Snow White and the Seven Samurai

Chapter 5

‘Again.’

The face in the mirror flickered, resetting itself to the position it had been in a few seconds earlier. ‘You, O Snow White, are the fairest of them all.’

‘I thought that’s what you said,’ Snow White replied. ‘Still,’ she went on, ‘it does no harm to check these things. Who the hell are you, anyway?’

‘Bad command or file name,’ replied her reflection austerely. ‘Please retry.’

Although her reflection stayed poker-faced, Snow White herself grinned like a thirsty dog. ‘Dear God,’ she said joyfully, ‘don’t say I’ve managed to hack into that bitch’s system. That’d be cool. You there, identify yourself.’

A minuscule flicker of disapproval moved a muscle in the reflection’s jaw. ‘Currently running Mirrors 3.1, incorporating Magic for Mirrors and SpellPerfect 7. Warning: this program is protected by international copyright. Any unauthorised reproduction or transmission of this program may render you liable—’

‘Enough.’ Snow White took a deep breath and let it go gradually. Never in her wildest dreams had she ever imagined herself in a position like this; the Wicked Queen’s legendary Mirrors system literally at her fingertips, enabling her to control the whole virtual-make-believe construct that made up the world she lived in. Wow, she said gleefully to herself, cyberpunk comes to Avenging Dragon Cottage. With a grin on one of her faces and a po-faced stare on the other, she leaned back in her chair and wondered what she was going to do next.

Where to start? Ask a silly question.

‘Right, you,’ she said briskly. ‘First, I want you to open me a numbered account at the Credit Suisse and pay in — let me see, deutschmarks or US dollars? Let’s make it dollars for now. Fifty million dollars, please. Next—’

‘Bad command or file name. Please retry.’

Anger creased Snow White’s lovely (fairest of them all) face. ‘You what?’ she snapped. ‘Don’t mess with me, dream-boat. One: fifty million dollars. Two—’

‘Bad command—’

‘Shut your face.’ Or should that be, shut my mouth? Irrelevant. All that mattered was that she was in command here and the mirror had to do what she told it to. ‘Why can’t I have the money?’

‘Requested operation out of character. Path not found. Retry or Cancel?’

‘Bugger.’ Hadn’t thought of that. In order to be able to use the wicked queen’s system, she had to become the wicked queen… Interesting dilemma for someone who really only wanted the money, rather than the power, the glory, and her head on the stamps. And if you’re going to be a wicked queen, having your head on the stamps isn’t necessarily a good idea. The citizens end up not knowing which side to spit on.

Not that that, in itself, was enough to deter her; but there was something to think about here, clearly. ‘Pause,’ she said; the image of herself in the mirror faded and was replaced by the usual eye-bending mobile geometric shapes. She stood up and walked to the window.

Below, in the garden, Mr Miroku, Mr Hiroshige and Mr Nikko were standing watching young Mr Akira weeding the turnip patch. Snow White frowned; there was something about the set-up here that she couldn’t fathom, and it bothered her. If only she could remember how she’d come to be here in the first place.

‘That’s right.’ Mr Miroku’s voice, carried up to her by the breeze. ‘Now you’ve got it. Be the hoe.’

If I’m going to be a wicked queen, Snow White mused, stands to reason I’ll need some trusty henchmen. Fat lot of good it’d be being a queen and having to do my own henching. Would these guys be up to the job? They prance around in armour with whacking great swords, so presumably they’re qualified in that respect. It’s just that they’re so.

She shook her head, sat down at the dressing table and gave the mirror a tap with her fingertip. The reflection reappeared.

‘Mirror,’ she commanded, ‘who am I?’

‘You, Snow White, are the fairest of them all.’

Snow White nodded. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Now we’ve sorted that out. Am I right in thinking that I’m now the wicked queen?’

‘Identity confirmed. Access available to all systems.’

Yes!

‘In that case,’ Snow White continued, ‘what’s become of the bi— I mean, who’s Snow White?’

‘Bad command or file—’

‘All right, yes.’ Snow White looked up and rested the point of her chin on the knuckle of her forefinger. She didn’t need to ask the question. She knew. ‘Never mind all that,’ she said. ‘How do we get this show on the road?’

The reflection didn’t lighten up exactly; it still glowered at her like the proprietor of an expensive restaurant from whom she’d just ordered egg and chips. But there was a slight thaw, as if the mirror was acknowledging that there was now a possibility that they’d be able to work together.

‘Running DOS.’

‘Whatever.’

Because if Mirrors was now back on line, by rights it ought to reconfigure all the buggered-up settings. Snow White would once again have seven dwarves, instead of seven Japanese master swordsmen. Since she was no longer Snow White but the wicked queen, that didn’t affect her. Whoever was now Snow White would be the one with the dwarves. Find the dwarves and you’ll find Snow White. Provided, of course, that she felt the need; after all, why bother? True, it would be in character for her in her new persona to send her seven henchmen to bring her Snow White’s head on a sharpened pole, but that wasn’t her personal style. So long as the kid didn’t mess with her, she had no quarrel with a fellow professional. This forest’s big enough for the both of us.

