Snow White and the Seven Samurai

Chapter 1

Once upon a time there was a little house in a big wood.

Not all little houses in big woods are quaint or charming, or even safe. Some of them are piled to the rafters with stolen car radios, others house illegal stills used for making moonshine (so called, they say, because one carelessly dropped match could lead to a fireball that’d be visible from the Moon). Some of them are the lairs of big bad wolves dressed as Victorian grandmothers, not that that’s anybody’s business but their own.

But this particular house is quaint. Roses scramble up the door-frame like young executives up a corporate hierarchy. Flowers bloom radiantly in its small but neat garden, and for once they aren’t opium poppies or coca plants or commercially exploitable varieties of the mescal cactus. Just in case there’s any doubt left in the onlooker’s mind, it has shiny red front door with a big round brass knocker, which in these parts is a sort of coded message. It means that if you go inside this house, the chances are that you won’t be strangled, stabbed, smothered with a pillow or eaten, although you may easily die of terminal cuteness poisoning. If you’re particularly observant, you can probably deduce more about the people who live there from the seven brightly coloured coats and hats hanging just inside the porch, and the fact that the lintel of the door-frame is only four feet off the ground.

The conclusive evidence is round the back, where the occupants of the little house put out the trash. No need to get mucky rummaging about in the dustbin bags; shy, timid, razor-clawed forest-dwellers have ripped the bags open, and the rubbish is scattered about like confetti on a windy day. There are approximately three hundred and twenty empty beer cans, forty-nine squashed styrofoam pizza trays, roughly half a pound of cigarette butts and ash, some slabs of cheese with green fur growing on them, several undergarments that were obviously worn too long to be cleanable and were then slung out, some crumpled balls of newspaper still smelling strongly of vinegar, and a thick wodge of the kind of newspapers that have small pages, big pictures and not much news inside them.

In this little house in the big wood, therefore, seven small men live on their own, with nobody to look after them. Nobody to clean and tidy; nobody to make them lovely home-cooked, low-fat, low-cholesterol meals with plenty of fresh green vegetables and no chips or brown sauce; nobody to remind them to take their muddy boots off before coming inside; nobody to throw away their favourite comfy old pullovers when they aren’t looking. How sad. How terribly, terribly sad.

Don’t worry, though. All that’s just about to change; because any minute now, a poor bedraggled girl will come stumbling out of the bramble thicket twenty-five yards due east of the front door. She’ll see the friendly-looking cottage with its cheerfully red front door and she’ll make straight for it, like a piranha scenting fresh blood. And in a week or so, you won’t recognise the place. It’s inevitable; it has to happen. No power on Earth can stop it.

Surely…?

Beautiful.

Stunning. Breathtaking. Fabulous. Gorgeous. Out of this world.

Satisfied that there had been no change since the last time she looked, the wicked queen turned away from her reflection in the mirror, slid back a hidden panel in the wall and switched on the power. The surface of the glass began to glow blue.

She frowned and tapped her fingers on the arms of her chair. For some time now she’d been trying to summon up the courage to upgrade her entire system, which was virtually obsolete; lousy response time, entirely inadequate memory, all of that and more. All that could be said for it was that she was used to it and it worked. Just about.

Somewhere behind the glass, mist started to swirl. She watched as it slowly coagulated into a spinning, fluffy ball, which in turn resolved itself into a shape that gradually became less like a portion of albino candyfloss and more human. The queen yawned. In theory she should be used to the delay by now, but in practice it irritated her more and more each day. She fidgeted.

The ball of mist had become a head; an elderly man, white-haired and deeply lined, with cold blue eyes and a cruel mouth, but with an air of such dreadful loneliness and despair that even the queen, who had put him there in the first place, never liked looking at him for too long. At first he appeared in profile; then his face moved round until his eyes met hers.

‘Running DOS,’ he said. ‘Please wait.’

He vanished, and his place was taken by a brightly coloured cartoon image of a spider spinning a web. Originally she’d meant it to signify cheerful patience, but now it was getting on her nerves. At least she’d had the good sense to disable the jolly little tune it used to hum when she first set it up. If she insisted on driving herself mad, there were far more dignified and interesting ways of going about it.

Just when she was beginning to think there must be something wrong with the mirror, the spider abruptly vanished and the old man was back. He gave her a barely perceptible nod. Good. At last.

The queen cleared her throat. With a system as painfully inflexible as this one, it was essential to speak clearly; otherwise there was no knowing what she’d get.

‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,’ she enunciated, in a voice that would have secured her a job as a newsreader on any station in the universe, ‘who’s the fairest of them all?’

The old man sneered. ‘Bad command or file name,’ he said. ‘Please retry.’

What? Oh yes. Damn. She’d said who’s instead of who is. She scowled and tried again, and this time the old man looked at her steadily and replied:

‘Snow White, O Queen, is the fairest of them all.’

The wicked queen lifted her head sharply. ‘Repeat,’ she snapped. Instantly the head shifted a few fractions of an inch, back to the position it had been in just before it made its previous statement.

‘Snow White, O Queen, is the fairest of them all.’

The queen sighed. ‘Diary,’ she commanded, and the head turned seamlessly into a cute graphic of an old-fashioned appointments book, with a two-dimensional pencil hovering over its pages. She snapped her fingers twice and the pages began to turn.

‘Stop,’ she commanded. Next Tuesday, she saw, was almost completely free, apart from lunch with Jim Hook and an entirely expendable hairdresser’s appointment. ‘Insert new diary entry for Tuesday the fifteenth,’ she said. ‘Ten-fifteen to twelve noon; murder Snow White, end entry.’

