Snow White & the Seven Samurai Tom Holt Read online

  ‘What do you mean can’t get...?’ Sis faltered. Regret­tably, the words can’t get back weren’t what you’d call ambiguous. ‘You mean, like marooned?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked round frantically for another exit; if not out of this crazy scenario, then at least out of the room, before anybody came. Not out of the window; this is a castle, remember, so out of the window would mean a long fall into a stagnant moat, and that’s if she was lucky. Only one door. Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Oh...

  ‘Mirror,’ she said. ‘Hide me, quickly.’

  The head looked at her, and in its eyes there was enough raw contempt to keep the book reviews page of the Guardian fully supplied for a year. ‘Bad command or file name,’ it said disdainfully. ‘Please retry.’

  ‘Mirror!’ she repeated imploringly, but the face vanished abruptly and was replaced by a pattern of slowly revolving geometric shapes, the one that makes your head spin if you watch it for too long. Whimpering, she tugged the curtain away from the wall and slipped behind it, just as the door opened and the wicked queen burst in, with an electric torch in one hand and a heavy Le Creuset frying pan in the other. She surveyed the room slowly and carefully, and sniffed.

  ‘Mirror,’ she commanded, ‘where is she?’

  The geometric shapes vanished and the head came back. ‘She’s hiding behind—’ it began, but got no further; because behind the curtain, Sis had found the power switch and turned it off.

  You can’t blame her, of course. You could even say it was really rather resourceful, in the circumstances. And, also in her defence, it’s hardly likely that she knew about the quite terrifying possible consequences of pulling the plug on an antiquated system like this one. After all, not many people do know that the principal drawback of Mirrors 3.1 was the very real risk of crashing the whole thing if you tried to shut it down without going through the proper procedure.

  Suddenly, everything vanished.

  Which is a rather melodramatic way of saying that there was a major systems malfunction, and all the information stored in the wicked queen’s magic mirror was tumbled out of its drawers on to the floor, painstakingly jumbled up and then shovelled back at random; the kind of complete and syste­matic random it takes a computer to achieve. That, of course, is going to the other extreme, since it gives the impression that all it’s going to take to get it all sorted out is the inter­vention of a pasty-faced young man with glasses, a beard and a packet of watchmaker’s screwdrivers, probably called Dave or Chris. Sadly, not so. The difference is that all the little bytes and snippets that live behind the glass of the wicked queen’s mirror aren’t mere electrical impulses and digitised items of data; lam not a number, they could all say, and they’d be absolutely right.

  For example —Once upon a time, there was the same little house in the same big wood. And it still had a rose racetrack up one side, and a miniature Wisley seething away out front, and a garishly red front door with a vulgar brass knocker. But this time there’s a note pinned to it, and it says —

  Falling snowflakes

  Melt on the cherry blossom.

  This place is a pigsty.

  Or, while we’re on the subject of pigs: a little way off in the same wood there’s another house; bigger, rather less quaint and unmistakable because of the moat, drawbridge, razor wire entanglements, caltrops, mantraps and signposts reading MINEFIELD and BEWARE OF THE DRAGON that occupy about ninety-five per cent of what should have been a fair-sized front lawn. The house itself shines in the morning light like an American bodyguard’s sunglasses.

  The pigs in question are up a scaffolding tower, welding a searchlight bracket to the side of the house. There are three of them; and the smallest, having replaced a 5/8” Stilson wrench in his tool belt, wipes his snout on his foreleg and gazes with satisfaction at his trotter work.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Just the perimeter fence to wire up, and we’re done.’

  The middle pig nods. ‘Trotters crossed, lads,’ he says. ‘We’ve tried straw, sticks, brick, breezeblock, stone, kevlar­-reinforced concrete and now molybdenum-steel-faced ceramic armour. If this doesn’t do the trick, we’re going to have serious credibility problems with the insurance company.’

  ‘It’d help if we knew how he does it,’ mused the biggest pig, pushing up the visor of his welding helmet and un­clipping the crocodile clip. ‘I don’t care what the forensic boys say, you’re not going to convince me it’s nothing but sheer lungpower. The last lot was better protected than the basement of the Pentagon, and how long did it take him? Thirty seconds, forty-five at the most, and all that hard work and expensive materials turned into so much second-hand Lego. If that’s an example of what huffing and puffing can do, I reckon Oppenheimer and his mates were wasting their time.’

