by Tom Holt
Just in time, she remembered that she’d forgotten to do her face. With a sigh and a curse, she pulled the chair away from her dressing table, sat down in front of the mirror and dabbed at her nose with a powder puff. When she’d restored enough girlish pinkness (memo to self: lay off the radishes and the garlic bread) she paused for a moment to look at her reflection.
Beautiful.
Stunning. Breathtaking. Fabulous. Gorgeous. Out of this world.
But she knew that already. There was something else about the image that faced her in the glass this morning that she couldn’t quite place. She looked again and began eliminating the impossible.
It wasn’t her, it was the mirror itself. It was looking at her.
‘Mirror?’ she whispered.
Her reflection regarded her coolly. Its perfect lips parted.
‘Running DOS,’ it said. ‘Please wait.’
Snow White’s eyebrows shot up; their counterparts in the mirror stayed put. What was going on? And what in blazes was DOS? And why did she feel this urge to ask…?
‘Ready,’ said the face in the mirror.
‘All right.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘Um. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’
The reflection’s lips flickered for a tiny moment in a mocking smile. Then it went back to the perfect stone face, and made its answer:
‘Thou, O Snow White, are the fairest of them all.’
Chapter 4
‘Hell fire and buggery,’ said the elf, with a barely suppressed snigger. ‘Exactly what happened to you?’
The handsome prince snarled. ‘You think it’s funny, don’t you?’ he said bitterly.
The elf shrugged. ‘Poetic justice, maybe. Actually, you should see yourself, it suits you. Better than the frog outfit, anyway.’
‘Get stuffed.’
The handsome prince took a step forward, staggered and grabbed hold of a tree to steady himself. It had been bad enough being turned from a wolf into a frog, but at least the leg count had remained fairly stable. The sudden jump from quadruped to biped was something quite other.
‘I guess that’s what’s meant by an identity crisis,’ the elf went on unkindly. ‘If you ask me, you’re headed for really major personality problems if you keep this up. Not that you haven’t got plenty of those already,’ she added fairly. ‘It’s just that they’re pimples on the bum compared to what’s in store for you.’
The handsome prince levered himself upright and extended a leg. His instincts were screaming at him that this was all wrong; walking on two legs was just a party trick, not the sort of thing any self-respecting wolf would even attempt to do while sober. He ignored the siren voices in his head; there was work to be done, he was way behind schedule, his recent performance record was looking pretty abysmal and he had his quarterly management assessment looming on the middle-to-short term horizon. Wolfpack didn’t listen to excuses or tolerate failure; they didn’t make allowances if you got turned into something nasty, because getting turned into something nasty in itself implied a whole subcategory of failures. He knew exactly what his superiors would say: if you’re dumb enough to allow yourself to get turned into a handsome prince, you’re just going to have to compensate as best you can. We are not an equal opportunities employer.
‘Come on, you,’ he grunted at the elf.
She ducked behind a nettle. ‘You leave me out of it,’ she said. ‘Both times I’ve done my bit; you’re the one who keeps screwing things up. Anyway, this is nothing to do with…’
Before she could complete the sentence, the handsome prince grabbed, closed his hand, snarled in triumph and then resorted to intemperate language as he discovered the hard way that human beings don’t like the touch of nettles on their bare skin. The elf wriggled and squirmed like a cabinet minister on a chat show, but it didn’t do her any good.
‘This is kidnapping,’ she squeaked. ‘Also assault, intimidation and discriminatory treatment of an ethnic group.’
‘Yes,’ replied the handsome prince. ‘Now shut your face and keep still.’
After half an hour or so of rubber-legged staggering, he’d reached the stage where he could reliably go more than three yards without falling over. Since he was in a forest, with lots of trees to hang on to, it wasn’t so bad. He ought to be able to deal with the next item on his agenda.
