“Hamlet’s dealing with a potentially damaging outbreak of reasonable behavior inside Othello,” said Mr. Fainset, a middle-aged man dressed in worn merchant navy garb. “He also said he needed to see Iago about something.”

“That’ll be about their Shakespeare spin-off play Iago v. Hamlet,” said the Red Queen, who was actually not a real queen at all but an anthropomorphized chess piece from Through the Looking Glass. “Does he really think he’s going to get the Council of Genres to agree to a thirty-ninth Shakespeare play?”

“Stranger things have happened.” Bradshaw sighed. “Where are Peter and Jane?”

“The new feline in The Tiger Who Came to Tea got stage fright,” said Lady Cavendish, “and after that they said they needed to deal with a troublesome brake van in The Twin Engines.”

“Very well,” said Bradshaw, tingling a small bell. “Jurisfiction meeting number 43,369 is now in session. Item One: The number of fictioneers trying to escape into the real world has increased this month. We’ve had seven attempts, all of them rebuffed. The Council of Genres has made it abundantly clear that this will not be tolerated without a Letter of Transit, and anyone caught moving across or attempting to move across will be reduced to text on sight.”

There was silence. I was the only one who crossed over on a regular basis, but no one liked the idea of reducing people to text, whether they deserved it or not. It was irreversible and the closest thing there was to death in the written world.

“I’m not saying you have to do that,” continued Bradshaw, “and I want you to pursue all other avenues before lethal force. But if it’s the only way, then that’s what you’ll do. Item Two: It’s been six months, and there’s still no sign of the final two volumes of The Good Soldier Švejk. If we don’t hear anything more, we’ll just bundle up the four volumes into one and reluctantly call it a day. Thursday, have you seen anything around the Well that might indicate they were stolen to order to be broken up for scrap?”

“None at all,” I replied, “but I spoke with our opposite number over at Jurisfiktivní, and he said they’d lost it over there, too.”

“That’s wonderful news!” breathed Bradshaw, much relieved.

“It is?”

“Yes—it’s someone else’s problem. Item Three: The inexplicable departure of comedy from the Thomas Hardy novels is still a cause for great concern.”

“Hadn’t we put a stop to that?” asked Emperor Zhark.

“Not at all,” replied Bradshaw. “We tried to have the comedy that was being leached out replaced by fresh comedy coming in, but because misery has a greater natural affinity for the Wessex novels, it always seems to gain the ascendancy. Hard to believe Jude the Obscure was once the most rip-roaringly funny novel in the English language, eh?”

I put up my hand.