The Outsorcerer's Apprentice Read online

  She looked at him. “Yeah, right. And then it’ll fly off after a pigeon or something and you’ll never see it again. You don’t know a lot about hawks, do you?”

  “Of course I do. I’m a prince.”

  “Ah. So you knew not to feed it for four hours before flying it.”

  But it had looked so hungry and sad, and he’d felt sorry for it. “That’s the traditional approach,” he said briskly. “In modern falconry—”

  “Mphm.”

  The goshawk spread its wings and flew away. When it was an almost imperceptible dot on the skyline, Florizel said, “Was there something?”

  “What?”

  “Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

  She looked at him, and he realised he was still holding a scrap of raw chicken in his uplifted left hand. In context, it didn’t make him look good. He dropped it, took off the glove, remembered that there were no damn pockets in this stupid doublet thing, and stood there holding it, like a prune.

  “Well?” he said.

  “What? Oh, sorry. Yes. I wanted to talk to you,” she said, “about the wizard.”

  He blinked. “Wizard?”

  She nodded. “Because, well, you did say you wanted to know if there was anything you ought to be doing something about, and I think it’s high time this whole wizard business—”

  “There’s a wizard?”

  Inscrutability really wasn’t one of her faults. “You don’t know about the wizard.”

  “Um. No.”

  She sighed. “You really ought to get out and about more. All right. There’s this wizard. Actually, he’s probably the most important man in the whole kingdom.” Present company excepted, she pointedly didn’t say. “And I think that some of the stuff he’s been getting up to is—”

  He decided he could afford a patronising smile. “It’s all right,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  Make that a patronising grin. “Magic isn’t real,” he said. “It’s just made up, like in stories. Make believe. So whatever this so-called wizard is doing—”

  The look on her face would have made a handy-dandy diamond grinder. “He can disappear and reappear at will,” she said. “And make things vanish. And turn water into beer. Not very good beer, but—”

  Florizel frowned. “Illusion and sleight of hand,” he said. “Your basic conjuring tricks.”

  “And change base metal into gold,” she went on. “And make lightning shoot from his fingertips. Oh, and he can fly, too. And stuff.”

  Florizel bought time with a carefully crafted fake sneeze. “That’s not actually magic,” he said. “There’s undoubtedly a perfectly simple non-magical explanation. It’s a well-known anthropological law, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from—”

  “He can raise the dead.”

  “Um.” Florizel thought for a moment. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Seen him do it,” she said casually. “We all have. Everybody around here knows the wizard. Except,” she added politely, “you, apparently. And what I think is, some of the things he does, I don’t think he ought to be allowed to get away with it. It’s not right. It’s destroying the foundations of a sustainable, ecologically responsible economy.”

  His eyebrow lifted. “Flying? Raising the dead?”

  “Well, not that, specifically. I was thinking more of some of the other stuff. Like, he’s got my dad and my uncles out there in the forest cutting down loads and loads of trees, and what’s that doing to the ozone layer?”

  Florizel cast his mind back. “Well,” he said, “it’s a huge forest.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “If memory serves, it stretches from the Blue Hills right across the High Country as far as the Sair Calathorn.“

  “Carathorn.”

  “Sorry, yes, what you said. Anyhow, it’s not like they’ve made any significant difference. In fact, if you compare the most up-to-date maps with the ordnance survey carried out fifty years ago, you’ll see that the deforested area is basically the same now as it was then.” He paused. Something he’d just said struck him as a bit weird, but never mind. “So really, I don’t think there’s any cause for—”

  “Is that true?”

  He nodded. “I think so,” he said. “I mean, I was out that way the end of last week, and I got lo—I happened to have a map with me, and the clearings in the forest are pretty much as they’re marked, and there’s definitely no signs of dangerously excessive deforestation, so honestly, I think you may be worrying about nothing. In fact,” he went on, “I was thinking, maybe a programme of controlled felling and land reclamation might not be a bad idea, you know, diversify a bit away from the over-dominant forestry sector into agriculture and food production, because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, there don’t seem to be terribly many farmers around here, so how people get anything to eat is a bit of a mystery to me.”

