Seeing Redd (13 page)

The tutor led Redd and The Cat to an alcove at the left of the stage, separated from the main room by a curtain of heavy black velvet. Within the alcove was a single table.

“We should be comfortable here,” said Vollrath. “We have an unobstructed view of the stage, but if I pull the curtain partway closed, like so, we have complete privacy, as we're out of sight from the audience. Any refreshments you desire are of course compliments of moi.”

Guests were starting to arrive, and Marcel had hurried over to the catacomb's entrance to greet them. “Good evening, my pretty friends! Good evening! And how fortunate you are to be at the master's one and only Paris performance! The event is shortly to begin! You risk the master's wrath if you don't immediately take your seats! Also, let's not forget, there's a two-drink minimum.”

The guests consisted solely of the wealthy and aristocratic, the women decked out in pearls and embroidered lace, smoking cigarettes through long ebony holders, while the men looked sophisticated in their tuxedos, tapping canes of polished rosewood against polished shoes as they sipped absinthe from narrow glasses. Within minutes, the catacomb filled to capacity. Touched by no human hand, an iron gate clanked shut across the entrance, unnoticed by the illustrious guests packed in at their tables, who were chatting loudly and laughing the hearty laughter of the privileged until—

Ffftsssst!

The room fell dark, the torches miraculously snuffed out as one. A woman screamed. A ripple of titillated laughter passed among the tables. A violin began to play a melody at once languid and stern, the work of no known composer. With the sudden crack of breaking wood—

Voila! A single cone of light illuminated Sacrenoir standing center stage before his pile of bones. In the light's dusky reaches, black-gloved Marcel could be seen playing his violin.

“Hurrah!” the audience cried. “Sacrenoir, magician extraordinaire!”

They rose to their feet, whistling and applauding and calling out in approval. Sacrenoir put a finger to his lips—
Ssshh!
—and waited until they had resumed their seats, quiet with expectation.

“It is said that when a person dies,” he began in a voice that seemed to address not those before him, but a numberless multitude as yet unseen, “whichever of his animal appetites are left unsated at the time of his death do not die but live on in the ether, in the very air we breathe, waiting to take up residence in another. I say, let the dead have their appetites back!”

“Give the dead their appetites!” the audience shouted.

Sacrenoir closed his eyes and his lips moved in an incantation impossible to hear over the strains of Marcel's violin. The bones piled behind him began to shift and creak.

“Oooooh!” someone moaned, in imitation of a ghost, and everyone laughed.

Neither Sacrenoir nor Marcel seemed aware of the audience, the one mesmerized by his own incantation while Marcel's melody rose to a crescendo, his bow streaking faster and faster on the strings of his violin. The bones skittered and scraped across the stage, arranging themselves into complete skeletons and, as if sprung from their very marrow, rotted burial clothes formed, hanging loose from hips and shoulders. The audience sat rapt and horrified.

The resurrected dead turned empty eye sockets on the crowd, fleshless jaws moving up and down in a grotesque imitation of speech. But the sounds coming from those empty throats and tongueless mouths, and which passed through clicking teeth, were no imitations.

“Hungry,” the skeletons chanted, stepping off the stage and moving among the tables. “Hungry, hungry, hungry.”

One gentleman who'd been gulping absinthe with abandon mumbled that magic was only harmless illusion. He got to his feet and began to dance with the nearest skeleton, reached out to twirl his skeleton-partner and—

“Gaaaaaahghg!”

The skeleton's jaws clamped down hard on his hand. With a relentless turn of the skull, it tore off three of the man's fingers and swallowed them and they clattered through its rib cage and fell to the floor. Shouts erupted. In an instant, tables were being overturned, glasses broken, drinks flung into the air, torches knocked from the walls, setting fire to the puddles of spilled alcohol. The iron gate remained locked, the audience trapped. Again and again, the skeletons lurched at them with hungry jaws. Yet the dead were unable to fill their bellies. Every swallow of living flesh passed down through their empty rib cages and splatted on the floor.

“Hungry,” they chanted. “Hungry, hungry.”

Sacrenoir gazed upon the carnage with pride. Marcel continued to play his violin, though his melody was now drowned out by screams and moans. Redd and The Cat remained with Vollrath in their alcove, its curtain pushed completely open so that they could get a better view of things. The last guest collapsed to the floor. Marcel set down his violin and for a time there was only the sound of the skeletons chomping desperately on the wealth of fresh kill, then—

“Bravo,” Redd called out, bored, with a single clap of her hands.