‘Mirror,’ she commanded, ‘locate Snow White.’

‘Ba—’

‘Mirror,’ she warned.

‘Locating.’

Ah. That was good. She’d got the mirror frightened of her. Essential first step in the control of technology is the establishing of a state of permanent mutual distrust.

‘Snow White currently located at Three Bears Cottage, The Forest.’

‘Thank you. Show me the location of Three Bears Cottage.’

The usual clicks and crinkles; then the reflection more or less leered at her.

‘Three Bears Cottage no longer exists.’

‘Who’s been sitting in my chair?’ asked Baby Bear, holding up a fragment of chair leg.

‘You know,’ replied her father, poking around in the rubble, ‘right now, I figure that’s the least of our problems.’

Baby Bear nodded, her snout wet with tears. Of the quaint, cosy little cottage in the woods, all that was left was a heap of scattered masonry and a few charred timbers. It did rather put a squashed chair and molested porridge into perspective.

‘Who the hell do you think it was?’ Mummy Bear asked, retrieving a miraculously unbroken sauceboat from under a fallen roof timber. Daddy Bear shrugged.

‘All sorts of people it could have been,’ he said. ‘Pixie Liberation Organisation. Gnome Rule activists. Does it matter which particular bunch of nutters? Come on, let’s see if we can salvage enough linen to rig up a tent.’

Mummy Bear sighed. ‘You read about it,’ she said, ‘but somehow you never think it’ll happen to you. Oh God, my mum’s teapot.’ She held up a chipped handle, sniffed and dropped it. ‘Never mind,’ she said bravely. ‘It’s all just things. Nobody got hurt, that’s all that matters.’

The three bears poked about a little more. ‘Good Lord,’ cried Daddy Bear, brandishing a blue cup with a rather wobbly picture painted on it. ‘My coronation mug. That’s something, I suppose. My Uncle Paddy gave me that when I was just a cub.’

Mummy Bear clicked her tongue. ‘Might have guessed that’d come through unscathed,’ she replied. ‘Fifteen years I’ve been trying to get that thing to meet with an accident. It must be made of cast iron.’

‘Oh.’ Daddy Bear looked hurt. ‘You mean you don’t like it?’

‘Never could stand the horrid thing, since you ask. But you never did, so I never said anything.’

Daddy Bear shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least we’ve got one cup left. There’s poor starving bears in Antarctica who’ve got absolutely nothing at all.’

‘Tell ‘em they can have your coronation mug, then. They’re welcome to it.’

Behind a clump of bushes at the extreme edge of the clearing, the three pigs watched the forlorn search and tried not to feel as guilty as hell.

‘Could have sworn it was our house,’ Eugene whispered.

‘Shut up and keep still,’ Julian replied, adjusting a knot on the makeshift sling he was attaching to Eugene’s arm. ‘I’ll admit I was fooled too, though,’ he conceded. ‘That’s the trouble with these rotten little design-and-build jobs, they all look the same. Anyway, we know what it’s like to have a house blown down around our ears, and it’s not the end of the world. Just for once, it wasn’t us after all. Be grateful for that.’

‘And we’ve got rid of the wolf,’ Desmond added brightly. ‘Copped the full force of it, he did. No way he could have survived that.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ Julian said. ‘Looks like Old Mr Silver Lining’s finally been flushed out into the open. Hey, lads, if that’s not our house, has anybody got any ideas where our house has got to?’

Eugene shrugged. ‘It’s a quaint little cottage in a clearing in the heart of the forest,’ he replied. ‘That narrows it down to about fifty thousand possibles.’

‘Bit of a turn-up, though,’ Desmond continued. ‘I mean, it being us who wrecks the cottage. Role reversal, I think the technical term is.’

‘Maybe it’s something to do with all the weird stuff that’s been happening lately,’ Julian suggested. ‘You know, like that business in the hospital with Humpty Dumpty and Jack and Jill. Like lots of things are getting stood on their heads all of a sudden.’

His brothers looked at him.

‘Does that mean we’re going to have to go around blowing down people’s houses?’ Desmond asked plaintively. ‘Because I don’t think I’ve got the puff for that.’

Julian thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Might be. I’m not all that sure how these things actually work. Adds a new terror to self-defence if it does.’

‘Huh?’

‘If someone attacks you and if you kill them, you’ve got to take their place,’ Julian explained. ‘If that’s the way it’s going to work from now on, I think I’d rather hold still and be eaten. Which,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘is the same thing in reverse, surely, since you are what you eat, though you don’t necessarily eat what you are. Am I burbling?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry, I’ll stop. There,’ he said, tightening the last knot on the sling, ‘how does that feel?’