The moving pencil wrote and, having writ, dissolved into a scatter of random pixels. She snapped her fingers, and the old man reappeared.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘that’ll do. Dismissed.’

The old man nodded. ‘This will end your Mirrors session,’ he said. ‘Okay or Cancel?’

‘Okay.’

There was a soft crinkling noise and the mirror seemed to blink; then all the wicked queen could see there was her own flawless, immaculate face. She studied it for a moment as she reached for her powder compact; then, having dabbed away a patch of incipient pinkness, she stood up, snuffed out the candle and stalked melodramatically out of the room.

Although it was dark now, the mirror continued to glow softly; a common occurrence with such an outdated model. In the far corner of the room, something scuttled.

‘We’re in,’ whispered a tiny voice.

Three white mice dashed across the floor, in that characteristic mouse way that makes them look as if they haven’t got any legs, and are being dragged along on a piece of string. They scampered up the curtain, abseiled down the tieback cord, swung Tarzan-fashion and landed on the mantelpiece, directly under the mirror.

‘We’re in luck,’ whispered a mouse. ‘Silly bitch has left the power on.’

All three mice twitched their noses. ‘Are you ready for this?’ one of them hissed. ‘We could get ourselves in a lot of trouble.’

The other two treated the coward to a look of distilled, matured-in-oak-vats scorn. ‘Pull yourself together, will you?’ squeaked the mouse who’d spoken first. ‘After everything we’ve been through to get here, this is hardly the time to get cold feet.’

‘Paws,’ interrupted the third mouse. ‘Come on, guys, stay in character. Just out of interest,’ it added, ‘why mice for pity’s sake? I hate mice.’

‘Because it was the only way to get in. Look, either we’re going to do this or we aren’t. Let’s have a decision on that right now, before we go any further.’

‘Fair enough,’ muttered the apprehensive mouse. ‘I’m not saying we shouldn’t, I’m just saying we should think about it.’

‘I’ve thought about it. Come on, Sis, where’s your sense of fun?’

‘In this costume, there isn’t room. And before you ask whether I’m a man or a mouse, I’m neither, remember?’

The other two pointedly ignored that last remark. ‘Come on,’ said the first mouse, ‘let’s get it over with. Show of hands?’

‘Paws.’

‘Show of hands. All in favour? Right, Sis, that’s two to one. We do it.’

‘I still don’t see why it had to be mice, though,’ the third voice whispered in the gloomy silence. ‘Yes, I know we had to hotwire a nursery rhyme or a fairytale or something like that in order to feed ourselves into the system. But why couldn’t we be something a bit less — well, small. And furry. And, come to think of it, completely and utterly defenceless.’

The first mouse sighed impatiently. ‘Not just any nursery rhyme,’ it explained. ‘Had to be an appropriate one, something with sneaking furtively about and getting into forbidden places. So, fairly obvious choice, three blind mice—’

‘Three blind mice? Now just a damn minute…’

‘It’s all right, I fiddled the code a bit, so now we’re three colour-blind mice. A small price to pay, I thought…’

For a brief moment the mice were perfectly still, as if composing themselves. Then the first mouse reared up on his hind legs, waggled his forepaws like a small furry boxer and squeaked, ‘Mirror.’

They waited breathlessly until the cotton-wool effect slowly began to extend inwards from the corners of the glass. The head appeared.

‘Too easy,’ muttered the mouse called Sis. ‘I think we should…’

The head opened its eyes and stared straight ahead; then it frowned, looked from side to side; then, its frown deepening, downwards.

‘Um, hello.’ The first mouse twitched his nose twice, unhappy with the way the face was looking at him. He could feel tiny spores of panic beginning to germinate in the back of his mind, but for some reason he found it impossible to say anything else. The head’s eyes seemed to be dismantling him, taking the back off his head and probing around in the circuitry.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Sis whispered urgently. ‘That thing’s examining us and you’re just sitting there doing paperweight impressions. Say something to it quick, before it eats our brains.’

‘I can’t,’ the first mouse hissed back. ‘I think it knows who we really are. Sis, I’m frightened.’

‘I can see that,’ Sis snarled. ‘Get out of the way and let me handle this.’ She pushed past him and sat up. ‘Mirror,’ she said.

The head looked at her, and she imagined that she could feel icicles forming on her whiskers. ‘Mirror,’ she repeated. The head studied her for a moment, during which she realised just how long a moment can be, namely three times as long as a life sentence on Dartmoor and not quite so nice.

‘Running DOS.’

The head vanished and was replaced by the spider; only it wasn't the friendly, cuddly little spider the queen had summoned. Instead it was big and black and hairy, one of those particularly unpleasant South American jobs that eat small mammals and move faster than a photon that’s late for an appointment.

‘It’s different,’ muttered the first mouse. ‘It wasn’t like that when she did it.’

‘It’s not sure it likes us yet,’ Sis replied, trying to sound matter of fact about it all. ‘Once it’s decided we’re friends it’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

The other two mice didn’t seem so sure; at least, they shuffled round behind her, forming a short, fluffy queue. She ignored them and carried on looking straight at the mirror. Inside, of course, she was absolutely petrified, which shows that she still had the sense she was born with.

‘Look,’ breathed the third mouse behind her shoulder. ‘He’s back.’

Sure enough, the head was there again. He didn’t look appreciably less hostile, but he nodded. Sis took a deep breath and curled her tail tight around her back legs.

‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,’ she managed to say; then she dried. Because it was all a bit of fun, because they’d never expected to get this far anyway, they’d never got around to working out what it was they were actually going to do, once they’d hacked their way into the wicked queen’s magic mirror and all her incalculable powers were theirs to command. This is embarrassing, Sis muttered to herself. She knew she had to say something, or otherwise the mirror would get suspicious again. She didn’t know what it was capable of doing to them if it finally came to the conclusion that they had no right to be there, but she was prepared to bet that it went rather further than the threat of legal action. On the other hand, breaking into the palace and hijacking Mirrornet just to play a couple of games of Lemmings seemed somehow rather fatuous. Think of some magic, quick, she commanded what was left of her brain.

She thought of something. It was nothing special, but it was all she could think of, ‘Mirror,’ she said, in as commanding a voice as she could muster, ‘show me the man I am to marry.’

The head looked at her as if she had chocolate all round her mouth. ‘Bad command or file name,’ it sneered. ‘Please retry.’

‘You’re a mouse, idiot,’ the first mouse whispered in her ear. ‘You can’t marry a man if you’re a mouse. Think about it.’

‘Oh right. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, show me the mouse I am to marry.’

The head’s brow creased. ‘Bad command,’ he said doubtfully, as if he wasn’t quite sure of himself. ‘Error. Incorrect format. Ignore or Cancel?’

‘Cancel,’ Sis replied firmly. Somehow she felt better now that she’d seen the head looking worried. She decided that the only way to deal with this was not to let the wretched thing see that she was afraid of it; no, there was more to it than that. The answer was not to be afraid of it at all. It was, after all, only a Thing, and she was a — Mouse. Well, a mouse strictly pro tem. For the first and last time a mouse. Even if she was a mouse right now, that was still several dozen rungs further up the evolutionary ladder than a sheet of silver-backed glass in a plaster frame. ‘Mirror,’ she said calmly, ‘listen to me. I want you to—’

‘Bad command or file—’

‘Shut up,’ she said; and when the head promptly stopped talking, somehow she wasn’t surprised. ‘I want you to turn us back into human beings. Now,’ she added sternly.

‘Sis,’ the first mouse hissed furiously, ‘what do you think you’re…?’ Before he could complete the sentence, he wasn’t a mouse any more. He was a teenage boy, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and sitting, rather to his surprise, on a mantelpiece several inches too narrow for his backside. He slid off and landed on the floor.

‘Ouch,’ said his younger brother. ‘Damien, you’re sitting on my leg.’

The three ex-mice untangled themselves, and as soon as he was sure which arms and legs were his, Damien scrambled up and scowled horribly at his sister.

‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he cried.

‘I’d had enough,’ his sister replied. ‘Mirror, turn Damien back into a mouse. He’s not fit to be a human.’

‘Sis…’ the mouse that had very briefly been Damien landed on its back, squirmed round, scrabbled for a foothold and was lifted up and dumped unceremoniously into Sis’s cardigan pocket. Her other brother gave her a look of mingled terror and respect and wisely said nothing.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Now at least I can think straight. I hate mice,’ she added, with a slight shudder. In her pocket something wriggled and squeaked. ‘That’s why I’m glad,’ she went on, ‘that we’ve got a cat.’

The wriggly object in her pocket suddenly became terribly still. She patted it affectionately and turned back to face the screen.

‘Now then,’ she said. ‘Mirror, are you still there?’

The head nodded. It was, she noticed, looking at her oddly; almost as if it had never seen a human turn her brother into a mouse in a fit of pique before. There was something else in its eyes besides surprise, though; she gave it a long, curious look and worked out what the something else was.

Respect.

Ah, she said to herself, now we’re getting somewhere. She took a deep breath and made a conscious effort to relax, letting the fear and tension melt out of her like ice cream through the disintegrated tip of a cone. In charge. In control. Now you can do anything you like.

‘Mirror,’ she said, ‘first I want a million pounds. Next, I want a big house in Malibu and another in Chelsea, and a ski lodge in Switzerland and a Porsche with a personalised number-plate and…’

She froze; someone was coming. Her brother Damien yelped, leapt out of her pocket and scrambled under the table and into the Interface, the incomprehensible lash-up of technology that her other brother Carl had improvised to bring them here. He slid through like a jellied eel through a well-greased letterbox, but unfortunately, being a clumsy boy, he caught the edge of the Interface door with the tip of his tail.

‘Oh no for God’s sake!’ Carl screamed, as the door snapped shut.

‘Quiet!’ Sis whispered furiously.

‘But he’s shut the door!’ Carl wailed. ‘We can’t get back without it. He’s safely back on the other side and we’re stuck here.’

‘What do you mean can’t get…?’ Sis faltered. Regrettably, the words can’t get back weren’t what you’d call ambiguous. ‘You mean, like marooned?’

‘Yes.’

She looked round frantically for another exit; if not out of this crazy scenario, then at least out of the room, before anybody came. Not out of the window; this is a castle, remember, so out of the window would mean a long fall into a stagnant moat, and that’s if she was lucky. Only one door. Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Oh…

‘Mirror,’ she said. ‘Hide me, quickly.’

The head looked at her, and in its eyes there was enough raw contempt to keep the book reviews page of the Guardian fully supplied for a year. ‘Bad command or file name,’ it said disdainfully. ‘Please retry.’

