by Tom Holt
‘Who’re you callin’ regular, friend?’
The pig became pinker than usual, until he looked like a ten-year-old girl’s idea of a chic colour-scheme. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘can’t we please start again? My name’s Julian, this is Desmond, we’ve got another brother called Eugene. We live out on the other side of the Big Forest. Can we buy you a drink?’
The dwarf leaned against the side of the bar and folded his arms. ‘Reckon you can, at that,’ he said affably. ‘Milk.’
Mrs Twinklenose produced another bottle and slid it across the counter. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Because they’re with you, it’s okay. But usually we don’t serve his kind in here. Except,’ she added meaningfully, ‘as scratchings. Just so as you know.’
‘They’re with me,’ the dwarf grunted, spearing his thumb through the foil and spurting milk up his nose. ‘All right, boys, what can I do for you?’
Julian swallowed. He felt as if he had an apple in his mouth. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s like this.’
‘Does anybody else live here,’ Sis asked, ‘or is it just you?’
The queen sniffed. ‘That, my young pest, is a good question. I suppose it mostly depends on when. Sometimes, you just can’t move for extras — you know, halberdiers, courtiers, pages, flunkies. Do you know what a flunky actually does, by the way? I’ve been trying to find out all my life, but nobody seems to know. The rest of the time, it’s deserted. Just little me. In fact, I’m not even sure it actually exists when I’m not here.’
‘Ah,’ Sis replied noncommittally. ‘It sort of depends on context, does it?’
The queen nodded. ‘Everything does, in these parts. Mostly, you see what you expect to see. I imagine that if I were to shout for the guards to come and drag you off to the dungeon, the door would fly open and there they’d be. But if we tiptoed out of this room and went looking for them, there wouldn’t be any. It’s just the way it works. Or worked,’ she added sourly, ‘before a bunch of young idiots…’
‘So we’re probably completely alone now,’ Sis said with a shudder. ‘I see.’
‘Not necessarily.’ The queen stood up and stretched, like a cat. ‘If I’m making any sense at all of what I can see in the pail there, all the usual functions haven’t been switched off or blown away. They’ve been jumbled up, any old fashion. Which is, of course, worse,’ she added. ‘Much worse.’
‘Oh.’
‘If it was simply a case of the mirror having been wiped, you see,’ the queen went on, ‘we could just reinstall it all from the bucket. But we can’t, because it’s all still there. Do you see?’
‘No,’ Sis admitted. ‘But it sounds awful.’
‘Doesn’t it ever,’ the queen said, grinning. ‘Still, it doesn’t do to sit around all day moping. There’s something I want to try, just in case it works.’
‘Ah,’ Sis replied hopefully. ‘Do you think it will?’
‘No. But I can’t think of anything else, so I’m going to do this. Ready?’
Sis nodded and took five steps back, until she bumped into a carved oak table. The wicked queen, meanwhile, had opened a cupboard and taken out a broom.
‘Not my prop, really,’ she said. ‘More your sort of witch’s broom, hence the little sticker on the back that says My other broomstick an Addis. Personally I think this whole escapade’s doomed to failure from the outset, but we’ll soon see.’
She sat down on the floor, the broom in one hand, the other resting on the rim of the pail. ‘Mirror,’ she said.
The usual ripples; and then the beard-and-glasses face appeared. Before it had a chance to get further than ‘Ba—’, the wicked queen lifted the broom up over her head and dipped its bristles in the water. There was a sizzle, like frying sausages, and a puff of hot steam.
‘I think this is going to be a disaster,’ said the queen cheerfully. ‘Oh well, never mind.’
‘What are you trying to do?’ whispered Sis, from behind a footstool.
‘The idea is to slave the broom to the bucket,’ said the queen, who was now almost entirely hidden by the cloud of steam. ‘The bucket takes control of the broom, the broom scoots off and finds Carl, Carl fixes the mess, job done. It’d be a good idea if only there was a hope in hell of it working.’
Sis peeped round the edge of the stool. ‘It’s doing something,’ she said.
