The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (5 page)

Ah, the glory of it.
Mithuriel
, the Elves called it;
blastein
, in Dwarvish; to the goblins, it was simply The Stuff–a hard
grey rock that, under certain circumstances, shone with a pure yellow light. Kings and archpriests slaughtered each other for a peanut-sized chip of it to place on their crowns. Dragons sat on it, trolls ate it (but there you go), Elves wrote scratchy sounding violin sonatas to celebrate its ethereal beauty; and the wizard
bought
it, top dollar, cash on the nail and keep it coming. Forty-five gobbos a ton. You could buy a lot of war with that sort of money.

He watched them load the raw blocks into the derrick, then strain against the bars of the capstan that turned the winch that swung the crane up and into the soot-black hole in the middle of the huge diamond-encrusted golden-brown circular Portal set into the back wall of the cavern. A moment later, the crane basket came back empty, and that was it. For some reason, Mordak found it vaguely unsatisfactory, as though there should be rather more to it than that. Like, what did the wizard actually do with a hundred and seventy tons of The Stuff; where did it go to, and what exactly lay on the other side of the black hole, beyond which no goblin had ever ventured? Not venturing, however, was an express term of the contract, on pain of forfeiture of a nine-figure sum. So; no venturing, or else.

There were theories, of course. Professor Magluk of the Goblin Institute of Alchemy had postulated that the black hole led to a transdimensional interface, in effect a sort of hiatus hernia in the gullet of space/time, and that there must be some unique property in The Stuff that allowed it to pass through the interface without being subject to quantum disruption, in accordance with Ngyuk’s Third Law, or otherwise the wizard would end up with a teaspoonful of irradiated grey ash for his money, which was improbable—On the other hand, Academician Snatbog of the Goblin Association for the Advancement of Science had recently made a very good case for arguing that the black hole was in fact the
imaging chamber of a functional teleportation device, presumably powered by an artificially created quantum singularity, with the power to transmute matter into energy and, by folding the fabric of the continuum back onto itself into a sort of Mobius paper chain, transport inanimate objects across the boundaries of alternate universes (in accordance with multiverse theory) to a preordained location. They were both good theories, and Mordak would have liked to have seen them taken further. Unfortunately, being goblins, Magluk and Snatbog had sought to resolve their differences by means of a duel to the death, in the course of which both of them had perished, so the question was, for the time being, unresolved.

S
he looked at him. He looked at her. The horse shuffled a bit and ate a nettle.

She’d heard the two words all her life;
handsome prince
. They went together so closely it was hard to think of them being used separately.
Ugly prince
or
handsome woodcutter
simply wouldn’t mean anything. And, at some point in her early childhood, a vague mental image had coalesced in the back of her mind; a tall, blond, curly-haired young man with a small nose, big ears, a white horse and a perpetual cheesy grin. The truth was, she’d never really
liked
handsome princes in stories. They were too easy, too convenient. The girl, stupid or spineless, gets herself locked up in a tower, put to sleep for a hundred years, poisoned with a magic apple; but not to worry, because some day, just in the nick of time, her prince will come and he’ll take care of everything; all she has to do is look fragile and decorative. To a girl who’d spent her eighth birthday prising the gold fillings out of the upper jaw of the dead witch she’d just brained with the kitchen hatchet, the picture didn’t seem right. Besides, she didn’t like curly hair on men, and horses made her sneeze.

“Gesundheit,” he said.

But this prince was different. He was − well, let’s not use
the H word, not when there’s terms such as cute, gorgeous, well fit and so forth, which haven’t been devalued by a lifetime of negative connotations. True, he was tall, and his fair hair was a bit curly, and his horse was indisputably white. Other than that, he was nothing like the soppy halfwits of her imagination.

“Excuse me,” he said (and his voice was soft and surprisingly deep; the handsome princes in her head all squeaked like hamsters) “I’m not from around here. Would this be the Forest?”

On either side of the track, the trees crowded round, their spindly heads swaying in the gentle breeze.

“Yes,” she said.

“Ah, fine, that’s all right.” He was scowling at the box in his hand, as if it had done something wrong. “Can’t seem to get a signal, for some reason. Are you local?”

“What?”

“Do you live round here?”

Dammit, she was going to blush. She tried to fight it, but it was no use. “Yes,” she said.

“Splendid, maybe you can help me. My name’s—” Was it her imagination, or did he glance down at the back of his hand, “Florizel, and I’m the new prince. What I mean is, my father’s just become king, so I’m sort of going around the place, checking stuff out, just a sort of preliminary fact-finding initiative, kind of thing. You know.”

