"This place is disgusting!" Sandra said not long after they passed through the city gates. She looked as if she was trying to preserve her shoes and her dignity by walking on tiptoes through the street muck. It wasn't working.
"Yeah, you missed it when we came in last time to see the king," Brax said. "Don't worry, it gets worse."
"I don't see how—"
"Score!" The shout from what Lisa could only think of as a Dickensian street urchin interrupted their conversation.
The filth-crusted boy who had yelled stood on one side of the road holding a broom with stiff, raggedy bristles waving in the air. Another boy, much the same as the first, stood at the other side, looking down with obvious disappointment at a large and apparently confused rat attempting to scurry away. Now that she was looking for them, Lisa noticed other boys on either side of the street who were similarly attired and equipped.
"What in the world are they doing?" she asked.
"Oh, it's a kid's game," Milton said. "They call it smack-a-rat. Kids from one side of the street try to smack rats to the other side of the street. It's great fun, but I was never much good at it."
"You're right," Sandra said to Brax. "It does get worse."
Milton led them to a two-story shop just off the main road from the city gates. A painted sign over weathered gray clapboards proclaimed it Milton's Magical Mending & Mundane Mechanisms (Milton Puddleswirth ~ Proprietor). Lisa was not entirely sure what either of the listed areas of expertise meant, although it was a clever, if tongue twisting, alliteration.
The magician's apprentice withdrew a black iron key from a pouch and unlocked the door. Light from the street filtered through thick glass windows and onto a worktable inside. Several crude but functional chairs sat around it. Tools hung on one wall from pegs, and shelves held neat rows of small boxes, jars, and ceramic pots. Two tin oil lamps with clear glass globes sat on a higher table deeper into the room but they were unlit and the wall behind remained dim.
A voice rumbled from the shadows. "Hi, boss. I made tea."
Emerging from a back room, the owner of the voice, wearing a pale apron and holding a large tin tray, stepped into the light. When Lisa saw his face, she, along with the other three members of the crew of the spaceship Brane Child, gasped in alarm.
"What?" the new arrival said. "Don't like tea?"
His disproportionally long arms straightened as he placed the tray on the table near the widow with exaggerated caution. Bewildered eyes regarded them above a piggish snout.
More bewildered eyes looked back at them.
"Is that an orc?" Sandra asked.
"Yes," Milton said. "Say hello to the nice people, Gorbo."
"Hello, nice people," the orc said.
"But aren't you like at war or whatever with the orcs?"
"Oh, Gorbo's all right. I've had him since he was a pup and he does make a good pot of tea. "
"Butter cookies, too," Gorbo said. "I made 'em fresh this morning."
Lisa glanced at the tea tray, which, in addition to cups, small plates, and a large teapot wearing a knitted cozy, held a ceramic platter of round, pale yellow cookies. They looked quite appetizing.
"Hang on," Sandra said. "I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but aren't we supposed to be ridding your city of orcs? Aren't they ravening monsters or something like that? Please tell me the ones last night weren't just domestic servants protesting for higher pay, because if they were, the deal's off. I'm not getting involved in a wage dispute. Those can get ugly."
"No, no," Milton said, his head shaking back and forth in fervent denial like a mouse between two cat paws. "Gorbo is the only orc living in the city. A friend of mine brought him to me after he came back from a hunting trip about six years ago."
Doc, stepped closer to the orc and regarded him with professional interest. The orc leaned away, apparently wary of his close examination, but he did nothing to prevent it.
"Your people hunt orcs?" Lisa asked. She accepted that she should not judge other cultures using her own as a measuring stick, but hunting intelligent creatures, no matter how brutish and ugly, was simply wrong by any standard.
Milton waved his arms as if fending off the accusation. "No, nothing like that. They were hunting wild boars, I think."
"Big pig. Nasty brute. Good eating," Gorbo elaborated, ending his short explanation with what might be a smile full of crooked yellow teeth.
"So how did they get an orc by hunting boar?" Lisa asked, still skeptical.
Milton paused as if trying to decide how to phrase his response. "Orcs—I mean, the orcs around here—well, sometimes if there's a runt in a big litter, a male one anyway, they leave it to, um, fend for itself."
"As babies?"
He shrugged. "I suppose it makes sense to them. Too many mouths, not enough teats, or something like that, I suppose. Typically when people find one, it's already dead from exposure, starvation, or predators, but Gorbo was healthy when my friend found him."
"So why did he bring him to you?" Lisa still suspected something ethically shady was going on.
"Well, he knew I was learning magic and that I had an interest in natural philosophy, so he thought I might like to study him. I was only sixteen at the time and only two years into my apprenticeship with Ferman, so I never thought about how dangerous it might be. Gorbo seemed small and harmless then, but they grow fast."
So the orc is a lab animal, she translated in her mind. But he seems healthy and happy enough. He's certainly better here than dead.