‘Very true,’ the queen replied. ‘But doing something and doing anything useful, or even not actively harmful, ain’t always the same thing. Ask any government. Oh dear, I think it’s starting to go terribly, terribly wrong.’
The broomstick had pulled itself out of the queen’s hands and was balancing itself on the surface of the water, like the Messiah of All Brooms, and glowing cobalt blue. There was also a humming noise that Sis didn’t like the sound of one little bit, and a faint but obnoxious smell.
‘At this point,’ said the queen, ‘I ought to grab the broom and try to pull it out before things get out of hand. But I won’t, because I know full well it’ll only shoot sparks at me and throw me across the room.’
‘It’d do that?’
‘That’s what it usually does. I told you this idea was doomed from the start.’
The broom sank an inch or so into the water. Then it began to twitch slowly from side to side, in the manner of a loose tooth when you jiggle it about with your finger.
‘Here we go,’ said the queen. ‘If I were you I’d climb up on something, quick.’
With a sharp, hard-to-follow movement, like speeded-up film of a roving triffid, the broom hopped out of the bucket and started waddling across the floor, leaving behind it a trail of what looked strangely like soap-suds. The queen jumped clear just in time to stop her shoes from getting soaked, and pitched on a low chair.
‘What on earth is it doing?’ Sis whispered.
‘Ah,’ replied the queen. ‘Looks like the broom’s slaved itself to the bucket okay, but the bucket’s failed to override the broom’s default programming. Which means,’ she continued, as the broom started shuffling backwards and forwards across the floor in a pool of suddy water, ‘the broom’s reverting to doing what it was primarily designed for, namely cleaning floors. Like I said,’ she added glumly. ‘Disaster.’
‘Is it? Surely it can’t do any harm just…’
‘Are you ignorant or just plain stupid? Think, girl. It’s going to carry on doing that indefinitely, and there’s absolutely no way of switching the wretched thing off.’
‘Oh.’ Sis’s eyes became very round. ‘You mean like the Sorcerer’s—’
‘Yes.’ The queen had become rather red in the face. ‘Exactly like that. Again. Other people learn from their mistakes, but not, apparently, me.’
‘You mean you were the—’ Sis stopped, swallowed a giggle and went on. ‘But I thought the um, apprentice, was a boy.’
‘Some kind of chauvinist bigot, are you, as well as everything else? Let me give you a tiny scrap of advice. If you were planning on making a career for yourself in the diplomatic service, now would be a good time to explore other options.
The broom had already covered half the floor in an ankle-deep carpet of suds. Sis hopped up on to the footstool and swayed out of the way to avoid the waving broom handle. ‘So now what do we do?’ she shouted.
‘Stop asking me that.’
‘But what did you do the — the last time?’
‘Waited for the sorcerer to come home and turn it off. Unfortunately he’s dead—’ A strange look passed over the wicked queen’s face ‘—Sort of; so that’s not a realistic option. Have you got any ideas?’
‘No,’ Sis replied, ‘none at all. But then, I wouldn’t have set the horrid thing off in the first place.’
The queen hitched her skirts up to her knees as the suds flecked her legs. ‘The only thing I can think of is knocking over the bucket,’ she said. ‘That’d probably stop the broom, but we’d lose all the stuff saved in it.’
‘What, the water?’
‘The backup from the mirror. A
ll gone, for ever. And without that—’
‘We’d never find Carl.’
‘We’d never fix my system, more to the point.’ She looked down at the rising tide of suds, then very cautiously started to clamber out on to the arms of the chair. ‘In the words of the late Oliver Hardy—’
‘Why don’t we just run away?’ Sis interrupted.
‘Another fine me— What did you say?’
‘Run away. Just leave it and go. We could take the bucket with us.’
The wicked queen thought for a moment. ‘You mean, buzz off and leave someone else to clear up the mess?’ she said.
‘It’s always worked for me.’
The chair wobbled, and the queen made a yelping noise. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘why not? Instead of being responsible for all this chaos, let’s be irresponsible for it.’ She hopped off the chair, which fell over, and landed on the floor with a splash and an explosion of soapy spray; then she grabbed the bucket, yelled, ‘Come on!’ and headed for the door. The two of them just made it through the door before the broom could catch them.
