by Frank Beddor
“Ha!” Alyss shouted, ecstatic.
Frenzied, the spider tried to shake the foreign object from its mouth. Dodge managed to free an arm and, with a single wide, circular swipe of his sword, chopped off the spider’s legs, then plunged the weapon into its vitals.
“Did you see that?” Alyss cried, holding on to her tutor’s back. “I imagined that!” “I saw it,” said Bibwit Harte. “Very impressive.”
But it would have been a whole lot more impressive, thought the tutor, if Alyss had conjured a happy end to this nightmare. Glass Eyes were again coming at them, simultaneously closing in on them from in front and behind, and General Doppelganger was out of cannonball spiders.
CHAPTER 40
“H OW COULD she not have been there?! Where else would she be?!”
Banging the end of her scepter on the floor with every other word, Redd sent long-stemmed, flesh-eating roses slithering around the feet of Jack of Diamonds and the thick-padded paws of The Cat, both of whom had to keep moving to prevent the flowers from climbing up their legs.
“Maybe the Jack of Diamonds isn’t as loyal as you supposed?” said The Cat. Redd turned on Jack. “Yes, perhaps.”
“My queen-I mean, Your Imperial Viciousness-the most important Alyssians were there and could have been done away with if The Cat hadn’t been concerned solely with Alyss.”
“I demanded that he be solely concerned with her!” “But I don’t think she’s as dangerous as-”
“Who asked you!” Redd bellowed. Her scepter lifted into the air, its pointed end poised at the pulsing hollow of Jack of Diamonds’ throat. “You don’t, by chance, have nine lives?”
Jack swallowed, hard. “I have only one, which I devote to you, Your Imperial Viciousness.” “Hmmph.” Redd twirled her scepter like a baton and stood it at her side. “Cat, why is there an empty
box of orb generators in the hall?”
An ammunition container slid into the room, moved by Redd’s imagination.
“Oh, that?” The Cat had been waiting for her to ask. Jack of Diamonds was in for it now. “We found it and many more at the Alyssian camp. I checked their manufacture codes. They were stolen from your factory three and a half lunar cycles ago. The thieves were interrogated and punished, but the twelve containers of stolen weapons were not where they informed us they’d be.”
“Get to the point, Cat, or you will feel one in your guts.”
The feline assassin bowed in acknowledgment. “Your Imperial Viciousness, you captured the thieves because of intelligence received by Jack of Diamonds. You allow the pudgy lord to have dealings with
the Alyssians. How could the Alyssians have come into possession of these weapons if not from him? He knew where to find the thieves, he must have known where to find the weapons.”
“Interesting,” said a thoughtful Redd. “So, my well-fed informant has been taking advantage of the freedoms I grant him by supplying weapons to my enemies?”
“No! Absolutely not!” declared Jack. “Your Imperial Viciousness, this is ludicrous.” “We’ll see how ludicrous it is.”
Again, the sharpened point of Redd’s scepter was at Jack of Diamonds’ throat. But thoughts of Alyss had never completely left her head and, in a blink of imagination’s eye, she saw the princess surrounded by sparkling, effervescent surfaces.
“She’s in the Crystal Continuum!” Redd shrieked. “Smash the looking glasses! Every last one!” Redd’s face, wild with rage, flashed onto the billboards and government posters of Wondertropolis. “Every looking glass in the queendom is to be smashed! Now!”
But the force of her anger beat most Wonderlanders to it. In pubs and stimulant dens throughout Wondertropolis, in the homes of ordinary Wonderlanders, in the gated and patrolled mansions of ranking families, looking glasses exploded. Wonderlanders eager for havoc ran through the streets, breaking windows and anything that could even remotely serve as a reflective surface.
CHAPTE R 41
T HEY WERE trapped, marooned. They would be killed for sure: Glass Eyes ahead of them, Glass Eyes behind.
The Continuum, it’s…it’s…disappearing!
