The Good, the Bad and the Smug

by Tom Holt

  “Can I quote you on that? The Face loves conspiracies.”

  Mordak grinned. “You’d be doing me a favour. From now on, I’d like to read that everything I do, no matter how reformist and progressive it may look on the surface, is part of a deep-laid plot to subvert liberal Elvish values and engulf the Realms in a Great Darkness.” He looked down at his neatly manicured claws. “I don’t care if the Elves believe it, so long as the goblins do.”

  She nodded. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions?”

  “It will be from now on. Which reminds me. Number six on my list of things to do, get the roads sorted out. Good infrastructure is vital to flourishing trade and a healthy economy.”

  “You’ve been reading the business section, bless you. Oh, while I think of it. What’s that hideous statuette propped up on the cabbage-leaf dispenser in your office toilet?”

  “That?” He had to think for a moment. “Oh, that. Some award. Most Evil, or something of the sort.”

  “Of course, you don’t give a damn.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s just a popularity contest, after all. The hell with all that.” He took a piece of candied finger from the bowl, broke it in two and handed her half. “Here’s to New New Evil.”

  The Dark Lord opened his eyes.

  There’s not a lot to be said for having spent a hundred thousand years, on and off, as a disembodied force of pure negative energy, but it does teach you to be flexible, resourceful and not easily startled. Just as well. When he’d closed his eyes, he’d been in his purpose-built Evil Body, in his chamber at the top of the Black Tower. Now, it seemed, he was in a totally different body, in a place he didn’t recognise. He frowned.

  The new body wasn’t a patch on the old one. It was fat, for one thing, and a bit short, and its eyesight was nothing special, and it had got cramp from falling asleep in its chair–a weird chair, weird but really cool; it swivelled and flexed when you leaned back, and it was all shiny chrome and black leather. He blinked. Dead ahead of him was a vast window, or was it a wall, made of some sort of incredibly pure crystal, so wonderfully translucent it practically wasn’t there. The view from it told him that he was very high up, higher than the Black Tower, in the heart of a city the likes of which he’d never imagined possible, even in his wildest and most warped dreams. Vast glass towers reared up all around like cobras poised to strike, and as far as the eye could see was white stone, gleaming in the sunlight.

  He caught sight of something on the desk in front of him. Round, brown, with a hole in it. A memory–not one of his, presumably it came hardwired in the body–told him it was food. He was hungry. He ate it. Yum.

  A door opened, and a human female in strange clothes came in. But that was all right. From experience (see above) he knew what to do. He cleared his throat and smiled.

  “I just fell over and banged my head,” he said. “I’m fine now, but I appear to be suffering from partial memory loss. Please tell me who I am, who you are and where this is.”

  The woman looked startled for a moment, but he could tell she was trained in instantaneous composure recovery. “Well, sure,” she said. “You’re Norman Kropatchek, CEO of Schliemann Brothers in New York.” She paused, then went on, “Schliemann Brothers, the world’s largest hedge fund?” She sagged slightly. “Hedge fund?”

  “I seem to have temporarily forgotten what that means.”

  “Oh boy. Well, it’s like this.”

  The Dark Lord listened with growing astonishment, which he had to work hard to conceal. Amazing. He’d realised quite early on that he wasn’t anywhere he’d ever been or even heard of, in a world where so many of the rules were different, though by the sound of it, a lot of them were reassuringly the same. On balance, he liked what he heard. These people had good magic (though they didn’t call it that), but they were strangely naïve in some respects, frighteningly sophisticated in others. He’d have to tread warily, but yes, he could do well here. And be happy.