‘Rivet,’ said the big bad wolf. ‘Rivet rivet rivet.’
The owl, seconded to Wolfpack by Avian Intelligence, translated. ‘What he’s trying to say,’ she chirped, ‘is that he’s going to, um, croak and wobble his cheeks in and out and then he’s going to blow your house down.’ She paused and pecked at her pin-feathers with her beak. ‘At least, I think that’s what he said,’ she added doubtfully. ‘Look, you in the bunker. Is any of this making sense to you guys? My frog’s a bit rusty.’
Inside the bunker’s command centre, Eugene made a great effort and forbore from making the obvious reply. ‘I get the message,’ he said. ‘You tell him from me he can save his breath.’ He frowned, reflecting that under the circumstances, he could have phrased that a whole lot better. ‘Frogs don’t frighten me,’ he went on firmly. ‘Who ever heard of a frog who—?’
Later, in hospital, once he’d come round from the coma, Eugene reckoned that the method the frog had used must have been something like blowing the yolk of an egg through a pinhole in the opposite end of the shell. He explained it to his brothers in those terms.
Julian closed his mouth, which had flopped open like the tailgate of one of those lorries they transport cheap televisions on. ‘A frog did that?’ he whispered.
Eugene nodded, as far as the neck restraint would allow. ‘Small green frog, about the size of an apple. Julian, what’s going on? This is all beginning to get out of trotter.’
Julian sat for a while, fidgeting with his nose-ring. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally admitted. ‘From time to time I think I’m starting to see a bit of the big picture, and then it all goes fuzzy on me again. Rather than understand it, let’s try doing something about it instead. I tracked down that dwarf.’
Eugene raised his eyebrow, the one that wasn’t trussed up in splints. ‘You mean the dwarf with no name?’
Julian nodded. ‘Actually, his name’s Dumpy. Anyway, he’s agreed to help us out, and he’s recruiting the other dwarves he says he’ll need.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Eugene sighed. ‘This is going to be expensive,’ he said.
‘Probably. But don’t worry, we’ll cope. You concentrate on getting better. You got any idea how much it’s costing us per day having you in here?’
‘It’s not exactly a fun place to be,’ Eugene replied bitterly. ‘It’s full of horribly mutilated people. One guy they brought in yesterday, he was so badly smashed up he came in six separate carrier bags.’
‘Jeez,’ Desmond muttered. ‘So what happened to him?’
‘Fell off a wall, so I heard. It was so bad they had to call in a specialist team of surgeons from the military. They got him fixed up, though, eventually.’
Julian looked up sharply. ‘They did?’ he asked.
‘That’s right. Wonderful job, by all accounts. That’s him, look, over there at the end by the wall. Big egg-shaped guy with no head.’
‘The one having his temperature taken by the polo pony?’
‘That’s the one. You know him?’
‘Heard of him,’ Julian replied. ‘I think.’ Doing his best not to be too obvious about it, he turned his head and took a long look. ‘Certainly seems to be in one piece now,’ he conceded, and the edge to his voice was sharp enough to cut rubber. ‘How about that?’
The patient in the next bed, who’d noticed Julian’s interest, grinned. ‘One hell of a show,’ she whispered. ‘He was in the theatre sixteen hours, so Sister told me. At one point they had a whole battalion of the Royal Engineers and seventy polo ponies in there working on him with rubber bands and glue. Wonderful, the things they can do now.’
Julian nodded, frowning. ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘Excuse me, but don’t I know you from somewhere?’
‘I doubt it,’ the patient replied, ‘unless your line of work brings you in contact with hydraulic engineers, because that’s what I do. The name’s Jill, by the way. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Likewise.’ The pig looked away, then swivelled back sharply. Jill’s head was heavily bandaged. ‘Sorry if this sounds a bit personal,’ he said, ‘but do you work with somebody called Jack?’
‘My business partner. You’ve heard of us?’
‘I think so. Looks like a pretty nasty knock you’ve got there,’ he observed neutrally. ‘How d’you do it?’
Jill pulled a wry face. ‘Fell down a hill, of all the silly things to do. Jack was all right, but I wasn’t so lucky.’
