ArchEnemy

by Frank Beddor

  “One last ingredient and you’ll have done it,” Rafters said.

  So why didn’t he tell her what the ingredient was? Because no way could she guess, not when the symbols in her mother’s notebook were gauzily unclear on account of her tears and she was ready to give up on all this schooling and cry out for—

  Ploink!

  A tear fell from her cheek into the experiment’s bowl; the slush frothed and fizzed, liquified.

  “Do you know what just happened?” Rafters asked.

  Molly sniffled, wiped at her face. “Yeah, I ruined it.”

  Rafters said nothing, dropped a leftover pebble of quartz into the water and watched it speed down and out of sight.

  “Now do you understand?” he asked.

  Molly, still unfocused by thoughts of her mother, shook her head. Rafters upended the bowl, spilling its contents on to the desktop and making—

  “A puddle where no puddle should be, a means of transport,” he said, though the wet splotch was not large enough for anyone but a baby to enter.

  Molly glanced from him to the puddle and back. “A means of transport,” she said. And then: “You worked at the Millinery.”

  The saddest expression the girl had ever seen marred Rafters’ face. “I did. Before your mother’s time. Hatter Madigan wasn’t even the age you are now.” As a young alchemist, he said, he’d made a mistake. “The exact nature of the mistake isn’t important for you to know. But I recognized it too late. My self-inflicted punishment was to follow the Wonderlanders whose actions earned the Pool of Tears its name—those who’d also made mistakes in their personal or professional lives and had stood on the cliff overlooking Tove Pond, as it was called, letting their tears fall into the water before they jumped, never to be seen by friends or family again. I’ve lived with my mistake for more years than I care to count.”

  “But you could’ve gone back,” Molly said. “You can go back now.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not yet brave enough to face those I left behind who are, I pray, still living. But I’ve related all of this, Molly, only so you’ll understand when I tell you that I have cried myself out long before today. More tears are needed to enlarge this portal if you’re to return to Wonderland. You must provide the tears—genuine, heart-felt tears they must be. I will give you privacy.”

  He was out the door before she realized it. But left alone in the garret, with everything—the end of Queen Alyss’ second exile, her own reunion with her father—dependent on her own grief-loosened tears, her eyes remained dry. Only when she gazed round at the trappings of a Millinery alchemist and let her mind drift back to Weaver and the father she was afraid to let herself love, only then did the tears come.

  “I can’t decide if it bodes well or ill that I’m without imagination one hour but possessed of it again a few hours later,” Alyss said. “It’s so strange, with regards to imagination, to be at the mercy of what happens in Wonderland.”

  “It may be,” Dodgson responded, sifting through the letters on his desk, “that it boded ill when imagination was n-nowhere to be found, but bodes well now that imagination’s returned to us.”

  Alyss was skeptical. “Mine is not of much value without the Pool of Tears.”

  “You’ve confessed what you find s-strange,” Dodgson said, ignoring his letters, “and so I will c-confess the same. I think it at least as strange that a source of power as great as the H-Heart Crystal can be possessed or c-controlled by a single individual. By any group of individuals. W-we are each of us born with our own talents, that much remains clear. But to th-think, to know, that to the extent each of us is able to utilize the imaginative ability with which we’re born . . . to know that this d-depends upon who possesses the Heart Crystal and w-what he or she does with it . . .” The reverend shook his head. “Possession of so much power will always lead to c-c-corruption. If not in the person who controls the object, then in those around her.”

  Alyss did not deny it, having for awhile now considered that being sovereign of any state meant constantly guarding against corruption in one form or another. She was about to say as much when the door banged open, as if kicked, and Molly burst in, as excited as in days of old.

  “I’ve made another Pool of Tears!”

  CHAPTER 57

  THEY HAD no more than half an hour—the most Alice Liddell was willing to spare apart from her family—and so they didn’t venture far, sitting in Christ Church Meadow and absently watching the people come and go as if it were any other day, any other hour, not the last time two friends would ever meet.

  “Father is about his work at the college again,” Alice Liddell said, “but Mother and I spend much of our time comforting Edith, who’s been the slowest to recover. I made her laugh earlier today.”

