Like most Elves, Efluviel wasn’t a morning person. She was not best pleased, therefore, when someone came hammering on her tree-house door just as the Beautiful Golden Face peeped over the horizon.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
King Mordak took a moment to catch his breath. “Suggestion for you,” he panted. “Buy a fucking ladder.”
She smirked at him. “Bit of an effort, isn’t it? Especially if you’re not used to it. Of course, Elves learn to climb trees practically as soon as they can walk.”
“Like monkeys.”
“Indeed. What do you want?”
Mordak grinned at her. He was carrying, she noticed, a rucksack crammed with every sort of junk imaginable. “The good news is,” he said, “I’ve decided to assign you a partner for your fact-finding mission.”
“That’s the bad news,” Efluviel replied. “What’s the good news?”
“Your partner is me,” Mordak said. “Mind out of the way, that’s a good girl. This pack is killing me.”
A strange sort of numb feeling crept down Efluviel’s spine. “Why are you carrying all that stuff?”
“For the journey.” Mordak slid out from under the rucksack’s straps and grounded it with a crash. “Bare essentials, that’s all.”
Efluviel could see the handle of an omelette pan sticking up from under the flap; also the eyepiece of an astrolabe and a small rosewood box of the sort that usually contains geometrical instruments. “Are you going somewhere?”
“We’re going somewhere,” Mordak corrected her, massaging his collar-bone. “Talking of which, why aren’t you packed yet?”
“Going where?”
“To find the truth, of course.”
“That’s a reason, not a destination.”
Mordak sighed. “Fine,” he said, “little Miss Hair-splitter. Wherever the quest takes us, all right? Talking of which, you weren’t thinking of wearing those shoes, were you? You’ll get the most dreadful blisters.”
“I’m not—” She checked herself. “I wasn’t planning on going anywhere involving much walking,” she said. “Down to the Face building, to check the archives. Maybe up as far as the University. For which,” she added, “I don’t suppose we’ll need all that lot, unless you feel the need to stop every fifty yards and fry something.”
He was grinning again. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “You won’t find anything useful there, my people have already looked. No, I thought we might head out to Farn Snefir and check out the Unconventional Sisters.”
She could feel the blood drain from her face. “Are you mad? That’s miles away. It’s dangerous. There’s wolves and bears and—” She stopped dead.
“And goblins, yes. That,” he added firmly, “is not a problem.”
“There’s no public transport.”
“Shucks.”
“Indeed.” Mordak picked up his pack and wriggled into it. “Hence my concern about your footwear. Still, you know best. I’ll make a start and you can catch me up, after you’ve packed.”
Ten minutes later she fell in beside him on the road. This time, she was the one fighting for breath.
“About time,” Mordak said. “What’s that you’re carrying?”
“My suitcase, of course.”
“Ah.”
She shifted it to her other hand. “Where’s the cart?”
“What cart?”
“The cart to take us as far as possible along the road.”
“Oh, that cart. There isn’t one. Try and keep up, there’s a good girl.”
“Why isn’t there a—?”
Mordak sighed. “Oh come on,” he said. “Goblins like horses but horses don’t like goblins. You should know that, being a journalist.”
As indeed she did, having covered the Gork Pies scandal, when Goblinland’s biggest bakery chain was accused of adulterating its popular range of horse pies with cow-meat. She’d written editorials about it, now she came to think about it. “You mean we’re going to have to walk the whole way?”
“Good healthy exercise,” Mordak said cheerfully, as Efluviel stopped to wrap a handkerchief around her hand, where the handle of the suitcase had bitten into it. “So much better for you than being bounced around in a cart all day.”
Editor of the Face, she told herself, what’s a little stroll in the country compared to that?
“And besides,” Mordak went on, striding ahead, “it’ll help you get in shape for when things really start getting energetic. You know what you could do with? One of those suitcases with the built-in little wheels. Though they wouldn’t be much help when we reach the Marshes.”
As it happened, the suitcase came in very useful at several points over the next three days. They hid behind it from a pack of hungry wolves, sheltered under it from a rockfall in the Anguent Pass, used it as a shield in a skirmish with bandits and pushed it in front of them like a sort of float as they waded waist-deep through the cauliflower swamps of Varn Medrith. After all that, the stuff inside it wasn’t good for anything much, so that when they had to dump it in order to use the case as a canoe for crossing the flood-swollen Fords of Nosen, it was no great loss. The case itself finally gave up the ghost after they slalomed down the shale-heaps of Onym Pal on it, but it held together until they were nearly at the bottom, so that was all right. It was just as well, Mordak graciously conceded, that they’d had it with them. Without it, the journey might have been a bit awkward.
On the evening of the fourth day they hobbled into the tiny fortified village of Farn Snefir, which perches on the southern escarpment of the Taupe Mountains like a small hat on a big head on a windy day. Farn Snepir had about thirty inhabitants, twenty-nine of whom fled as soon as they saw a goblin marching up the road toward them. Fortunately the one who stayed was the innkeeper, who charged them seventeen pieces of silver for a meal they’d have buried in a lead box back home, and told them the way to the Fountain.
