by Tom Holt
He sat up and looked out of the window. Another dark, overcast day in the Land of Shadow, with most of the useful light coming from the red glow of the molten lava dripping slowly down the slopes of Mount Snorfang. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Sometimes, when the mountain laboured in its wrath and gushed out great torrents of blazing reflux, the glare got so bright that it was hard to sleep. What he could really do with, the Dark Lord decided, was a set of curtains for his window. Not a lot to ask, he decided, considering that without him the whole place would grind to a halt. Damn it, yes. Curtains he needed and curtains he would have.
Curtains—
He wasn’t a fussy person by nature, but he did spend a lot of time in this chamber, and why the hell shouldn’t he have something nice for a change? He didn’t need much imagination to picture in his mind the sort of curtains he’d get if he left it to Buildings Maintenance: coarse, scratchy cloth, carelessly hemmed, and black, of course–doesn’t show the dirt, they’d told him when he asked them the other day, and that did make a certain amount of sense; the Dark Horde’s goblinpower was vast but not unlimited, and if you have thousands of goblins tied up in laundry duty, they can’t be out there raiding and slaughtering. Even so. And now he came to think of it, the Captain of the Wraiths didn’t have to make do with everything black, he’d just had his whole suite of offices done out in sickly livid green.
“Guards!” he yelled.
Claws and steel-soled boots skittered on the stone steps of the spiral staircase. “Boss?”
“Get me,” the Dark Lord commanded, “a book of fabric samples.”
“Boss?”
“You heard me. And if they’re all black, you’re troll-food.”
It was a long time before they returned. Between them they were carrying a thin, flat cube the size of a paving-slab, completely wrapped in sheet lead.
“Sorry we took so long,” panted the guard sergeant, as he and his colleague hauled the thing up on to the dressing-table. “Only, we had to go and look in Inventory to see if we’d got one, and this is the only one we’ve got, and it was down in the high-security dungeon because of it being Hazardous Material. Elvish,” he added, with a slight shudder. “So then of course we had to sign for it, and—”
“That’s fine,” the Dark Lord said. Elvish would account for the lead wrapping. “Thank you. Get out,” he added quickly. The guards snapped a brisk salute. “Hold it,” he added. “Get all that lead off. Right now.”
“Boss? You sure? That’s an Elf artefact, you just don’t know with them buggers—”
“Now.”
They were quick about it, and his exceptional hearing meant he could hear them muttering on the stairs; they were worried about him, which was really rather sweet. But really, what possible danger to the Heart of Darkness could a collection of little squares of patterned cloth conceivably pose?
He swung open the cover of the book.
Some time later, between six and eight hours, the Officers of the Watch turned up to make their daily report. The Dark Lord didn’t look up when they came in, or even register their presence. He was slumped forward on the table, his head resting on the open pages of a horrible Elf-smelling book.
“Oh shit,” gasped the Castellan in horror. “He’s melting.”
The Captain of the Guard didn’t bother to correct him, though he recognised the symptoms from his long service in the wars. Their master wasn’t melting; rather worse than that. He was—
“Straight up,” he told his fellow officers in a hushed voice, as they crowded round the mess-hall trestle. “I kid you not. Blubbing his eyes out, he was.”
There was a shocked silence. Then someone said, “Elf book, you said?”
“Stank of the bastards. You could smell it down the corridor.”
“Well, there you are, then.”
The Captain nodded slowly. “Yeah, but even so,” he said. “I mean to say, he’s the Dark Lord. Elf magic isn’t supposed to work on the Dark Lord.”
“It’s ever since he got that body,” said another. “That human body. That’s what’s behind it, bet you a million snargs.”
“He was just sort of sprawled there,” the Captain said. “Just kept saying, so beautiful, so beautiful, over and over again. Wouldn’t let go of the book. We had to prise him off it with a wrecking bar.”
A brevet-major of Imperial stormtroopers looked at him sharply. “What did you do with the horrible thing?” he asked.
