An Orc on the Wild Side

by Tom Holt

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Humor & Satire; Humorous Fantasy; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

An Orc on the Wild Side is the latest comic masterpiece from one of the funniest writers in fantasy.

Winter is coming, so why not get away from it all?

Being the Dark Lord and Prince of Evil is not as much fun as it sounds, particularly if you are a basically decent person. King Mordak is just such a person. Technically he's more goblin than person, but the point is that he is really keen to be a lot less despicable than his predecessors.

Not that the other goblins appreciate Mordak's attempts to redefine the role. Why should they when his new healthcare program seems designed to actually extend life expectancy, and his efforts to end a perfectly reasonable war with the dwarves appear to have become an obsession?

With confidence in his leadership crumbling, what Mordak desperately needs is a distraction. Perhaps some of these humans moving to the Realm in search of great homes at an affordable price will be able to help?

Release date: September 10, 2019

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

In a hole in the ground there lived an advertising account executive. Not a nasty, cramped, smelly hole with no indoor plumbing, electricity or mains water; nor yet a ghastly primitive hole without air conditioning, broadband access, wi-fi or cable. It was a tastefully modernised halfling-hole, which the advertising account executive had bought for an absolute song and spent a fortune doing up; and that meant comfort.

When he and Pauline bought the place, of course, it had been a rather different story. After one look at it, they’d very nearly given up and gone back to Fulham. For a start, the front door was round—no, honestly; well, that had to go, naturally, which meant ripping out the doorframe, which was structural, wouldn’t you know, so the whole frontage had to come out and be propped up with RSJs, and as soon as they did that they discovered the joists were completely shot, woodworm or termites or something, God only knows what was holding the place up, force of habit presumably, so they had to scrape off all the turf and go in from the top, because of subsidence or whatever, and you can imagine how much that cost, and then redo all the timberwork, really, it’d have been so much easier to start from scratch but you don’t know that, do you, when you start bashing holes in walls; and once you got inside everything was panelled in this godawful gloomy dark wood, so all that had to come out and then the whole lot had to be plastered, and the floors, don’t talk to me about the floors, just horrible great stone slabs, freezing cold underfoot and every time you walked across a room it sounded like Frankenstein, so that was no good; a hundred and six tons of concrete it took before we could get a floor level enough to lay a decent bit of carpet. And the plumbing, don’t get me started on the plumbing. For one thing you just can’t get a plumber, they’re all dwarves and they live about a thousand miles away under some stupid mountain, it’s three months each way just to get there, and of course the moment they start work they discover they haven’t got some stupid tool or other and they’ve got to go back for it. And if you think it’s hard getting a plumber, you just try finding anyone who’s prepared to do a bit of cleaning and dusting. Which is hardly surprising, you should see the way the Short-arses, sorry, mustn’t call them that, the locals keep their houses, it’s disgusting, really, and they all smoke like chimneys. And the nearest supermarket’s the Lidl in bloody Hobbiton, twelve miles away, I know it doesn’t sound a lot but you try it rattling about on what they laughingly call roads in a stupid pony-trap, and they all drive like maniacs, and when you get there it’s practically a dead cert they’ll be out of Tunisian olives or parmesan. Thank God for the Internet, that’s what Pauline and I say, if we couldn’t order in stuff from home we’d starve.

Do we regret it? Oh no. No, once we’d got past all the teething problems, you can’t beat it. I mean, I can work from home via the Net, and now we’ve built the pool and found a company back in England that’s prepared to ship out Beefeater gin, Pauline’s happy as a clam, and it’s so quiet and peaceful and unspoilt. And the locals, once they’ve got to know you, they couldn’t be more friendly.

Or take the Barringtons, Terry and Molly. He was something high powered in phosphates and she ran a thriving online boutique, but then they got sick of it and thought, wouldn’t it be nice to get away from the pressures of the big city and rediscover the simple life. She could carry on with her business but sell locally sourced artisan craftworks, while he’d always fancied having a crack at writing that novel… And then they heard about the Hidden Realms from the Hendersons, who’d just sold their poky little flat in Ealing and bought what was effectively a castle, with a sodding great deer park and a lake and its own windmill, and still had enough left to pave over the rose garden for extra parking.

