by Frank Beddor
“Why didn’t you say so before, Alyss?” Bibwit asked.
“I don’t know.” She and Dodge were looking steadily at each other now. “It was wrong of me not to say anything.”
“What did he show you of Redd?” asked General Doppelgänger.
Dodge had turned away, needlessly adjusting the hang of his thigh holster.
“I saw her fumbling with a crystal shaped like a door key,” Alyss said. “She was with a tutor. And I saw her gripping something that looked like an old, much neglected scepter.”
Bibwit groaned. “It’s worse than I thought,” he said. “Much, much worse. Alyss, I haven’t had the luxury of educating you as fully as I would’ve done in a time of peace. Certain finer points of monarchical theory I either summarized or skipped altogether. As I did with certain historical details or facts I have hoped would be irrelevant. Of this last sort are particulars related to Looking Glass Mazes. I neglected to tell you every little thing about them—everything that is known, I should say. But I see now that my neglect was the result of my own wishful thinking. I’ve been hoping that if I did not name the possibility, if I ignored it, it would not exist.”
“The possibility of what, Bibwit? No one has any idea what you’re talking about.”
“I was certain that if Redd returned in a recognizable form, she would never discover it on her own. I hadn’t counted on her uniting with one of my species and actually learning anything. But assuming Redd has returned, I fear that the tutor the Ten Card mistook for me was, in fact, Vollrath—one of my kind who long ago succumbed to Black Imagination and had to fling himself into the Pool of Tears. I’ve always assumed that he’s been causing trouble on Earth, and Blue’s warning to you, Alyss, makes it plain: If Redd has not accomplished it already, she intends to enter her Looking Glass Maze. The tutor must have told her about it. She will retrieve her scepter and, in doing so, become stronger than before.”
“I don’t understand,” Alyss said. “I’ve already navigated the maze.”
“What difference does any of this make?” Dodge asked Bibwit. “Redd is back and we’re not going to surrender to her, no matter what. As long as we don’t underestimate her capacity for blood and mayhem—”
“It might be impossible for us to do anything but underestimate her, such could be her strength. Alyss, I will explain all, but we must confirm whether or not Redd is among us, and whether what Blue showed you of Redd with her scepter is the future or the past. If the future, it may still be prevented. If the past…I’d rather not think about it. General?”
“It should be coming online now, Bibwit.”
Doppelgänger had activated the holo-crystals embedded in the demarcation barrier’s pylons at gate crossing 15-b. Real-time images of both Boarderland and Outerwilderbeastia appeared on screens in the war room.
“What’s that?” Dodge asked, seeing movement in the distance of the Boarderland terrain.
General Doppelgänger directed the holo-crystal to zoom in, and there, by an outcropping of rock as if waiting for someone, were a male and female of no known Boarderland tribe. They might have been Wonderlanders. Then again, they might have been earthlings. The third figure, however, with his long ears and nearly translucent complexion, was unmistakable.
“That,” Bibwit said, “is Vollrath.”
Just then, Redd’s only feline assassin stepped around a boulder into view.
“The Cat,” Dodge whispered. He had thought himself prepared, but the actual sight of his father’s murderer—smudged somehow, as if seen through a greasy window—made all of his earlier professed hopes for self-restraint now sound hollow, false.
“Dodge?” Alyss said, watching the hand with which he gripped the handle of his father’s sword. It was shaking.
“Dodge?”
But he was no longer with her. His world could fit only two: himself and The Cat.
CHAPTER 39
REDD WOULD have preferred to be in the Chessboard Desert, within sight of Mount Isolation, the better to recall that long-ago day in all its heart-twisting gall. But every moment she remained in Wonderland without an army to support her was a risk; Alyss could sight her at any time. So she made use of the corrupt border guard introduced to her by Jack of Diamonds, and led Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire back into Arch’s kingdom.
