ArchEnemy

by Frank Beddor

  “What are you thinking?” Dodge asked.

  Which was when Alyss realized what the prickling signified. Because Dodge couldn’t see them. The girl and her father were nowhere in sight. They were in a crowded flat while she was here, outside, in a refuse-strewn alley between two tenements.

  She had been remote viewing, watching the pair in her imagination’s eye.

  “It’s coming back,” she said.

  Mr. Dumphy, who’d been dozing with his legs straight out in front of him, jerked awake and scrabbled to his feet as if to be of service in some capacity, any capacity.

  “It is?” Dodge asked. “How do you know? Can you conjure?”

  Conjurings of the second order, phantasms born of imagination, having enough reality to deceive the eye but not the touch. Alyss started with the smallest first. Amid the litter at her feet: A pillow appeared, shortly followed by a mound of greasy, slithering gwormmies.

  “I’ve seen constructs before,” Mr. Dumphy breathed. “They were always ghostly, but these . . .”

  He extended a hand toward the gwormmies, but they faded and a wooden chair took their place. He tried to lean on the back of the chair, but his hand passed through it and then he was faced with a gwynook, its wizened man’s face observing him from atop its penguin-like body. The gwynook morphed into Alyss, then into a smail-transport and, briefly, a jabberwock.

  “Finally!” Dodge said, ripping open his jumpsuit and exposing the weaponry that could easily arm three guards-men. “Let’s get out of here!”

  But Alyss wasn’t done. Her imagination didn’t feel as strong and clear as it used to; like an atrophied muscle, time and exercise would be needed for it to recover its former power.

  Time is what we don’t have.

  Conjurings of the first order were not phantasms but the genuine articles—objects in all their bruising, sharp-cornered reality. Alyss concentrated on the weapons in her mind, her talent an intuitive knowledge of their arcane mechanics as—

  A crystal shooter came into existence, leaning against a tenement. Then another and another and another until she’d created enough to outfit a full deck of Heart soldiers. A rack of AD52s had begun to solidify when she said, “Mr. Dumphy, please relay a message to your friends that our release from this prison is imminent. They should be alert for my signal.”

  The tinker bowed. “And what will that signal be, Your Highness?”

  Alyss had finished with the AD52s, was imagining into actuality orb generators and cannonball spiders. “They’ll know it when they see it. Tell them to just be ready: The moment of our uprising is near.”

  CHAPTER 20

  IT WASN’T in Hatter’s nature to run, nor had his Millinery training instilled the impulse in him. He and Molly emerged from a looking glass in the Everlasting Forest and, despite knowing the importance of remaining inconspicuous, he couldn’t keep himself from battle. Heart and Spade soldiers were exchanging fire with mercenaries positioned on their front and left flanks, the enemy darting behind protesting trees after each trigger-pull of their AD52s. Suddenly, from the card soldiers’ right flank, an orb generator blazed through the forest.

  Feeeeeeeeooooooshhhhkaaaghghgk!

  The explosion took out two full hands of Hearts and Spades. The rest struggled to hold position and not let the mercenaries advance, but again from the right flank, the unexpected: mind riders stabbing through the air toward them, indiscriminate of card number and suit, lodging into the foreheads of Twos and Fives and Sixes alike and injecting angst serum into the folds and crevices of their brains. The soldiers forgot the mercenaries and attacked those closest—one another. Maldoids stepped into the open on the soldiers’ right flank and easily annihilated them.

  Not ten spirit-dane lengths away from the Crystal Continuum’s exit glass, Hatter activated his backpack with a shrug, reached quickly over one shoulder and then the other for the pack’s protruding daggers, corkscrews, Hands of Tyman. With terrible accuracy, he flung them at the Maldoids, moving steadily forward until he was in their midst and—

  Fwap!

  His top hat was off his head, flattened into rotary blades and sent punishingly into several tribesmen. He snapped both sets of wrist-blades into action at once. Mercenaries’ razor-cards ricocheted off spinning steel. Charging tribal warriors met their fate as if at the bottom of a blender.

  Fffshaw!

