by Mike Ashley
The sales staff stood respectfully watching as the company president himself sat down to try out one of the gleaming new terminals. The president had started the company out of his basement when home computers were new, and he was only a college dropout from Silicon Valley, and he was still proud of his programming skills.
But as the president punched figures into the keyboard, long, curling, purple moose antlers began to sprout from the top of his head.
The sales staff stood frozen in silent horror. Barry gasped; then, recovering swiftly, he reached over the president’s shoulder to hit the cancel key. The purple moose horns disappeared.
The Old Man looked up, puzzled. “Is anything wrong?”
“Only a glitch, sir,” Barry said smoothly. But his hand was trembling.
He was afraid that there were going to be more such glitches.
The way sales were booming – a lot more.
Evidently, the fairyfolk had finally figured out what computers were really for. And Barry suddenly seemed to hear, far back in his head, the silvery peals of malicious elven laughter.
It was a two-way system, afterall . . .
DEATH SWATCH
Esther Friesner
Esther Friesner (b. 1951) is rapidly becoming the Queen of Comic Fantasy. Although she has produced much excellent serious fantasy, it is for her humorous work that she is best known. These include the Demons sequence, Here Be Demons (1988), Demon Blues (1989) and Hooray for Hellywood (1990), and the Gnome sequence, Gnome Man’s Land (1991), Harpy High (1991) and Unicorn U (1992), plus some wonderful one-off books such as Druid’s Blood (1988) and Yesterday We Saw Mermaids (1991). She has also edited the audacious anthology Chicks in Chainmail (1995) and its follow-up Did You Say Chicks? (1996). She has produced scores of clever short stories since her first sale in 1982, all too few of which have been collected in book form, although you’ll find a good selection in It’s Been Fun (1991).
Jorc the orc shifted his warty bulk from paw to paw and lugubriously announced, “I don’t like it,” to his companion on guard duty. “I don’t like bein’ held r’sponsible fer what’s behind this door. Gives me the willies, it does.”
“Two questions,” the troll replied through his tusks. “One: What’s not to like? And two: If you think the Grim Lord cares whether us poor menial slaves like his doings or not, you’re crazy, even for an orc.”
Jorc blinked slowly, his thick eyelids making an audible thunk every time they met. “Tha’s not a question. I know. I can tell. Hasn’t got one o’ them twizzly rune-thingies at the end o’t to tell you that yer voice’s gotta go up. What makes it sound more interrogative-like.”
“Ahhh,” the troll said, his face showing as much innocence as possible, given its aesthetic limitations. “So it’s things that make your voice go up that makes it a question?” And to be honest, his own voice did lift a bit at the end of that sentence, giving a creditable imitation of a rusty door hinge.
Jorc nodded vigorously and leaned back against the jamb of the monstrous door that he and the troll had been set to guard. It was a post of honor, being as it was the sturdiest portal in the Grim Lord’s castle, the gateway to the tower rooms where His Awfulness lodged only those “guests” of the highest rank or the most amusing pain thresholds.
None of which had much bearing on the matter presently under discussion between these two minions.
“ ’Sright,” Jorc said. “If it makes yer voice go up, then s’a question-rune.”
“Oh,” said the troll, and he took his mace and bashed Jorc squarely between the legs.
“eee!” Jorc trilled, folding over double.
“Well, I’ll be,” the troll said, regarding his mace with a false expression of maiden startlement. “And all this time I’ve been toting a question-rune into battle and I never knew it! If that doesn’t beat all!”
“That does not beat all,” came a deep voice from the shadows of the stairwell. “I do.”
A figure stepped out of the stairwell, into the light cast by the twin torches flanking the great portal. The troll saw and trembled, then fell to his knees. Jorc the orc was already on his knees, but one look at this dread caller knocked him all the way down onto his belly. Both guards groveled in terror.
“My-my lord!” the troll gasped.
“Is this how you ward my prisoner?” the Grim Lord thundered. “Nutting one another?”
