ArchEnemy (30 page)

“I know,” Alyss said. “I know.”

Finally, Molly managed, “You were at the Liddells.’ ”

“I was. But I wouldn’t be here now if there were a portal anywhere in the city. There is no way back to Wonderland.”

Molly felt an unmooring inside of her: No way back? But that meant her father could never return for her, that they could never—

“At least we have each other,” Alyss sighed.

Dodgson cleared his throat. “And me.”

“Ah.” The queen smiled with a sadness that might have reached back generations. “Let’s hope—no, let’s
believe
—we are enough.”

W
ONDERLAND’S ORACLES sat upon their respective fungi, the vibrant blue, green, red, orange, yellow and purple of their spongy mushroom thrones contrasting sharply with the faded colors of the wise, riddle-tongued creatures themselves. The oracles’ colors had begun to fade with each passing lunar hour, their skin becoming ever more dried and shriveled. Prophetic larvae of immodest proportions: They who had been ageless and suffered no debilitating physical change since before there was such a word or concept as “queendom” were at last showing the effects of aging, victims of an accelerated process that kept time with the dying Heart Crystal.

Ignoring their hookahs, the caterpillars sat wearily, as if sitting were itself an exhausting enterprise. Forlorn, distrustful, they blinked milky eyes at the tarty tart caldron before them—the third caldron delivered to them by Arch’s intel minister who had been ordered to regularly supply them with fresh treats.

“So tasty and yet so dangerous,” the once orange caterpillar said of the tarty tarts.

“You first,” the vaguely yellow caterpillar insisted to the formerly red caterpillar.

“I couldn’t possibly think of partaking before Green,” the formerly red caterpillar demurred.

“It would be bad form to help myself before Blue has had a nibble,” said the barely-green-any-longer caterpillar.

The not-quite-blue caterpillar grumbled and said, “I’m stuffed,” though he hadn’t eaten a tarty tart in hours, his digestive system having lamentably grown tarty tart intolerant.

The more-ashen-than-purple caterpillar, in a painstaking, arthritic semblance of his earlier enthusiasm, betook himself to the caldron, brought a squigberry tart to his mouth, bit into it and—

“Ow!”

Two of his teeth had fallen out, stuck in the tarty tart.

“What did I tell you?” the once orange caterpillar said. “So tasty and yet so dangerous.”

“Obviously!” the vaguely yellow caterpillar said to the barely-green-any-longer caterpillar.

The barely-green-any-longer caterpillar crinkled his face. Not sure he understood what his fellow council member was about, he said questioningly, and in a single rush of breath, “I was going to mention that the king has done what Everqueen requires but which we could not tell him to do outright because, wary as he is, he wouldn’t have done it, and so we arranged circumstances in hopes that he might figure it out on his own, which he has since done, thinking he is catching us unaware with his doings?”

“Obviously!” said the vaguely yellow caterpillar. “He believes himself to be a strategist without equal!”

“The risk to ourselves was necessary,” the not-quite-blue caterpillar reminded them. “Although there are possible futures that hold the worst for the Crystal and this council, the only path toward establishing Everqueen is through the events we have put into motion and on account of which we currently suffer.”

“And now it is up to Alyss Heart.”

“And the girl.”

“Yes, the girl! Homburg Molly!” said the others.

“And one other,” the not-quite-blue caterpillar corrected. “The council forgets a possible future that now appears imminent as a result of our intervention.”

“I see so many futures, I can’t keep them straight!” complained the once orange caterpillar.

“Welcome to old age,” said the barely-green-any-longer caterpillar.

“You
never
could keep them straight,” the formerly red caterpillar said to the once orange caterpillar.

The more-ashen-than-purple caterpillar, not knowing what else to do with his two broken teeth, returned them loose to his mouth, after which the eyes of every council member went wide as they all envisioned the imminent future scenario to which not-quite-blue had referred, and which involved none other than—

“Redd Heart!” the oracles cried simultaneously.