“Wrapped it back up in its lead sheets and locked it away in Number Six vault,” the Captain replied, “pending figuring out how the hell you dispose of something like that. Can’t chuck it out or bury it, there’s the risk of contaminating the water supply. Can’t just chuck it in the Fires,” he added, “it might blow the whole place up. You just don’t know, do you?”
“What sort of book was it?” asked somebody else.
“Oh come on, you don’t think I looked at it, do you? All I saw was, the pages were like bits of old rag with patterns on.”
“No words? Just pictures?”
The Captain shrugged. “Not even proper pictures,” he said. “More your sort of coloured squiggles.”
“Nasty.”
“What the hell was he doing with something like that, anyway?” asked the brevet-major. “I mean, magical research, he’s got people for that. Expendable people.” He smiled at the Senior Technical Officer, who scowled back.
“Excuse me.” A terrified junior officer was standing in the mess-hall doorway. “Message for the Captain of the Guard.” He took a deep breath, then added, “From Him.”
“Bloody hell,” someone said. Even being in the same room as a message from the Dark Lord wasn’t something to be taken lightly, and any show of irreverence was a mug’s game (the mugs in question being neatly arranged on hooks hanging over the bar). “What’s he on about now?”
“Um. He’d like his book back.”
The Captain passed a scaly tongue over his suddenly-dry lips. “When you say book—”
“The one he was reading, sir. The one you took off him by force, sir.”
A deathly silence fell over the assembled officers. Slowly the Captain stood up. “Well,” he said quietly, “better go and see what he wants, I suppose. Cheers then, lads. Next round’s in me.”
The brevet-major looked at him. “You mean on.”
“No,” the Captain said, “I’m afraid I don’t. Bye for now.”
All the way down to the vaults to get the book, then all the way back up the main stair to the topmost tower. Stupid way, the Captain mused, to spend the last half hour of your life. He knocked at the door, and a rather thin, weak voice said, “Come.” Oh well, the Captain thought, and opened the door.
The Dark Lord was sitting up in bed, sipping a cup (I know that face, the Captain thought, but couldn’t put a name to it straight away) of what smelt alarmingly like herbal tea. “Ah,” the Dark Lord said, “you’ve got it. Good man. Well, don’t just stand there, fetch it here.”
“Sir.”
“Splen—Oh for heaven’s sake, you silly man, you’ve put all that ridiculous lead sheeting round it again. Get it off, quickly.”
“Um. Sir. With respect—”
“Oh, don’t be such a fusspot. Give it to me, I’ll do it.” The Dark Lord’s steely fingers ripped away the sheet as though it were tissue paper. “Ah, that’s better. Now then, Captain, I’d like your opinion.” The Dark Lord was leafing through the bits of ensorcelled rag. “This one? Or this?”
“Sir?”
“Curtains, man, curtains. Oh come on, it’s not going to bite you. I quite like this one, but maybe the pattern’s a bit on the busy side, especially against a darkish background.”
The Captain was still struggling to come to terms with what he’d just heard. “Curtains?”
“For my window. The light from the lava flow keeps me awake.” The Dark Lord frowned at him, and the Captain’s knees began to shake. “You do know what a curtain is, don’t you?”
The Dark Lord sighed. “I know what you’re going to say,” he said. “But I don’t want black; it’s boring and I’m sick to death of it. I’ve got a good mind to have the whole tower made over while I’m at it, in nice bright cheerful colours. Black is so depressing. Sometimes I feel, if I have to look at one more horrid old black wall, I’ll scream.”
The Captain was staring at the book out of the corner of his eye. Strong magic, he told himself, appallingly strong; if he’d known the Elves could do stuff like that, he’d have had trouble sleeping at night. “Well?” the Dark Lord snapped. “I asked you a question, soldier. This one? Or the dove grey and tangerine?”
A shudder ran down the Captain’s spine. Death before tangerine. “The first one, sir. In my opinion.”
“Yes, I think so too. And if I have the walls done in apricot, it’ll go just nicely. Thank you, Captain, that was most helpful. You can run along now.”
