“Do what?” replied the Emperor.

“Make such a pointlessly dramatic entrance? And what are those two goons doing here?”

“Who said that?” said a muffled voice from inside the opaque helmet of one of his minders. “I can’t see a sodding thing in here.”

“Who’s a goon?” said the other.

“It’s a contractual thing,” explained the Emperor, ignoring them both. “I’ve got a new agent who knows how to properly handle a character of my quality. I have to be given a minimum of eighty words’ description at least once in any featured book, and at least twice in a book a chapter has to end with my appearance.”

“Do you get book-title billing?”

“We gave that one away in exchange for chapter-heading status. If this were a novel, you’d have to start a new chapter as soon as I appeared.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we’re not,” I replied. “If my mother was here, she’d probably have had a heart attack.”

“Oh!” replied the Emperor, looking around. “Do you live with your mother, too?”

“What’s up? Problems at Jurisfiction?”

“Take five, lads,” said Zhark to the two guards, who felt around the kitchen until they found a chair and sat down. “Mrs. Tiggy-winkle sent me,” he breathed. “She’s busy at the Beatrix Potter Characters Annual General Meeting but wanted me to give you an update on what’s happening at Jurisfiction.”

“Who’s that, darling?” called my mother from the living room.

“It’s a homicidal maniac intent on galactic domination,” I called back.

“That’s nice, dear.”

I turned back to Zhark. “So what’s the news?”

“Max de Winter from Rebecca,” said Zhark thoughtfully. “The BookWorld Justice Department has rearrested him.”

“I thought Snell got him off the murder charge.”

“He did. The department is still gunning for him, though. They’ve arrested him on—get this—insurance fraud. Remember the boat he sank with his wife in it?”

I nodded.

“Well, apparently he claimed the boat on insurance, so they think they might be able to get him on that.”

It was not an untypical turn of events in the BookWorld. Our mandate from the Council of Genres was to keep fictional narrative as stable as possible. As long as it was how the author intended, murderers walked free and tyrants stayed in power—that was what we did. Minor infringements that weren’t obvious to the reading public, we tended to overlook. However, in a masterstroke of inspired bureaucracy, the Council of Genres also empowered a Justice Department to look into individual transgressions. The conviction of David Copperfield for murdering his first wife was their biggest cause célèbre—before my time, I hasten to add—and Jurisfiction, unable to save him, could do little except train another character to take Copperfield’s place. They had tried to get Max de Winter before, but we had always managed to outmaneuver them. Insurance fraud. I could scarcely believe it.

“Have you alerted the Gryphon?”

“He’s working on Fagin’s umpteenth appeal.”

“Get him on it. We can’t leave this to amateurs. What about Hamlet? Can I send him back?”

“Not . . . as such,” replied Zhark hesitantly.

“He’s becoming something of a nuisance,” I admitted, “and Danes are liable to be arrested. I can’t keep him amused by watching Mel Gibson’s films forever.”

“I’d like Mel Gibson to play me,” said Zhark thoughtfully.

“I don’t think Gibson does bad guys,” I conceded. “You’d probably be played by Geoffrey Rush or someone.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad. Is that cake going begging?”

“Help yourself.”

Zhark cut a large slice of Battenberg, took a bite and continued, “Okay, here’s the deal: we managed to get the Polonius family to attend arbitration over their unauthorized rewriting of Hamlet.”

“How did you achieve that?”

“Promised Ophelia her own book. All back to normal—no problem.”

“So . . . I can send Hamlet back?”

“Not quite yet,” replied Zhark, hiding his unease by pretending to find a small piece of fluff on his cape. “You see, Ophelia has now got her knickers in a twist about one of Hamlet’s infidelities—someone she thinks is called Henna Appleton. Have you heard anything about this?”

“No. Nothing. Nothing at all. Not a thing. Don’t even know anyone called Henna Appleton. Why?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. Well, she went completely nuts and threatened to drown herself in the first act rather than the fourth. We think we’ve got her straightened out. But whilst we were doing this—there was a hostile takeover.”