"So he's harmless now?" Sandra asked.
"No, I mean yes. He's not likely to run around hurting people indiscriminately, if that's what you mean."
"So this handsome fellow is only six years old?" Doc said, appraising the orc with obvious curiosity.
"Yeah. As best as I can tell, it's roughly equivalent to the physical maturity of an eighteen-year-old person."
"And you raised him?"
"Well, my friend Mari helped."
"Mari's nice," Gorbo said with an uncomplicated but truthful smile.
"I imagine that not all of your neighbors are as accepting of him as you are," Doc hazarded.
"Not that many people know about him. We try to keep him inside as much as possible, and he knows that if he does go out he needs to cover up in a hooded cloak. If anyone asks about him, I usually say that he's a man who was cursed and that I'm treating him. Since I'm a magic user, other people simply assume he's my familiar. We haven't had any serious problems yet."
"Tea's going cold," Gorbo said. He sounded hurt that his offering was not welcomed, and Lisa felt a tug of compassion for him.
"Oh, yes. I need to pour out. I'm sorry, Gorbo, I was distracted. Everyone, please sit down and help yourselves to cream and sugar if you'd like, and try one of Gorbo's cookies. I think he does a fine job with them. It's a recipe Mari taught him."
Brax was the first to accept.
"Hey! These are good," he said, shedding a few crumbs.
Lisa hesitantly sampled the tea and cookies and found both quite palatable. She couldn't identify the type of tea, but this didn't surprise her since she was more of a coffee person.
"So what have you discovered about him in six years?" Doc asked.
"Well, if Gorbo is typical, I'd say adult orcs are roughly equivalent, intellectually and emotionally, to a six-year-old human. But what seems most fascinating to me is that orcs may be intrinsically magical. I don't mean that they make good practitioners of magic; they are magic. You see, I've done some experiments, and if you modify a basic Detect Magic spell to eliminate the kind of strong thaumic resonance you get from truly magical items, there is still a faint magical radiation emanating from him, a weaker version of what you get from dragons, or so I've read. I've never been in a situation to verify this first hand, of course."
Lisa struggled to make sense of what he was telling them, but Brax nodded his understanding. Doc also seemed to follow Milton's explanation, but he did so with a far more bemused expression
than did the pilot.
"We met a few of those on our way here," Brax said.
"Dragons? Really? What kind?" Milton asked, clearly impressed.
"Red ones. Four of them."
"Fire-breathers. How did you survive?"
Brax shrugged. "We're faster than they are."
"Tell us more about this magical radiation you detect from Gorbo," Doc said.
"Well, under the spell, it's just an undifferentiated purplish-green aura showing that the underlying magical field is being contorted."
"Interesting," Doc said. "Would it be all right if I got a blood sample from Gorbo?"
"Um, how would you do that? I don't want him hurt."
"I have a small device I can use. I won't need much, and he shouldn't feel more than a slight pinch, if that."
"Well, if you think it might help. Is it okay with you, Gorbo?"
The orc shrugged and set his teacup down on the table with a delicate 'clink'. "Okay. What do I do?"
"Thank you, Gorbo," Doc said. "Just sit still for a minute. This won't take long."
Doc reached into his medical bag and removed a small syringe. Gorbo sat stoically until Doc uncapped the needle. The orc's beady eyes widened to the size of large, black marbles.
"What's that?"
"It's what I use to get a few drops of blood."
"It looks kind of hurty."
"I know, but I can make it so it's not. Trust me."
Gorbo looked to Milton for reassurance. The young apprentice smiled and nodded, although he looked far from certain himself.
"Do you like my cookies?" Gorbo asked Doc. This seemed a complete non sequitur to Lisa, but Doc appeared to understand.
"Yes, you make very good cookies."
This seemed to soothe the childlike orc for some reason. "Okay. I'll sit still." He tightened his face and sat stiffly in his chair, waiting for the needle.
"There, all done," Doc said a few seconds later. "That wasn't so bad, was it? And you were very brave. I think you deserve another cookie."
"I didn't feel it. No hurts at all," Gorbo said, seeming surprised.
Doc turned his attention to Milton. "You implied before that female orcs are never abandoned. Why is that?"
"Not as many of them are born. I estimate that only one out of ten orcs is female."
"No wonder they're grumpy," Sandra said.
"Are the orc tribes ruled by the females then?" Doc continued.
"I don't think so. Not in the way I think you mean. They don't really have monarchs or a council of elders or anything like that. As far as I can tell, they don't, anyway. They simply seem to have an instinct to follow whoever is strongest. They don't debate issues."
"But certainly they can make choices."
"On simple things, yes, but they don't seem to plan. They react. They tend to be quite impulsive."
"Not much different from most people, then," Lisa commented softly.