  The middling pig grins; even the ring in his nose sparkles merrily in the early morning sun. ‘He might just be in for a surprise this time,’ he says. ‘On account of the seventy ­gigawatt interactive force field generator I’ve got hidden in the coal bunker. Just let him so much as sneeze near that and he’ll suddenly find out what’s meant by lethal feedback.’

  The smallest pig, who’d been scanning the horizon through an infra-red viewer, scuttles down the scaffolding towards his companions. ‘I hope you’re right,’ he mutters, ‘because here he comes, the bastard. Right, positions, everyone. Desmond, you work the console. Eugene, the remotes. I’ll do all the rest.’

  In the distance there’s a small grey four-legged shape. As it gets nearer, the three little pigs can make out the lolling tongue, the small round black eyes.

  ‘Incoming,’ Desmond snaps. ‘Big bad wolf at bearing three-three-zero-mark-five-Alpha.’

  Julian, the small pig, just has time to wire up the last few connections and throw the lever as the wolf reaches the outer perimeter of the security zone. Like all wolves, he doesn’t look such a big deal when viewed from a distance; just a grey, long-haired Alsatian with a long nose and sad eyes. (And, by the same token, Australia looks like it might be a nice place to live, when seen from space.)

  ‘Standing by,’ crackles the intercom in Julian’s trotter.

  Julian takes a deep breath. He can’t clench his trotters because trotters don’t clench; but he folds them back as close to the knuckle as they’ll go. ‘On my mark,’ he mutters. ‘Steady. And, activate!’

  Suddenly the air is alive with blue fire. The humming from the wires all but drowns out the wolf’s all-too-familiar little speech. On the cue blow your house down, Desmond flicks the toggle that controls the remotely operated traverse of the Planetcracker-class laser cannon. There’s a flash, like a fuse blowing in Frankenstein’s laboratory, and —‘Missed,’ Desmond growls under his breath; then, into the intercom, ‘Julian, I’ve forgotten. How d’you set this thing for a wide-dispersal beam?’

  ‘Red dial on the instrument panel, three full turns clock­wise,’ the intercom crackles back. ‘Get a move on, will you? He’s through the fence, God alone knows how. I wish someone’d explain to me how he manages to do it.’

  ‘Search me,’ Desmond admits, ‘I wasn’t watching. Must have got under it somehow. It’s all right, though, he’s walking straight into the Claymore field.’

  ‘Aha!, At his command post, Julian clasps his front trotters over his head in a gesture of triumph. ‘This time he’s for it. All right, commencing remote detonation procedure on my command. And go!’

  The Earth shakes; then it starts raining divots. Then, as the smoke clears, the three little pigs are just able to make out the shape of a vulpine tail wagging on the edge of the drawbridge.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Julian howls. ‘That’s impossible. An anorexic gnat could just have squeezed through on tiptoe if it’d had a copy of the minefield layout. All right, Desmond, turn on the cyanide gas. He’ll soon realise he’s just making things harder for himself.’

  Desmond reaches for the dial; but before he has a chance to twist it, the wolf takes a deep breath. A huff,
even.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Eugene mutters, not looking up from the long bank of monitors in front of him. ‘I knew we should have spent the extra money and laid on air-to-surface support.’

  ‘Try calling Strategic Air Command just in case,’ Julian replies. ‘You never know, there may still be time...’

  The wolf exhales, letting out just enough breath to shift a small, lightweight leaf or project a very thin smoke-ring half­way to the ceiling.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Eugene groans. ‘He’s about to puff.’ Julian growls. ‘All right,’ he says grimly. ‘All power to pri­mary deflector screens. Eugene, shut down the weapons systems if you have to, but keep those screens.

  Puff. The ejected carbon dioxide buffets against the side of the house like a half-hearted assault with a limp feather duster. The wolf breathes in —‘Exactly like the last time,’ Julian observes. ‘Hey, Desmond, why’re you taking so long with that damn gas?’

