ArchEnemy

by Frank Beddor

  It could not have been going worse for her niece, chessmen succumbing to slashing blades, card soldiers falling a pack at a time under a barrage of orb generators and cannonball spiders. How invigorated Her Imperial Viciousness had felt, watching Alyss’ pathetic defensive maneuvers as Boarderland’s twenty-one tribes, under her command, stormed into Outerwilderbeastia, each tribe wielding the weapons they most favored: gossamer shots (Awr), mind riders (Maldoids), kill-quills (Scabbler), death-balls (Gnobi), knobkerries (Astacans), and the crude tools of less developed tribes hardly worth her notice. No, her attack on Wonderland couldn’t have been going better. Her Boarderlanders and Earth recruits had laid flat shuffle after shuffle of Heart soldiers, rampaging through Outerwilderbeastia into the Everlasting Forest and the Chessboard Desert, converging on Wondertropolis. How she had frowned with appreciation as The Cat swiped claws across the chests of Six Cards and swatted down pawns! How she had grimaced with pride as her foremost military rank, the most gifted of her Earth recruits, proved their worth: Sacrenoir, who raised the bones of the dead into skeleton-zombies desperate to satisfy their insatiable hunger for live flesh; Siren Hecht, unhinging her jaw to release high-pitched screams that sent platoons squirming to the ground in pain; Alistaire Poole, the surgeon/undertaker who conducted autopsies on living card soldiers; and Mr. Van de Skülle, dexterously lashing chessmen with his spike-tipped whip.

  And at last she’d been making her way down Heart Boulevard, toward Heart Palace and a final victory over her presumptuous upstart of a niece! But that’s when things had gone instantly, horribly—

  Odd.

  She awoke, lying in the middle of the boulevard, her head hazy, her soldiers splayed about in various stages of unconsciousness. She had tried to view Alyss with her imagination’s eye but saw only blackness. Whether or not her niece had harnassed some sort of reserve power from the Heart Crystal, as Arch had suggested, Redd didn’t know. The infusion of strength she’d experienced when nearing the Heart Crystal had gone in a moment. She’d been barren of imagination ever since.

  “Not bad,” she said, applauding listlessly as Ripkins dragged a defeated Glass Eye from the sparring arena.

  She had called for the fights in order to boost morale. The tribes were fitful, having never remained in such proximity to one another for any length of time and not understanding why they hadn’t stormed Heart Palace when they had been so close. But she couldn’t have risked entering the palace when Alyss might have had her powers while she . . . no, she hated to admit it even to herself. Besides giving her an opportunity to observe what Arch’s bodyguards were capable of, the sparring matches would distract the troops from their unease.

  Redd nodded in Blister’s direction. “Your turn.”

  The bodyguard stepped into the sparring arena, pulled off his elbow-length gloves and placed them neatly in his pocket. Her Imperial Viciousness glared out at the troops.

  “Anyone wishing to earn my special regard, which should be every one of you, will step forward and earn it!”

  Blister waited for an adversary, but none came forward.

  “Are this Doomsine’s talents so great that you’d all risk my wrath as cowards?”

  “Let me fight him.”

  The Cat’s words had come out as a growl. He was standing between Redd and Arch in humanoid form, erect on two heavily muscled legs, his strong arms reaching down past his waist, his paws unsheathing claws sharp and long enough to run through an average-sized Wonderlander. His fangs showed beneath his flat pink nose, his twitching whiskers.

  “You’ve only one life left,” Redd reminded him.

  “And it’s worthless if I don’t risk it doing what I do best.”

  “I like your rashness, feline. Take your position.”

  The Cat leapt into the sparring arena. He and Blister eyed each other, unmoving.

  “Is this supposed to be impressive?” Redd snorted.

  Like one warming up for more strenuous exercise, Blister tossed a whipsnake grenade, but The Cat easily sidestepped its slithering, snapping electric coils. Blister would try to work his way in close, The Cat knew. Every swipe of a paw could prove as deadly to himself as to Blister. He should be careful. But he wasn’t here to be careful, so he ran straight at his adversary, his powerful legs carrying him forward with such thrust and purpose that anyone else would have tried to flee, but Blister merely remained where he was.