  Something in her troubled eyes suggested that the same thought had crossed her mind once or twice. But; “All right,” she said, “forget about cutting down the trees for the moment. What about the dwarves and the goblins? He’s a bad influence on them, I think, and one of these days—”

  “Dwarves.”

  A blank look. “Yes, you know, Drain son of Dror’s lot, under the Mountain.”

  “Goblins.”

  “King Mordak’s people. Surely you know about the—”

  “Yes, sure, of course I know about them,” said Prince Florizel, making a mental note to say something really horrible and snarky to the Royal Remembrancer the moment he got back to the palace. “What about them?”

  Before she could answer, the sky went dark as a cloud covered the sun. Except that it wasn’t a cloud; it was a huge, fast-moving shape, a very long way up but still almost impossibly big; a bird, except that the wing shape, the long neck, the serpentine tail—

  “What the hell,” Florizel gasped, “is that?”

  “What? Oh, it’s just a dragon. Like I was saying, I don’t think—”

  “A drag—”

  “Of course.” She was staring at him; not contempt, genuine surprise. “Do you mean to say you’ve never seen a dragon before?”

  The monster had banked and wheeled. It was coming towards them, and she was just standing there. “For crying out loud,” he whimpered. “It’s a dragon. We ought to—”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” she said, “a knight’ll kill it, they always do. Actually, that was another thing I wanted to talk to you about—”

  But Florizel had had enough. Ignoring his tethered horse, he took to his heels and ran, not stopping until he’d reached the cover of a plausibly fireproof granite outcrop. He crawled under a jutting ledge as far as he could get and tried to catch his breath.

  Dragons, he thought. Dragons. What in God’s name have I let myself in for?

  A blanket of darkness swept over him, faster than a man could run, and he heard the slow whop-whop of unimaginable wings. No, he told himself bitterly, this is not fun.

  Which meant, he realised, that things weren’t turning out a bit like he’d imagined. The idea was, a nice relaxing place he could slip away to, when the stress and aggravation of everyday life got to him; a place where he could escape from his troubles, his shortcomings, the disappointment of being himself—

  Something warm and wet was trickling down his leg. He listened hard. The whop-whop sound was fading. No it wasn’t. It was dopplering and coming back. Oh hell.

  It had never occurred to him, even in his most wimpish, panic-stricken moments, that he might actually come to harm here, possibly even die; that his escape from real life might end in a premature rendezvous with real death. Of course not. Don’t be so silly. It’s perfectly safe, or they wouldn’t have—

  The shadow was back, but it wasn’t moving so fast. In fact, it had stopped, and the wingbeat noise had turned into a monstrous puppy-dog snuffling. Do dragons hunt by scent rather than sight? he wondered; and then realised that h
e had no way of knowing, because there was no data, because dragons weren’t real and therefore no scientist had studied them. On balance, though, it seemed likely (because dragons are presumably reptiles, and lizards have notoriously poor eyesight, and why in God’s name was he trying to extrapolate biological information about an entirely mythical species?); and thanks to the right old state he’d got himself into, chances were he stank to high heaven of sweat and adrenalin and various other less honourable bodily odours, in which case his only hope was if the dragon had a really bad cold, in itself improbable in a natural firebreather—

  He heard something else; the whinny of a horse, the clank of metal. What on earth? A horse-drawn plough? An old-fashioned rag-and-bone man? Or–what was it she’d said, just before he so impressively ran away? A knight.

  A deafening roaring noise blotted all thought from his mind. It seemed to go on for ever, and then it stopped. Silence; then a man’s voice saying, “Sorry. Nothing personal.”

  Florizel realised he’d stopped breathing. Damn silly thing to do. He put that right with a deep, ragged gasp.

  “Learn your destiny,” said a voice that spoke ordinary words but definitely wasn’t human. “You must ride to the forest of Evinardar—”

  “Actually,” said the man, “would it be all right if I stopped you there, because in actual fact I have no intention whatsoever of going to bloody Evinardar, it’s a godawful place, the food’s lousy, the women smell and the gross national product is less than the cost of the two sets of horseshoes I’d wear out getting there. So, if it’s all the same to you—”

  “Suit yourself,” croaked the other voice; and then there was a ground-shaking thump, as though something very heavy had fallen over. About a minute later, Florizel heard the sound of a saw, and some out-of-tune whistling.

