Sure enough, the King and Queen were beginning to fidget in an ostensibly warlike manner. The two dwarves headed off down the stairs.

‘Why were you looking for me?’ Rumpelstiltskin asked.

‘I’m looking for good dwarves,’ Dumpy answered, as they came out into the castle courtyard. It was deserted, and the only sound was that of hurriedly closing shutters and bolts being slammed home on doors. ‘Dwarves I can rely on. They gotta be smart, mean and fast with a—’ With a what? Suddenly he realised that he couldn’t remember what dwarves fight with. Something small, presumably, and capable of being used to devastating effect against the ankles of their victims. ‘Fast,’ he repeated. ‘Real fast.’

‘I see,’ Rumpelstiltskin said thoughtfully. ‘Smart, mean, fast, reliable dwarves. What’s this for, a cut-price pizza delivery service? One where you just carry the pizza in under the door without waiting for the customer to open it?’

Dumpy shook his head, trying to recall what the job was. ‘Fighting a wolf,’ he said, suddenly inspired. ‘I been hired to keep this wolf from preying on three little pigs.’

‘And so you want reliable, quick, clever, stingy dwarves. Sorry if this sounds rude, but the logical connection escapes me.’

‘Not stingy,’ Dumpy explained. ‘Mean. Like in, you know… mean.’ Dammit, he knew there should be a better word, a word that’d mean what it meant, but somehow he couldn’t think of it. It was as if there was a big fat policeman standing outside the door of his memory, refusing to let him in there unless he could produce the necessary permits. He knew he was capable of expressing himself in something more lucid than this strange idiom and this horrible drawling accent, which he knew for certain had never been spoken by any real person. ‘Mean,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t you understand Dwarvish?’

They reached the gate. The two halberdiers on duty took one look at them, dropped their weapons and jumped in the moat. ‘What was all that about?’ Rumpelstiltskin asked.

Dumpy shrugged. ‘Folks is just scared of dwarves, is all,’ he said.

‘Oh. Why?’

‘Because we’re mean, I guess.’

‘Ah. I can see where that might be annoying, like if you’ve gone out for a meal together, but not frightening, surely.’

Dumpy concentrated. A stray shard of memory was loose in his mind, but it wouldn’t stay still long enough to be identified. ‘You saying that where you come from, folks ain’t scared of dwarves?’

Rumpelstiltskin nodded. ‘It’s more or less the other way around, in fact. At least, I think so. Thought so. You know, it’s sort of slipped my mind.’

‘Where you come from,’ Dumpy repeated, ‘dwarves are scared of regular folks?’

‘I think so. Or at least they try to stay out of their way. Partly I imagine it’s unthinking bigotry and size-hatred, but mostly it’s because they tend to tread on us without realising we’re there. That’s why we’re shy, retiring creatures who live deep in the forests and hide when the Big People come clumping by.’

Dumpy was shocked. ‘We do?’

‘Apparently. Hard to credit, isn’t it?’ Rumpelstiltskin frowned, and the frown hardened into a scowl. ‘Can’t be right, though. I mean,’ he went on, straightening his back and letting his chin jut out, ‘we’re dwarves, dammit. How come we let those big guys push us around? How come they don’t show us no respect?’

‘Too darned right,’ Dumpy confirmed. ‘You ain’t got respect, partner, you ain’t got nothin’.’ He jutted his chin out too, so that the pair of them looked like a bonsai granite outcrop. ‘C’mon, let’s go out there and kick us some ass.’

‘Sure thing,’ replied Rumpelstiltskin, punching the palm of his left hand with his right fist and wincing slightly. ‘Mind you, we may need to stand on something in order to reach.’

Dumpy bristled. ‘Forget that kind of talk, mister,’ he said. ‘Dwarves bend the knee to no man.’

‘Well, quite. Wouldn’t be a great deal of point. Still, let’s get out there and teach the suckers a thing or two.’ He grimaced horribly, knowing that for some reason it was the right thing to do. It hurt his face, and he stopped.

‘Sure.’ Dumpy rubbed his chin. ‘Though of course we ain’t gonna go around terrorising innocent folks.’

‘No? I’d have thought they’d be easier. For beginners, that is.

‘Hell, no. We don’t do that kinda stuff. We’re good.’

Rumpelstiltskin blinked. ‘We are?’ he said. ‘Oh.’

‘You betcha. We’re the goddamn heroes. Okay, maybe we gotta throw our weight about from time to time, punch out a few guys who don’t show us no respect, but deep down we’re the best. In a land torn apart by anarchy and oppression, we are the law.’

‘Oh joy,’ muttered Rumpelstiltskin, without enthusiasm. ‘What I always wanted to be when I grew up.’

‘Somewhere,’ muttered the queen, a shoe in each hand, ‘near here.’

Around their ankles, the mud of the swamp seethed and gurgled like a casserole neglected in a hot oven. Wisps of thick grey fog wound in and out of the skeletons of dead trees. In the distance, swamp gas occasionally flared into torches of lurid orange flame. Overhead, some kind of huge, slow-moving bird wheeled and circled, watching them with a more than passing interest.

‘Somewhere near here,’ the queen repeated. ‘Usually, of course, he comes to see me.’

Sis groaned, and shifted the bucket across to her left, marginally less blistered hand. Something in the mud around her ankles was nibbling at her toe. ‘Who are you talking about?’ she asked.

The queen pulled aside a curtain of lank reeds, shook her head and let it fall back. ‘My accountant,’ she said.

‘Your accountant?’

‘That’s right.’ She turned her attention to a dead tree, its heart eaten out by time and some indeterminate form of blight. ‘Hello? Anybody home? Oh well.’

‘Your accountant.’

‘You seem surprised.’

‘Sorry. It just seems a bit unlikely, that’s all.’

The queen raised an eyebrow. ‘Not a bit of it. Oh, your heroes and dragonslayers and knights in shining armour are all right for fetching and carrying and basic pest control, but when you’re in serious trouble what you need is sensible, level-headed professional help. And this chap we’re going to meet is so level-headed you could play snooker on his hat. Given a choice between him and your average heavily armed leather fetishist—’

‘I see what you mean,’ Sis replied. ‘It’s just that my uncle Terry’s an accountant, and his office is over a chemist’s shop in a suburban high street. This doesn’t look…’

‘Different strokes, girl,’ the queen said patiently. ‘In these parts, this is a suburban high street. I wish you’d said you were an accountant’s niece. I’d have taken you a bit more seriously if I’d known that.’

‘I—’ Sis would undoubtedly have said something worthy of her ancestry if she hadn’t chosen that moment to step on a chunk of green, slimy log and topple over. There was a horrible-sounding glop! noise, and she disappeared into the mud.

‘Oh God,’ the queen said, hauling her out, ‘the bucket…’

She looked round. Being lighter than a fairly well-nourished adolescent girl, the bucket hadn’t sunk into the mire; it was sitting, or floating, on the scummy surface at an angle of about forty-five degrees. There was a newt swimming in it.

‘Hell,’ the queen said. ‘That’s another chunk of data we’ve lost. Much more of this and we might as well forget the whole thing. Why couldn’t you look where you were going, instead of…?’

Sis wasn’t listening. Rather, she was staring at something behind the queen’s back and pointing. ‘Over there,’ she said.

‘Hm? Oh good Lord, right under our noses and we didn’t see.’

The base of the dead tree had swung open, revealing a carpeted staircase apparently leading down into a tunnel under the mud. Having carefully unglued the bucket, the queen waded across, looked in vain for something to wipe her feet on, then squelched down the stairs and out of sight, leaving Sis to follow as best she could.