‘Mirror!’ she repeated imploringly, but the face vanished abruptly and was replaced by a pattern of slowly revolving geometric shapes, the one that makes your head spin if you watch it for too long. Whimpering, she tugged the curtain away from the wall and slipped behind it, just as the door opened and the wicked queen burst in, with an electric torch in one hand and a heavy Le Creuset frying pan in the other. She surveyed the room slowly and carefully, and sniffed.

‘Mirror,’ she commanded, ‘where is she?’

The geometric shapes vanished and the head came back. ‘She’s hiding behind—’ it began, but got no further; because behind the curtain, Sis had found the power switch and turned it off.

You can’t blame her, of course. You could even say it was really rather resourceful, in the circumstances. And, also in her defence, it’s hardly likely that she knew about the quite terrifying possible consequences of pulling the plug on an antiquated system like this one. After all, not many people do know that the principal drawback of Mirrors 3.1 was the very real risk of crashing the whole thing if you tried to shut it down without going through the proper procedure.

Suddenly, everything vanished.

Which is a rather melodramatic way of saying that there was a major systems malfunction, and all the information stored in the wicked queen’s magic mirror was tumbled out of its drawers on to the floor, painstakingly jumbled up and then shovelled back at random; the kind of complete and systematic random it takes a computer to achieve. That, of course, is going to the other extreme, since it gives the impression that all it’s going to take to get it all sorted out is the intervention of a pasty-faced young man with glasses, a beard and a packet of watchmaker’s screwdrivers, probably called Dave or Chris. Sadly, not so. The difference is that all the little bytes and snippets that live behind the glass of the wicked queen’s mirror aren’t mere electrical impulses and digitised items of data; I am not a number, they could all say, and they’d be absolutely right.

For example — Once upon a time, there was the same little house in the same big wood. And it still had a rose racetrack up one side, and a miniature Wisley seething away out front, and a garishly red front door with a vulgar brass knocker. But this time there’s a note pinned to it, and it says—

Or, while we’re on the subject of pigs: a little way off in the same wood there’s another house; bigger, rather less quaint and unmistakable because of the moat, drawbridge, razor wire entanglements, caltrops, mantraps and signposts reading MINEFIELD and BEWARE OF THE DRAGON that occupy about ninety-five per cent of what should have been a fair-sized front lawn. The house itself shines in the morning light like an American bodyguard’s sunglasses.

The pigs in question are up a scaffolding tower, welding a searchlight bracket to the side of the house. There are three of them; and the smallest, having replaced a 5/8” Stilson wrench in his tool belt, wipes his snout on his foreleg and gazes with satisfaction at his trotter work.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Just the perimeter fence to wire up, and we’re done.’

The middle pig nods. ‘Trotters crossed, lads,’ he says. ‘We’ve tried straw, sticks, brick, breezeblock, stone, kevlar-reinforced concrete and now molybdenum-steel-faced ceramic armour. If this doesn’t do the trick, we’re going to have serious credibility problems with the insurance company.’

‘It’d help if we knew how he does it,’ mused the biggest pig, pushing up the visor of his welding helmet and unclipping the crocodile clip. ‘I don’t care what the forensic boys say, you’re not going to convince me it’s nothing but sheer lungpower. The last lot was better protected than the basement of the Pentagon, and how long did it take him? Thirty seconds, forty-five at the most, and all that hard work and expensive materials turned into so much second-hand Lego. If that’s an example of what huffing and puffing can do, I reckon Oppenheimer and his mates were wasting their time.’

The middling pig grins; even the ring in his nose sparkles merrily in the early morning sun. ‘He might just be in for a surprise this time,’ he says. ‘On account of the seventy gigawatt interactive force field generator I’ve got hidden in the coal bunker. Just let him so much as sneeze near that and he’ll suddenly find out what’s meant by lethal feedback.’

The smallest pig, who’d been scanning the horizon through an infra-red viewer, scuttles down the scaffolding towards his companions. ‘I hope you’re right,’ he mutters, ‘because here he comes, the bastard. Right, positions, everyone. Desmond, you work the console. Eugene, the remotes. I’ll do all the rest.’

In the distance there’s a small grey four-legged shape. As it gets nearer, the three little pigs can make out the lolling tongue, the small round black eyes.

‘Incoming,’ Desmond snaps. ‘Big bad wolf at bearing three-three-zero-mark-five-Alpha.’

Julian, the small pig, just has time to wire up the last few connections and throw the lever as the wolf reaches the outer perimeter of the security zone. Like all wolves, he doesn’t look such a big deal when viewed from a distance; just a grey, long-haired Alsatian with a long nose and sad eyes. (And, by the same token, Australia looks like it might be a nice place to live, when seen from space.)

‘Standing by,’ crackles the intercom in Julian’s trotter.

Julian takes a deep breath. He can’t clench his trotters because trotters don’t clench; but he folds them back as close to the knuckle as they’ll go. ‘On my mark,’ he mutters. ‘Steady. And, activate!’

Suddenly the air is alive with blue fire. The humming from the wires all but drowns out the wolf’s all-too-familiar little speech. On the cue blow your house down, Desmond flicks the toggle that controls the remotely operated traverse of the Planetcracker-class laser cannon. There’s a flash, like a fuse blowing in Frankenstein’s laboratory, and—

‘Missed,’ Desmond growls under his breath; then, into the intercom, ‘Julian, I’ve forgotten. How d’you set this thing for a wide-dispersal beam?’

‘Red dial on the instrument panel, three full turns clockwise,’ the intercom crackles back. ‘Get a move on, will you? He’s through the fence, God alone knows how. I wish someone’d explain to me how he manages to do it.’

