The Good, the Bad and the Smug

by Tom Holt

  “You’ve got—” Efluviel’s eyes opened wide. “Oh my God. The Fifth Stone. The Fifth Stone is in the hands of goblins.”

  “Mphm.” Mordak hesitated, but she did look terribly upset. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.

  “Oh really. The Fifth Stone is controlled by the enemy and he says not to worry.”

  “We can’t get it to work,” Mordak said. “It used to, about four hundred years ago. But then the picture got a bit blurry, and some fool thought he could fix that by cleaning it with nitric acid. We clean everything with nitric acid,” he explained, as Efluviel stared at him, “it’s the only way to get rid of those stubborn ground-in stains without the boil-wash. Anyway, since then it hasn’t worked worth a damn.”

  “Oh.” Efluviel breathed a sigh of relief. Then she frowned. “Hang on, though,” she said. “If you’ve got the Fifth Stone, and the other five are all accounted for, what on earth is that?”

  Mordak shrugged. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Oh no, I can’t.” Efluviel was actually blushing. “He’s the hermit. No, no, I can’t. Really.”

  Mordak rolled his eyes. “We’ve come all this way to ask him questions and now you’re shy. I don’t believe it.”

  “You ask him. I just can’t. Sorry.”

  “Elves,” Mordak said. Then he advanced towards the hermit and cleared his throat. “Excuse me—”

  “Quiet!”

  Behind him, Mordak could hear a little whimper, which he ignored. “I said, excuse—”

  “Shut up,” the hermit roared. His eyes were still fixed on the crystal.

  Mordak could feel his hackles rising. He took a deep breath, then another. “Listen, friend,” he said. “The lady and I have come a long—”

  “Shut up! Go away! Oh for God’s sake. Why do you people always have to show up at exactly the wrong moment? Go away.”

  Mordak thought for a moment. Then he slipped off his tattered travelling cloak and threw it over the crystal sphere. The hermit stared for a moment, then screamed. It was possibly the shrillest noise Mordak had ever heard, and goblins have rather sensitive ears, attuned to picking out very faint noises in the dark. So he did what he had to do, whereupon Efluviel hit him with a chair. By then, however, it was too late.

  “You lunatic,” she screamed in his ear. “You’ve killed him.”

  Mordak sighed. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “He’s just mildly stunned, that’s all. He’ll be fine in a minute.” He picked a splinter of wood out of his collar and looked at it. “Did you just attack me?”

  “Yes.”

  He shrugged. “Well, you’re not very good at it. You can explain to him why his one and only chair is now firelighters.” He leaned forward, twitched the cloak off the globe, and crouched down to listen. Very faint and far away, he heard a voice that seemed to be saying, “Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, moderate easterly, good”. He shrugged. “Oh look,” he said. “Your friend’s waking up.”

  The hermit groaned, opened his eyes, saw Mordak and cringed away. “Get him off me,” he shouted. “Help! Goblins!”

  “Now then,” Mordak said, “there’s no call for that. I just—”

  “Goblins!” The hermit scrambled to his feet, caught his bare toes in the hem of his robe, slipped, skated across the smooth floor of the cavern, banged head first into the wall and went back to sleep. “Oh come on,” Mordak said. “This is silly.”

  Efluviel grabbed him by the sleeve and marched him over to the opposite corner of the chamber. “Stay,” she snapped. “I’ll talk to him. You’ve done enough for one day.”

  “The silly sod tripped over his feet,” Mordak protested. “How is that my fault?”

  “You’re a goblin.”

  Mordak made a faint whimpering noise. “Fine,” he said. “You talk to him. A moment ago you were too shy.”

  “That was before you started beating him to a pulp.”

  “I did not—”

  “Goblins,” Efluviel said savagely. “Bloody goblins.” The hermit was stirring again. “You,” she said, giving Mordak a look that would’ve stripped paint. “Stay there. Don’t do anything. Don’t say anything. Leave everything to me. Understand?”

