by Frank Beddor
CHAPTER 36
WHEREAS OTHERS would have stood gazing down upon the valley in silent awe at the gigantic, multicolored mushrooms and remarked that even the quality of the valley’s light seemed more vibrant than it did anywhere else, Redd started the final descent into the caterpillars’ habitat without pause or murmur. Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire tramped after her—Siren and Alistaire muting their amazement at a vista unlike any they had ever seen, The Cat stewing in worry because the valley had fully recovered from the devastation his mistress had ordered in her first months as Wonderland’s queen. It wasn’t supposed to have recovered and Redd might punish him.
But Her Imperial Viciousness had other concerns as she stepped along the valley’s spongy floor, searching for the caterpillar-oracles in her imagination. The mushrooms were serving as a sort of cloaking network, deflecting her imaginative sight every which way so that all she saw were mulch and stalks and mushroom tops.
“We’ll have to draw them out,” she said, conjuring a vendor’s cart filled with fresh, aromatic tarty tarts in a variety of flavors.
Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire fanned the delicious scents out in all directions, and in less time than it would have taken a hungry Wonderland child to eat a single tarty tart—
“There!” Vollrath exclaimed, pointing to a blue smoke cloud that formed a beckoning hand.
They followed the hand to a nearby clearing, where the members of the caterpillar counsel sat with their bodies coiled beneath them as they puffed on the same antique hookah. Each of the caterpillars occupied a mushroom as distinct in color as himself: blue, orange, red, yellow, purple, and green.
“Mmm, tarty tarts to munch,” Blue said.
Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire began handing out the treats.
“I get the vanilla ones with gobbygrape filling!” called the yellow caterpillar.
“I want vanilla!” whined the orange caterpillar.
“Anything with choco-nibblies is mine!” the purple caterpillar cried.
“I get the choco-nibbly ones!” complained the red caterpillar.
“Ahem hum, I’ll trade two caramel tarties for one of the sugar-dusted winglefruit-filled,” Blue offered.
“No way!” rebuffed the green caterpillar.
It was one of the most difficult things Redd ever had to do: stand polite and respectful while the larvae bickered like brats and stuffed their wrinkled faces, dropping crumbs and jellied filling onto their mushrooms. When they were no longer shoving three tarts into their mouths at once but nibbling one at a time, she said, “Wise, ancient caterpillars, my tutor, Vollrath, has informed me that for many years I’ve been remiss in not passing through my Looking Glass Maze.”
The red and yellow caterpillars were mouthing Redd’s words as she spoke them, and the orange caterpillar motioned with his numerous right legs for Her Imperial Viciousness to get on with it.
“It’s a circumstance I want to correct,” Redd said. “I already know that my maze is located in the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes, but I need you to tell me where the garden is.”
“Yadda, yadda,” said the purple caterpillar. “Yadda, yadda, yaddda.”
“The question is not where the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes is but when,” Blue grumbled, his mouth full of caramel.
“When the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes is?” the orange caterpillar asked, doubtful.
“That’s the question!” exclaimed the red caterpillar.
The oracles giggled and fell silent, alternately munching their tarty tarts and puffing on their hookah. Finally, with a look of exasperation, the yellow caterpillar said to Redd, “Du-uh. We’re waiting for you to ask the question!”
Redd balled her hands into fists. “When is the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes?” she rasped.
“Oh, now and then, now and then,” Blue answered, upon which all of the caterpillars shook with loud laughter—all except Green, who continued to munch a tarty tart and blink at Redd with an appraising, curious expression.
Unable to hold back any longer, Redd aimed her crooked stick at them as if it were a rifle or bayonet and—
Foo-foo-foo-foo-foo-foosh!
Fireballs shot out. The caterpillars’ six mushrooms erupted. Flames licked the sky, sizzled out as quickly as they’d come. The mushrooms had been charred black, but there was no sign of the caterpillars.
“Idiots! Useless idiots!” Redd shouted.
Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire dropped to the ground and covered their heads as she lashed out at the landscape, conjuring orb generators, crystal shot, and flaming spears. A shadow fell over them as an enormous scythe formed in the air and began to swing, lopping mushrooms flat. But at the very height of the violence—the exploding fungi, the thousand razor-cards shredding mushroom stalks—Redd felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned and there was the green caterpillar, nonchalantly puffing on a small hookah. Redd held up a hand; the outsized scythe paused mid-swing, the orb generators and razor-cards and flaming spears hung suspended in mid-flight.
“The Garden of Uncompleted Mazes exists in the could-have-been,” the oracle said. “What could have been was then. But it is also now. Do you understand?”
“I don’t want to understand. Tell me where the garden is or you will lose the valley forever.”
The caterpillar pulled at his water pipe and considered the renegade princess before him: the hate-infused creases of her toughened skin; the knotty hair; the gown of rose vines in constant slithery motion. At length, he said, “To get there, it is necessary for you to think back to the precise moment when your becoming queen—a thing to be—became a could-have-been. Let your mind be wholly absorbed in that moment. Give yourself up to it. Reexperience it in all of its emotional devastation. Once you accomplish this, you will see, somewhere in the rear of the memory, a small door. Through this door, you will find the garden.”
Redd was suspicious. “Why are you telling me this when the others didn’t?”
“Let’s just say, it gives me something to do.”
The caterpillar exhaled a cloud of green smoke. It enveloped Redd and the others, and when they awoke, they were alone.
CHAPTER 37
PARTING FROM Redd, Jack of Diamonds had lumbered breathlessly into the first encampment that fell in his way.
“Your leader!” he’d said to the Gnobi tribespeople lolling about. “It’s important that I speak to your leader immediately! Your future freedom depends on it!”
The Gnobi, when not roused to violence, were a sluggish clan, the least nomadic of Boarderland’s tribes. Not sensing any immediate threat to their freedoms in the person of Jack Diamond, they had responded to his urgency with characteristic listlessness.
“Myrval’s tent is somewhere that way,” one of them had said with a vague wave of the hand.
“Follow the sound of the snoring and you’ll find it,” another had suggested.
But there had been a fair amount of snoring to be heard in the camp, and not until Jack had roused several civilians from their naps did he catch sight of the only tent with a pennant flying from its roof and two males asleep on stools at its entrance.
“Guards,” he’d said to himself.
He had marched past the slumbering guardsmen and, in the tent’s front room, discovered five more sleeping guards—two slumped on chairs, two curled up on floor mats, and one snoring on his feet. What Jack had come upon was no less than a festival of snoring, a riot of honking inhalations, snotty exhalations, and inarticulate mutterings. But louder than all of these, coming from the back room: the wail of an ailing jabberwock. Jack had stepped into the back room and seen a lone figure asleep on a cot.
“Myrval!” he’d called, unsure, which had caused the sleeper to groan and roll toward the wall.
“I’m an emissary of Redd Heart, former and future queen of Wonderland,” Jack had said, shaking the Gnobi leader awake. “She has sent me here with a proposal that can guarantee future peace and freedom for the Gno
bi tribe—for all of Boarderland’s tribes. But it’s a—”
“That’s nice of Miss Heart to think of us,” Myrval had mumbled, and again closed his eyes.
“We must arrange a gathering of the tribal leaders to discuss the details of Mistress Heart’s proposal, a summit.”
“You can arrange what you like. I have nothing against nineteen of the twenty other leaders, but Gerte, who heads the Onu tribe, insulted my daughter. He’s an abomination and I will never meet with him unless he is to apologize.”
Jack had been about to promise this and anything else when Myrval yawned, “The Gnobi and Onu are on the verge of war.”
Jack had had similar trouble with the rest of the tribal leaders, each citing one of their number with whom they refused to have any dealings that did not involve bloodshed. Several of them also took offense at Jack’s not having physically visited their camps to request their attendance at the summit, seeing in this his favoritism of the Gnobi tribe. But Jack of Diamonds had exercised his powers of persuasion to the utmost. At last able to convince the twenty-one leaders to talk, he was now in one of Myrval’s conference tents, with Myrval seated on his left, a fire pit glowing in front of him, and the faces of the other leaders on screens around the pit.