With every looking glass in the queendom smashed, the crystalline pathways that made up the Continuum were vanishing. The Glass Eyes advancing upon Alyss and the others were themselves being chased by a void. And the void was gaining.
To be swallowed by nothingness is to become nothing.
At least they wouldn’t suffer; one felt nothing upon becoming nothing.
The void rushed at the Glass Eyes, consumed the rear guards first and moved quickly up their ranks. No more Glass Eyes.
And still the void came fast.
“Anyone have a pocket looking glass?” Dodge asked.
Alyss and the others glanced at him, not understanding. “Quick!”
Bibwit reached into the folds of his robe and pulled out a looking glass no bigger than a tuttle-bird’s wing. Dodge took hold of it. No Wonderlander had ever attempted what he was about to do. There had never been a need.
He held the looking glass at an angle, aiming it so that it reflected a small portion of the Continuum, regenerating it. As fast as the void swallowed up what was behind them, the modest little mirror added the corresponding length of Continuum ahead of them. But now what? Were they doomed to race through the void, safe in this small portion of Continuum-which, had he been at leisure, Bibwit would
have pointed out was no longer strictly a Continuum since it connected to nothing, and without the pocket glass it would not, in fact, continue. Were they destined to be imprisoned in this mobile prism, zipping this way and that through pure emptiness until they perished from starvation, or fatigue caused Dodge to drop the glass?
What’s that? Is it…It is. A way out.
At least one looking glass in the queendom must have still been intact. Ahead of them in the void, a short distance off, was a crystal byway, a dead end. Where it had once connected with the Continuum’s main thoroughfare, it now simply stopped, connected to nothing.
“Dodge!” “I see it!”
With subtle shifts of angle in the way he held the looking glass, Dodge steered them over and they linked up with it. The additional light and increased play of translucent colors were like the dance of life itself. Dodge, Bibwit, and Alyss, General Doppelganger, Hatter-they emerged from the Continuum in the same order in which they’d entered, discovered themselves in a landscape resembling the open belly of a volcano, with clouds of sulphurous smoke drifting lazily into the upper reaches of the sky, and jets of flame spouting from the rocky ground between streams of bubbling lava: the Volcanic Plains.
CHAPTER 42
T HEY TREKKED single-file along a volcano’s narrow ridge, their noses and mouths covered with cloth torn from Bibwit’s robe to protect them from airborne ash. It was too hot to speak, almost too hot to breathe. No one had said a word since they first emerged onto the Volcanic Plains and Dodge had suggested they smash the exit portal just in case. Redd’s diabolically inventive mind was not to be underestimated; any remnant of the Crystal Continuum might cause her to reconstruct it in its entirety, providing her with the means to reach the plains that much sooner. Now Redd and her armies would
have to travel on foot or by beast.
“The looking glass must have been used by jabberwocky poachers,” Bibwit Harte had said. “Lucky for us, it was over-looked or we’d still be…” He’d shivered with the thought of the void.
“If Redd saw us in the Continuum, she might still be watching us,” General Doppelganger had observed. “Can’t be helped,” Hatter had said.
Dodge had been impatient. “Then let’s stop standing around and get to where we have to go.”
So Bibwit, who carried detailed maps of the queendom within his bald head, led them toward the Valley of Mushrooms. Picking their way along the rocky, irregular ridge, they constantly had to look down to be sure of their footing, all the time reminding themselves of how high they were and how dangerous their pa
ssage.
“Ah!”
A hardened chunk of lava hit General Doppelganger on the shoulder. The Alyssians paused, looked up. Another chunk of lava rock fell. Another and another.
The volcano’s moving.
