ArchEnemy

by Frank Beddor

  Taegel arrived early, commandeering a table away from the windows, but much surprised when a Wonderlander with the skin of a newborn and a head of thick, curly brown hair joined him. Clearly, this was not Queen Alyss.

  “Does Taegel not recognize an old friend?” the stranger asked.

  The lips nearly as white as the surrounding skin, the mischevious play of the eyes.

  “Bibwit!” Taegel said.

  “As pale as ever though a little more hirsute,” the tutor acknowledged, pulling at his curls to show they were not part of a wig. “Courtesy of Queen Alyss’ imagination. Rather interesting—to have a bushel on one’s head.” He glanced at the engineer’s long gray hairs rising every which way in tremulous wisps, making it appear as if steam was emanating from the fellow’s venerable skull. “Don’t take offense, dear Taegel, but I greatly hope—which is to say, it is my ardent wish—that my defection from Arch’s authority won’t require me to keep this hair for the remainder of my days.”

  The engineer couldn’t help laughing and even Bibwit allowed himself a brief chuckle. Which was how Alyss, Dodge, and Mr. Van de Skülle found them, basking in a lighthearted moment’s afterglow. Seeing the queen, Taegel started from his chair, intending to genuflect before her, but Dodge pressed a firm hand on his shoulder to keep him in his seat.

  “Right,” Taegel said. “Sorry.”

  Alyss, Dodge, and Mr. Van de Skülle settled in around the table.

  “Bibwit and General Doppelgänger have explained to me your reasons for being here,” Taegel told Alyss. “I am humbled by their recommendations of me and honored to do everything I can to help you.”

  “You assume great risk by having us here, Mr. Taegel,” Alyss answered. “It’s a reminder of what constitutes model service to White Imagination and it is your steadfastness in this service that humbles me.”

  Taegel, embarrassed by the queen’s praise, busied himself with a satchel at his feet, pulled three smaller satchels from it and passed one each to Alyss, Dodge, and Mr. Van de Skülle. “I didn’t expect you,” he apologized to Bibwit, “and still have to provide for you and the Milliner.” He explained that the satchels contained ID badges as well as subcutaneous ID chips, eyeglasses that presented to munitions factory security scanners a complete genetic makeup and 3-D image of eyeballs belonging to those with the highest clearance, and second-skin gloves with vetted fingerprints—all of which were needed to get the queen into his lab at the munitions factory. “I can take you tonight, if you wish,” he concluded.

  Dodge and Bibwit were smiling at each other.

  “Or tomorrow, if you prefer?”

  This amused the tutor and guardsman even more.

  “Or . . . the day following?” tried Taegel.

  Still, Dodge and Bibwit grinned.

  “What?” the weapons engineer asked. “What is it?”

  “Alyss’ imaginative powers pretty much nullify the factory’s security measures,” Dodge said.

  “But we thank you for your trouble,” Alyss added.

  “Speaking of trouble,” Bibwit patted the curls covering his head, “it is probably best, my dear, not to tax your imagination with the inessential. Now that I’m free of Arch, I’ll not trouble you any longer with my disguise—which is to say, I invite you to rid me of this most inessential hair as soon as we’re somewhere more private.”

  “You don’t think Arch will have warriors searching for you?” Dodge asked. “Because it wouldn’t surprise me if he rounds up every member of the tutor species he can find.”

  Alyss considered a gwormmy-blink. “I’d rather keep my tutor’s hair than lose my tutor altogether,” she said, to the albino’s obvious disappointment. “Oh, you don’t look that funny, Bibwit. Let’s leave it be for now.” She stood. “Is your home far from here, Mr. Taegel?”

  “Not very, Your Majesty. My transport is just outside.”

  A factory-issue transport: missile-shaped, light as foil, all sleek, reflective surfaces. Seated in the vehicle’s long, slender body, they shuttled along to their destination while Taegel—nervous, excited: The queen would be in his flat!—chattered away as Bibwit often did, to no one and everyone.

  “It was tough at work,” he said, unbidden, “tough all around at the factory when imagination was blinkered, but I’d say things are back to normal. I think they are anyway. At least as far as my own work is concerned.”