Odd. Handsome princes wandered around the place all the time, but they were hunting or hawking or exercising their horses, they didn’t find facts. She’d always assumed they had people for that. “Oh,” she said.

“That’s right,” said Prince Florizel. “And sounding out local people in, you know, local communities. Seeing what their concerns are, what they want from their public services, all that. Schools, infrastructure, integrated transport networks.”
He was trying to stuff the little grey box into his tunic, but there wasn’t a pocket where he was trying to put it. “Anything you’d like to, you know, put on the agenda?”

“Excuse me?”

“Is there anything you feel the government ought to be doing that it isn’t?”

Government
. Now there was a word. She’d never heard it, but she knew what it meant. So, apparently, did he. But that was all wrong, she thought. We don’t have government, we have kings and handsome princes and pretty, airheaded princesses with wicked stepmothers. And as for
infrastructure
—

“Actually,” she said, “there is one thing.”

“Yes?”

“Wolves,” she replied. “Do you think you could do something about the wolves?”

Prince Florizel looked distinctly apprehensive. “There’s wolves in these parts?”

“Oh yes.” She nodded vigorously. “Loads of them.”

“Ah.” He frowned. “But, you know, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about wolves. The truth is, they’re quite shy animals really. Very intelligent, highly developed social structure, and they hardly ever attack humans.”

She looked at him. “Oh yes they do,” she said. “Well,” she added, “they try.”

“Do they?” He looked worried.

“All the time, they’re a real nuisance. I’ve had to kill six this week already.”

“My God. Well,” the prince said quickly, “I can see we’ll have to do something about that.”

“Oh, they don’t
hurt
anybody,” she said. “But if they keep coming down here and getting killed, pretty soon there won’t be any left, and that probably wouldn’t be a good thing. Would it?”

“Ah,” he said. “In that case, maybe a carefully orchestrated relocation programme, naturally taking care not to upset the ecological balance in the local habitat.” He reached towards the pocket that wasn’t there, realised the grey box was still in his hand and prodded it several times with his fingertip. “Well, I’ve definitely made a note of that,” he said. “We’ll get on it right away. My father the king, I mean.”

“That’d be…” Highly unlikely? A miracle? “Very nice,” she heard herself say. “Really kind of you, and your father. What was his name again?”

This time she watched, and he definitely read the name off the back of his hand. “Hildebrand,” he said. “The First. We’re a new dynasty.”

“Oh. What happened to the old one?”

“They retired. Abdicated.” Prince Florizel was picking at his cuff. “Gone far, far away. So we’re in charge now, Dad and me. Anyway,” he went on briskly, “wolves, yes, got that. Anything else?”

She hesitated. It was something that had always bothered her, but a little voice in her head was telling her that when you meet your handsome prince, socio-political issues shouldn’t be foremost in your mind. But what the hell. “Actually,” she said, “there’s one thing I’d really like to ask, if it’s all right. About kings and stuff.”

“Fire away.”

“Where?”

“Please ask your question.”

“Oh, right.” She took a moment to order her thoughts, because the question − well, it was kind of slippery. It had taken her a very long time to formulate it, mostly because the same little internal voice that was currently urging her to lead the conversation round to an entirely different topic had always told her not to be so silly, every time she’d tried to figure it out for herself. Now, with Florizel only a few inches
away from her, it was as if a battle was going on inside her between the question and the voice. But she knew, she suddenly realised, which side she wanted to win. She took a deep breath. “It’s like this,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Well.” She looked straight at him. “You know when there’s a giant, and it goes round burning down villages and destroying crops and all that stuff, and nobody can defeat it, so the king sends out heralds to say that any hero who kills the giant will get his daughter’s hand in marriage and half the kingdom.” She paused. Florizel was frowning slightly. “With me so far?”

“What? Oh, yes, definitely.”

“And then the hero comes along and he kills the giant and he gets the princess and half the kingdom, right?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose so.” Florizel gave her a big smile. She couldn’t help feeling it was intended as a distraction. “But of course giant attacks are very rare. There is no cause for alarm.”

“Rare-ish,” she said. “Six in the last hundred and fifty years.”

“Is that right? Well, fairly rare, then. Not something you really need to be concerned about.”

“Which means,” she ground on, “that in the course of the last century and a half, the size of this kingdom has halved
six times
.”

“Um.”

“All right,” she continued. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that the kingdom started off with an area of three million hectares, which is probably the bare minimum required to sustainably support, say, five major cities, given a basically agrarian society. You’ll agree, I’m sure, that any geopolitical entity with less than five major urban centres would properly be classified as a duchy or principality rather
than a country, according to accepted international diplomatic protocols.”

