by Frank Beddor
“I have never abandoned my training yet,” the Milliner said. “I will not start now.”
“I’ll go,” Dodge offered, but Alyss pretended not to hear him.
“Your past performances give me no cause to doubt you,” she said to Hatter, “but then, as far as you knew, nothing you’ve done before has ever involved your daughter. I don’t want to make a hasty decision. I want to use what little time we have to consider the smartest course of action.”
“Perhaps we should send the knight and rook with a company of chessmen?” General Doppelgänger suggested.
“Yes, and you can monitor their progress in your imagination’s eye,” said Bibwit. “If there are Ganmedes to negotiate with, I doubt they’ll refuse to talk with whomever we send.”
Alyss agreed. “If they do, I’ll be close enough to the Heart Crystal to combat them through my imagination. And while they’re occupied with saving their own lives…” she directed her words at Hatter, “…you can then lead a force to rescue Molly.”
The Milliner stood looking at his queen for a long moment. “If that is what you command, Your Majesty,” he said. But something was welling up inside him, something he had never felt before and that at any other time he would have tamped down with all the force of his formidable will: disobedience.
CHAPTER 23
THE REMAINS of the well-heeled audience were piled in the corner, the waiters taking longer than usual to sweep up the dust that had been the bones of Sacrenoir’s resurrected dead, too often pausing to glance at the man-cat and the ruinous woman in her dress of teeth-baring roses.
“Get to work!” Marcel scolded. “Unless you’d like Master Sacrenoir to treat his dead to a meal of your flesh?”
The waiters tried to focus on their brooms, but hardly a minute passed before they were again sneaking glances at the alcove next to the stage, where a scarlet cloud hung over the table, images flickering within it while the grim woman expounded to Vollrath and Sacrenoir:
“What you’re seeing is the moment my ill-judging mother informed me that I would not be queen,” Redd was saying.
In the cloud, images brought forth from her imagination flared and passed like lightning. A younger, less bitter-worn version of herself railed at Queen Theodora, who apparently didn’t appreciate being talked to in such a manner and walked off, leaving her daughter to steep in futile anger. The scene shifted to Redd marching up a spiral hall. She had aged, grown haggard from years of disdain, the line of her mouth set in a permanent frown of disgust.
“There I am, festering on Mount Isolation, my home in the Chessboard Desert, heir to a queendom reduced to an heir of insult and outrage.”
She watched herself step out onto a balcony atop Mount Isolation and begin to preach to the mercenary card soldiers and Black Imagination enthusiasts gathered below.
“Those are the nearly useless beings I called a military. It was all I could do to force them into a weak semblance of the army I deserve.”
Again, the scene changed. The walls of Heart Palace tumbled. Queen Genevieve’s card soldiers fell dead as Redd sauntered untouched through the battle of that long-ago day when her sister had been cut down from the throne. The Cat, sitting next to his mistress in the alcove, began to purr. But then the cloud revealed Genevieve’s private quarters, the blades of Hatter’s top hat catching the feline assassin unaware and costing him one of his lives. He saw what he’d not been able to see when it happened, lying there dead as he’d been: Hatter escaping into a looking glass with seven-year-old Alyss Heart, Redd imagining her knotty scepter into a scythe and beheading Genevieve.
“My niece escaped through the Pool of Tears,” Redd told Vollrath and Sacrenoir, “and for reasons I won’t go into, I believed her dead.” The next scenes passed quickly, as if she were growing impatient with the past. “After years of shaping Wonderland to my fickle will, as is my birthright, my niece had the gall to bubble up through the Pool of Tears, returning through a portal puddle she’d discovered here on Earth.”
