The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (3 page)

He stood up, yawned and stretched. His earlier exertions, together with a long ride on an unsprung cart, were beginning to set hard, rather like slow-drying plaster. I’m getting too old for this, he thought. He was twenty-two.

By the time he reached the wizard’s house, the night shift
had finished skinning and quartering the dragon; they’d hung the quarters on a great steel frame on little wheels, and the bronze doors were open so they could take it inside. Through the open doors Turquine caught a glimpse of a vast, high-ceilinged chamber, brilliantly lit, its walls and floor white as snow. It was filled with row upon row upon row of skinned dragon quarters on steel frames, hundreds, thousands, of them. A bitter chill from inside wafted over him, and he shivered. The night-shift foreman was marking one of the quarters with a stencil. He turned to Sir Turquine, and grinned.

“You all right, mate?” he said.

Turquine nodded. “That’s a lot of—”

“Yeah, well.” The foreman shrugged. “You go on down the office, they’ll give you a blue form and a receipt. All right?”

“Thanks,” Turquine said. He was peering over the foreman’s shoulder. Right at the back of the great white chamber, set into the furthest wall, he could see–what? A gateway? A portal? It was round, maybe fifty feet in diameter, surrounded with a sort of golden-brown frame that glistened and sparkled in the pure-white glare, as though studded with thousands of diamonds, though the hole in the middle was as black as soot. The men working inside had loaded a dozen racks of dragon quarters on to a crane, which swung across into the black hole in the centre of the portal; a moment later, the crane swung back again, empty.

The foreman was looking at him. “All right?” he repeated.

“What? Sorry.” Turquine got the feeling he wasn’t entirely welcome. “I was just—”

“Go down the office,” the foreman said firmly, “they’ll give you your blue form and your receipt, and then you can get paid. All right?”

“Yes, right.” For some reason, the look on the foreman’s
face made Turquine nervous, in a way dragons never did. Not live ones, anyway. “Thank you.”

“ ’S all right,” the foreman said, still looking straight at him. “Mind how you go.”

He went to the office, where a very old man in a brown coat and a curious flat-topped cap gave him his blue form and his receipt, smiled and put up the “Position Closed” sign before he could say anything. He looked round, but the only other living creature in the office was a very tall, thin young man, leaning against the wall, eating a sausage. He didn’t look as though he was in any position to answer difficult questions, though he nodded politely as Turquine walked past him into the cold night air.

The drill was, you took the blue form and the receipt to the other office, right round the other side of the building, where you got your money; but the other office closed at dusk and didn’t open until three hours after daybreak. Turquine glanced down at the blue form, and was pleasantly surprised; 907 lbs @ 15d./cwt = 6s. 2d. Six shillings and twopence. A warm smile spread over Turquine’s face, like spilled oil on water. Six bob. Hey.

He went back to the inn and asked for a beer. “The good stuff,” he specified.

The innkeeper looked at him. “You sure?”

Turquine nodded. “I can afford it.”

The good stuff was still pretty bad, but it was unimaginably better than the other stuff. Turquine sat by the fire, nursing his beer, staring into the flames. He was trying to remember what it had been like, before the wizard came. He found it remarkably difficult. How old would he have been? Hard to say. Nine, twelve, something like that; he was pretty sure he’d been in the dragon-slaying business for four years, and he’d won his spurs when he was eighteen. Of course, those four years had felt like for ever.

Yes, but it was so much better now, wasn’t it? He unfolded the blue form and looked at it, just to make sure the numbers were still there. Six shillings and twopence. The family estate, to which his father and now his brother had devoted their lives, brought in a gross income of one pound two shillings and fourpence (in a good year, when the harvest didn’t fail and the chickens didn’t get fowl pest), and that put their family in the top third of the nobility; new shoes once a year, fresh cabbage leaves for the outhouse and half a bottle of malmsey wine at Candlemas. Before the wizard came, any transaction involving six shillings and twopence was big news, the sort of thing they’d be talking about in the inn and the smithy from lambing through to blackberry-time. Now, though; now, a no-account younger son like Bedevere (a nice enough chap in his way, but scarcely the sharpest bodkin in the quiver) could earn himself three pounds nine shillings in a single month, and for doing what? Pest control. Forty-one pounds a year for being basically a glorified rat-catcher.