Eventually, after a lot of effort and a great amount of unintentional comedy (imagine John Cleese doing funny walks in zero gravity on a highly polished floor) he reached the edge of the forest and peered through the screen of low branches at the plain beyond. He saw what he was looking for, and chuckled.
He was looking at something which at first sight could have been taken for a giant windmill. It had huge, carefully shaped sails forming an X on one side, and stood on a circular plinth, which in turn was cemented into the ground. The upper section, which looked like a salt cellar designed by an illiterate giant, was clearly intended to revolve, turning with the wind. Where it differed from the average windmill was in having searchlights, 50-calibre machine guns and a barbed-wire entanglement.
You had to give the little buggers credit for trying.
He lurched, limped, wobbled and staggered out of the wood, across the plain and up to the gate in the white picket fence that surrounded the whole installation. A porcine head poked up out of a kevlar-reinforced skylight, took one look at him and vanished. Klaxons began to blare and red lights flashed. Under the ground there was a rumble of hydraulics as the ground fell away at the handsome prince’s feet, revealing a deep trench lined at the bottom with savagely pointed stakes.
The handsome prince stooped, picked up a pebble and tossed it lightly against one of the steel-shuttered windows.
‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Anybody home?’
He stood still and listened carefully. The afternoon air was still, and he could make out the sound of raised voices inside the tower, made audible on the outside as they vibrated off the stiff steel plate of the shatterboards.
‘It’s him,’ hissed a voice. ‘I know it is.’
‘Rubbish. It’s a human.’
‘Yeah,’ replied the first voice irritably. ‘And last time he was a frog. Can’t you see it’s another damn trick?’
‘You can’t be sure of that.’
‘Can’t I? Watch. And load the fifty-cals. I’m going to blow him apart where he stands.’
The handsome prince took off his hat, with its cheerful feather sticking out of the side, and waved it. ‘Can you hear me in there?’ he called out. ‘Hello?’
‘Yes, but if he is a prince and we gun him down in cold blood—’
‘Oh get real, Eugene. If he’s a prince I’m Noel Edmonds. Now get out of the way of my rangefinder. All I can see is your fat backside, and I know how far away that is.’
The handsome prince stood on tiptoe. ‘I’m looking for a pig called Julian,’ he called out. ‘Anybody of that name live here?’
The nose of a surface-to-surface missile poked out of a loophole at the top of the tower, followed by the tip of a pig’s snout. There was a flash as the sunlight caught the nose-ring.
‘Who wants to know?’ called out a voice from the loophole.
‘You don’t know me,’ the prince shouted, ‘I live the other side of the forest. But I met this talking wolf back along, and he asked me to give you a message.’
The snout vanished and reappeared a few moments later. ‘So why couldn’t this wolf carry his own messages?’ it demanded.
‘He was caught in a bear trap at the time,’ the prince replied. ‘Wasn’t looking all that chipper, to be honest with you. Lost a lot of blood. In fact, I’d say if he isn’t got to a vet in the next ten minutes, he’s had it. That’s why I want to use your mirror.’
The pig’s head went away again, and the handsome prince started to count to ten. Just when he’d reached eight, the head popped out again.
‘Assuming you’re telling the truth,’ it said, ‘we’ve got nothing to
be afraid of. But why the hell should we want to help that sucker? He does nothing but blow our houses down. Let the bastard rot.’
The handsome prince frowned. ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say, is it?’ he said.
‘True. What of it?’
‘Fair enough,’ the prince replied. ‘I just thought there was rather more to you pigs than that. I was wrong. I’ll try somewhere else. It’s all right.’
Silence from the tower; then, ‘Oh, the hell with it. Okay, we’re winding back the ditch cover now.’
Reprise of the hydraulic hum, this time with feeling. The plates slid back over the spike-filled trench, and a doorway opened through the wire. The handsome prince waved his thanks and walked up until he was within fifteen yards. Then he took a deep breath — Once he’d gone and the dust had started to settle, Julian climbed out of the lavatory cistern he’d been cowering under and looked around at the wreckage of what was supposed to be his home.
