Snow White and the Seven Samurai

Chapter 12

‘You can run,’ Snow White rasped, slashing at random at the bushes with her sword, ‘but you can’t hide.’

Souris, the former-blind-mouse-turned-mainframe-turned-fairytale-princess, knew better. Perfectly possible to do both, simultaneously even, so long as you did the running part in dense cover, such as a forest. No mere theory, this; she’d been doing it for seven hours, while Snow White followed her chopping the heads off saplings and skewering dead trees. Odd, then, that Snow White should still be trying to convince her of the truth of a hypothesis they both knew to be false. Maybe it was a human thing, this apparent ability to believe propositions one knows to be fallacious. It’d explain a lot, including the popularity of soap opera and the fact that humans still vote in elections.

‘Sooner or later,’ Snow White went on, ‘I’m going to find you, mouse, so why not make it easy on yourself and come out where I can see you? I’m not going to hurt you, I promise.’

Not necessarily a lie; the sword in Snow White’s hands looked so sharp that she probably wouldn’t feel a thing.

Thinking back, the farmer’s wife’s eight-inch Sabatier hadn’t hurt very much, or at least not at the time. There are worse things, however, than mere pain.

Souris tucked herself under an elderberry bush, painfully aware that she was a whole lot bigger than she was used to and that her concealment instincts hadn’t yet recalibrated themselves enough to guarantee her security, and consulted her database. Help, she said.

Running Help, please wait.

Time is a purely relative thing. Measured by one set of criteria, the Mirrors system had a response time that made light look like a twelve-year-old with an impending maths test getting out of bed in the morning. From another viewpoint, such as that of a defenceless ex-rodent barely an arm’s length away from three feet of razor-sharp high carbon steel, it moved like an hourly-paid Amstrad. Souris had just enough time to mutter comeoncomeoncomeoncomeon under her breath before the answer came through.

Are you sure? she asked. The database confirmed. She stood up.

‘Over here,’ she said.

Snow White yelped with relief and swung round, the blade raised above her head. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Now, here’s the deal. You do exactly what I tell you and you might just live to see the dawn. Well?’

Souris shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘You see, if you kill me, bang goes the network. Not just your access to it, the whole thing. So you aren’t going to kill me. And if I know you aren’t going to kill me, why on Earth should I do what you say? Besides,’ she added, as Snow White tried to work through the equations in her head, ‘I wouldn’t let you kill me even if you could. I’m the operating system, remember. In this domain, I can do anything.’

By way of a demonstration, she snapped her fingers and at once the sword flew out of Snow White’s hands and vanished.

‘And before you ask,’ Souris added, ‘the wicked queen is the fairest of them all. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. Okay?’

Snow White took a few steps backwards, until a tree got in the way and made her stop. ‘All right,’ she grunted. ‘But you need me. You may have the data, but you haven’t got the savvy. You’re not gladewise like I am. Without me, you wouldn’t last five minutes.’

Souris felt like pointing out that without her she’d already lasted over seven hours, and that was with a crazed swords-woman hot on her heels. This, though, was no time to score cheap debating points. ‘Please explain,’ she said.

‘You need to know the plot,’ Snow White wheedled. ‘Like who to watch out for and who you can trust, what’s the best way of going about things. Human nature. That kind of stuff. Come on, we can work together. Be a team. It’ll be so much better for both of us that way.’

‘Really? Why?’

Snow White fished about in the depths of the handbag of her resourcefulness, among the credit card slips, solo ancient peppermints and bits of chewed-up tissue. ‘It’s too complicated to explain,’ she said. ‘Like, if you could understand, you wouldn’t need me.’

Souris’ face twitched rapidly as she subconsciously tried to waggle whiskers that were no longer there. ‘What you’re saying is,’ she said, ‘trust you implicitly and take your word for it. Yes?’

‘That’s the idea,’ Snow White replied. ‘And as the absolute clincher, I’ll give you my word.’

‘Fair enough,’ Souris said. She gave her new colleague a friendly smile, then looked round to see exactly where she was. It was at this point, or to be precise a second and a half later, just after clobbering the back of her head with a large branch, that Snow White gave her the word she’d promised earlier. It was ‘Sucker!’, and Snow White put a good deal of feeling into it.

Interestingly, the sharp blow to the back of Souris’ head had roughly the same effect as the well-aimed kick applied by a skilled electronics engineer to a recalcitrant piece of high-tech gear. A connection closed, or a relay pulled in, or something happened, and the Mirrors network inside the ex-mouse’s skull began quietly running a couple of programs.