“N-now my lord, strictly speaking I did not ‘nut’ Jorc. In the first place, the term ‘nutting’ refers to a severe blow to the head, and in the second place, orcs do not have—”
A bolt of pure red power arced from the Grim Lord’s fingertips and barbecued the troll where he stood. Even his sturdy mace was reduced to a pitiful puddle of slag. The Grim Lord casually blew the smoke from his nails. “Mmm. A shame. Now I’ll never know what it is that orcs do not have. Unless you can tell me?” He bent the gaze of his awful Eye upon the still-writhing Jorc.
“Job security!” Jorc blurted, and scuttled down the stairwell and out of the castle without so much as a note of resignation left behind on his captain’s desk.
The Grim Lord sighed. “I lose more Level G-7 personnel that way.” A sphere of Faroverthereseeing materialized in his hand. “Captain Slugwallow! Dispatch two fresh guards to the Tower Ruthless. I am going to visit the princess. They had better be on post by the time I leave her apartments. Do I make myself clear?”
The face of a much-harried orc appeared in the sphere. The whims of optics distorted his features in the crystal so that he looked like a cross between a true orc and a hamster with fully-stuffed cheek pouches. Then again, the Grim Lord mused, considering the barrack-room gossip about Captain Slugwallow’s mother and her sexual inclinations . . .
“Aye, Dread One,” Captain Slugwallow said wearily. “It shall be as you command.”
“It always is,” the Grim Lord replied affably (for a magical megalomaniac). “By the way, give your mother my regards.” He tossed the sphere into the stairwell and smiled to hear it smash. “Plenty more where that came from,” he told the shadows. Turning, he regarded the heavy portal. It was secured by a large oaken bar, a crisscross of iron chains, and a combination lock threaded through a hasp in the upper right-hand corner. The Grim Lord merely gave it a pointed glance with his Eye and the whole thing turned to raspberry gelatin.
As he stepped through the swiftly melting mess, the Grim Lord yanked a pixie out of his tunic pocket and squeezed it until the sprite’s eyes bugged out of their sockets. “Memo to Captain Slugwallow:” he said. “Send the royal carpenter up here along with those guards.” Then he lobbed the pixie over his shoulder and went on his way.
Beyond the now-liquefied portal stood the twisty narrow stairway that scaled the dark heights of the Tower Ruthless. Even though this was the highest point in all Dire Garde, the Grim Lord’s fortress, it was still as dank and moldy as the lowest dungeon. Not so much as the glimmer of a candle flame broke the pitchy blackness of this dismal aerie. Even the scuttling vermin seemed to go about their filthy lives with constant squeals and chitterings of misery. The Grim Lord set his lipless mouth in a grimace of satisfaction. Could he build ’em or could he build ’em?
At the top of the stair stood another door. This one was not locked or barred. Why bother? Anyone who could breach the lower portal clearly knew his business. Setting a second barricade in his path would accomplish nothing and merely serve to irk him. Even the Grim Lord, who could number his living enemies on the fingers of one tomato, knew better than to irk a worthy opponent. On principle, anyway.
The Grim Lord paused at the second portal and harked. No sound reached him from the other side. “Perhaps she is asleep,” he murmured, and for an instant his mind – normally preoccupied with a thousand plans of conquest, world domination, and the enslavement and torture of anyone whose face he didn’t like – strayed to gentler images. In his imagination he saw the wide, silk-hung bed which he had provided for his captive. Upon it slept the princess, a maiden of t
ranscendent beauty, even for an elf of the blood royal. He sighed wistfully as he imagined her milk-white eyelids closed in blissful dreams, her diaphanous wings chastely folded over the scented curves of her lithe yet voluptuous body, her full, ripe bosom glimpsed beneath the golden veil of her hair, her slender legs inexorably drawing the beholder’s eye up, up, up to rest at last upon the exquisitely tempting sight of her—
“Yipe!” cried the Grim Lord as the door spontaneously burst into flames. His musings upon the princess’s many charms had caused him to inadvertently confuse the controls governing his mind’s eye with his mind’s Eye and the inevitable had happened. A mystic gesture turned on the castle sprinkler system, dousing the blaze. He stepped over the smoldering timbers and into the princess’s chamber.
“Knock, knock,” he said sheepishly.