  Someone fired a gossamer shot. The web spread wide above Hatter’s head and dropped down: the end of resistance for anyone not equipped with Millinery-grade weapons. Hatter held a set of wrist-blades horizontally over his head and they shred a hole in the gossamer and the web fell harmlessly to the ground around him.

  His top hat blades flew a single pass through the Maldoids, boomeranged back to him. He caught them, was about to let the weapon fly a second time when he glimpsed Molly standing beyond the violence—not trying to hide or join the fight, just standing there, a small figure between a pair of squalling cypresses as a mercenary, camouflaged by moss-covered growth at her back, released a spikejack tumbler in her direction, its spikes hurtling toward her.

  “Molly!”

  She turned her head to him, then to the spikejack coming up fast, but she didn’t move. He would never reach her in time.

  Fwingk, fwingk!

  He pulled two scissoring V-blades from his backpack, sent one slicing into the mercenary. The other crashed into the spikejack and deflected it into a nearby Maldoid. Molly gazed at the fallen warrior, passionless, as if his fate had had nothing to do with her. Then, again, she looked at Hatter.

  He had to keep running. Without his daughter, he never would have done it, never would have racked his brain for an adequate safehouse and decided there wasn’t one—not in Wonderland. He would have stayed and fought, proudly owning his “treason” of Arch—yes, he’d been integral in bringing WILMA down—and daring the king to reap vengeance. He would have fought in the queendom’s defense to the last spin of his Milliner blades and deemed death in such service honorable. But Molly changed everything. He had to run. If running was dishonorable . . . but how could protecting his daughter’s life be dishonorable?

  Maldoids surrounded him. Top hat still in hand, he moved his arms furiously, wrist-blades deflecting incoming razor-cards, crystal shot and the more primal swipes of sword-bearing warriors. By the light of discharging weapons, he caught sight of a mercenary aiming an orb launcher at him from the branches of a burned-out tree.

  Fi-fi-fi-fi-fith!

  He sent his top hat slicing out over the tribesmen, ran straight at one of them. Flicking his wrist-blades shut and punching his belt buckle, he somersaulted over the warrior’s head, the J-shaped sabers in his belt activated as—

  “Agh!”

  The mercenary in the tree dropped, a victim of the top hat blades.

  Hatter landed behind the Maldoids at a run. His top hat blades circled back to him, seemed to morph into their conventional shape and fix firmly on his head without his help. One set of blurring wrist-blades pushed out in front of him, he swooped past Molly and grabbed her hand and they ran. Thick clouds blotted out the moons; the more distance they put between themselves and the skirmish, the darker it became until Hatter couldn’t even see a dozen gwormmy lengths in front of him. Only the whispering trees all around told him he was still in the forest.

  They were being chased. Probably by Maldoids. Hatter heard them speeding through the underbrush, snapping branches in headlong pursuit, almost exactly as he had heard, long ago, The Cat sprinting after him through these same coal-dark woods, he with seven-year-old Princess Alyss in his arms, having promised Queen Genevieve to keep her daughter safe, alive. This time, however, the promise he had made was to himself. And it had nothing to do with Alyss Heart.

  The Whispering Woods opened on to a wide expanse, and father and daughter came breathless to the edge of a precipice—the cliff overlooking the Pool of Tears. They could hear the rough water below, just make out the occasional glint of the pool’s crystal b
arrier.

  “I don’t want to go,” Molly said.

  Hatter opened his mouth to say he didn’t particularly want to leave Wonderland either when—

  Fsoosh!

  A slew of kill-quills arrowed out of the woods behind them. Hatter gripped Molly tight and pushed off from the cliff and together they plummeted toward the surface of the water.

  CHAPTER 21

  REDD LED her assassins through the Chessboard Desert to the square of black rock occupied by Mount Isolation. But when the fortress came into view on its promontory, it no longer looked like the place that had been her home more than any other, where she had so often breathed a bracing air, heard her footsteps echo in empty halls, and gazed out through the Observation Dome’s telescoping glass at the wastes of the desert and beyond.

  “Who are all those people?” she glowered.

  “I don’t know, Your Imperial Viciousness,” Vollrath answered.