One was a simple search; and a nanosecond later, Mirrors came up with the following result:

CASTLES: (p2/2)… From which it can plainly be seen that all castles are in fact the same castle, and the only thing stopping people who have business in castles from meeting each other and spilling over into each others’ stories is CastleManagerTM For Mirrors, a complex sorting-and-stacking utility that allows an almost infinite number of stories to take place in one castle simultaneously by virtue of a series of spatio-temporal shifts. In plain language, CastleManagerTM ensures that for as long as Story A is taking place in the main hall, the narrative requirements of Story B will confine it to the dungeons, while Story C stays in the kitchens and Story D deals with events in the gatehouse.

The few niggling little bugs found in early versions of CastleManagerTM have all been corrected, and the utility now operates with the absolute reliability for which all Mirrors products are justly famous. In previous versions, however, it was theoretically possible for the so-called ‘Chinese walls’ separating different stories to be ruptured by a number of otherwise routine and unimportant systems malfunctions, leading to situations where, for example, two heroines or two assistant villains could be present in the same part of the castle at the same time. This occasionally had the unfortunate effect of triggering the CHARACTERMERGE.EXE program. CHARACTERMERGE speaks for itself. EXE stands for EXECUTE, an unfortunately ambivalent command in the context of a royal residence well supplied with armed guards.

Sis opened her eyes and quickly turned away. She’d been down in the tunnel for so long that the light scalded them, and besides, they had clearly developed some sort of abstruse technical fault, because as soon as she’d opened them she’d imagined seeing what looked like a scene from an old horror movies, with Boris Karloff and — who was the other one? Bela Lugosi? Something like that. Anyway, her eyes were clearly on the blink. She rested them for a moment —‘Igor? Igor! Don’t just stand there gawping. Get those people out of my laboratory.’

This time, Sis’s eyes opened wide, and to hell with the brightness of the light.

Igor?!

‘Oh bugger,’ mumbled Rumpelstiltskin, his nose poking through the thin gap between frame and door. ‘Back the way we came, quick.’

But Sis wasn’t moving. Instead she was staring at someone; not the Baron, in spite of his colourful language and impressive range of angry gestures; not at Igor, although he was hurrying towards her with a big hammer gripped in both hands. She looked straight past them, or through them, at the figure sitting up on the table.

‘Carl?’ she said.

‘Sis?’

‘Where the hell have you been?’ they both asked at once.

A lifetime devoted to the study of the art of inter-sibling bickering had given Sis instincts that could override even the most severe shock, so she got her reply in first. ‘Looking for you, moron,’ she said angrily. ‘I could’ve got killed, chasing round among all these loonies. Of all the thoughtless—’

‘Hold it.’ The Baron thumped the bench so hard that it shook. ‘Shut up, both of you. That’s better.’ He took a deep breath, then went on, ‘Do I take it that you two know each other?’

‘Of course,’ Sis replied, annoyed at the interruption, ‘he’s my brother. Who are you?’

‘Your brother…’

Sis nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘People often don’t believe we’re related. I can understand that,’ she added, ‘because he’s got a face like a prune. Who did you say you were?’

‘I…’ The Baron’s jaw flopped open, like the gangplank of an exhausted car ferry. ‘Never mind who I am,’ he rallied, ‘who are you? You can’t be his brother, for pity’s sake, I’ve just built him. Out of bits.’ He stared at Carl for a moment, then back at the table. ‘Or at least,’ he amended thoughtfully, ‘I built something. But the one I just made had big clumpy boots and a bolt through his neck. This one…’ Words failed him, and he pointed. Sis nodded gravely.

‘Agreed, our Carl would look much better with a bolt through his windpipe,’ Sis replied, observing out of the corner of her eye that although Igor was (still) bustling towards them at a great rate with his hammer raised like a battleaxe, the amount of ground he was actually covering was negligible. ‘Real improvement, that’d be. If you could find some way of turning off the voice box, that’d be ideal.’

Carl stuck his tongue out, revealing the neat row of stitching that held it in place, and for the first time Sis realised that Carl didn’t look in the least like Carl; he looked, in fact, just like Boris Karloff. More so, in fact, than Mr Karloff himself ever did. But it was definitely Carl, no question. Whee-plink went the falling penny, and she realised.

‘Did you do this?’ she asked.

‘Me?’ Carl tried to look indignant, then grinned sheepishly. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It just sort of happened.’

‘Just sort of happened!’

Carl stopped being defensive and scowled, a time-honoured tactic he’d used since he was three. It meant he was in the wrong, of course, but where else would a younger brother ever be? ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it just sort of happened. When you started messing about with things. It’s all your fault really.’

‘It is not my—’

‘And because you started mucking around, I got stuck, and the only way I could get unstuck was this. So I did. No thanks to you.’

‘But Boris Karloff—’

Carl pulled a face. ‘It’s a joke,’ he said. ‘Carl/Karloff. Joke. Funny. Ha Ha.’

‘Carl, your joke’s just about to brain us both with a big hammer.’