Getting to the Realms was a bit weird but incredibly quick and easy, and almost as soon as they arrived they saw the place of their dreams and knew they just had to have it—

Terry Barrington craned his neck until he could feel something go click, but still he couldn’t see the top of the tower. He took three steps back, but it didn’t help. The black stone seemed to swallow up the light—it wasn’t so much a colour as an absence, a rip in the fabric of reality—and when Molly Barrington touched the wall it was so cold it tore skin off her fingertips, as though it was covered in superglue.

“Who did you say used to live here?” Terry asked.

The guide smiled. “Well,” he said, “according to local folklore, a great wizard once dwelt in Caras Snorgond.”

“A wizard,” Molly squeaked, “that’s wonderful. I can almost feel the aura. Can you feel it, Terry?”

“When was the last time this lot was rendered?” her husband asked.

“Recently,” the guide said smoothly. “They used a local process, very reputable contractors, and it comes with a twenty-five-thousand-year guarantee.” He didn’t add that the re-rendering had been necessary to cover up the scuff marks left by the war engines of the Kings of Men during the Great Siege, when for six weeks a thousand trebuchets had pounded the tower day and night. Because of the spells of Gorman the Blue, they had succeeded in causing only minor cosmetic damage, but an offcomer might be sceptical about that and demand a full structural survey, which would confirm the futility of the assault but which might well turn up other issues which a purchaser might find off-putting. A quick dab over with coal tar and a freezing spell, however, covered a multitude of sins.

Terry took a further step back and felt something snap under his heel. He stooped down and picked it up. “What’s this? Looks like a bit of dowel.”

“Arrow shaft,” the guide said. “Stuff like that’s always turning up. This site is particularly rich in historical artefacts and antiquities.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Absolutely. The locals can’t dig their vegetable patches without coming across a dozen arrowheads or a bit of rusty armour.”

You can make good money selling historical artefacts on eBay. Terry casually dropped the fragment in his pocket and took a few steps towards the tower. Something was missing. It took him a moment to figure out what it was.

“Where’s the door?” he asked.

“Ah.” The guide beamed at him. “I was going to tell you about that. One of the special features that makes this property so unique is the amazing security system.”

“Great. Where’s the door?”

“There isn’t one,” the guide said. “That is, unless you know the secret incantation.” He made a very peculiar noise, like someone gargling with gravel, and four glowing red lines appeared on the face of the black stone and slowly joined to form a rectangle. There was an audible click, and the rectangle swung open. “You can forget your triple-bolt deadlocks and your infra-red motion detectors and your CCTV,” the agent went on. “Without the magic words, no force on earth can get in here. It’s also handy,” he added, “for anyone who has trouble remembering where they put their keys.”

“Mphm,” Terry said, trying hard not to sound impressed. “So how about windows?”

“Ah. Just step inside and see for yourself.”

They followed him, through the almost invisible entrance and up a long flight of winding steps. It was pitch dark and bitter cold. Terry was just about to say something when the guide did some more of that weird muttering, and suddenly—

“The walls, you see,” said the guide, “are transparent.”

Molly squealed with delight, and Terry had to admit he was impressed. It was a 365-degree picture window, looking out over green pastures and vast tousled forests towards the gaunt grey outline of the distant mountains—

“With,” the guide added, “built-in magnification.”

—which were suddenly right up close, in your face, as if you’d just teleported a hundred miles and were hovering in mid-air just short of the cliff face. Then lift your head just a little and suddenly you’re looking over the mountaintops, down through the clouds (which part and dissipate instantly) at purple moorlands, golden wheat fields, and then a rocky coastline and the sky-blue sea…

“That’s amazing,” Terry said. “It’s like Google Earth without a mouse.”

“Quite,” the guide said. “Or, if you prefer, you can mute them so they’re just slightly translucent.” The view vanished abruptly, and they were in a bare circular room with walls of faintly glowing mother-of-pearl, and a polished pink marble floor.

“That’ll have to go,” Molly said firmly. “I’m not spending the rest of my life on my hands and knees keeping that clean.”