She was not asleep. She was fully awake and dressed. (Dang! thought the Grim Lord.) Attended by her two handmaidens, the Princess Minuriel stood before the sole window of her tower prison, all her regal dignity upon her. She wore the gown in which she had been captured by the Grim Lord’s minions, although since her imprisonment he had sent her a hundred lavish robes, each more dazzling than the last. The princess scornfully cut them up and used them for unmentionable purposes, in spite of the fact that all those sequins had to hurt.
Elves! the Grim Lord thought bitterly. Proud creatures! If I had it my way, I’d scour them from the face of this world. Except the cute ones. He stared at the princess, and for all his dark powers he could not conceal how he hungered for her.
“What do you want?” the princess demanded.
“The same thing I always want,” the Grim Lord replied. “Your consent to be my bride.”
“That you shall never have while I live, while yet there is justice in the world, hope in my heart, or breath in my body,” she shot back. “So buzz off.”
The Grim Lord’s mouth turned up at the corners, an uncanny expression that made him look like a soup tureen (if soup tureens could smile with an air of hovering menace). “I do not think so,” he said. “My lady, the time for trifling has passed. You know, do you not, the reason why I ordered your capture, abduction, and imprisonment?”
Princess Minuriel’s huge blue eyes opened even wider. “You mean it’s not just because you’re a squidhead?”
The Grim Lord’s chuckle was deep, false, and patronizing. “I am afraid not. Although I am flattered that you noticed.” He tucked a stray tentacle back into place behind his left ear. “No, my lady; charming though the, ah, charms of your body are, there is more than mere raw physical lust behind my actions.”
“According to what they say about you in the elfin court, mere raw physical lust is never behind your actions.” The princess gave him a nasty, knowing grin. “If you release me, I’ll use my magic to whip you up a batch of Uncle Oriel’s Quick Fix Elixir, guaranteed to put a little lift in your driftwood.”
The Grim Lord’s smile blinked away. Small thunderheads gathered themselves over his brow. “I do not have that problem!” he snapped. “As you will be the first to know after you give your consent to our marriage!”
“Which I will never do,” Minuriel returned haughtily. “Nor is there any way for you to force your loathsome attentions upon me. Truly it is written that an elf maiden of royal blood, so long as she keep herself virgin and pure, may never be possessed in body or spirit by a pig like you unless she gives her express consent. Fat chance.”
“Then you leave me no alternative. I tire of the waiting game. Behold!” The Grim Lord snapped his fingers and a fresh sphere of Faroverthereseeing materialized. This was the larger model, a crystal taller than the Grim Lord himself. It took up most of the floor space in the princess’s tower cell and almost nudged one of her handmaidens out the window.
Princess Minuriel and her attendants gazed into the vision that swam out of the crystal’s depths. All three of them gasped. There, before their eyes, they saw the full complement of the Grim Lord’s forces massed on the borders of the elfin homeland. Ravening orcs, repulsive trolls, host upon host of the living dead, ghastly wraiths, and really ugly dogs stood poised and ready for the invasion. But this was not the deepest horror.
“Picnic baskets!” the princess whispered.
“Yes!” The Grim Lord was never famous for being able to suppress that nasty habit of gloating. “Packed full with all manner of noxious edibles, for my loyal forces’ delectation: Limburger cheese! Garlic bagels! Lutefisk! Poi! Kim chee! Sauerkraut! Quiescently frozen artificial chocolate flavored extruded dessert product! And there’s more where that came from!” He clapped his hands together over his head and the panorama of the dark hordes, on pleasure bent, vanished from the sphere. It was replaced by a vision of the forest elves falling like autumn leaves before the onslaught of having to watch sentient beings happily devouring foodstuffs that looked and smelled like landfill.
How can they put stuff like that in their mouths? Eeeeeeewwwww! The dying cries of hapless elves echoed mercilessly within Princess Minuriel’s brain as she watched her people perish. And of course there was the matter of litter.