Carl clicked his tongue impatiently, turned round and glowered at Igor, who vanished.

When the Baron asked him what the devil he thought he was playing at, he vanished too.

‘Joke over,’ Carl said, and folded his arms. ‘Satisfied?’

Sis gulped, as if trying to swallow a very large live goldfish. ‘How did you do that?’ she asked.

Carl shrugged. ‘I can do anything I like,’ he said. ‘It’s only make-believe.’

‘What?’

‘Make-believe. Pretend. Like virtual reality or holo-suites in Star Trek. Just computer stuff, that’s all.’

Sis thought about that. ‘Then how come I can’t do it?’ she demanded.

‘Because you’re thick,’ Carl replied, with the air of Einstein crafting the inevitable solution of a quadratic equation. ‘And you’re only a girl. Girls don’t understand computers, everybody knows that.’

He could live another eighty years and earn his living defusing bombs, and still Carl would never be closer to death than he was at that particular moment. But it passed.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Sis replied wearily. ‘And get us out of here. I’ve had enough. And Mum’ll be worried sick.’

‘No she won’t,’ Carl replied, as he systematically erased the rest of the Baron’s laboratory until there was nothing left but four bare stone walls and a flagstone floor. ‘We haven’t been anywhere in real time,’ he explained, ‘only in cyberspace. I’d have thought even you’d have realised that.’

‘Excuse me.’

‘The day I understand your gibberings is the day I have my brain replaced,’ Sis replied haughtily, “cos then I’ll know I’ve gone as barking mad as you. And I don’t want to understand computers,’ she added quickly. ‘Only very sad people understand computers. Only very sad people who haven’t got a life—’

‘Excuse me.’

‘Shut up,’ Sis commanded, and Rumpelstiltskin immediately pulled his nose back through the trapdoor. Then Sis turned slowly round and stared in his direction. ‘Just a minute,’ she said. ‘Carl, did you do that?’

Carl frowned and shook his head. ‘Never seen him before,’ he replied. ‘I thought it must be your new boyfriend. You know, the one you don’t want Mum to know about…’ Sis made a strange, high-pitched noise, rather like brass foil shearing under enormous pressure. ‘You know who that is?’ she demanded. ‘That’s bloody Rumpelstiltskin. That’s a character from a fairytale!’

Carl shrugged. ‘So? For once you got lucky. Well, when I say lucky, compared to some of the freaks you’ve brought home—’

In order to explain her reasoning, Sis made use of the old dialectic technique of grabbing the other guy’s ear and twisting it. ‘He’s imaginary,’ she yelled. ‘Can’t you see that?’

‘So you got yourself another imaginary friend. Big deal. Hope he’s got a better appetite than the last one, because Mum got really pissed at having to cook dinner for him and none of it ever getting eaten. Ouch, that hurts!’

‘Carl. Listen to me. He’s a little pretend person from the Pink Fairy Book. Make him go away.’

With a well-judged jink and swerve, Carl pulled himself free and put an arm’s length between himself and his sister. ‘I didn’t make him up,’ he said, ‘you did. So you’ve got to make him go away. Nothing to do with me.’

‘Excuse me.’

Sis whirled round and pulled the trapdoor open, revealing Rumpelstiltskin cowering behind it. ‘I thought I told you to shut up,’ she said.

‘Yes, but—’

‘But?’

‘But,’ Rumpelstiltskin said, pointing, ‘I was just wondering, had you noticed? Sorry to have bothered you.’

‘What are you—?’ Sis looked over her shoulder. ‘Oh,’ she said.

The laboratory was slowly fading back in. The workbenches were already there, and the retorts, alembics, Bunsen burners, circuit boards, generators and other clutter were gradually taking shape. Everything was where it had been, right down to the pool of green fluid that had seeped out of the beaker Igor knocked over just before he disappeared.

‘Just thought I’d mention it. Bye for now, then.’

Before he could escape, Sis grabbed his collar and pulled. ‘Oh no you don’t,’ she said. ‘You’re going to stay here and talk to them. They’re your kind, not mine.’

A door opened. No need to look to know who it was. ‘Igor!’ he was shouting. ‘Call the guards!’

‘My kind? I didn’t send for them!’

This time, Sis realised, there was something subtly different, even though everything was apparently the same. Something that hadn’t been there before. What could it be? Ah yes, the guards, with their body armour and machine pistols. That was what was different.

‘That was always your trouble,’ she hissed to her brother, who was standing as still as a rock and gazing at the troopers as if they’d just appeared from out of his own nose. ‘No imagination.’

‘I didn’t send for them,’ Carl said. ‘I thought it was you.’

‘Me? What would I want with…?’

‘This is silly,’ Carl said loudly. ‘Delete guards, enter!’ Nothing happened. ‘Control, delete guards, enter!’ More nothing. ‘Control, Alt, Delete!’ he barked shrilly. ‘Oh come on, you useless thing, stop mucking about and do as you’re bloody well told!’