  She said the last word slowly, accentuating each syllable. It was probably the single most dangerous thing she ever did in her life, though at the time she was too preoccupied to realise. For a moment, Mordak’s eyes glowed like tiny furnaces; then he suddenly smiled.

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Clown.” Efluviel turned her back on him and stalked across the chamber. By the time she reached the hermit he was sitting up, massaging his forehead with the palms of both hands. “Excuse me,” she said.

  “No!” yelled the hermit. “Go away! Keep back. Don’t hit me.”

  Efluviel had a smile on her face, hard and inflexible as an axe-head. “It’s all right,” she said, “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m an Elf. I’m good.”

  “Piss off.”

  Efluviel dropped on one knee and leaned forward to examine the hermit’s forehead. He shrank back. “Get off me.”

  “I just want to see if—”

  “Get away from me or I’ll rip your ears off.”

  “Mphm.” Efluviel edged back a little. “You don’t seem to be too badly hurt. No blurred or double vision, nausea, dizziness?”

  “I’ve got a knife,” the hermit said. “Somewhere,” he added, looking round. He scrabbled on the floor beside him and his fingers closed on something. It turned out to be a fork. “Want some of this, do you, needle-ears? Come on then, if you think you’re hard enough.”

  Efluviel’s jaw dropped. “Needle-ears?”

  “You heard me.”

  For a moment, her eyes gleamed just like Mordak’s. Then she said, “It’s all right, I forgive you, you’ve just had a very traumatic experience. Just don’t ever call me that again. Capisce?”

  There was a clatter as the fork hit the floor. “Sorry,” the hermit said. “Just keep your goblin off me, all right? And don’t scowl at me like that.”

  “I’m not scowling. This is just my face.”

  “Then for God’s sake take it outside. It’s making my teeth hurt.”

  Efluviel blinked twice. Then she turned round. “Mordak,” she said. “Come and talk to the nice gentleman.”

  “Love to.” Mordak got to his feet and wandered across. “Hello,” he said, “let’s start again. I’m Mordak, king of the goblins, though I’m sure you knew that already. Sorry if my assistant here’s been bothering you. I wonder if you’d care to answer a few questions. If you do,” he added quickly, before the hermit could speak, “we’ll go away and never come back.”

  “Shoot.”

  Mordak smiled. “Thank you,” he said, and sat down cross-legged on the floor. “First, you said something about lunch.”

  “Over there.” The hermit waved at the bean jars.

  “Thank you. My assistant will see to that. Would you like to join us?”

  “I’m not eating anything she’s been fiddling with.”

  Mordak smiled. “As you wish. Can’t say I blame you. Now then, that thing over there. What is it?”

  The hermit glared at him. “None of your damn business.”

  A crash behind him told Mordak that Efluviel was knocking the heads off baked-bean jars. “It’s one of those seeing-stones, isn’t it?”

  “Might be. Never said it wasn’t.”

  “But she doesn’t know about it.”

  A broad, crafty grin spread across the hermit’s face. “Loads of stuff she doesn’t know about,” he said. “Thinks she’s so smart. Patronising cow.”

  “I like you,” Mordak said. “In fact, I like you so much I might just decide to come and settle here permanently, and bring all my friends. Unless,” he added pleasantly, “you tell me where you got that thing from and why her lot don’t know about it.”

  The hermit’s face didn’t change, but his eyes grew very round. “They all came through It,” he said
quickly, “all the seeing-stones. All that about the Pink Ships is just bull. But that one came later than the others. Bloke who sold it to me said so. Bloke in a bar.”

  “Ah.” Mordak gave him a reassuring grin. “And does it work?”

  “Sort of.”

  Mordak nodded slowly. Goblins love bargains, so the properties of objects bought from men in bars were familiar to him. “It doesn’t work.”

  “Well, no. Not for talking to the other stones, but then, who gives a damn? All the other stones belong to Elves.”

  “Quite.”

  “But it does work. Sort of.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Ah.” The hermit seemed to have forgotten that he was talking to a goblin; his voice was higher and far less whiny, and he’d stopped quivering. “That’s a good question. It talks to me. I talk to it, but either it can’t hear me or it isn’t interested. A bit like my ex-wife.”