  She had expected to find the fortress abandoned or under heavy guard. She would not have been surprised to find it destroyed. But Mount Isolation resembled the center of a fairground, Wonderlanders milling about and the squeals of happy youngsters punctuating music that piped out from who knew where.

  Redd covered her head with cloth torn from Vollrath’s robe. The tutor and The Cat would be too recognizable to bring with her. “Sacrenoir, you come with me. The rest of you wait here.”

  The long incline leading to Her Imperial Viciousness’ former haunt was thronged with tourists and those who catered to them. She pushed past couples having holograms of themselves etched by entrepreneurial artists. She sidestepped vendors selling pennants, T-shirts, and caps, all featuring a silhouette of the fortress and its name spelled in glittering, gothic letters. She strode through a thicket of Wonderlanders buying and selling Mount Isolation note crystals, writing scrolls, push pins, magnets, calendars, mugs, pot holders, tote bags, snowglobes, The Cat and Redd Heart action figures.

  “You’ll have to get in line,” a doorman said.

  She and Sacrenoir had arrived at Mount Isolation’s front gate. “What?”

  “Back of the line if you want to get inside.”

  Redd was caught between fury and humiliation and might have revealed herself if Sacrenoir hadn’t given her arm a respectful tug.

  “At least the line’s moving,” the assassin offered when they had progressed from the back of the line to the middle.

  This did little to lighten his mistress’ mood, but then they were again at the front gate, facing a booth that had not existed when Redd lived at the fortress.

  “Admittance for two adults is ten-gwormmy weight in gemstone,” the Wonderlander in the booth said.

  “To get into my own home?” Redd snapped.

  The attendant was tickled. “You do play the part, don’t you? I guess you don’t want to hear then that your contribution goes toward promoting the principles of White Imagination throughout the queendom.”

  Sacrenoir drew Redd’s attention to the time-battered scepter she’d been using like a cane, which still had a number of unpolished stones clinging to it. Redd ripped off a pair and shoved them at the attendant in the booth.

  The climate inside Mount Isolation had always been chilly. During Redd’s occupancy, it had been impossible to generate enough heat to warm the place no matter how many fire crystals she added to the furnace. But now, with so many breathing bodies everywhere, the air was stuffy, oppressively warm. And so much for hearing her footsteps echo in empty halls. Her Imperial Viciousness and Sacrenoir drifted with the crowds . . .

  The cavernous room she’d had carved from the land itself, in which hundreds of cages containing thousands of seekers—those hybrids of vulture and fly—used to hang from the ceiling, had been turned into a theater. A sold-out musical revue, Redd Heart’s Blues, was to begin in half a lunar hour.

  “Who did this?” Redd rasped through tensed jaw. She had spent many comforting nights of self-pity in this room, serenaded by the screams of her aerial “bloodhounds” with bird-of-prey bodies and the heads of blood-sucking insects.

  The rest of the fortress was no better. The Invention Hall, in which Her Imperial Viciousness had displayed prototypes of her inventions in spot-lit alcoves—a Two card from The Cut; a Glass Eye with one long horizontal crystal for vision-intake instead of the more humanoid orbs—at first appeared the same. But then Redd noticed that someone had designated it the Museum of the Macabre.

  “Nothing macabre about it,” she steamed.

  Even the ballroom at the foot of the spiral hall, the site of her now legendary battle with Alyss Heart, had been desecrated, turned into a cafeteria. Behind the orb-blasted wall where she had stowed the genuine Heart Crystal: a graffiti-covered replica.

  “Stupid Wonderlanders.”

  But it was in the Observation Dome that Wonderlanders were most rampant, crowding five-deep at the floor-to-ceiling windows to enjoy the view while others posed for photo crystals with the petrified wig-beast. The creature stood a meter taller than the tallest Wonderlander in the room, and was significantly hairier than the hairiest.

  “It used to be so imposing in action,” Redd rued, recalling the moment she had imagined the thing into being from a curl of Jack of Diamonds’ wig.

  “What’re those?” Sacrenoir asked.

