The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (9 page)

All right, fine. But he wasn’t just being nice about that, he was being nice about me wanting to drop out of Uni.

Didn’t let you, though.

No, because it wasn’t the right thing for me to do. He explained that.

You agreed with him.

Well, yes. He was right.

I put it to you, he only wants you to stay on and do your exams so you won’t make him give you a job at his work. Because he doesn’t want you there.

He said, it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d enjoy doing.

Because he
doesn’t like you
.

No, I can’t accept that. Just look at everything he’s done for me.

Yes, because he promised your mum.

You’re just trying to make trouble. He likes me. I’m his nephew. When he’s gone, all this will be mine. He said so. And I live here. If he couldn’t stand the sight of me—

He’d have packed you off to boarding school when you were twelve. Oh, wait, yes, he did. And then straight to college. You hardly had time to unpack.

I’m here now.

Now
look
. One, none of that is true. Two, it’s beside the point. All I was saying was, he could’ve been really upset and angry, shouting, throwing stuff. And he wasn’t. All right?

Yes, and isn’t that just a teeny bit suspicious?

Oh come
on
. You can’t have it both ways.

No, you come on. You saw how he reacted when you asked him what he actually does for a living.

And he answered the question, didn’t he? Accountancy. Management consulting.

Mphm.

All right, what?

No, it’s fine. You seem perfectly satisfied with that answer. Far be it from me to go stirring up trouble.

Look—

It just occurs to me and my nasty, suspicious mind, if that’s really want he does, why did the question stop him dead in his tracks—

Ah yes. The crass militaristic tank metaphor.

Actually, I thought it was rather good.

You would.

Anyway
. Sorry, where was I? Oh yes. So, two things for you to think about. One. All right, I’ll concede, he’s fond of you, to some extent. But he goes to a lot of trouble and expense to get you out of the house and a long way away. Two. Questions about how he makes his money stop him dead like a bear trap. Now, then. Exercise that fine analytical brain of yours. Don’t you think there may be something just a little bit—?

He’d had enough. Damned if he was going to sit still and listen to himself saying horrid things about Uncle Gordon, when he’d been so nice. He needed to get away, go somewhere he could clear his head; somewhere the insidious little voice couldn’t follow.

The garage. Or, to be precise, somewhere over the garage, way up high, to wish upon a doughnut. He wasn’t quite sure how, but he knew that the voice couldn’t get at him there. Maybe–his memory was oddly unclear on the point–that was why he’d gone there the last time.

Tin box. Doughnut. Here goes nothing—

And into nothing he went; and stepped out into bright sunshine under a clear blue sky. No change there, then. Amazing they ever managed to grow anything in a place with so little rainfall. He reached for a pocket to stow the doughnut in, but the stupid tunic thing he was wearing didn’t have one. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was; inside the palace grounds, but that’s like saying you’re not lost because you know you’re somewhere in Europe. He looked round, but for once the place wasn’t seething with courtiers and guards and gardeners with wheelbarrows. And that was another thing. Where did the money come from to pay all those people? Taxes? Excise duties? A 4 per cent levy on traditional narrative tropes? He made a note to ask the Chancellor, first chance he got—

Something swooped down at him out of the sun. He barely had time to drop into an instinctive terrified cringe when a hawk shot past him, its wingtips brushing his face, snatched the doughnut from his hand, and swung away, two feet or so above the lavender bushes, and vanished from sight.

The small part of him that really was Prince Florizel felt quite smug about that; told you it’d come back when it was hungry, assuming it’s the same hawk, but then, there can’t be an infinite number of goshawks in these parts, assuming it was a goshawk. The rest of him, outnumbering the Florizel bit by several hundred to one, froze in horror. The doughnut. The way home.

He sat down on the gravel, too shocked to stand or move. His mind was racing, trying to remember the rules of the YouSpace device. For your convenience and ease of use, YouSpace can be accessed through the hole in the middle of any doughnut, fried onion ring or bagel; so, wherever you are, in practically any alternative reality in the multiverse, you’re never far from a handy, reliable portal back to your
default universe. Fine. He remembered sitting on his bed, on the day when he’d first found the stupid thing, reading the book of instructions and drawing a glowing yellow line through the word
practically
with a highlighter pen. Practically every universe; in other words, there are universes (how couldn’t there be, in an infinite multiverse?) where there aren’t doughnuts with holes in them, fried onion rings or even bagels. That was why, on that fateful day, he’d stuffed the instructions back in their envelope, put the envelope back in the box, and shoved it away under his bed as far as his arm could reach. Too risky, he’d told himself. Find yourself in a doughnut-free continuum, you’d be screwed; stuck for ever, unable to get home. Then, later, when the tedium of revision had begun to gnaw his brain and he’d resolved to give the thing a try, he’d promised himself that he’d pay very, very close attention to safeguarding at least one doughnut at all times, to be on the safe side, to be
sure
. And now—

Don’t panic
, cried his inner Lance Corporal Jones. Well, indeed. All was very far from lost. All he had to do was go to the kitchens, find the cook and demand a doughnut. He was entitled to do that, being supreme ruler of the kingdom. And even if they couldn’t do doughnuts, they ought to be capable of a simple bagel. And if they couldn’t do bagels, any bloody fool can batter a bit of onion.