Just before dawn on the fifth day, Mordak and Efluviel (wearing Mordak’s spare boots, since her shoes were buried somewhere deep in the sand-drifts of Evlum; the boots were much too big, but she padded them out with cabbage leaves) trudged up the goat-track that led from the village to the mountain. They almost passed the cottage without seeing it, for it was set back from the track and sheltered by a screen of tall, spindly elm trees. But there was a splintered wooden board nailed to one of the trees, and if you looked closely you could just about make out
FOUNT OF ALL KNOLEDG
in faded grey lettering.
“Is this it?” Efluviel asked.
“Afraid so,” Mordak replied. “Now, whatever you do, leave the talking to me. Otherwise it could get complicated.”
“Suit yourself.”
Mordak leaned the spear he’d been using as a staff against the cottage wall, sighed, gritted his teeth and knocked on the door.
They had to wait a long time. Eventually, though, the upstairs window directly above their heads creaked open an inch, and they saw a rusty key dangling on the end of a piece of string. Mordak took the key, turned it in the lock and took it out again; immediately it was whisked away, and he heard the window slam.
The single room that comprised the lower floor of the cottage was empty, apart from a broken milking-stool and three chickens. They looked round, and on the wall directly above the fireplace they saw, scrawled in charcoal letters
Pleas hold
Yor visit is importnt to us
A coleag will be with you shortly
“The Unconventional Sisters?” Efluviel asked.
“Weird’s rude,” Mordak replied. “Listen up, someone’s coming.”
The stairs creaked, and three women trooped into the room.
Although he’d been hearing about the Fount for years and knew plenty of people who’d gone there, it was the first time Mordak had actually been there himself. Accordingly, he was partially but not fully prepared for what he now saw. The women: from the neck down, they were perfectly ordinary, in a genteel-shabby sort of a way; their dresses had been meticulously ironed many, many times and their shoes were so sensible they could practically speak. From the neck up—
The tallest woman, dressed in blue, said, “Who’s got the eye?”
A weary sighing noise from her sister in the brown dress. Blue thought about it, opened her mouth, took out a tongue (wrinkled and sort of pinky-grey) and passed it to Brown, who popped it into her mouth and said, “She has.” Blue frowned, mouthed something, snapped her fingers. Brown pulled back her hair to reveal an ear, which she pulled out with a faint plopping noise and handed over. Blue installed the ear and prodded Brown on the shoulder. “She has,” Brown repeated. Then she took out the tongue and gave it to Blue, who then unplugged the ear and held it out to the third sister, in green, who took it and stuffed it in place. “Have you got the eye?” Blue said. Green nodded. “I said, have you got the eye?” Blue repeated. Green took out the ear and handed it to Blue; Blue gave her the tongue. “Yes,” Green said.
“Excuse me,” said Mordak.
Blue scowled, then held out her hand to Green, who passed her the tongue. “Be quiet,” Blue said. “We’ll be with you in a minute.”
Then there was a long interval while Green and Brown gesticulated irritably, and Blue said, “It’s no good you waving at me, I can’t see you”; since she also had the ear, her words had no effect, and the other two carried on with their hand-signals. Then Blue gave Green the ear and said, “Give me the eye.” Then Green gave her the ear, and she gave Green the tongue, and Green said, “Certainly not, it’s Tuesday.” Then Green gave Blue the tongue, Blue gave her the ear, and Blue said, “It’s not, it’s Wednesday, isn’t it, dear?” Green sighed and gave Brown the ear. “It’s Wednesday,” Blue repeated, and gave Brown the tongue. Brown gave Blue the ear and said, “I know.” Blue took back the tongue, gave Green the ear and said, “She says it’s Wednesday.” Then she gave Green the tongue and took back the ear, and Green said, “Dulcie always has the eye on Wednesdays.”
Mordak picked a chunk of charcoal out of the grate and wrote EXCUSE ME on a scrap of paper he found lying on the floor. Then he got up, walked over to Green and held up the bit of paper so she could read it.
“Would you please not interrupt?” Green said.
Blue waved her hands angrily. “I wasn’t talking to you, dear,” Green said. “There’s a rather tiresome young man here. He’s waving a piece of paper at me, but his writing’s so bad I can’t read it.”
Mordak nodded, went away, leaned the paper against the wall and wrote his message again, in big bold capitals. Then he showed it to Green, who said, “We’re rather busy. Come back later.”
Mordak sighed. I HAVEN’T GOT MUCH TIME, he wrote. I NEED TO ASK YOU SOMETHING.
“He says he hasn’t got much time and he needs to ask us something,” Green said. Blue shook her head vigorously. Brown opened the bag looped over her shoulder and took out some knitting. “It’s not convenient right now,” Green said. “Can you come back on Wednesday?”
Mordak turned the piece of paper over. IT IS WEDNESDAY, he wrote. PLEASE?
Green sighed. “Oh, very well,” she said. “What do you want?”
Mordak had run out of space on the bit of paper. So he turned to Blue and said, “Would you be kind enough to give the ear to the lady in the green dress? Thank you.”
Blue shook her head. “Oh,” said Mordak. “Why not?”
Blue mouthed something. Fortunately Mordak was a competent lip-reader. “No,” he said, “it’s Wednesday.” Then he turned back to Green and said, “You couldn’t possibly spare me a scrap of paper, could you?”
“No.”