‘Bloody awful.’

‘Oh well, never mind. It’ll have to do for now. I suggest we wait here till nightfall and then try to find our house.’

The other pigs shrugged. ‘Might as well,’ Eugene muttered. ‘Nothing to hurry home for, after all.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Julian enquired.

Eugene frowned thoughtfully. ‘It’s just occurred to me,’ he said. ‘If we really have managed to snuff the wolf, what are we going to find to do with ourselves from now on? For as long as I can remember, we’ve been building houses for that creep to blow down. If he’s gone—’

Julian stared at him. ‘You’re not saying you miss the bugger, surely.’

‘I don’t know, do I? I’m just asking a simple question, that’s all. Personally, I reckon I’m too old and set in my ways for a radical career change.’

‘He’s got a point,’ Desmond agreed.

‘So has an almost bald hedgehog,’ Julian replied. ‘What of it? Nothing to say we can’t carry on building houses just because there’s no one to blow them down any more. Think of it. Building houses that are still there in the morning. I’d have thought you’d all have liked the idea.’

‘It has a certain novel charm,’ Eugene conceded. ‘Though whether it’ll catch on remains to be seen. There’s such a thing as gimmickry for gimmickry’s sake, you know.’

Julian made a vulgar noise. ‘Don’t you see,’ he said angrily, ‘we’ve done it. What we’ve been trying to do since I can’t remember when. What we’re for. We’ve killed the big bad wolf, and now we’re free to go. Happy ever after. That’s how it works, isn’t it, in stories? Well, isn’t it?’

The other two looked at him as if he’d just fallen out of the sky at their feet. ‘What’s he talking about?’ Desmond whispered. ‘I don’t like it when he starts talking all funny.’

Eugene shrugged. ‘Comes of being the youngest, I suppose,’ he replied. ‘You know how it is with litters, the run— I mean, the youngest isn’t really even supposed to survive. Makes ‘em a bit weird in the head sometimes.

‘Hey!’ Julian glowered at his brothers, who smiled sweetly back at him in a manner that suggested that the only reason they weren’t trussing him up in a straitjacket was that they didn’t have a straitjacket. ‘Do you mind,’ he went on. ‘I’m still here, you know.’

‘Of course you are,’ Eugene replied. ‘Anything you say. Or maybe,’ he added in an audible aside, ‘it’s just a bang on the head or something. That can turn people funny, and sometimes they get better.’

Julian thought for a moment. His mind was full of strange things, none of which had been there a while ago, though it felt as if they’d always been there. It was like going up in the loft for the first time when you’ve been in the house five years, and finding a whole lot of cardboard boxes left behind by the previous owners. In this case, Julian got the impression that the cardboard boxes had things like GELIGNITE — HANDLE WITH CARE stencilled on the side, which didn’t exactly help.

Somehow he’d suddenly become aware of the fact that he was in a story. What a story was, or what being in one actually meant in practical terms, he wasn’t exactly sure; there were little bits of information stuck to the insides of his mind like the shreds of paper that come off on your windscreen after you’ve pulled off a sticky-backed car park ticket, enough to make him realise that there was something important here to know, but not enough to make sense of any of it. It was as if he’d known the story once, but forgotten ninety per cent of it; fairly significant bits, like the beginning, the middle and the end. If he’d had any say in the matter he’d have deleted them at once, but that was out of the question. It was a bit like having someone tell you who the murderer is about halfway through a detective story you’re really enjoying; you wish you didn’t know, but you do and that’s that.

And then he thought: detective story? What’s a detective story? And it was almost as if he could see fragments of the memory rushing past him and gurgling down the plughole of oblivion, winking maliciously at him as they vanished.

This is silly, he muttered to himself. Get a grip. Pretend it isn’t happening. Otherwise, at the very least, these two are going to have you put away in the bewildered pigs’ home. At worst, that might possibly be the right thing to do.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘just thinking aloud, don’t mind me. All I was trying to say was,’ he went on, sneaking a surreptitious glance over his shoulder to check that the way was clear if he had to make a run for it, ‘why don’t we carry on building houses, for now, and wait and see what happens? I mean, something’s bound to turn up. Something always does.’

Eugene and Desmond looked at each other warily. ‘I think he’s trying to say he isn’t crazy,’ Eugene said. ‘I’m not sure I believe him.’

‘Nor me,’ Desmond replied. ‘I reckon we ought to tie him up ma sack and have him seen to. You know, take him somewhere where they know about these things. A fair, or whatever.’

‘A fair?’

Desmond nodded. ‘Heard about it once. There’s people at fairs who know all about pigs. They can even tell you how much you weigh just by looking at you. They’d know what to do, I reckon.’

Still smiling, they advanced, and Julian started to back away. At precisely the moment when Eugene, having assured him that it was all for his own good, made a grab for his hind legs and Desmond, explaining that they were only trying to help, tried to knock him silly with a chunk of wood, he darted between them, dodged their flailing trotters, and ran for it.