The guide smirked. “No need,” he said. “Self-cleaning. Just say the appropriate spell.”

Terry looked at him suspiciously. “You keep saying that,” he said. “Spells and rubbish. Are you trying to tell us this place is powered by magic?”

“Good heavens no,” the guide said, and in the pocket of his jacket his fingers were tightly crossed. “It’s just really sophisticated voice-activated, solar-powered technology, so advanced and discreet it looks like magic. But perfectly normal, I promise you. I mean, magic. Would I ask you to believe in anything like that?”

“Mmm,” Terry said. “Where’s the toilet?”

“There are garderobes,” the guide corrected him gently, “on every floor, naturally.” He mumbled something, and a door appeared in the wall. The outside wall, Terry was about to point out, but then the door swung open to reveal a large bathroom, with pale green marble walls and what looked suspiciously like a solid gold bath and lavatory bowl. Terry reached in and fingered the toilet paper. It was amazingly soft, as though woven from cloud.

There comes a point when there are no more tyres left to kick. “How much did you say they want for this place?” Terry heard himself say.

The guide quoted a sum of money that would just about buy a lock-up garage in Chiswick, provided you weren’t fussy about roofs and stuff. “There’s got to be a catch,” Terry said. “What about rates and ground rents and local taxes?”

“Ah,” said the guide. “They come to about five thousand silver marks a year.”

“That’s a bit—”

“They pay you,” the guide added quickly. “As Lord of the Tower of Snorgond and Prince of Falthithuil. The titles come with the property.”

Terry’s mouth moved up and down for a bit, but no sound came out. Molly said, “Does that mean we’ll be lords and ladies? That’s so exciting.”

“Something like that,” the guide said. “Of course, there’s a few purely nominal obligations that go with it; basically, just letting the locals use part of the grounds for fetes and flower shows, that sort of thing. No big deal. Of course you don’t have to accept the title, but—”

Five thousand silver marks a year; what exactly was a mark, and how much did it weigh? Gift horses’ teeth, Terry thought. “Oh, I think we ought to enter into the spirit of things, don’t you, Moll? I mean, what’s the point of coming to a place like this if you aren’t going to make yourself part of the community? That’s what the big society is all about.”

“That’s the spirit,” the guide said cheerfully. “Now, if you’d like to follow me up onto the roof, I think you’re going to like the view. You can see right out over the Entwoods as far as the Great River.”

“Whee!” Molly said, gazing up at the eagles circling overhead. “What’s an Entwood?”

Maybe the guide hadn’t heard her. “Over there,” he said, “you can see the White City, with its celebrated shopping facilities, entertainment complex and folkloresque Old Town. There’s a carrier’s cart three times a week, but I expect you’ll keep your own carriage. Now, if you look closely you can just make out the remains of the curtain wall, which marks the boundary of the property. It’s about five square miles, give or take.”

Just before they came to the Realms they’d had drinks with the Lushingtons, who’d made them both feel sick, banging on about their wonderful converted mithril mine in the foothills of the Taram Asalat, which they’d snapped up for a trivial sum and had such plans for. Already, in his mind’s eye, Terry was showing the Lushingtons this view, before adjourning to the patio for a glass of wine from his own vineyard, which would be somewhere about there—“What do you think, Moll?” Terry said. “Will it do?”

Before she could answer, they heard a scream. It started low and rose to a piercing shrill crescendo, blending all the hate and all the sorrow in the world into one heart-stopping, anguished leitmotiv. Then it died away as abruptly as it had begun.

“Ooh,” Molly said. “That’s a bittern. They’re dead rare, they are.”

The guide had gone white as a sheet and stepped back into the shadow of the ramparts. The sound had apparently awoken some old memory; once bittern, twice shy, or something of the sort.

“Well?” Terry said.

“I love it, Terry. We are going to buy it, aren’t we?”

Only last year the Cordwainers had paid nearly as much for a beach hut at Lyme Regis. “Not at that price,” Terry said, with what he hoped was genuine sincerity. “Knock off ten per cent and maybe we’d be interested.”

“Done,” the guide said.