  Only Molly knew it was to be their final meeting. Queen Alyss had thought it best not to expose the Liddells to more trauma or confusion. But it was harder than Molly had anticipated, to sit here and say nothing.

  “The authorities refuse to tell us about the man who was killed,” Alice went on. “I don’t mind, really. What does it matter who he was or how he contrived to make it seem as though knives came from his fingers? I doubt knowing either would explain why he did such a thing to my family.”

  “What about, you know, the other you?” Molly asked.

  Alice shrugged, her hands worrying in her lap. When she spoke, she was too adamant, as if trying to convince herself of what she thought others wanted her to believe though she didn’t, couldn’t believe it. “I think my parents and sisters mistaken as to the extent of the similarity between us. I saw the lady but briefly and am sure I overstated our resemblance. I would like to know if she’d been the man’s accomplice and had second thoughts, since how else could she have known he was threatening our family? In any case, I’d like to thank her for saving them, but I don’t expect to have that privilege.”

  A boy ran giggling past, chased by a shaggy terrier.

  “I should get back. I promised to read to Edith. Perhaps we can meet for tea next Tuesday, if my sister’s improved by then.”

  “Yeah,” Molly said, saddened to know Tuesday tea would never happen; Miss Liddell wasn’t the only one who had to get home. “Yeah, maybe I’ll see you then.”

  Alyss and Dodgson were waiting for her at Rafters’ garret: the bed of straw, the dresser turned into a workbench, the puddle where no puddle should be. Molly pocketed the Milliner blades she and Rafters had produced with the help of her mother’s notebooks—C- and S-shaped blades, daggers and folding knives, skin-boring tools that looked like mini tridents, all weapons that might have come from Hatter’s backpack.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to come?” Alyss asked Rafters.

  He bent from the waist. “I thank you. But it’s not as if you’re returning to a paradise. Though, who knows? One day I might have the courage . . . and you’ll see me again in Wondertropolis.”

  “I look forward to it,” Alyss said. There was nothing more to do but leave. She looked around and added, “Well . . .”

  “Well . . .” said Dodgson, and suddenly bowed: “May we never meet again, Your Majesty.”

  Never meet again? After I thought we’d made amends and—

  “F-for if we don’t meet again,” the reverend explained, “I will know you’ve s-succeeded in retaking the crown and, of course, that imagination for both our w-worlds is safe. I do trust, however, that if we’re never more to meet, I may then be free of your aunt and her followers as well.”

  “Oh. I see,” Alyss said benignly. “Then may we never meet again, Mr. Dodgson.”

  The reverend turned his attentions to the queen’s traveling companion. “Good day to you, Homburg Molly.”

  Difficult to say who seemed more uncomfortable, Dodgson with his starched pose or the fidgeting Molly, though it was the girl who braved demonstrativeness. She stepped forward and, without looking at the reverend, gave him a quick hug, after which, without a glance for anyone, embarrass
ed, she hopped onto the workbench, next to the puddle where no puddle should be. Alyss climbed up beside her, and without further ado, they jumped one after the other into the portal, neither of them fighting against its steady downward pull, its deepwater lull, its upward push: the question about to be answered, of whether they would emerge into a recognizable Wonderland or an alien place in which friends and beloved were forever absent.

  Even amidst the bloody free-for-all outside the Iron Butterfly, The Cat and Blister were left to themselves, as if in hopes they would do away with each other.

  Dodge had, for the present, maneuvered as close to The Cat as he wished to be. He hadn’t waited this long for vengeance, suffered this long, to shoot the humanoid freak in the back. He wanted the assassin’s full attention, and so he occupied himself with any enemy who confronted him—tribal warriors, Club soldiers, he didn’t care. He fought whoever came at him.

  “Hguuunh!”

  Dodge turned, saw The Cat standing with his legs firmly planted and his body positioned as far from Blister’s reach as he could, keeping one arm extended and a pawful of claws rammed up into the bodyguard’s stomach.

  “Ghuuuh,” Blister drooled, hands fumbling at the assassin’s arm, blistering it repeatedly.

  The Cat rammed his claws deeper into the bodyguard before spitting and flinging him to the ground. Dodge stepped forward.

