s what I really want. He’s not really a bad person, just—”
“An inhuman monster?”
“Thoughtless,” Benny said. “Not much consideration for other people. I think it’s because he uses up all his consideration on me, so there’s none left for anyone else. I’ll deal with him, leave it to me.”
The old man coughed gently. “Excuse me, sir, but you can’t.”
“Oh, I don’t know. If I can only make him see—”
“No, sir, if you’ll let me finish. You can’t go back to the other side, sir. You’ll die.”
Benny stared at him, but the old man nodded sadly. “Die? As in—”
“Yes, sir.” The old man took his cap off and twisted it in his hands. “No disrespect, sir, but you weren’t listening to what this gentleman here was saying. About the plutonium-302, sir. Particularly nasty isotope, the 302. Very bad for you, I’m sorry to say, and you were wandering about down there in the tunnels ever so long. Young Art’s been down there with his Geiger counter, bless him, and he says the ambient level is ninety times the safe max.”