‘Search me,’ Desmond admits, ‘I wasn’t watching. Must have got under it somehow. It’s all right, though, he’s walking straight into the Claymore field.’

‘Aha! At his command post, Julian clasps his front trotters over his head in a gesture of triumph. ‘This time he’s for it. All right, commencing remote detonation procedure on my command. And go!’

The Earth shakes; then it starts raining divots. Then, as the smoke clears, the three little pigs are just able to make out the shape of a vulpine tail wagging on the edge of the drawbridge.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Julian howls. ‘That’s impossible. An anorexic gnat could just have squeezed through on tiptoe if it’d had a copy of the minefield layout. All right, Desmond, turn on the cyanide gas. He’ll soon realise he’s just making things harder for himself.’

Desmond reaches for the dial; but before he has a chance to twist it, the wolf takes a deep breath. A huff, even.

‘I don’t like this,’ Eugene mutters, not looking up from the long bank of monitors in front of him. ‘I knew we should have spent the extra money and laid on air-to-surface support.’

‘Try calling Strategic Air Command just in case,’ Julian replies. ‘You never know, there may still be time…’

The wolf exhales, letting out just enough breath to shift a small, lightweight leaf or project a very thin smoke-ring halfway to the ceiling.

‘Oh Christ,’ Eugene groans. ‘He’s about to puff.’ Julian growls. ‘All right,’ he says grimly. ‘All power to primary deflector screens. Eugene, shut down the weapons systems if you have to, but keep those screens.

Puff. The ejected carbon dioxide buffets against the side of the house like a half-hearted assault with a limp feather duster. The wolf breathes in—

‘Exactly like the last time,’ Julian observes. ‘Hey, Desmond, why’re you taking so long with that damn gas?’

‘Should be through any sec—’

This time, thanks largely to the steel cladding, at least it was different. When the wolf blew out, instead of simply collapsing in a cloud of dust and flying masonry, the house crumples and twists like a squashed beer can. At first the metal stretches; then it begins to tear, and razor-edged seams unzip from the footings right up to the top storey windows, until the whole building peels back like a banana skin. Fortunately for them, the three little pigs are thrown clear at an early stage. They land, with more velocity than dignity, in their own moat, more or less at the same moment as the roof hits the ground.

‘Woof,’ says the wolf cheerfully.

Wearily the pigs roll onto their fronts and piggy-paddle their way to the bank of the moat.

‘It’s precisely this sort of thing that puts you off owning your own home,’ Desmond grunts bitterly, hauling himself up out of the water. ‘Mortgage interest relief is all very well, but maybe this time we should seriously think about renting somewhere instead.’

‘How about an underground bunker?’ Eugene says. ‘Even he’d be hard put to it to blow it down if it was underground.’

‘He’ll find a way, don’t you worry,’ Julian replies, picking a needle-sharp splinter of steel out of his ear. ‘What I want to know is, why? What harm have we ever done him? Is he just psychotic, or is he the Dirty Harry of the local planning department?’

‘Planning permission we got,’ Desmond points out. ‘They know me so well down at County Hall, I’ve even got my own mug with my name on it. No, I reckon the only course of action left to us is a bloody hard pre-emptive strike. Unless we want to be doing this for the rest of our lives, we’ve got to waste the bastard.’

Julian lifts his head sharply. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘you might just have something there.’

‘Why not? We’ve got precious little to lose, after all. And there’s three of us.’

‘Tell it to the chipolatas.’ Julian shakes himself, spraying water in all directions. ‘This isn’t something we can do ourselves, you know. Think about it; if we can’t nail that overgrown granddad-of-a-terrier with laser cannon and Claymore mines, then creeping up on him while he’s asleep and hitting him with a big stone’s probably not going to work either. No, if we’re going to do this, we’ll have to hire someone.’

Eugene’s little piggy eyes widen. ‘An assassin, you mean? A hit-pig?’

Julian nods. ‘Something like that. Only probably not a pig. And not an assassin. Villains hire assassins and we’re the good guys. Good guys hire champions.’

‘Ah.’ Desmond wrinkles his snout, a symptom of increased mental activity. ‘What you’re saying is, we need to hire an odd-numbered company of adventurers and soldiers of fortune, each of them a rough diamond with a heart of gold who’ll claim they’re only in it for the money but who nevertheless are revealed as having a deeply felt vocation to right wrongs and fight for justice, freedom and the rights of the underpig. Yes?’

‘You got it,’ Julian says. ‘Took the words right out of my snout.’

Eugene rubs his ear against a large stone. ‘Why do I get the feeling,’ he says mournfully, ‘that the word magnificent is just about to feature in this conversation?’

Julian looks at him. ‘You’re way ahead of me,’ he says. ‘What we need is the Seven.’

Desmond and Eugene ponder this suggestion for a moment. ‘You’re sure?’ Eugene asks. ‘You really think they’ll be up to it?’

‘Oh yes,’ Julian says confidently. ‘Just so long as they stand on a ladder.’

‘Mirror!’ screamed the wicked queen.

The mirror looked at her.

The face was gone. In its place was a nightmare of jumbled components; as if Baron Frankenstein had dropped the drawer he kept all the bits of face in, and by some random, million-monkeys-with-typewriters fluke they’d fallen in a pattern that wasn’t quite a face, but almost.

‘Bad command or file name,’ it croaked offensively. ‘Trees reply.’

She sighed, and switched it off again. Then she slowly turned her head and gave the girl a long, long stare.

‘Well,’ she said.

The girl looked at her shoes. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.

