ArchEnemy (28 page)

“He’s an alchemist?”

“He’s many things—a rather unorthodox g-gentleman, as I say, not that I suppose his unorthodoxy will bother
you
. We will avoid visiting him on Sundays, and as to the d-discomfort he may cause me . . . your talent, Molly, wherever its origins lie, is worth it.”

If Rafters could teach her about alchemy, Molly thought, he could bring her that much closer to her mother, to understanding the woman Weaver had been; she’d try to be receptive. She followed Dodgson up yet another flight of stairs, could have sworn the lodging house had only three floors; it was so humble and rickety-looking from the street. Yet from the number of stairs they had climbed, they should have been well above the third landing.

“Here we are,” Dodgson said.

Molly was sure the garret door hadn’t appeared until after he spoke. And not just that. There were more stairs. She gazed up the crooked flight that led further into darkness, about to ask what was
up there
when—

“Well, well, if it isn’t the famous author, the great man.”

To Molly’s eye, the fellow who answered Dodgson’s knock at the door did not have a face suggestive of supreme intelligence. His misshapen nose revealed nothing of alchemy. The gray-splotched stubble of his cheeks communicated no analytical or mathematical genius. The rectangular brow overhanging his dull eyes seemed less a storehouse of arcana than a ruddy brick.

“I would not have called on you unexpectedly—” Dodgson started.

“At all,” corrected the man.

Dodgson forced a smile. “I would not have c-called on you so unexpectedly, Mr. Rafters, if I didn’t be . . . believe you would want to meet this extraordinary person at my side, and were time not so p-pressing. Homburg Molly, Mr. Rafters.”

The two greeted each other with skepticism, Mr. Rafters apparently judging Molly’s appearance to be no more indicative of extraordinary abilities than she had judged his. Dodgson produced a small leather-bound book from his pocket, opened it to a page on which he’d written one of his puzzles.

“Have you seen this before?” he asked Molly.

“No.”

He read aloud: “‘Two travelers, starting at the same time, went opposite ways round a circular railway. Trains start each way every fifteen minutes, the easterly ones going round in three hours, the westerly in two. How many trains did each meet on the way, not counting trains met at the terminus itself?’”

“Nineteen,” Molly answered reflexively.

Rafters whistled mockingly, as if he thought their performance contrived, but he stepped aside to let them into his apartment. “Mr. Dodgson, you and your friend are welcome to my hospitality, unless of course you think your delicate sensibilities will be offended.”

The reverend gestured for Molly to enter the garret and followed her over the threshold. Uncommon intelligence, a wealth of knowledge—these were as inevident in the apartment’s shabby array as they were in Rafters’ face. The dresser stood at a tilt, having but three legs. One side of the room was taken up with a pallet of straw covered with an old horse blanket. The grime on the lone window was too thick to see through and the dust on the floor so thick that Molly and Dodgson tracked footprints wherever they stepped. There were no books or pamphlets about, no scientific tools or writing instruments, nothing in the slightest to declare the garret’s occupant an avid cultivator of his mind.

The occupant was speaking. Molly, trying not to touch anything, needed a second to realize he was addressing her, presenting her with a problem. It was a puzzle like the first ones Dodgson had shown her in his flat.

“Six,” she answered.

Rafters nodded: correct.

He asked her a few more, all of which she answered with similar ease. Then the puzzles changed, became games of symbols in differing combinations that required no outside knowledge to solve, just the ability to discern what effects the symbols were supposed to have upon one another when placed in various arrangements—coupled, de-coupled, adjacent to, on top of or below one another. These puzzles Molly also answered promptly, correctly, and without effort. Rafters found a stub of pencil and a newspaper under his dresser. Transitioning from oral quiz to written, the puzzles grew more elaborate. Which was when Molly sensed a fog seep into her brain. She felt buffle-headed, taking longer and longer to correctly answer Rafters’ puzzles, which should have given her no trouble. And Rafters himself seemed slower, as if formulating and writing out his puzzles had grown more difficult. By the time he finished composing one that Molly had no idea how to solve, she was pretty sure he didn’t know its answer either. So they left off where they began: neither much impressed with the other.

“Show him your mother’s notebooks,” Dodgson said.