Doc seemed about to ask another question, but she stopped him. "I'm sorry Doc. I know you find all of this fascinating, but we're not here for an anthropological study of the orcs. We just need to find them and get them to go away."
"Of course. I'm sorry. The first thing we probably need to know is where they are right now."
"Good. That is more to the immediate point," Lisa said. "Milton, do you have a map?"
The apprentice magic user turned to the orc. "Gorbo, Please go fetch my map from the library."
"Got it, boss," he said, leaving the table. A minute later, he returned with a scroll of heavy, yellowish paper. Milton stood and unrolled it on the table.
"This is the city. And here," he said, circling an area to the east with his finger, "is where we think the orcs are."
Lisa also stood to get a better view. What she saw was more of a drawing than a map, although it did show the major roads of the city, presumably in their proper locations. There was, however, no sense of scale, and the map faded at the edges with fanciful drawings and a warning that those areas were 'Where Monsters Dwell'. The only details provided beyond the city were labeled dots along a serpentine line that she assumed was the river. They must represent other towns.
Milton continued, pointing out another feature. "The area along here is quite hilly and there are caves all around. Some orc tribes prefer to build their dens underground."
"So I assume they see well in the dark," Doc said.
"Oh, yes. Gorbo has very good night vision, but bright light bothers them. They avoid it if they can, but I'm sure you already know that."
Brax nodded as if this was common knowledge.
"They don't like light," Lisa mused. "I wonder if we could construct high intensity lamps and deploy them around the walls."
"We could use the specs we have for our landing lights, rig up some kind of stands, and wire them into the ship's power," Brax said.
"That might keep them away for a while, if we could make enough of them."
"We wouldn't need them close to the ship. It has lights already, but yeah, we could rig up something, I'm sure. There's a lot of wall, though. We probably can't cover it all."
They were still talking about the construction and deployment of the lamps when the door opened and a young woman with brown hair and a roundish face entered.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Milton. I didn't know you had customers."
"Mari!" Gorbo said running to her.
"Who's a good boy, then?" she said, reaching up to give him a friendly scratch behind one pig-like ear.
Milton introduced them. "Mari, these are the Peacekeepers: Commander Chang, Doc, Sandra, and Brax."
"The mighty adventurers from the flying behemoth, of course. I'm honored to meet you," she said, curtseying.
"This is Mari," Milton said to complete the formal introduction. "She's my…. She's a good friend of mine."
She smiled and gave Gorbo a scratch on his other ear.
"You know," Sandra said, "from what I see, orcs don't seem very dangerous."
Lisa agreed. Seeing Mari and Gorbo together reminded her of a Disney interpretation of an old beauty and beast fairy tale but with less of the grime removed.
"Gorbo certainly isn't," Mari said. "But the wild ones can be."
"Bad orcs fight." Gorbo said.
"And what do good orcs do?" Mari prompted.
"Good orcs make cookies!" he replied.
"What do the bad orcs do when they're not attacking cities?" Lisa asked, trying to get back on topic.
"Well, Gorbo likes to dig in the herb garden," Milton said. "He's actually quite good at it. The soil he mixes up in our mulch pit is doing wonders for my mandrakes."
"I like digging," Gorbo agreed.
"Actually, I think orcs in general enjoy it. I've visited some of the tunnels they've abandoned, and they're far more extensive than they needed to be for the size of the tribe. They may dig as a form of entertainment."
"It hardly seems entertaining to me," Sandra said.
"Believe me; it's far better than some of the other things they do, like with cats for instance."
"They like cats?"
"Briefly. Mostly for the screaming, I think."
"That's disgusting!"
"Before you become too judgmental," Doc said, "you should know that medieval people did similar things. I specifically recall reading about two very ugly entertainments they indulged in involving cats."
"I think we're straying off topic again," Lisa said. "I don't see how this helps us unless we can herd a bunch of cats into the orc's camp and get by them while they're distracted."
"You can't herd cats," Milton said. "I did an experiment once to see—"
"I wasn't serious!" Lisa said. Frustration was making her edgy. She knew far more about orcs now than she did when she arrived, but she didn't see how any of it would help her accomplish their assignment for the king and get what they needed to escape from this distorted fantasy universe.
"Oh, right," Milton said. "Sorry."
"The orcs aren't th
e biggest problem; it's the one leading them," Brax said.
"That's right," Milton agreed. "And it's one of the things I wanted to find out more about once you all got here. I'm going to try to observe the orc's camp. We may be able to pick up some clues about that."
He got up and returned, carefully holding a bowling ball shaped object covered in black velvet in both hands.
"Master Ferman let me borrow this," he said, removing the cloth.
"A crystal ball?" Brax said.
"Yes."
Lisa rolled her eyes. She couldn't help it. Next, he'd be pulling out a wand and saying abracadabra, or something.
"How does it work?" Sandra said.