The vast rooms of Mount Isolation took shape around twenty-year-old Alyss Heart, now become a rebel leader and dressed in the coarse-fibered clothes of the Alyssians. Beyond a half-destroyed wall, the Heart Crystal was visible. Aunt and niece faced each other, razor-cards, orb generators, and cannonball spiders rocketing between them. Alyss shot an energy spear from her finger, snagged Redd on the end of it, and began smashing her around the room. With a heave of imagination, Redd freed herself and closed with Alyss like a fighter ungifted in imagination who physically attacks her foes. Clangk! Scepters clashed, and just when Redd’s defeat seemed assured, she and The Cat dared what no Wonderlanders had ever dared before—a leap into the Heart Crystal.
“I’d had a cold that day and wasn’t as powerful as usual, otherwise Alyss would never have done so well,” Redd said as, in the alcove, the final image dissolved. She blew at the cloud and it drifted off into the crypt. “Has a malicious ruler ever suffered more? I think not.”
“There have been rumors that one might travel to Wonderland through certain puddles,” Vollrath said. “But until your mention of Alyss a moment ago, nobody, as far as I knew, had ever put the rumors to the test.”
Redd scoffed. “Why would they? What would any of you have returned to in my sister’s Wonderland but a skulking life in a society unappreciative of your talents? Nothing more than that awaits you even now, so long as Alyss remains queen. But your savior has arrived—me. For the first time, Wonderlanders reduced to living in this junk heap of a world have someone powerful enough to lead them back to their native home. And in exchange for helping me regain my crown, I will allow them to live free of whatever punishments were unfairly bestowed upon them by the narrow-minded courts of Wonderland.”
“I can think of a hundred souls in this city alone who’ll be eager to subjugate themselves to you,” said Sacrenoir.
Redd pushed away from the table and stood. “Take me to them. They will either pledge their allegiance to me—and if lucky, live through my impending war with Alyss’ forces—or I’ll kill them where they stand.”
“Your impatience is a virtue,” said Vollrath, his long ears tilting forward in supplication, “but to prevent your attracting too much attention from earthlings, you might want to consider a change of clothes. It’s unfortunate enough that you’re somewhat blurry around the edges, but in addition…well, a gown of animate roses is not exactly the fashion of the times.”
“You don’t like my dress?”
The vines of Redd’s couture stretched toward the tutor, the roses’ petal-mouths chomping.
“It isn’t that, Your Imperial Viciousness. The earthlings will not understand you. Not understanding you, they will be frightened and send their petty authorities to apprehend you.”
“Ha!”
“Of course they’ll fail. That isn’t the point. But you’ll have to waste energy dealing with them instead of concentrating on your niece’s destruction. I doubt that the way to achieve your aim is to spread your strength across many fronts so that, when it’s time to battle Alyss, you may not be at the peak of your powers. Your niece, I gather, shouldn’t be underestimated.”
Vollrath hadn’t graduated from the Tutor Corps for nothing. “I don’t like it when sound reasoning counters my wishes,” Redd hissed.
“I apologize, Your Imperial Viciousness, and will try not to let it happen too often. But you might also want to camouflage this rather intimidating feline creature with whom you travel.”
“The Cat is his own camouflage,” said Redd. And to The Cat: “Show them.”
The Cat shrunk down into a kitten, meowed, then morphed back into an imposing humanoid.
“Ingenious!” enthused Sacrenoir. “Your Imperial Viciousness, I will find you something suitable to wear from the clothes of my recent audience. Something not too ravaged and bloody.”
“I don’t mind blood so long as it isn’t mine.”
The magician returned with a gown that bore the marks of it
s previous owner’s demise: the lace was torn in parts, the once shimmering silk stained with dirt and worse.
“We will leave you while you dress,” Vollrath said, and pulled the alcove’s curtain shut to give Redd privacy.
At the foot of the stage, The Cat indulged a sudden urge to bathe himself. The waiters paused in their work to watch him, risking little now that Marcel was busy reviewing the night’s receipts with Sacrenoir. And though Vollrath too was staring at The Cat, he hardly saw the creature. He was recalling everything Redd had divulged of her history, mining the narrative for tidbits he could exploit to make himself ever more necessary to Mistress Heart, and thus, ever more deserving of reward. A vital piece of information seemed missing from all he’d heard. He approached the alcove and addressed Redd through the curtain:
“Your Imperial Viciousness, for my own edification, would you mind telling me when your mother removed you from succession? Was it before or after you had navigated your Looking Glass Maze?”
