ArchEnemy (31 page)

“More.”

“Yes, more.”

Redd’s face contorted, looked about to break into many pieces—a grimace born of happy reminiscence, but she checked it. “I no longer have the intention of letting you be my weakness, Archy. And in the interest of preventing future temptation . . .”

A Hand of Tyman materialized and its five spikes flew at the king. A lesser warrior wouldn’t have had the speed to pull a knobkerrie from his sash, but Arch managed to raise his weapon in time.
Clongk!
The Hand of Tyman crashed against it, missing Arch’s carotid artery but its outer spikes still grating across the side of his head. He stumbled to the rail of the platform, pressing a hand hard against his wound to stanch the bleeding as best as he could, hot liquid life cascading over his fingers as—

The intel minister blasted at the Redd construct with a mauler rifle. But you can’t kill what isn’t there, even if what isn’t there can kill you. Which knowledge the Boarder lander came to as he dropped dead to the floor, skewered by a spear that hadn’t existed a moment earlier.

On the grate below, ministers stopped tending the fire crystals to stare up at their dead brethren, at their troubled king and the spurned, vindictive Black Imaginationist of supreme ability having her revenge.

“Back to your orders!” Arch yelled at them.

Knobkerries of a size and heft never wielded by any Doomsine formed in the air, batting His Highness this way and that. He broke his own knobkerrie in half trying to defend himself from a blow.

“I’m stronger than I’ve ever been!” Redd boasted through her construct.

In addition to the pummeling knobkerries, Arch had blades of all kinds to contend with: Cutlasses swished past his ear; sickles swooshed before his eyes; daggers, razor-cards, swords, javelins, so many skin-shredding weapons threatened him, it was as if he were losing a fight against several Milliners at once. He didn’t know how many times he’d been stabbed, couldn’t have said how many bleeding cuts riddled his body. Something was wrong with his left arm; it flapped useless at his side.

“Ugh!”

He felt a blade drive into his chest below his right col larbone, fell facedown on the platform and blinked past its girders at the ministers on the grate beneath him, the ministers who were trying to ignore the violence and keep to their fire crystal work as he’d ordered. But any lunar minute they’d have no work to keep to, because the last of the Pool of Tears was evaporating—a puddle no larger than a Boarderland wash tub being all that remained and getting smaller with every gwormmy-blink.

The Redd construct, laughing, was suddenly quiet. It turned its head, as if becoming aware of something. “Ah, company’s arriving at the Butterfly.”

Arch started to drag himself toward the edge of the platform with his one good arm.

“Do you think, Archy, that your bodyguard and his band of toy soldiers can defeat me when they CAN’T EVEN CHALLENGE ME? My mercenaries are flocking to me again now that I can exercise my full power! My
true
power!”

Arch was almost to the platform’s edge. He pulled himself closer, closer as—

“I do thank you for ridding Wonderland of my niece,” Redd said. “There’ll never be another like you, Archy. Which is just as well.”

Blender blades large enough to mince a grown Boarder lander formed on both sides of the king. Whirring, they pushed in fast toward him just as—

He heaved himself over the edge of the platform. Falling, he crashed down into the grate of fire crystals and knocked a section of it loose, continued falling past the busted grate toward what remained from the Pool of Tears, which was now no more than could fit in a bucket, and—

He dropped into the water, was sucked out of sight.

The subterranean chamber became exceptionally still: no sound but the pop and crackle of fire crystals. The ministers on the grate stared down in disbelief: The Pool of Tears was gone, completely evaporated, and their king gone with it. When they dared to look up, there was no sign of Redd; they were alone.

T
HE BURIAL field in the land beyond the Whispering Woods: hundreds of mounds spaced evenly in rows, each mound signifying the resting place of one who’d belonged to the ancient Helmex race. In the near distance, from nowhere the Alyssians could see, came adrenaline-spiked cries of battle, the whistle of air-splitting missiles.

“Where precisely are we to meet them?” Bibwit asked. Recovered from the dust of despair, the tutor was armed with an oozy. In his nervousness, he had more than once mistaken a weed trembling in the wind for an enemy, spraying it with the weapon’s mulch.

Dodge noticed a winking light at the burial field’s northern perimeter. “There,” he said.

A few lunar minutes later, when the Alyssians met up with the white knight and rook, the knight directed the Alyssians’ attention to the Iron Butterfly, which was glowing with a reddish nimbus out beyond the burial field.

“Arch has converged his most aggressive forces on it,” the chessman said. “It’s a battle for the Heart Crystal.”

Dodge, Hatter, Bibwit, and Taegel gazed off at the mysterious edifice, around which Doomsines and Club soldiers were hacking it out against Redd’s troops. Here and there—in the deflective energy shield surrounding mercenaries, in the sudden materialization of orb cannons—Redd’s wrathful imaginative doings were fully evident.

“Has anyone seen or heard from General Doppelgänger?” Bibwit asked.

The chessmen answered that they had not, and in the ensuing silence, Hatter checked the spin of his wrist-blades.

Dodge nodded toward the battle. “There are too few of us.”

“Are there?” the rook asked with something of his usual gallantry.