Weaver’s trio of notebooks tied with flugelberry vine, their contents as yet unfathomable to Molly though they were her dearest keepsakes. With reservation, she handed them to Rafters.

“Flugelberry,” he said, showing interest before he even untied the vine that bound them.

Molly almost missed it, worried about his handling of her mother’s writings. He’d said “flugelberry”? Did they have that on Earth? How could he have known about flugelberry unless—

“Come back tomorrow,” Rafters said, thumbing through one of the notebooks, his dull eyes as lively as Molly had ever seen. “But only if you bring these.”

Once she and Dodgson were on the landing with the closed garret door separating them from Rafters, the reverend asked, “W-what happened in there? You’ve been s-successful with problems more difficult than any he posed.”

“I don’t know,” Molly said. “I feel . . . not right.”

“I feared so. I feel it as well.”

Out on Beaumont Street, everyone appeared to feel it. Some walked hesitantly, as if unsure where they were going. Others struggled to count out the money needed to pay carriage drivers or flower-mongers, while a not insignificant number acted as perfect layabouts—slack-jawed, glaze-eyed, doing nothing.

“It’s n-nearly the same as the time p-p-previous,” Dodgson said, “before you and your father showed up at my d-door. But this is worse. Do you suppose the Heart C-Crystal has been . . . is again shut down?”

Molly had no way of knowing and she didn’t consider what such an event might mean for her, for Hatter, for Wonderland’s queen and the Alyssian effort. Not yet anyway, because—

Glimpsing a clock through a draper’s window, she told the reverend she would meet him back at his rooms and started quickly off: She had only a few minutes to make her rendezvous with Alice Liddell.

F
ROM THE long tables cluttered with burners and tubing and glass vials to the white-boards covered with scribbled formulae to the chemical smells, Taegel’s lab at the munitions factory looked no different from a science lab in any of Wonderland’s schools. But it was here, as well as in the factory’s surrounding workshops, that the prototypes of every weapon employed by Wonderland’s decks and chessmen had been conceived, designed, built and tested—orb generators and cannonball spiders, AD52s and crystal shooters, porta prison bombs and whipsnake grenades. The munitions factory: where theoretical physics and chemistry were wedded to practical application, the evolution of weapons technology, and ingenuity was devoted to the instruments of death and destruction.

“How to begin,” Taegel was saying, “when there’s so much in the final stage of development?” On the wall behind him was an entertainment crystal tuned to a Wonderland news program, the voices of its reporters constant background chatter. “I always leave it on,” he explained, noticing Dodge’s distraction. “It gives the impression I’ve just stepped away and will return at any moment, which discourages idea-poaching by other engineers. It’s quite competitive here. Now . . .” He picked up the nearest object at hand—an elongated fragment of glass with no sharp edges or corners, as if these had been rounded, smoothed, to prevent harm to its bearer. “This is a splinterscape. It does . . . well, it’s hard to explain really. Stand back.”

Taegel aimed one end of the weapon at a room that opened off the lab proper, the floor and walls of which were pock-marked with previous weapons tests, its ceiling marred by scorch marks. He touched his thumb to a white crescent symbol on the weapon’s side and finger-length glass splinters shot out, embedded at all angles in the floor and grew to over a meter in length.

“Cover the ground between you and an approaching enemy,” Taegel said, “and unless the enemy’s traveling by air, they can’t get to you. Needs reloading only every 10,000 splinters.”

“We’ll take five,” said Dodge.

Taegel set down the splinterscape and picked up what might have been the small limb of a cactus. “This is a weapon in a similar vein: the shardstorm, which essentially creates what its name indicates. But while other bomb types detonate on impact with a hard surface, a shardstorm detonates when
impacting the air
, after a certain velocity has been maintained for four gwormmy-blinks. This small delay is to allow the user a measure of safety and give him or her a chance to avoid the coming storm.”

Taegel tossed the shardstorm into the adjoining room and a tornado of wulfenite shrapnel formed. Two Wonderlanders high, its wulfenite whipped about and ripped at the walls and ceiling.

“We’ll take as many of those as you’ve got,” Dodge said, before it had petered out, and not alone in his appreciation.