  The Cat pounced—a low, perfectly horizontal leap forward. He morphed into a kitten in mid-air, ducking Blister’s outstretched hands, and transformed back into a humanoid as he passed, raking his claws across Blister’s shin. He came to a stop three spirit-dane lengths away, a full-formed assassin again.

  Blister showed no sign of feeling the bloody gash in his leg. He produced an AD52 from somewhere beneath his coat and held down its trigger, shooting a full deck of razor-cards at The Cat and stalking after it. The Cat avoided what projectiles he could and batted down others, smacking the tops of them without touching their sharp edges, but Blister was able to get within arm’s reach and—

  The Cat hissed, leapt back. Blister had grazed his shoulder with a finger. The fur immediately swelled; the skin underneath it bubbled. The Cat popped the swelling with a claw and spat.

  Beneath Redd’s canopy, Arch leaned toward his mistress, smiling and flirtatious.

  “You’re looking particularly grim, Your Imperial Viciousness.”

  “Flatterer.”

  “I was going to woo you with lies, Redd, but I have to say, the blurriness that’s been part of you and The Cat since your return to our world—”

  “What of it?”

  “I know you said something about its being the result of your unprecedented journey through the Heart Crystal, but . . . well, it’s pretty much gone.”

  Redd crinkled her nose in what was supposed to be a teasing manner. “Again I ask: What of it, Archy? Does it surprise you that I used my powerful imagination to rid myself of a loathsome blurriness? It’s just taken longer than I’d liked. What the Heart Crystal gives isn’t so easily done away with . . . even for me.”

  “Hm,” Arch said.

  Blister and The Cat stood breathing heavily in the middle of the sparring arena, each waiting for the other to make the next move. Blister’s clothes were shredded, thin lines of blood showing where The Cat’s claws had dragged across his chest, back, leg, and arms. The Cat’s shoulder and forearms were leaking—wherever Blister had even lightly touched him, yellow pus dribbled from popped bubbles of skin.

  “Caterpillar,” Vollrath noted, his ashen finger pointing at a series of green smoke rings drifting out from behind a fried dormouse hawker’s stall.

  In the sparring arena, Blister threw a dagger at The Cat. The feline dropped into a crouch, about to spring forward.

  “Enough!” Redd shouted. “As much as we’re all dying to see the outcome of this little dalliance, I may still have use for both of you.”

  Though she’d always deemed caterpillar-oracles to be ugly, annoying creatures, Her Imperial Viciousness stomped toward the dormouse hawker’s stall, leaving Blister and The Cat to believe they had lost their sole chance to prove which of them was the greater fighter. They couldn’t know there would soon be another.

  CHAPTER 9

  ALYSS DIDN’T think they would survive. Too many anti-imaginationists in the salvage lot had seen Dodge hurry her into this rotting smail-transport to avoid the Club soldiers . . .

  We’ve a few steps head start at most.

  ... and now he was leading her up a buckled aisle to the pilot’s station, pushing a hand under the sleeve of his jumpsuit to touch the keypad strapped to his forearm.

  “Deal the decks!”

  He’s wearing his ammunition belt.

  “Alyss has been recognized! Lord and Lady of Clubs on premises! Deal the decks!”

  The general’s voice sounded from somewhere beneath Dodge’s jumpsuit. “Decks dealt! Decks will—”

  Pfffffffffffaaa!

&n
bsp; The transport shook. Outside, Alyss could hear the metallic wheeze of unfolding cannonball spiders, the scuffle of running feet, panicked voices.

  “This transport’s positioned against the lot’s outer fence,” Dodge said, pulling an AD52 from under his jumpsuit, “so if we can just . . .”

  He aimed his weapon at the side of the pilot’s station and hit the trigger. Fith fith fith fith fith!

  Razor-cards embedded in the wall, forming a rough circle.

  Everything’s moving so quickly and yet so slowly . . . Dodge kicking at the wall panel outlined by his razor-cards, and there, a Three of Clubs entering where we did just a gwormmy-blink ago. Has it only been a gwormmy-blink or—?

  “Dodge?”

  Before the Three of Clubs had even planted a second foot in the transport, Dodge somehow armed himself with a crystal shooter and sent out a swarm of luminous bullets. The soldier fell, but more were coming, shoving aside the lifeless Club and scrabbling into the ruined vehicle, their mauler rifles spitting shards of quicksilver.

