by Frank Beddor
Jack of Diamonds leaped up on his chair and pointed a stubby finger at Dodge. “He dared strike my royal person and he kidnapped Princess Alyss, and you can see by the dirt on their shoes that they left the palace! I demand that the commoner be deported to the Crystal Mines!”
The suit families all started talking at once, grumbling their displeasure, guffawing in disbelief. “Everyone, please calm down,” said Queen Genevieve. “Bibwit, is this true?”
“Not precisely,” answered Bibwit. “But I’m afraid the children did leave palace grounds momentarily.”
“Dodge Anders!” bellowed Sir Justice. “You get over here right this minute!” “Yes, sir.”
“The Crystal Mines!” Jack insisted, biting into a tarty tart and spewing a mouthful of crumbs into the
Lady of Spades’ hair.
The Lord of Diamonds stood up, as if making an announcement in court. “Good and kind Queen, I expect an increase in lands and tithes as a result of this unfortunate occurrence. My family’s name has been tarnished beyond recognition by my son’s treatment at the hands of this…this…boy!” He gestured at Dodge.
The Lady of Clubs whispered into her husband’s ear, “His family’s name’s suffered more harm from his own boy than any other.”
The Lord of Clubs snorted with laughter.
“Hear, hear!” demanded the Lord of Spades, rising from his chair. “If the Diamonds receive more land and money, so do we!”
Queen Genevieve was getting a headache. “There will be no increase in lands or tithes for anybody.” The families protested, their voices rising in heated debate. Alyss’ kitten trotted into the room.
“My cat!” Alyss cried. The room went quiet.
“Your-?” Queen Genevieve said, but that was all she got out before a deep rumbling shook the palace, goblets and chandeliers trembled, and the kitten began a gruesome transformation, its limbs stretching
and expanding until it stood on two muscled legs, its forelegs having become two lean and powerful arms and its front paws thick, with claws as sharp and long and wide as butcher’s knives. Its face remained catlike, with a flat pink nose, whiskers, and slobbery fangs. This was no adorable little kitten. This was The Cat-Redd’s top assassin, part human, part feline.
Before General Doppelganger or Sir Justice Anders had time to act, before even Hatter Madigan could tumble into blade-spinning action, there came shouts and an explosion from outside the dining room. The heavy double doors blew apart, a wall crumbled, and a horde of Redd’s card soldiers charged through the blasted opening with swords raised.
Standing amid the crumbled stone and splinters of wood was a nightmare version of Genevieve, a woman
Alyss had never seen before.
“Off with their heads!” the woman screamed. “Off with their stinking, boring heads!”
CHAPTER 9
T RAINING THE soldiers had taken time, effort. It disgusted Redd how many fools claimed to be practitioners of Black Imagination but didn’t realize the amount of work needed to become halfway decent at it. Or they lacked the ambition, the spurs of vengeance and fuming hatred, that helped Black Imagination flower within them. But these had never been the most disciplined members of the queendom. Not only had Redd been banished from Wonderland years ago, forced to live in a grubby fortress on Mount Isolation in the middle of the Chessboard Desert-acres of icy snow alternating with acres of tar and black rock, forming what looked from the air like a giant chessboard-not only this, but
she’d had to piece together a military force out of deserters, mercenaries, cutthroats. A good many of these had been Twos and Threes in the Wonderland Deck, card soldiers who were little more than bodies to be thrown in front of incoming cannonball spiders and generator orbs, doomed to die. Luckily, Redd also had Fours, Fives, and Sixes at her disposal, and a ragtag group of ex-Wonderlanders who’d never been part of the Deck at all but who hadn’t felt at home living in bright, happy Wonderland.
But how many times in the past fistful of years had she toured her training camps in the hope of witnessing the glory of a budding war machine with ranks of well-trained soldiers eager for bloodshed? 347. And how many times had she been disappointed, seeing only misfits engaged in sloppy, inefficient military maneuvers? 346. She once came upon a Six Card, a lieutenant, yelling at some idiot Two who was cradling a cute, fuzzy guinea pig.
“I tell you to think black thoughts and you come up with that!?” the lieutenant had screamed. “Is a guinea pig bad? Do you consider a guinea pig the representation of all that’s evil?”
“Maybe…if it’s an evil guinea pig?”
The lieutenant and Two Card had eyed the animal, which sat in the soldier’s folded arm, twitching its nose, oblivious.
“That is not an evil guinea pig!” the lieutenant had shouted.
Even though she needed every able body she could get, Redd ordered the lieutenant to kill the soldier. By the force of her vindictive will, as much as by the training the soldiers endured for ten hours of every
lunar cycle, her army was at last ready. She decided upon Alyss’ seventh birthday as the occasion of attack. Wonderland would be celebrating its future queen. What better time to wrench back what was hers? She would give Wonderland its future queen all right, but it wouldn’t be the one citizens were expecting.
She sent out seekers-deadly creatures with vulture bodies and fly heads-for aerial reconnaissance. She had bred and trained them herself. Her troops suited up, sharpened blades, loaded crystal shooters and orbs. Redd stood before them on the jagged promontory of Mount Isolation. She spread out her arms as if to embrace all that was bad and threw her voice into the wind.