Somehow, that didn’t inspire Sis with a great deal of confidence, since she’d heard him shouting more or less the same words up in his bedroom on the not-too-infrequent occasions when he’d contrived to crash his computer. And Carl’s computers, she recalled with a heavy feeling, tended to crash about as often as a blind rally driver.

‘I don’t think they can hear you,’ she said softly. ‘Or they aren’t particularly interested.’

Nor, on the other hand, were they getting there all that fast; like Igor a few minutes ago, they seemed to be running on the spot. ‘Restart,’ Carl howled. ‘Return to DOS. Mummy! Help!’

Whoever or whatever it was that Carl was yelling at didn’t seem to be taking the slightest notice; which was, of course, completely normal. All computers expect to be yelled at. There’s not a single computer in the whole world that hasn’t been sworn at. Even the discreet little VDU with the crossed keys monogram on the keyboard that sits on the Pope’s desk in his office in the Vatican has in its time heard language that’d make a Marine blush.

‘I don’t understand,’ Carl confessed, as the guards continued their racing-stalagmite rush towards them. ‘It shouldn’t be doing this. I think someone’s been playing with it, and it’s gone haywire.’

‘I have an idea,’ Sis said. ‘Let’s run away.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Carl replied contemptuously. ‘It’s just software, it can’t—’

One of the guards racked back the slide of his machine gun. He made a pantomime of it, and the sound effects were both overdone and unrealistic. And when he fired, the row of bullet holes in the wall above their heads was far too straight and unwavering.

However…

They ran.

‘I dunno,’ sighed the elf, gracefully sidestepping a falling roof-beam. ‘Before I got mixed up with you, I used to go days at a time without having houses fall on me. But now…’

‘Shut up.’ Fang grabbed a chair and threw it through a window. ‘After you.’

‘You’re too kind.’

‘I want to see if they’re still shooting at us.’

As it turned out, they were; but both arrows missed by at least an eighth of an inch. The elf made a peculiar noise, two parts rage to three parts terror with a pinch of cayenne pepper and a cocktail olive, and darted away in the direction of the nearest bush. A couple more arrows narrowly missed her, persuading Fang to jump back out of the way of the window. Then he jumped forward again to avoid a manhole-cover-sized chunk of falling plaster.

‘Hey, you,’ he yelled at Julian, ‘you know about this sort of thing. What should we do?’

Julian, sensibly crouched under a stout oak table with a paper bag over his head (he’d picked up that tip from a government leaflet), beckoned with his front right trotter. ‘Under here,’ he said. ‘It’s what I usually do, and it hasn’t let me down yet.’

Fang joined him, just as a rafter landed right where he’d been standing. Not long afterwards, what was left of upstairs and a representative sample of the walls followed suit. Despite several direct hits, the table stayed in one piece.

‘Thanks,’ Fang muttered, when the bombardment was over. ‘I reckon I owe you one.’

Julian took off his paper bag. ‘Just who are you?’ he said. ‘I’ll swear the voice is familiar.’

‘Ah.’ Fang thought quickly. There were the three little pigs. There were the dwarves. There were also, apparently, the samurai, though what harm he’d ever done them he hadn’t a clue. Virtually everybody he could think of at the moment was fairly radically anti-wolf.

On the other hand, Wolfpack’s fundamental and highly cherished Prime Directive demanded that its officers tell the truth at all times, regardless of the consequences. Along with justice and the Fairyland Way, truth was what the Pack stood for. It was what made them a force for good in the world.

‘I’m a handsome prince,’ Fang replied. ‘What does it look like?’

Julian shrugged. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get out of here quick, before those nutcase brothers of mine come looking for me.’

Having shifted sundry bits of dead architecture out of the way, Fang and Julian crawled out from under the table and looked round. The dense clouds of dust were just beginning to settle, and in the distance there were shouts of ‘There he is!’, followed by the twang of bowstrings.

‘Which way?’ Fang shouted.

‘No idea. Hang on, though, what about that castle over there? Good strong walls, high towers, moat, portcullis; you never know your luck. Come on.’

As they ran, Fang could have pointed out that in his quite extensive experience, the average castle could be razed to the ground with less puff than it takes to blow up a party balloon; but his burgeoning diplomatic instincts prevented him. They made it to the gatehouse in remarkably good time.

‘Here,’ Julian called out, ‘let us in, quick!’

A small sally-port in the main gate creaked open, and a long, thin nose appeared in the opening. ‘Why should I?’ squeaked a high, thin voice. ‘Get lost.’

‘We’re in mortal danger, that’s why,’ Julian replied urgently. ‘Haven’t you people got any respect for the concept of sanctuary?’