And what was good for the younger sons of the nobility, of course, was good for the kingdom; all that extra money in circulation, leading inevitably to prosperity for all. True, there wasn’t much sign of it to the casual observer. The villages were still poverty-stricken, mostly because of the depredations of the dragons, but no more so than before; about the same, in fact. Turquine thought about that. If the wizard hadn’t come along when he did, they’d presumably still have had the plague of dragons (where
did
they come from? Good question), but without the vital cash boost to the economy that the wizard provided. Without the wizard, in fact, they’d be in all sorts of trouble, though of course it was no use trying to tell that to the average peasant-in-the-stocks. That was the trouble with ordinary folk. They simply couldn’t get their heads around the complexities of economics.

He lapped the last half-inch of his beer round the bottom of his mug, watching the white specks of dead yeast scurrying in the eddies like carp in a pond. Two things, a wise old man had told him once, that you don’t ask about: what the meat is in a shop-bought meat and turnip pie, and where anything worth having comes from. Wisdom indeed. True, the same old man had then sold him a cow that died three days later, but there you go. Life is really just a river; it moves on, and all sorts of stuff ends up in it.

Next day, he went to the desk in the other office and got his six shiny silver coins and his two rather world-weary coppers. He put the coppers in his pocket, then trotted along to the shimmering white marble building that housed the Consolidated Wizards Bank. Reckless courage, the willingness to risk everything on a desperate million-to-one chance, is the hallmark of the hero, except where money is concerned. But what could possibly be safer than a bank?

“Three pounds,” the girl behind the counter told him, “nine shillings and fourpence.”

Sir Turquine scowled. “That’s not right.”

The girl checked her ledger. “Sorry,” she said. “Three pounds, nine shillings and fourpence
halfpenny
.”

Knights are trained from boyhood to treat all damosels with chivalrous respect; even so, Sir Turquine couldn’t help making a growling noise in the bottom of his throat, like an angry dog. “That’s more like it,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

“Have a nice day.”

T
he next time, she didn’t hesitate. The moment she saw the little stooping figure tottering up the path in front of her, she reached into the basket, grabbed the hammer she’d borrowed from her father’s workbench and swung hard. There was a chunky noise and a shrill yelp, and she stepped back to give the wolf room to fall.

“Right,” she said, pulling off the dented straw bonnet to reveal two pointed grey ears. “I want a word with you.”

The wolf looked at her with pale yellow eyes. “Oh,” it said. “It’s you.”

Buttercup frowned. “You know me?”

“Heard of you,” the wolf replied. “Oh yes. Where I come from, we know all about
you
.”

“Really?”

“The Angel of Death, that’s what you’re known as.”

Buttercup couldn’t help feeling mildly smug. “Is that right.”

“Yes.”

“Fine. So why’d you keep coming? You know it’ll all end in tears.”

The wolf shrugged. “We’re wolves,” it said simply.

Buttercup grabbed the nearest ear and twisted it hard.
“That’s not good enough,” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t make
sense
.”

The wolf looked at her. “Sense?”

“That’s right,” she said eagerly. “Come on, think about it, for crying out loud. You’re wolves, right? Presumably you live in some sort of pack, up in the Blue Hills.”

The wolf’s other ear was flat to the side of its head. “I’m not telling you where,” it said firmly.

“I don’t want to know,” Buttercup said. “Really.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Really. I mean,” she went on, “what actual threat do you pose to us? None whatsoever. Because it’s always the wolf that gets killed, never the cute little girl. Look, how many raids do you do every week? Two? Three?”

“Not telling.”

“At least two, often three. And what happens? The wolf dies. You always lose.”

“I know what you’re doing,” the wolf said. “This is advanced interrogation techniques, right? First you destroy my self-esteem and sense of individuality, then you force me to tell you where the pack hides out, so your woodcutter pals can come and slaughter us. Well, you’re wasting your breath. I won’t talk. I
won’t talk
. Got that?”

“You are talking,” Buttercup pointed out. “In fact, shut up a minute and let me finish. Two raids a week, let’s say, fifty-two weeks a year, that’s a hundred and four dead wolves, out of a pack of what, two hundred and fifty? No, I’m not asking you,” she added quickly, as the wolf started shaking its head frantically, “I’m just trying to make the point. In evolutionary terms, what you’re doing is genetic suicide.”

The wolf’s eyes were perfectly round, and Buttercup had never seen such terror. Compared with it, the fear of death was mild apprehension. “Evo-what?”

Buttercup shivered slightly. The words, the long words
she’d never heard before but which she understood implicitly, were coming more and more frequently, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. “It doesn’t make
sense
,” she translated. “If you carry on like this, you’ll all be dead. Extinct. No more wolves. So—” She took a deep breath. “Why do you do it? Why?”

The wolf looked confused as well as terrified. “We’re wolves. We need to eat.”

“Then why the hell don’t you eat sheep? The hills are covered with them.”