  “Sir Justice’s spawn!” The Cat hissed.

  The assassin was badly blistered on his thighs and back, blood seeped from his shoulder and arms, but if he felt pain, he didn’t show it. He sprang at the guardsman, morphing into a kitten while airborne so that Dodge swung his sword too high, and returning to humanoid form as he landed. He swatted the guardsman in the back and sent him reeling. Dodge regained his footing and charged; sword clattered against claw and fell from his grasp. The Cat kicked the blade away and Dodge reached under his jumpsuit for a whipsnake grenade. Within moments he had recourse to every weapon he was carrying. Whipsnake grenade, AD52, shardstorm: not a single one went untried, but The Cat’s speed and agility were more impressive than the guardsman remembered.

  Too impressive.

  After failing at everything else, he, Dodge Anders, was going to fail at this too. He would not outlive Sir Justice’s murderer. While The Cat bobbed and weaved to avoid shardstorm shrapnel, Dodge made his father a whispered apology for his failure. He apologized to Alyss and offered her his undying love. His clothes were tattered, shredded—his flesh too in many places. He’d exhausted his arsenal except for a single dagger. He ripped a strip of cloth from his jumpsuit and flapped it at The Cat, who abruptly fell still, as if mesmerized. Dodge again flapped the shred of cloth.

  “Stop it,” The Cat said, unable to move, fixated on the cloth.

  “What’s the matter, kitty?” Dodge teased, waving the string-like cloth, moving closer. “Infatuated by the string, kitty?”

  “Stop it!”

  But Dodge didn’t stop it, at least not until he was close enough to press the point of his dagger against the hollow of The Cat’s throat. Unfortunately, The Cat at the same time managed to lift a claw to Dodge’s chest, where his heart was.

  “So it will end for both of us,” The Cat said. “Do it.”

  Dodge stared into The Cat’s pulsing eyes, the moist nostrils, the slobbery fangs. He was not afraid to die, but . . . revenge? It had never been the way to honor his father’s memory. He’d always known it, but now, for the first time, he felt it. His hesitation lasted no more than a whisker twitch, but The Cat sensed it.

  “Time to join your father,” the assassin mocked.

  Dodge suffered the pop of skin as The Cat’s claw penetrated his chest. Revenge might not have been the best way to honor a father’s memory, but what good were such considerations now? He put pressure on the dagger against The Cat’s throat.

  “Mreeeooooooow!”

  The Cat leapt away, staggered, an entire deck of razor-cards lodged in his back. And there was Blister, barely able to stand, a forearm pressed against his stomach, loosely aiming an AD52 at the feline.

  Dodge let his dagger fly—wi-wi-wi-thimp!—and even before it pierced Blister, killing him instantly, The Cat had disappeared.

  Prrrssshhhaw!

  They splashed from the water and landed on the floor of a vast well—all that remained of the Pool of Tears. Far above: a circle of sky no larger than the mouth of a wine bottle. Alyss immediately tingled with the increase of imagination that came from being in the same world as the Heart Crystal.

  “Sit back and hold tight to the rail,” she told Molly.

  “Sit back and—?”

  Something bumped the girl behind the knees, knocked her to a sitting position. She was next to Alyss in a flying machine for two. A silver rail ran the width of the seats, securing her and the queen in place. Behind them, a shaft rose up, supporting the coptering blades that carried them swiftly out of the crater and into the Wonderland sunshine.

  “Look!”

  “It’s Alyss Heart!”

  The cliff overlooking the crater was still lined with Wonderlanders feeling the loss of loved ones who, without a Pool of Tears, could never return to Wonderland. Alyss landed the flying machine a little way from the cliff’s edge.

  “Where did you come from?” some asked.

  “How did you . . . ?” asked others, pointing at Alyss and then into the crater.

  “Is there really a Pool of Tears?” still others asked.

  “There is,” Alyss said in answer to the last.

  The news caused the Wonderlanders to cry afresh, not in sadness but joy. Because if the Pool of Tears existed, if inter-world travel was possible, then they might see their loved ones again after all. The Wonderlanders’ happy tears rained down into the crater even as one of them, an admirer of the House of Hearts, expressed dismay that Alyss was not at the Iron Butterfly.