  Dodge pulled a slender rod from the top of his boot, and—

  Fwathump!

  The rod opened like an umbrella from Earth, its webbing shielding him and Alyss from incoming shards.

  “Get that off,” Dodge said, nodding at the would-be escape hatch and handing Alyss his AD52.

  He sent a steady spray of crystal shot around the shield, aiming at anything and everything. Only enemies were on the other side of the shield.

  Alyss kicked at the pilot station’s wall. Focus, concentrate . But it was hard, trying to conjure, as she’d been forced to do in past battles with Redd’s card soldiers and Glass Eyes, swaddling herself and her forces in a cocoon of deflective NRG. She had to sharpen her attention to a pinpoint while still kicking at the—

  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh!

  A mauler shard whistled by her head.

  “I can’t hold them off much longer!” Dodge said.

  Alyss stepped back and held down the AD52’s trigger until the ammo cartridge clicked, empty. At least three decks of razor-cards outlined a circle on the pilot station’s wall. She aimed her foot at the circle’s center, kicked as hard as she could.

  The wall panel came loose, clattered to the floor.

  The outer fence.

  She could reach out and touch it, but pressed up against its other side, blocking any chance of escape: the solid win dowless side of another transport.

  “What’s wrong?” Dodge shouted. “Go! Go!”

  He backed toward her, shield still held to their advantage and crystal shooter spewing its life-ending spatter. Club soldiers continued to advance, sheltering behind rusty benches, progressing cautiously up the aisle to the pilot’s station.

  Then Dodge saw it: the second transport.

  But in the quarter-instant he and Alyss stood staring at its impenetrable side wall, with mauler silver ricocheting dangerously around them, swatches of it began to vanish, swiped into nonexistence by an unseen hand, like figures being erased from a blackboard.

  A man’s face appeared in the opening—the man with mutton-chop sideburns who’d been roughly escorted from the salvage lot.

  “I thought I heard something,” he said.

  He was holding what looked like a kaleidoscope, no longer than his forearm, the larger end of which he now dragged back and forth against the fence that separated the two transports. Wherever the instrument touched, the fence faded to nothing.

  “You’re both welcome on board,” he said. “Although I doubt you’ll like where we’re going, it should be safer than staying here.”

  The man’s transport jerked into motion. Alyss and Dodge had no time. Mauler shards were pinging and bouncing off the pilot station’s controls. Dodge’s jumpsuit had already been sliced through in several places. Another few paces and the Club soldiers would be upon them.

  They jumped out of one transport into the other, landing awkwardly in the aisle, and Alyss immediately found herself attacked by scarves, blouses, a hooded cloak: imaginationist-prisoners offering what they could for further disguise.

  “They’ll be looking for you dressed as a farmer’s helper,” the sideburned man explained, inclining his head and adding an almost inaudible “Your Highness” to indicate that he knew who Alyss was. He moved his kaleidoscope-like instrument back and forth over the hole in the side of the transport. Wherever the instrument passed, the wall re-formed until the transport was entire again. Up and down the aisle, prisoners had gathered in twos and threes to prevent the Club soldiers in the heavily partitioned pilot’s station from noticing the disturbance, but they now settled quietly into the shadows. Alyss and Dodge sat among them as if they had been there all along.

  “Where are they taking us?” Alyss asked the whiskered Wonderlander.

  “I couldn’t tell you the exact location, but my guess—and my hope—is that we’re going to one of the limbo coops.”

  The limbo coops.

  Dodge—surreptitiously tapping at the keypad on his forearm, transmitting tracking codes to General Doppelgänger—looked at her. They had heard unsubstantiated rumors of limbo coops, in which imaginationists were being imprisoned. But they had known for sure only that Wonderlanders were being routed from their homes and deposited somewhere . . . if not suffering worse.