Not the entire volcano, just the topmost layer of rock and earth on the steep slope above them. The ridge gave way, crumbling beneath the Alyssians’ feet, and they tumbled and rolled down into a gorge at the base of the volcano. General Doppelganger was half buried in earth and rubble. Bibwit came to rest completely upside down, his feet in the air, but he quickly righted himself, coughing and spitting, before he was suffocated. Alyss, being the lightest among them, had bounced down the volcano’s craggy lower slope and slid to a stop on a bed of gravel. Hatter and Dodge stood wiping lava crud from their coat sleeves as if surviving a landslide was something they did every day.
“Everyone all right?” asked General Doppelganger. “Alyss?” Dodge’s voice, concerned.
“I’m okay.” She didn’t want the others to think she considered a few scrapes and bruises serious injuries. She was supposed to be strong enough to defeat Redd. “Someone’s watching us,” she said.
A pair of yellow-green eyes were peering at them from the black mouth of a nearby cave. Before anyone could speak, the giant reptilian head of a jabberwock thrust forward from between two boulders. Its long tongue lashed at Bibwit, scorching a swath through the sleeve of his robe to his delicate skin.
“Yaow!”
Even in the heat of the plains, Alyss and the others could feel the hotness of the jabberwock’s breath, fouled by the stink of carcass meat. The creature opened its slobbery mouth impossibly wide, as a cobra does to swallow a rabbit-a display of menace quite uncalled for, since the jabberwock could have easily fit two full-grown Wonderlanders in its jaws with any old everyday chomp. The Alyssians backed toward the cave. The jabberwock lurched toward them, shot a spitball of fire at Alyss. She dived to the ground and the fireball flared against the gorge wall, but in its brief explosion of light the Alyssians saw
that the yellow-green eyes in the cave belonged to a miniature jabberwock surrounded by gnawed bones:
a newborn.
“She’s protecting her baby,” Bibwit said.
The mother jabberwock rose up on her hind legs, preparing to charge, and in a single swift motion, Hatter took off his top hat, flicked it into blades, and hurled it at the rock overhanging the cave entrance.
Thwink-thwink-thwink-thwink!
Rocks loosened and fell into a pile, blocking the mouth of the cave. Hatter’s blades were still boomeranging back to him when the mother jabberwock let out a pained wail and, ignoring the Alyssians, scratched and scrabbled at the fallen debris, clearing it away to save her baby, as Alyss and the others escaped unharmed along the gorge floor.
Each of them knew without saying it aloud: As long as they were on the plains, the threat of jabberwocky still loomed.
CHAPTER 43
S URPRISINGLY, BIBWIT Harte did not have a pair of gemstone fire crystals tucked anywhere in his scholar’s robe, so they had to build a fire the old-fashioned way, with the suns and a pile of dead branches. The Volcanic Plains were behind them and they had made camp next to a wide river en route to the Valley of Mushrooms.
Dodge wrapped a dampened leaf around Bibwit’s burn and tied it with strong vine. Bibwit tested the movement of his arm, grimacing and perhaps making more of his injury than was necessary, because Dodge, with a quick glance at General Doppelganger, said, “We might have to cut it off.”
Bibwit fell still, too horrified to speak.
“You can tutor just as well with one arm as with two, can’t you?” Bibwit’s mouth opened and closed, but nothing came out.
Dodge and General Doppelganger sputtered with laughter. “I’m just teasing, Bibwit,” Dodge said. “You’ll be fine.”
“Oh. Ha ha,” Bibwit said uneasily. “A bit of levity to ease the burden we’re under. Yes. Ha ha.” But he hugged his injured arm close until Dodge and the general settled into sleep. Regaining his usual composure, he took a seat next to the princess. “Now, Alyss, we shall have that lesson of ours that keeps getting put off. Lucky for us, I have memorized most of the necessary books.”
Alyss nodded, but she was in no mood for a lesson. The day itself had been a lesson-in survival. “I will close my eyes for a moment,” continued Bibwit, “to file through all that’s in my head for the
appropriate material. It’ll just take a moment.”