She wanted a location unexposed to elements and enemies alike, a refuge where she would not be bothered with present threats or concerns. Half a lunar hour’s walk from the demarcation barrier, she found it: a natural sculpture of heavy granite slabs and boulders thrown up by the land’s shifting tectonic plates.
“No one had better disturb me,” Redd warned.
“No one will,” said The Cat.
“We’ll be standing watch, Your Imperial Viciousness,” Vollrath promised. “You’ll have all the time and peace you need.”
Redd slipped between a pair of boulders into a sort of room—roofless, with walls of pockmarked rock. She sat on the ground and closed her eyes. It took awhile; to forget or mentally shunt aside all thoughts of the present, the now, was not so easy. But after a few superficial dips into the well of memory, she was there again, living it—a seventeen-year-old princess, wild-eyed and tipsy from indulging in artificial crystal, sneaking home from forbidden fun with young Arch of Boarderland. Her parents, Queen Theodora and King Tyman, were waiting for her in her bedroom.
“It’s late, Rose,” Theodora sighed.
“It’s so late, it’s early,” said Tyman as he pulled back a curtain to let in the morning sun.
“Always so quick with the blatantly obvious, aren’t you, father?” Redd began to undress, turning away from her parents to avoid having to explain her bloodshot eyes.
“Rose,” Theodora said to her backside, “I don’t know if we’ve somehow failed you as parents or if your behavior comes from chemical imbalances brought on by your ferocious decadence. But your constant disobedience—not only of me and your father but of the queendom’s most basic laws, as if these should apply to everybody else but not to you—your disregard of even common civilities, and your utter lack of respect for how government works…you’re far beyond merely alienating those you would need to help you govern effectively.”
“It is they who’ve alienated me!” Redd shouted, spinning round.
“Raising your voice will accomplish nothing.”
“Rose, have you been…ingesting artificial crystal?” Tyman asked.
“Don’t be stupid, father.”
“In any case,” Theodora went on, “I don’t see how you can effectively govern a nation when you are unable to govern yourself. I’m sorry. But you’re not to be queen.”
Redd laughed. “Of course I am, mother. I’m the eldest; I’m the heir. Nothing can change that.”
“I can change it. Your imagination might be as powerful as you believe—certainly you would have made a formidable monarch. But partaking more of Black Imagination than White as you do, I’m removing you from succession. Genevieve is to be queen.”
“Genevieve!”
Objects in the room became suddenly kinetic—jewelry cases, books, holo-crystals, and end tables shot from their usual places and smashed against one another.
“And we think it best,” Tyman said, ducking to avoid a flying lamp that shattered against a wardrobe, “if you live on Mount Isolation for a time.”
“That rotten old place?”
“We’re hopeful that living in relative isolation will have a sobering effect on you,” Theodora explained. “You will not have the same amenities there as you enjoy here and, we hope, less opportunity to indulge your ruder appetites.”
A phalanx of chessmen marched into the room.
“What’s this, an escort to my new home?” Redd jeered. “I could send these mediocrities to oblivion with a single strike of my imagination.”
“You forget, Rose, that I have powers of imagination too,” Theodora warned. “And I am more practiced in the use of them. You will kill no on
e, though if you so much as try, I assure you, for all intents and purposes, you will be as good as dead to your father and me.”
“This hurts us as much as it hurts you,” Tyman said.
“Not yet it doesn’t, my dear dim father. But it will. It will hurt you both much worse, I swear.”
Redd threw her clothes back on and was about to stomp out of the room and through the palace halls, exploding bookcases, vases, statuettes, candelabra—everything she passed—with her imagination. This was what she’d done in actuality, but now, reliving the scene in her memory, she turned and saw, past the chessmen waiting to escort her from the premises, a door where no door had ever been. It was connected to no wall—to nothing, in fact—and the top of it reached only as high as her bosom. She elbowed through the chessmen and approached it. She pushed it open, unable to see what lay beyond. No matter. Her whole future was staked on stepping through…
Most gardens are recognizable by their array of flowers and other plantings, but whoever or whatever had named the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes obviously hadn’t set foot in it. What passed for sky was blackness, void. The ground was as smooth as some never-seen-before gemstone and resembled the surface of a petrified sea. Eleven crystal cubes, identical to the key to Alyss’ Looking Glass Maze in everything except size, were rooted in the curious ground, each at a single point so that they seemed to be balancing precariously. Even the smallest of the cubes was taller than Redd.
