by Frank Beddor
But even the walrus-butler wasn’t naïve enough to believe this. They were safe only so long as Queen Alyss Heart remained so, and right now—the animal cast a fretful eye at the nearest holo-screen—things looked very bad indeed.
They were surrounded. Directly ahead, cannonball spiders rocketed closer and closer while, on their left, a cannonade of orb generators eclipsed all but death. On their right, umpteen decks of razor-cards cut through the distance toward them and, at their backs, spikejack tumblers churned air in prelude to churning their flesh.
The Glass Eyes were trying to overwhelm the queen, to catch her imagination off guard.
I won’t let it happen.
Alyss flicked out her fingers and a cannonball spider shot out from each of them, hatched in midair, and clashed with those shot by the enemy. Halfway between Wonderland’s queen and the Glass Eyes, the mechanical spiders fought, dismembering one another as heartily as they would have dismembered any Wonderlander, while—
Thrusting her scepter skyward, Alyss veered the incoming orb generators away from her and the others, imagined them streaming out high over Wondertropolis to land in the Volcanic Plains, home of the jabberwocky.
Can’t let it happen.
Dodge, the chessmen, and generals were standing with swords raised in the futile hope that they might deflect enough razor-cards away from themselves to survive. The missiles were nearly close enough to shave the hair off their arms when—
Fith, fith, fith! Fith, fith, fith, fith, fith, fith, fith!
—Alyss imagined them into neatly stacked decks, grounded and harmless. Immediately, she whirled around to face the spikejack tumblers and sent them crashing into one another. Their spikes latched, holding the tumblers together to form a sort of worrisome jungle gym that hit the ground and skidded toward them, scraping and gouging the pavement.
“When I give the go ahead, go ahead,” Alyss said, the spikes of a jungle gym having come to a stop less than a gwormmy-length from her face.
“What?” the four General Doppels cried at once.
“Run when I say so.”
Dodge frowned.
“We have to get out of this square,” she said. “Find a better vantage from which to fight.”
“Wondronia’s just up Brillig Way,” the knight offered. “We’ll have the most number of options there.”
“To Wondronia Grounds then,” Alyss said. “But first, you’d all better duck.”
They barely had time to drop to the pavement before she spun, her scepter held horizontally above her head with both hands, sparks of imagination spewing from its ends, shooting out in all directions and—peewthungk! peewthungk!—laying low the surrounding Glass Eyes with heat-seeking accuracy.
“Now!”
The chessmen and generals took off, razor-cards ripping from their AD52s, cover fire issuing from their crystal shooters. Running behind them, Dodge kept close to Alyss.
“You should get back to the palace,” he urged.
She guffawed. “I understand. You were preoccupied and didn’t notice that I just saved your life?”
“The queendom needs you safe,” he said. “I need you safe.”
“But I’m the only one who can defeat Redd.”
“For Issa’s sake, Alyss!”
Ahead of them, the chessmen and generals were battling their way into the elaborate complex of buildings that made up Wondronia Grounds.
“You want me to return to the palace,” Alyss said, “then you have to come with me. The Cat nearly killed you once, Dodge. If you insist on fighting him again, I won’t let you do it alone.”
A few more strides and Wonderland’s queen and the leader of her palace guard would have caught up with the chessmen, just a few more steps and—
A Glass Eye leaped out from behind a parked smail-transport, blocked their way. “Did you drop something?” Dodge asked the assassin. “’Cause I think I see your…” he unsheathed his sword and swung, decapitating the Glass Eye in one blow, “…head over there.”
Hand in hand, Dodge and Alyss ran, their feet a blur on the pavement, explosions all around them, and then—
Relative quiet. They were in Wondronia Grounds, stood catching their breath with the chessmen and generals in the enormous promenade.
“Spooky,” the rook said.