  Which was true enough since factory colleagues were once more finding the engineer busy at his lab in a nest of wire, relay switches, trigger mechanisms, nano-scanners, compression chambers, ammo cartridges, loading cylinders, docking bays from dismantled crystal shooters and AD52s—anything used in the manufacture of weaponry within arm’s reach. Unfortunately for Alyss and her companions, Taegel’s flat was just as messy as his lab. If, as Dodge did, you tried to sit in the lounge-pod, you felt the prick of springs and coils in your backside. If, as Bibwit did, you cautiously lowered yourself on to the arm of a floating chair, you wound up squashing the empty razor-card cartridges that had blended in with the chair’s fabric. Better to remain standing, as Alyss and Mr. Van de Skülle did—and not risk injury.

  “Sorry,” Taegel muttered, scooping up armloads of weapons parts and laboring into his bedroom. “My apologies, sorry.”

  “Hatter should be with us shortly,” Dodge noted.

  “And General Doppelgänger told me he would establish contact as soon as . . . ah, there he is.” At the sound of his crystal communicator, Bibwit called up a projection of Wonderland’s long-time commander of card soldiers and chessmen.

  “Queen Alyss,” Doppelgänger said, seeing his sovereign, “I’d like nothing more than to be there with you, but I hope to be of some value as your ‘man on the inside,’ as it were.” Then, splitting into two identical figures: “We’re your men on the inside!” Generals Doppel and Gänger said as one.

  “And I, Generals,” Alyss responded, “would prefer to have you near but believe you made the right decision. It’s better for the stability of Wonderland’s decks that you remain where you are.”

  “Although we should hope,” said Bibwit, “that my having left Arch doesn’t endanger the general—pardon, the generals—further.”

  Mr. Van de Skülle stood quiet with his hand on his whip, and Taegel kept coming and going in his effort to clear the common room of lab debris, as Alyss informed Bibwit and the generals of her most recent “meeting” with Redd Heart, of their decision to try and turn one of Arch’s personal guards via remote constructs, and of Her Imperial Viciousness being in the Whispering Woods to help surround Heart Palace.

  “We, for two, are glad to hear of the attempt on the guard,” Generals Doppel and Gänger said in unison.

  “Had you provoked Arch into battle with conjurings,” started General Doppel, “as it seemed you were thinking of doing—”

  “—we wouldn’t have relished unshuffling the decks, even against an imaginative construct of our queen!” finished Gänger.

  Dodge was watching Taegel pick up what looked like junk—all of it, he knew, the scattered scraps of warfare technology that could help him protect Alyss, depose Arch, ruin Redd, and wreak vengeance upon The Cat.

  “I’d definitely like to get hold of whatever new weapons are available at the factory,” he said, “but we probably shouldn’t chance a run on the place until we know how we’re going to proceed.”

  Bibwit’s ears flapped. “Now that you’re here, Alyss,” he asked, “do you feel Power of Proximity to the Crystal?”

  Alyss shook her head.

  “Perhaps if a guard’s turned, he will disclose to us the Heart Crystal’s location? But regardless . . .”

  The tutor sniffed, his nostrils taking in a whiff of something curious, and in a moment they were all sniffing, breathing in the fragrance of leaves and soil after a downpour. Bibwit was the first to look up and see him: the blue caterpillar, hanging upside down from the ceiling, calmly puffing at his hookah as he would were he rightside up.


  “About time,” Alyss murmured.

  Indeed it was, particularly if one assumed that this long-overdue visitation from an oracle was a favorable sign. Generals Doppel and Gänger, to judge by their flurry of polite coughs and hair rakings, were unsure. And Bibwit felt too well the uncertainty of Alyss’ role in maintaining the Crystal’s future welfare. The caterpillars had kept aloof too long for him to optimistically interpret Blue’s sudden visit. Like Dodge, he needed more, if he was going to be optimistic.

  “Oh, wise, blue oracle,” the tutor began, “your coming might be belated but is nonetheless—”

  “Ahem hem hum,” Blue grumbled, and exhaled a miasma of hookah smoke, in the middle of which Alyss recognized the deanery’s drawing room in Oxford. The dean and Mrs. Liddell, Edith and Lorina were being roughly handled by—

  Ripkins!