The book, the Captain thought, as he tottered slowly down the stairs, barely aware of the slippery treads under his iron-shod feet. It’s that damned Elvish book, it’s poisoned, it’s eating his brain. Except—The Captain paused and grabbed the iron handrail; he desperately needed something to hold on to at that moment. Except, it couldn’t just be the book, because both of them had stared at it. Not just the Dark Lord, but himself as well. And his brain hadn’t turned to mush. Well, had it?
So if it wasn’t the book—
If it wasn’t the book–well, maybe the brevet-major was right and it was that new human body. That or something else; it really didn’t matter. What mattered was, the Dark Lord had lost it. And if it wasn’t just a temporary thing, if there was any chance at all he’d stuck like it and would be that way for ever and ever—
The very fact that the Captain was still alive, of course, proved it beyond reasonable doubt. He’d done wrong, taken the Lord’s book away from him, made him angry; by rights, there should be a pewter handle riveted to the back of his head for what he’d done. Instead, it had been thank you, most helpful, run along. And the inner sanctum of the Dark Principle, done out in apricot…
On the last step but one the Captain reached his decision, the only one he could possibly make. He’d served Evil for a hundred and forty-six years, and in that time he liked to think he’d come to understand the meaning of Duty. True, the decision he’d made would almost certainly mean his own death, and that of tens of thousands of his comrades, but what did that matter? The future of Evil was at stake. There comes a time when a man must stand up and do what he knows is Wrong.
“He’s off his chump,” the Captain muttered under his breath. “He’ll have to go.”
Mordak took a deep breath of clean, fresh mountain air. When he’d finished coughing, he said, “Right, now we know what we’ve got to—”
He stopped. Efluviel wasn’t by his side. He looked back and saw her sitting on a rock, about twenty yards away. “Hey,” he called out. “Come on.”
No reply. She didn’t seem to have heard him. He tried shouting louder, but no effect. Frowning, he trotted back up the path.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m not talking to you.”
Mordak’s mind was still full of revelations, theories, explanations, expediencies, and what she’d said did not compute. “You what?”
“You heard.”
Elves. “All right,” he said. “What did I do?”
She scowled at him. “Oh, that’s typical,” she said.
“What did I do?”
She sighed. “You there, Elf,” she said, in a pretty mediocre impression of his voice. “Cook the baked beans while we men solve the problem.”
“Don’t you ever call me that again. I’m a goblin. Not what you said.”
“I do apologise,” Efluviel snapped. “We males.”
“All right.” Mordak spread his arms in a vague gesture of appeasement. “Like I said, I’m a goblin.”
Efluviel gave him a look, but halfway through, it sort of faded into thoughtfulness. “Yes,” she said. “I must’ve forgotten that. Goblin, as in evil.”
“Yes, well,” Mordak said, with a hint of discomfort. “What I mean is, we goblins have a system of robustly traditional cultural values. Also,” he pointed out, “no females. I mean,” he went on, “we’d definitely do chauvinistic gender stereotypes if we could, but we can’t.” He frowned. “What I’m trying to say is, I denigrate and belittle you because you’re an Elf, not because you’re a girl. All right?”
Efluviel shrugged. “If you say so. It’s just—”
“What?”
“Oh, forget it,” she said, and stood up. “Sorry,” she said (and, five thousand miles away, the Far-Seeing Monks of Culiastre, who’d been wondering what all the comets and two-headed calves they’d seen recently had been in aid of, looked up from their crystal balls and said, Well, that explains that, then), “Just for a while there, I sort of forgot.”
“What?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Efluviel said irritably. “Now, then. What next?”
Mordak frowned. “I was going to ask you that,” he said.
For some reason, Efluviel felt absurdly pleased. “Right,” she said. “Sorry, what was the question?”
Behind them, the sheer cliffs glared red in the dawn light. “What,” Mordak said patiently, “do we do now?”
“Ah.” Efluviel nodded. “Right. First, let’s just quickly run over what we know. There’s a big hole thing.”