  “I see,” Mordak said. “What does it say?”

  “All sorts of really weird stuff,” the hermit replied excitedly. “I think it must be gods or something. You get different voices at different times of day. Like, the one I was listening to a moment ago tells you what the weather’s going to be, except that it’s always wrong and I’ve never heard of any of the places. And a lot of the time it’s a horrible noise like music, except it’s not music. And then there’s other gods telling me about stuff happening in a load of other places nobody’s ever heard of, and I can understand most of the words, but none of it makes any sense.”

  Mordak thought for a moment. “You’re sure it’s real,” he said, “and you haven’t gone mad or anything?”

  “I wondered about that,” the hermit said earnestly. “I mean, at one point I was pretty sure I must be imagining the whole thing. But I asked some visitors if they could hear it too, and they could. You heard it, didn’t you? Just now.”

  “Yes, now you mention it, I did hear something.” Mordak said. “It was a little voice coming from a long way away. Dogger and Fisher and—”

  “German Bight.” The hermit nodded vigorously. “So if you can hear it, it must be real. But I’ve researched it thoroughly, I’ve looked in all the records of the wisdom of the ages.” He nodded in the direction of the floor a few yards away; lying in the dust among the empty bean jars Mordak could see two small, rather dog-eared books, Wisdom and More Wisdom. “And there’s nothing in any of them about Dogger or Fisher or German Bight, or Washington or London or Brussels or Kabul, I don’t even know if they’re people or places or what the hell they are. And the stuff. The stuff’s just plain bizarre.”

  “The stuff.”

  “The stuff the gods tell me about. Crazy. Half of it’s all wars and earthquakes and some really odd kind of politics, and the other half is a load of trivial nonsense about actors and musicians and people who play kids’ games for money. And the god makes it sound like they’re all equally important, which makes no sense at all.” He sighed, and slumped against the wall. “For two pins I’d chuck the bloody thing down a volcano and be done with it, except—” He shrugged. “If it really is gods talking to me, I’ve got to listen, haven’t I? It’s my duty.”

  Mordak rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You said that the ball thing came here through It.”

  “That’s right. At least, I think so. That’s what the bloke told me. Where else could it have come from?”

  “What’s It?”

  The hermit’s face suddenly went blank. “You don’t know.”

  It occurred to Mordak that he might have made a serious tactical error. “Of course I know,” he said. “I just wanted to be sure we were talking about the same It, that’s all.”

  He’d just made things worse. “There’s only one It,” the hermit said. “And you don’t know about it. And if you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “No I can’t. That’s sacred wisdom, that is. Need to know only. Not to be shared with the likes of you.”

  Mordak pursed his lips. “What if I were to make a Freedom of Information request?”

  “You do what you damn well like.”

  “All right. How about if I bite your arms off?”

  The hermit’s nostrils twitched. “That’s different.”

  “Splendid,” Mordak said, grinning so as to exhibit his full range of teeth. “Now then. Tell me everything.”

  “I’m not supposed to. I’ll get into all sorts of trouble.”

  Mordak clicked his tongue. “No you won’t,” he said. “You’re under the direct personal protection of the king of the goblins, who’s unconditionally guaranteeing your safety. Also, if you don’t, I’ll hit you.”

  Goblin diplomacy at its finest. The hermit shuddered, then sighed. “It,” he said.

  “It.”

  “It’s a thing.”

  “You don’t say.”

  The hermit gave him a much-enduring look. “I don’t know how you’d describe it,” he said. “Basically, a few hours’ march from here, there’s a cliff. In the face of the cliff, about three feet off the ground, there’s a hole, about six feet across. All round the hole there’s this—” The strain of searching for the right word distorted his face for a moment. “Thing. It’s like a big circle, it’s sort of a light brown, they do say it’s soft when you push against it, like a cushion, and oily and glistening, and there’s sparkly things like diamonds all over it. That’s it. A thing.”

  Mordak frowned. “A thing with a hole.” He scratched his head. “Sounds like a perfectly ordinary cave to me.”

