Snow White and the Seven Samurai

by Tom Holt

  ‘Quite possibly. But I’m a elf, not a fairy. And anybody who goes around saying he doesn’t believe in elves gets petrol through his letterbox. Understood?’

  Fang was about to take the argument further when the front door flew open and a round pink shape whizzed in and cowered behind a sofa.

  ‘Don’t let them know I’m here,’ he said. ‘I think I got rid of them this time, but I’m not taking any risks.’

  Fang stared for a moment, speechless. Then he started to laugh.

  ‘He’s a pig,’ he said, in reply to the elf’s request for further and better particulars. ‘In fact, I reckon he’s one of the three little pigs who used to live on my patch. Now what on earth…’ He leaned forward and had a closer look. ‘Hello, it’s Julian, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who the devil are you? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Just don’t let my brothers know I’m here, all right?’

  ‘Sure,’ Fang replied. ‘After you, are they? That’s odd. You people always struck me as being just one happy family.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into them,’ Julian said sadly. ‘Behaving like utter swine, both of them.’

  Fang shrugged, as far as he was able with a quarter of a mile of rope tied round him. ‘I won’t say a thing, promise. And in return you could do a small favour for me.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Undoing these ropes’d be favourite. Come on, before I die of old age.’

  The pig did as he was told. For some reason, Thumb (who could easily have fitted inside Julian’s ear) made no effort to stop him. The elf, who’d been anticipating having to race to Thumb’s rescue and defend him with, if necessary, all reasonable force (she’d been looking forward to that) sat open-mouthed.

  ‘You’re not just going to cower there while the prisoner escapes, are you?’ she said at last.

  Thumb shrugged. ‘Why not? No skin off my nose.’

  ‘But…’

  The elf’s first reaction was to mention such concepts as duty, loyalty, my comrades right or wrong; but there was something in Thumb’s manner that suggested that he wasn’t likely to respond well to that sort of argument. ‘That dwarf’ll flatten you if you don’t,’ she therefore said.

  ‘So? And the pig’ll flatten me if I do. Besides, Dumpy’ll have to catch me first. He may be big but I’m small, if you get my meaning. There may be nowhere on Earth a dwarf won’t dare to go, but there’s ever so many places he won’t fit.’

  ‘But…’ The elf hesitated. Somehow, she’d assumed that, just because he looked fairly like the dream man she’d imagined for herself over the years, the interior specifications would match the externals. The idea that he might turn out to be a coward (defined in her world view as someone who doesn’t joyfully embrace a potentially lethal fight with a much larger, stronger opponent without a better reason than not letting down a colleague he couldn’t actually stand) came as a bitter disappointment. ‘Oh, go on, then,’ she snarled. ‘Get out of my sight before I tread on you.’

  ‘Hey!’ Thumb stared at her in pained surprise. ‘What’s all that about, then? I thought we were, well, you know…’

  ‘Did you? Then you were wrong.’ She reached down and grabbed his ear, so that he had to stand on tiptoe to avoid becoming a permanent Van Gogh look-alike. ‘I really thought you were something special, you know? Someone I could rely on. Someone I could look up to.’ She stifled a sob and twisted his ear another thirty degrees. ‘Just goes to show how wrong I was, doesn’t it?’ she said, and let him go. He fell to the ground with a bump. ‘Come on,’ she said to Fang, who was free of his ropes at last, ‘let’s be getting out of here. You wouldn’t happen to have such a thing as a white feather about you anywhere, would you? It so happens I need one.’

  Before they could get to the front door, however, there was a tinkle of broken glass and a rock sailed in through the window. Fang reached for the door handle and wrenched it open, then jumped back with a yelp of terror as an arrow shot through his hair and embedded itself in the wall behind his head.

  ‘Bit late for that now, surely,’ the elf said, then she too ducked as six or seven more followed it. ‘Like buses, really,’ she muttered. ‘You wait and wait, and then they all come along at once.’

  ‘YOU IN THE HOUSE!’ The bullhorn voice made the surviving windows rattle. ‘SURRENDER THE PIG AND NOBODY GETS HURT EXCEPT THE PIG, OF COURSE,’ it added, ‘OR THERE WOULDN’T BE MUCH POINT YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS.’

  ‘Oh Christ, it’s Desmond,’ Julian wailed. ‘Remember, you said you wouldn’t tell.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Fang replied. ‘We’ll just explain that this is nothing to do with us and quietly go on our way. I’m sure they’ll understand.’

  He opened the door a crack and actually got as far as ‘Excuse me,’ before another volley of arrows spitted the door. Before retreating he carefully plucked one out of the door, unpicked a white feather from the fletchings and handed it solemnly to the elf, who was cringing under the table with a waste-paper basket over her head. ‘You wanted one of these,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ she snarled back, ‘point taken. Where are those other three clowns when we need them?’

  ‘IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING WHAT’S BECOME OF YOUR THREE FRIENDS,’ the voice went on, ‘PERHAPS I SHOULD MENTION I HAVE THEM HERE. IF YOU EVER WANT TO SEE THEM ALIVE AGAIN, YOU’D BETTER DO AS YOU’RE TOLD. GOT THAT?’

  ‘Incentives just aren’t his strong point, are they?’ Fang sighed. ‘Well, we might as well make ourselves comfortable, because it looks as if we’re going to be here for quite some time.’

  ‘You reckon we should stay put?’ the elf said doubtfully.

  Fang shrugged. ‘Not much option, really,’ he replied. ‘At least while we’re safe in here, there’s not a lot they can do to us.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘ALL RIGHT THAT DOES IT TIME’S UP EUGENE, START THE GENERATOR.’

  Fang didn’t particularly like the sound of that; so he crawled to the window and cautiously peered out. In the distance he could see two pigs setting up a huge, diabolical-looking machine, something that looked like a giant mutant vacuum cleaner. ‘Jeez,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘What in hell’s name is that?’

  ‘Let me see,’ Julian said, and he crawled over and had a look. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s bad.’

  ‘Really? What is it?’

  ‘It’s a heavy-duty compressor,’ Julian replied nervously. ‘Used to generate an exceptionably powerful jet of compressed air. If I know Desmond, he’s proposing to huff and puff and blow our house down.’

  ‘But he can’t!’ Fang exclaimed. ‘That’s my…’ He remembered who he was talking to and broke off.

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Didn’t sound like nothing to me. And how the hell did you know my name?’

  Julian stared at Fang with a curious expression on his face, but before he could say anything further, the compressor started to rumble, making further conversation impossible. Fang took one last look, then dived for cover.

  ‘Anyway,’ he growled to himself, ‘it’ll never work.’

  Wrong again.

  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 o
f 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.