“Enough!” The elfin princess threw out her hands, her own considerable magic shattering the sphere into a billion pieces. Her wings drooped and she bowed her head. “No more. I cannot stand by and allow my subjects to suffer so. I will give my consent to wed you, Grim Lord. And well I know that you do not seek to possess me for my beauty alone, nor for the sake of true love, and positively not because you lust for my fair young body, I don’t care what you say, you do have that problem. No, I know that the real reason you would have my hand in marriage is so that you might conquer my father’s lands through his only child. You stink.”
“Not as much as lutefisk,” the Grim Lord said, that old contented-soup-tureen look back on his face. “You are as wise as you are beautiful, my lady. I will give orders that the wedding preparations begin at once.” He turned on his heel and strode from the room.
“Ow! Owowowowowowowow!” The Grim Lord hopped from foot to foot, pulling slivers of the shattered Faroverthereseeing sphere from his soles. With a single poisonous glance of his Eye, he caused the rest of the shards to melt and fuse into a glassy carpet. Then he departed, very much on his dignity. The elfin maidens heard him clump down the tower stairs and slam the brand-new door at the bottom shut behind him.
“Well, someone’s in a pissy mood,” said Shikagoel, the princess’s right-hand handmaiden. She sneered at the now-empty doorway through which the Grim Lord had so recently passed.
“He’ll get over it,” said her companion, Shiksael, as she fussed over her mistress’s wings. “Just as soon as he remembers that he’s going to get his own way with our lady.”
“No, he’s not,” said Minuriel. Her mouth was set in a taut, determined line that might have given even His Abominability pause.
“But, my lady, you gave your consent!”
“So I did. And by the same enchantment that seals the marriage bond between a highborn elfin virgin and her chosen mate, now it is his turn to give me something.”
Shiksael was puzzled. “I heard he couldn’t.”
Shikagoel gave her a sharp poke with her elbow. “Not that. Her Highness speaks of the Gift.”
“Gift?” Shiksael’s usually vacant face lit up at the mention of this Word of Power.
“It is the requirement of all who would wed a daughter of the elfin royal house to grant the bride one Gift, of her own asking, before the wedding may take place,” Minuriel intoned. “Unless this condition be fulfilled, the maiden is freed of her promise and must be returned to her father’s house, lest a great evil befall.”
“Oh, like that’s going to scare the Grim Lord.” Shikagoel snorted. “He lives with evil. He lives for evil. Evil is just so much diaper rash to him.”
“This is a really, really, really great evil,” Minuriel reproved her skeptical attendant. “And he knows it.” A scary little half-smile touched her lips. “That’s why he’ll do anything
to fulfill my request for a Gift . . . and that is why my Gift shall spell his doom.”
“Ooh! Ooh! I get it now!” Shiksael jumped up and down, clapping her hands together excitedly. “You’re going to ask him for something impossible, right?”
Shikagoel sighed. “Not the decimal equivalent of pi. It’s been done to death.”
“No,” the princess replied. “By the laws governing all magic, I am forbidden to demand the impossible for my Gift. But not—” there was that nerve-scraping smile again, “—the unpleasant.”
The great hall of the Grim Lord’s castle was being decked out in finery suitable for the celebration of His Atrocity’s nuptials. Gray garlands of swamp-blooming bug-in-the-coleslaw dripped from the rafters, nosegays of smuksmuk flowers were set out on the banquet tables, and orange crepe paper had been strewn about with a hand that understood the meaning of “lavish” but hadn’t a clue to the implications of “tacky”.
A raised platform had been set up directly beneath the minstrels’ gallery, mercilessly out of sight of that selfsame gallery’s decor. (The Grim Lord had ordered that the stone balcony be adorned with the severed heads of minstrels who refused to believe that their dread patron’s Absolutely No Polkas! rule meant them.) It was draped with costly black silks and carpets of the finest weave. Pearls and diamonds had been scattered hither and yon to sparkle at the feet of bride and groom. The attar of rare blossoms drenched the fabrics underfoot, filling the air with their heady fragrance, although not heady enough to overcome the lingering aroma of yogurt. A bower constructed entirely of wrought silver and gold rose from the center of the platform, crowned by a single sapphire whose worth in lives and souls could not be calculated by mortal men. A honeycomb paper wedding bell dangled from the center of the pavilion.