‘You’re sorry,’ said the wicked queen. ‘You invaded my house, sabotaged my magic mirror and crashed the operating system for this entire dimension, and you’re sorry. That’s all right, then.’

‘I said I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, you did. Curiously enough, that doesn’t seem to have solved anything. I expect you’re feeling hard done by because I haven’t turned you into a frog. Sorry; I would if I could but I can’t.’

Sis’s face burnt red. ‘So what do you expect me to do about it?’ she snarled wretchedly.

‘Oh, let me see. How about putting right all the damage you’ve done? That’d help.’

Sis winced. ‘You know I can’t do that,’ she objected. ‘I don’t know how your silly mirror works.’

‘No, you don’t, do you? Neither do I.’

Sis stared. ‘You don’t?’

‘Not a clue. I just use the thing. I switch it on and it works. Or rather it worked. Important distinction there, don’t you think? One instance where grammatical accuracy isn’t just me being pedantic.’

‘Oh.’ Sis consulted her shoes again, but they were staying out of it. ‘So what’re we going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ the wicked queen replied, sitting down and rubbing her nose with the heel of her hand. ‘I can give you a fair idea of what we can’t do. We can’t run the system. As a result, the entire dimensional matrix is going to tie itself up in knots. And just in case you don’t know what a dimensional matrix is, it means that everything out there is probably going wrong. Everything,’ she added, with a little smile. ‘What fun.’

‘What about Carl?’ Sis suggested. ‘He might know what to do.’

‘Carl.’

‘My brother. He’s the one who hacked into your system in the first place. He knows all about computers.’

‘Oh, how splendid. Where is he, by the way?’

‘I—’ Sis looked round, suddenly alarmed. ‘I don’t know. He was here a moment ago.’

The wicked queen nodded. ‘He was here a moment ago, when you crashed my mirror. The other one got away, but I’m sure Carl was left behind. And now he’s vanished. Wonder why.’

A look of horror passed across Sis’s face. ‘You mean he’s been caught up in—’

‘Yes, I do. Didn’t it ever occur to you to wonder exactly why s mashing a mirror brings you seven years’ bad luck?’

‘But we’ve got to do something,’ Sis squealed urgently. ‘We’ve got to get them back, now. Before—’

The wicked queen smiled. ‘Before your mother and father get back from the office party and start asking what’s become of the two siblings they left in your care? Ah yes. Let’s all panic and declare a state of emergency. Just think; if you don’t find Carl and Damien in time, they might cut off your pocket money.’

‘Don’t be horrible,’ Sis replied angrily. ‘And don’t just sit there. You’re the stupid old wicked queen. You’ve got to—’

‘Do something, I know.’ The wicked queen clicked her tongue wearily. ‘There’s all sorts of things I could do—’

‘Told you so.’

‘Unfortunately, none of them would help, except by way of easing my anger and frustration. We could try that, if you wouldn’t mind holding still for twenty minutes.

Sis backed away. ‘Can’t you phone somebody?’ she asked. ‘You know, a helpline or something.’

‘Phone somebody. All right, I’ll give it a try. Just as soon as you tell me what with.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Show me the telephone in this room.’

Sis looked round. ‘There isn’t one,’ she said.

‘Magnificently observed. Not in this room, this castle, this kingdom, this whole dimension. Remember where you are.’

‘But surely—’

‘No phone,’ said the wicked queen, checking off on her fingers. ‘No fax. No computers. Just a magic mirror. Don’t you just love fully integrated systems?’

‘Oh.’

‘Now then,’ continued the wicked queen briskly, ‘this is the point at which any teenager worth her salt mumbles an excuse and departs, leaving someone else to clear up the mess after her. And I’d be only too delighted to see the back of you, if only it were possible. But it isn’t. Integrated systems. I’m stuck with you. Isn’t that jolly?’

‘You mean I’m stranded?’ Sis’s eyes grew round with horror. ‘But that’s not fair,’ she wailed. ‘There must be—’

The queen chuckled. ‘What’re you going to do, call the Embassy? Walk home? I’m terribly sorry, my sweet, but this time you’re going to have to face up to the consequences of your actions. Who knows,’ she added, ‘you might enjoy it. You’ll never know until you’ve tried it at least once.’

Sis raised her head and scowled. ‘Well, I don’t see how you being horrid to me’s helping either,’ she said. ‘Not very constructive, is it?’

The queen sighed. ‘Very true,’ she said. ‘I imagine it’s some sort of Pavlovian reaction, what with you being young and blondely cute and me being a wicked queen.’

‘Pavlovian?’ Sis queried. ‘Isn’t that ice cream and meringue?’

The queen winced. ‘In a sense,’ she replied. ‘You’re right, though, gnawing bits off each other isn’t getting us anywhere.’ She sat quietly for a while, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve; then her face lit up like the jackpot on a complicated pinball table. ‘I’m an idiot,’ she said. ‘Water.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Bucket of water.’ She stood up, lunged across the room and came back with a heavy-looking oak pail, out of which water slopped on to her ankle and the floorboards. ‘Mother Nature’s laptop,’ she explained. ‘It’s what we in the trade call backing up to sloppy.’

In the cartoon version, a light bulb starts to glow above Sis’s head. ‘Oh I see,’ she said. ‘You mean you made a copy, and it’s stored…’

‘In here.’ The queen nodded. ‘The memory’s not up to much and the response time’s lousy, but it’s better than nothing. Right then, let’s see.’ She pulled her hair back from her face, leaned over the pail and looked at her reflection. ‘Here goes. Mirror, mirror, in the bucket, are you reading me? Oh f— fiddlesticks.’ She scowled, dipped her finger into the water and fished out a tiny, struggling fly. ‘The slightest thing, and it refuses to play. Mirror,’ she repeated sternly.

