The Outsorcerer's Apprentice by Tom Holt

Author:Tom Holt [Holt, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction / Fantasy / Contemporary, Fiction / Fantasy / Urban, Fiction / Humorous
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2014-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

When he was sure they’d all gone, Benny walked into the mouth of the canyon.

At first he did his best not to make any noise, but by the time he was five yards in, he was so hopelessly tangled up in briars and brambles that he gave up stealth entirely and concentrated his efforts on trying to force his way through, which meant that, a minute or so later, he was wedged solid, and the only part of his body he could move with any degree of freedom was his eyelids.

Sod this, he thought. “Help!” he yelled.

After a long interval, he saw something moving in front of him; something white. He could also hear a sound, something like a blend of distant train noises and an old man sucking a boiled sweet. “Hello?” he said.

The white shape kept on coming, slowly, relentlessly, until what he could see of it through the very narrow gaps between swatches of bramble gradually began to suggest the shape of a horse. The sound grew clearer; munching. At this point, Benny remembered that he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.

“Unicorn?” he said. “Is that you?”

More munching sounds, and the creak of bramble stems under pressure. “I’m here,” Benny said. “Just in case you hadn’t noticed, I mean. Hello?”

A silver horn slid through the briar tangle about a foot to the left of his head. It was about two feet long and very sharp. Then a head, equine but distinctly different from your ordinary workaday horse, smaller and with a pointier nose. Its jaws were chewing a monstrous portion of bramble. “You clown,” it said.

“I’m stuck.”

“Yes,” said the unicorn, “aren’t you? Hold still, I’ll see what I can do.”

Slowly and methodically, the unicorn gnawed him free. “You’re so lucky,” it said with its mouth full, “that I happen to like brambles. If you’d got yourself stuck in thistles, you’d be on your own.”

“Thank you.” Benny tugged his sleeves free of the last residual thorns. He felt like one enormous consolidated scratch. “I came looking for you.”

“I sort of gathered that,” the unicorn said. “You and your nasty friends. Gave me the fright of my life, till I saw you there.”

Benny blushed. “I didn’t know how else to find you,” he said.

“Fine. That’s like saying, how do I go about defrosting a chicken? I know, I’ll burn the house down. There’s ways and ways, you know.”

Defrosting? “I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well. You’re here now. Next time, just hang around in a clearing somewhere, and I’ll find you.”

He had to ask. “Defrosting a chicken?”

The unicorn nodded. “That’s right.”

“As in frozen—?”

“Well, yes. Highly recommended, unless you want to break teeth.”

“You know about—”

“Ah, right, I see. Yes, I know about defrosting frozen chickens and other similar concepts, alien to this environment but familiar in the one you originally came from. Me, too, actually.”

Benny waited, then asked, “You too what?”

The unicorn swished its tail. “I too am not from around here. Originally. I, however, have made some sort of an effort to blend in, which you palpably haven’t.

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