ArchEnemy (26 page)

“Three,” she said.

Dodgson placed another of his Pillow Problems—the math and logic puzzles with which he occupied himself in the small hours of restless nights—in front of Molly.

“Fourteen,” she said.

He presented the puzzles to her in order of increasing difficulty, though one wouldn’t have known it from the effortlessness and speed with which she provided the correct answers. She had no need to work out the answers on paper and appeared to arrive at her answers by instinct.

Dodgson placed before her a puzzle he had not yet answered himself; nearly a page worth of scribblings had brought him no closer to its solution.

“Seventeen out of twenty-seven,” Molly said. She had taken perhaps a mere second longer to answer the problem than she had the previous ones. Dodgson didn’t doubt that it would later prove to be the correct answer.

“How did you learn to do this?” he asked. “Did someone teach you?”

“No, I don’t know. It’s common sense.”

“It is by no means c-c-common, I assure you. It is . . . remarkable.”

Dodgson’s eager appreciation was having an effect on Molly.

“Maybe I got it from my mother,” she shrugged.

“What pedagog-og-og . . . methods did your mother use to teach—”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said, and told him that her mother had been an alchemist at Wonderland’s Millinery, a regular citizen except for her gift transmutating the elements of the physical world, which she’d done according to formulae kept in three private notebooks tied together with flugelberry vine. She pulled the notebooks from her inner coat pocket, showed them to him.

Alchemy? Were the girl’s talents related to the incomprehensible symbols covering page after page of the notebooks? Could the girl’s talents be related? Dodgson wasn’t sure, though he knew someone who would be: the unorthodox Mr. Rafters. He knew no one better to assess the girl, not even among the college’s logicians and mathematicians.

“I’m a halfer,” Molly said.

“I’m sorry, a h-halfer? What’s a halfer?”

She showed him the “h” behind her ear. “Half Milliner, half regular Wonderlander,” she said. “You’re either born a Milliner or you’re not, but if you are, you’re only supposed to be with other Milliners—to maintain the purity of the queendom’s ultimate military force. But Hatter didn’t. That’s why I make too many mistakes. Big ones. It’s what halfers
do
.”

In time, Dodgson would ask Molly about these mistakes, but right now, unable to ignore the self-laceration in Molly’s tone, his softer emotions were piqued: No one should hate herself as much as this girl seemed to.

“You say halfer as if it’s a terrible thing,” he said. “But everyone I’ve ever known has been a halfer; if old enough t-to be called an adult, then ch-childish in their prejudices. All of us in this world really, I take to be h-halfers—half human, half divine, halfers of the best sort. I’d think the s-same must be true for the people of Wonderland, that there’s . . . there is no such thing as s-someone who is
not
a halfer, or even a quarter-er, if you’ll allow me the inelegant term.”

“Hatter’s not a halfer!”

“I disagree,” said the reverend. “Hatter Madigan strikes me as
very much
a halfer. Has his devotion not been split in two, divided between w-w-what he owes to you as a father and what he owes to Alyss Heart and the queendom as a M-Milliner? If he were not so divided, halved in this way, d-do you suppose you’d be here without him?”

Molly eyed Dodgson with such fixedness that some of his old apprehension returned, his unease at being holed up with a Wonderlander whose abilities he’d hardly begun to comprehend. He called forth his easiest manner, arranged his note papers and put them away in his desk.

“Come,” he said, “there is someone you should m-meet.” He was leading Molly to the door, out into the quad where the sky seemed wide enough to contain the heavens of both their worlds. “Or perhaps I s-should say, there’s a halfer who really must meet
you
.”

B
LISTER STALKED up and back in his shared quarters, touching everything of Ripkins’ that he passed—the quilts of unicorn skin, the entertainment matrix, the virtual reality goggles, the game-controller body gear. Not for the first time, he cursed the fact that his touch didn’t have its enflaming, pus-inducing effect on inanimate objects.

It wasn’t that he despised Ripkins; he liked the Doomsine well enough, as much as he could like anybody, and he worked better with Ripkins than he had with any of Arch’s previous lame recruits. But the king had chosen sawteeth fingerprints over instantaneous, fatal blistering: Royal favor had been bestowed upon another. It didn’t matter that the ministers said the king needed the blistering assassin close, because nothing they argued could convince him he hadn’t been snubbed, forced to hang around, waiting to be given some scrap assignment the way the king’s doggerels of war were thrown bones after a banquet.

“Ripkins,” Blister muttered.

He extended killing fingers toward his roommate’s unkillable sleep-pod, felt movement behind him and spun.

“Redd Heart.”

“Miss your playmate?”

Fast as blood spraying from a wound, Blister hurled a pocket-sprocket at Her Imperial Viciousness, the fin-shaped blades a blur as the weapon rotated through the air like a ninja star of Earth, but—

Redd vanished before it reached her. The weapon clanked off the wall and on to the floor. Blister heard the grating hiccup of Her Imperial Viciousness’ laugh, saw her standing under the archway that led to the public halls.

“All alone in the great big palace with nothing to do?” she asked.

He threw no weapon at her, made no move in her direction. Redd Heart, he knew, was both with him and not with him: a construct.

“Perhaps you’ve outgrown your usefulness to King Arch?” the phantom said. “Perhaps you’d be better off with me and—”

The construct was gone: present one gwormmy-blink, absent the next. As it would be if someone choked off the energy that had made its existence possible.

