Tom Holt - Snow White and the Seven Samurai

‘Doesn’t matter,’ his colleague hissed back. ‘And for crying out loud don’t let him hear you say…’ The pig glanced up, then down, and realised that the dwarf was staring at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he stuttered, ‘you’ve got to excuse my brother, he’s only ever lived with pigs, he doesn’t know how to behave around regular people.’

‘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.