“Before,” Redd answered in a clenched voice. “But I would have navigated it if I’d had any underlings worth even a tenth of Bibwit Harte’s intellect. The key to the maze was in my hands, but no one could get it to work.”
Vollrath’s ears took on the aspect of little beings huddled against the cold. “Where did you find this key?”
“My seekers snatched it directly out of Alyss’ hands. She’d entered the maze. It’s the only reason I’m here. If I had entered it too, she wouldn’t have gotten the better of me at Mount Isolation. We would have both gained in strength from passing through it, instead of her alone.”
Redd’s lack of knowledge astounded the tutor. Did she really understand so little about how a Wonderland princess became queen?
“She doesn’t even know what she doesn’t know,” he mumbled, and then: “Your Imperial Viciousness, perhaps we should speak face-to-face, without this velvet barrier between us. Are you decent?”
“I’m never decent!”
The curtain was flung open and there she stood, a clash of opposites—the hate-infused pallor of her blemished skin and her spaghetti-wire hair at odds with a dress that was meant to be seen in lavish parlors, and which, despite its rips and bloodstains, still retained an aura of delicate creaminess.
“The gowns of the privileged class suit you,” Vollrath lied.
“If wearing this rag will in any way speed the process of gathering my future soldiers, then I will wear it. But if it doesn’t…”
Vollrath bowed. “I will subject myself to your temper.”
“You’ll have no choice.”
Again, Vollrath bowed. He knew how to humble himself before a potentially lucrative pupil.
“It’s time to leave this tomb,” Redd announced. “I want to be unofficially introduced into Earth society. Cat!”
The Cat devolved into a kitten and rubbed against her leg. She lifted him onto her shoulder and he perched with his claws digging into her skin to steady himself—the pricks of pain a comfort to this high priestess of Black Imagination. Sacrenoir issued instructions to Marcel for the disposal of his audience’s remains and, torch in hand, led Redd and Vollrath out of the theater crypt.
“Every would-be queen has a Looking Glass Maze, which they and they alone can enter,” Vollrath lectured Redd as they made their way through a catacomb to the open air of Paris. “Since you were in line to succeed your mother, there existed a Looking Glass Maze intended for you, and which, to tap the full potential of your imagination and become queen, you would have had to successfully navigate. You couldn’t operate the key to the Looking Glass Maze because it was the key to Alyss’ maze.”
“Alyss’ maze?”
“Indeed. Perhaps when my old colleague Bibwit tutored you as heir to the throne, he was remiss in his teachings. It wouldn’t surprise me, although it would likely surprise most Wonderlanders. Only a handful of times in Wonderland history has a princess failed to complete her maze, but you are the first to be removed from succession. However, with regard to the fate of a Looking Glass Maze, the result of both must be the same.”
“What force or being constructs these mazes?” Redd demanded.
“That is an important question, and the answer lies with those who can provide the answer to another, perhaps more pressing one: What happened to your Looking Glass Maze after you were removed from succession? I assure you, it did not cease to exist, and if you’re able to locate and navigate it…”
Redd understood. A maze intended solely for her, designed specifically to unharness the full power of her imagination? Alyss had gained surprising strength and skill by passing through her Looking Glass Maze. Yet she, Redd, had nearly conquered Alyss without passing through her own. The maze was everything. She would storm through as many of its false passages as necessary to complete it; she would become invincible.
“Earn your life, tutor. Where do I find my maze?”
“In the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes, of course. But where this garden is, I have no idea. You have to ask the oracles of Wonderland.”
“The caterpillars,” Redd sneered as a staircase of uneven stone came into view ahead of her. “I hate the caterpillars.”