  The guard shoved the family members down on to a sofa, where they huddled together, frightened. The serrated blades of Ripkins’ fingerprints glinted, but as he moved toward the family, the scene and the hookah smoke dissipated.

  Desperate eyes raised to the caterpillar, Alyss asked, “Is this the past or the future you’ve shown me?”

  “It is the present,” said the caterpillar.

  Dodge stepped up close beside her. “Alyss, it’s a trap.”

  “Yes, yes, a trap!” agreed Doppel and Gänger.

  “To try and save them would be to reveal yourself to Arch,” Dodge warned. “You’d be risking your life and imagination and everything we fight to achieve for Wonderland. There’s nothing you can do for them.” He gestured to where the images of the Liddells had just been. “Unfortunately.”

  But it’s the present I saw?! And there’s nothing I can . . . ?

  She was, she realized with a jolt, wary of Dodge, the man she had believed would never give her the least cause to distrust. He’d reacted so jealously after he’d found her acting the part of Alice Liddell. Might he not say anything to keep from feeling that way again? Her doubt must have shown in her face because—

  “As you know too well,” Dodge said, “we’ve all sacrificed loved ones for the greater good. I say this for no reason except to see you back on Wonderland’s throne and White Imagination again prominent in the queendom: There’s nothing you can do to save that family.”

  “‘ That family’?” Alyss huffed. “Their name is Liddell!”

  “Ahem hum,” the oracle grumbled. “What one sets as a trap, others know to be a release.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Dodge said, impatient, turning on Bibwit.

  “Alyss Heart must go,” the oracle pronounced. “Everqueen requires it.”

  Everqueen?

  The term, unknown to the Alyssians, left them temporarily silent. Mr. Van de Skülle occupied himself with the braid of his whip. Taegel stood with a tumbleweed of wire in his arms, his eagle eyes alternately alighting on Alyss, her advisers, and the oracle.

  “Who or what is the Everqueen, wise one?” Bibwit asked. “Is Alyss the Everqueen?”

  “She must go,” the oracle said again.

  Has he ever been so forthright? Perhaps in one of his previous visitations, before she had passed through her Looking Glass Maze or—

  “Please, Alyss,” Dodge said, his voice calm, petting. “Why should you listen to this oracle? Where has he been hiding? Why didn’t he come to you before Arch took Wonderland or the Clubs were giving us so much trouble?”

  “Yes,” said General Doppel, “why does he come now?”

  “He might not be on our side anymore!” cried General Gänger.

  But he visited Molly. He’s on our side. I feel it.

  The queen’s advisers burst out all at once, Dodge and the generals repeating why she shouldn’t risk a journey to save the Liddells, Bibwit ruminating aloud whether she should risk the journey or not, the answer to which, he reasoned, depended on if the “release” mentioned by the oracle was beneficial to both the Alyssians and the Heart Crystal, or to just the Crystal alone, though admittedly he couldn’t see any benefit in it to either, not at the present moment at any rate, but—

  Blue exhaled another mass of hookah smoke into the room, which sifted into four clouds—one each enveloping Dodge, Bibwit, Taegel, and Mr. Van de Skülle. In no more time than it took to breathe, the foursome were unconscious on the floor, and Generals Doppel and Gänger, their like nesses still projecting from Bibwit’s crystal communicator, were left straining for sight of their queen from beneath a footstool.

  “Go,” Blue said to Alyss.

  And she did.

  After Green’s visit, Arch acted quickly: consulted with his mechanics to make sure the siphons and tankers could do what he needed them to do; briefed the Doomsines and Fel Creel who would be operating the equipment on where they should wait for his command, which he said would be self-explanatory when he gave it. He sent a minister through the Pool of Tears dressed in a form-fitting undersuit whose sensor-fibers would monitor his vital signs, needing to make sure the data could be transmitted between worlds—heart rate, blood pressure, and adrenaline levels relayed from Earth to the master board set up in the war room of the Wondertropolis palace. He told those involved no more than they needed to know to perform their given tasks, and he did all of this while running interference so as to obscure his scheme from the oracles, simultaneously despatching ministers to consult with tribal leaders and briefing Awr and Scabbler warriors on plans he might or might not execute; he didn’t allow himself to decide even in the “privacy” of his thoughts, lest he clued Green and the rest of the oracles in to what he was truly up to and they made moves to stop him.