“I guess.”

“Well then, subdivide three million by fifty per cent six times, and you’re left with a surface area of 46,875 hectares, which is clearly insufficient to sustain one city of, say, twenty thousand inhabitants, not to mention the cost of a royal court, centralised administration and bureaucracy and a standing army. Then, when you factor in the knock-on effect of economic disruption caused by a series of unanticipated partitions, not to mention loss of confidence in the currency and the concomitant pressure on sovereign debt—” She stopped and breathed out slowly. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Does it?”

There was a long, awkward silence. “You thought of that all by yourself?” Florizel asked.

“Yes.”

“Dear God.” He blinked twice, then broadened the smile until she could almost hear the tendons in his face creaking. “You’re a pretty smart girl, you know that?”

“Yes. But how does it
work
?”

The smile was still there, but now she reckoned she could see things moving behind it. “How come,” he asked her, “you know about hectares?”

“I—” She narrowed her eyes. “Come to that,” she said, “how come
you
know about hectares?”

“Look.” The smile had gone now. “It’s perfectly simple. For a start, it’s a big kingdom. Very, very big. Also, you’ll probably find that on at least one occasion, the king didn’t have a son, so when he died his son-in-law the giant-killer inherited his throne, so the kingdom was put back together again. Or maybe he inherited a chunk of another kingdom, as the result of a carefully planned dynastic marriage. Or something like that. The point is, it
does
work and it
does
make
sense, and the only reason you can’t see it is because you’re a girl from a stupid little village and you don’t know about important stuff like politics. All right?”

She thought about that for a moment. Then she stamped on his toe. “I see,” she said. “Thank you so much for explaining it to me.”

He’d closed his eyes. Now he shifted his weight slowly from one foot to the other and hopped towards the horse, which was eating bracken. “My pleasure,” he said. “Any time.”

“You won’t forget about the wolves, now will you?”

“I’ll try very hard not to.”

“You shouldn’t let your horse eat that stuff. It makes them sick.”

“Does it? Ah well.” With visible effort, he put his stamped-on foot in the stirrup and hoisted himself into the saddle. “Well, I’d just like to say what a pleasure it’s been meeting you.”

“Likewise.”

“I’d like to say that, but I can’t, because it isn’t true.”

“Always tell the truth,” she told him. “It’s what princes do.”

“You don’t say. Well, goodbye for now.”

“Bye.”

He nudged the horse with his heels and rode away, wincing slightly as he rose to the trot.
I just assaulted a member of the royal family
, she told herself, as he ducked under a low branch just in time, then got hit in the face by a broad spread of chestnut leaves.
That’s − not right
. But it had felt right at the time. Oh yes.

Geopolitical entities, she thought, as she walked slowly down the path. Hectares. Sovereign debt. The words had bubbled up in her mind like silt from the bed of a stream, as soon as she’d thought of the idea that needed them to be expressed with. Had they been there all along, she wondered?
She couldn’t have made them up, because
he’d
understood them. And his explanation; well, it was so full of holes you could strain soup through it, but it was—She frowned. It had sounded like it came from the same place her own thoughts came from, wherever the hell that was. So—

There was a dear old lady hobbling up the path towards her, her face buried in a shawl. Oh damn, she thought, not
now
.

—So maybe he did, too. Now there was an interesting idea, and one that didn’t need long, difficult words. She lifted her head, settled the basket comfortably in the crook of her arm and quickened her step. As soon as the dear old lady came within hailing distance, she gave her a terrifying scowl and yelled “GO AWAY!” at the top of her voice. The dear old lady froze, looked at her, wriggled out of the shawl with a splendidly fluent movement and dashed off into the trees, its tail between its legs.

“That’s better,” she said, to no one in particular. “Thank you.”

She walked on a few steps, then stopped dead, turned round and ran back. She found the place where she’d stood talking to Prince Florizel
−
the horse had thoughtfully left a brown pyramidal marker for ease of identification
−
and dropped to her hands and knees, scrabbling in the leaf mould until she found what she was looking for.

When she’d trodden on Florizel’s foot, he’d dropped his small grey box. She’d seen it fall, out of the corner of her eye, but at the time she’d had other things on her mind. She picked it up and looked at it. She’d never seen anything like it before. It was a little bit like a small roof tile, except that it had a piece of glass set into it; decoration of some kind, she guessed, like the numbers and letters laid out in neat rows underneath. She turned it over in her hand, but the back was quite plain.