“What I have already said to each of you singly,” Jack began, “I repeat to you now that we’re together. You are made subordinate to King Arch by the antagonisms he invents to keep you at war with one another. He does this to prevent you from joining together to fight his forces, knowing that he doesn’t have the military power to defeat you if you formed a coalition against him.”
“That’s insane,” said the Sirk leader. “Just yesterday, I got word from a reliable spy that the Fel Creel are gathering beyond the pale hills in preparation for an attack against us.”
“That’s your justification for the attack my reliable spy says you are planning!” shouted the Fel Creel leader.
“We planned no attack until we learned that you were.”
“Ditto!”
“This proves what I’ve been saying,” Jack interrupted. “It’s obvious that neither of you would be attacking the other if not for the ‘intelligence’ you received. The Sirk tribespeople would go about their peaceful business and the Fel Creel would go about theirs.”
“Right!” said the Sirk and Fel Creel leaders.
“But the intelligence you both received was false,” Jack explained. “It came directly from King Arch in order to put you at deadly odds. Just as the ‘intelligence’ the Catabrac received of an impending ambush by the Shifog was false, as was the report the Shifog received of the Catabrac stockpiling weapons to annihilate them.”
The Catabrac and Shifog leaders mumbled in surprise; neither had mentioned these intelligence reports outside of their own tight-lipped clans.
Jack turned to the Gnobi leader. “And Myrval, I assure you, Gerte of the Onu tribe never said your daughter looks as if she’s been put together out of spirit-dane droppings and that her personality is just as foul as her person. I was there when King Arch thought up that particular bit of ugliness.”
Myrval said nothing. Each tribal leader was glancing at every other, unsure what to believe.
“He might be speaking the truth,” said the Maldoid leader.
“How else could he know the exact wording of the insult?” Myrval answered. “I have never repeated it, not even to Gerte, who I assumed recalled his own foul words.”
“I’m glad to see that I’m gaining credibility,” Jack said. “Now, as Redd Heart’s emissary, I’ve come to propose that you all unite under Redd to battle Arch. King Arch will be defeated and, in exchange for helping you take control of Boarderland to govern equally among you, Redd asks only that you fight under her command for another teensy little war with the forces of Alyss Heart, so that she can regain control of Wonderland.”
“Excuse me,” said Myrval, “but now that you have informed us of Arch’s methods, why should we fight under Redd’s command when we can battle Arch without her help?”
“Because,” Jack said, “to fight Arch on your own, you will be required to choose a leader from among you. I’m just guessing, but I think there’ll be more than a little argument over which of you is best fit to lead the others. With Redd at your head, you are all equal.”
“With Redd at our head, we are all equal,” repeated the Maldoid leader, encouraged.
“Redd Heart is not known for being trustworthy,” said the leader of the Awr tribe. “But even supposing that we agree to this proposal, and that she leaves Boarderland under our control as she promises, we would still have to contend with her as our neighbor. She would make a dangerous neighbor.”
“She ruled Wonderland for thirteen years without causing Arch much trouble,” Jack said. “I urge you not to let this opportunity for true freedom pass.”
“And why is Redd suddenly so concerned about our freedom?” asked the Kalaman leader.
“Her Imperial Viciousness is primarily occupied with regaining her crown. The easiest way to accomplish this is to engage you all as her mercenary army. Happily, you stand to benefit from the arrangement as much as she does.”
“We would like to discuss the matter in private,” said the Glebog leader.
“Of course.” Jack rose to depart. “But allow me to say one more thing before I leave you to your decision. If you accept Redd’s proposal, you face the uncertainty of a future that you will, at the very least, have some power to shape. But if you reject the proposal, you’re doomed to remain as you are, with only the freedom to fight against one another for as long as Arch lives.”