  ‘Should be through any sec—’

  This time, thanks largely to the steel cladding, at least it was different. When the wolf blew out, instead of simply collapsing in a cloud of dust and flying masonry, the house crumples and twists like a squashed beer can. At first the metal stretches; then it begins to tear, and razor-edged seams unzip from the footings right up to the top storey windows, until the whole building peels back like a banana skin. Fortunately for them, the three little pigs are thrown clear at an early stage. They land, with more velocity than dignity, in their own moat, more or less at the same moment as the roof hits the ground.

  ‘Woof,’ says the wolf cheerfully.

  Wearily the pigs roll onto their fronts and piggy-paddle their way to the bank of the moat.

  ‘It’s precisely this sort of thing that puts you off owning your own home,’ Desmond grunts bitterly, hauling himself up out of the water. ‘Mortgage interest relief is all very well, but maybe this time we should seriously think about renting somewhere instead.’

  ‘How about an underground bunker?’ Eugene says. ‘Even he’d be hard put to it to blow it down if it was underground.’

  ‘He’ll find a way, don’t you worry,’ Julian replies, picking a needle-sharp splinter of steel out of his ear. ‘What I want to know is, why? What harm have we ever done him? Is he just psychotic, or is he the Dirty Harry of the local planning department?’

  ‘Planning permission we got,’ Desmond points out. ‘They know me so well down at County Hall, I’ve even got my own mug with my name on it. No, I reckon the only course of action left to us is a bloody hard pre-emptive strike. Unless we want to be doing this for the rest of our lives, we’ve got to waste the bastard.’

  Julian lifts his head sharply. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘you might just have something there.’

  ‘Why not? We’ve got precious little to lose, after all. And there’s three of us.’

  ‘Tell it to the chipolatas.’ Julian shakes himself, spraying water in all directions. ‘This isn’t something we can do ourselves, you know. Think about it; if we can’t nail that over­grown granddad-of-a-terrier with laser cannon and Claymore mines, then creeping up on him while he’s asleep and hitting him with a big stone’s probably not going to work either. No, if we’re going to do this, we’ll have to hire someone.’

  Eugene’s little piggy eyes widen. ‘An assassin, you mean? A hit-pig?’

  Julian nods. ‘Something like that. Only probably not a pig. And not an assassin. Villains hire assassins and we’re the good guys. Good guys hire champions.’

  ‘Ah.’ Desmond wrinkles his snout, a symptom of increased mental activity. ‘What you’re saying is, we need to hire an odd-numbered company of adventurers and soldiers of fortune, each of them a rough diamond with a heart of gold who’ll claim they’re only in it for the money but who never­theless are revealed as having a deeply felt vocation to right wrongs and fight for justice, freedom and the rights of the underpig. Yes?’

  ‘You got it,’ Julian says. ‘Took the words right out of my snout.’

  Eugene rubs his ear against a large stone. ‘Why do I get the feeling,’ he says mournfully, ‘that the word magnificent is just about to feature in this conversation?’

  Julian looks at him. ‘You’re way ahead of me,’ he says. ‘What we need is the Seven.’

  Desmond and Eugene ponder this suggestion for a moment. ‘You’re sure?’ Eugene asks. ‘You really think they’ll be up to it?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Julian says confidently. ‘Just so long as they stand on a ladder.’

  ‘Mirror!’ screamed the wicked queen.

  The mirror looked at her.

  The face was gone. In its place was a nightmare of jumbled components; as if Baron Frankenstein had dropped the drawer he kept all the bits of face in, and by some random, million-monkeys-with-typewriters fluke they’d fallen in a pattern that wasn’t quite a face, but almost.

  ‘Bad command or file name,’ it croaked offensively. ‘Trees reply.’

  She sighed, and switched it off again. Then she slowly turned her head and gave the girl a long, long stare.

  ‘Well,’ she said.

  The girl looked at her shoes. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.

  ‘You’re sorry,’ said the wicked queen. ‘You invaded my house, sabotaged my magic mirror and crashed the operating system for this entire dimension, and you’re sorry. That’s all right, then.’