It was: to see a place dedicated to entertaining thousands of Wonderlanders at any given time empty of the usual families, strolling couples, retirees, and cliques of teenagers. All vacationers had been evacuated, all amusements abandoned; unfinished meals sat on restaurant tables; the massaging cloaks and hairstyle helmets of the salons buzzed and clicked as if clients were still relaxing beneath them. Nothing but water coursed down the quartz water slides at the far end of the lobby while, closer to Alyss, carnival rides such as the Whipsnake Coaster and the Spinning T-Cups were completely still.
Chkkchchkkchchchrshshshkkkk!
A dozen Glass Eyes burst through Wondronia’s locked front doors. The knight, rook, four Doppels, and four Gängers surged forward to engage them. Dodge grabbed Alyss’ hand and pulled her into the closest shelter—the Total ImmEx unit, where, as Hatter Madigan, visitors could do battle against various enemies. By the time a trio of Glass Eyes chased after them, the Total ImmEx unit was in operation—Dodge, with Hatter’s coat and weaponry superimposed on him, twisting and leaping in his fight against the Glass Eyes it manufactured, the real Glass Eyes momentarily confused by the sight of their false selves until—
Simultaneously, they turned their heads, quick and jerky as tuttle-birds sensing prey, and sighted Alyss Heart on their right flank. But she was on their left flank too. There were three Alysses in total. Only one of them could be Wonderland’s real queen. The Glass Eyes would do away with them all.
“Hagh!”
Dodge somersaulted over two of them—sword in one hand, Hand of Tyman in the other—and sent them to the nothingness of their afterlife. The remaining assassin, ducking and swiveling to avoid the crystal shot of its unreal brethren, was about to spray the place with its AD52 when Dodge snatched a circular blade from his Millinery backpack and threw it. The Glass Eye, not knowing that weapons produced by Total ImmEx couldn’t cause harm, moved to knock it away with the muzzle of the AD52. The opening was all Dodge needed. He lurched forward, his sword extended out in front him, and he thrust it into the assassin as far as its hilt.
Dodge and Alyss—the real Alyss, the decoys she’d imagined gone now—found each other, safe amid the scything and eager trigger-pulls of the Total ImmEx Glass Eyes.
“All right?” Alyss was breathless.
“No problem.”
They ran out to the lobby, where the white knight and generals were surrounded by an ever-growing number of Glass Eyes. And the rook, where was…? There, on the Spinning T-Cup ride, in a replica single-seater fighter craft shaped like a capital T, its guns parallel to the cockpit and located at the end of each wing. The rook was slashing at the assassins trying to climb up and put an end to him.
With blades swinging, Dodge offered what support he could to the generals and knight, but Alyss remained where she was, a pillar of calm amid the turmoil of battle as she employed the weapon of her imagination. The Spinning T-Cups kicked into operation. The ride’s fighter craft began to rotate, increasing in speed until the Glass Eyes climbing up to challenge the rook blade to blade were flung off like so many—
Crack!
The rook’s fighter craft was free of the ride altogether, independent, flying under the distant ceiling of Wondronia’s lobby.
“Yeeeeah!” the chessman shouted, piloting in low over Dodge, the knight and generals, and firing his craft’s guns into the Glass Eyes, annihilating half of them. A second flyby finished off the enemy and, with no small skill, he landed the fighter so that it blockaded Wondronia’s exposed front door.
“If you imagine every entrance and exit blocked, we’ll have time to defeat whatever Glass Eyes are still inside,” the four General Gängers said to Al
yss.
“No. I want as many of them as possible to come in.”
“You want what?!”
She didn’t need Bibwit to tell her that, being unable to imagine herself at every skirmish simultaneously, she couldn’t annihilate every Glass Eye in the city with a single strike of her imagination. She knew her limits all too well.
I have to kill off as many as can be brought together in one place.
“What’s the largest room here?” she asked.
“Penniken Fields on the second floor.”
“Take us there.”
Clicketclacketclacketyclick!
Scorpspitters, released by the Glass Eyes outside, skittered through small gaps not blocked by the rook’s fighter. Out the forked ends of their curled tails shot bullets of black liquid. Dodge, the chessmen, and generals tried to shield themselves with their weapons, but—
Splat! Sploink! Splish!