T
HEY HAD maneuvered nearer the Iron Butterfly, as close as Redd thought they could get without being betrayed by the unsubtle tread of their jabberwocky, obscured from sight by burial mounds made in earliest time.

“You have a quarter lunar hour to get in position,” Redd said.

Without a word, Alistaire Poole and Sacrenoir galloped on their jabberwocky to opposite flanks of the Iron Butterfly. For the next quarter lunar hour not a word was spoken, though Vollrath several times opened his mouth, on the verge of speech, only to shut it again at the sight of Redd’s unwelcoming demeanor, her unrelenting focus on the Butterfly. She was, the crosshatched creases around her downturned mouth declared, not to be distracted with trifles, and Vollrath’s fear for his life was a trifle.

“It’s time,” Redd said, just as—

An orb generator exploded on the sunrise side of the Butterfly, which Sacrenoir, positioned behind a burial mound in the area, had set off. A knot of Astacans on the Butterfly’s sunrise side started toward the explosion site.

On the Butterfly’s sunset side, a jabberwock bucked and roared and spewed flame. The beast had been prodded into the open by Alistaire Poole and was supposed to tramp toward the megalith, though it was evincing more interest in the burial mound the assassin was hunkered behind.

“Idiot beast,” Redd muttered, watching from her hidden vantage.

She scratched two scabs of skin from her jabberwock’s back and stuck them in her ears. Vollrath and The Cat did likewise. Redd pointed her scepter at Siren Hecht and the assassin unhinged her jaw and let out a head-splitting scream as—

She and her murdering cohorts spurred their jabberwocky into a run behind their mistress, stampeding toward the Iron Butterfly. Doomsines, Awr, and Astacans fell to the ground in pain. Some covered their ears with dirt, ammo cartridges, whatever was near, trying to block out the wretched peal of Siren’s voice. Others pounded the ground or thrashed in agony. Redd and her assassins weren’t without pain themselves since jabberwock skin did not completely prevent Siren’s scream from penetrating their skulls. Which was why the assassins went round to every writhing tribal warrior and did away with them as quickly as possible. Within the Iron Butterfly, they split off in every direction, eager to rid the place of Arch’s followers and leaving no one alive, while Redd herself stalked the cobwebbed corridors, stabbing the sharp end of her scepter into every Doomsine warrior and intel minister unfortunate enough to fall in her path. By the time she passed into the Iron Butterfly’s innermost sanctum, Siren had stopped screaming. One by one the assassins entered the cavernous room to find Redd surrounded by the dead and dying, staring with disgust at a giant knitted thing taking up the center of the floor.

“I’m right next to it but feel no stronger, no Power of Proximity,” Her Imperial Viciousness said.

The assassins didn’t understand, but Vollrath stepped up to the knitting and started to pull at it.

“Help him!” Redd scolded.

Before she could grow more impatient, Vollrath and the assassins had the cocoon of caterpillar silk bunched on the floor. With the Heart Crystal freed, Redd extended her arms and lifted her face to its glow, absorbing its energy through every pore. And so she remained, her assassins in silent awe until—

“Pardon, Your Imperial Viciousness,” Vollrath braved, “but don’t you think it likely that a distress signal might have been sent to Arch?”

“And do you not suppose, tutor, that I shunted any such signal to oblivion with the first flush of imagination returned to me?”

Vollrath showed his mistress the top of his head. “With one as clever as you, Your Imperial Viciousness, my job is ever more redundant.”

“Which is no doubt why you perform it so admirably.”

“Although it’s possible, is it not,” the tutor’s ears bent flat against his skull, “that a distress signal may have reached Arch before you were reinvigorated with imagination?”

Redd fixed her annoyance on the tutor. The rose vines of her dress snaked close to his exposed skin. “I’m prepared,” she said at length, and then, using her scepter, poked at the cocoon on the floor. “Caterpillar silk.”

