Neville. Neville, you dozy… Hey, you. I thought you said you’d put me in touch with Nev Grimm. All I’m getting is static.

‘Drive Nevgrimm is not ready,’ the accountant droned. ‘Please try again or restart Mirrors.’

Oh Gawd. You can tell we designed this crap, can’t you? All right, transmitting as text—only files for later retrieval. Don’t lose it, okay? Here goes. I’m sending through the update, that’s Mirrors 2000 1.1, with this message. We’ve fixed it so it’ll overwrite all existing files, repeat, all existing files, which means we’ll be able to control the whole box of tricks from back here. Your priority one is to make sure that the Crazy Old Bastard, the woman Tracy Docherty, the girl Sis and the boy Carl do not, I say again do not, leave the Mirrors domain. That way, we can seal the whole thing up tight as an actuary’s bum, throw away the key and get on with running this company the way it ought to be run. And before you start panicking, there’s two outshots reserved for both of you under filename THREEPIGS.EXE, so you’ll be able to get out before we close the domain up for good. Just make sure you get the right one, or you’ll find yourself buried under a load of useless fonts before you can say Clive Sinclair. You got all that? Why am I asking, when you can’t bloody well hear me? Oh…

The accountant’s hand shot out and knocked the cup over, spilling the water on to his desk, where a thick pile of papers quickly absorbed it. The accountant opened his eyes.

‘Bugger,’ he muttered, ‘now look what I’ve done.’ He scooped up the papers, tried to mop up the water with his tie, then hit the intercom button.

‘Nicky,’ he barked, ‘bring me a J-Cloth, quick as you like. And another coffee.’

‘Right you are,’ crackled the voice at the other end.

Presumably she didn’t mean it.

‘Tracy?’ said the little doddery old man.

The wicked queen looked round, did a double-take and stared at him. ‘Mr Dawes!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh my God. I thought you were…’

Mr Dawes shook his head. ‘Well, I’m not,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’

Neatly sidestepping a pair of samurai, the wicked queen vaulted over a bench on to a table and down the other side, patted Fang absently on the head, ignored Julian and gave Mr Dawes a hug that would have squashed a grizzly bear. ‘Mr Dawes!’ she repeated. ‘Oh boy, am I glad to see you!’

‘Are you? That’s nice.’ Mr Dawes disentangled himself from the wicked queen with the ease of a bullet passing though a sheet of wet blotting paper. ‘Is there a mirror anywhere in this tiresome place? There’s some things I think I ought to sort out.’

‘Hey!’ Carl’s voice, loud and piercing with all the abrasive clarity of youth. ‘You’re Ben Dawes! You run Softcore! Wow!’

Mr Dawes gave him a sweet, sad look, the sort that’s worth a million of the sort of words that are usually immediately followed by off. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘And don’t tell me, you want to be a software engineer when you grow up. My advice is don’t. Either of them. And now, if you don’t mind…’

It occurred to Sis, as Carl stopped dead in his tracks and went red in the face, that if this was really the celebrated Ben Dawes, then of course he’d have had plenty of practice in making bumptious young computer freaks shut up; still, it was quite an awesome exhibition. It would be nice, she reflected, if he could make the same technique work on armed guards and Japanese warriors. Assuming it really was the great Ben Dawes. She remembered something.

‘Excuse me,’ she said.

Mr Dawes turned to look at her. For a moment she was afraid he’d loose that awful stare on her; but for some reason he didn’t. He looked even more like a kindly old uncle than ever. ‘Well?’ he said.

‘Excuse me,’ she repeated, ‘but are you sure you’re Ben Dawes?’

The old man smiled; it was a very sad smile. ‘Last time I looked,’ he said.

‘Ah. It’s just — you’re rather older than I expected.’

Mr Dawes nodded. ‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘I’m twenty-nine.’

‘Ah.’

Mr Dawes nodded. ‘It’s the climate in these parts,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure it agrees with me. Now then, where was I? Oh yes. A mirror. Any mirror will do,’ he went on, and he was speaking to — yes, confound it, it was the wicked queen, although a moment ago Mr Dawes had called her Tracy, which seemed improbable. ‘Polished metal’d do at a pinch,’ he added. ‘Or even a bit of wood with a good beeswax shine on it. Surely that’s not too much to ask, is it?’