The wolf hesitated. “I don’t know,” it said. “I guess we’ve never—I don’t know.”

“And anyway,” Buttercup ploughed on, “you
don’t
eat little girls. You try to, but you
always fail
. How come you haven’t all starved to death long since?”

The wolf’s eyes were a mirror of spiritual agony. “I’m not answering any more questions,” it said.

“Come on,” Buttercup said, “this is for your benefit as much as mine. Why don’t you starve?”

The wolf’s eyes turned glassy. “Wolf,” it said, “beta male. Serial number zero zero zero six three seven.”

“Answer me,” Buttercup yelled, shaking the wolf by the throat. “Answer me and I’ll let you go, all right?”

She’d done it this time. “You’ll what?”

“Let you go.”

“
You can’t do that
.” The wolf was shocked, as though Buttercup had suggested something unspeakably obscene. “Don’t you understand? We’re the bad guys.”

“No you’re not,” Buttercup said. “That’s the point.”

“Of course we’re the bad guys.” The wolf was trembling uncontrollably. “We’re wicked predators who sneak down from our lair and gobble up innocent—”

“No you
don’t
,” Buttercup howled in his face. “You come down here, over a hundred a year, and we
slaughter
you.
You’re a goddamn
endangered species
because of us, you’re
victims
. Don’t you see that, you stupid bloody poodle?”

The wolf composed itself, acquiring a strange, sad dignity as it looked past Buttercup at the relentlessly blue sky overhead. “Wolf,” it said. “Beta male. Serial number zero zero—”

”You’re an ecological disaster waiting to happen,” Buttercup screamed, then broke off. The wolf was dead. She let go; but she knew from the lack of cramp in her fingers that she hadn’t strangled it, you have to squeeze really hard, and your hands are stiff for days afterwards. It had just died.

“That’s
silly
,” she howled at the sky, but no reply came.

She knelt down and pulled its shawl respectfully over its face. A wolf, the ancestral enemy, as stupid as a brick, but within its own frame of reference it had died with honour. (And another thing; what happened to all the dead wolves, anyway? Nobody ever buried them, so the woods should be littered with shawl-shrouded bones. But the next day they were always gone, without fail.) Looking down into its empty eyes, she felt a pang of guilt. But it wasn’t me, she reminded herself, I didn’t kill it, it just died.

Animals don’t just die.

She picked up her basket and went on her way through the dappled gallery of the woods, stopping from time to time to watch a scampering squirrel or a gently grazing deer. Animals don’t just die. I didn’t kill it. Therefore—

Therefore, somebody else killed it.

Don’t be so silly, she told herself, carefully stepping over a big red toadstool with cute white spots. No arrow wound, no wound of any sort. Poison? A remote possibility, but she didn’t think so. Nobody would dream of putting down poison, for fear of harming the squirrels, badgers, hedgehogs, pixies, gnomes. And anyway, why would anybody want to kill—Why would anybody apart from the woodcutters and herself want to kill a notoriously harmless wolf? Unless—

I won’t talk
, it had said, inaccurately. Now she thought about it, the wolf had been far more afraid of interrogation than mere death. Leaving aside the impossible problem of how you kill a wolf without leaving a mark or even being there, suppose the wolf had been killed to prevent it from betraying some secret. Was that possible? She thought about it. It struck her as pretty far-fetched, but she could just about imagine circumstances in which somebody might just do such a thing.

Advanced interrogation techniques
. Were they, she asked herself, words that had suddenly appeared in the wolf’s head, completely unfamiliar but perfectly understood, because it had needed to know their meaning? Maybe, maybe not; but someone or something had trained that wolf how to resist aggressive questioning − not very well, admittedly, but presumably the concepts involved had been as unfamiliar to the wolf as economic models and evolutionary dead ends had been to her, just a short while ago. In which case, it hadn’t done too badly.

She frowned. If someone was doing this, he, she or it wasn’t very nice. Suddenly she grinned. Not being very nice was a bad career move in these parts. Sooner or later, they always got what was coming to them. So, maybe there was a woodcutter’s axe with his-her-its name on it somewhere. And why the hell not.

A round, pink face appeared above a bush beside the track; it was wearing a green cap with a red feather, and a mildly bewildered expression. She sighed. “Hi, Tom,” she said.

Tom the woodcutter was even taller, broader and fairer-haired than John the woodcutter, though there wasn’t all that much between them in the gormlessness stakes. Both of them, in fact, were bottomless pits into which gorm vanished without trace. “Hello, Buttercup,” Tom said, and
stepped out from behind the bush. He had his axe on his shoulder. The edge, she couldn’t help noticing, had recently been honed to razor-sharpness.