“Years ago I was told to leave the comforts of home by my own family. I was removed from the power to which I’d been born. All of you have had to leave your homes for one reason or another, and together we have suffered through our lives in this barren land. But all that’s over now. Today we will return to our birthplace and remake it in our image-which is to say, my image. Today we will make history. But…” And here she scowled down at her troops massed before her at the foot of the mountain. “If there be any doubters among you, any who are unsure of their willingness to die for my cause, let them step forward now. They will be excused from this day’s battle until they are ready to fight, and they can enjoy a nice cup of tea.”
Redd then did an extraordinary thing: She smiled. But her facial muscles weren’t accustomed to being used in this way, and the soldiers thought they had never seen her look more fierce. They knew better than to step forward.
“To victory then!” Redd shouted.
She had to give her rogue soldiers credit: They might not have been the most imaginative, they might have
been novices in Black Imagination, but every single one of them had learned well how to kill. Equally good with swords, knives, spiked clubs, spears, orbs, crystal shooters, they had little trouble getting past the guards that patrolled the edges of the Chessboard Desert, meant to contain her and her kind. And Redd herself made sure that no warning dispatch made it to the palace, rerouting it to oblivion by the power of her imagination. They had little trouble butchering the interior guards. They marched into Wondertropolis, hardly the worse for wear, trailing bloodred clouds and howling winds. At the sight of them, Wonderlanders, who had been celebrating only moments before, abandoned their games and ran off to what security their homes afforded. Every Wonderlander over the age of twelve remembered the devastation of the civil war between Redd and Genevieve. They knew why Redd had come.
The palace appeared in view, the Heart Crystal the only bright light in the gloom Redd had brought with her. She ordered her troops to surround the place. In her imagination’s eye she saw her most formidable henchman, in the form of a kitten, padding silently along heart-shaped halls, past watch-posts where guardsmen said, “Hey, look at the cute cat,” and, “Here, kitty, kitty.” But the kitty was on a mission and didn’t stop. He approached the Security Oversight Room and transfor
med himself from feline to assassin. The Cat smashed through the locked door, surprising the five guards lounging by the controls and monitoring crystals. With a few swings of his powerful arms, he flung them down like so many rag dolls, leaving them slumped and bleeding on the floor. He ripped the master key from the waistband of the highest-ranking guard and inserted it into the security console. He turned the key and flipped release switch after release switch; all over Heart Palace, bolts unlocked, doors and gates swung open, and Redd’s troops stormed in. The Cat turned back into a kitten and bounded toward the South Dining Room, where the Hearts and their guests still had no idea what was happening.
Redd entered the palace for the first time since she was a girl-the palace in which she’d been born and spent most of her young life, her palace-and all the hurt and resentment she’d tried to keep in check for so many years started to boil over. With every step she took toward her sister, she grew angrier and angrier. So what if she’d been a “bad girl”? So what if she’d experimented with artificial crystal and imagination stimulants? So what if she’d never cared for justice, love, duty to the people, blah blah blah? She was her own person. Why couldn’t her parents have respected that and left her alone instead of trying to turn her into the princess she could never be? Why couldn’t they have loved her for who she was?
The time she was removed from succession to the throne came back to Redd with the full force of its heart-stopping gall…
The ever wise Queen Theodora announced that she could not allow such an unruly daughter to have queenly power. Genevieve was to be queen instead of her! Redd’s features immediately began to change, to twist and sharpen, so potent was the fury within her. She had always been prone to jealousy, rage, and bitter hatred, but now she had fuel for all three to last a lifetime, and she cultivated them until-
Abandoning herself to her wrath, she slipped into her mother’s dressing room.
“Even you cannot take away what is mine by birthright,” she snarled and placed a deadly pink mushroom on her mother’s tongue. Fed by the queen’s saliva, the roots of the fungus worked their way down the sleeping sovereign’s throat and strangled her heart. The mushroom cap poked out of her mouth to signify that the heart had stopped beating.
As for her father, she let him live-weak, useless man that he’d always been. After the murder of his beloved Theodora, Tyman went insane, chatting to his dead wife and shuffling aimlessly through the palace. And Redd would have been queen-she would have ruled with all the innate power she possessed-if not for the presumption of her sister. It was almost laughable: Goody-Two-Shoes Genevieve actually believed that she should be queen. Redd armed her followers and Genevieve
organized hers. They clashed. People died and homes were destroyed. Redd knew her imagination to be stronger than Genevieve’s, but her forces were outnumbered and she didn’t have anyone from the Millinery on her side, no one to rival Hatter Madigan. But now she had The Cat. And the seekers. Still, the sting of being roundly defeated and banished from Wonderland by her younger sister had been an embarrassment impossible to live down.
Seething with anger, Redd strode toward the South Dining Room, paying no attention to the explosions going off to the left and right of her, the palace guardsmen falling dead at the hands of her soldiers. An orb generator detonated directly in front of her but, without slowing her pace, she walked through the smoke and flames. She stood in the ruins, face-to-face with her sister at last, and screamed her head off.