I cursed aloud, and Zhark jumped. Nothing was ever straightforward in the BookWorld. Book mergers, where one book joined another to increase the collective narrative advantage of their own mundane plotlines, were thankfully rare but not unheard of. The most famous merger in Shakespeare was the conjoinment of the two plays Daughters of Lear and Sons of Gloucester into King Lear. Other potential mergers, such as Much Ado About Verona and A Midsummer Night’s Shrew, were denied at the planning stage and hadn’t taken place. It could take months to extricate the plots, if it could be done at all. King Lear resisted unraveling so strongly we just let it stand.

“So who merged with Hamlet?”

“Well, it’s now called The Merry Wives of Elsinore, and features Gertrude being chased around the castle by Falstaff while being outwitted by Mistress Page, Ford and Ophelia. Laertes is the king of the fairies, and Hamlet is relegated to a sixteen-line subplot where he is convinced Doctor Caius and Fenton have conspired to kill his father for seven hundred pounds.”

I groaned. “What’s it like?”

“It takes a long time to get funny, and when it finally does, everyone dies.”

“Okay,” I conceded, “I’ll try to keep Hamlet amused. How long do you need to unravel the play?”

Zhark winced and sucked in air through his teeth in the same manner heating engineers do when quoting on a new boiler. “Well, that’s the problem, Thursday. I’m not sure that we can do it all. If this happened anywhere but in the original, we could have just deleted it. You know the trouble we had with King Lear? Well, I don’t see that we’re going to have any better luck with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.”

I sat down and put my head in my hands. No Hamlet. The loss was almost too vast to comprehend.

“How long have we got before Hamlet starts to change?” I asked without looking up.

“About five days, six at the outside,” replied Zhark quietly. “After that, the breakdown will accelerate. In two weeks’ time, the play as we know it will have ceased to exist.”

“There must be something we can do.”

“We’ve tried pretty much everything. We’re stuffed—unless you’ve got a spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve.”

I sat up. “What?”

“We’re stuffed?”

“After that.”

“A spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve?”

“Yes. How will that help?”

“Well,” said Zhark thoughtfully, “since no original manuscripts of either Hamlet or Wives exist, a freshly penned script by the author would thus become the original manuscript—and we could use those to reboot the Storycode Engines from scratch. It’s quite simple, really.”

I smiled but Zhark looked at me with bewilderment. “Thursday, Shakespeare died in 1616!”

I stood up and patted him on the arm. “You get back to the office and make sure things don’t get any worse. Leave the Shakespeare up to me. Now, has anyone figured out yet which book Yorrick Kaine is from?”

“We’ve got all available resources working on it,” replied Zhark, still a bit confused, “but there are a lot of novels to go through. Can you give us any pointers?”

“Well, he’s not very multidimensional, so I shouldn’t go looking into anything too literary. I’d start at political thrillers and work your way towards spy.”

Zhark made a note.

“Good. Any other problems?”

“Yes,” replied the Emperor. “Simpkin is being a bit of a pest in The Tailor of Gloucester. Apparently the tailor let all his mice escape, and now Simpkin won’t let him have the cherry-colored twist. If the Mayor’s coat isn’t ready for Christmas, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Get the mice to make the waistcoat. They’re not doing anything.”

“Okay,” he sighed, “I’ll give it a whirl.” He looked at his watch. “Well, better be off. I’ve got to annihilate the planet Thraal at four, and I’m already late. Do you think I should use my trusty Zharkian death-ray and fry them alive in a millisecond or nudge an asteroid into their orbit, thus unleashing at least six chapters of drama as they try to find an ingenious solution to defeat me?”

“The asteroid sounds a good bet.”

“I thought so, too. Well, see you later.”

I waved good-bye as he and his two guards were beamed out of my world and back into theirs, which was certainly the best place for them. We had quite enough tyrants in the real world as it was.

I was just wondering what The Merry Wives of Elsinore might be like when there was another buzzing noise and the kitchen was filled with light once more. There, imperious stare, high collar, etc., etc., was Emperor Zhark.