‘Jack was all right…’
‘Oh yes. As in “I’m all right, Jack”, only the other way round. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, no reason,’ Julian answered unconvincingly. ‘Just curious, that’s all.’
Not long afterwards, Sister came and slung the visitors out. As they walked home, Julian was unusually silent. Desmond, who’d been outlining his plan for a mobile home slung from the underside of a helium-filled airship (‘Away, yes. Away we can handle. Down, no.’) stopped dead in his tracks and waved a foreleg in front of Julian’s snout.
‘Julian?’ he said. ‘Snap out of it. You look like Uncle Claude just after they’d finished inserting the sage and onion.’
‘Sorry.’ Julian sighed. ‘I was just thinking about what Eugene said; you know, about things getting out of trotter. He’s right. Something very odd’s going on.’
‘So? Around here, it sort of goes with the territory.’
‘Maybe. I guess I need to think it through a bit more.’ He twitched his nose and sniffed, as if he’d just sensed truffles. ‘Suddenly I’m beginning to see things that probably aren’t there. You know, conspiracies and paranormal phenomena and cover-ups and everybody acting as if everything’s perfectly normal. There’s a word for it when you start doing that.’
‘American?’
‘Paranoid. Maybe I’m getting paranoid.’ He shook his shoulders. ‘The hell with it,’ he said. ‘Come on, I’ll buy us each a turnip down the Swill and Bucket.’
There was a new note on the front door of Avenging Dragon Cottage. It was written on scented pink notepaper, and it read:
Spring winds stir the willow, A distant star flickers.
Empty the dustbins.
‘Marvellous way with words she’s got,’ observed Mr Hiroshige, idly straightening the petals of a wind-blown flower with his mailed fingers.
Beside him, Mr Miroku nodded. ‘I particularly liked the way she used the image of spring, the time of renewal in nature, to suggest the need for a new dustbin bag. Whose turn is it?’
‘I did it last time,’ young Mr Akira pointed out. ‘And the time before that.’
The other two considered this. ‘In fact,’ pointed out Mr Miroku, ‘you already have considerable experience in emptying dustbins.’
‘True,’ said Mr Akira.
‘Expertise, even.’
‘I suppose so. Not that it’s all that difficult.’
‘To you, maybe not,’ said Mr Miroku gracefully. ‘Likewise, t
he trained ivory-carver has no difficulty creating a perfect netsuke out of a tiny scrap of waste bone, whereas you and I wouldn’t know where to start. I expect your children will find it easier still, and so on down the generations.’ He smiled. ‘You carry on,’ he said. ‘You don’t mind if we watch, do you? It’s always inspiring to watch a craftsman at work.’
Mr Akira shrugged and went off round the side of the cottage. A little later he came back holding two densely stuffed black plastic bags.
‘Observe,’ said Mr Hiroshige thoughtfully, ‘how he’s holding one in each hand, so as to equalise the weight distribution. The boy’s clearly got a flair for it.’
Mr Akira couldn’t help simpering a little with pride. They were, after all, fully accredited adepts in the Way, whereas he was little more than a novice. As he shifted his grip on the left-hand bag a little, there was more than a touch of conscious élan about the movement.
‘Correct me if I’m mistaken,’ said Mr Miroku, stopping him with a courteous gesture, ‘but isn’t this the point where you put the plastic bags in the big PVC dustbin up by the garden gate?’
‘That’s right,’ the young man replied.
‘How do you do that, exactly? It must be ever so difficult.’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ replied Mr Akira, frowning a little. ‘At least, I’ve never had a problem with it. I just lift the lid and put them in.’
The two older men exchanged glances. ‘He’s just lifts the lid and puts them in,’ Mr Hiroshige repeated. ‘Like the archer who, on the point of releasing the arrow, closes his eyes and entrusts its flight to the harmonies of the universe. It’s like what I’ve always said: the more apparently complex an act, the more vital it is to search until you find its inner simplicity. May we watch? We promise not to make a noise.’
‘Feel free,’ said Mr Akira, with a slight bow. ‘This way.’