‘No.’ The nose withdrew, and the door started to close.

‘Stop,’ Fang barked out. ‘Wait. Don’t listen to my friend, he’s just kidding. What we are in fact is, we’re double glazing salesmen.’

The door didn’t open, but it stopped closing. ‘Double glazing salesmen?’

‘That’s right,’ Fang panted. ‘We also sell brushes, useful gadgets for the kitchen and complete sets of the Encyclopaedia Gigantica.’

‘That’s more like it,’ the voice behind the nose grumbled. ‘Still…’

‘Also,’ Fang added desperately, ‘we’re fully accredited evangelists of the Church of the Divine Revelation, and if you’d care to spare us a moment, we could show you some really interesting pamphlets.’

‘Pamphlets,’ the unseen doorkeeper repeated, with barely contained excitement. ‘Tracts? You got tracts?’

‘We got more tracts than you could possibly imagine. Not just religious ones, either. For discerning people like yourself, we also have a wide selection of canvassing leaflets to help you decide who to vote for in local elections.’

The door swung open. ‘You’d better come in,’ said the doorkeeper. ‘Got any Referendum Party videos? I love Referendum Party videos.’

Once inside, Fang and Julian quickly knocked the doorkeeper out and tied him up with a piece of rope they found hanging on a hook near the gate; it was just the right length, and presumably kept there for the purpose. ‘Now,’ Fang muttered, ‘we need a couple of guards. Ah, here they are.’ He reached for a thick billet of wood that was lying conveniently close; then he frowned. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Talk about inefficient. Here, you.’

‘Who, me?’ said one of the guards, coming over.

‘Yes, you. What’s your inside leg measurement?’

The guard thought for a moment. ‘Twenty-nine,’ he said.

‘Waist and collar size?’

‘Thirty-six and fourteen. Why?’

Fang sighed. ‘Go away,’ he said, ‘and send me one of your mates who’s thirty-one inside leg, thirty-two waist and a number sixteen collar. Go on, jump to it. Your colleague,’ he added, pointing to the short, fat guard who was standing a few feet away, ‘can stay. Go on, jump to it. We haven’t got all day.’

The guard trotted off, and a minute or so later was replaced by another one who was the right size. Fang bashed them over the head and stripped off their uniforms. ‘Here,’ he muttered, passing Julian the short guard’s boots. ‘I don’t know,’ he complained. ‘I mean, off-the-peg guards are one thing, but do I look like a thirty-six waist to you?’

Someone was hammering at the gate. ‘Desmond,’ Julian groaned. ‘Look, why don’t you buzz off, see if there’s a back door or something you can sneak out of before they start tearing the place down? It’s not you they’re interested in, and there’s no point in you getting hurt too.’

Fang was tempted. After all, he still had a wicked witch to find, and this didn’t seem like the sort of place witches frequented. On the other hand, he noticed, there were quite a few tall, pointy-topped towers, of the kind inevitably inhabited by crazy old wizards. There might even be a wicked queen…

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ he replied. ‘Don’t you worry, they won’t get in here. And even if they do, they’ll never find us. A place this size, there must be millions of nooks and crannies we could hide in. Or a secret tunnel under the walls leading to a ruined priory. I heard somewhere there’s more miles of tunnel under the average castle than the whole of the Circle and Piccadilly Lines put together. No, you stick with me and you’ll be just fine.’

As soon as they’d put on the captured uniforms, they crossed the courtyard, climbed a short flight of steps and opened the door to the chapel. It was empty, and the light passing through the stained glass windows threw bizarrely garish pools of coloured light on the polished stone floor.

‘It’s odd, about the nooks and crannies,’ Fang said. ‘They must be put there on purpose, because they’re no earthly use for anything except hiding in, but you take a look at an architect’s floor-plan for a castle and show me where it says Nook here or gives the dimensions for a cranny. It’s almost as if they grow of their own accord.’

‘Or else something makes them,’ Julian replied. ‘You know, like woodworm holes and places where moths have been at the curtains.’

It was bleak and cold in the chapel, and on all sides the grim faces of dead knights and bishops, lying on the lids of their stone coffins like so many malevolent fossilised sun-bathers, seemed to be staring at them. It felt like the inside of Medusa’s freezer.

‘Somewhere around here,’ Fang muttered, ‘there ought to be some stairs leading down to the crypt. Plenty of places to hide in a crypt. Assuming these cheapskates haven’t turned it into a pool room or a wine cellar, of course.’

‘I don’t think I like the sound of a crypt,’ Julian replied with a shudder, as he did his best to avoid the eye of a particularly sinister-looking marble crusader. ‘Crypts have Things in them.’

Fang bent down, grabbed hold of an iron ring in the floor and pulled, revealing a trapdoor and some steps going down. ‘Depends on who you’re more afraid of,’ he said, ‘Things or your brothers, You know them better than I do.’