  “Once your undersuit transmits to me an increase in your heart rate and adrenaline indicative of a man in battle,” he told Ripkins, who had just been outfitted and was moving first one limb and then another while technicians confirmed that the suit functioned as it should, “I’ll know you’ve engaged with Alyss and may or may not then give my next command.”

  There was a liquid puuh behind him, where Blister, moping ever since Ripkins had been chosen to go to Earth, was taking his feelings out on a potted sunflower left over from Alyss Heart’s days. Puuh: the sound of blistered petals bursting, drowning in pus.

  “I sent a minister through the Pool to be certain the suit works between worlds,” Arch told Ripkins. “We received readings without a glitch, so I don’t want to hear any lies about why yours didn’t. There are no excuses for failing to engage Alyss.”

  “I don’t make excuses,” Ripkins said. “I never fail.”

  “You’ve been prepped as to where the Liddells are located and what they look like?”

  “I have.”

  Psssuuubssshhhh!

  Blister was pressing a naked finger against the skin of the sunflower’s stalk, which had swelled up and down its entire length and popped, dribbling viscous green stuff and releasing trapped air like a body’s expiring breath. Still flexing his arms and legs, Ripkins faced him. From the pair’s deadpan expressions, one never would have known they had fought side by side in many successful battles. Then Ripkins bowed quickly to the king and left, and—

  Though the sunflower was dead, Blister yanked it out of its soil and squeezed its drooping stalk in his fist as if to kill it all over again.

  CHAPTER 41

  AS SHE’D done years before—at age seven, leaping for her life under Hatter Madigan’s protection, escaping the death of family and friends and the only queendom she’d ever known—Alyss fell toward the Pool of Tears, her feet pointed down and her arms held close to her body.

  Kerplassshhhh!

  She plunged through the water, down and down and down, then up and up and—

  Prrrssshhhaw!

  She shot out of a portal puddle on to the solid ground of Earth. But where? Because she was definitely not in Oxford, England. Snow-capped mountains. A village, its buildings with their white stucco and dark, rough-hewn timber: It was exactly like something she’d seen in the geography books given her by
Miss Prickett, her governess when she’d lived with the Liddells.

  “Switzerland!” she said, spinning round and throwing herself into the puddle portal, again plummeting to the depths but this time aiming her body slantwise so as not to drop straight down. Even after she reversed directions, torpedoing up, she held her body at a tilt until—

  Prrrssshhhaw!

  She splashed out into a large open square. People were muffled and bundled against the cold. At one end of the square: a many-colored structure that resembled something made of gingerbread, its columns topped with striped dollops of cake icing. Next to this was a fortress: massive rectangular buildings surrounded by a stone wall complete with turrets and clock tower.

  “The Kremlin!”

  She dove back into the puddle portal, slanting her body to the left instead of the right as she had the last time and—

  Prrrssshhhaw!

  She was in a town, somewhere in France or Germany perhaps. She didn’t stay long enough to find out, dropped a fourth time into the puddle portal, aiming her body farther left as she went down and up and—

  Prrrssshhhaw!

  “The Houses of Parliament!”

  She was in London. Getting closer. One more time. She again saw the inside of the puddle portal, again steered her body leftward and—It worked!—she came out practically at the foot of Oxford’s Carfax Tower. Hoping to make up for the time she’d lost, she sprinted toward Christ Church, her feet barely touching the ground, as if her shoes had wings. Which, briefly, they did.

  Finally!

  The deanery. She raced up the front walk, using her imagination to unlock the door and turn the latch. Inside the house, nothing had changed. The umbrella stand and hat rack, the family pictures hanging in the hall, even the gouge in the baseboard marking where she’d thrown her ice skates one winter afternoon: Everything was exactly as it had been when she’d lived there.