The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (18 page)

“Doing that for you now. Done. Transaction complete. Thank you for calling FirstServe Internet Banking. Have a nice day.”

There was a loud click. The sphinx closed its eyes for about five seconds, then opened them again. Its tail suddenly thrashed, and a low growl made the floor of the cavern shake.

“Oops,” Gordon said, grabbing Mr Greenlander by the arm, “time to go. I’d run if I were you.”

They ran. They didn’t stop running until they reached the mouth of the cave and stumbled out into the light. They dropped to their knees and knelt gasping for breath for quite some time. Then Gordon said, “Actually, she’s quite nice once you get to know her. Well, no, I tell a lie. But she’s damned good at her job.”

“I gathered that.”

“Anyway.” Gordon stood up, made a big deal out of brushing dust off his knees. “That’s just a few examples of the sort of thing we can do for your company. Unless there’s anything else in particular you’d like to see, I suggest we go back to your office. OK?”

Mr Greenlander nodded dumbly, and Gordon reached inside a fold of his robe, took out the golden box and looked around carefully–up, down, three-sixty-degrees all around–before opening it and taking out the doughnut. “Ready?”

“Oh God, yes.”

This time, it was like being inside a flashbulb when the picture gets taken. Mr Greenlander opened his mouth to scream, and found he was sitting in his chair in his office, looking straight at the clock on the wall, which read 2:37:14. Gordon was putting the gold box carefully away in his briefcase.

Mr Greenlander realised his face was wet; sweat, rapidly cooling. Gordon handed him a Kleenex, and he dabbed his forehead with it. “What the hell,” he asked, “just happened?”

Gordon steepled his fingers and looked at him steadily. “What do you think just happened?”

“I—” Mr Greenlander hesitated. Yes, he knew what he’d just seen. He’d been there, and there was absolutely no doubt in his mind. The trouble was, everything he’d seen and heard, in an experience which, according to his office clock, had taken no time at all, was impossible. Gordon was watching him keenly, like a cat guarding a mousehole. “Yes?”

“We visited some places,” Mr Greenlander said. “A computer server. A place where they make little wooden sticks. A—”

“Call centre?”

“Thank you, yes, a call centre. It was all—” He paused. Gordon’s eyes were fixed on him, like the tiny red dot on your forehead that tells you the sniper’s looking straight at you. “It was all very interesting.”

“Indeed.” Gordon closed his briefcase with a snap. “Well, you were curious to find out how we can undercut our competitors on the goods and services your company needs. Now you know. Unless you’ve got any questions?”

Questions, yes; many, many questions, the answers to which he really didn’t want to hear, not if it meant having to live with them for the rest of his life. “No, no, that’s fine. It all seems, you know, perfectly fine.”

“And ethical? You don’t have any issues on that score?”

“Absolutely not. And your prices are—”

“Yes?”

“Competitive. Extremely competitive.”

“I’m sure your shareholders will think so,” Gordon said smoothly. He leaned back in his chair, which creaked ever so slightly. “So,” he said, “what can we do for you?”

B
uttercup had never felt this way before.

The trouble was, she couldn’t be sure whether the strange floating sensation, the breathlessness, the burning, was love or indigestion. She’d never been troubled with either, and from what she’d been able to gather, from elderly female relatives and eavesdropping, the symptoms were so similar that it was a job to tell them apart. Usually, she’d come to the conclusion, you could figure out which was which from context; but she’d just spent an hour having a heavy meal with an undeniably attractive man. So—

Split the difference, she decided. A bit of both.

Turquine was gazing longingly at her, or at least in her direction. “You want the rest of that bread roll?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh. Fine.” The slightly strained expression on his noble face (particularly good in profile) suggested that he might possibly have a touch of indigestion, too. Or the other thing. “Pudding,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Do you fancy some pudding,” he said. “Only I saw someone over there getting apple pie, and if there’s one thing—”

“It’s tuppence.”

“Oh.”

A wave of indigestion swept through her, and she smiled. “Go on,” she said, “I’ll treat you.”

“What?” He frowned, then smiled back. “I keep forgetting, you’ve got all that money. All right, then, thanks. That’d be nice.”