The liquid bullets imploded in midair, hung in their splattered state as against the windshield of a smail-transport. Alyss had, by the power of her imagination, cocooned herself and the others in a protective NRG shield and the bullets had smacked against it. A good thing too, because the few that had zipped past them hit the trunk of a guppy tree planted in the lobby, the poison causing its fish-faced leaves to audibly suffocate and its bark to fall off in colorless strips.
“Penniken Fields,” Alyss said again.
They stayed close together, the better to remain within the protection of the NRG shield. The Glass Eyes were now entering Wondronia by the smail-loads, having gotten the better of the rook’s T-Cup, and they fired orb generators, crystal shot, and razor-cards at the Alyssians while the scorpspitters let fly with round after round of their poison bullets. The bullets splatted against the NRG shield; the crystal shot and razor-cards bounced off of it, visiting damage upon the lobby’s restaurants and theaters and shops.
“Couldn’t we at least run?” the rook asked.
“No,” said Alyss.
Penniken Fields: the largest indoor park in Wonderland; a masterpiece of landscape architecture that might have made Nature jealous if it hadn’t paid such beautiful homage to Her with its arrangements of flower beds and shade trees, meandering paths, picturesque ponds, streams, and gently sloping vistas. At the Fields, the architect had managed to hide the ceiling behind the deep blue of an artificially produced atmosphere complete with clouds. With Glass Eyes and scorpspitters trailing them, Alyss led the others to a meadow bordered on one side by a hedge three Wonderlanders tall.
“Now we wait until there are more of them,” she said. “Keep me informed.”
“Keep you—?”
Mentally, she was already deep within herself. She had to focus, to concentrate on imagining a weapon that could explode with ten times the force of an orb generator. She thought of the munitions factory in the flatlands between Outerwilderbeastia and the suburbs of Wondertropolis that she’d once toured.
“How many Glass Eyes are there?” she asked.
“About a hundred,” answered Dodge.
Not enough. She remembered the production line where orb generators were assembled. She visualized the round, lightweight casings that might have been balls in a children’s game if not for the arrangement of molecules and atoms they contained.
“How many now?”
“Somewhere between three and four hundred maybe.”
In her imagination’s eye, she gazed into the hot center of an orb generator—the chambers that would open into one another on impact, allowing the nuclei they held to fuse in a chain reaction that gave the weapon its deadly force.
“And now?” She was tired. The protective cocoon, the outsized orb generator—all this imagining required stamina, physical strength.
“I have no idea,” Dodge said. “A lot.”
She opened her eyes and saw nearly a thousand of them. This had better work. She wouldn’t be able to maintain the NRG shield for much longer.
With the sound of a straining girder—eeeeeeeeeeeeeehh—the largest orb generator ever seen by Wonderlanders dropped from the artificial sky: armageddon for the Glass Eyes in Penniken Fields.
WabooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMB!
The force of the explosion knocked Alyss and the others through the hedge that bordered the meadow and served a double function—as decorative planting and as camouflage for the wall behind it. Alyss and Dodge, the chessmen and generals went crashing through the wall and out to the street below. Alyss lost her imaginative focus; the protective cocoon was dissolving as they hit the pavement, making their landing not as pain-free as it might have been.
Stunned, they were still picking themselves up when—
Thew, thew, thew, thew!
A whir of S-shaped blades, spinning fast around a common axis, coptered over their heads and sliced through an unnoticed Glass Eye that, from a fourth-story window of the Wondronia Hotel across the street, had been taking aim at them with an orb cannon.
Thew, thew, thew!
The weapon boomeranged back to the gloved hand of its owner, Hatter Madigan. With a flick of the wrist, he returned it to its innocuous incarnation as a top hat and set it on his head.
“I’m ready to return to service, if my queen will allow it,” he said, bowing to Alyss.
“Hatter!” She would have hugged him if she hadn’t thought he’d be bothered by the display of affection.
“Pretty good timing.” Dodge smiled. “A little sooner and you would’ve been perfect.”
The eight generals surrounded the Milliner, each insisting on shaking his hand and offering a hearty welcome.