"To be honest, I really don't know, other than that it exploits the basic principles of magic field theory. I think it reads images from the user's mind and then searches the pervading magical field for the closest match. If it finds one, it displays an image of it in the ball. I know it works best if you're familiar with what you're looking for."
He put his hands on the globe and stared into the glass for several minutes while the rest of them waited expectantly.
"Um, I don't seem to be getting anything on this," he said eventually, tapping it with one finger. "I can't seem to get it to resolve an image."
"Are you sure it's turned on?" Lisa said.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"I'll try again later. There may be something disrupting the magic field."
"That's too bad," Brax said. "It would be good to know what we're up against."
Lisa raised her eyebrows and shot him a disbelieving glance, which he did not seem to notice. Did he really expect the thing to work?
"What I'd like to know," Mari said, "is how you do it." Her voice suggested honest curiosity and perhaps a touch of awe.
"How who does what, my dear?" Doc asked.
"Adventurers. How do they know to come here just when we seem to need them?"
"I don't think I know what you're talking about."
"What Mari means," Milton said, "is that sometimes, just when we need them, adventurers arrive. Sometimes, it’s one lone hero, but there’s normally at least four—a magic user, a cleric, a fighter, and a thief."
"Like last year," Mari said. "An evil foreign wizard was trying to overthrow the king, and a group of young adventurers arrived to stop him."
"They were mostly magic users and unbelievably talented for their age," Milton added.
"Before that, it was zombies," Mari said. "We had quite a run of those. It seemed that every other month we'd have zombies lurching out of somewhere."
"Vampires seemed to be the thing when I was a boy. People were hanging garlic everywhere."
"Except for those stupid girls who kept trying to invite them in because they thought they were 'sparkly'," Mari said.
"Yeah, well, vampires can be appealing to the weak-minded, but eventually a band of adventurers got rid of them."
"And you say some hero or a group of heroes invariably arrives to deal with these threats?" Doc asked.
"Yes. It's like they somehow know before they get here that they're needed."
"These adventurers are often strangers, I take it."
"That's right. Almost always."
"Do the heroes always win?"
"Um, no; not always, but I've noticed that if the heroes are especially competent, they're usually up against something pretty powerful, almost as if someone is trying to keep things balanced. I have a hypothesis that there is some kind of magical conservation of skills—"
"What happens when the heroes don't win?" Lisa interrupted before he could elaborate. His speculations about magical fields and other mystical mumbo jumbo were not going to help them.
"That's the funny thing. Either another group will come, or whatever it is that's causing the trouble will go away on its own after a while."
"There's no plot without a hero," Doc mused.
"What?" Milton said.
"Oh, just a stray thought."
The door to the shop opened and a young man with a bowl-shaped haircut entered.
"Mari! Dad's looking for you. He said if he finds out you were here again, he's going to wallop you."
She stood up. "So don't tell him, Jop. Say you couldn't find me, which you couldn't have since I'm not here, right? I'm out shopping the market stalls, but I'm going home now, and you can meet me on my way there. That's all you need to say and I won't need to mention that thing about you peeking through the hole in the wall behind Madame Fleur's bathhouse."
"What? Hey! I never, I mean, not recently…."
She grabbed his arm. "Come on, little brother. I think it's time to go home."
Half dragging her still confused sibling, she turned and said, "It was a pleasure meeting you all. I'm sorry I have to rush off. Bye, Milton."
The door closed behind them.
"What was that all about?" Sandra asked. "I assumed she was your girlfriend."
"Oh, well, yes, kind of," Milton said. "Except she can't be because her father doesn't approve. For one thing, he's a member of the Tradesmen's Guild and, well, the guilds tend to be competitive. The tradesmen and magicians have always been at odds, and not just because they sometimes compete for customers. I think the biggest thing is that he wants to marry her to someone who can bring money into the family. Unfortunately, that's not me. Magic really isn't a lucrative profession, not recently, anyway. It's not as reliable as it once was, for some reason. No one seems to know why, but it's been bad for business. I've been living on my inheritance from my father, and the money is going out faster than it's coming in. I guess I can't blame her dad. He has to think about his old age. That's just how things are, you know."
"What a medieval attitude," Sandra said.
"We should go, too," Lisa said. "We have a bit more information now, and we need to start working on those lights."
"But the things the king was going to let you use haven't arrived yet. Can't you stay a bit longer?"
"No, it's getting late. You can bring them to the ship tomorrow, if you'd like."
"But—"
"Don't worry," Sandra said. "Just do what the Commander says and everything will be fine." She patted him on the cheek. "There's a good boy."
"Oh," Lisa added as they were leaving. "We're going to need a big tub of clean water. I'm sure you can take care of that."
"Uh, sure. I suppose."
Brax, as the last one out, closed the door on Milton's befuddled expression.