Efluviel’s head was starting to hurt. She’d heard vague stories about the three omniscient sibyls of the north ever since she was a child, and had often wondered why the Elves went to all the trouble of reading books and building astrolabes and observatories rather than just coming here and asking. Served her right, she decided, for doubting the wisdom of her elders. Mordak meanwhile was rummaging in his right sleeve; he found what he was looking for, and turned back to Blue.
“If you give the ear to the lady in green,” he said, “I’ll give you a biscuit.”
Blue hesitated for a moment, nodded, and unplugged the ear. Mordak handed over the biscuit (it was one of the three the innkeeper had sold them, for breakfast), as Green installed the ear. “It won’t do her any good, you know,” she said. “It’s not her turn for the tooth till Friday.”
Mordak took a deep breath. “I need to ask you a question,” he said.
“We gathered that,” Green said icily. “Well, don’t just stand there gawping. What do you want?”
“Well,” Mordak said, and launched into a full account of the human sudden-access-of-wealth crisis. He hadn’t got far when Green help up her hand and said, “Just a moment.”
“Yes?”
“This is all about the past, isn’t it?”
“I guess so. But—”
“So sorry,” Green said. “I’m the present. If it’s the past you want, you need to talk to Dulcie.”
Mordak closed his eyes, but only for a moment. “Which—?”
“Ah, right, thank you. Um, would you mind?”
Green clicked the tongue, then took it out and gave it, along with the eye and the ear, to Brown, who gave him a sad little smile and said, “How can I help you, young man?”
“Well,” Mordak said, and started all over again. When he’d finished, Brown said, “Yes, I know.”
“You do?”
Brown gave him a patient look. “Of course. This is the Fount of all Knowledge. I do wish people would take the trouble to read the sign.”
“So you know all about the—”
“Oh yes. Now, how can I help you?”
Mordak took a deep breath. “I need you to tell me what’s happening.”
“What’s happening?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry.” Brown smiled at him. “That would come under the present. You need to ask Elsie about that.”
“Mphm.”
“In the green tweed.”
“Thank you.”
Brown extracted the complete set of organs and handed them to Green, who installed them and said, “Yes?”
Mordak took a moment to phrase the question. “In the light of the sequence of unusual events which I’ve just described to the other lady, can you tell me what’s going on?”
“Of course,” Green said briskly. “It’s really perfectly simple. What’s happening is—Installing wisdom updates, please wait.”
“What?”
“Installing upgrade 1 of 1,377. Do not discontinue enquiry until all upgrades successfully installed. Please wait.”
The floor was quite comfortable to sit on, once you got used to it. Efluviel was just about to doze off when Green abruptly said, “Upgrades complete,” fell over, got up again and pressed the ear, which had started to come loose, firmly back into place. “It does that sometimes,” she said. “Who are you?”
“You were about to tell me about—”
“What? Oh yes.” Green paused for a moment, then stood up very straight and began to recite: “There is one who is the key. He is not of this world. He that is the key has forsaken them, and hides behind the sugar-spangled hole. In his absence, the hole is open and we are not ourselves. I think that more or less covers it,” she added, relaxing and massaging her neck. “So nice to have met you. Any time you’re passing.”
“Thank you,” Mordak said. “That’s quite unbelievably helpful. So, what am I supposed to do about it?”
Green’s smile was almost a grin. “You seek a future course of action.”
“Future.” Mordak sighed. “Her in the blue?”
“Lottie.”
“Thank you so much,” Mordak said. Green took out the ear and the tongue and handed them to Blue, who said, “But it’s Wednesday.”
“Is it still? Gosh. Look—” Mordak realised what he’d said. “Listen,” he amended, and he went through the whole thing all over again. And when he’d finished, he added, “So what do I do?”
Blue thought about it for a very long time. “Well,” she said eventually, “it’s perfectly obvious. What you need to do is, ah, a-a-a tchoo!” And she sneezed, and the tongue shot out of her mouth like a bullet, through the half-open door.
There was a moment of absolute silence. Then Efluviel stood up, stretched her aching back said, “It’s all right, I’ll go.”
It took her a long time to find it, by the last rays of the setting sun, some fifteen yards from the door. She picked it up, held it pincered between forefinger and thumb, and carried it back into the cottage. “You were saying?”
“Oo idyut,” Blue mumbled. “Ot ave oo un oo it?”
“Sorry,” Efluviel said, “it landed in a clump of nettles.”
“Urts.”
“That’s too bad,” Mordak said soothingly. “Is there anything—?”
“Ock eef.”
So Efluviel went back outside again and scrabbled out in the gathering dark until she found a couple of big, juicy dock-leaves. She kept one for herself and rubbed the other on the tongue with as much vigour as she could bring herself to apply. “Better?”
“A bit.” Blue glowered at her through the eye, which was emerald green and slightly bloodshot. “Honestly, you two have been nothing but trouble ever since you showed up here. Now, what was it you wanted?”
“You were about to tell me,” Mordak said, “what I can do, about all the weird stuff.”
“Oh, that. Really, I’d have thought it was self-evident, to anyone with a bit of common sense. You must find the one who is the key before it’s too late, and then you must put everything right.”
Mordak waited for a moment, but there wasn’t any more. “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“Put everything right.”
