“Redd might provoke Arch in a way that compromises us,” Generals Doppel and Gänger said.
“In a way that compromises Alyss,” Bibwit qualified.
The generals nodded, but Dodge made a face. “She can only do so much without an army.”
It was a reasonable assumption. But with Redd, one always knew: If Her Imperial Viciousness could be a problem, she would be.
CHAPTER 25
Oxford, England. 1875.
THE CLOCK showed five after six. The fire in the hearth crackled and Dodgson busied himself with trifles—boiling water, warming the tea kettle, setting out cups and saucers, sugar and cream, to avoid thinking on the larger problems that had presented themselves at his door.
“Hatter M-Madigan is it?” he stuttered, though he of course remembered the name.
The Milliner inclined his head. “And this is my daughter, Homburg Molly.”
Dodgson had already been introduced to the girl twice. The tea steeped. The fire in the hearth crackled.
“Th-this is highly unusual,” he said finally.
“I couldn’t think of anywhere safer for my daughter,” Hatter returned.
Dodgson thought he saw Molly cringe slightly—embarrassed or annoyed, he couldn’t tell which.
“Do you i-i-intend to stay?” he asked, pouring the tea. “B-because, you see . . .”
He was about to say it was neither proper nor allowed, but he had experienced what Hatter and his blades could do. Would such a man care for the rules of a provincial college?
“. . . because, you see, I hope I have enough blankets.”
If Hatter was concerned about the reverend’s possible lack of blankets, he didn’t say. He told Dodgson of King Arch, of WILMA and how even in her compromised state she had affected the Heart Crystal, virtually snuffing out imagination queendom-wide. His tone remained even and unemotional, but the Wonderlander who epitomized the Millinery ethic of never uttering more than necessary had uncorked himself. From anyone else, the quantity of his words would have been unremarkable. But as Molly sat listening to a recitation of events she wished she didn’t know, the guilt she felt all over again was tinged with something new; she had never heard her father speak so much.
“Queen Alyss and Redd Heart are both without their powers,” Hatter finished.
“Alice told me of the Heart Crystal,” Dodgson said, recalling that afternoon on the banks of the River Cherwell, young Alice excited but terribly serious as she described Wonderland while her sisters played in the river’s shallows. “She referred to it as a s-source, I believe. Wait a moment.” The reverend dug in the cubbyhole above the desk for his old notes. “Yes. Here.” In silence, he read over what he’d written. Then, to the room at large, in astonishment: “No imagination in Wonderland m-means no imagination on Earth?”
It explained his recent creative drought, and what he’d been seeing in everyone around him. An outsized crystal in a parallel world that served as fountainhead of humankind’s creativity? The logician in him thought it quite impossible. And yet the author in him, the part of him that had created worlds out of words, mere symbols on a page, had no doubt of it. He dropped into his chair.
“Not good.”
“The absence of imagination has been Arch’s opportunity,” Hatter said. “I don’t know what’s become of Queen Alyss under Arch’s rule, but I fear the worst. When Molly and I jumped into the Pool of Tears, the queen was confined in a prison-town with other imaginationists.”
“But w-why come to me?” Dodgson asked. “Wouldn’t anywhere on Earth be just as safe for your d-daughter? Perhaps safer, since I have had some contact with . . . with a f-few characters in this drama.”
Hatter held his hat in hand, stared into the depths of its underside. “I’m not sure. But when I was here before, of all the people I met, your glow was among the brightest.”
“My glow?” Dodgson glanced down at his hands. They looked like ordinary hands. A bit dry, but certainly not luminescent.
“To my eyes,” Hatter explained, “almost everyone on Earth glows.”
“Mine too,” Molly said, hardly audible.
“Some darkly, others brightly,” Hatter elaborated. “Some strongly, others faintly. I believe these glowings to be connected with imagination. The stronger the glow, the stronger the imagination.”
“Extraordinary,” the reverend exclaimed.