‘Good point,’ Julian answered. ‘All right, after you.’

Fang duly led the way, reflecting as he did so that a good industry-standard Thing, with the usual level of regulation magical powers, could have him back in his nice warm fur coat and running about on four feet quicker than you could say H.P. Lovecraft. ‘Mind your head,’ he called out as he disappeared down the steps, ‘the ceiling’s rather ouch!’

‘Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind.’

It was, of course, as dark as strong black coffee in the crypt, and for a while the only sound was Fang’s muffled swearing as he stubbed his toes on what turned out to be large marble sarcophagi. But of Things, amazingly, not a sign.

‘I don’t know,’ he grumbled. ‘A place like this, you’d expect it to be lousy with Things. Huh. I’ve been in creepier bus stations.

‘Have you?’

‘No. It’s a figure of speech.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s a pretty poor show, though,’ Fang went on. ‘I suppose it could be something to do with the cock-ups, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.’

‘I think you’re right.’

Fang sighed. ‘I reckon it’s just good old-fashioned sloppiness,’ he said. ‘That or the cuts.’

‘Could be.’

‘And stop agreeing with me.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Excuse me,’ Julian interrupted from the other side of the crypt, ‘but who exactly are you talking to over there?’

There was a moment of utter stillness, during which the fall of a pin would have had the neighbours phoning the environmental health people to complain about the noise.

‘I think that’s a very good question,’ Fang croaked. ‘I thought it was you.’

‘No it wasn’t.’

‘Yes it was.’

Fang took a deep breath. ‘Excuse me asking,’ he said, ‘but are you a Thing? Not you,’ he added quickly, before Julian had a chance to reply. ‘Him.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. The one who lives down here, not the one I brought with me. Are you a Thing, or just waiting for a bus or something?’ He clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘God, if only it wasn’t so dark in here…’

‘It is rather, isn’t it? Just a moment.’

There was a disconcerting flash of blue light, which faded into an aquamarine glow that revealed, among other things, a spider.

‘Actually,’ Julian admitted, ‘what I’m really terrified of, most in all the world, is spiders.’

‘Tough.’ Fang took a step closer to the web in which the spider hung. Web, he thought. No, surely not. The spider didn’t move; there, in the very centre of the fragile, lethally efficient environment it had created for itself, there wasn’t any need for it to stir, only to wait for the gullible and the clumsy to come blundering through. Web, Fang thought again. Imagine there was a spider’s web that stretched right across the known world…

‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ he said.

The spider lifted its front legs and waggled them.

‘Yes, very nice,’ Fang said impatiently. ‘Great symbolism. Now, would you mind turning back into whatever you really are? You’re giving my friend here the horrors.’

The spider began to spin. It quickly spun a huge ball of gossamer, so large that it could easily have concealed a human being. Just as Fang was about to lose patience (gossamer being spun, paint drying; you pay your money and take your choice) the cocoon split open and out fell a short bald man in rimless spectacles and a threadbare towelling robe bearing a monogram on the pocket that suggested that it had been stolen from the Grand Hotel, Cardiff. ‘Watch it,’ muttered Fang. ‘You nearly trod on my foot.’

‘Sorry,’ the short man apologised. He was sitting on a tomb whose lid was carved into what looked uncomfortably like an effigy of himself. ‘Problem with the encryption software. I’d try to fix it, but I can’t understand the code.’

‘Code,’ Fang repeated.

‘Code. Computer language. You know,’ the man added, ‘the stuff the programs are written in. What you get when you open one of the system files, and the screen looks like someone’s eaten too much alphabet soup and been sick. Code.’

‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.’

‘What? Oh, of course, I forgot. Sorry.’

Fang took a deep breath. ‘Forgot? Forgot what?’

The man grinned a forty-watt grin. ‘I keep forgetting that I’m the only one of you, or rather us, who knows about the operating system.’

‘Operating system.’

‘That’s right. What makes this whole domain work.’

‘And you know all about it, do you?’

The man nodded. ‘I ought to. After all, I built it.’

Counting up to ten usually worked, but not this time. ‘You’d better start explaining,’ Fang growled. ‘And it’d better make sense, too. If it hadn’t been for those tricks you just did I’d assume you’re as crazy as a barrelful of ferrets; but you aren’t, are you?’

The man shook his head. ‘Not to the best of my knowledge,’ he replied, ‘though after two hundred years down here all on my own in the dark, maybe my own assessment of my mental health isn’t all that reliable. I could be stark staring mad by now and not have noticed. Anyway,’ he went on, as Fang made an involuntary flexing movement with his fingers, ‘what it all comes down to is, I created this domain. Does the phrase computer-generated imaging mean anything to you? No? Well, never mind. How about Mirrors?’