  Now there was a point. A certain amount of the recent past was filtering back in–maybe he had hit his head, after all; you never know when you might be telling the truth, as the old saying goes–and he could remember the last few weeks or months; a voice in his head, he recalled, prompting him to do all sorts of weird, crazy stuff. But the voice didn’t seem to be there any more, and he wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. He’d hated all the unnatural things the voice had forced him to do–had he? He wasn’t sure. When he tried to cast his mind back, he found he couldn’t actually remember ever being happy (just angry, frustrated, terrified, exultant; plenty of joy, now he came to think of it, but no actual contentment). A phrase came into his head, presumably also pre-installed with the operating system: the pursuit of happiness. Hmm. Pursuit; hound it down and destroy it utterly, presumably. Or maybe not. What were you supposed to do with it once you’d caught it? Maybe that was something you only found out at the time.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “I remember now.” He glanced at the glass-fronted box on the desk. There was clever writing on it, a bit like the seeing-stones back home, but the typeface was smaller. “So,” he said. “What’s this all about?”

  “Oh, that,” the woman said. “That’s the hostile takeover of MultiSoft.” She pulled a grim face. “Not going so well. Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.”

  “Give me a minute.” He read the words and figures on the glass, and found they made quite good sense. In about thirty seconds, he’d figured out what was going on. He could also see a number of tactical mistakes whoever had been doing this job before him had made, and several clever ways of getting round them. “All right,” he said. “Here’s what we’ll do.”

  Later that day, as the markets buzzed and trained negotiators did their very best to talk the former board of MultiSoft down off a very high ledge on the top floor of what had that morning still been their building, the woman came back in to see him. She was smiling. “It went well,” she said.

  “Told you it would.”

  “The word on the street is, Norm Kropatchek’s got his mojo back.”

  He frowned. “Norm Kropatchek is me?”

  “Um, yes.”

  “What’s a mojo?”

  She gave him a startled look, then changed the subject. Pan-Terrestrial Foodstuffs Inc., she said, was in her opinion ripe for the picking. Would he care to look at some figures? He would.

  Her voice was quite nice, when you got used to it.

  Presumably I could go back, the Dark Lord thought. Something brought me here, and most processes are reversible. On the other hand, why bother? Watch out, Happiness, he said to himself. You can run, but you can’t hide.

  Mr Winckler opened his eyes and looked down, and saw his feet.

  Well, he thought, that would explain the pain. He looked sideways, at his extended arms. Yup, he thought, check. Nails through the palms and ankles will do that to you every time.

  He was not alone. On either side of him, nailed to more or less identical crosses, were two men. One of them was nearly gone, his head slumped on his chest, eyes closed, lips slowly moving. The other one caught his eye and grinned.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Mike.”

  “Albert,” Mr Winckler replied. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, hanging in there.” Mike waited. Mr Winckler nodded wearily. “Great view you get from up here,” Mike said.

  “If you like desert.”

  “So,” Mike went on after a pause, “what did they get you for, then?”

  “You first.”

  “Thieving,” Mike said. “Can’t complain, it was a fair cop, they got me bang to rights. You?”

  “I think,” Mr Winckler said, “I may have invented Christianity.”

  “Christianity.” Mike frowned. “Hey, isn’t that the one where you love your neighbour as yourself and try and be nice to people?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Mike tried to shrug, but gravity wasn’t having any. “Doesn’t so
und so bad to me,” he said. “Still, the law’s the law.”

  “It is that.”

  “And a lot of what you said, that was blasphemy. That was blaspheming against the Lord.”

  “Indeed,” Mr Winckler replied. “You could say, I fought the Lord and the Lord won.”

  “True, my friend, very true. Even so. Ah well.” Mike sighed, sucked his teeth, whistled a tune. “Hey, look, down there. Isn’t that him? You know, the Roman governor. In the red cloak.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Never met him.”

  “Pontius–Pontius something. On the tip of my tongue.”

  “Pilate?”

  “That’s the guy. He’s all right, so they say. Good law officer. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. Zero tolerance on thieving.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “He’s coming this way.”

  Indeed he was; and behind him trotted two men, carrying a ladder. At the foot of the crosses, Pilate stopped, looked up, shaded his eyes against the vicious glare of the sun, and called out, “Hey, you. Not you,” he added, as Mike looked down hopefully, “the other one. You still alive?”