Terry blinked twice. “When I said ten, what I actually meant was twelve.”

“Of course you did,” the guide said, contorting his neck so he could peer up at the sky without coming out of the shadows. “Twelve per cent it is. Now, by some extraordinary chance I happen to have a draft contract in my pocket, all we need to do is fill in the blanks and we’re away.” A shadow had fallen across the sun; a slick, fast-moving shadow that flew against the wind. “Just sign the last page, where the pencil cross is, and initial the first paragraph. You can use my back to rest on if you like.”

Before he succeeded the Nameless One as Dark Lord and Prince of Evil, King Mordak had acquired a justly deserved reputation as the greatest proponent of liberal social reform in the history of Goblinkind. True, he was the greatest goblin reformer in the same way that the Sun is the hottest star in the solar system, or seven is the biggest whole number between six and eight; but his agenda had been ambitious, and he’d given it everything he’d got. Under the banner of New Evil, he’d come a long way in a short time, although he was painfully aware that there was still an even longer way to go before he could declare victory in any credible sense.

Getting the Dark Lordship had, naturally, put a bit of a crimp in things. There had to be a period of consolidation. The honeymoon hadn’t lasted long. He’d barely seated himself on the Iron Throne (his feet didn’t quite touch the floor; he had the engineers looking into that) when the infighting started in earnest; wraiths against trolls, Dark Elves siding with the revisionist faction of the Undead against the Erlking and the cobolds, the Queen of the Fey shamelessly pulling every string in sight to get herself appointed to the vacant chair on the Finance Committee. Sorting all that out had taken a long time and rather too much of his reserves of mental and spiritual energy; and while his attention was elsewhere the goblin Old Guard had been quietly gnawing away at everything he’d managed to get done in the last ten years of patient, agonisingly slow effort.

Take, for example, his flagship universal healthcare programme—

“No,” he said. “And that’s final.”

The Chairgoblin of the Apothecaries’ Guild scowled at him. “It’s traditional.”

“I know. That’s why it’s got to stop. From now on, you get paid in money, or not at all.”

There was an awkward silence. From time immemorial, goblin surgeons and apothecaries had been remunerated in the old-fashioned way: a flat fee of fivepence if they cured the patient, or the carcass if they didn’t. “Where’s the incentive in that?” the Chairgoblin said angrily. “Threepence an hour, regardless of whether they get better or not? I mean, why bother?”

Mordak counted to five under his breath. “All your patients die,” he pointed out. “And then you eat them. Admit it, that’s not an ideal system.”

The Chairgoblin was shocked. “That’s social responsibility, that is,” he said. “By weeding out the sick and infirm, we’re making an invaluable contribution to the future of the species.”

“Threepence an hour,” Mordak said firmly, “and no more amputations for ingrowing toenails. You want drumsticks, you buy them in the market like everybody else. Next.”

Next was the Defence Committee. Mordak glanced at the agenda and sighed. “All right,” he said, “would somebody care to explain to me why we’re at war with the dwarves again?”

A thickset goblin in troll-scale armour shuffled his feet. “They started it.”

“Of course they did. What did they do this time?”

The goblin stuck out his chest. “They failed to comply with an ultimatum to evacuate Grid Section 34992/XP/239 by the date specified.”

“Fine.” Mordak unrolled a map and peered at it. It was a sad but undeniable fact that the Dark Eyesight wasn’t getting any better as time went by. The humans, so he’d heard, had these bits of ground glass you stuck in your eye, and it helped you see better. Sounded promising. Goblins had something similar, of course, but designed to achieve the opposite effect. “Hold on,” he said. “Did you say 239?”

“Sir.”

“According to this map, that’s the guest wing of King Drain’s palace.”

The goblin shrugged. “It’s directly above one of our main supply tunnels,” he said. “If they were to neglect it and it all caved in, our ability to transport vital materiel from the depot to the front-line tunnels would be seriously compromised.”

“Just a second.” Mordak fiddled about with a ruler and a pair of dividers. “By directly above, you mean separated by a thousand feet of solid rock.”

“Solid at the moment, sir,” the goblin said. “All it’d take would be a bit of water erosion and some tectonic shift and we’d be staring disaster in the face. Much better to act now, sir, from a position of relative strength.”