‘Sorry, Mr Dawes,’ the wicked queen replied awkwardly, as if she’d negligently brought him a cup of warm blood instead of his morning coffee. ‘Usually there’s any number of mirrors around the place, but just now we seem to be right out of them.’

‘Marvellous. Well, there must be something—’ Just then Mr Hiroshige, who’d got his sleeve snagged on the corner of the table, managed to free himself and advanced on the wicked queen, brandishing his sword in the approved, highly ceremonial and utterly symbolic manner. He’d just, in fact, accidentally sliced through a bowl of wax fruit and a table lamp; and as he swung the shining katana around his head, the light flashed on the immaculately burnished steel of its three-foot blade.

‘You there,’ Mr Dawes barked, and at once the samurai stopped brandishing and stood on one leg looking extremely self-conscious. ‘Stop fooling about with that thing and give it to me. Hurry up,’ he added, snapping his arthritic fingers, ‘that’s the way. Now then,’ he added, as he took the sword from Mr Hiroshige’s unresisting hand, ‘let’s see what we can see. Tracy, I’d be ever so grateful if you could stop those buffoons with guns clumping up and down. This is rather delicate work, you know, especially under these conditions.’ As he spoke, an oppressive weight of guilt and shame seemed to encompass the Baron’s halberdiers, as if they’d been called up to the front at morning prayers and told off in front of the whole school. They shuffled back out of the way, holding their assault rifles behind their backs and trying to look inconspicuous. For beginners, it was a creditable attempt.

Mr Dawes held the sword blade up to the light; then he laid it down again, took off his glasses, rubbed them on his sleeve, put them back on his nose, breathed on the sword, rubbed that with his sleeve and held it up again, squinting at it. ‘Not used to bright light, you see,’ he explained. ‘Now then. Mirror!’

For a heart-twistingly anxious moment, nothing; then the face of a very old and venerable Japanese monk appeared in the steel.

‘Mirror,’ Mr Dawes repeated.

The monk stared at him impassively for about three-quarters of a second; then he bowed slightly from the neck and opened his lips.

‘What?’ Mr Dawes frowned. ‘Oh, right. Never mind all that now. Select Setup, quick as you can.’

The Japanese gentleman bowed again and vanished. Mr Dawes made an exasperated noise with his teeth and upper lip and sat down on a bench, tapping the fingers of his free hand on the table. Everybody else seemed to be watching, and also (Sis realised) trying to avoid being noticed by Mr Dawes; even Fang had curled up under the table with his tail between his legs. She wondered why this was; after all, he seemed a nice enough old man, not to mention being the rich and famous Mr Dawes; then she remembered the effect that a very slight brush with his displeasure had on Carl (he was under the table too, and the only reason his tail wasn’t between his legs was that he didn’t have a tail). A nice enough old man, she decided, but also formidable; kindly old Uncle Darth.

And then she noticed someone who wasn’t respectfully cowering: a cute, fresh-faced blonde girl, a year or so older than herself, with pigtails that came down to her waist and cheeks as rosy-red as the bruises on the face of someone who’s just been done over by a Glasgow dope gang. Snow White, she deduced, and she looks ready to commit mayhem. As yet, though, she didn’t look as if she was about to do anything more aggressive than mere savage pouting (she’s got the lips for it, God knows; she’s what you’d expect to see if Frankenstein had gone to work for the Disney corporation), but it crossed Sis’ mind that she ought perhaps to warn Mr Dawes; and then she thought of what might happen if she interrupted Mr Dawes when he was busy, and decided that he was probably old enough and avuncular enough to look after himself. She looked away — At precisely the same moment that Snow White made her move; which is why the first Sis knew about it was the ear-splitting shriek as Snow White snatched Mr Miroku’s sword out of his fist, leapt up on to the table and aimed a ferocious slash at Mr Dawes’ head. Fortunately, she missed; but the blow knocked his sword clean out of his hand and sent it flying across the hall. It hit a wall, rebounded and fell with quite remarkable precision on to the rope that still attached Dumpy, Tom Thumb and the Brothers Grimm to the battering ram, cutting it in two.