  “Afraid so,” Mr Winckler said.

  “Hold on, I’m coming up.”

  There was a brief flurry of activity as the two assistants propped the ladder against the arm of the cross and Pilate scrambled nervously up it. He was bright red in the face, and sweating in his heavy bronze armour.

  “So let’s get this straight,” he said, his nose six inches from Mr Winckler’s chin. “What you’re basically saying is, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and render unto God—”

  “Yup,” Mr Winckler said. “That’s about it.”

  Pilate gave him a thoughtful frown. “And all this stuff about destroying the Temple,” he said. “You’re going to tell me that was all whatsit, allegorical.”

  “Metaphorical,” Mr Winckler said. “Which is roughly the same thing.”

  “Metaphorical schmetaphorical,” said Pilate. “What I mean is, you aren’t urging people to get out there with pickaxes and burning torches, and all of that crap.”

  “Me?” Mr Winckler said. “Advocate violence? Perish the thought.”

  “So really,” Pilate said, “what I’m getting at is, you’re not political at all, you’re just some religious nut. Well?”

  “I object,” Mr Winckler said, “to the term ‘nut’. It’s pejorative.”

  Pilate scowled at him. “If it’s politics,” he said, “that’s treason, I’ve got no choice but to string you up. If it’s just religious stuff, I can’t be bothered with all that. Well?”

  “Religious nut,” Mr Winckler said firmly. “That’s me in a nutshell.”

  Pilate sighed wearily. “All right, boys,” he called out, “get him down.” He started to descend the ladder, then stopped. “A word of advice,” he said. “Stay out of trouble. Lay low. Keep your nose clean. I don’t ever want to hear your name again, savvy?”

  (The Imitation of Christ, Mr Winckler thought to himself. Well, why not? I can do a pretty good Peter Falk.)

  “What name would that be?”

  “Good boy. That’s the spirit.”

  As they were pulling out the nails, Mr Winckler recalled some of the things he’d heard about the YouSpace device, when he’d been negotiating to obtain one. The navigation system, for one thing. Just think of a destination, and it takes you there–or somewhere close enough for jazz, which was where problems so often arose. The point being, it takes you where you really, truly want to go, in your heart of hearts.

  It brought me here, Mr Winckler thought. Jeez!

  They put some sort of ointment on his hands and feet. It was green, and had chives in it. It didn’t help much. He told them so. They laughed. What do you expect, they said, miracles?

  “Just try and keep out of trouble,” Pilate told him, for the fifth time. “Have you got some place to sleep tonight?”

  Mr Winckler shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  Pilate sighed. “There’s a hostel on the corner of the Via Appia and the Linen Market,” he said. “Tell ’em I sent you, they’ll see you right.” He took a purse from the sleeve of his tunic. “Here’s ten sesterces,” he said. “It’ll see you through while you’re looking for work. Now get out of here.”

  What have I done, Mr Winckler thought, as he limped through the streets with the coins gripped tight in his hand. Screwed everything up again. No, because this is now a separate bifurcation of space/time comprising a brand new alternative reality, because of multiverse theory. So that’s all right; except that millions of people will have to live in it, in the universe I just created. Oh, it keeps on getting better and better, doesn’t it?

  Eventually, after many adventures, he drifted to Rome, where he got a job cleaning out the Cloaca Maxima, the main sewer that evacuated the waste of the entire city into the Tiber. The previous record for long service in that particular job was six months. Mr Winckler kept at it for twenty years. Then, one morning as he was sploshing to work through the waist-high whatchamacallit, he saw a familiar shape floating slowly towards him. He reached out and picked it up. It was a doughnut.

  The ancient Romans invented many things. Doughnuts were not among them. Mr Winckler held it between his fingertips and stared at it (sideways on) for a long, long time. Then he said, “I am not worthy”, and put it back.