She would kill them all.
CHAPTER 10
T HE FORCE of the blast knocked Alyss over in her chair and she was still on the ground, coughing from dust and debris, when she saw innocent courtiers and civilians attacked by a mob of Redd’s card soldiers and fierce ex-Wonderlanders.
“No!”
A hand clamped over Alyss’ mouth. It was Dodge. He pulled her under the table with him. “Keep quiet or they’ll get you too. Stay here and don’t move.”
Alyss wasn’t planning on moving, not out from under the table at any rate. Too much was happening and none of it good. But Dodge was with her. She had him. As long as Dodge and I stay together…
In the quarter-moment after the explosion, General Doppelganger ran behind a thick curtain and pulled a lever attached to a crank half buried in the floor. The black floor tiles of the room flipped over to reveal an army of white chessmen-knights, rooks, bishops, pawns. The chessmen battled the invading card soldiers, blades swinging and bodies falling. General Doppelganger split into the twin figures of Generals
Doppel and Ganger, and each of them split in two, so that now there were two General Doppels and two General Gangers battling Redd’s soldiers. Not that Alyss realized that the poisonous-looking woman who’d shouted “Off with their heads!” was her aunt Redd. She hadn’t made the connection yet because…where was her mother? There, fending off Redd’s soldiers two and three at a time. Alyss
never knew her mother could fight. She flinched with each near hit Genevieve suffered, watching as the queen imagined new weapons for herself-swords, sabers, spiked clubs-whenever one was knocked from her grip. She was always armed with four weapons at once, her imagination swinging two of them, to fend off attacks from behind.
But why didn’t she imagine the card soldiers dead? Alyss tried doing it herself; she closed her eyes and pictured the soldiers piled in a lifeless heap in the center of the room. Bibwit was not there to explain that, by the power of imagination alone, nobody could kill a creature that had the will to live. When Alyss opened her eyes, the room was still in chaos, white pawns and rooks and the occasional knight falling at the hands of the enemy. The cries of pain and defeat still filled her ears.
A body slammed against the tabletop. Dodge put his arm around her, as if that could keep her from harm.
“Don’t move, don’t move,” he whispered.
She huddled against him. She didn’t want to watch any more, wanted to bury her face in Dodge’s shoulder and lift it up again to find the horrid scene over, everything as it used to be.
Hatter Madigan removed his top hat. Holding it by the brim, he flicked his wrist hard and fast; the hat flattened and divided into a series of S-shaped rotary blades held together at the center. He winged the weapon across the room, the blades spinning and slicing through the enemy before embedding themselves in the mortar of the far wall.
One of Redd’s Four Cards pulled the weapon out of the wall. But throwing Hatter’s top hat required a technique not easily mastered, and every time the soldier tried employing the quick wrist-flick he’d seen Hatter use, the weapon only clattered to the floor.
Hatter fought his way toward the top hat, flipping and tumbling through the air, his long Millinery coat flaring like a cape. His steel bracelets snapped open and became propeller-blades on the outward side of his wrists. His backpack sprouted blades and corkscrews of various lengths and thicknesses, like an
open Swiss Army knife.
The Four Card was growing more desperate as Hatter approached. The top hat clanged on the floor one last time. Hatter picked up the weapon, examining it to make sure it hadn’t been damaged.
“One must learn how to use it,” he said. “Here, let me show you the proper way.” These were the last words the soldier ever heard.
Redd strolled through the mayhem of the battle unharmed. Whenever a white pawn made the mistake of attacking her, she flicked him with a long, bony finger and sent him hurling into the stone walls or the pointed end of someone’s spear. It gave her no small pride to see The Cat performing so well in combat, poking fatal holes in chessmen with his claws, easily taking out as many of them as Hatter did card soldiers. She was also pleased to note the speed with which the suit families had fallen into obedience.
No sooner had she ordered the removal of everyone’s head than the Lord of Diamonds bravely stepped forward, bowed, and said, “Your Majesty, we regret that we’ve been deprived of your presence for so long and rejoice that you’ve returned.” The Spades and C
lubs echoed him with bows and fond regards of their own. So she would let them live. For the moment. Besides, there was something intriguing about the young Diamond boy. He stood under the protective arm of his father, seeming more interested than scared, as if learning all he could from the violence around him. Who knew? He might grow up to be useful.
Sir Justice Anders cut and slashed at the invading card soldiers. He rescued several chessmen momentarily overpowered by a band of Two Cards, and when he spotted an opening toward The Cat, he made a run at the creature, sword poised to strike.
Dodge saw what was about to happen. “Watch this,” he said to Alyss, proud of his father’s skills and bravery.
But The Cat had no trouble dealing with the leader of the palace guard. With the back of his hand, he knocked Sir Justice to the ground, sent the man’s sword skittering across the floor and out of reach. The Cat picked up Sir Justice and swiped him with a claw.
“Noooo!” Before Alyss could stop him, Dodge bolted out from under the table, snatched up his father’s
sword, and attacked The Cat. “Yaah!”
The assassin merely grinned, knocking him to the ground with a light blow. Six white chessmen converged on him and kept him from finishing off the boy.