‘Eugene?’ he called out. ‘Desmond?’
Something moved under a near-intact sheet of plasterboard. ‘Has he gone?’
‘I believe so, yes.’
When the first gust of air from the handsome prince’s lungs (call it the huff) had hit the sails, they’d begun to turn; at first slow and graceful, gradually picking up speed, until the humming sound they made became unbearable. The tower had moved all right; more than that, it’d spun like a top round the concrete base as the forward momentum of the sails had tried to drag it out. It was quite a sight.
Then the handsome prince had started off Phase II; puffing. It was at this point that a lot of the shutters and other projecting features that didn’t lie flush against the outer skin of the tower were ripped away and flung through the air like autumn leaves. The hum of the blades became a searing scream, and their axles started to glow red hot.
The third attempt was better. More dramatic. Brought the house down, in fact.
First, however, it lifted it up, with a horrible snap and the groans of overstressed metal. The blades were now little more than a molten blur, and the shriek and whine of the slipstream on the curved aerofoils had been loud enough to boil a man’s brain. And still the handsome prince had gone on blowing, until something structural had given way with an ear-splitting twang, and quite unexpectedly the main body of the tower had lifted clear of the pedestal and launched itself into the air, lifted up by the action of the four ‘foils. For a second and a half, maybe two seconds, it hung in space like a huge dandelion seed, until gravity and entropy reminded it that this was no way for a building to behave and escorted it back to the ground. It landed the wrong way up and flew to bits.
‘I knew it was him,’ growled Desmond. ‘I told you, but you wouldn’t listen. All that stuff about expecting better things from us because we’re pigs; what human would ever have said that?’
Julian avoided eye contact. ‘What I want to know is,’ he said, ‘how’s he doing it? First a wolf, then a frog, and now a human. What the hell is the creep going to show up as next?’
Desmond spat out a chunk of concrete. ‘A JCB, maybe. At least that’d be honest. Now what I’d like to know is, where the hell were those two hired dwarves of ours when we needed them most? How much again did you say we were paying them?’
‘Off recruiting,’ Julian said. ‘Just our luck. I honestly didn’t expect to see him back again so soon.’
‘Underestimating the enemy,’ Desmond complained. ‘You keep doing it, and we keep ending up ham-deep in rubble.’ He sighed and shook himself, dislodging a dust-cloud that enveloped him completely. ‘Look, I know you’re going to bite my head off for being defeatist, but why don’t we just move on? Up sticks and go somewhere else where he isn’t going to bother us? It’d be so much easier—’
‘Sure,’ Julian replied. ‘Until the next one of his kind shows up and it starts all over again. Face it, Des, sooner or later we’d have to stop running and stand and fight. Better to do it here and now and get it over and done with.’
‘You know something, Julian? I can’t wait to see you with an apple in your mouth. It’d stop you talking garbage, for one thing.’
Julian shrugged. Matter of opinion, presumably. It had felt like the right thing to say, but maybe Desmond was right; perhaps it would be better to clear off out of the forest altogether, or go back to living in a sty with all the other non-uppity pigs, where they belonged…
‘Come on,’ he said, kicking away a strip of tangled steel with his hind legs. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
‘More power!’ roared the Baron.
Fearfully, Igor obeyed, throwing his weight against the huge lever and driving it forward. Livid blue sparks like fat, sizzling worms cascaded from the contacts. Somewhere a fuse overloaded, but the failsafes and backups cut in immediately; a fine piece of work, though the Baron said it himself, continuity of power supply guaranteed no matter how recklessly he abused the system. He bent down over the Thing strapped to the bench and peered hungrily at the dials on the control panel.
‘More power,’ he repeated.
Igor’s eyes widened like an opening flower in stop-motion. ‘The resistors,’ he screeched. ‘They’re at breaking point as it is. They just can’t take any more!’