Alerted to her presence, the skeletons turned, started jigging toward her, the snap and clack of their jaws answered by the eagerly chomping roses of her dress. “Hungry, hun—”

The Cat sprung from his seat. With a single swing of his arm, he shattered four skeletons into so many pieces that all of Sacrenoir's powers could not have put them together again.

“Don't waste your strength,” Redd yawned.

The Cat stepped aside and watched as, motioning with a finger from where she sat, his mistress sent one skeleton careening into another. She again gestured with her finger and two skeletons slammed together and fractured to crumbs. But Redd was not known for her patience, so she sucked air deep into her lungs, imagined the heat of jabberwocky breath as her own and exhaled, her breath hot enough to disintegrate every bone of every skeleton to dust. And even before she pressed forefinger against thumb to douse the numerous fires burning around the catacomb, Sacrenoir was bowing before her.

“Forgive my former rudeness, Your Imperial Viciousness. I didn't realize the extent of your powers, to which mine compare as a candle flame to the great fire of London. If you'll accept of it from such an undeserving wretch as here kneels before you, I offer you my eternal allegiance.”

As Redd considered, she turned to Vollrath. The tutor inclined his head and smiled, having expected his pupil to grant her proper respect all along.

“You were right not to subordinate yourself too readily, Master Sacrenoir,” Redd said at length. “I would find no value in the allegiance of a fool ready to give himself up to any old hag of Black Imagination who presented herself. I will accept your allegiance. For now. But if I ever decide you're useless, you are a dead man.”

“To be killed by you is to be desired more than a life excluded from your service.”

“Bravo,” Her Imperial Viciousness laughed with genuine feeling. “Bra-vo!”

Hardly ten hours removed from the crystal, Redd Heart had found her first two recruits. And if Vollrath and Sacrenoir were any indication, the army of ex-Wonderlanders and talented earthlings she was determined to amass would be a stronger military than the one she'd used to wrench the crown from Genevieve. With the discipline and single-minded purpose she would instill in troops so gifted in Black Imagination, she would not, could not, fail to overthrow her nauseatingly well-intentioned niece.

Doomsine Encampment, Boarderland. Six lunar cycles earlier.

W
HEN KING Arch learned that the newly crowned Alyss Heart had ordered the annihilation of all Glass Eyes in her realm, his scheming brain went into hyperdrive. He had occupied Boarderland's throne for more than half his life by remaining several ruthless steps ahead of his enemies. To what particular use he might put an army of Glass Eyes, he wasn't yet sure. But to have access to such a military force without anyone knowing he had it was an advantage he could not let pass.

Lounging in his palace tent with wives numbered eleven, six, seventeen and twenty-eight, all of whom were trying not to look or act depressed, he called Ripkins and Blister to his side.

“My ministers have informed me that Alyss is ridding her land of Glass Eyes.”

“Her people can't control them,” confirmed Blister.

“Overriding the imperative that Redd embedded in them is harder than she thought,” added Ripkins.

“In other words, they're designed to kill and nothing more.”

The bodyguards bowed that this was so.

“Perhaps the trick is not to override their imperative,” Arch mused, “but to reprogram them to acknowledge a different master. Everyone in Wonderland—even the otherwise rebellious Redd Heart—is, was, or always has been occupied with inventing
things
. But what good are things if there are no clever schemes in which to use them? I put
things
to unexpected and imaginative use.”

The man wasn't named
Arch
for nothing. Arch politician. Arch tactician. Arch strategist. By the age of seventeen, he had risen through the ranks of his birth tribe, the Onu, to become Boarderland's first sovereign. Before his ascension, the country's nomadic tribes had been completely independent, with nothing in common other than the landscape over which they traveled. He had forced them into having something else in common: the honor, respect, and obedience they showed to him. This, he often reminded his ministers, was what
united
the tribes of Boarderland. His subjugation of them gave the nation its identity, its focus and culture.

“I'm a uniter, not a divider,” he would laugh.

By the time he crowned himself, he had amassed his own tribe, the Doomsines, having siphoned off from the Onu and others the most skilled fighters, the smartest intel ministers, the most beautiful females to become his wives and servants. He had also recruited numerous wayward souls and misfits from Boarderton, Boarderland's de facto capital city. Among the Boarderton recruits: Ripkins and Blister.

“Leave us,” he ordered, shooing his wives toward the exit.

Promptly, and with a tinkling of jewelry, the women removed themselves from the tent.