  He started to wade on. Then his foot caught on something, and he fell forward. An instant before his face hit the meniscus, he saw—

  No matter what he saw; he saw it through the hole in the middle of the doughnut. All at once he was caught up by a great rushing sensation, which swept him away through every possible permutation of reality in the smallest possible fraction of a second, and deposited him far, far away—

  The YouSpace device takes you where you want to go. In your heart of hearts.

  Mr Winckler opened his eyes. He looked down. He whimpered. “Oh for crying out loud,” he said.

  extras

  meet the author

  Photo Credit: Charlie Hopkinson

  TOM HOLT was born in London in 1961. At Oxford he studied bar billiards, ancient Greek agriculture and the care and feeding of small, temperamental Japanese motorcycle engines; interests which led him, perhaps inevitably, to qualify as a solicitor and emigrate to Somerset, where he specialized in death and taxes for seven years before going straight in 1995. He lives in Chard, Somerset, with his wife and daughter.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE SMUG,

  look out for

  THE OUTSORCERER’S APPRENTICE

  by Tom Holt

  A happy workforce, it is said, is a productive workforce.

  Mmmm.

  Try telling that to an army of belligerent goblins. Or the Big Bad Wolf. Or a professional dragonslayer. Who is looking after their well-being? Who gives a damn about their intolerable working conditions, lack of adequate health insurance, and terrible coffee in the canteen?

  Thankfully, with access to an astonishingly diverse workforce and limitless natural resources, maximizing revenue and improving operating profit has never really been an issue for the one they call “the Wizard.” Until now.

  Because now a perfectly good business model—based on sound fiscal planning, entrepreneurial flair, and only one or two of the infinite parallel worlds that make up our universe—is about to be disrupted by a young man not entirely aware of what’s going on.

  There’s also a slight risk that the fabric of reality will be torn to shreds. You really do have to be awfully careful with these things.

  Once upon a time there was a story. It was about magic and the magical land, and the right here and the very much now. It was about wizards and dragons, profit and loss ratios, doughnuts, manpower coefficients, crystal portals, a handsome prince, a poor but feisty peasant girl, Vivaldi, a unicorn, a LoganBerry XPXX3000, coffee stirrers, goblins and high-speed broadband. It starts off “once u
pon a time”. It goes like this—

  The long shadows of a summer evening were falling across the meadows as Buttercup walked from the village to the big woods. In the basket over her arm she carried her father’s supper: bread and cheese, an apple and half a jar of pickled walnuts. As she approached the eaves of the wood, a rabbit poked its head out of its burrow and looked at her.

  “Hello, Buttercup,” it said.

  She looked at it. “Get lost,” she replied.

  The rabbit twitched its whiskers. “It’s a lovely evening,” it said.

  “It’s always a lovely evening,” Buttercup replied. “Go nibble something.”

  “You seem upset,” the rabbit said. One of its ears was drooping adorably across its face. “Is something the matter?”

  Buttercup reached into the basket, found the apple, took a quick but sure aim and threw. She hit the rabbit just above the eye, and it vanished back down its hole. Buttercup retrieved the apple, wiped the smear of rabbit blood off it with her sleeve and put it back in the basket. She felt a little better, but not much. A song thrush perched in the low branches of a sycamore tree opened its beak, thought better of it, and flew away in a flurry of wings.

  Twenty yards or so inside the wood, Buttercup met an old woman sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree. She was wearing a big shawl, with a hood that covered her face. “Hello, little girl,” she said, in a dry, crackly voice. “And where might you be going on such a fine evening?”

  Buttercup stopped, sighed and put down her basket. “You’re new here, right?”

  “I come from a village twelve miles away, across the Blue Hills,” the old woman replied. “I’ve come to visit my son. He’s a woodcutter.”

  Buttercup slowly shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she replied. “Look, we both know the score, right? Now, since you’re not from round here, I’m going to give you a break. I’ll count to five, and if you just get the hell away from me and don’t bother me again, we’ll pretend none of this ever happened. If not,” she added, “well.”