by Frank Beddor
The Cat knew better. But it was all right; the cowardly Jack of Diamonds would only get in his way. “Do what you want,” he spat, and accompanied by the high cards of The Cut, he pounced into the Alyssian headquarters while the lower numbers began smashing its perimeter mirrors.
CHAPTER 37
D ODGE HADN’T told her that they’d be leaving the forest. They should have informed somebody. Bibwit, the general, Hatter. We should have told them we were going. That’s what the old Dodge would’ve done… The ten-year-old Dodge Anders who had prided himself on strict adherence to military procedures and the importance of communication among members of a fighting force. But a lot about the adult Dodge was unlike the child Alyss used to know.
He kept in front of her, moving at a rapid pace, and she often had to trot just to stay in sight of him. He turned around every now and again to make sure she was still following him, but really, he could have been more considerate. Wouldn’t hurt him to slow down a little.
They came to the edge of a shabby city, the one she had already passed through this day. The pawnshops and military checkpoints, the ear-clutter of recorded voices declaring “Better Redd than
dead” and “The Redd way is the right way.” The barrage of gaudy, flickering advertisements for products and places Alyss had never heard of. I can hardly…is it really my once-gleaming city? The only landmark she recognised was The Aplu Theater, where she’d seen performances by the Merry Pretenders, an acting troupe favored by her parents. It was boarded up and had been left to rot. The few
Wonderlanders she saw passed through the city like shadows, flitting and ashamed.
Dodge was waiting for her up ahead. About time he showed some consideration. But when she stepped up beside him, she found that it wasn’t manners that had made him stop and wait for her.
“That is your home,” said Dodge. “Redd left it standing to show how far the Hearts and White
Imagination have fallen.”
She grew dizzy, looking at the ruins of Heart Palace, her mind suddenly aswirl with memories. Where Father and I used to play tag in the halls and he could always catch me by making me laugh. “The letters of my name spell ‘alnon’ or ‘onnal’ or ‘lonan’ when shuffled around,” he’d say. And laughing, I’d say, “But those aren’t words,” and he’d know where I was from hearing my voice, and he’d tag me, saying, “Why, Alyss, I never claimed they’d spell actual words!”
And where there were all sorts of nooks perfect for spying on him and Mother, and I saw him massage the nape of her neck as she sat on her throne, she lifting her face to his for a kiss.
“Can we go inside?” “If we’re careful.”
The grounds appeared deserted-no Wonderlanders looting the place, hurrying past with goblets and cutlery in their fists, because there was nothing left to take. But Dodge unsheathed his sword all the same, and he guided Alyss carefully to the palace entrance, keeping his voice to a whisper.
“The poor and desperate sometimes live here for a while, until they die from imagination-stimulant addiction or Redd sends them to the Crystal Mines.”
Entering through the broken front gate, Dodge’s heart pumped as quickly as if he were in battle. He hadn’t personally set foot in the palace since the day he and the rook buried his father-hadn’t wanted to return, afraid of what he might feel. He held his face turned away from Alyss, wrestling with emotions he was no longer used to experiencing.
Inside, the once-great halls were scarred with obscenities, and what little that had remained of furniture and decorations lay in charred piles throughout, evidently used as fuel for fires.
“It’s empty because people stole things,” Dodge said. “Right after, you know…that day.”
Alyss reached out, ran a hand along the cold stone walls. “It’s not empty,” she said. The place was full of the past. At a bend in one of the halls: Here is where I imagined the floor covered in squig berries and the walrus slipped on them and dropped the tea platter and squashed the berries, rolling in them and turning himself squig color. In the anteroom of her mother’s throne room: Here is where I used to charge toll to the servants, not letting them pass unless they gave me a treat of jollyjellies or tarty tarts.