Sacrenoir dropped his torch to the ground and kicked dirt over it to extinguish the flames. A slant of light shone down on the stairs from above. Redd led the way up to the street. It took several moments for her eyes to adjust to the harshness of the morning sun, but even then—
“What’s this?”
Everywhere she looked: Parisians enveloped in hazy nimbuses, some gray, others as purple-dark as bruises, while still others were more or less radiant with a whitish glow.
“To some Wonderland eyes,” Vollrath said, “those gifted in White Imagination glow brightly while those given to Black Imagination glow darkly. It’s more difficult to notice the dark glow at night time. It’s an excellent thing to be able to discern friends and enemies at a distance. The dark glow will make it easier for us to find the soldiers you desire. You should see the cloud that hovers around you, Your Imperial Viciousness. It’s a wonder you’re visible at all.”
Redd examined herself—her arms, her feet. Everything appeared as it had since she’d stepped from the painter’s canvas. No bruise-dark aura.
“Wonderlanders can’t see their own glow,” Vollrath explained, “for the same reason that they’re usually not good judges of their own behavior. They do not see how they actually are, only how they perceive themselves.”
Redd stared out at the passing clouds of people. The Cat, his tail swishing, nimbly crossed from her right shoulder to her left.
“You needn’t tramp about the city with us, Your Imperial Viciousness,” said Sacrenoir. “Let Vollrath and me gather our acquaintances so that you can review them as a group. This will save you labor and give you time to plot a search for your Looking Glass Maze.”
“An idea worthy of my tutelage,” agreed Vollrath. “Mistress Heart, you will, I think, be intrigued by the Hall of Mirrors in the Versailles Palace. Why not take in the sights Paris has to offer?”
“Because, tutor,” Redd snorted, “I’d sooner kill you.”
CHAPTER 24
DODGE, NOT usually one to linger over tokens of the past, was in his guardsman’s quarters picking over the few items he had salvaged from the former palace: a portrait of his father he’d drawn when he was eight years old, a dented broach that had belonged to his long-dead mother, and a packet of letters he’d written during Redd’s reign but never sent.
He set the portrait prominently on the mantel and moved the dining table in front of the glowing hearth, laying out two place settings and a pitcher of winglefruit juice. There was nothing left to do but wait.
“No talent for waiting,” he said to himself.
He had volunteered to go after the Diamonds and Alyss had ignored him. In front of everybody. He thought it important for her to understand a couple of things. He surveyed the room again, hoping to find some final preparation that needed doing, but al
l was in order.
Bleep, bleep bleep bleep, bleep.
His crystal communicator sounded with the agreed-upon signal. Any moment Alyss would be passing down the hall to the sovereign suite. He pulled smooth the sleeves of his guardsman’s coat and squared his shoulders, to appear as official as possible. He stepped to the door and out into the hall.
“Queen Alyss, my guards have discovered something I think you should see.”
Her face had relaxed at the sight of him, but her brow at once contracted, her lips thinned with tension.
“We’ve found evidence of suspicious activity in the palace,” he said.
“What sort of activity?”
“You might want to step this way and see for yourself. I apologize in advance for your having to set foot in a guardsman’s quarters.”
He led her into his rooms. The boyish portrait of Sir Justice, the fire crystals in the hearth, the elegantly arrayed table: Alyss blinked in puzzlement.
“What is all this?”
“My best guess, Your Majesty, is that it’s breakfast, but I can’t be sure until we taste it.”
Which was when she realized. “Dodge,” she said quietly.
A guardsman entered carrying a pair of covered serving dishes, set them on the table and departed. Dodge pulled out a chair for Alyss and, once she was seated, assumed the role of gallant host.
“On platter number one,” he said, “we have what I believe is your favorite—Chef Blanchaud’s mysterious hash, which I agree is delicious even if we don’t know what’s in it.” He lifted the cover of the serving dish and steam escaped toward the ceiling. “On platter number two…” he removed the cover of the second dish with a flourish, “…we have half-baked cakes with choco-nibblies.”