The accountant sat down and stared into the bucket.

He’d taken all the precautions he could to make sure he wouldn’t be disturbed (and caution comes as naturally to an accountant as fleas to a rabbit); he could take his time, do the job properly, as it ought to be done. Opportunities like this, he knew, only come once in a professional lifetime, and it would be sheer folly to waste this one by rushing it.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let it out again, but it didn’t work; he was still tense and jumpy, not at all the right frame of mind for tackling such delicate work. He needed something calming, familiar, soothing, soporific. He opened his eyes again, reached up to a nearby shelf, and pulled down a volume of tax statutes at random.

‘One of the characteristic features of Schedule D case III,’ he read aloud, allowing his tongue to caress each solid syllable, ‘is the provision under sections fifty-two, fifty-three and seventy-four of the Taxes Act 1970 for the deduction and collection of tax at source from the payer. The payee will receive a net sum from which tax has been deducted at source…’ Better; much better. He could feel a sort of benign numbness creeping upwards from the junction of his neck and shoulders, a sort of delightful narcosis; now he’d have to be careful he didn’t drift into that unique kind of half-sleep that anybody who has much to do with tax legislation spends so much of his life in, somewhere in the middle of a triangle formed by boredom, sleep and death. He needed to be relaxed, but not that relaxed.

When he felt the moment was right he closed the book carefully and laid it down slowly on his desk, taking great care to line the edges of its cover square with the desktop; then, with the slow deliberation of an hourly paid sleepwalker, he took another deep breath, exhaled and leaned over the bucket.

‘Mirror,’ he said.

His own face, a Spitting Image caricature of a living prune, blinked back at him, stifled a yawn, twitched its nose and mumbled ‘Running DOS’ in a soft, bleating voice before closing its eyes and sliding forward an inch or so on its neck. For a moment, the accountant felt a deep-seated sense of confusion, as if acknowledging that the face in the water was rather more like him than he was himself. Then, as the reflection began to snore, he tightened the muscles of his throat and produced a tiny dry cough. The reflection opened its eyes again, looked up at him as if to ask why he’d thought it necessary to spoil such a beautiful dream (I know that dream, the accountant thought sympathetically, it’s the one about offsetting the costs of a sale of associated property against gains incurred on a series of linked sales of business assets spanning two consecutive fiscal years) and mumbled, ‘Please wait.’

A tiny spurt of excitement flared inside the accountant’s brain, but he called on a lifetime of professional training and suppressed it, in a way that only an accountant could. The effects of excitement and emotion are about as desirable among members of the profession as a hungry rat in a mortuary, and the majority of their long, gruelling apprenticeship is spent learning how to prevent them. It’s often said that the only way to get an animated reaction out of an accountant is to kill him and attach two electrodes to his feet; what’s less well known is that when accountants say it, they do so with pride.

He waited as he’d been told, and just as he was about to nod off himself, he noticed a minute degree of movement on the surface of the water; tiny ripples, as if a little splinter of gravel had fallen in the bucket, except that these ripples started at the circumference and moved inwards, instead of the other way round. The circles gradually closed up, until the rings dwindled into a dot in the very centre of the meniscus, where they stopped, formed themselves into a minuscule waterspout, hung in the air for about two and a half seconds and then slowly subsided, sending another series of ripples back across the surface, this time proceeding in the conventional manner. When this process had repeated four or five times, the accountant nodded, muttered screen-saver under his breath, put the tips of his fingers together and settled down to wait.

‘Ready.’

The accountant jumped; the words had summoned him back from the place where the good accountants go before they die, and for a moment he couldn’t quite remember where or who he was. Then he caught sight of the reflection and sat up a little straighter in his chair.

‘Mirror,’ he said.

The reflection looked at him, expressionless.

‘Mirror,’ he repeated, ‘compile a database of all financial records relating to the following. One: Ali Baba. Two: Aladdin. Three: Babes in the Wood, The. Four—’

It was a long list; but eventually he reached the end, double-checked and then triple-checked against the handwritten ledger entries, cross-checked the list against another list he kept locked in the top drawer of his desk, checked once again for luck and one last time because he didn’t believe in luck, and then whispered the words ‘Delete files.’ There was another slow outbreak of ripples, a gurgle and a faint plop, and then the reflection sighed, bobbled its head sleepily and murmured ‘Done.’ The accountant asked for confirmation, received it, and allowed himself the luxury of stretching his arms and legs until the joints creaked. Then, with a smile of modest satisfaction at having removed every last trace of his most valued clients’ affairs from the records of the Revenue Service, he leaned forward over his desk, cradled his head on his elbows and went to sleep.