“You are to enter Wonderland and capture a Glass Eye,” he commanded Ripkins and Blister. “I want it fully intact or it will be useless to me. That means every pore of its engineered skin, every swath of its manufactured muscle and tissue, every nanochip and filament in its brain: all undamaged so as to be properly dissected and understood. You must bring back a live one.”

Ripkins nodded, but Blister stared coldly at nothing. Impossible to know what he was thinking.

“Do you understand what I'm saying, Blister?”

“I understand.”

It had been an annoyingly peaceful time in Boarderland, Blister cranky and depressed because he hadn't filled anyone with pus for nearly an entire lunar cycle. Only the previous day, Arch had found him in a spirit-dane corral, blistering the creatures to the point of death, such was his need to touch and destroy.

“No one can know of your mission,” Arch said. “You must remain absolutely invisible. It's necessary for Alyss and her people to believe they will have cleansed the realm of Glass Eyes. I intend to manufacture my own army of them, using the one you bring me as the model from which the rest will be cloned.”

Following Ripkins out of the tent, Blister sulkily pinched the blade of a silver-leafed palm between finger and thumb. The blade bubbled, swelled. Then another and another. The longer he held on to the plant, the more it suffered until—

Swollen to bursting, it leaked yellow liquid from every blade, and died, a wilted husk of a thing.

“Intact, Blister,” Arch warned.

Blister bowed, was gone.

 

Crossing into Wonderland was, for the average citizen, a tedious way to spend several hours. One had to wait in long lines, undergo elaborate security searches, sit through mild or not-so-mild interrogations conducted by overworked officials.
What is the purpose of your visit? The expected length of your stay?
But Ripkins and Blister had a difficult time blending in with average citizens and so they chose to cross into Alyss' territory, not at one of the official checkpoints, but at an unpopulated spot between a silty edge of Boarderland's Duneraria and a particularly dense patch of Wonderland's Outerwilderbeastia.

To be invisible meant that whatever death and injury the bodyguards caused would have to be done by conventional methods—no ripping or shredding for Ripkins, no blistering for Blister, lest their victims' bodies serve as evidence of their mission. Accordingly, Blister wore elbow-length gloves, and he and Ripkins carried a wealth of traditional Boarderland weapons hidden in their clothes, munitions that might be used by a variety of the nation's tribes: mind riders, remote eyes, kill-quills, gossamer shots. They were likewise armed with the whipsnake grenades and crystal shooters so prevalent in Alyss' armies. But to be invisible also meant that members of their own tribe could not witness their doings; unwanted chatter, possibly compromising intel, could come from any quarter.

The guards patrolling the Boarderland side of the demarcation barrier were members of the Doomsines—two youths born into the Astacan tribe who had found life among their own kind uninspiring. Like all Astacans, their long, spindly legs and foreshortened torsos, which had evolved from generations of Astacans making camp in mountainous regions, rendered them particularly adept at maneuvering on irregular terrain. Some Boarderlanders thought Astacans elegant and graceful creatures, but others—Blister among them, fellow Doomsine or not—thought them grotesque.

“I'm feeling a tad Maldoid-
ish,
” Blister said, taking a couple of mind riders from his coat pocket.

Self-propelled darts with serum-infused tips, most commonly used by Boarderland's Maldoid tribe, mind riders could turn the most peace-loving citizen into a brawling lunatic.

“Haven't thrown one in a while,” Blister said. “Good to keep in practice.”

He and Ripkins stepped into view and the border guards paused in their patrol, surprised to see Arch's notorious henchmen.

“What're you both doing here?” one of them asked.

“Nothing much,” Blister said, and with a forward thrust of his arm, released the mind riders.

Thunp! Thunp!

A mind rider lodged in the forehead of each border guard, tips penetrating their skulls, injecting the angst serum into the nooks and gulleys of their brains. Their neural pathways filled with static. Poison spiked their wits.

The serum never took long to produce its effect.

The Astacans looked about in a daze. Then, as if noticing each other for the first time, their glazed-over expressions morphed into visages of hate.

“Aaaagh!” one of them yelled.

“Yaaah!” the other shouted.

They fell together, punching and kicking at each other with a ferocity that would soon leave them both dead.

Ignoring the brawling pair, Ripkins and Blister stepped up to the demarcation barrier—a tight, impassable mesh of lightning-like sound waves. To try and step through the barrier, even to venture a single limb tentatively into its mesh, was to invite a painful end. The sound waves would cause one's internal organs to vibrate, generating more and more heat until one burned to death from the inside out.