“Check.”
“Anything that goes into it doesn’t come back, but from time to time, truly bizarre stuff comes out of it.”
“Check.”
“Why do you keep saying check?”
“I’m not quite sure, now you mention it. Go on.”
Efluviel sighed. “The hermit,” she said, “was unwilling to commit himself on the question of where the human princes are getting all their money from.” She paused to give Mordak a chance not to say check, then went on, “He did, however, express the opinion that anything more than ordinarily weird that shows up around here generally turns out to have come through the big strange hole. He therefore suggested that we continue our investigations there.” She shrugged. “What do you reckon?”
“Go for it,” Mordak said.
“Right.” She nodded decisively. “Let’s do that, then. Now, I wrote down the co-ordinates he gave us—”
“Clever girl.”
She gave him a warning look. “So I suggest we take a look at the map and plot a course to get us there.” She paused again. “The map.”
“I thought you had it.”
“It’s sticking out of your pocket.”
“Oh, that map.” They spread it out on a rock. Then Efluviel said, “Right, we’re here. That’s the mountain range behind us there, and that’s the top of the ridge running more or less north-south there, and over there we’ve got the—hang on. This map’s not right.”
“Yes it is. It’s the latest edition goblin ordnance survey.”
“It’s not. It’s all wrong. Look. There’s all these contour lines here, where my finger is, but look, no mountain. Just a steep-sided ravine.”
“That’s not contour lines. That’s a gravy stain.”
A short pause, while Efluviel drummed her fingers on the rock. It seemed to help. Then she went on, “So if we follow the course of this river here, down the valley, circling round the base of the volcano—”
“Not a volcano.”
“Not—?”
Mordak scratched the map gently with his foreclaw. The volcano disappeared. “Sorry about that. You were saying.”
“Anyway,” Efluviel said, grabbing the map and stuffing it back in Mordak’s pocket, “it’s over that way somewhere. It’s probably signposted. Or we can ask someone. Well come on. Or are your feet hurting again?”
It was a long, grim march. To take their minds off the effort and discomfort, Efluviel gave Mordak the benefit of her opi
nions on various matters, including goblin fiscal policy, his handling of various recent diplomatic crises and his takeover and subsequent management of the Beautiful Golden Face; because, as she explained later, time simply whizzes by when you’re furiously angry. Which proved to be perfectly true.
“And another thing—”
“We’re here,” Mordak said.
“Don’t change the subject. Moving the opera reviews from the front page to halfway down page six was, in my opinion, one of the most appalling acts of cultural vandalism in the history of the world, and when I’m editor, the first thing I’m going to do—”
“We’re here.”
Efluviel blinked. “So we are,” she said. She looked up at the rocky crags above them. “Where is it? It’s supposed to be right here, but—”
“Efluviel,” Mordak said quietly.
“What?”
“Over there.”
“I can’t see—Oh.”
About three hundred yards away, on the skyline, two figures. “You’ve got better eyes than me.”
“Yes,” Efluviel said.
“Well?”
“Human,” Efluviel said. “Coming this way.”
For some reason, Mordak felt distinctly uneasy. “Coincidence,” he said. “Probably just simple shepherds. I bet, soon as they see us, a goblin and an Elf, they’ll run like hell.”
“Oh, they’ve seen us all right.”
“Ah. But once they get up close—”
“The short one’s waving.”
“Won’t he be in for a nasty surprise,” Mordak said nervously. “My only concern is, they’ll be so scared, they’ll trip on the rocks and do themselves an injury.”
“Really? That’s very altruistic of you.”
“Maybe we should just get out of sight behind a rock or something. In the interest of public safety.”
“They’ve definitely seen us,” Efluviel said. “There’s a short one and a tall one. Mordak? Oh for crying out loud. Come out of there, don’t be such a baby.”
The king of the goblins shuffled out from behind a large boulder and made an unconvincing display of doing up his fly. “Call it warrior’s intuition,” he said, “but I have a very bad feeling about those two.”