She chewed a mouthful of bread roll thoughtfully. If he was in love or indigestion with her–if his heart burned for her, would it matter if it was because she had a pocket jingling with florins and shillings? Probably, she decided, not. What, after all, is love? A largely irrational attraction, generally focused on some superficial attribute of the beloved, the value of which the lover tends to exaggerate out of all proportion. As far as men were concerned, in her limited and circumscribed experience, the attribute tended to be a body part–cornflower-blue eyes, or mammary glands of a certain size, profile and ogive. She’d always reckoned that was a pretty silly way of going about things, though she was prepared to concede that women’s approach was scarcely more rational. Well; if you can love someone for their eyes or their boobs, why not for their money? And why shouldn’t that love (or indigestion) be every bit as pure, ardent and holy? Beauty, after all, inevitably fades, but money only dissipates if you’re foolish enough to spend it.

Indeed. But fourpence for two slices of apple pie could be regarded in the circumstances as a perfectly sound investment. She waved to the innkeeper, and placed the order.

“Would you like clotted cream with that?”

“Is it extra?”

“No, same price.”

“Yes, please.”

Besides, she reflected, around here everyone’s nice-looking; for some reason, we just don’t seem to get ugly people (why
was
that?) so the traditional criteria for choosing
a life partner were frustratingly difficult to apply. A really sensible, down-to-earth attitude to personal finances, on the other hand, was distinctly rare. She’d known Bill the woodcutter spend his last farthing on a bit of ribbon to tie up his true love’s hair, and where the hell was the sense in that? And all those idiots who bought wood from the woodcutters in the marketplace, when you could go fifty yards further down the road with a wheelbarrow and simply help yourself—No, she knew, she could never love any of the men around here. But Turquine (she caught a glimpse of a neatly darned hole on the elbow of his otherwise perfectly good shirt, and her heart melted) was different.

“It’s funny,” he was saying. “I move around a lot in my line of work, but I don’t think I’ve been in these parts before.”

She shrugged. “One sleepy little market town’s the same as any other, surely.”

“You’d have thought so. Actually, most of them are. Dumps. This one, though—”

“Different?”

“Yes. Bloody sight more expensive, for one thing.”

She tried not to blush, but she had an idea that that was her doing. After nearly a decade of selling the personal effects of dead wolves, she had an uncomfortable feeling that she’d stimulated the local economy rather more than was good for it. People liked to buy nice teapots and cushions and placemats and matching sets of silver-plated spoons, but it did mean they had to put up the price of their firewood to compensate, and she had an idea that that in turn had led to food and other thing costing more, though since the firewood buyers didn’t seem to mind paying the higher prices (why?
Why?
) it didn’t actually appear to matter all that much; they had enough money, wherever it was they got it from, and the net result seemed to be that life went on exactly as it always had, except that a considerable number of people now
had teapots and teaspoons, which they put carefully away in cupboards for best and never used. And why not?

“You know,” he went on, and there was a distant, faraway look in his eyes that gave her indigestion something rotten, “I figure that if you bought a whole load of stuff in one of the other villages, where everything’s cheaper, and stuck it in a cart and brought it here and sold it, where everything’s much dearer, you could make out like a bandit.”

She caught her breath. “You think that?”

“Well, yes.”

“Me, too,” she said shyly. Further down the street, someone had just started playing a soupy sweet tune on a violin. At any other time, she’d have been annoyed.

“But you never—”

She shrugged. “It’s different,” she said quietly, “when you’re a girl. You ask people how much to hire a cart for three days, and they just look at you, or they laugh.”

“That’s stupid.”

Sharps and arpeggios. “You think so?”

“Of course. If I had a cart I wasn’t using and some woman came and offered me money to borrow it for a day or so, I’d take her hand off at the wrist. I mean,” he added, “money’s money, no two ways about it.”

“We could—” She stopped. It was too soon. She barely knew him.

“What?”

“We could get a cart,” she whispered. “You and me. I know where there’s a good, big six-wheeler, hardly been used, just sits there in a barn all week. You could get a lot of stuff in it.”

He smiled. “Yes, why not? Tell you what, it’s got to be better than killing bloody dragons. And that’s another thing. Actually killing them’s only about, what, ten per cent of the time. The rest of it’s lugging carcasses about the place, in
carts. So really, it’d be more or less what I’m doing right now, only I’d get more money. Not to mention not being flamed at by nasty great big lizards.”