As if on cue, chessmen stepped from behind every nearby burial mound: the entire set of Wonderland’s chessmen. And then
—fwi-fwi-fwi-fwish!
—there was the sound of decks unshuffling and five decks of Heart Cards stood with the chessmen, ready to fight.

“For General Doppelgänger,” a Ten Card said.

Dodge took his father’s sword in one hand, a splinterscape in the other. “Well then, I guess we should do this,” he said, with a last look at the surrounding faces before—

“Wooooohoooooooo!”

He sprinted out from the shelter of the burial field, leading the Alyssian charge, slashing through enemy soldiers with glinting sword and without concern for his own well-being, an orb’s explosion highlighting the four parallel scars on his rugged cheek. Using the splinterscape to keep enemies at a distance, he worked his way through scrums of hand-to-hand fighting, and crossed dangerous terrain over which Doomsines and mercenaries exchanged fire. The Cat was nowhere to be seen. He would fight his way toward the Iron Butterfly’s entrance: Wherever Redd was, The Cat would be nearby. But Redd’s military was still relatively small and Her Imperial Viciousness was, imaginatively speaking, everywhere. To make the most of the Power of Proximity, she physically remained inside the Butterfly, within arm’s reach of the Heart Crystal, but in her imagination’s eye she was outside fighting next to Alistaire Poole and Siren Hecht, killing no fewer Club cards than either; she was riding her jabberwock along the flank of a sword-bearing Sacrenoir as he drove pawns and Heart cards toward his ravenous, flesh chomping skeletons; she was conjuring replicas of Hatter Madigan’s top hat blades and launching them straight at the Milliner as he fought a pair of Doomsines and a Five of Clubs.

His top hat a blur of spinning death, wrist-blades activated, Hatter knocked the replicas to the ground without letting up on his adversaries for even a gwormmy-blink. Meanwhile—

Dodge caught sight of The Cat, who had squared off against Blister just outside the Iron Butterfly. No hot surge of vengeance filled him. Cold, matter-of-fact, he would do what had to be done, and he annihilated tribal warriors and Club cards with an ease rivaled by very few as he fought his way toward the feline.

He might have failed at everything that mattered—at helping to restore White Imagination to prominence, at saving the queendom from tyrants; he might have failed most of all at keeping Alyss safe—but if he was to die, he would take The Cat with him.

M
OLLY DIDN’T want to keep her appointment with Rafters, but Alyss insisted.

“You said you believed he’s from Wonderland?”

Molly nodded. She’d told the queen how Rafters had recognized the flugelberry vine that bound her mother’s notebooks together when no such thing grew on Earth.

“Then keep your appointment,” Alyss said, thinking of Blue’s visitation to the girl. “We don’t know where an opportunity to return to Wonderland will come from. Or when.”

So Molly reluctantly brought herself to Beaumont Street, climbed the lodging house stairs that seemed to continue up without end until, frustrated—

“Here I am,” she said, and the garret door appeared where a moment before there had been none.

Rafters said nothing as he let her into the flat, acted as disinterested as he’d been at the start of their previous meeting. But he had readied the room for the appointment. The window was still fogged with grime, the floor still a gathering place for dust mites, and the pallet of straw looked as rough and prickly as ever beneath the horse blanket. But the three-legged dresser was now a multi-tiered workbench that supported scopes and tumblers and pestles and a host of implements unfamiliar to Molly. Weren’t those the outlines of the drawers and drawer pulls she saw in the table’s surface? Somehow the dresser had been transformed into a properly functioning four-legged table as solid as oak.

“How are you feeling?” Rafters asked.

She knew what he meant. Her imagination was back. She would not be slow in solving his puzzles today. “Fine,” she said.

Yet he tested her with a number of puzzles, and not till he was satisfied by the speed and ease of her answers did he ask to see her mother’s notebooks.

“The formulae these books contain,” he said, untying the flugelberry vine, “are comprised of symbols which, in their proximal and implied interactions, represent the play of physical substances. Everything that seems to the sight and touch to be perfectly solid is, at its most fundamental level, a swamp of animated particles. Your mother’s art is simply a matter of redirecting the movement of these particles.”

Eternal flux, malleability, atomic collision—Molly tried to take it all in, to not let a single word escape her understanding. For herself. For Weaver.

“We’ll start with something basic,” Rafters said.

Within five minutes Molly had turned a pence into a shiny gold piece. Using the formulae in her mother’s notebooks, she was soon transmutating stalks of straw from Rafter’s bed into Millinery-grade steel. And the more she transformed, under Rafter’s impressed eye, the everyday objects of Earth into Millinery gear, the more she felt she was not in an Oxford garret but in her mother’s laboratory, being allowed to help as a child might help her parent prepare dinner in the kitchen. She saw Weaver shaping the blades to be used by Hatter in battle, struggled to imagine their lives before her birth—her mother and father and a love too strong to be held in check by Millinery codes, societal considerations. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes.

“One more ingredient,” Rafters said.

She was standing over an experiment in progress, the aim of which he had not divulged. She looked at the formula in her mother’s notebook:

She looked at the incomplete experiment on the table in front of her—the shallow bowl which had once contained a collection of solid metal pieces and gems and which had turned first into a gelatinous mass but was now more akin to slush.

“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—

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.”