“Fancy meeting you here,” she said.

“What? Oh, I was just—” He stopped, and his eyebrows met. It was like watching a fight between two crazed hedges. “You all right?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Um. Well, they do say there’s wolves been seen in these parts lately.”

She nodded her head at the sad bundle on the ground. “Who told you?” she said.

“What?”

“About the wolf. Who told you it’d be right here, precisely now?”

“Nobody told me, I just—”

”Just what?”

“Thought there might be, well, you know, someone in trouble.”

“You heard the screams and came running.”

“What screams?”

“Quite.” He looked like he wanted to make a run for it, but she fixed him with a stare, folded her arms and waited. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Why did you think there’d be someone here needing saving from a wolf?”

“I don’t know, do I? I just thought—”

”You’re lying.” As soon as she said it, she wondered why. It was such a bizarre thing to accuse anybody of, let alone Tom the woodcutter. “Someone told you. Who was it? Was it the wizard?”

“What? No, of course not.”

There are some people whose lies are a lot more reliable
than most people’s statements of truth. Whenever Tom told a lie, his ears went red, his nose twitched, his eyes blinked rapidly and he started to sweat. There aren’t many things in this life you can absolutely depend on, but Tom’s lies were rock-solid.

“It
was
the wizard. Wasn’t it?”

“No. Yes. Well, sort of. Not really.” He backed away and bumped gently into a tree, which swayed visibly. “I − I don’t know. Honest.”

“Tom.” She gave him three seconds of the stare, then switched to sweet and winsome. “It’s all right,” she said, smiling as pleasantly as she knew how, “you can tell me.”

He shook his head. “No, I can’t.”

Try something else. “You can tell me,” she said reasonably, “or I can hit you with this hammer.”

“Buttercup?”

All right, then, not that. “Sorry, Tom, just kidding.” She sighed. This was getting tedious. “Look,” she said, trying not to plead. “
Why
can’t you tell me?”

“Because I don’t know.” She looked at him, and he was genuinely miserable. “It’s just that sometimes—”

”Yes?”

“When I’m in the forest, cutting wood,” Tom went on, looking away, “it’s like I hear this voice in my head saying, Go to such and such a place, and when I go there, usually there’s this little girl just about to be gobbled up by a big bad wolf or a wicked witch or a troll or something. So then I smack the wolf with my axe, and—”

“This voice,” she interrupted. “It’s the wizard, right?”

“Sometimes I think it might be,” Tom said uncertainly. “Except, I’ve never actually heard the wizard say anything, so how would I know?”

Suddenly she felt very tired. “Fine,” she said. “Well, thanks anyhow. You’ve been a great help.”

“No I haven’t. The wolf was already dead when I got here.”

“Yes,” she told him. “That’s what was so helpful.”

She watched him to see if that might possibly sink in, but it didn’t; she could almost watch it bounce off and dissipate in the empty air. “Well,” she said, “don’t let me keep you.”

He nodded, half turned, stopped and blushed like a sunset. “Buttercup.”

“What?”

“Um. Would you like to go to the Spring Dance with me?”

“No. Goodbye.”

He drooped, then shouldered his axe and shambled off into the trees. She couldn’t help feeling just a little bit sorry for him, but not enough. He’s another victim, just like me, she thought. The difference is, he doesn’t know it. That’s quite a difference.

She became aware of the pressure of the basket handle on her arm. Her father and uncles would be expecting their dinner. She looked round briefly, but she couldn’t see the wolf’s cosy little hut; the hell with it, they’d have to make do without their ham and cucumber sandwiches for once. (Query: where do wolves get ham and cucumber sandwiches from? And how does a wolf, a quadruped lacking an opposable thumb, dress itself up in a shawl, bonnet and button-up boots? And why, come to that, did her father and uncles insist on having their workshop in the heart of a dark, wolf-infested forest when there was a perfectly good barn out the back of the house which nobody ever used for anything?)

I have to get away from here, she thought. I need to get right away − five miles, even ten, assuming the world was that big; the other side of the Blue Hills, at any rate. Things would have to be different on the other side of the Blue Hills; no wolves, no woodcutters, and maybe just possibly, things would make
sense
. She cast her mind back, trying to retrieve
any information she’d gathered over the years about the big wide world. Well, to start with, there was the town. Lots of people lived there; they bought loads of wood, so at the very least it’d be warm there, and practically everything came from there, all the clothes people wore and the tools they used, so she wouldn’t need to take anything with her, except money, and she’d got quite a bit of that stored in the sock under her mattress. And maybe, just maybe, there were other towns even further away, beyond other hills—