The water rippled, although the air in the chamber was still. Almost imperceptibly, the queen’s reflection began to mutate — ‘I hate it when it does that,’ she commented, wrinkling her nose. — Until it had become the image of a young man, comprising a small stub of nose sandwiched between an enormous pair of glasses and a bushy black beard.

‘Bad command or file na—’

‘Quiet,’ the queen snapped. ‘And take that gormless expression off your face, or I’ll feed you to the dahlias. Display all systems files, and look sharp about it.

The surface of the water rippled again, and just underneath the meniscus Sis thought she could see a pair of two-dimensional fish tracing geometric patterns. ‘I know,’ muttered the queen, following her line of sight, ‘it’ll send you potty if you look at it for long enough. One of these days I’m going to replace it with something that’s not actually pernicious.’

The fish snapped out of existence, and a thick mass of symbols and equations glowed dully blue on the surface of the water. The queen studied them for a while and then shook her head.

‘Doesn’t mean a lot to me,’ she confessed. ‘It could be all the little cogs and gears you managed to trash just now, or it could equally be the thing that numbers your pages for you.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Do you really think this brother of yours could make sense of this?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sis replied. ‘He says he knows all about this sort of thing. It’s worth a try.’

‘Display our available options in table form, and it’d be at the top,’ the queen replied with a sigh. ‘And the bottom as well, seeing as how it’s the only one. Right, let’s give it a go. Mirror, locate— what did you say his name was?’

‘Carl.’

‘Of course. Mirror, locate Carl.’

Ripple, ripple. A crude graphic of a frog hopped off an equally rudimentary lily-pad. Then the face came back.

‘Path Carl not found,’ it replied sheepishly. ‘Retry or Can—’

‘Oh, be quiet.’ The queen rubbed her hands together, as if trying to remove something distasteful. ‘I know what’s happened,’ she said. ‘When you bent everything, your wretched brother must have got renamed somehow. He’s out there, but the mirror thinks he’s called something else.’

‘Oh.’ Sis opened her mouth and closed it again. ‘So what do we do?’

‘I wish you’d stop asking me that,’ the queen replied. ‘I’m the wicked queen, remember. It’s hard enough for me not to be poisoning you or having you taken off to be murdered in the woods without listening to you drivelling as well.’

‘Queen,’ Sis said, biting her lip, ‘what do you think’s happening out there?’

The wicked queen shook her head sadly. ‘I only wish I knew,’ she said.

The shiny red door of the quaint little cottage in the clearing opened, and a man stepped out on to the garden path. In a sense, he struck an incongruous note, dressed as he was from head to foot in lacquered black and red armour, with big rectangular shoulder-guards and a bulky helmet decorated with a shiny black upturned crescent. He was holding a rake, with which he proceeded to mark out a delicate pattern of semicircular sweeps in the thick, evenly laid gravel of the garden path. As he worked, he chanted:

Above him, a tousled head of golden hair appeared through an open casement. ‘Yoo-hoo,’ trilled a silvery voice. ‘Hello! Mr Suzuki!’

The man looked up, saw the head and bowed politely. If there was in his eyes the faintest tinge of fear, it could only have been visible from a few feet away.

‘Mr Suzuki,’ the silvery voice continued, ‘have you been cleaning your armour with my dusters again?’

The man bowed his head.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ said the silvery voice. ‘Dusters are for dusting, Mr Suzuki, not that you’d know much about that, of course. If you must clean your silly old armour in the house, there’s a shoebox full of old socks and things in the cupboard under the sink. All right?’

The man nodded, head still bowed, unable to meet her clear blue eyes.

‘Oh, and while you’re there,’ the voice went on, ‘I’ll just get you to nip into the hall and change the light bulb. It’s gone again.’

(And before you ask, how many samurai does it take to change a light bulb? Easy; seven, of course. One to change the bulb, six to commit ritual suicide to expunge the disgrace of the old one having failed. In this household, however, ritual suicide’s on the forbidden list, along with Zen archery practice in the front parlour and walking on the kitchen floor in muddy wellies.)

Having blown down the little pigs’ house, the big bad wolf glanced up at the sun, noted its position and calculated his estimated time of arrival at his next appointment. Then he dropped his head (aerodynamic efficiency) and broke into a trot.

Grandmama’s cottage lay in a clearing in the south-western sector of the forest; a pretty hairy place for a big bad wolf to have to go into, what with the woodcutters and the Free Foresters, not forgetting the dreaded Greenshirts. Although he knew he was well behind schedule, the wolf slowed down. Any bush or briar patch in this neighbourhood could be hiding a disgruntled timber worker with an axe or a string-happy archer, or any one of a number of talking farmyard animals with an innate grudge against wolfkind. Futile to pretend he wasn’t scared droppingless, but he’d figured out long ago that true courage is the ability to throw fear out of focus just long enough to get the job done. Through these mean glades a wolf must trot, and that was all there was to it.

When he saw the cottage, he stopped where he was and lay down under a bramble-bush, his chin on his forepaws, watching. His wet, delicate nose tasted the air, searching for traces of scent that shouldn’t be there: human sweat, the delicate tang of fresh sap on a steel blade, beeswax on a newly cleaned bowstring, fresh earth where a pitfall trap had just been dug. But there was nothing except what he’d expect — week-old human spoor and wood smoke, the stench of newly baked bread and lavender bags. Nothing unusual.