Bibwit was bending down before a pan containing what looked like spice to be sprinkled on someone’s lunch. “This smells tasty.”

“Don’t!” Taegel warned.

But Bibwit had already brought a pinch of the stuff to his mouth. “We’re doomed!” he moaned. “All is lost without Alyss! We might as well sit down and die right here!” To prove that he didn’t speak idly, the tutor plopped down on the floor, head in his hands. “What’s the point? What’s the point of anything?”

“Dust of despair,” Taegel explained to the others. “Takes away an enemy’s will to fight.”

“To breathe is such a burden,” Bibwit complained to his lap.

“We’ll take a few pouches of that,” Dodge said.

Taegel demonstrated the oozy, a rifle that sprayed out streams of foul-smelling mulch (“We’ll take at least two,” said Dodge), and a dazzle dart, which upon hitting its target exploded with light bright enough to cause temporary blindness (“We’ll take a couple fistfuls,” said Dodge). The engineer might have gone on to demonstrate the rust-ruin, the tweedler, and a host of other weapons not yet so complete if Hatter hadn’t stopped him.

“I assume you have a supply of whipsnake grenades, cannonball spiders, and AD52 ammo cartridges here?” the Milliner asked.

“Absolutely.”

To Dodge and Van de Skülle, Hatter said, “We should load up.”

Which was what they were doing—securing the familiar weapons about their persons—when Bibwit, still influenced by the dust of despair, cried out:

“We’re dead already and don’t know it! What hope is there for anyone? None! None at all! Just look! Feast your eyes on our demise!”

Pulling at his hair, the tutor directed everyone’s attention to the entertainment crystal, which showed a crowd hundreds of Wonderlanders strong standing vigil at the edge of the empty Pool of Tears. An offscreen reporter was speaking of unprecedented events and the need for those whose loved ones had ever fallen or jumped into the Pool to grieve afresh, because with the Pool of Tears drained, there was positively no chance of seeing those loved ones again.

“How’d Arch . . . ?” Taegel mumbled.

“Alyss,” Dodge whispered, his voice a mixture of anguish and alarm.

“She might not have gone in,” Hatter said. “We need to leave. We’ve been here too long as it is.”

The Milliner helped Bibwit to his feet and Taegel led them back along the corridors the way they’d come, out on to factory grounds.

“Still online,” Taegel said as they passed through an unmanned checkpoint in the first soundwave barrier along the factory’s perimeter. “Which means Arch hasn’t yet—”

“Our end has come!” Bibwit moaned.

On the left and right of the Alyssians: too many ScorpSpitters to count. Behind and in front of them: deadly walls of internal organ-charring soundwaves. Scorpion-like contraptions, the ScorpSpitters curled their “tails” into a “C,” taking aim at the Alyssians, about to shoot bullets of deadly poison.

Mr. Van de Skülle brandished his whip, lashing ScorpSpitter after ScorpSpitter on the left, while with one set of activated wrist-blades, Hatter deflected the poisonous gobs shot at them from the ScorpSpitters on the right.

Mr. Van de Skülle’s whip fell to the ground, the Dutchman himself the lone casualty of a whipsnake grenade dropped from the sky. Dodge and Taegel glanced up at the gangways above the soundwave barriers; normally patrolled by Three Cards and white pawns, the gangways were crowded with Doomsine warriors and more senior chessmen. Among the latter: the knight and rook who’d fought next to Dodge in Alyssian battles during Redd’s reign. Their weapons were trained on the intruders, but seeing the guardsman and Hatter and Bibwit, they hesitated. It was all the time Hatter needed to pull his folded top hat blades from his coat pocket and send them coptering into the enemy.

The rook and knight jumped clear, but the Doomsines, even as they gunned razor-cards and crystal shot at the trapped Alyssians, succumbed to the whirling blades.

The weapon boomeranged back to Hatter. Which was when Taegel saw a cannonball spider rocketing toward them from somewhere beyond the litter of ScorpSpitters, its legs unfolding midair, its pincers opening and closing. He barely got the shardstorm off in time. The cannonball spider slammed into the cyclone of wulfenite scraps and emerged with limbs severed at the joints, body dented and misshapen. It crashed to the ground and rolled to a stop at his feet.