  “The Iron . . . ?” Alyss said, directly casting her imaginative eye to that oldest of Wonderland structures, where she saw chessmen and Heart Cards among the welter of clashing soldiers—Dodge! Bibwit!—surrounding it. And inside the Butterfly: Redd Heart, Vollrath, the Heart Crystal. She scanned for Arch but couldn’t locate him.

  She had an idea, wouldn’t know if it was brilliance or suicide until after she’d brought it to fruition. If it’s even possible . She couldn’t allow herself to be seen again. Not yet. Which meant that she couldn’t protect Dodge as he fought at the Iron Butterfly, couldn’t add the strength of her imagination in support of the Alyssians.

  The hardest part. Hurry.

  Arriving at the land beyond the Whispering Woods with Molly, Alyss imagined her conjured flying machine back into millions of microscopic particles. She needed the Power of Proximity as much as possible and crouched behind a hobblebush, a grenade’s toss from the Iron Butterfly. About to make use of all the imagination she possessed, she noticed Molly’s restlessness. Looking out through drooping branches, the girl’s eyes were skittering from one pocket of fighting to another, her hands active with shadow-moves, hinting of what she’d do were she amid the violence.

  “I have something for you,” Alyss said and held out her hand, in which a homburg took shape, solidified.

  Molly grabbed it as if it were a long-lost friend, gave it a flick; it flattened into a knife-edged shield.

  “You could probably also use . . .” Alyss said, and Molly found herself outfitted with a Millinery backpack.

  In front of the hobblebush: a Three of Hearts about to make the ultimate submission to a Four of Clubs’ mauler rifle. Molly sidearmed her homburg shield at the Club soldier and, running after it, shrugged the corkscrews and blades of her backpack to the ready. Alyss watched as the girl saved the Three of Hearts, watched her spin, kick, somersault, tumble, punch, and wing her Millinery weapons at the lesser-skilled, so very like her father in every move she made.

  Her father, Hatter Madigan, who’d sighted Molly while twirling with activated belt sabers through a gauntlet of Doomsine warrio
rs. How had she come to be there? his expression seemed to ask. Where had she found her homburg? He and Molly battled their way toward each other, and then—spinning, kicking, somersaulting, tumbling—more than held their own against a too-numerous enemy force.

  Seeing father and daughter together, up against this too-numerous enemy, Alyss was reminded of something and . . .

  At the limbo coop situated in the remotest of the Clubs’ land holdings, where Mutty P. Dumphy walked through a dirty lane, an Alyss construct appeared.

  “Now, Mr. Dumphy,” the queen’s proxy said. “Now is the time for imaginationists to rise up!”

  The tinker didn’t need to be told again. Protected in a bubble of deflective energy, he ran from tenement to tenement, calling all imaginationists to take up their arms against imprisonment.

  “Rise up and imagine again!” he shouted. “Fight! Live!”

  Word spread, and in limbo coops throughout the territories belonging to the House of Clubs, a similar scene played out: Alyss constructs urged the prisoners to rise up, and Club cards not diverted to the Iron Butterfly were overwhelmed by imaginationists fighting their way to freedom.

  Alyss, in the land beyond the Whispering Woods, had meanwhile started to concentrate, focusing her thoughts on a pair of objects and devoting all of her power to their creation: High above the Iron Butterfly, obscured by a layer of clouds, two orb generators came into being—generators ten times the size of ordinary ones but imbued with the strength of a hundred. Fully formed, they dropped in a vertical line like falling suns, dropped toward the Iron Butterfly’s inner sanctum, where Redd, carried away with the annihilation of petty beings, wouldn’t have guessed what was coming even if she’d known her niece was in Wonderland. That Her Imperial Viciousness used her imagination to keep Arch’s forces and Alyssians from raiding the Butterfly was a given. That she used it to protect herself and her proximity to the Crystal was also a given. But that she should have been shielding the source of her power itself . . . ? She would not have dreamed that any imaginationist, let alone one as powerful as Alyss, would direct violence at it.