“But unlike my last visit, all glows I’ve seen this time are faint to nonexistent. Even yours. It’s extremely faint right now.”
“Yes,” Molly whispered.
Dodgson wanted to add this alleged correlation between glow and imagination to his old notes on Wonderland. But welcome as this desire was, he made no move toward pen and ink. Wasn’t it precisely this sort of obsessive note-taking that had led him to commit such violence on the memories of the young Alyss Heart/Alice Liddell?
He studied his visitors. Molly pouting at the dregs of her tea, as withdrawn as any teenager he’d ever known; Hatter tormented by uncertainties and parental worry: The pair might have been from another world, but they presently appeared nothing so much as Earth-bound, human.
“Now what?” he asked.
CHAPTER 26
FAMILIAR AS the Gnobi were with various terrain from their nomadic life in Boarderland, able to trudge through the Swampy Woods of Chance as efficiently as they could scale the Glyph Cliffs, they had never experienced anything like Wonderland’s Volcanic Plains. Wherever they went in the charred region, they inevitably found themselves at the base of an active volcano . . . or two. Their nostrils polluted with the stink of sulfur, their lungs scorched by the air, they were constantly having to avoid geysers of noxious gas, jets of flame shooting randomly from the rocky ground, pits and rivers of boiling lava.
Divided into groups and sent around the queendom to hunt for Redd Heart, their instructions were simple: Find Her Imperial Viciousness, kill her, and present her body to King Arch as apology for letting her get away from them in Outerwilderbeastia.
“Listen,” a warrior said as the tribesmen avoided yet another spray of fire from underground.
Cutting through the low-pitched rumble of eruptions, coming from beyond a cluster of fossilized lava stalagmites that looked like an oversized bed of nails: the intermittent phlegm-rattling roar of beasts and the steady crack of a whip. Weapons drawn, the Gnobi weaved carefully through the stalagmites, peered out from behind the last of them.
There she was: Redd Heart, surrounded by eight jabberwocky while one of her assassins stood outside the circle of beasts, whipping their backsides. A short distance off, the remainder of Redd’s assassins occupied a sort of natural terrace in the side of a volcano, their attention wholly on their mistress who gripped leashes of heavy chain in her fist, the other ends of which were fastened around the jabberwocky’s necks.
Up on their hind legs, the beasts’ small forearms—like those of a Tyrannosaurus Rex from Earth’s prehistoric times—frantically paddled the air and their claws raked at nothing. They writhed to be free of their chains. They bellowed and tried to stomp Redd into the ground. But with atypical calm, and without dropping the scepter she held in one hand, Her Imperial Viciousness avoided the slightest injury even as one of the jabberwocky opened its mouth wide enough to swallow her whole, the smallest of its teeth as large as The Cat’s paw, and—
Chhhhooooooshhhhk!
The beast shot a fireball from the back of its throat.
Redd lifted her scepter; the fireball hovered before her in midair. She blew at it as if to rid herself of a bothersome insect and it reversed directions, burning a comet’s trail through the air and grazing the jabberwock on its way to smash into a distant volcano.
“You’re of no use to me injured,” Redd said to the beast, “otherwise you would have felt worse.”
The jabberwock roared and slobbered and swung its tail, hard. Redd jumped and let it whip past underneath her. Almost before she landed, she imagined a jabberwock tail on her own backside
and, as if she’d been born with it, swatted the offending beast.
It lasted no longer than a gwormmy-blink, but for the first time in Wonderland’s history, a jabberwock wobbled in a daze, cowed. Then raged twice as brutally as before while—
Amid the stalagmites, the Gnobi aimed their orb cannons; with a synchronized release of the triggers, Redd and all of her assassins would be decimated.
“On my signal,” a Gnobi whispered, but a blanket of green smoke descended upon him and his fellow warriors, and they drooped, unconscious.
The green caterpillar and his hookah floated out from behind a stalagmite.