Mordak closed his eyes for a moment. “Oh, come on,” he said. “We only just managed to patch things up after the last war. They wiped the floor with us.”

“I did say relative strength, sir. Who knows, in five thousand years’ time they could be ten times stronger than us, instead of just three, like they are now. That’s why we should strike now, sir, while we’ve got the chance.”

“Scribe.”

A bored-looking Elf sprawling in a chair to his left took a pencil from behind her ear. “What?”

“Write a nice polite letter to King Drain reassuring him that we have no hostile intentions and that we hope he wasn’t unduly alarmed by our April Fools message.”

“It’s September.”

“Backdate it.”

The Elf shrugged and went back to her newspaper. That was one area, at least, in which he could reasonably claim to have succeeded; there were now Elves living (for longer than ten minutes) and working in Goblinland, performing such essential administrative functions as reading, writing and adding up, and making a valuable contribution to goblin society. True, they were if anything even more insufferable than they’d been before the great rapprochement—there’s nothing like living and working with a species, they delighted in saying, for confirming all your deeply entrenched prejudices—but at least they were here, tolerated and uneaten, and someone was doing the paperwork and telling him where he was supposed to be and when.

“All right,” Mordak said to the Defence goblins, “you lot clear off, and try not to start any more wars without at least telling me. Next.”

Ah yes, the civil engineering programme. New roads, bridges, infrastructure of all kinds, just what was needed to create jobs and boost sustainable economic growth—

“What do you mean, you’ve stopped work?”

The chief engineer shrugged. “Can’t get the materials.”

“For a road? Oh, come on.”

“It’s not just any road, is it?” the engineer retorted. “It’s a road from the State ordnance factory to the principal supply depot at G’nash G’vork.”

“I know that. It’s so we can move cartloads of iron ore on the flat, instead of having to go up three levels and then back down again.”

“Ah,” said the engineer. “But if you look at the map, see, there’s this half-mile section here that goes straight past the royal palace, right?”

“Well, yes. I don’t mind. Roads have got to be built. I’m not one of those not-in-my-backyard whiners who—”

“Yes, Your Majesty, but with all due respect you’re missing the bloody point. If it goes past the palace, you might walk on it.”

Mordak’s head was starting to hurt. “There is that chance, yes. So?”

“So,” said the chief engineer, “everybody knows, the King of the Goblins tramples on the bleached bones of his mortal enemies, it’s traditional. You can’t just go walking about on tarmac. You got your royal dignity to think of.”

“Yes, but—”

“So,” the engineer ground on, “if we’re going to build this stupid road, it’s got to be bones, and the thing of it is, there just aren’t enough of ’em to go round. You aren’t executing enough mortal enemies, all due respect. So, either you start chopping off a few more heads, or we’re going to have to reroute to bypass the palace area altogether, which’ll mean digging seven miles through solid rock and coming out here”—he stabbed at the map with a splintered foretalon—“which is three levels down, so you’d need a bloody great big embankment here, and if you’re going to have to do all that, I ask you, where’s the bloody point?”

Mordak looked down at his hand. He’d just bitten clean through one of his own claws. Never mind. “You know what,” he said, “you’re quite right.”

“I am?”

“Yes. And I’m a fool not to have thought of it before. Silly me. What we need, obviously, is a whole lot more executions.”

The engineer grinned. “Now you’re talking. There’s the Highways Committee, for a start. Chop the lot of ’em and who’d ever notice?”

“Quite,” Mordak said. “But that’s still only, what, thirty yards’ worth of bones. Whereas your department—just offhand, round numbers, how many goblins have you got working for you in Construction? Yourself included.”

“Um.”

“Got to be at least seven thousand. That’s, let me see, best part of half a mile. Which would cover the stretch of road that goes past the palace just nicely.”

“Yes, but—”

Mordak smiled. “I know,” he said. “You’re going to point out that you and your colleagues aren’t my mortal enemies, and therefore not suitable for deployment as roadmaking material. Isn’t that right?”

The engineer seemed to be having difficulty speaking, but he could still nod his head.