Her Imperial Viciousness approached the one nearest her, reached toward its glossy surfaces and—
Plink! Her fingers came up against its cold solidity. She punched and knocked at the cube’s six sides. Nothing. It would not let her in. At the next four cubes, she did the same—pressed and knocked on their sides, explored every sparkling cranny, every luminescent crevice in search of the lever or button that would provide access to her maze.
Then she realized: Her impatience had made her dim. Her key would be the smallest of the eleven, the one that had had the least time to grow.
It was several spirit-dane-lengths in front of her. She started to run. Not knowing why or what she planned to do, she ran directly toward the cube.
Fssst!
She was standing in her maze, her own face sneering back at her from the countless, dust-filmed looking glasses that surrounded her.
“I’ve come!” she yelled, the words ricocheting off the cloudy glasses without cease or loss of volume. Consonants jarred, vowels overlapped. The noise pained her ears, but what did she care? She would endure anything. She had made it this far. She would not leave until she had found what she’d come for.
In every direction, mirrored corridors branched off into the maze’s dusky reaches. She tried to locate the scepter in her imagination’s eye, but her powers were useless. She would have to find it the old-fashioned way, by scouring every gwormmy-length of every corridor.
“Not much of a maze, are you?” she muttered, because she had discovered that she could step through the looking glasses without consequence. It was as if she were in a giant room, the mirrored halls the ghostly residue of the intricacy it had once contained.
“How dare you, when I’m smarter and more imaginative than you!” a girlish incarnation of herself hissed. The night she’d murdered her mother played out in a glass. But mostly, phantasms of the past kept to the edge of her senses, half heard, half seen.
Then she spotted it, lying up ahead as if it were nothing but a useless stick someone had dropped in her hurry to leave. A once brightly colored staff, it had rotted black with age. The heart at its top was shriveled and gray, its filigree flaked and rusted—the scepter’s abandonment like that she had suffered from her parents.
“And they had the impudence to blame me!” Redd shouted, her mind again spiraling into the memory of that distant day that had changed everything.
“It’s your own fault, Rose,” Theodora had said. “You refuse to listen to anyone’s counsel but your own, and you insist on being so undisciplined, disregarding the most basic principles of White Imagination.”
“Perhaps I have discipline in other things!” Redd had spat.
“That’s what I’m afraid of. You’ve already scared a number of important Wonderlanders.”
Redd shook the memory out of her head. Her fingers closed around the scepter, giving her access to the full potential of her imaginative powers. She was the strongest Heart alive. Soon, she would be the only Heart alive.
CHAPTER 40
SHE HAD stopped trying to fight, only daring to move her mouth so as not to be knocked flat by the drug-delivery system the ministers refused to remove. Her brain was still woozy from the last dosing, when she’d tried to prevent one of King Arch’s wives from clipping a bauble to her ear.
“You should let your hair grow,” the wife said now, flicking at Molly’s short-cropped bangs with a manicured hand.
“I like my hair the way it is.”
She had kept it short because of her work as Milliner and Queen Alyss’ bodyguard. It could have compromised her; a combatant might have snagged hold of long hair in a fight. But she didn’t have to worry about any of that now, did she? She’d given up her post. She probably deserved this humiliation for the deadly mistake she’d made—having to sit unmoving with Arch’s wives gathered around her, applying rouges and powders to her cheeks, coloring her lips, and dolling her up in their bracelets and necklaces.
