"Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island-"

"Why?"

"Nell and Harv had been locked up in the Dark Castle by their evil stepmother."

"Why didn't their father let them out of the Dark Castle?"

"Their father, who had protected them from the whims of the wicked stepmother, had gone sailing over the sea and never come back."

"Why did he never come back?"

"Their father was a fisherman. He went out on his boat every day. The sea is a vast and dangerous place, filled with monsters, storms, and other dangers. No one knows what fate befell him. Perhaps it was foolish of him to sail into such danger, but Nell knew better than to fret over things she could not change."

"Why did she have a wicked stepmother?"

"Nell's mother died one night when a monster came out of the sea and entered their cottage to snatch Nell and Harv, who were just babies. She fought with the monster and slew it, but in so doing suffered grievous wounds and died the next day with her adopted children still nestled in her bosom."

"Why did the monster come from the sea?"

"For many years, Nell's father and mother badly wanted children but were not so blessed until one day, when the father caught a mermaid in his net. The mermaid said that if he let her go, she would grant him a wish, so he wished for two children, a boy and a girl.

"The next day, while he was out fishing, he was approached by a mermaid carrying a basket. In the basket were the two little babies, just as he had requested, wrapped up in cloth of gold. The mermaid cautioned him that he and his wife should not allow the babies to cry at night."

"Why were they in gold cloth?"

"They were actually a Princess and a Prince who had been in a shipwreck. The ship sank, but the basket containing the two babies bobbed like a cork on the ocean until the mermaids came and found them. They took care of those two babies until they found a good parent for them.

"He took the babies back to the cottage and presented them to his wife, who swooned for joy. They lived happily together for some time, and whenever one of the babies cried, one of the parents would get up and comfort it. But one night father did not come home, because a storm had pushed his little red fishing boat far out to sea. One of the babies began to cry, and the mother got up to comfort it. But when the other began to cry as well, there was nothing she could do, and shortly the monster came calling.

"When the fisherman returned home the next day, he found his wife's body lying beside that of the monster, and both of the babies unharmed. His grief was very great, and he began the difficult task of raising both the children.

"One day, a stranger came to his door. She said that she had been cast out by the cruel Kings and Queens of the Land Beyond and that she needed a place to sleep and would do any kind of work in exchange. At first she slept on the floor and cooked and cleaned for the fisherman all day long, but as Nell and Harv got bigger, she began to give them more and more chores, until by the time their father disappeared, they toiled from dawn until long after nightfall, while their stepmother never lifted a finger."

"Why didn't the fisherman and his babies live in the castle to protect them from the monster?"

"The castle was a dark forbidding place on the top of a mountain. The fisherman had been told by his father that it had been built many ages ago by trolls, who were still said to live there. And he did not have the twelve keys."

"Did the wicked stepmother have the twelve keys?"

"She kept them buried in a secret place as long as the fisherman was around, but after he sailed away and did not come back, she had Nell and Harv dig them up again, along with a quantity of jewels and gold that she had brought with her from the Land Beyond. She bedecked herself with the gold and jewels, then opened up the iron gates of the Dark Castle and tricked Nell and Harv into going inside. As soon as they were in, she slammed the gates shut behind them and locked the twelve locks. 'When the sun goes down, the trolls will have you for a snack!' she cackled."

"What's a troll?"

"A scary monster that lives in holes in the ground and comes out after dark."

Nell started to cry. She slammed the book closed, ran to her bed, gathered her stuffed animals up in her arms, started chewing on her blanket, and cried for a while, considering the question of trolls.

The book made a fluttering sound. Nell saw it opening in the corner of her eye and looked over cautiously, afraid she might see a picture of a troll. But instead, she saw two pictures. One was of Princess Nell, sitting on the grass with four dolls gathered in her arms. Facing it was a picture of Nell surrounded by four creatures: a big dinosaur, a rabbit, a duck, and a woman in a purple dress with purple hair.

The book said, "Would you like to hear the story of how Princess Nell made some friends in the Dark Castle, where she least expected it, and how they killed all of the trolls and made it a safe place to live?"

"Yes!" Nell said, and scooted across the floor until she was poised above the book.

Judge Fang was not afflicted with the Westerner's inability to pronounce the name of the man known as Dr. X, unless a combined Cantonese/New York accent counted as a speech impediment. In his discussions with his trusted subordinates he had fallen into the habit of calling him Dr. X anyway.

He had never had cause to pronounce the name at all, until recently. Judge Fang was district magistrate for the Leased Territories, which in turn were part of the Chinese Coastal Republic.

Dr. X almost never left the boundaries of Old Shanghai, which was part of a separate district; more to the point, he stuck to a small but anfractuous subregion whose tendrils were seemingly ramified through every block and building of the ancient city. On the map, this region looked like the root system of a thousand-year-old dwarf tree; its border must have been a hundred kilometers long, even though it was contained within a couple of square kilometers. This region was not part of the Coastal Republic; it styled itself as the Middle Kingdom, a living vestige of Imperial China, prohibitively the oldest and greatest nation of the world.

The tendrils went even farther than that; Judge Fang had known this for a long time. Many of the gang members running around the Leased Territories with Judge Fang's cane marks across their asses had connections on the mainland that could ultimately be traced back to Dr. X. It was rarely useful to dwell upon this fact; if it hadn't been Dr. X, it would have been someone else. Dr. X was unusually clever at taking advantage of the principle of grith, or right of refuge, which in the modern usage simply meant that Coastal Republic officials like Judge Fang could not enter the Celestial Kingdom and arrest someone like Dr. X. So usually when they bothered to trace a criminal's higher connections at all, they simply drew an arrow up the page to a single character, consisting of a box with a vertical slash drawn down through the middle. The character meant Middle, as in Middle Kingdom, though for Judge Fang it had come to mean, simply, trouble.

At the House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel and other Judge Fang hangouts, the name of Dr. X had been pronounced more frequently in recent weeks. Dr. X had tried to bribe everyone on Judge Fang's hierarchy except for the Judge himself. Of course, the overtures had been made by people whose connection with Dr. X was tenuous in the extreme, and had been so subtle that most of those approached had not even realized what was happening until, days or weeks later, they had suddenly sat up in bed exclaiming,