Finding the kitchen turned out to be a challenge in itself. He knew it was in a separate building, because of the risk of fire. That narrowed it down to a choice of thirty-five. Thirty-fifth time lucky; he knocked on the door, waited for several minutes while nobody answered, remembered that he was the prince, damn it, opened the door and went in. Two dozen men and women stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at him.

“Hello,” he said, in his best Florizel voice. “Which one of you’s the cook?”

It was one of those I-am-Spartacus moments, and it went some way to explaining why the soup was always lousy. “Fine,” he said, selecting one at random. “I want you to make me some doughnuts. Please,” he added, before Florizel could stop him.

The man, a huge creature with hair in his ears, looked at him. “Doughwhats?”

Oh Christ. “They’re a sort of—” He hesitated. A sort of what, for crying out loud? Bread? Pastry? Now he came to think of it, he had no idea what was in a doughnut, or how you went about creating one. Flour, presumably. Maybe eggs. That was the total extent of his knowledge. Might as well show a builder a pile of stone blocks and expect to get a perfect replica of the Parthenon.

“Bagels?”

“You what?”

“All right,” he said, trying to fight down the surge of panic in his insides. “How about a nice fried onion ring?”

He’d said the wrong thing, apparently. The cook went white as a sheet, made a complicated sign with his fingers across his forehead, and started to back away, mumbling something under his breath. “Sorry,” Benny said quickly, “I didn’t mean to upset anyone, I didn’t—”

The stares of the kitchen staff pierced him like arrows. Well, of course. He might not be expected to know that onions, or fried onions, were anathema and abomination in these parts, but Prince Florizel would know, of course he would. He cleared his throat and smiled. “Very good,” he said, “just testing. Carry on.” Then he left the kitchen, very fast.

Practically
every reality. Oh boy. He leaned against a handy wall and caught his breath. This is hopeless, he thought. No doughnuts, no bagels and especially no fried onion rings, not if you don’t want to end up with your head
stuck on a pike somewhere. How am I going to get
home
? This is
terrible
.

Think, he ordered himself.

Look, it’s cooking. How hard can it be? Flour, eggs, water, a source of heat, a flat pan, butter. Any bloody fool can fry an onion.

Amend that to
practically
any bloody fool, because he could think of one prime example of bloody stupidity who couldn’t, and he was wearing his shoes. It’s all very well to speak airily of rustling up a quick plate of doughnuts and a side of onion rings, but he knew his culinary limitations, and he was in enough trouble as it was without adding arson to the equation. Not me, then; someone else. There’s got to be someone in this kingdom who’d be prepared to cook me something with a hole in the middle without feeling the need to send for the Witchfinder General.

Then it occurred to him that he didn’t actually know a lot of people in his kingdom; certainly not on could-you-do-me-a-small-favour terms. Most of the people he did know were court functionaries of one kind or another, politicians, precisely the sort of person who couldn’t be relied on to keep their minds open and their mouths shut if His Majesty came and asked them to do something unspeakably weird to an onion. Which left–well, two or three of the gardeners were all right, and the man who looked after the dogs, and the odd-job man. At least, he’d smiled at them a couple of times and said hello, and they’d smiled back instead of doing all that awful bowing and bobbing about. One of the women who did the laundry looked like she might be quite nice, except that she was stone deaf and just grinned when he spoke to her. Apart from that—

Come
on
, he told himself (and he created a mental image of Uncle Gordon to say the words, to give them immediacy and impact), cooking is cooking, you’re a
quantum physicist
. If
you can extrapolate the existence of the Higgs boson from observing the simulated collision of two protons, you can probably make a functional doughnut. Provided, of course, that you have a recipe—

Of course. All he needed to do was Google “donut recipe” on his phone. He’d already established that, although he couldn’t make or receive real-life calls in this universe, he could access the internet, give or take a few inconsequential anomalies–all the semicolons became dollar signs, for instance, and any reference to Australia made it crash, but he could live with that, just about. A simple recipe, and he could—

He’d lost his phone. He remembered realising that, back at Uncle’s house. He closed his eyes and cursed silently; and then it occurred to him that, although he’d discovered the loss back in real life, it must actually have taken place
here
, on this side. In which case, his phone had to be around here somewhere, and if he could only find it, assuming it hadn’t got trodden on by unicorns and the battery hadn’t gone flat, he could get the recipe, pay some poor old peasant woman a million gold coins to cook him one and get the hell out of here, back to where he belonged. If only.

Right. A certain degree of confidence returned, because looking for misplaced articles was something he knew all about, from a lifetime’s bitter experience. He knew, better than anyone, that the Great Primordial Question, the starting point of every journey and the fountainhead of all wisdom, is
where did you have it last?
Now, then—

The girl. The irritatingly bright girl who asked questions. He’d been using it, the time before last that he’d met her. She’d been interrogating him about something or other, and he’d said something to annoy her, and she’d deliberately stamped on his foot—

Forget about that. The phone. He’d had it when he met
her, and he couldn’t remember seeing it or using it after that. He tried to picture in his mind the spot where the meeting had taken place; in the forest somewhere, well, that’s a great help. No, wait. There had been a funny-looking tree—