“That’s what I said, wasn’t it?”
“I see. And the one who is the key. Where will I find him?”
“At the place where he is.”
“Of course, how silly of me. And his name?”
Blue stared at him for a moment, then giggled. “Quite,” she said. “Now then, unless there’s anything else—”
Mordak smiled at her. “No, thank you, that’s quite enough to be going on with. Thank you so much for your time, you’ve been quite incredibly helpful, I shall tell all my friends to come here as often as possible. Goodbye.” He walked to the door, opened it, shoved Efluviel through it and turned back. “Oh, and by the way,” he said. “It’s actually Monday.” Then he slammed the door behind him and started to run.
With a frown that threatened to crack his newly acquired face down the middle, the Dark Lord stared at the sheet of parchment in front of him, and sighed until the Black Tower shook.
Three days now, and the new body, he had to admit to himself, wasn’t turning out quite as he’d have liked. Immeasurably better than no body at all, no question about that, and after a thousand years of disembodiment there was a strong case to be made for being grateful for anything he could get. Nevertheless.
He shooed the reservations out of his conscious mind and concentrated on the pictures. They too were not quite right; nearly there, and he was as firmly convinced as ever that Evil needed a logo, a single visual image that put across the message, instantly, viscerally and at a net saving of a thousand words, the moment you saw it. Nearly there, but not quite. He’d read all about logos while he was, um, indisposed, and he could appreciate that as a weapon in the battle for hearts and minds—
Yes, fine. They needed a logo. But maybe not one of these.
A stray gust of wind, slanting in through the arrow-slit, lifted the paper a little and made it dance. The Dark Lord extended his hand and pressed it down on the table. It was nice–oh, so nice–to be able to do things like that again, instead of having to transmit a telepathic order to the Captain of the Guard to send a platoon of goblin stormtroopers up the six hundred and fifty flights of stairs that separated the guardroom from his eyrie, just to pick a stray bit of paper up off the floor. Also, it made him feel silly; and once a Dark Lord starts thinking like that, you might as well tell the lads to pack up and go home, because the end was very near. The alternative–chasing round the room as a non-dimensional force of pure energy trying to read a document as it fluttered through the air–was only marginally preferable. Yes, it was good to have hands again, even if they did come at a price.
He’d tried explaining about the need for hearts and minds to the goblins, who’d looked at him and said, yes, great for a curry; except for Mordak, of course. Ah, Mordak. Now there was a goblin who actually got it. Mordak had been a hundred and ten per cent behind the idea of a logo, except that his suggestions tended to be along the lines of red hands, scary staring eyes and all that sort of thing. Negativity, that was Mordak’s problem. Even he, so enlightened in many ways, was still inclined to see Evil and Good purely in terms of black and white.
Mordak, he knew, wasn’t going to like any of these. The rose, for instance, or the oak tree; the Dark Lord could picture him now, scowling thoughtfully and carefully not saying, “What’s all that supposed to be about, then?” Or the dove. Mordak would take one look at that and say, “This bloke can’t draw vultures worth a toss.” He’d have a point there, mind; it was a very wobbly dove, and the things sticking out of its shoulders might have been wings, or maybe the poor creature was on fire; who gave a damn, really? Just rotten drawing, if you asked the Dark Lord.
He sighed again, and was just about to impale the parchment on the for-filing spike when he noticed a fourth image, one which he couldn’t remember having seen there before. If so, it was odd, because the fourth image was far and away the most striking. He drew the parchment close to his nose and squinted at it.
The fourth image was essentially a pair of concentric circles; a fat one in the middle, and a thinner one surrounding it. What was it? Could be several things. An archery target, for not particularly ambitious goblin marksmen (plenty of those) or a partial solar eclipse. Or—
He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt-front. A circle inside a circle; it definitely reminded him of something he’d seen recently, but what was it? It’d make a damn fine logo, he was sure of it–a wheel within a wheel, suggesting intrigue, chicanery and dark goings on; an outer circle and an inner circle, implying division, polarisation, us against them, concepts at the very heart of Evil; also, a very precise fried egg. And who in the world doesn’t like fried eggs, apart from the Elves, who practically live on salad?
Where had he seen it before? Mordak might know. Mordak knew a surprisingly large amount of stuff. But (he recalled with a sigh) Mordak was off on some quest somewhere, and a long way away by now. A disembodied force of pure energy would be able to zip through the ether and into his mind in an instant, no matter where he was; the fortunate owner of a new (well, new-to-you) corporeal body couldn’t face the thought of all those stairs, let alone bumping around in a badly sprung carriage on roads like potato furrows. Not that he was having regrets or anything. Perish the thought.
A circle within a circle. Definitely familiar.
There was a knock at the door–he had a door now, which was wonderful. “Come in,” he said.
“Officer of the day reporting as—” The goblin soldier froze, then whipped out his sword. “Gnasz, Burgk, get up here quick. There’s a sodding Elf in the chief’s room.”
The Dark Lord sighed. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”
“Shut it, Elf.” The goblin had backed up against the wall, his sword held out in front of him in trembling hands. “Soon as the lads get here, you’re goulash, capisce?”
Iron boots were clumping up the stairs. The Dark Lord took off his spectacles and laid them on the table. Obviously, the changeover was going to take time, he appreciated that. Not to mention almost superhuman patience.