“I felt it! The Power of Proximity!” Redd spewed, stalking up and back in the hardscrabble dirt of the land beyond the Whispering Woods. The empty feeling she’d had when lacking imagination was back, the internal barrenness once more acute. “I felt the infusion of energy I get whenever I’m close to the Heart Crystal!”

“But now?” Vollrath asked.

With her assassins holding the reins of their jabberwocky and looking on, Redd tried, and failed, to imagine a new construct of herself since the one she’d used to haunt Ripkins had somehow been taken from her. She attempted to conjure a flesh-swallowing rose blossom, but she couldn’t manage that either. She stomped up to Vollrath as if he might be responsible for her inability.

“Now, tutor, I’m tired of trying to be clever. I’m tired of
strategy
. Now we fight for the Crystal. The old-fashioned way.”

“You mean without imagination?”

Redd scowled. “Is that a problem for you, pale face?”

“If it isn’t a problem for you, Your Imperial Viciousness,” Vollrath said, bowing. “I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to claim that it’s a problem for me.”

Not a hectare’s length in front of them, the Iron Butterfly looked like some petrified primeval creature with its tail-end in the ground, its wings partly spread and its body slanted at a forty-five-degree angle, antennae aimed at the sky. It wasn’t made of iron but a kind of stone—of unknown origin and still not understood—that
resembled
iron ore: its hard surface a deep umber, spotted with corrosion and rust, seasoned by eons of weather. Even Wonderland’s oldest tutors couldn’t recall who had named the ancient megalith, nor when it had been named. It was believed to be as old as the land itself, constructed when the mountains, rivers, jungles, plains, and desert had first formed, before there had been a queendom or Boarderland, before there had been nations or “civilization.” And because the skills needed to build it were obviously beyond those possessed by the hulking Helmex of the earliest epochs, the Iron Butterfly had become the subject of a thousand rumors, some claiming it had been a temple, a shrine to stars, moons and sun, others that it’d been a house of sacrifice, where jabberwocky hearts throbbing with life were offered up to merciless gods, and still others that it’d been the site of duels, marriages, executions, births, coronations, regicides, crucifixions, resurrec tions, reanimations. Redd didn’t care what it had been, only what it was: the current home of the Heart Crystal. She would make the Iron Butterfly the site of future history, the landmark in which she seized the Heart Crystal from the grasping hands of the undeserving.

“You don’t feel the Power of Proximity any longer?” Vollrath mused. “You
did
feel it but now you do
not
. We must conclude that Arch has devised a way of turning on and off the Crystal’s power, as one, so to speak, turns on and off the light of a room.”

“My tutor,” Redd scoffed, “well-schooled in the obvious.”

The Cat purred. Sacrenoir and the others grinned. The jabberwocky spat flame and strained against their chains.

Redd stroked her mount, its skin like volcanic crust. “We’ll be outnumbered,” she said, more to herself than her assassins. “We’ll be outgunned.”

“And your point is . . . ?” Sacrenoir asked.

“That it will be a raucous good time so long as we annihilate them quickly! Before Arch’s reinforcements arrive, I’d
better
be in possession of the Crystal.”

“You will be,” Sacrenoir promised.

“But Your Imperial Viciousness,” Vollrath asked, “what if you’re unable to revive its power?”

“Then we’ll die, tutor. But if Arch can turn the Crystal’s power on and off, so . . . can . . . I.”

“Of course. But perhaps since you and Alyss Heart are presently in cahoots—”

“‘Cahoots’? Who’s in ‘cahoots,’ tutor? I’ll put
you
in cahoots, you intellectual!”

Vollrath again humbled himself before her. “Please, Your Imperial Viciousness, I merely meant to suggest that since you and your niece are somewhat allied and we’re outnumbered by Arch’s forces, we might avail ourselves of the additional bodies—those of your niece, her guardsman and, of course, Mr. Van de Skülle.”

The idea amused Redd, if anything could be said to amuse her; her nostrils flared as if at the foul odor of her pleasure. “I suppose I
should
rue the misfortune that Alyss isn’t here to fight alongside us. But what can I do? First to the Crystal, first to power. Too bad for her.”

Vollrath, The Cat, Sacrenoir and the others gathered round their mistress, her attention fixed on the looming edifice that held her future—either ultimate power or death, because she would accept nothing else.

“Here is how we’ll attack . . .” she said.

T
HE DOOMSINES and Fel Creel stared into the shadowy hole that had been the Pool of Tears, its water still sloshing in the tankers behind them. The siphons were put away and the warriors should have been proceeding back to the palace as King Arch had commanded them to do, but instead they stood in a religious silence, risking not only His Majesty’s wrath but also—leaning as far over the cavity’s edge as they could for a better view into the depths—their lives.

A Doomsine took a palm-sized medallion from his pocket and launched it into the air, where it briefly hovered, looking like a coin spinning fast on its edge. But unlike a coin, and emitting no sound louder than the rapid flutter of insect wings, the remote eye flew down into what had been the Pool of Tears, transmitting what it “saw” directly to the Doomsine warrior’s visual cortex.

“Well?” a Fel Creel asked.

“Nothing,” the Doomsine said. He did not speak again, but remained wide-eyed at what the others could not see: pure darkness.

“It’s bottomless,” another Fel Creel eventually said.