Skeletons of card soldiers and chessmen littered the dusty hall approaching the South Dining Room. Many more skeletons were in the dining room itself. The air tasted as if it hadn’t been breathed by the living in more than a decade. The walls were pockmarked from Redd’s attack, but no weapons were anywhere to be seen. Silent tears coursed down Alyss’ cheeks. She turned to see if Dodge was crying, feeling the sorrowful weight of the scene, but it was difficult to tell in the dimness of the room.
“Your father,” she whispered. “He’s…buried in the garden.”
Dodge’s voice sounded choked. He was taking deep, even breaths in an effort to remain calm. Anger birthed from grief. He wanted to punch something. He wanted to make someone feel the pain and loss he
felt standing in this place.
Alyss bent down and picked up off the floor a triangular-shaped, weathered, chipped piece of bone. It hung on a bit of chain. “Do you remember this?”
He wasn’t sure. It couldn’t be-
“You gave it to me. I said I would keep it forever.”
The jabberwock tooth-the one he had given to her as a birthday present. She unclasped the necklace and secured it around her neck. The tooth hung at her throat.
“I never thanked you for saving my life, so…thank you.” He winced, as if the thanks physically hurt him.
“Dodge, I know it’s hard seeing each other after all this time. So much has happened. We’ve both grown into adults we never imagined becoming. But I would have expected a friendlier reception from you, of all people.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. It’s just…we were friends, Dodge. We were more than friends. Wasn’t that why you came for me in that other world?”
“To defeat Redd, to face The Cat, I would do anything.”
Annoyed, Alyss clicked her tongue. “Is that why you danced with me at the masquerade? Was that to defeat Redd too? Did you do that for The Cat?”
Dodge didn’t answer.
Alyss turned from him and examined her reflection in a sliver of looking glass, the only fragment left in the frame of the large decorative mirror that had once hung on the east wall. “If you no longer care for me, why did you bring me here?”
“I never said I don’t care for you.” But Dodge didn’t trust himself to say more. He held his tongue, began again. “I brought you here to remind your heart of what Redd’s done. To spark your vengeance. You’re the agent by which I’ll have my revenge. That’s what you mean to me now. That’s all you must mean.”
“Touching.” Her fingers toyed with the jabberwock tooth at her throat. Take it off. Take it off and show that if it means nothing to him, it means nothing to-
Her reflection in the looking glass suddenly rippled and morphed into an image of Redd. “So glad you could visit us. Now off! With! Your! Head!”
Dodge snatched Alyss’ hand and pulled her away as the glass broke into sharp piercing pieces-tiny daggers meant for the princess. The floor shook beneath them, the walls shivered, the thick ceiling beams creaked and cracked, and mortar dust and skull-sized stones began to fall. They ran, each with an arm over their head to protect themselves from falling debris. They hurdled smashed wall stones and ducked fallen beams as the old palace collapsed around them, sending stinging pellets of rock into the backs of their legs. They barely managed to make it outside to safety.
Alyss stood bent over, coughing from dust and wiping her mouth. Where Heart Palace had stood only moments before: a pile of rubble.
“She’s destroyed everything,” Dodge said.
Resignation to the past, defiance of the present, hope for the future-Alyss felt them all at once. “Not everything,” she said.
Not if she had hope.
CHAPT
ER 38
S OMETHING WAS wrong in the Everlasting Forest. Tuttle-birds were shrieking, jabbering, making a din. In a moment the problem became clear: trees and shrubs had been hacked, clubbed, chopped, cracked in half, or ripped from the soil. Flowers lay stamped into the ground, silent. What foliage happened to still be alive warned, “Don’t enter! Don’t enter!” An unfamiliar sound filled the forest, a steady, mechanical beat: endless columns of Glass Eyes marching toward the Alyssian headquarters. The bodies of Alyssian guards were scattered pell-mell on the ground, the looking glasses that had once camouflaged the headquarters smashed, some cracked and left half standing, others completely destroyed.
“Bibwit and the others,” Alyss breathed.