The arrival of two more goblin warriors seemed to put new heart into the duty officer. He took half a step forward and brandished his sword a little bit more purposefully. “Sergeant,” he said. “Get that Elf.”
“Um, Chief—”
“Are you disobeying a direct order? I’ll have your guts for—”
“Chief.”
A tiny flicker of doubt inside the duty officer’s small, round head. He lowered his guard just a little, while the sergeant leaned forward and whispered something in his shoulder-length-lobed ear. “Oh,” said the duty officer.
The sergeant gave the Dark Lord a sheepish grin. “Sorry about that, Boss,” he said. “He’s new.”
“So I gathered,” the Dark Lord said, as the duty officer cringed against the wall. “Also, he doesn’t bother reading the memos.”
“Can’t read, Boss,” explained the sergeant. “Wrong sort of eyes, see.”
Well, of course. Goblin logic. There’s a subspecies of goblins who can’t see things properly if they aren’t moving, so naturally it’s from them you recruit your staff officers and administrative grades. “Get out,” he said, not unkindly, and the soldiers withdrew. He could hear them clump-clumping down the stairs, and the duty officer’s voice exclaiming, “He’s a what?”
The Dark Lord shook his head sadly. The exceptionally difficult and dangerous piece of Dark magic that had made it possible for him to regain a physical shape had been known hitherto only to a forgotten sect of cake-worshippers far away in the jungles of the south, and where they had learned it from they had long since forgotten. There was nothing in the actual code of the spell to suggest that it had originally been Elvish magic, and it was all so long ago that the Dark Lord had clean forgotten about the Elf-sorceress Gluvior and her experiments with eternal life; rotten luck, in a way, that the cake-botherers’ spell had turned out to be hers, and worse still that she’d only perfected it when she was seventy-six and nearly crippled with arthritis. Still. Even so. A body is a body is a body, and that was all there was to it.
Apart from the dreams—
A light flared inside the Dark Lord’s labyrinthine brain. That was where he’d seen it before.
He scrabbled for the parchment and looked at it again. A circle within a circle. He closed his eyes, but the after-image remained, as though he’d been staring at the sun. A circle surrounding a circle. A circle encompassing a void. An abyss.
His old body, the one he’d lost after the war, when he was cast down by those annoying princes of the West, hadn’t been troubled by dreams, since it never slept. It was only since he’d come to live in the reconstituted mortal shell of bloody Gluvior that he’d experienced sleep (which wasn’t so bad) and dreams (which were). And it was in those dreams, those beguiling, horrible episodes, unreal and more than real, that he’d seen the void encompassed by the circle. Not just once, but every single time; no sooner had he closed his eyes and drifted away into temporary synthetic death, than there it was–a great bloated ring standing unsupported between heaven and earth, its glistening brown fabric sparkling with innumerable white crystals, its contours rounded, its scent strangely mouthwatering, and in the centre… In the centre, the void, the abyss, empty yet not empty, rather a window looking out on to strange, terrible, wonderful things, as a voice in his head chanted, Look not for too long into the doughnut, lest the doughnut look into you.
Just the thought of it made him shiver; and that said it all, really. That thing, whatever it was, that nest of concentric circles, that brown-pupilled eye, that doughnut–well, if that wasn’t the evillest thing he’d ever come across in all his life… so really, no contest, if he wanted a logo for Evil, what could be better? He opened his eyes again and there it was, scowling up at him from the parchment. It took a special effort of will to stop looking at it. There you go, he thought. Better than a stupid old oak tree any day of the week.
The dreams, though; he wasn’t sure he was entirely comfortable with them. It would help, of course, if he didn’t forget most of them a few seconds after he woke up, because he had a nasty feeling that the stuff that happened in them was somehow important. Impossible to know for sure because he couldn’t remember, but he had an impression, at the very least, that in those dreams there was a voice, a particularly irritating voice that told him to do things, and sooner or later (he had no idea what they were) he was going to have to do them, if only to make the voice shut up. That wasn’t right. Nobody tells the Dark Lord what to do. It’s one of the painfully few perks of an otherwise unrewarding job. In the dreams, of course, he wasn’t a Dark Lord. He was just–well, a person, a small, insignificant individual with no power or personality and a voice in his ear saying, Why haven’t you done it yet, you promised faithfully you would, I ask you to do one simple thing, it’s not rocket science, for crying out loud, while in the background the great shining circle-in-a-circle glowed and throbbed, and the void peeked out at him, and just occasionally winked. It was all very trying, and he hadn’t had to put up with it when he was a disembodied force of pure energy. Nor, when he didn’t have a head, was he quite so prone to splitting headaches.
Even so. He yawned, settled back in his chair, stretched his arms and folded them behind his head. In a minute, he promised himself, he’d send down to the kitchens for some biscuits and a glass of warm milk. Food was definitely an advantage of being corporeal, although it was a nuisance that this body’s digestion was pretty well shot, and anything fried or topped with a sauce made him feel as though he’d swallowed a volcano. Biscuits and warm milk were all right, though, in moderation. Plain biscuits, anyhow.
