Read The Outsorcerer's Apprentice for Free Online Page B

actually
mean
?”
    Behind him, Mordak could hear twenty thousand goblins starting to mutter. “I don’t know, do I?” Drain said helplessly. “There’s never been—”
    “Peace,” Mordak said, quickly and urgently, “means no more fighting. Also, it means an end to the ruinous expense of training, equipping and supplying two ridiculously large armies, which is bleeding both of us white. It means an opportunity to stand down the armed forces, fire the existing generals and get new ones who aren’t actively plotting against us, recruit and train up a decent professional standing army to replace the useless, sloppy, bolshie bunch of draftees we’re both lumbered with, and take a bit of time and a bit of care to get ready for the
next
war—”
    “Ah!”
    “—At the end of which, our combined forces will have wiped the Elves off the face of the Earth.
That’s
what peace means. Well?”
    “
Ah
.”
    Mordak allowed himself a brief, happy grin. “Thought you’d get the hang of it,” he said, “a bright fella like you.”
    He’d won. He knew it. Goblins and dwarves hated each other; of course they did. But
everybody
hated the Elves; and why not? Bunch of stuck-up, supercilious, patronising, bleeding-heart-liberal-intellectual tree-huggers, it made his blood boil just thinking about them. If peace was what it took to nail every last Elf to a tree by the tips of its pointy ears, it was a small enough price to pay. And Drain might be thick as three lead bricks, but he had to see that, too. Didn’t he?
    “Done,” Drain said. “You got yourself a deal.”
    “Thanks,” Mordak said. “Friend,” he added. That got him an extra special dwarven nasty look, but he felt he deserved a little self-indulgence.
    He let Drain do the speech; and, to be fair, the little chap did it pretty well. He talked about new beginnings and a bright new dawn for their children and their children’s children, about understanding and reconciliation and kicking twelve kinds of shit out of the Elves; and by the time he’d finished forty thousand battle-hardened warriors were standing around with stunned expressions on their faces, and five centuries of war were suddenly over, just like that—
    I did that, Mordak thought. And then he thought;
why
did I do that?
    Well, he told himself afterwards, as he sipped a well-earned margarita from the jewel-encrusted skull of his predecessor (the gemstones picked out the words WORLD’S BEST BOSS; goblin craftsmanship at its finest), obviously I did it so that we can go after those bastard Elves and sort them out once and for all. And then he played a little game; substitute dwarves for Elves and Elves for dwarves, and see what difference it makes.
    None whatsoever.
    Yes, but—He frowned. Fine. First we deal with the Elves. Then we can break the alliance and sort out the dwarves, after they’ve done most of the hard work annihilating the pointy-ears. Put like that, it made perfect sense. One thing at a time, and only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Yes. Of course.
    And was that the real reason? No. Thought not.
    What’s got into me?
He scowled at his drink and put it down. While we’re on the subject of things that only fools do, how about lying to yourself? Other people, fine, no problem; yourself, no. The
real
reason—
    Was that the war was
stupid
. The war meant that 75 per cent of the goblin workforce was fighting the war, costing him money, when they could be working down the mines, earning him money; sure, the war was about who controlled the mines, but so long as it lasted, ownership was irrelevant, because practically nobody was working down there. Also, a hell of a lot of goblins were getting killed, and maybe that wasn’t such a good—
    He cringed. He was starting to sound like an Elf. No, worse than that (because Elves had no problem with wars so long as they weren’t actually doing the fighting). He was starting to sound like a
human
.
    Yuck.
    After we’ve done the Elves