The reflection stayed where it was. It didn’t appear to mind; staring vacantly into space seemed to suit it very well. It was just about to dissolve into the pretty ripples effect when something disturbed the surface of the water. The face changed; it was no longer the reflection of the accountant, but a cute little face, a bright pink, shiny, painted face, with two black dots for eyes, a daubed line for a mouth and a length of wooden dowel radiused at the end for a nose. As the head swivelled from side to side, its movement was awkward and somehow mechanical. It wore an Alpine hat with a feather stuck in it.

‘Help,’ it said.

Nothing happened. The face looked round with that same artificial movement.

‘Help,’ it repeated.

The accountant twitched and grunted in his sleep. In his dream, someone was telling him to do something he’d prefer not to, and when he asked how much whoever it was had in mind for a suitable fee, there was no answer. He grunted again and his lips moved.

‘Help,’ said the face a third time; and the accountant made a snarling noise and sat up, eyes still closed, still fast asleep.

‘Please wait,’ he grumbled.

The wooden face’s range of expressions was necessarily limited, but he was able to register joy by waggling his head from side to side. ‘Oh come on,’ it said. ‘I haven’t got long, and those two loonies could come back any minute. Please hurry. Please.’

But compassion’s a hard enough commodity to get out of an accountant when he’s awake, let alone asleep; in terms of difficulty of extraction, somewhere between his teeth and his money. No dice.

‘You’ve got to help me, really,’ implored the face. ‘My name is Carl Wilson and I don’t belong here, really I don’t. I’m stuck actually inside this wooden puppet thing in this horrible laboratory, like something out of a bad horror flick, they’ve been connecting me up to the mains and electrocuting me, and all I did was try to hack into a computer game for free. Not even Microsoft do that to people. And really it was my sister’s idea, not mine, so if anyone should be in here.’

‘For Help topics,’ the accountant said in a flat, droning voice, ‘select the appropriate mirror or press F1.’

‘Oh right,’ wailed the little wooden face, expressing exasperation and despair by waggling its head from side to side in the other direction. ‘You tell me how, with no mouse and no keyboard.’

‘For Help topics, select the appropriate mirror or press F1.’

‘Oh no, I haven’t got time for this,’ the little wooden face snarled. ‘No, wait, all right, let’s try something. Execute voice prompt.’

The accountant didn’t move. ‘To execute voice prompt, select the appropriate mirror or press F9.’

The face waggled so furiously that its feather nearly came loose. ‘Yes, but how?’ it demanded. ‘Oh go on, give me a break.’

‘Bad command or file name.’

‘All right, all right.’ The face leaned over sharply to the right to convey Concentration.

‘Let’s start with the obvious. Select appropriate mirror for voice prompt.’

The accountant’s lip curled half a millimetre before it replied. ‘Error,’ it intoned. ‘Path not found.’

‘You lousy—’ The face twisted round through 180 degrees, a manoeuvre that would have snapped a human spine; then it swivelled back. ‘They’re coming,’ it hissed. ‘The Baron and his creepy friend. Come on, you’ve got to… Oh, exit Mirrors.’

The face disappeared with a plop! and the surface of the water slowly filled with more ripples; first one way, then the other, like the tides of the oceans of a tiny flat planet. The expression on the accountant’s face softened into something approximating to a smile, while a tiny spider, dangling from the end of a long gossamer thread, dropped into his ear.

More so than the frog, the human itched.

Also, Fang muttered to himself as he stared balefully at his reflection in a puddle, it looked silly. There were of course times, he admitted to himself, when any self-respecting animal found it useful to stand on his hind legs; pushing open a door, or reaching things dangling from the lower branches of trees. But a species that spent its entire life reared up on its back paws was a gimmick, pure and simple, as contemptible as the circular teabag — some marketing executive somewhere deciding that since it hadn’t been done yet, it was probably worth a try. It’d be bad enough if he were some naturally dim-witted, demoralised kind of creature, such as a bird or a fish; but for a wolf of all creatures to be violently and unexpectedly sewn up in a monkey suit and condemned to waddle about on half the proper number of feet was nearly unbearable. Although he knew it wouldn’t work, he had a terrible desire to jump in the puddle and roll around just to see if the Human would wash off.

So: priority number one, get rid of it. And to do that, all he had to do was find a witch.

Hah!

It was typical, Fang reflected as he trudged sullenly and bipedally along the dusty road. Under normal circumstances, you could hardly move for witches in this neck of the woods. Shake any tree, and a witch’d fall out. Spit, and a witch’d get wet. It was that easy. Now, when he was actively looking for one, were there any? Were there hell as like.

Then, as he turned a bend in the road and found himself facing a spindly, rather run-down-looking tower that slouched among the trees like a spaceship playing at being an ostrich, the vestiges of his lupine sense of smell detected a faint but unmistakable flavour on the breeze. A rich, musty, unpleasant smell; stale cooking fat, unwashed human, iodine, cat-pee, onions and something from the cheaper end of the Giorgio Armani range of fragrances, all mixed together to produce something that, in concentrated form, was eminently suitable for use in trench warfare. Witch.