His eyelids were feeling heavy, and he closed them just for a moment or so. Warm milk, he thought; well, maybe not exactly what he’d had in mind when he condemned himself to a lifetime of confinement in this Elvish bucket of guts, but his researchers were working on it, and his next body would be much better, a top-of-the-range goblin or maybe a GM troll, or possibly it was time to raise two fingers to the bipedal anthropomorphs and go for something really exciting and different, such as a dragon. Now that would be something. Huge great wings to take you anywhere you wanted, and heartburn would be a positive advantage.
His breathing grew slow and regular, as his consciousness slipped away and floated helplessly, like thistledown, through vast empty space, until in the distance he saw what he knew he’d subconsciously been searching for; a great brown hoop floating in mid-air, glistening with cooking-oil, sparkling with white crystals, and far away a voice that said, Oh there you are at last, I do wish you wouldn’t keep drifting off like that, not when there’s so much I want you to do for me. Now listen carefully or you’ll get it all wrong, what you have to do is this—
Hum, went the spinning-wheel, and round the red glow of the campfire, fat grey moths clustered, like commodities brokers round a famine. The little man groaned gently, because his leg was tired from pumping the treadle. All for the sake of making a little money.
“Hello?”
By now the little man could picture what they looked like just from the sound of their voices. This one, he figured, would be tall, broad-shouldered and slim, with shoulder-length golden hair and clear blue eyes. Not too difficult. They were all like that.
“This way, Your Majesty,” he sang out. “Mind your sleeves on the brambles.”
And guess what, he’d been right. Another day, another prince, another shedload of straw. The prince edged into the circle of firelight, sucking a pricked thumb. “Excuse me,” he said, “but are you him?”
“That depends,” said the little man. “Who are you looking for?”
“The straw-into-gold chappie,” replied the prince, peering at the little man through the woodsmoke. “Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Mister Rum–I mean, the dwarf with no name?”
“That’s me.”
“Fantastic. Delighted to meet you. Everybody’s talking about you, you know.”
“Fancy,” the little man said. “Right, then, to business. How much, and where is it?”
The prince blinked. “Excuse me?”
“The straw,” said the little man. “The straw you want me to spin into—”
“Ah.” A tragic look spread quickly across the prince’s face. “That’s the problem, actually, now you mention it. There isn’t any.”
“No straw,” the prince said with a sigh. “Not a single solitary bloody stalk.”
The little man frowned. “No straw?”
“Nope.”
“My God. What happened? Thunderstorms? Mice?”
The shadow of a frown flickered across the prince’s handsome face. “Actually, it’s all your fault. I don’t mean that in a nasty way,” he added quickly, “I’m sure you didn’t do it on purpose or anything, you were just doing your job, you know, obeying orders, all that stuff. Only, the thing of it is, ever since you started on this straw-into-gold business, the price of straw–well, it’s gone mad.”
“Ah.”
“Crazy.” The prince shook his head in recollected disbelief. “Never known anything like it in all my life.”
The little man nodded slowly. “Let me guess,” he said. “The price of gold—”
“That’s the other thing,” the prince said mournfully. “Gone right down. Was nine hundred and seventy silver florins an ounce, now it’s around four-twenty. It’s making a lot of problems for people, I can tell you. The soldiers have started saying they want paying in silver.”
The little man smiled sadly. “So, of course,” he said, “all your fellow princes have been buying more straw to bring to me to make into more gold, to make up the shortfall.”
“That’s right,” the prince said. “Who told you?”
“Amazingly, I guessed. And the more straw the princes buy, the more the price goes up, presumably.”
“Yes, that’s right,” the prince said. “It’s just getting silly. I tried to get a couple of dozen bales for the stables, and the chappie wanted four hundred and fifty florins an ounce. For straw.”
The little man’s eyebrow quivered just a little. Four hundred and fifty florins an ounce for straw, when the gold he’d soon be spinning that straw into was changing hands at four hundred and twenty. No doubt about it. These people had taken to free market economics with a vengeance. “I can see your problem,” he said.
“Quite.”
“And no fun for the horses, either.”
“Oh, they’re all right, we’re bedding them down on dried bracken. But that’s not the point. The simple fact is, I haven’t got a stalk to bless myself with, and with all my neighbours raising these stonking great big armies, it seems to me I’d better get a stonking great big army too, or else things might start getting a bit unpleasant. Only–no straw.”
“Indeed,” the little man said gravely.
“So I was wondering,” the prince said, turning on the charm-tap, “does it actually have to be straw? I mean, what about hay? We’ve got stacks and stacks of hay. Or nettles, possibly. Do you think you could do anything with nettles?”
“A nourishing if rather bland soup,” the little man said. “Otherwise, no.”
“Hay?”
The little man shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s got to be straw. This is a dedicated straw-matrix processing unit. If I tried to weave hay, the best you could hope for would be a very lumpy mat.”
“Oh hell,” the prince said, and he turned away for a moment to hide the expression on his face. “That really is confoundedly awkward. Only, you see, I’ve already sent out the draft notices, and there’s going to be twenty thousand chaps turning up at my place in a day or so to be my army, and I imagine they’re going to want paying. And with no straw—”
The little man sucked in air through his teeth. “You’ve got a problem, I can see that,” he said. “Well, I’m very sorry for you, but I don’t see what I can do.”
