The waitress bobbed again, thanked him and was gone.
“Perky, that one, isn’t she?” said Zhark, staring after her. “Do you think I should make her my wife?”
“You’re considering getting married?” asked Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, almost scorching a collar in her surprise.
“I think it’s high time that I did,” he said. “Slaughtering peaceful civilizations on a whim is a lot more fun when you’ve got someone to do it with.”
“Does your mother know about this?” I asked, fully aware of the power that the Dowager Empress Zharkina IV wielded in his books. Emperor Zhark might have been the embodiment of terror across innumerable star systems, but he lived with his mum-and if the rumors were correct, she still insisted on bathing him.
“Well, she doesn’t know yet,” he replied defensively. “But I’m big enough to make my own decisions, you know.”
Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and I exchanged knowing looks. Nothing happened in the imperial palace without the empress’s agreement.
Zhark chewed for a moment, winced and then swallowed with a look of utter disgust on his face. He turned to Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.
“I think you’ve got my pie.”
“Have I?” she replied offhandedly. “Now you come to mention it, I thought these slugs tasted sort of funny.”
They swapped pies and continued eating.
“Ms. Next?”
I looked up. A confident middle-aged woman was standing next to the table. She had starburst wrinkles around the eyes and graying brown hair, a chicken-pox scar above her left brow, and asymmetric dimples. She was a well-realized character but I didn’t recognize her-at least not at first.
“Can I help?” I asked.
“I’m looking for the Jurisfiction agent named Thursday Next.”
“That’s me.”
Our visitor seemed relieved at this and allowed herself a smile. “Pleased to meet you. My name’s Dr. Temperance Brennan.”
I knew who she was, of course: the heroine of her own genre-that of the forensic anthropologist.
“Very pleased to meet you,” I said, rising to shake her hand. “Perhaps you’d care to join us?”
“Thank you, I shall.”
“This is Emperor Zhark,” I said, “and the one with the spines is Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.”
“Hello,” said Zhark, sizing her up for matrimony as he shook her hand. “How would you like the power of life or death over a billion godless heathens?”
She paused for a moment and raised an eyebrow. “Montreal suits me just fine.”
She shook Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s claw, and they exchanged a few pleasantries over the correct method to wash linens. I ordered her some coffee, and after I’d asked about her Outlander book sales, which were impressively large compared to mine, she admitted to me that this wasn’t a social call.
“I’ve got an understudy covering for me, so I’ll come straight to the point,” she said, looking with apparent professional interest at Zhark’s high cheekbones. “Someone’s trying to kill me.”
“You and I have much in common, Dr. Brennan,” I replied. “When did this happen?”
“Call me Tempe. Have you read my latest adventure?”
“Grave Secrets? Of course.”
“Near the end I’m captured after being slipped a Mickey Finn. I talk my way out of it, and the bad guy kills himself.”
“So?”
“Thirty-two readings ago, I was drugged for real and nearly didn’t make it. It was all I could do to stay conscious long enough to keep the book on its tracks. I’m first-person narrative so everything’s up to me.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, “that first-person thing can be a drag. Did you report it to Text Grand Central?”
She pushed the hair away from her face and said, “Naturally. But since I kept the show going, it was never logged as a textual anomaly, so according to TGC there’s no crime. You know what they told me? ‘Come back when you’re dead, and then we can do something.’”
“Hmm,” I said, drumming my fingers on the desk. “Who do you think is behind it?”
She shrugged. “No one in the book. We’re all on very good terms.”
“Any skeletons in the closet? If you’ll excuse the expression.”
“Plenty. In Crime there’s always at least one seriously bad guy to deal with per book-sometimes more.”
“Narratively speaking, that’s how it appears,” I pointed out. “But with you dead, everyone else in your books would become redundant overnight-and with the possibility of erasure looming over them, your former enemies actually have some of the best reasons to keep you alive.”
“Hmm,” said Dr. Brenann thoughtfully, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“The most likely person to want to kill you is someone outside your book-any thoughts?”
“I don’t know anyone outside my books-except Kathy and Kerry, of course.”
“It won’t be them. Leave it with me,” I said after a moment’s pause, “and I’ll see what I can do. Just keep your eyes and ears open, yes?”
Dr. Brennan smiled and thanked me, shook my hand again, said good-bye to Zhark and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and was gone, muttering that she had to relieve the substandard and decidedly bone-idle understudy who was standing in for her.
“What was that all about?” asked Zhark.
“No idea,” I replied. “It’s kind of flattering that people bring their problems to me. I just wish there were another Thursday to deal with it.”
“I thought there was.”
“Don’t even joke about it, Emperor.”
There was a crackle in the air, and Commander Bradshaw suddenly appeared just next to us. Zhark and Tiggy-Winkle looked guilty all of a sudden, and the hedgepig washerwoman made a vain attempt to hide the ironing she was doing.
“I thought I would find you here,” he said, mustache all atwitch, as it was when he was a bit peeved. “That wouldn’t be moonlighting, would it, Agent Tiggy-Winkle?”
“Not at all,” she replied. “I spend so much time at Jurisfiction I can hardly get through the ironing I need to do for my own book!”
“Very well,” said Bradshaw slowly, turning to me. “I thought I’d find you here, too. I have a job that only you can handle.”
“I thought I was suspended?”
He passed me my badge. “The suspension was purely for the CofG’s benefit. The disciplinary paperwork was accidentally eaten by snails. Most perplexing.”
I smiled. “What’s up?”
“A matter of great delicacy. There were a few minor textual irregularities in…the Thursday books.”
“Which ones?” I asked, suddenly worried that Thursday5 might have taken her failure to heart.
“The first four. Since you know them quite well and no one else wants to touch them or her with a barge pole, I thought you might want to check it out.”
“What sorts of irregularities?”
“Small ones,” said Bradshaw, handing me a sheet of paper. “Nothing you’d notice from the Outland unless you were a committed fan. I’m thinking it might be the early stage of a breakdown.”
He didn’t mean a breakdown in the Outlander sense. In the BookWorld a breakdown meant an internal collapse of the character’s pattern of reason-the rules that made one predictable and understandable. Some, like Lucy Deane, collapsed spontaneously and with an annoying regularity; others just crumbled slowly from within, usually as a result of irreconcilable conflicts within their character. In either case, replacement by a fully trained-up generic was the only option. Of course, it might be nothing and very possible that Thursday1-4 was just angry about being fired and venting her spleen on the co-characters in the series.
“I’ll check her out.”
“Good,” said Bradshaw, turning to Zhark and Tiggy-Winkle. “And you two-I want you all geared up and ready to try to get into ‘The Speckled Band’ by way of ‘The Disintegrator Ray’ by fourteen hundred hours.”
Bradshaw looked at his clipboard and then vanished. We all stood up.
“Do you want us to come with you?” asked Zhark. “Strictly speaking, your checking up on Thursday1-4 is a conflict-of-interest transgression.”