She took a step forward, but Dodge grabbed her arm, stopping her. “We can’t go any closer. It’s too dangerous.”
They were already too close. A Glass Eye shot clear of a nearby thicket, deadly blades sticking forward from the back of its hands, and flew at Alyss. Dodge tackled her. Missing its target, the Glass Eye smashed headfirst into a dead tree. But more of its kind were already upon them. Dodge fought with a sword in each hand. Alyss focused her energy on imagining the Glass Eyes…What? Dead? Forever inactivated? Can they be killed like ordinary Wonderlanders? Concentrate, concentrate. She focused on Dodge, imagined him with increased strength and skill, but the Glass Eyes had been engineered for this sort of combat. Dodge was overpowered; a few moments more and he wouldn’t be able to protect himself, let alone her.
A weapon. I need a weapon. Alyss crawled to the Glass Eye lying motionless in a shatter of tree bark. Must be a weapon on it somewhere. She reached for the avocado-like object hanging from its belt-a whipsnake grenade, one of Redd’s newest inventions. She pulled the ring at the top of the grenade, threw it at the Glass Eyes, and it blew open, releasing a nest of snakelike coils, alive with electricity and whipping through the air. Dodge dropped to the ground and rolled.
Swaap!
A coil whipped a Glass Eye’s cheek, short-circuiting it. Swaap! Swaap-swaap! Swaap!
The Glass Eyes fell. Dodge and Alyss were up and running before the coils of the grenade lost their power and sizzled on the forest floor. A fresh pack of Glass Eyes stepped free of their marching column and darted around smoldering tree trunks and broken, low-hanging branches after them.
The rapid thunder of their approach…
Dodge raised a sword to strike, was bringing it forward with all the strength left in him when, out of the surrounding foliage, burst-
Not the Glass Eyes, but Generals Doppel and Ganger on galloping spirit-danes. Dodge tried to check his swing. Too late. General Doppel instinctively raised his sword in defense and it clanged with Dodge’s.
“Dodge!” cried General Doppel. “Alyss!” exclaimed General Ganger.
The white knight, the rook, and a platoon of pawns hustled up behind them.
“We’ve been casing the perimeter in hopes of finding the princess,” the rook explained to Dodge. “Though we feared the worst.”
The Glass Eyes converged and Dodge and the chessmen lost themselves in the urgency of battle. The generals took up positions at Alyss’ flanks, their spirit-danes affording her momentary protection.
Concentrate, Alyss. Imagine.
With a war cry that sounded like ripping metal, a Glass Eye knocked aside the pawns and sprinted toward her, but General Doppel, leaping from his spirit-dane onto General Ganger’s, shot a cannonball spider at it. On impact, the oversized spider bit an unhealthy gob of synthetic flesh off the assassin and chomped at its vital circuitry. Spooked, the riderless spirit-dane reared and took off. Dodge, entangled with a Glass Eye, kicked it in the groin. The Glass Eye looked down, confused, because it didn’t have anything sensitive in that area. The assassin’s confusion lasted only half a moment, but it was enough time for Dodge to reach out and grab the reins of the frightened spirit-dane as it hurtled past. The animal ran, dragging him alongside until he managed to climb onto its back.
“Princess! Catch!”
Alyss turned, caught the weapon tossed to her by the white knight-the Hand of Tyman, five short sword blades rising from the handle grip. She raised it as a Glass Eye leaped toward her. One of the blades lodged into the assassin’s left ocular opening and stuck there. The Glass Eye fell to the ground and, as the rook finished it off, Dodge galloped over on the spirit-dane and lifted Alyss up behind him, into the saddle.
“Go!” the rook shouted. “We’ll hold them off again!”
Even with the fighting raging all around, Dodge had to smile. “Again”: a little joke among battle-scarred warriors.
Generals Doppel and Ganger merged into one as they spurred their animal away from the fight. The spirit-dane carrying Dodge and Alyss galloped alongside.