But as soon as the tutor shut his eyes, he began to snore, his ears opening and closing with each breath. Alyss smiled a tired smile and pulled the ends of his robe about him as a blanket. She moved to the other side of the fire to let him sleep undisturbed. As it had long ago, on that first night with Quigly and the orphans in the London alley, her mind was plagued by too much to allow her any rest. How did it work when I was young? Her ability to conjure objects from the strength and depth of her imagination. How had it worked? She’d been lucky with the muzzle. She hadn’t intended to conjure such a thing, had only tried to imagine Dodge safely out of the spider’s sticky clutches.
Hatter sat beyond the fire’s glow cleaning his weapons, his top hat beside him. He removed first his left wrist-bracelet and then his right, and set about wiping their blades with a leaf. Alyss had never seen a Milliner without his bracelets. He looks so much like an ordinary Wonderlander. Indeed, especially now, as Hatter paused in his work to strip off his long outer coat and lay it on the ground beside him. Without his coat and the tell-tale weapons, there was nothing in his appearance to distinguish him from any normal, adult male Wonderlander. He must have hopes, dreams, loves, and sorrows outside his duty, as anyone does. Strange that I should know so little about him when he’s devoted his life to protecting my family. He caught her looking at him. She smiled in apology, as if she had been intruding. Hatter went back to his cleaning.
The thing about when she was young…she didn’t remember her imagination having to work. It just was.
“Hatter?”
“Yes, Princess?”
“When you’re fighting in a battle, what do you think about?” Hatter considered. “Nothing, Princess. Nothing at all.”
“So you don’t tell yourself, ‘I’m going to throw my top hat and then I’m going to attack with the blades on my wrists’ or anything of that sort?”
“No.”
“No,” Alyss echoed, “of course not. It just happens. Your body knows what to do.” Hatter nodded.
It’s unconscious. To will something into being, the willing of it must be so deep down that no self-doubt is possible. The imaginative power itself must be a given, a thing already proven that cannot be disbelieved.
Lunar hours passed and, at first, Alyss was all too aware of her efforts to conjure, all too aware of the items she attempted to imagine into being. A platter, a sword, a crown. A platter, a sword, a crown. She repeated these words over and over again to herself. No crown materialized. Part of a platter did form, but quickly vanished. A sword appeared, but in outline only, plain and without detail, as if the weapon had not been precisely envisioned. With time, the fire died down to a heap of glowing embers. Alyss’
mind cleared. While she was in this trance-like state, a large glass cover akin to one you might see over a cake in a bakery formed in the air. Alyss looked at it without surprise. She tilted her head to the left and the glass cover tilted left. She tilted her head to the right and the cover tilted right. Then, without moving
at all, she brought it down over the fire. Robbed of oxygen, the embers fizzled out. The glass cover dissolved in the air.
Alyss beamed-for not only had she conjured, but she had controlled her imagination in a way she never had before. I’ll need to practice. I’ll need to…oh. Hatter was watching her, had witnessed this first controlled exercise of her powerful imagination. He bowed his head in respect. Then came a final, honking snore and Bibwit awoke, shivering and hugging himself.
“It i
s chilly without the fire, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER 44
W ITH THE queendom’s looking glasses obliterated, Redd again turned her anger on Jack of Diamonds. “I grant you a leniency that others don’t enjoy. Why? Because it’s supposed to benefit me. I let you
believe you’re your own boss. In exchange, you’re to provide me with Alyssian intelligence. As queen, I
command the better end of all deals and it doesn’t fill me with glee, Lord Diamond, that you’ve been profiting from treachery.”
“Your Imperial-”
Redd made a shooing motion with her hand and Jack slammed against a wall of the Observation Dome. The Cat’s tail whisked back and forth, happy and playful.
“What am I to do with you?” Redd asked.
“M-maybe you could-” Jack began. The Cat raised a paw. “I know.”
“It was a rhetorical question, fools! You don’t answer it! Since when do I need help making anyone suffer?”