  “Excuse me,” he called out. “Hello?”

  Pause. Then an upside-down face appeared just below the jutting ledge, “Hello,” said the face. “You all right down there?”

  “Is it dead?”

  The face grinned. “As a doornail,” it said. “You’ll be the prince, then.”

  In spite of everything, Florizel couldn’t help wondering–“How’d you know?”

  “Come on.” A mail-clad arm extended towards him. “Let’s get you out of there, and then we can talk.”

  While he’d been under the ledge both of Florizel’s feet had gone to sleep, a fact he only became aware of when he tried to stand on them. So he sat down instead, with his back to the rock. “I’m Prince Florizel,” he said weakly. “How can I ever—?”

  There was a slightly glazed look on the young man’s face. “Oh, let’s not bother with all that now,” he said. “I’m Sir Turquine, by the way. Look, is there any chance of a cart and a dozen men?”

  “Of course,” Florizel said. “Anything else?”

  “Rope,” said Sir Turquine. “About two hundred square yards of muslin would be nice. And if you could possibly come up with half a ton of ice—”

  Florizel nodded eagerly. “There’s a sort of cave thing out in the back of the palace, full of the stuff. They use it for making sherbet, whatever that is. Help yourself.”

  The knight gave him a beautiful smile. “Look,” he said, “about your daughter—”

  “I haven’t got a daughter.”

  “Sorry, silly me, your sister—”

  “I’m an only child.”

  “You are? That’s splendid.” Sir Turquine looked genuinely pleased. “That’s that sorted, then. Look, how far away are the ropes and the cart and stuff? Only, time’s getting on and it’s a warm day.”

  As best he could, Florizel gave him directions to the palace. “Ask for the Grand Steward,” he said, “say I sent you. And if he gives you any trouble—”

  He must have said something amusing, because the knight laughed. “He won’t, trust me. Well, thanks ever so, and it was a pleasure doing business with you.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Whatever. And if you get any more dragons, remember, Turquine’s the name. Fast, efficient service, no supernatural monster too large or too small. Cheerio for now.”

  Turquine vaulted onto his horse, which sagged slightly; then he trotted away, making a sound like a panel-beating contest. When he was out of sight, Florizel slowly turned round and looked at the dragon.

  For obvious reasons, it didn’t look back at him. Its eyes were open, and there was dust on its eyeballs; its yard-long jaws were slightly open, and Florizel could see teeth as long and yellow as bananas, and a cushion-sized segment of pink tongue. In spite of its size it looked very, very real, and as sad as road kill. No, he thought, I’m definitely not having fun. In fact, why don’t I just go back where I came from and get a real life?

  This is real, said a little voice in his head. And it’s not right.

  Where did that come from, he wondered. No idea. No way in hell could the existence of real dragons be considered his fault; and if there are real dragons in or near a populated area, someone’s got to deal with them, because otherwise they’d slaughter everything that moved. A predator this size, capable of flying and breathing fire, must use up an inconceivably high level of energy, which means it’d need to be feeding all the damn time. Obviously you’d have to control the creatures–control? Wipe them off the face of the Earth. Damn it, if the nice man in the iron knitting hadn’t happened to be passing, I’d be toast—

  A cart, twelve men, muslin and a lot of ice. Maybe that was what was wrong.

  Not my problem, he assured himself. Yes, this is real; but it’s not my fault, I’m a tourist, I came here under the misapprehension that it’d be a bit of fun, and now I’m going to go away and never come back—

  Well, said the little voice. Go on, then.

  He allowed himself a little groan. Oh, all right, he admitted to himself, maybe it is my fault, just a teeny-weeny bit; not anything I’ve done, of course, it’s one of those transfer-of-undertakings things, like when you buy up a company and that makes you responsible for all its outstanding debts. I did choose to be the prince, didn’t I?