“You didn’t have to do that!” Redd called to him. “I knew they were there! Mr. Van de Skülle!”
The Dutchman took the jabberwocky’s leashes from his mistress. Redd’s conjured tail disintegrated. She approached the caterpillar, stood sneering down at the sleeping tribesmen.
“Call it a gesture of friendship,” the oracle said. “I wanted to do something for you, however small.” He pulled and puffed at his hookah a moment. “But you will say you have no need of friendship.”
Redd, on the contrary, said nothing. She was no longer sure what she needed. And she was trying to keep her mind empty, free of thoughts she didn’t want the maddening worm to know.
“There are packs of warriors searching for you throughout the queendom,” the oracle said.
“They’ll soon find me at Heart Palace.”
“They search for your niece too.”
“Why do you talk to me of her?”
The caterpillar went on as if he hadn’t heard: “Tell me, now that your imagination has returned, how will you do away with Arch and gain control of the Heart Crystal?”
Descending from extraordinary imaginative power to utter barrenness, however temporary, had produced a change in Redd just now perceptible. Whereas the old Redd would have frothed, “I don’t know, slug! Why don’t you tell me how I’ll take control of the Crystal?” the new Redd felt a check to her rash arrogance and remained quiet. How was she going to get the Crystal? She’d yet to come up with an adequate plan.
“You told me my imagination would return and that what I chose to do then—now—would determine everything.”
“So you do listen,” the caterpillar said.
“You knew I’d get my imagination back. You know what I’ll choose to do, even if I don’t.”
“News to me,” the oracle said. And after indulging a moment with his hookah: “I do not see the future so much as all possible futures. One-tenth of a lunar cycle from now, depending on what happens, there may be a wholly different set of possible futures for you. Be glad, Mistress Heart, you no longer have the futures that were yours if you’d not left Mount Isolation before the tribal warriors arrived. For once Arch knows where you are—”
Redd guffawed. “He thinks he knows where I am right now!” She banged her scepter on the ground, smoke issued from its crippled heart, in the middle of which a lavish bedroom in Heart Palace became visible—Arch’s bedroom, with gwynook skins and spirit-dane hides hanging from the walls. Knobkerrie in hand, the king was facing off against what he clearly supposed was Her Imperial Viciousness herself. The scene played out silently in the smoke while, far away in Heart Palace . . .
“You took a big risk coming here alone, Rose,” Arch said. “Or is your feline with you? Not that it matters.”
He lunged, his knobkerrie swooping around to crack the construct in the skull, but the weapon came up short, clashing with a knobkerrie instantly conjured by Redd, and which she manipulated with her imagination, leaving the construct’s hands free.
“I did expect this,” Arch said, swinging again, his knobkerrie clattering against Redd’s, “just not so soon.”
More knobkerries formed to pummel the king’s arms and shoulders and gut while the construct watched, smug. Then, from nowhere Arch could see, a sword shot toward him, its point aimed for his heart and not a spirit-dane length away when—
Blister and Ripkins, hearing the commotion from the hallway, came rushing into the room. Blister jumped in front of the king, catching the sword in a gloved hand. Ripkins, his fingerprint sawteeth flashing, sprinted at the construct and—
Passed right through it. The bodyguards exchanged a surprised glance, but Arch only had eyes for the construct, which faded from sight, cackling at his gullibility.
In the Volcanic Plains, the smoke from Her Imperial Viciousness’ scepter thinned, drifted away. It had never been a good plan, Redd judged. A remote kill of Arch would have brought her satisfaction, but not necessarily closer to the Heart Crystal. There were too many unknowns. Who had been assigned to command in the event of Arch’s premature death, before she and her remaining assassins could reach the palace and take possession of the Crystal? If no one assumed command and the tribes and Heart soldiers fell into civil war, would she have time to gather her former forces together—or enough of them, at least, to win the Crystal?