“You could be pretty if you tried,” said another wife, coming at her with an eyelash brush.
The wives stepped back to appraise her.
“Much better,” one of them said.
“Now maybe you won’t scare prospective husbands off,” said another.
But Molly couldn’t care less about prospective husbands. She had noticed, in the rear wall of the tent, a slit that hadn’t been there before…as if made by the skillful swing of a blade.
Before being sent to engage WILMA, Hatter had already searched most of the Doomsine encampment for evidence of his daughter. Disguised as a day laborer, he now did quick reconnaissance of the few unexplored neighborhoods that still remained, but found nothing, Molly’s whereabouts as unknown to him as ever.
He would have to start over. He’d never be able to search the entire camp a second time. He squinted up at the sky—little more than one revolution of the Thurmite moon before the time allowed for his WILMA mission expired. All he could do was hope. And move fast, but not so fast that he attracted suspicion.
Head lowered, making the most of his peripheral vision, Hatter huffed along recently visited streets and alleys. At a market stall selling fresh herbs and vegetables, he saw two of Arch’s personal chefs. The sight of them, royal servants out among the common folk, served as a jolt to his senses. How could he have been so remiss? He had searched everywhere for Molly except the royal enclave in which he himself had been living—among the tents of Arch’s personal retinue. He had always assumed that the king would keep Molly close, but that close?
He made his way to Arch’s tent at the center of camp, where the threat of being recognized was greater than anywhere else, and had barely begun his hunt when—
“Are you in need of work, laborer?”
It was Weaver. He bowed his head to indicate that he was, not wanting to risk letting his voice be heard.
“I have some furniture that needs to be moved. I can pay you a necklace of beaded quartz and a hot meal.”
He followed Weaver out of the main thoroughfare to her tent. Swallowing her sobs, she spoke in a desperate whisper.
“They said you’d gone, and I…You were right. You’ve been right all along. I overhead Arch talking about Molly. I should’ve believed you sooner, I—”
“Sshh, Weaver. Sshh, you wanted what you thought was best for Molly, for all of us. You have no cause to blame yourself. Do you know where she is?”
Weaver stepped back and wiped her cheeks. “I’m not sure. His ministers take turns visiting one of the wives’ tents. I doubt Arch would let the
m if their business had anything to do with his wives.”
“Show me which tent.”
She was about to step out to the street, but he touched her arm to stop her. “How did you recognize me?”
“I’ll always know you. The way you walk is as familiar to me as my own thoughts, even after so many years.”
Hatter nodded. But if she could spot him so easily, others might not have a difficult time of it. Still, there was nothing he could do about it now.
“Show me where Molly’s being kept.”
Weaver, walking ahead of him as instructed, indicated the wives’ tent with a slight turn of the head and continued past. Hatter ducked around to the back, to a small space with enough room only to stake and unstake the tent supports. He tapped his belt buckle, the sabers of his belt snapped open, and he quickly sliced a small gash in the canvas. He tapped his belt buckle again and the sabers retracted. He peered through the slit he’d made into the tent. Among the thirteen wives who lounged on voluptuous pillows and lush silks, he saw her: guarded by a pair of intel ministers, sitting glum and alone in the corner. She was without her homburg and dressed in pink clothes he’d never seen before.
Weaver was waiting for him in her tent.
“She’s there,” he said. “I’ve only got my wrist-blades and my belt. Do you have access to weapons?”
“I’ve heard of a dealer in the Kyla district. Contraband. But—”
“If our daughter’s to live, we have to find him.”
CHAPTER 41
CHESSMEN GUARDED the palace’s perimeter, card soldiers had been dispatched to key points in Wondertropolis, and military outposts throughout the queendom were put on alert. In the palace’s war room, the screens showing Vollrath, The Cat, and the two unidentified strangers blinked on and off as if from a momentary power failure. Before the failure, Vollrath and the others were visible; afterward, they were gone.