‘More power.’
Oh well, muttered Igor to himself, he’s the boss, presumably he knows what he’s doing. And if he doesn’t — well, in years to come Katchen and the children would take a picnic up to the ruined tower on the top of the mountain, and Katchen would bring them into the burnt-out shell of the laboratory and point to a man’s silhouette appliquéd onto the flagstones and say, ‘See that? That’s your Uncle Igor.’ Immortality, of a sort. And it was better than working in the cuckoo-clock factory.
He edged the lever forward, and at first nothing happened. Then somewhere behind the massive screen of lead bricks, something began to hum, and a moment later a tremendous surge of power began to burgeon and swell, like the wave of a surfer’s lifetime on Bondi Beach. Little silver beads of molten lead glistened like dewdrops in the interstices of the shield.
A few inches away from the Baron’s nose, the needle on a dial suddenly quivered. ‘More power!’ he roared, slamming both fists down on the console and sending his coffee-mug (a birthday present from Igor, thoughtfully inscribed World’s Best Boss) flying to the floor. Igor closed his eyes, mumbled the first four words of the Ave Maria, and thrust the lever all the way home.
Raw power sprayed out of the circuits like fizzy lemonade from a shaken-up bottle. One of the minor transtator coils dissolved instantaneously into a glowing pool of molten copper; but the backup took the load, and the meter hardly wavered. You could have boiled a kettle on top of the main reactor housing, if you didn’t mind drinking luminous green tea.
‘Yes!’ thundered the Baron. ‘Igor, it…’
Before he could say exactly what, a gun barrel-straight shaft of blue fire burst from the mighty lens poised a few feet above the bench and enveloped the Thing completely. The Baron screamed and threw himself at the fire-shrouded form, trying to beat out the flames before they utterly consumed his creation; but before he even made contact, a tremendous force hauled him off his feet and slammed him against the far wall. Igor ducked under a table as a cyclone of distilled energy ripped circuit-boards and clamps and conduits out of the benches and juggled them in a spinning maelstrom of blinding heat and light around the glowing outline of the Thing. It was incredible, awesome, terrifying; Spielberg let loose in the effects laboratory with a blank cheque signed by God.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. All the lights snapped out and the laboratory was shrouded in darkness, except for an ice-cold blue glow from the bench where the Thing had been. The smoke cleared, and there was silence except for the sizzle-plink of molten copper slowly cooling.
‘Igor?’
‘Baron? Are you all right?’
Cautiously, both men stood up and stared at the bench and the source of the unearthly blue light. ‘Did you see w
hat happened, Igor?’ the Baron whispered. ‘That fire… Is there anything left?’
Igor shrugged. ‘Search me,’ he said. ‘I was hiding.’
Together they approached the bench. The blue fire danced on the scarred surface of the oak like the brandy flare on a Christmas pudding, and in the heart of the glow, where the Thing had been, there was a shape; humanoid, certainly, with the correct number of limbs and in more or less the right proportions, but…
‘My God,’ whispered the Baron. ‘Igor, what have we done?’
‘What d’you mean, we?’ Igor whispered back. ‘I just work here, remember?’
Where there had been a seven-foot frame of carefully selected muscle and bone, painstakingly put together from raw materials taken from the finest mortuaries in Europe, there was now a short, stocky child-shaped object with a small, squat body, sticklike arms and legs and a head that was too large for the rest of the assembly. It was wearing brightly coloured dungarees, an Alpine hat with a feather in it and shiny black shoes. It was made of wood and had a perky expression and a cute pointy nose.
‘It’s a puppet,’ the Baron growled.
‘So it is,’ Igor replied, trying to keep the grin off his face and out of his voice. Despite all the melodrama of the last half hour, he couldn’t help liking the little chap.
‘A puppet,’ the Baron repeated. ‘A goddamned wooden puppet. What in hell’s name am I supposed to do with that?’