‘The things you look at yourself in?’

The man shook his head. ‘I’d better start at the beginning,’ he said. ‘Now then, once upon a time…’

‘Hey!’

‘You want me to cut the traditional preamble? Very well. I used to be what we call where I come from a software engineer, and I was playing about one day when I found a way to break into alternate universes using computer simulations as a gateway… This is all gibberish to you, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wrote all this,’ the man said. ‘On my old Macintosh. At least, I wrote an operating system that would make all the hundreds of different fairy stories and folktales and nursery rhymes and what have you actually exist in real time, rather than just floating about in the human imagination. It was just a question of protocol compatibility, really. Once I’d got that sorted out, it more or less wrote itself. Anyway, I called it Mirrors, and it all works through the magic mirror belonging to the wicked queen; you remember, Snow White’s stepmother.’

Fang nodded. ‘At last,’ he said, ‘something I can understand. You’re the magician who cast the spell that gives the mirror its power.’

The man blinked. ‘Isn’t that what I just said?’ he replied. ‘Sorry. You’ll find that’s a common failing among computer people, saying perfectly simple things in an utterly incomprehensible way. And before you ask, a computer’s just another word for a magical thing that does spells. All right?’

Fang nodded. ‘I follow,’ he said. ‘So then what?’

‘Actually,’ the man went on, ‘the wicked queen was my pupil. Nice kid, hard working, quite good at it whenever she managed to apply her mind to it for more than a minute at a time.’

‘And she locked you up down here, did she? To make you tell her the secret of the magic?’

‘Oh no. Tracy wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

‘Tracy?’

‘That’s right. She used to be my secretary when I was still running Softcore Industries. That’s in the real — I mean, in the domain I originally came from. Tracy Docherty, her name was. She’d been with Softcore for years.’

Fang closed his eyes and concentrated. ‘And Softcore was the name of your — what did you call it? Your domain?’

‘Oh no.’ The man laughed, and there was just the slightest fleeting hint of cold, hard authority in his voice; a faint smear on the glass, no more. ‘No, when I was running Softcore the whole world was my domain. Or at least I was the richest, most powerful, most widely respected—’ The little old man stopped, and smiled. ‘I was. Never really liked it much, either. It all happened so fast, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. One minute I was sitting in my squashy little apartment in Aspen playing about on my computer, and the next there were all these deputations from world governments offering me honorary doctorates. Anyhow, where was I? Oh yes, Tracy. Nice kid. Did I mention she was a nice kid?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah. Sorry. Actually, it all started because every time I looked round, it seemed as if she had her handbag open and one of those powder compact things in her hand, and she was looking at her face in the little mirror. And every time I saw that I used to say to myself, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” And that sort of set me thinking.’

Fang decided that concentrating on what the little man was saying was probably counterproductive and might even eventually fry his brain.

‘Anyhow, when I wrote Mirrors she became the wicked queen, and I was teaching her to run the system by herself. Then,’ he added with a sigh, ‘came the accident with the bucket.’

‘Accident. Bucket.’

‘Well, more with the mop than the bucket. She tried my cleaning-up program, but it sort of went wrong and created one of those Groundhog Day loops, the kind that run the same program endlessly over and over again until your hard drive falls to bits. In this case, the whole castle got filled up with self-propelled mops and flooded out with soapsuds. I got trapped by the flood and ran for it, and then I got lost, ended up down here and found I couldn’t get out again. Because of the loop, I think. I’ve had plenty of time to think it over, and I suspect what happened is that two mirrors somehow managed to end up facing each other, with me trapped in the middle…’

Fang had no trouble visualising that. He shuddered.

‘So basically,’ he said, ‘you’re a wizard, right?’

The man nodded. ‘That’s what they used to call us, computer wizards. I think it was meant as a compliment, but I’m not sure. Ambiguous term, really.’

‘So.’ He took a deep breath. ‘You can, um, turn people into things, right?’

‘Oh yes, piece of cake,’ the little man replied. ‘I can turn you back into a wolf, no trouble at all.’

Fang stared. ‘You know—’

‘Like I said, I wrote the code. Shall I do it now?’

‘Yes. Yes please. I can’t—’

Pfzzz.

‘—Woof.’

‘Better now?’

Fang, a large grey timber-wolf with a lolling tongue and staring red eyes, wagged his tail furiously. ‘Woof!’ he said; and then paused and listened to what he’d just said. ‘Woof?’ he queried.

‘Oh, play fair, please,’ the little bald man protested. ‘You said you wanted to be turned back into a wolf, so that’s what I did. And when you’re a wolf, you’re not supposed to be able to talk. It was only the mess-up in the code when the system crashed that gave you the ability. Can’t you remember what it used to be like? Before the crash, I mean?’

‘Woof. Woof.’