  ‘I said I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes, you did. Curiously enough, that doesn’t seem to have solved anything. I expect you’re feeling hard done by because I haven’t turned you into a frog. Sorry; I would if I could but I can’t.’

  Sis’s face burnt red. ‘So what do you expect me to do about it?’ she snarled wretchedly.

  ‘Oh, let me see. How about putting right all the damage you’ve done? That’d help.’

  Sis winced. ‘You know I can’t do that,’ she objected. ‘I don’t know how your silly mirror works.’

  ‘No, you don’t, do you? Neither do I.’

  Sis stared. ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Not a clue. I just use the thing. I switch it on and it works. Or rather it worked. Important distinction there, don’t you think? One instance where grammatical accuracy isn’t just me being pedantic.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sis consulted her shoes again, but they were staying out of it. ‘So what’re we going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the wicked queen replied, sitting down and rubbing her nose with the heel of her hand. ‘I can give you a fair idea of what we can’t do. We can’t run the system. As a result, the entire dimensional matrix is going to tie itself up in knots. And just in case you don’t know what a dimensional matrix is, it means that everything out there is probably going wrong. Everything,’ she added, with a little smile. ‘What fun.’

  ‘What about Carl?’ Sis suggested. ‘He might know what to do.’

  ‘Carl.’

  ‘My brother. He’s the one who hacked into your system in the first place. He knows all about computers.’

  ‘Oh, how splendid. Where is he, by the way?’

  ‘I —’ Sis looked round, suddenly alarmed. ‘I don’t know. He was here a moment ago.’

  The wicked queen nodded. ‘He was here a moment ago, when you crashed my mirror. The other one got away, but I’m sure Carl was left behind. And now he’s vanished. Wonder why.’

  A look of horror passed across Sis’s face. ‘You mean he’s been caught up in—’

  ‘Yes, I do. Didn’t it ever occur to you to wonder exactly why smashing a mirror brings you seven years’ bad luck?’

  ‘But we’ve got to do something,’ Sis squealed urgently. ‘We’ve got to get them back, now. Before—’

  The wicked queen smiled. ‘Before your mother and father get back from the office party and start asking what’s become of the two siblings they left in your care? Ah yes. Let’s all panic and declare a state of emergency. Just think; if you don’t find Carl and Damien in time, they might cut off your pocket money.’

  ‘Don’t b
e horrible,’ Sis replied angrily. ‘And don’t just sit there. You’re the stupid old wicked queen. You’ve got to—’

  ‘Do something, I know.’ The wicked queen clicked her tongue wearily. ‘There’s all sorts of things I could do—’

  ‘Told you so.’

  ‘Unfortunately, none of them would help, except by way of easing my anger and frustration. We could try that, if you wouldn’t mind holding still for twenty minutes.

  Sis backed away. ‘Can’t you phone somebody?’ she asked. ‘You know, a helpline or something.’

  ‘Phone somebody. All right, I’ll give it a try. Just as soon as you tell me what with.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Show me the telephone in this room.’

  Sis looked round. ‘There isn’t one,’ she said.

  ‘Magnificently observed. Not in this room, this castle, this kingdom, this whole dimension. Remember where you are.’

  ‘But surely—’

  ‘No phone,’ said the wicked queen, checking off on her fingers. ‘No fax. No computers. Just a magic mirror. Don’t you just love fully integrated systems?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Now then,’ continued the wicked queen briskly, ‘this is the point at which any teenager worth her salt mumbles an excuse and departs, leaving someone else to clear up the mess after her. And I’d be only too delighted to see the back of you, if only it were possible. But it isn’t. Integrated systems. I’m stuck with you. Isn’t that jolly?’

  ‘You mean I’m stranded?’ Sis’s eyes grew round with horror. ‘But that’s not fair,’ she wailed. ‘There must be—’

  The queen chuckled. ‘What’re you going to do, call the Embassy? Walk home? I’m terribly sorry, my sweet, but this time you’re going to have to face up to the consequences of your actions. Who knows,’ she added, ‘you might enjoy it. You’ll never know until you’ve tried it at least once.’

  Sis raised her head and scowled. ‘Well, I don’t see how you being horrid to me’s helping either,’ she said. ‘Not very con­structive, is it?’