“Your return is a boon to the confidence of our military,” said one General Gänger.
“The queendom simply isn’t the same without you,” enthused another.
“Welcome, welcome!” cried a pair of General Doppels.
Bleep bleep. Bleep bleep.
“Incoming transmission.” The rook pressed a button on the keypad strapped to his forearm. A projector-like light beamed out of the nozzle on his ammo belt. A screen formed in the air, visible to all, on which Bibwit appeared, still in the palace’s briefing room.
“Were we not in the midst of a crisis, Queen Alyss,” gushed the royal tutor, “I would tell you that I am as proud as I’ve ever been of any of my students! Such a clever strategy you employed! Such victorious ways! Such wisdom in so young and inexperienced a sovereign!”
“Bibwit?” the queen said.
“Quite right, yes. I shall embarrass you with praise some other time. There are still troops of Glass Eyes in Wondertropolis, but few enough now to be handled by our card soldiers and chessmen. You must return to the relative safety of the palace so that we can discuss what’s to be done about the woman who is to remain nameless—by whom, I think you know, I mean your aunt Redd.”
“Bibwit…have you seen Homburg Molly? It’s unlike her not to throw herself into a fight where she can show off her skills.”
“It is not at all like her,” the tutor agreed, “but I haven’t seen the girl.”
While Hatter tried to act as if Molly’s whereabouts didn’t mean everything to him, Alyss quickly scanned the palace with her imagination. She didn’t glimpse her bodyguard anywhere.
Probably still sulking because I sent her off. She’ll have to learn not to take things so personally.
“Expect us momentarily, Bibwit,” she said.
The tutor’s ears dipped in acknowledgment. The screen faded, the transmission ended.
“My queen,” said the knight, “with your permission, as long as a single one of my chessmen risks death against the Glass Eyes, so must I.”
“I should stay and fight,” agreed the rook.
One glance at Dodge and Alyss could tell that he wanted to stay and fight too. Till every living vestige of The Cat is rent from the world for all time. It was ironic that to keep him from further risking his life and sanity for revenge, she had to tempt him with a greater opportunity to accomplish its end.
“Dodge,” she said, “the Glass Eyes are only foot soldiers, as you’ve said yourself. Redd and The Cat won’t be so easily coaxed into the open. Come with me. Together we’ll devise a plan to flush them out of wherever they are. Return to the palace with me and we can confront them together.”
She held out her hand. The Wonderlanders were silent, and Dodge’s jaw looked diamond-hard as he stared off into the distance. But at last he turned to the woman who was both Wonderland’s queen and his love. He would follow her.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 16
Montmartre, Paris. June, 1873
THE PAINTER awoke from a fitful sleep, his nightmares cut short by the cries of his newborn son, who seemed to be suffering unquiet dreams of his own. Outside, rain thrashed the streets and lightning split the sky. The painter’s wife complainingly went to check on the baby, and the painter himself stared out the window at the few pedestrians making their way through the downpour; with their shoulders hunched and their heads bowed, they looked—to his trained eye—furtive and morose, people bent on illicit errands.
“What are you gawking at?”
His wife was standing at the door of their room with the whimpering baby in her arms. If he’d had any doubt before, he had none now: Her mood was as foul as the weather. What did he propose to do about the landscape he’d been commissioned to paint with a storm raging the way it was, she wanted to know. How was she supposed to pay for the milk and butter they needed? No wonder the child was bawling all the time with such a useless thing for a father!
To get away from her, the painter locked himself in his studio, where he sat sulking and blinking at his blank canvas. But after what felt like an endless morning, the weather broke: The sky was overcast, the sodden streets blanched by a flat, pallid light.
“It will have to do.”
He packed up his box of paints and brushes and, with a folded easel under his arm, escaped into the streets. The gutters were choked with mud and litter. The rumble of carriages attacked his ears like the roaring of giant beasts, and the faces of those he passed, peering out sullenly from between lowered hat brims and upturned collars, seemed marred by unfriendliness if not outright hostility.