‘But that’s silly,’ replied the little man. ‘You were Fang the non-talking big bad wolf for ages and ages. You must be able to remember something.’

‘Woof. Woof woof. Woof.”

‘Honestly? Well, you surprise me, you really do. Obviously the problem’s more serious than I’d guessed. If only I could get out of this place,’ he added with a deep sigh, ‘I could get it fixed.’

‘Woof?’

‘He’s right, you know,’ Julian added, coming out from behind the granite coffin where he’d been hiding just in case the little bald man really was a Thing (or, worse still, Desmond or Eugene in a latex mask). ‘You should be able to get out, if we could get in. Maybe whatever’s been keeping you down here was wiped out along with the rest of the system.’

‘That’s—’ The little man peered at Julian over his spectacles. ‘You’re one of the Three Little Pigs, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Julian?’

Julian nodded.

‘And you seem to understand something about how the system works,’ the little man went on, ‘which is why, though they don’t know it themselves, your brothers are trying to kill you. They think you’ve gone so dreadfully mad that you’ve got to be stopped at all costs.’

Julian shivered. ‘And that’s all because of the mix-up, is it? What you called the crash?’

The little man shook his head sadly. ‘Not that simple, I’m afraid. You see, on top of the original crash — which I strongly suspect was no accident, by the way; did you happen to meet a couple of strangers in grey suits earlier on? Hm, thought so. It’s depressing when you think that actually they’re my employees. Still, that’s corporate politics for you. Sorry, where was I? Quite apart from the original crash, there’s several other rather tiresome people fiddling about with the system, and that’s been causing all sorts of further problems. Quite simple to put right,’ he added, ‘if only I could get out of here.’

Julian shrugged. ‘Maybe you can. Have you tried?’

‘Have I tried?’ the little man repeated. ‘Have I tried? Well no, now you come to mention it. At least, not since the crash. You know, it might be a rather interesting experiment, don’t you think?’

Julian tried to imagine what it must have been like; two hundred years trapped in a dark crypt, when you knew that it was all just a fairytale anyway. ‘You could say that,’ he replied. ‘How will you know if it’s stopped working?’

The little man smiled. ‘When I walk up the stairs and actually manage to get to the top,’ he replied. ‘As simple as that. In this business,’ he added, ‘things are rarely difficult. They’re possible or they’re impossible; no grey areas where things like difficulty can breed. Shall we go?’

‘All right.’

‘Woof.’

‘Fine,’ said the little man, standing up with an enormous effort and nearly collapsing again. ‘Let’s go, then. After you.’

Although it’s open to the public (in roughly the same way as a spider’s web is open to visiting flies) there is no readily available guide-book to this castle. Which is not to say there isn’t a guide-book; it’s just that it’s twice as big as the castle itself.

If you were to get a crane as high as Kilimanjaro and a winch capable of pulling the moon down out of orbit, you could turn to page 254,488,057,294,618 of the guide-book, where you’d find a plan showing the corridor that leads from the back of the chapel to the minstrels’ gallery above the door of the great hall. Twenty-seven thousand-plus pages further on, you’d find another plan showing the secret passage from the great hall that comes up through a trapdoor in the woods a mere five yards or so away from the spot where Snow White clobbered the ex-blind-mouse, Souris. From there, turn back 908,415,012 pages and you’ll see a diagram of the Baron’s laboratory, clearly showing the passageway that connects it to the great hall. They are all, of course, the same passageway. There’s only one passageway in the whole castle.

First came Snow White, dragging the unconscious body of Souris. She dumped her burden on the steps of the dais on which the high table stood, straightened her back and used some coarse and unimaginative language. Then she heard a shuffling noise, looked over her shoulder and saw…

A wolf, a pig and a doddery old man with a bald head and round glasses. They didn’t notice her at first; the old man was making a beeline straight for a place on the wall where a rectangular outline marked in discoloured whitewash and grime showed where a large mirror had once been. He took in the absence of mirror, sat down on a bench and used coarse and unimaginative language, until the sound of running feet, angry shouting and distant gunfire made him turn his head and see.

A blonde girl and a scruffy-looking boy running out of the archway where the corridor came into the hall, closely followed by quaintly costumed halberdiers with assault rifles, who were just about to catch up with them when they ran lickety-split into the small knot of samurai who were chasing a beautiful but dangerous-looking young woman in the opposite direction…

But before any serious mayhem could get under way, a side door burst open under the weight of a battering-ram swung with great enthusiasm by two pigs, who were followed by a motley collection of dwarves and Brothers Grimm, their hands securely tied behind their backs with a length of rope lashed to the carriage of the ram.

While at opposite ends of the gallery two doors opened, to admit a flustered-looking elf and another, extremely bewildered-looking dwarf with cobweb in his beard…

At which point, everything froze.