  The noise of the salvage lot was growing faint and, as the smail hummed through darkened neighborhoods toward the Clubs’ extensive land holdings, Alyss studied the diminutive hairy-cheeked man. He had a single eyebrow nearly as coarse and bristly as his sideburns. Squiggles of hair pushed out from his shirt cuffs, and tufts of the stuff grew thick on the first digit of each of his fingers. The only place he didn’t have hair, it seemed, was on top of his head, which resembled the rounded point of a gwynook’s egg. And unlike Dodge who, finished with his keypad, sat as tense as wire, and unlike the others in the transport, the man’s status as a prisoner apparently did not weigh heavily upon him; he wore an expression of pleasant anticipation.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Again, he inclined his head ever so subtly. “Just an average tinker who makes his living by traveling the queendom, offering for sale the modest gadgets I design and manufacture myself, and which I trust either amuse and educate my customers or make their daily chores a touch easier.”

  “But you have a name, I take it?”

  “My name is Mutty P. Dumphy. But as I said, I’m a simple tinker who lives by what modest wit and imagination I possess, as all of my kind must.”

  “You live by your inventiveness, but you subscribe to the Clubs’ anti-imagination propaganda?” Dodge asked.

  “I don’t subscribe to it at all, sir.”

  “Then why were you at the salvage lot to hear them speak?” asked Alyss.

  “I see no harm in my tinkering with ideas as I do objects, if only to better understand why I don’t believe what I don’t believe. But mostly I was there in hopes of getting myself reunited with any number of friends who’ve been taken to the limbo coops. I can’t be sure to which coop I’ll be taken, of course. I don’t even know how many there are. But I can’t help being optimistic. I trust I will meet at least one of my friends, yet if not, others might benefit from seeing me, as I have encouraging—”

  The smail-transport came to a sudden stop and Mr. Dumphy, who’d been standing in the aisle, went tumbling into the pilot’s partition. Ordered to disembark, the prisoners filed out on to an unpaved street, both sides of which were crowded with ramshackle structures that appeared on the verge of collapse—multi-level, if none-too-well constructed lean-tos complete with slanting floors and out-of-plumb corners. Around all, sheer walls of dolomite rose to unseen heights.

  “Welcome home!” a Six of Clubs mocked from a guard tower, his mauler rifle aimed at the imaginationists. “Congregating on the street is not allowed! Idling is not allowed!”

  Limbo coop residents had shuffled from buildings to prevent the newcomers from settling into already overcrowded rooms. Slowly,
not knowing what to do or where to go, Alyss, Dodge, and the tinker walked the gauntlet of broken, defeated Wonderlanders, Dodge half a step in front of Alyss and using his body as a shield. Alert for threats, he returned the goggle-eyed stares of families—dirty, hungry, and growing more haggard by the hour; he scanned the cramped street, the condemnable buildings, and the imposing dolomite walls rising into the night sky . . .

  “Why would anyone want to come to a place like this?” Alyss murmured.

  The tinker glanced about to make sure no one was near enough to hear but still spoke as softly as he could: “Your Highness, I was trying to tell you I have encouraging news, and it is this: I’ve reason to believe imagination is returning to Wonderland.”

  CHAPTER 10

  IT SHOULD have been an uneventful journey from Talon’s Point to Hatter and Molly’s new flat in Wondertropolis’ Gimble Lane. The skirmishes that intermittently flared up between Wonderland card soldiers and Redd’s retreating forces were nowhere near the Snark Mountains. It should have been nothing more than a plodding trek from the lower slope of Talon’s Point to one of the public hikers’ cabins in the foothills, where Hatter and Molly could enter the Crystal Continuum and travel quickly to the capital city. Instead, they didn’t even make it to the base of Talon’s Point before—

  “What was that about?” Molly asked, waking with her father next to a bushel of shady greens, the faint stink of caterpillar in the air. They had not been unconscious long. “I knew oracles were big, but . . . do they always act so weird?”

  “Not always,” Hatter said.

  He’d been as still as a fossil—he, who knew precisely what to do when facing an enemy of terrible violence and power, had made no move and uttered no sound as Blue confronted his daughter, issuing his one-word prophecy. Never before had a caterpillar revealed itself to a Milliner not in company of the queen, let alone a halfer whose confidence in her abilities had been shattered by a conniving king. Whether Molly didn’t remember being singled out by Blue or didn’t care, Hatter couldn’t determine. Without a word, she got to her feet and started down the mountain again, sullen, uncommunicative, her eyes on the uneven ground. As if nothing had happened. As if she didn’t care whether he followed her or not.