Ripkins removed a palm-sized medallion from his pocket. With a flick of his thumb, he launched it spinning into the air. Like a coin spinning fast on its edge, the remote eye became almost impossible to see. But unlike a coin, the thing
flew
. Emitting no more sound than the rapid flutter of insect wings, it spun through an opening in the demarcation barrier's mesh and into Wonderland, transmitting images directly back to Ripkins' visual cortex. He saw what it saw: the number and location of card soldiers on border patrol.

“A full hand,” he said. “Pair of Threes. Pair of Fours. Lone Two.”

The remote eye flew back through the demarcation barrier. Ripkins caught it and stowed it in his pocket. He called out to the card soldiers on the other side of the barrier:

“Pretty dull work, just pacing up and back all day, isn't it? Don't know about you cards, but I didn't sign up for this boring detail! Luckily, I've got something that helps us Boarderland guards pass the time! Come here and I'll show it to you!”

The two nations were not at war and the soldiers had no reason to think of Boarderland guards as enemies. The Three Cards ventured close.

“Yeah?”

They tried to get a view of Ripkins through the eyesquintingly bright sound waves, when—

Thewp! Thewp!

Ripkins harpooned them with kill-quills, yanked hard on the coils attached to the quills' blunt ends and pulled the soldiers into the demarcation barrier's mesh.

Tzzzzzzzzccckkkkzzzkkkckch!

The dead card soldiers acted as shields, created a gap in the sound waves through which Ripkins and Blister jumped safely into Wonderland, tumbling and rolling because razor-cards were slicing the air and ground all around them, the Four Cards making the most of their AD52s while the Two Card tapped his ammo belt, about to transmit an emergency message via his crystal communicator, except—

Mid-roll, with effortless accuracy, Blister pulled the trigger of his crystal shooter and shot the Two Card dead.

Ripkins lobbed a whipsnake grenade at the Four Cards, and while they danced and hopped to avoid its deadly coils—sending razor-cards everywhere but at their attackers—he and Blister sprinted forward.

Suffering the nasty twistings of body parts that should never be twisted, the card soldiers fell, lifeless, and Arch's bodyguards were soon pushing through the tangles of Outerwilderbeastia, crunching twigs and leaves underfoot.

“Visit the labs?” Blister said, referring to the squat network of buildings in Wondertropolis' warehouse district, where a consortium of Alyss' scientists and engineers had tried to transform a host of captured Glass Eyes into a benign force. On lab grounds were the incinerator baths—large pits into which Glass Eyes were being herded and melted down, scorched into ash. There would be lots of Glass Eyes to choose from at the labs, but Ripkins shook his head.

“Too much security,” he said.

“Find one that's roaming?”

“It'll be easier for us to avoid notice,” Ripkins said.

“Yeah, but it'd be more
fun
to hit the labs.”

The bodyguards knew where they had to go: Mount Isolation in the Chessboard Desert, Redd's former home and the birthplace of those they hunted.

Avoiding the notice of Alyss' card soldiers, who were themselves scouring the land for Glass Eyes still at large, became more difficult when they reached the desert. The alternating quadrants of black lava rock and sun-reflecting ice did not allow for much camouflage.

“Not surprising,” Ripkins whispered when they came upon Mount Isolation.

Decks of card soldiers had the place under surveillance. Unable to return home, Glass Eyes might have been hiding nearby.

Careful to avoid detection, the bodyguards began to case Mount Isolation in ever widening circles, their course spiraling out from the dark palace while—

Not far away, behind a boulder that sat like an enormous lump of coal in the landscape, a pack of Glass Eyes was engaged in biological self-assembly. The vacant stare of crystal in their sockets; their eerie, waxwork stillness as if, all at once, they had suddenly paused in the middle of various activities: They were defragmenting their internal hard drives, healing wounds superficial and otherwise with the regeneration cell-buds that could develop into organs, limbs, tissue. But hearing the lightest of footsteps, their heads turned as one.

Ripkins and Blister were on their third time around Mount Isolation, approaching a quadrant of craggy rock formations, when—

Sssst!

A blade came slamming down toward Ripkins' shoulder.

“Humph.” He sidestepped it with the calm of one avoiding a dollop of seeker droppings, pulled a crystal shooter out of his thigh holster, and fired.

The blade-wielding Glass Eye staggered, went down.

Blister was taking on two of them at once—hand to hand, blade to blade, defensive swivel countering offensive lunge in a ballet of violence. Ripkins sensed it more than saw it, the clash of activity to his left, because he'd become busy with his own pair of Glass Eyes, slashing at them with a forearm-length blade, using his crystal shooter to deflect their swords and knives, all while avoiding crystal shot from a third Glass Eye.