  The grin that covered the hermit’s face had nothing o do with amusement; it was beyond pleasure or fear. “Ordinary it ain’t,” he said. “Anything that goes through the hole doesn’t come back.”

  “Ah.”

  “Quite.”

  “That sort of hole.”

  “That sort of hole,” the hermit repeated solemnly. “And if you stand next to it and keep very, very still, sometimes you can hear voices on the other side.”

  “I bet.”

  “Straight up. Distant voices, whispering. And nothing that goes in from our side ever comes back, but—” He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a murmur. “They do say, sometimes things come from the other side into our side. Things and people.”

  Mordak’s head was starting to hurt. “Seems to me,” he said, “that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get a bloody great big rock and fill it in. Just to be on the safe side.”

  That grin again. “Oh, they’ve tried that. The Wise. They’ve blocked it with boulders, they’ve built walls, they’ve sapped into the cliff face and brought down avalanches. Next day, the bloody thing’s back again. There’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to get rid of it. Believe me, they’ve tried. Six hundred years ago, the Jade Emperor of the East garrisoned an entire army there, six thousand men, to make sure nothing came through. When the supply wagons rolled up there two days later, they were all gone. Nothing left behind but a belt buckle and a small heap of plum stones. People try not to go near it much these days.”

  “For some reason.”

  “Indeed. Anyway,” the hermit said, taking a deep breath, “that’s It. And that’s where the man in the bar said this stone thing came from. Through the hole. From the other side.”

  Cautiously, Mordak edged forward and nudged the crystal very gently with his foot. It didn’t move; it was like pressing against a wall. But it was spherical. Touching it made Mordak feel sick. “Well,” he said, “that’s really very interesting, but it’s not what I came to see you about.” He picked up the cloak he’d thrown over it earlier and replaced it, taking care that his fingertips came nowhere near the crystal’s surface. “All I want is to ask you a few questions.”

  The hermit was looking at the covered sphere. “You know what,” he said, “when you do that, it’s different, somehow. Like suddenly it can’t see me any more.” He pulled himself together with a visible effort. “Let’s have some lunch,” he said. “I could mur
der a baked-bean sandwich.”

  “A baked-bean sandwich wouldn’t be murder,” Mordak said. “It’d be self-defence.”

  Archie wiped blood out of his eyes and propped himself up on one elbow. His head felt like he’d been using it to drive in fence-posts, and his fingers and toes were tingling ominously. “Define bad,” he said.

  “Well.” The bald man reached out a hand. Archie shrank away, then realised that the bald man was offering to help him up. “A bad host, for one thing. Can I get you some milk? Pineapple juice? Maybe a couple of croissants.”

  Archie was on his feet again. He swayed; balance sold separately. “Have I just been abducted?”

  That made the bald man laugh. “If you like,” he said. “Me, I’d call it relocated or maybe added to inventory, but these things are subjective. If you don’t fancy croissants, I can get the lads to run you up a cheese and rocket salad.” Then he frowned. “You’re not going to attack me again, are you? Please don’t. Human bodies can’t take it like goblin bodies can.”

  Archie nodded. “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s pretend I have attacked you, and I’ve smashed you to the floor and jumped on your face a few times, and now I’ve terrified you into telling me exactly what’s going on.”

  “Sure,” the bald man said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Who are you, where am I, what am I doing here—” The bald man held up his hand. “That sort of thing,” he said. “Yes, why not?” He sat down cross-legged on the floor, took an apple from his pocket, bit off a large chunk, pulled a face, spat it out. “Are you sitting comfortably?” he said. “Then I’ll begin.”

  Presumably you’re aware (the bald man said) of the Law of Conservation of Matter.

  You aren’t? Gosh. Not to worry, because I was just about to say, forget everything you’ve ever learned about the Law of Conservation of Matter, ignore it, expunge it from your mind entirely. But you won’t have to do that, so that’s all right. Actually, you’re far better off than most people, because they know about the Law of Conservation of Matter, and it confuses the hell out of them when I tell them what they actually ought to know, which is the Law of Conservation of All Sorts of Things.