Fang breathed in deeply, then sneezed. Another definite black mark against human bodies was their truly awful sense of smell; to get any useful data at all, you had to breathe in enough air to float a large balloon.

The witch was up in the tower; and the tower, needless to say, was locked. Craning his neck, Fang looked up to see if there were any accessible windows, conveniently placed drainpipes, fire escapes, even (let’s not forget the blindingly obvious) an open door, anything he could use to effect an entrance. Nothing doing; the lowest window was five storeys up and the heavy oak shutters were resolutely shut. Ah well, Fang told himself, there’s plenty of witches but I’ve only got one neck. He shook his head sadly and was about to trudge on when something fell down the side of his tower and hung level with his armpits. A rope.

Now that was more like it; except, why would any sane witch throw down a rope when she could quite easily come down and unlock the front door? Laziness? A macabre sense of humour? He glanced up and saw that the rope was hanging from the very topmost window; it would be a dreadfully vertiginous ascent, and he wasn’t absolutely sure that as a human he knew how to climb ropes. Also, there was something peculiar about the rope itself. Instead of the customary coarse hemp fibres it appeared to be made out of some kind of very fine sandy-yellow thread. Or hair, even.

A rope made out of hair; well, witches are a funny lot, not to mention not terribly well off as a rule. It was also worth bearing in mind that anybody who lived in a small chamber at the top of a very tall, locked tower might well have nothing better to do all day than weave hairdresser’s salvage into a long, blonde rope. That would explain the composition of the rope itself, but not why it had suddenly descended right under his nose. Another factor worth considering was the old Wolfpack adage that if your enemy offers you a means of transportation, leave it well alone because it’s bound to be a trap.

Prudence dictated that until he saw evidence to the contrary he should assume that any non-wolf he met was more likely to be an enemy than a friend. Just out of curiosity, however, he reached out a paw and gave the rope a sedate little tug.

‘Ouch!’

The voice came from far up above, and it didn’t sound in the least like any witch that Fang had encountered before. It was young and girlish and silvery, so presumably its owner was likely to be about as much use to him as a cardboard car-jack. What he wanted was something ancient and wrinkled and extra crone, not some long-haired kid.

‘Sorry,’ he yelled back.

The rope started to climb the wall; obviously its owner didn’t trust him not to yank it again. He looked up to watch it go, and was thus in an ideal position to observe the contents of the porcelain vessel that a pair of unseen hands tipped out of the window as they sailed down and landed on his head. Wet, and didn’t smell very nice. Eau de toilette, in a sense. He closed his eyes, swore, and started to walk away. An apple missed him by inches as he turned, closely followed by an old shoe and a coffee-mug. Taken together, they appeared to constitute hint.

‘All right, already,’ he shouted, as the hint was reinforced by a half-brick and a week-old portion of macaroni cheese, ‘I’m going…’

‘Help!’

The second voice froze him in his tracks; fortunately, as it turned out, because whoever it was who threw the old saucepan that narrowly missed him in front had obviously included a nicely calculated degree of forward allowance in the throw, and if he’d still been moving he’d have been clobbered silly.

‘Help! Help!’

Now that, Fang grinned to himself, sounds a bit more like it. A harsh, cracked, wheezy, gnarled old voice, not just extra crone but extra crone plus; the owner of that voice had to be a hundred and five if she was a day, and could easily be the Playmate of the Month from the current number of Witch Magazine. Ducking instinctively to avoid an egg so old it could easily have been laid by an archaeopteryx, he doubled back towards the base of the tower, where the overhang would afford him some degree of cover from the flying household ephemera, and he could formulate a plan of action.

‘Sod off,’ shrieked the first, silvery voice. ‘Get out of it before I set the dogs on you.’

Of course, said Fang to himself, she isn’t to know. That’s all right then.

‘I’m warning you. All right, then. Here, Buttercup, Popsy, Snowdrop! Kill!’

A yard or so to his left, the door creaked open and three large Rottweilers bounded out, ears back, tongues lolling. Fang let them get right up close and then, in his best parade-ground voice, barked out, ‘Atten-shun!’

The dogs skidded to a halt, lifting divots with their outstretched claws. By the time they came to rest, they were sitting up ramrod-straight, chests out, chins in, Oh-God what’ve-we-done expressions engraved on their stupid canine faces. Fang counted to five under his breath and said, ‘At ease,’ whereupon the dogs snapped like lock-components into a triangular crouch.

‘All right, as you were,’ he murmured, and the Rottweilers sloped hurriedly off into the tower. Fang had plenty of time to slip in after them before the doors clanged shut.

‘You there,’ he grunted. ‘Where’s the witch?’