“Oh.” The prince looked very sad. “That’s a nuisance. Only, I think when the chaps turn up and there’s no army and no pay, and with all the neighbouring kingdoms threatening to invade on top of that, I might just be in a spot of bother. Harsh words, and all that. Not that it’s your fault really,” he added. “And I don’t mean to burden you with all my difficulties. It’s just–oh well.”
The little man pursed his lips. “Of course,” he said, “I could lend you some straw.”
“Could you?”
“Oh yes.” The little man nodded. “It just so happens that before the price started to rise, I bought up two hundred and ninety thousand tons of the stuff. To practise on, you know. It’s in that barn over there.”
“Two hundred and ninety thousand—”
“And I might be willing to lend you a bit of it,” the little man went on. “Just to tide you over, you understand, until the harvest comes in.”
“The harvest.”
“The wheat harvest,” the little man clarified. “You know, farmers and stuff.”
“Oh, yes, right. We’ve got lots of farmers down our way.”
“I’ll bet.”
The prince nodded. “Splendid chaps. Make excellent soldiers. That’s why I’ve enlisted them all for my new army.”
“Ah.”
The prince frowned. A thought seemed to have struck him. “Which is a bit of a bugger, really,” he said. “Because if they’re off fighting wars and things—”
“They can’t be back home sowing wheat for next year’s straw harvest, quite.” The little man rubbed his nose. “And no harvest, no straw. Also, for what it’s worth, no corn, so no bread. But that’s just a side-issue, of course. Still, it’s rather inconvenient.”
“I should cocoa,” said the prince. “Bloody shame, if you ask me. They should be back on the land, ploughing away like mad, instead of wasting their time eating their heads off in barracks. You know what? There’s thousands of acres up in the foothills country that’s just right for growing wheat, only the dukes and earls will insist on pasturing their racehorses there. We could plough all that up and be absolutely rolling in straw.”
“Quite,” said the little man. “But instead, all your ploughmen are going to be square-bashing in a barracks yard somewhere. Rather a waste, if you ask me.”
“Too right,” said the prince, with feeling. “But since everybody else is raising these armies, what can we do?”
The little man was quiet for a while. “You know what,” he said, “it’s just possible that this stuff we’ve just been talking about might have occurred to your neighbours as well.”
“Oh. You think so?”
The little man smiled, recalling many recent conversations. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” he said. “In which case, they’re going to be sending their soldiers back home to get the ploughing done and the crops sown, and nobody’s going to be invading anybody, at least until the beginning of October.”
“Really? Why October?”
“Think about it. Of course,” he went on, “after the harvest’s in and the grain’s been threshed and the straw’s all safely baled, then you can recruit your army all you like.”
“That’s true.”
The little man nodded. “It’ll only take you–what, a month, six weeks at the most, to get them through basic training and then you’ll be ready to march.”
“Absolutely.” The prince’s eyes lit up. “And then we can invade all our neighbours. That’ll teach ’em to plan to invade us.”
“Quite,” the little man said. “Except that by then, it’ll be mid-November, which is when you get the first heavy snowfalls around here, as I understand it, which means all the mountain passes will be blocked, and nobody’s going to be able to invade anybody until March at the very earliest, probably well into April if we’re going to be realistic about it.”
The prince shrugged. “Ah well,” he said. “Come April, we’ll show the bastards—”
“At which point,” the little man went on, “you will of course need every available man for the spring ploughing.” He spread his hands in a vaguely consoling gesture. “But what the heck,” he said. “There’s always next year.”
The prince, who’d been frowning, suddenly smiled. “Absolutely,” he said. “Next year, we’ll kick those Eastern bastards’ arses out through their ears, they won’t know what’s hit ’em. Meanwhile—”
“Ah yes.” The little man smiled. “You wanted to borrow some straw.”
“Yes please, if that’s all right.”
“Fifty thousand tons do you?”
“Absolutely. If you could possibly manage a bit more—”
The little man pursed his lips. “We’ll see how we go,” he said. “Of course, I will have to charge you a teeny bit of interest on that.”
“What? Oh, right. Yes. Yes, that’s fine.” Pause. “When you say teeny—”
“I was thinking,” the little man said, “of two hundred per cent.”
“Um. Is that a lot?”
“It’s the going rate,” the little man said. “Same for everybody, you know, no favouritism.”
“Oh, of course not, absolutely.” In the prince’s face the little man could plainly see the agony of mental arithmetic. “Two hundred per cent, so that’d be—”
The little man smiled. “I lend you fifty thousand tons,” he said. “You give me back a hundred and fifty thousand. Perfectly simple,” he added. “Nice round numbers.”
“Oh, quite,” said the prince. “Couldn’t be rounder. Yes,” he added decisively, “that’ll be fine, I’m sure. Yes. As well as all the racehorse pastures, we can plough up the royal parks and all that land out on the plain we’d earmarked for the soldiers to do training manoeuvres on. Yes, that’ll be just fine.”
“That’s a deal, then,” said the little man, producing a sheet of parchment out of apparently nowhere. “So if you’d just care to sign here, and here and here and here and here, and here, oh yes, and here, please, just where my thumb is. No need to read it first,” he added kindly, guessing that literacy wasn’t one of the prince’s greatest strengths. “Splendid,” he added, folding the parchment up very small and sticking it down the front of his jerkin. “So, that’s fifty thousand tons of prime straw, yours to do what you like with.”