Jack stepped from the tent, his words—the wisest he’d ever uttered in his life—lingering after him.
CHAPTER 38
ALYSS AND her advisers were gathered in the palace’s war room, Alyss shifting uneasily in her seat as Dodge and the others tried to decipher what they thought was the entirety of Blue’s message.
“He said he would teach you about yourself,” Bibwit questioned thoughtfully, “but then you didn’t appear in anything he showed you?”
Alyss nodded.
“Most curious.”
“I don’t like it,” General Doppelgänger said, and began punching buttons on the crystal communicator’s control pad strapped to his forearm.
Zzzz! Flink! Zzzz! Flink!
From the vision nozzle on the general’s ammo belt, real-time images of Ten Cards stationed at outposts throughout the queendom were projected onto the air. No sign of trouble, every lieutenant reported, or of anything unusual. But then a Ten Card posted in Outerwilderbeastia caught sight of Bibwit.
“Back already, Mr. Harte? I knew the tutor species was fast, but not that fast.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Bibwit asked.
“Just one quarter of a lunar hour ago I saw you hurrying toward the demarcation barrier. I assumed you were on some scholarly pilgrimage to Boarderland, as you were headed directly for gate crossing 15-b.”
Bibwit’s ears danced a dance of perplexity atop his head. “Was I…alone?”
“I didn’t get much of a look at the others. Being so pale, you stand out against Outerwilderbeastia’s vines, you know.”
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure I do,” Bibwit said absently.
“Your Majesty.” The Ten Card bowed to Alyss. “General.” The Ten Card saluted and his image dissolved.
“I’m starting to get a bad feeling,” the tutor said.
“Starting to?” Dodge guffawed.
The general’s crystal communicator beeped. He pressed a button on its keypad and an image of the white knight formed in front of him.
“General, all the soldiers guarding the pool are dead,” the knight reported.
Dodge was instantly on his feet, checking his weapons—the ammo clip in his crystal shooter, the trigger of his AD52. “Any evidence of The Cat?” he asked. “Slash marks or anything like that?”
“Hard to tell what exactly killed them.”
Beep
, beep beep. The general again pressed his communicator’s keypad and an image of the white rook appeared next to the knight.
“Listen,” the rook said.
After several moments the general frowned. “I hear only silence.”
“Yeah, and I’m standing in the Whispering Woods,” said the rook. “Every mouth here has been glued shut.”
Bibwit was tugging on an ear, his brow as furrowed as a rumpled bedsheet. “In the scheme of all that is conceivable,” he said, “it’s possible that another villain might be responsible for the deaths at the pool, but it would be irresponsible of us not to assume the worst—by which I mean, that Redd has returned.”
“Already there, Bibwit.” Dodge was checking his supply of razor cartridges and whipsnake grenades. “What’s the plan, General?”
“It’s difficult to prepare adequately when we don’t know where the front line is. Or the enemy.”
“All of Wonderland is the front line,” Dodge countered. “The enemy could show herself anywhere at any time.”
He was being careful not to look at Alyss—the exact opposite of Bibwit, who was watching her intently, almost as if, with his acute hearing, he could hear her mounting discomfort.
A responsible queen would probably be searching for Redd in her imagination. But a responsible queen wouldn’t have let her advisers believe she’d told them the whole of Blue’s message.
Her parents’ words nagged at her conscience: Her duty was to secure the greatest good for the greatest number; she could not put Wonderland at risk to save a single citizen.
I must own the truth. For the queendom. For myself.
“I think,” Alyss said suddenly, “I would like to go over again what Blue presented to me.”
Confusion showed on the faces of Dodge and the general, but Bibwit looked as if he’d been afraid of this. “Yes?” he said.
“Blue told me that he, an unnaturally large caterpillar, would reveal to me that of myself which yet I know not. I’m pretty sure those were his exact words. He showed me Arch pulling on the whisker of a colorless caterpillar, but before that…” her eyes swiveled to Dodge, “…he showed me Redd.”