“That’s what I thought,” Mordak said. “Because in order for someone to be my mortal enemy, he’d have to do something to get me seriously annoyed, like making difficulties, or deliberately holding up one of my pet projects, or not doing as he’s damn well told. Agreed?”

“Anything you say, boss.”

“Which you would never dream of doing, it goes without saying. So, that’s fine. Oh, and by the way, did I ever tell you how I feel about concrete?”

“Boss.”

“I hate concrete. One of these days I’m going to have all the concrete in Goblinland rounded up, stood against a wall and shot. And then I’m going to dance on its shattered rubble. Get the picture?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good man. Down with concrete. Death to aggregates. Two, four, six, eight, they’re the stuff we really hate. Now get on with it. Next.”

Next was the president of the Equality Commission. And, he had to admit, just for once, here was someone in charge of something who’d actually made an effort. Just, perhaps, a trifle misguided.

“It says here,” Mordak said, “you’ve had nine hundred and forty goblins arrested and their feet cut off. Is that right?”

“Nine hundred and forty-six.”

“I stand corrected. Out of interest, why?”

“They weren’t equal.”

You know that feeling of having just walked into a plate glass door? “Excuse me?”

“It says in the Universal Declaration of Goblin Rights,” the president said patiently, “henceforth, all goblins are to be equal. Well, they weren’t.”

“Um?”

“Too tall. So, we shortened them a bit. The mean average height of an adult goblin is forty-nine-point-seven inches, so—”

“Ah.” Mordak nodded. “So presumably the reason why you locked up eight thousand goblins in a dungeon with no food for a month—”

The president nodded. “Too heavy. The mean average weight—”

“Yes, all right.” Mordak drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “And the ones you had squashed between two huge slabs of stone were too wide, I think I get the picture. May I ask, what definition of equal are you using as your point of reference?”

The president frowned. “You told me, look it up. So I did. It means being the same in quantity, size or amount. So I looked up size, and it said—”

“Mphm.” Mordak took a strangely shaped metal object from the baggy sleeve of his black robe, polished it on his cuff and balanced it carefully on the arm of the throne. “Come on, S’nrrg, it’s me you’re talking to. I know you. You’re doing this to be awkward, aren’t you?”

“What, me? Perish the—”

“You and all the rest of them. You don’t like the reform package, you’ve never really got behind the core values of New Evil, and you’re trying to make me look like an idiot. Well?”

The president looked at the metal thing, then at Mordak, then back at the thing. “All right, so me and some of the lads don’t hold with all this new stuff. But we’re loyal goblins. Dead loyal. We’re just doing like you said. Honest.”

“S’nrrg, I wouldn’t trust you if we were sitting under a clock and you told me the time. The question I always ask myself before I appoint someone to high public office is, is this man more scared than bolshie? I think I may have misjudged you, old friend.” He smiled. “I admire you for that. You’ve got to take your hat off to someone who’s prepared to die horribly for what he believes is right.”

“Honest, boss, I never—”

“Of course,” Mordak went on, picking up the metal thing and turning it slowly in his hand, as if trying to find the sweet spot, “if I could convince myself that you were capable of true, sincere cowardice, not just a bit frightened but genuinely terrified out of your—”

He paused and glanced down. A dark, treacly pool had appeared around the president’s feet, and Mordak could smell the sharp fumes of dissolving marble. He nodded and put the metal thing back in his sleeve. “In that case,” he said, “I might feel justified in giving you a second chance. Well? What do you reckon?”

“Oh, I think so, boss,” the president whimpered. “I mean, why not? Just for the hell of it.”

“Quite.” Mordak gave him a warm smile. “In that case, I suggest we start by amending article one of the Declaration so that it says something like equal rights and opportunities for all goblins, regardless of age, size, rank, gender or religious preference. How would that be?”

“Um, boss.”

“What?”

“Sorry, boss, but you can’t do that.”

Mordak sighed. “You’re being brave again, S’nnrg.” He pulled the object a little way out of his sleeve, just far enough so that the torchlight could play on its burnished steel. “In fact, not just brave but downright bloody heroic. Now, what d. . .