  A bank of mirrors Her Imperial Viciousness had never seen. In front of each glass, a Wonderlander stood making faces at his or her reflection, then pausing a gwormmy-blink and laughing. Some asked their reflections simple questions such as “How are you?” or offered trite observations—“It’s warm today”—then paused and laughed.

  “Nonsense Mirrors,” Sacrenoir said, noting the sign as he and his mistress drew closer.

  Redd scowled at each of them in turn—more so when she didn’t see the Wonderlanders’ reflections, which were visible only to those standing directly in front of the mirrors.

  A young boy laughingly skipped away from his glass and Redd took his place. Her expression was as unfriendly as usual, but the figure staring back at her looked nothing if not comical: protruding front teeth, ears sticking out from the sides of her head like underdeveloped wings, her eyes, nose, and mouth scrambled into different positions all over her face.

  “Is this supposed to be funny?” she whispered.

  “Is this blahdeeblahdeebabooooo? Hunny funny hun hun!” her reflection said.

  “Whoever’s responsible for all of this . . .”

  “Whoever booever responsibobbility-whee!” said her reflection.

  “Your Imperial . . .” Sacrenoir said, but that’s all he got out before the Wonderlanders at the other mirrors stepped back, gasping.

  A black cloud had formed above Redd and crackled with jags of lightning. Glaring at her supposedly humorous reflection, she noticed none of it. She had let herself be insulted by doormen and booth attendants. She had waited in line (and paid!) to get into her own home, to see the rooms in which she’d spent years festering in enforced solitude despoiled by White Imagination losers.

  “And now this!”

  “Annow how this wow!” said her reflection.

  The cloud above Her Imperial Viciousness’ head roiled like water heated over a fire crystal. Believing it a surprise performance, part of the Mount Isolation experience, the tourists in the Dome gathered five-deep around her. Redd’s dress began to move; the weave of its material squirmed, became serpentine vines blooming flesh-eating roses.

  “I will not lie down and die! I’ll have what’s mine and kill him!”

  Redd’s reflection translated this into nonsense but she was no longer listening, completely engulfed by a cyclone of blood-hued energy. The surrounding tourists applauded, but then—

  A thorny vine shot out, fast as a viper’s tongue, from Redd’s dress, and a rose blossom gnashed its teeth into the neck of a gleeful Wonderlander sporting his Mount Isolation T-shirt and cap.

  “Aaaaghrrrr!”

  In their rush to escape the Dome, the onslaught
of panic, Wonderlanders shoved, kicked, kneed, and trampled one another. More and more rose vines with teeth-clacking blooms stretched out from Redd’s dress, grew to impossible lengths as they trailed the stampeding crowd down the spiral hall to the fortress’ ground floor until—

  The Wonderlanders burst out the front entrance, fled across the desert in every direction and—

  In the Dome, Redd banged her scepter against the floor and the vines of her dress shrank back, coiling close around her. The teeming cloud of imaginative energy vaporized. All was, for a moment, calm.

  Redd Heart, Wonderland’s supreme mistress of Black Imagination, was back.

  CHAPTER 22

  Oxford, England. 1875.

  THREE IN the morning. Most of the university’s lecturers were tucked comfortably beneath their bedclothes, but Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, lecturer of mathematics at Christ Church College, sat awake in his bachelor’s apartment in Tom Quad. At his desk with his journal open before him, he stared dumbly at the puzzle he had written a fortnight earlier:

  He had not been sleeping well of late, had in fact never been a sound sleeper, which accounted for these little math puzzles scattered throughout the pages of his journals. Their twofold purpose: to serve as agreeable diversion, but also to drive out the blasphemous, unholy thoughts that tortured him in these small hours. Yet as Reverend Dodgson glanced at the clock—three fifteen—he knew, as he’d known for the past hour, that this particular puzzle wasn’t working. He was not agreeably diverted or kept from thoughts of a world he never heard mentioned at church but only by the once young Alice Liddell.

  He bent to the puzzle again.

  Had he truly composed this puzzle himself? It was in his journal, and the writing did appear to be his own. Why then did he have no inkling as to how to solve it? This inability to comprehend his own writings had been getting steadily worse, an inability all the more frightening as he didn’t believe it the result of his recent trauma . . .