  For some reason, when his mind referred that one back to committee, he was rewarded with a fleeting mental picture of her, the annoying girl with all the difficult questions. No way, he protested, no way in hell. True, she was pretty–was she? Actually, he wasn’t sure. All the girls here were pretty, just as all the men were handsome; like under-thirties in a daytime soap (because you don’t progress far enough in the dramatic profession to be cast in one unless you meet a certain standard of physical appearance); accordingly, after the first week, a sort of snow-blindness had set in and he no longer registered beauty, except on the rare occasions when it wasn’t there. So it wasn’t that, he reassured himself, and if it’s not that, for someone as shallow and superficial as me, what else could it possibly be—?

  Suddenly, the earth shook. He staggered. It felt like standing up on a fast-moving train while drunk.

  Earthquakes, for crying out loud. Somehow (probably thanks to all those trips he’d taken on fast-moving trains while drunk) he managed to keep his feet; then, when it was all over and the ground had stopped moving, he put his foot in a rabbit hole and fell flat on his face.

  He discovered that he was eye to glassy, dusty eye with the dead dragon. He jumped up, swore, and ran back to the palace without looking round.

  The slight tremor that so distressed prince Florizel was no bother at all to Yglaine as she made her way through the forest. Yglaine was an Elf, and Elves have a sort of special relationship with the ground; which is why they can walk over snowdrifts without sinking in, and why wellington boots aren’t available in Elf foot sizes.

  It made her frown, though. If the earth was shaking, it meant that the goblins, or the dwarves, or both of them were back to work in the mines. That was very bad. There was no need for it, they only did it to make money for their greedy, brutish leaders, and it was terribly bad for the trees and the environment and wildlife and stuff. She’d often
wondered why they couldn’t all get normal, sensible jobs, doing the sort of things Elves did for a living–abstract contemporary pottery, for instance, or sitting on committees, or writing amusingly snide reviews of each other’s latest volume of collected essays.

  She made an effort and shooed all such unpleasant thoughts from her mind. Today, after all, was going to be a special day, quite possibly the happiest day of her life, and it’d be such a pity if she let dwarves and goblins spoil it for her.

  Suddenly there was an ominous disturbance in the bushes beside the road, and a fully grown wolf sprang out. It hesitated for a moment, its red eyes blazing, its tongue lolling out of the corner of its panting mouth. But then, before she’d had a chance to quote it the latest statistics about the decline in squirrel numbers or lecture it about the known risks of red meat, it tucked its tail between its legs and fled.

  All her life, Yglaine had lived to make music; and now–she still couldn’t quite believe it–here she was, on her way to her first performance with the Sylvan Elves’ Youth Ensemble, the most prestigious orchestra in Elvenhome. As she ducked under an overhanging branch and took the left fork in the path that led to Harpers’ Glade, she couldn’t help wondering what the first piece she’d be called upon to play would be. Of course, she knew the entire repertoire, had done since she was six years old, but she rather hoped it’d be something that would allow her to shine; Tantuviel’s Third, perhaps, or maybe Luvien’s Exquisite Teardrops suite, or possibly even the overture to Gloriel and Glorfandel, with its thrillingly sustained G minor diminuendo in the ninth movement—

  She’d arrived. In fact, she realised with horror, she was late, because the other members of the orchestra were all there, sitting or reclining gracefully on the mossy bank under the shade of the ancient miramar trees, drumming their fingers and looking irritable. She stammered an apology, which the conductor received in stony silence and handed her a score. She sat down, opened her violin case and glanced at the sheet of music she’d just been given.

  The Four Seasons. Vivaldi. One; Spring.

  Never heard of it. She ran her eye over the first few bars and thought, what? It wasn’t Elven music, that was for sure. There were far too many notes, for one thing. Elven music tends to average two notes a minute. Also, this thing appeared to have a tune. As for Viv-whatever-it-said, that sounded suspiciously to her like a human name; at least, it wasn’t dwarf or goblin, and it most definitely wasn’t Elf, so what else could it be? Still, she was well aware of the Youth Ensemble’s dedication to cultural diversity and showcasing the very best of the artistic traditions of inferior races; she’d just never imagined she’d have to play any of the stuff, that was all.