Her eyes were shining. “You don’t like being a dragonslayer?”

“It’s
silly
.” The vehemence of his outburst seemed to have startled him; he had that it-just-came-away-in-my-hand look on his face. “Well, it is,” he said. “I mean, for one thing, there never used to be all these dragons about. But the more we kill the stupid things, the more of them there are. And all this stuff, carting them to the wizard’s house; what the hell does he want with thousands of tons of dragon meat? What possible use could it be to anyone?”

Her brow furrowed in thought. “Maybe,” she said, “he’s got a deal on with a butcher, or someone who makes pies or sausages or whatever.”

“Dragon pies? Who’d buy them?”

“Maybe they don’t let on that they’re dragon. Maybe they mix the dragon in with a load of proper pie meat–horse, dog, rat, you know–in such small proportions that people don’t know what it is they’re actually eating. If dragon’s a whole lot cheaper than rat or horse, you could make a fortune.”

Turquine frowned. “Surely not. I mean, who’d be dumb enough to fall for that?”

She shrugged. “Just a thought.”

“I mean, great idea,” he added quickly, so as not to offend her, “if you could get away with it. But my guess is, it’s something magical, something special wizards need dragon for. Making potions, that sort of thing.”

“You’re probably right,” she said. “Anyway, I think it sounds like a horrible way to make a living.”

“You’re so right. For one thing, there’s all the princesses.”

She sat up a bit. “Princesses?”

“God, yes. Half my kingdom and my daughter’s hand in marriage. It’s so
embarrassing
having to say thanks-but-no-thanks all the time. They look at you out of their great big sheep eyes.”

“How unpleasant for you,” she said, a trifle coldly. “Time you got into another line of work, if you ask me.”

“Couldn’t agree with you more. So, where is this cart, exactly?”

And could it be more perfect than this, she asked herself; and yes, obviously it could, but this was appreciably better than staying home and washing her hair. She thought of Prince Florizel, a man with so much money that he’d paid two florins for a bit of old tea without a second thought. No, she could never feel love, or even a slightly upset tummy, for a man like that, no matter how loaded he might be. No good having it if you don’t value it. Take away his wealth (and there’d be so many clever people out there trying to do just that) and he was just another Bill the woodcutter, all purchasing power and no trousers. Besides, she guessed she’d already reached a decision, or else why did the thought of the sheep-eyed princesses make her want to reach for her hatchet?

She told him some more about the cart, and where they could get a team of horses really cheap; and he said, hang on, what about oats and hay and so forth, which was so sweet of him, and when she mentioned how she knew where they could get a deal on a load of perfectly good hay, some slight water damage but nothing to worry about, he gave her a look that turned her knees to jelly. And then she realised that they were the only customers left in the taproom, and the innkeeper was putting the chairs up on the tables.

“Let’s do it,” Turquine said suddenly. “Let’s do it now.”

“All right,” she said softly. He took her hand, and together they left the inn and crossed the town square to the livery
stables; and if hens clucked instead of bluebirds singing, she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The old man who’d been playing the violin in a doorway opposite the inn watched them go. He was frowning. As the door of the livery stable closed behind them, he put his fiddle and bow back in its battered case, scooped the handful of coppers out of his hat and dropped them in a pocket without counting them, and walked briskly up the street in the direction of the forest. He carried on for several miles, choosing the left-hand fork at the crossroads and following the old cart track that led to the mountains. It was a long, slow climb and he kept stopping, but eventually he cleared the tree line and came out into bright sunlight. Then he looked around until he found a narrow path, scarcely more than a suggestion of a path in the sparse heather, which went straight up the steep incline towards the summit of Nol Cuithin. He didn’t pause until he reached the outcrop-fringed hollow known locally as the Wizard’s Chair; there, he put down his violin case and looked carefully round, as if making sure there was no one watching him. The Chair was, of course, the perfect place for seeing and not being seen. It also had other virtues, though the townsfolk wouldn’t have understood them even if they’d known.

Two ravens swooped down out of the clear sky, circled him twice and pitched a yard or so away. He stooped and picked up a stone; they lifted and flew off, complaining bitterly. He let the stone fall from his hand, then reached inside his frayed old coat, took out his LoganBerry and keyed in a number.