“Hatter and Bibwit have gone ahead to clear the emergency portal,” General Doppelganger panted.
But no matter how fast they traveled, their escape would be as fleeting as a wisp of smoke in a fog. More
Glass Eyes were already after them.
CHAPTER 39
T HEORETICALLY, IT was possible for inexperienced Continuum travelers to discover the rebels’ emergency portal; they could have been inadvertently reflected out of it. But the portal was connected to the Continuum by such an unlikely arrangement of crystal byways (courtesy of strategically placed looking glasses) that no traveler who wasn’t Alyssian had ever determined its location or even learned of its existence.
Hatter Madigan and Bibwit Harte hurried to clear the dried brush from the portal entrance-a thick, ancient-looking glass with bevelled edges located in a part of the forest rarely frequented by Wonderlanders. Hatter pressed his face through the glass, peering into the Continuum, and pulled it out as General Doppelganger, Dodge, and Alyss raced up on their spirit-danes.
“It’s clear,” Hatter said.
“I’ll go first,” Dodge said and, without another word, he jumped into the glass. “Be quick,” Bibwit said, his ears trembling. “I hear our enemies approaching.”
The tutor guided Alyss through the portal’s liquid-crystal surface and into the Continuum. General Doppelganger followed, and Hatter brought up the rear. It was only the second time in her life that Alyss had been inside the Continuum. For a moment, wide-eyed and entranced by the beauty of the luminous surfaces surrounding her, she navigated it as well as anyone, zooming through this kaleidoscopic lifeline at pace with Dodge and the others. But as soon as she realized that she’d only been in the Continuum once before…Whoa!…She lost control, floated up and back, bumping into General Doppelganger.
“Focus your will and think heavy thoughts,” shouted the general, “or you will be reflected out!” Heavy thoughts? What are…?
The general let go of her. Uh-oh.
Again Alyss lost speed, would have been sucked up out of the Continuum if Hatter hadn’t caught hold of her. With the princess in tow, he steered his body toward Bibwit.
“Hold on to him,” the Milliner instructed.
So she did, traveling through the Continuum piggyback. “Glass Eyes incoming!”
Without slowing, Hatter flicked his top hat; it morphed into deadly spinning blades and he flung them at the Glass Eyes racing up fast at his back. The blades cut into one after another, ricocheting among them, then returned to him.
Still the Glass Eyes closed in, firing orb generators. Hatter deflected them into crystal byways by spinning his top-hat blades so quickly that the force of their wind sent the orbs reeling. If he’d been alone, he would have reversed directions and attacked the Glass Eyes, but his duty required him to stay close to Alyss. He would have to fight them nearer to her than he liked. He slowed his pace. The saber blades of his belt snapped open and he twirled, letting the Glass Eyes come at him. Sliced and batted by his sabers, they became disorientated. Unable to maintain their equilibrium inside the Continuum, they were sucked from its main artery and reflected out of looking glasses.
“More coming!” Dodge shouted. From in front of the
m this time.
“Out of the way!” warned General Doppelganger.
Dodge steered his body to the Continuum’s edge and the general shot a cannonball spider at the attacking Glass Eyes. Mid-shot, the cannonball cracked open and the emerging spider latched on to the
entire pack, holding each of them fast with a sticky leg while its pincer-mouth pecked at them in rapid fire, reducing them to lifeless husks. Shoosh! They were reflected out of the Continuum.
The cannonball spider now came careening up fast toward the Alyssians. Dodge threw himself at it to prevent it from targeting Alyss. The spider held Dodge’s arms and legs, and though it wasn’t designed to live long-would soon fold into itself and die-it had time enough to end Dodge’s life. Its pincers opened and moved in toward Dodge’s stomach.
Concentrate, think, imagine.
A muzzle formed out of nowhere-a rust-colored contraption that covered the spider’s pincers, rounding their pointed ends.