But in field operations such as this, the unusual is so usual as to be virtually compulsory. There should be other smells, he realised: fresh squirrel-shit, the reek of newly sprouted mushrooms, a dash of unicorn pee and dissolving tree-bark. Something was wrong, and although he couldn’t quite put his paw on it, he knew it was there.

Set-up.

Abort the operation and get out of there, his instincts screamed. But he couldn’t do that, could he? Go back to Wolfpack HQ and explain that he’d abandoned his mission because everything seemed normal. Wolves who did that sort of thing found themselves pulled off active service and assigned to retrieving foundling human babies from riverbanks before their paws could touch the ground. At the very least he had to get close enough to see what form the trap took.

One thing they teach well at Wolfpack Academy is stealthy crawling. Gradually, his ears flat to his skull, his tummy brushing the dirt, he edged slowly forward, pausing every yard or so to taste the air. A small voice inside his head told him he was wasting his time. Elementary tactics demanded that the trap would be sprung close to the cottage, where there was little or no cover and a clear field of fire for archers hidden behind the chintz curtains of the upper storey. Between the edge of the underbrush and the front door there was an open space twenty-five yards wide that he’d have to cross, and while he was in the zone he might as well have a target-boss embroidered on his back in yellow, red and blue fibre-optic cable. Which left him with only one course of action. Stage a diversion.

Oh yes, piece of cake. With no backup and no resources, that was an order so tall they’d have to festoon it with coloured lights to stop aircraft flying into it. In his mind’s eye he could picture his Academy instructor, wagging his tail and saying, ‘Think, Mr Fang. What would Hannibal have done?’ And never once, back in those dear long-ago days, had he pointed out the obvious fact that the recommended technique was fatuous, since Hannibal was never a wolf. Easy enough to guess what Hannibal would have done: he’d have encircled the cottage with his heavy infantry, made a feint attack with his light cavalry to draw off the enemy strike-force and then sent in the war elephants to finish the job. Simple. Problem solved. Give me a thousand legionaries, five hundred horse archers and a dozen trained elephants and I’ll be through here in a jiffy.

Think, Mr Fang. What would you do in this situation?

The wolf breathed in deeply, as if trying to inhale inspiration. And so he did, in a manner of speaking, because a moment later he made a lightning-fast grab with his left forepaw.

‘Gerroff! You’re squashing my ears!’

The wolf eased off the pressure slightly, and the gossamer shadow under its claws stopped squirming. ‘Well now,’ the wolf growled softly, ‘what a surprise. And what’s an elf doing in these parts, so far from the Reservation?’

The elf spat. ‘That’s Indigenous Fairylander to you, Fido,’ she hissed. ‘And you got five seconds to get your goddamn paw the hell off me, or you gonna wish you lived in a kennel and fetched slippers in your mouth.’

‘Easy now,’ Fang replied calmly, not letting go. ‘You don’t need me to tell you you’re in no position to make threats. Instead of trying to scare each other, why don’t we help each other out?’

The elf sneered. ‘And why’d I want to help you, Mister Dog?’

‘Because otherwise I’ll eat you,’ Fang replied cheerfully. ‘Now shut up and listen. I’ve got to get in there and do a job of work, but I have the feeling I’m expected. So I need someone to stage a diversion.’

‘Man, you can stage a Broadway revival of Oklahoma! for all I care. I ain’t helpin’ no wolf. What’s in it for me?’

‘Bread,’ the wolf replied temptingly. ‘Also milk. And a chance to get one back on the Yellowhairs. Interested?’

‘Bread?’ the elf repeated.

‘Bread,’ Fang confirmed. ‘And milk. And I’m not talking about the poxy little saucerfuls they deign to put out for you every once in a blue moon. I’m talking loaves and pints here. All the bread and milk you and your people need for a month, for just five minutes’ work. And no shoemaking.’

The elf squirmed restlessly under his paw. ‘Say, how do I know I can trust you?’ she said. ‘Wolf speaks with long pink tongue. You could be setting me up.’

The wolf yawned, making the elf shrink away instinctively. ‘Why should I bother?’ he said. ‘Wolfpack’s got no quarrel with you guys, even if you are thieving little scum. After all,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t us who cheated you out of your ancestral lands in exchange for beads and firewater.’

‘All right. First, you get your paw off me. Then we talk.’

Fang raised his paw a sixteenth of an inch; there was a faint gossamer blur, and the elf shot like a bullet into a patch of stinging nettles. ‘Shit,’ she muttered.

‘Happier now?’

‘Okay, Mister Wolf,’ said the elf, ‘you got yourself a deal. What you want me to do?’

Carefully the wolf explained, and a few minutes later the elf broke cover and whizzed in vertiginous zigzags across the open ground. When she was ten yards or so from the front door she changed course and started running round the cottage, whooping and yelling and shooting arrows from her tiny bow. It worked; almost immediately a gang of axe-wielding woodcutters burst out of the hydrangea bushes and let out after her, swinging wildly and chopping divots out of the lovingly manicured lawn. When the pursuers and the pursued were safely out of range, the wolf got up and trotted casually to the front door, which had been left ajar. He jumped up, put his forepaws against it and pushed until it swung open. And that, of course, was as far as he got. In the fraction of a second between the searing flash of blue light and the completion of the process of turning into a frog, the wolf had just enough time to reflect that not all old women who live alone in isolated cottages deep in the forest are kindly old grandmothers.