The nearest dog clicked back to attention, raised its offside front paw and pointed to a spiral staircase. Fang nodded, murmured, ‘Carry on,’ and bounded up the stair before any of the trio of feeble doggy minds had a chance to evaluate the recent exchange. Bred-in-the-bone instinct was one thing, but personally he wouldn’t trust a dog called Snowdrop as far as he could sneeze it out of a blocked nostril.

Perhaps justifiably; somewhere near the top of the stairs, Silvery voice was yelling, ‘Buttercup! Popsy! What are you doing down there, you pathetic animals?’ with such venom that, if he were a dog (even a dog called Snowdrop), he’d obey its commands without a moment’s hesitation. Time, he decided, to get to the bottom of all this, find the witch and get out of here fast.

He turned a corner and found himself out in daylight again; and dead ahead of him, just turning away from the parapet, was the most beautiful girl in the world. Slim as a wand, with startlingly blue eyes, rosebud lips and golden hair that cascaded around her shoulders like the crystal waters of a mountain stream — Instinctively, Fang threw himself sideways, lunging for the slight cover of the doorframe. If he’d had to rely on purely human reflexes, he’d never have made it; as it was, he was showered by chips of flying stone as a twenty-round burst from the girl’s Uzi turned the frame and lintel of the doorway into gravel. Then there was a click, followed by a clatter as the discarded magazine hit the stone floor. Fang was up and out of the doorway before she had time to rack back the bolt, but he was still too slow. He could see her sweet face, and the snub barrel of the gun, behind the bowed shoulders of the ugly, wrinkled, hook-nosed, shit-scared old crone his tardiness had allowed her to use as a human shield.

‘Back off, Fido, or Granny gets it,’ the girl snarled. Then she lifted the gun and squinted down the barrel at him; he had a fleeting glimpse of a cornflower-blue eye along a runway of blued steel before his training and survival instinct sent him scampering back the way he’d just come.

Spiffing, he muttered to himself, as another fusillade of shots chiselled shrapnel out of the stonework inches from his head, a hostage situation. One fuck-up, and it’ll be the teddy-bears’ picnic all over again. He forced himself to stay calm. She had the hostage, the gun and the benefit of knowing the layout. Plus any other wee surprises she might have stockpiled up there, such as grenades. He, on the other hand…

…Had a matchbox.

Yes. Well. Put like that, it wasn’t exactly mutually assured destruction. But a matchbox, under these circumstances, was at least a three hundred per cent improvement on nothing at all. He fumbled in his pocket, found the box and slid open the lid, praying as he did so that in his recent displays of acrobatics he hadn’t contrived to squash its contents flat.

‘Get lost,’ hissed the elf.

‘Shut up,’ Fang reasoned, ‘and listen. Up there, there’s a fairytale princess with a machine gun. She’s holding a witch hostage. I need your help.’

From inside the recesses of the box came an unpleasant snickering noise. ‘I agree you need help,’ said the elf, ‘but since I don’t have a degree in severe personality disorders, probably not mine. Now bog off and leave me alone.’

‘I—’ Fang’s next few words were drowned by the ear-splitting roar of the Uzi, as its hail of lead sheared away another slice of the doorway. ‘I’ll make a deal,’ he said. ‘Do as I say and we’re quits. You can go. Free and clear. How about it?’

From inside the matchbox came a small, clear rude noise. Fang lost patience and knocked the box out over his open palm, somersaulting the elf into the fork between his index and middle fingers.

‘Ouch,’ screamed the elf, ‘you’re squashing me!’

‘I know,’ Fang replied, ‘but not nearly as much as I want to. Now listen.’

While he was telling the elf what to do, another clatter on the stone floor informed him that the fairytale princess had slammed in a new clip and was ready to resume demolition. ‘You got that?’ he hissed; then, without waiting for a reply, he straightened his fingers and blew hard. The elf was buffeted into the air like a fragment of gossamer and floated away, shrieking curses at him, out of sight.

‘You in the doorway,’ called out the silvery voice, ‘you got one chance. Come out now with your hands where I can see ‘em, and—’ The silvery voice broke off and turned into a fit of coughing that suggested that she was on at least forty a day; whereupon Fang hurled himself out of cover, lunged forwards, barged the witch out of the way and made a grab for the Uzi. He managed to get hold of it easily enough, but in the process — ‘AAAAaaaaaaaaaaah!’ said the silvery voice; and then there was a dull thud from somewhere down below. Laying the gun carefully on the floor, Fang stuck his head over the parapet and had a look, just in case she was hanging from a ledge doing Doppler-shift impersonations; he needn’t have worried. Far below he could see what looked like a Barbie doll that’d just been run over by a Mack truck. Fair enough, he muttered to himself; the cuter they are, the harder they fall. He turned back, and — ‘Oh for pity’s sake,’ he complained, as the crone prodded him in the tummy with the barrel of the Uzi. ‘I just rescued you, you senile old fool.’