“Um,” the prince said. “I think I’d like it spun into gold, please.”
“I can do that for you,” the little man said cheerfully. “If you’re sure.”
“Quite sure.”
“You don’t want any for the royal stables, anything like that?”
“No, just gold, if that’s all right.”
“Perfectly all right.”
“You couldn’t make that sixty thousand tons, could you? Only then we could probably afford to drain the swamps out by the Green River and plough that lot up, too.”
The little man smiled. “Oh, go on, then,” he said. “Since it’s you.”
“I say, thanks awfully.” He smiled–he had a very nice smile–and turned to go. “You’ve been frightfully decent about all this, you know.”
The little man shrugged. “I do my best.”
“Shame about the nettles, though.”
“Ah well.” The little man sighed. “It really does have to be straw,” he said. “For one thing, it’s canonically correct.”
“Did you ever try nettles?”
“Not as such,” the little man said. “Where I come from, they did once try turning paper into gold, or at least substituting paper for gold, which is much the same thing.”
“Ah. Did it work?”
The little man shook his head. “Total distaster,” he said. “Absolute washout. No, you’re much better off sticking with straw. You know where you are with straw. Also, it has useful by-products. This time next week suit you?”
“Sorry?”
“For the gold. Should be ready by then. Remember to bring some carts.”
The prince smiled. “Will do,” he said. “Lots and lots of carts.” He looked round at the bramble-bushes. “In fact, if it wouldn’t put you out too much, we might just build a road for them to go on. Take all the hassle out of getting stuff to and fro.”
“Good idea.”
“And we could probably do with a bridge over the river, come to think of it.”
“Why not?”
The young man nodded briskly. “Save all that mucking about trying to swim the carthorses across the ford,” he said. “Make life much easier for everybody, that would. In fact, I can’t understand why nobody’s ever thought of it before.”
The little man grinned at him. “Clearly they weren’t as smart as you are.” He scratched the lobe of his ear. “It’ll be something for the twenty thousand men to do, now that they’re not going to be soldiers. Should keep them occupied right up to the start of ploughing season.”
“That’s an idea. Gosh, yes. Clever old you for thinking of it.”
“Oh, just common sense, really. Mind how you go.”
The usual crashing and ripping noises as the prince negotiated the bramble thicket, then nothing but the sighing of the wind in the trees, the hoot of a distant owl, the hum of the spinning-wheel. The little man was counting under his breath. Ninety-eight, ninety-nine—
“Just one last thing.”
He turned and smiled. “You’re back again.”
“I almost forgot,” the prince said. “If by some amazingly miraculous flukey chance I happen to guess what your name is, does that mean I get let off the interest on the straw?”
“No.”
“Oh.” The prince’s face fell, then he smiled again. “Worth a try, I suppose. Never mind. Cheerio for now, then.”
“Goodnight, Your Majesty.”
“Goodnight, Rump–I mean, whoever you are.”
Real silence this time. The little man took his foot off the treadle and let the wheel spin to a standstill. He laid his hand on the frame; it was hot. He sighed, and leaned forward, resting his head against the rim of the wheel. He’d been working flat out for–well, as long as he could remember, and he was exhausted.
Worth it, though, he told himself. Gradually, step by painful step, he was getting there. And although most of the princes and kings and dukes and earls were as dumb as he’d expected them to be, some of them showed the occasion glimmer of intelligence, and there were one or two who might eventually, with the proper guidance and coaching, one day be capable of getting it. At that point, assuming he ever got there, his work here would be done and he’d be at liberty to move on, pitch his tent and his wheel in some other ghastly, god-forsaken bramble patch, and start all over again with another consignment of deadheads.
Gosh. Put like that, it all seemed pretty bleak. On the other hand, at least he was doing something; and he’d known all along that if he was ever going to pay off his debt to society and make atonement for the things he’d done before he came here, it was going to be a very long road indeed, with many a sheer cliff to scale before he had any chance of reaching the moral foothills, let alone the high ground. He lifted his right foot with his hand, peeled off the shoe and the sock and examined the sole. A mass of blisters, from working the damn treadle. He pulled up a handful of grass to stuff the sock with.
I deserve it, he thought. In fact, I’m getting off lightly. When I think about what I used to be—
He shuddered, and stuffed his foot back into the sock. But I’m done with all that now, he reassured himself, I’m a reformed character, I’m the dwarf with no name–he liked the sound of that. An enigmatic stranger who blows into town, rights wrongs, succours the afflicted and then departs, as mysteriously as he’d come, to continue his mission elsewhere, alone, misunderstood—
Um.
Using his forefinger as a shoehorn, he eased the shoe back on to his foot, replaced it on the treadle and began to pump. The wheel whirled round, making its characteristic humming noise; not an inherently unpleasant sound, but loud enough to drown out minor background noises, such as stealthy footsteps, the snapping of one small twig, the shallow breathing of two men trying very hard to be quiet, stuff like that. It wasn’t loud enough to cover the flapping of the coarse hessian sack as it was lifted high in the air and dropped neatly over the little man’s head; he heard that one loud and clear, but by then it was far too late.