She sought the power source for the cosmos in her imagination’s eye, might never have glimpsed its location if not for the extraordinary amount of activity around a certain shrub, the coming and going of intel ministers to and from its underground hiding place. It was, she knew, too much activity around the Heart Crystal to be innocent; Arch was up to something.
The caterpillar, intent on refilling the bowl of his hookah, did not confirm or deny these thoughts. He made no comment on what had just taken place in Heart Palace, and Redd was beginning to think the worm had forgotten her when he gestured with five of his right legs at the sleeping Gnobi.
“You should not be here when they wake.”
“They shouldn’t wake at all,” Redd countered.
The caterpillar took to the air on a cloud from his hookah, rising higher and higher. “To get what you want, Rose Heart, you must go toward that which you most despise.”
Redd watched the oracle until he vanished into great banks of geyser steam. She should go toward that which she most despised? She despised so many things: Alyss, White Imagination, happy, well-adjusted—
Raaaannghg!
She spun round to where Mr. Van de Skülle was still taming the eight jabberwocky. When she’d been queen, she had intended to train the beasts and use them in place of spirit-danes. It had amused her to picture herself charging through Wondertropolis on the back of such a ferocious creature, but now . . .
She might not yet know what despised thing she was to go toward, but whatever it was, however she proceeded, it would culminate in violence. Having jabberwocky at her disposal could not fail to be an advantage in the coming war.
CHAPTER 27
ALTHOUGH ALYSS’ imagination was again hers and she had strength and abilities he could never match, Dodge was unwilling to relax his vigilance for her safety. In case soldiers were lying in wait, he preceded her through the limbo coop’s wall and out across land belonging to the House of Clubs. To prevent them being seen from above, Alyss conjured a canopy that took on aspects of the changing landscape over which they traveled, yet he insisted on leading the way, determined to take unto himself any enemy fire.
“You’re on the northernmost rim of Outerwilderbeastia,” General Doppelgänger informed them via crystal communicator, “in one of the Clubs’ more remote land holdings.”
Dodge hacked a path into the jungle with his father’s sword, cutting back vines thick as a spirit-dane’s shin bone and rubbery fronds the size of tea platters. Pushing through the dank, heavy foliage, he tested each gwynook-length of spongy ground with his own body weight before letting Alyss follow. Infrequent communications with General Doppelgänger and Bibwit failed to settle them on a destination, and unsure how long it would take to maneuver through Outerwilderbeastia, they stopped to rest in a sort of enclave, an area surrounded on all sides by dense jungle and no larger than the table in the palace’s briefing room.
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” he suggested.
“What about you?”
??
?Don’t worry about me.”
He knew he’d never be able to close his eyes. And so, with what passed for silence in Outerwilderbeastia as accompaniment to his ruminations—the whir of fist-sized insects, the caw and rattle of unseen creatures—he watched her sleep.
He’d been intending to propose—even before the queendom’s distant military outposts were attacked, before the need to figure out who or what was attacking them rendered the timing for highly personal questions inappropriate. And since then, there’d been one calamity after another, misfortunes contriving to prevent him from ever asking what his heart compelled him to ask. Couldn’t he and Alyss manage so much as a quarter lunar hour together, which, if not romantic, might at least be free of invasions, rebellions, unlawful incarcerations, political and military subterfuge? Between Alyss’ loss of imagination and the Clubs’ uprising, the timing for a proposal perhaps hadn’t been the absolute worst, since her loss of power had brought her closer to Dodge’s level as an ordinary Wonderlander. Expecting a better opportunity, though, he hadn’t acted. But what if a better opportunity never came? Maybe this was, in part, what it meant to love a queen: Where your personal life was concerned, you made what you could of unlikely times and places.
There, in a tiny clearing in northern Outerwilderbeastia, watching his beloved sleep, Dodge made up his mind: He just had to do it—to not think but act. Their future survival was uncertain, but he would declaim his feelings for Alyss Heart, ask her to make him—despite all—the happiest man in Wonderland.
CHAPTER 28