‘True,’ the witch conceded, ‘which explains why I ain’t shot you. Yet,’ she added, tightening her arthritic forefinger on the trigger. ‘But you’ll have a reason for doin’ that, I dare say. Handsome princes don’t do nothing ‘cept for a reason.’

‘All right,’ Fang sighed wearily. ‘Stop poking me with that thing and I’ll tell you.’ He nodded towards the parapet. ‘Or we can do this the hard way,’ he added meaningfully.

The witch shuddered. ‘Ain’t no need to go making threats,’ she squawked. ‘I’m just a lonely, defenceless old woman tryin’ to take care of herself.’ Her eyes flicked towards the edge, and then back to Fang. ‘Say,’ she said, ‘how did you do that?’

Fang shook his head and grinned. It wasn’t such an impressive grin, now that he had a toothpaste-ad smile where a row of foam-flecked upper canines used to be, but he could still make it fairly unsettling. The old lady cursed and lowered the gun, though she didn’t hand it over.

‘I had help,’ Fang said. ‘Now there’s something I’d like you to—’

‘Not so fast,’ snapped the witch. ‘What kind of help would that be, exactly? Only…’

‘This kind, stupid!’ said a tiny shrill voice somewhere in the vicinity of Granny’s ear; and while she was looking frantically round to see where it had come from, Fang was able to reach across and take the gun away from her. Smirking, the elf hopped down off the top of her head and flitted like a small, tawdry moth on to Fang’s wrist. ‘You owe me,’ she said blithely. ‘Again. When this is all over, you’re going to have to buy me Unigate.’

‘I might just do that,’ Fang conceded. ‘Now then,’ he continued, hoisting the Uzi over his shoulder by its sling, ‘let’s stop clowning about and get some work done. You’re a witch, right?’

‘Nothin’ wrong with that,’ grumbled the crone. ‘Used to be a decent living in these parts before—’

Fang looked at her closely. ‘Before what?’

The witch thought for a moment, then shrugged her coat-hanger shoulders. ‘Search me,’ she said. ‘You get to my age, you forgets things.’

Fang frowned; there was something tapping at the inside of an eggshell inside his mind, but he couldn’t locate it. He let it go. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you’re a witch. You can do turning people into things?’

Another bony shrug. ‘Sure,’ the witch replied. ‘For a moment there, I thought you was goin’ to ask for something difficult.’

‘Big bad wolves?’

‘Easy as pissin’ in a pot,’ the old lady replied. ‘You ready?’

‘When you are.’

The witch nodded. ‘All done,’ she said. ‘There. Told you there wasn’t nothin’ to it.’

Fang looked down at his feet, then along his arms, then at his tummy. ‘I’m waiting,’ he said. ‘When are you going to—?’

‘Woof.’

He spun like a top. There beside him, glaring up at him with baleful red eyes, was the biggest, darkest, most sinister-looking wolf he’d ever seen in all his life. At the same moment, he realised that the elf was no longer perched on his wrist.

‘Oh,’ said the crone. ‘You meant turn you into a—’

‘Here’s the deal,’ growled Fang, as he jerked his head towards the parapet. ‘You turn her back into an elf and me back into a wolf, and in return I postpone your flying lesson. All right?’

‘All right,’ the witch grumbled. ‘I’ll do the elf first, they’re easier. You,’ she snarled, pointing a long and disgusting fingernail, ‘quit being a wolf. See?’ she added, as the wolf was suddenly sucked back into a tiny elf-shaped packet, like fifty cubic feet of grey jelly being squidged out through a broken window in a pressurised airliner cabin. ‘No sweat. You’ll be that bit harder, of course, but— Just a minute.’ The old lady was staring at him closely. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘You’re him, aintcher? You’re the big bad wolf, I’d know them nasty little eyes anywhere. What you doin’ dressed as a handsome prince anyhow?’

Fang sighed. ‘Believe me, I wish I knew. But what’s that got to do with—?’

The witch took a step backwards. ‘See you in hell first,’ she hissed, reaching up for her black pointy hat and pulling out a four-inch hatpin. ‘I ain’t doin’ no deals with no Wolfpack finks.’ She swept off the hat; and from under it cascaded an enormously long braid of hair, all the colour of ripe corn (except that the roots needed doing) ‘So long, copper,’ she hissed, as she quickly looped the end of the braid round a free-standing gargoyle and secured it in an elegant timber-hitch. ‘I may be a wicked witch, but I ain’t that wicked.’

Before Fang could do anything about it, she’d hopped up on to the parapet, both hands full of the braid. He tried to make a grab at her but missed; so instead he caught hold of the braid and began hauling on it to pull her back. Too late; the fine-textured rope slipped through his hands, burning them painfully, and just as he’d managed to get a more secure grip and was about to try again, he heard from below the sharp metallic sound of a pair of scissors closing. When he tugged on the rope, it came up at him like a jumping salmon, with nothing on the end except a black velvet toggle and some dandruff.