“Everqueen!” a disembodied voice echoed throughout the Iron Butterfly. “Ev-er-queeeeeeeen!”

To Her Imperial Viciousness’ ear, it sounded like the green caterpillar trying to be ominous. “Show yourself, worm!”

“Everrrrrqueeeeeeeeeen!”

“The Everqueen is here!” Redd shouted. “I’ve come! Now it’s time to reclaim my throne!”

“Everrrrqueeeen!” the voice repeated one last time before fading to silence.

Redd turned on her assassins. “What is it I always say?”

The Cat, Sacrenoir, and the others bandied uncertain glances about.

“Don’t be stupid?” ventured Alistaire.

“I should kill you now?” offered The Cat.

“Do I have to murder everyone myself?” tried Siren.

“No, idiots! When in doubt, go for the head.
That’s
what I always say.”

“I never heard . . .” Sacrenoir started, but one look from his mistress shut him up.

“Arch is Wonderland’s Head of State,” Redd intoned, her scepter thrust skyward, the Heart Crystal turning crimson and shooting sparks and jags of energy everywhere. “And so . . . off with Wonderland’s head!”

O
N THE grounds of Arch’s Wondertropolis palace, in the subterranean chamber that once housed the power source for the cosmos, a cadre of intel ministers tended the fire crystals being used to evaporate the water drained from the Pool of Tears. There were a thousand such crystals, and the moment one no longer burned as bright as when first cracked open, it was doused and replaced, which required the ministers to clamber constantly about, exchanging crystals in the grate that had been laid out across the flooded chamber near the water’s surface. Siphons hung through the chamber’s open hatchway, reaching like gargantuan tendrils to the submerged floor, and whenever the water level fell more than a spirit-dane length from the fire crystals, more was pumped in from the tankers parked above—in the formerly well-kept garden now marred by swaths of destruction, those outsized vehicles having trundled over hollizalea and sunflower and daphnedews.

The king observed the evaporation process from the bronzite platform on which Alyss Heart had once stood to coax the Heart Crystal’s weakened energy into her. “So they’re even uglier than they were the last time?”

“The caterpillars will surely be dead soon, Your Majesty,” confirmed the minister returned from delivering tarty tarts to the oracles.

“Not soon enough.” Arch shouted at those working on the grate below: “More fire crystals! The evaporation is taking too long!”

“My liege.” An intel minister was at the control desk so often manned by General Doppelgänger in the past. “We have . . . an issue.”

The desk’s viewing screens were broadcasting images of tribal chiefs encamped with their warriors on the outskirts of Wondertropolis, all reporting the same thing.

“Repeat,” the Awr chief said. “We’re facing a full-on attack by Redd Heart and her army.”

Two of the viewing screens revealed what the chiefs were seeing: Redd, riding a jabberwock at the head of a massive mercenary force.

“Impossible,” Arch said.

Not one to wait for an enemy to strike first, the Awr chief ordered the launch of orb generators, which lobbed through the air, on target to wipe out Redd’s front line, but—

Redd and her army were unharmed, still positioned for attack.

“A construct?” the minister at the control desk gasped.

“Not possible,” Arch said.

But the other tribal leaders confirmed it: Their weapons had no effect on the enemy. Redd’s army was a well-wrought illusion, the product of unsurpassed imagination. Arch tapped a quick finger on his crystal communicator’s keypad, contacting his ministers at the Iron Butterfly. A hologram of one of them, bowing in reverence, projected from the communicator’s vid nozzle:

“What’s happening there?” Arch asked.

“Nothing, my liege. Everything is as it should be, according to your last commands.”

“The Heart Crystal?”

The hologram expanded to take in the cocooned Crystal behind the minister.

“Rap your hand against it,” Arch ordered.

The minister did so; it appeared solid. Arch cut communication.

“Something’s wrong.”

Blister, who’d been at the king’s side for some time, stepped to attention, awaiting orders.

“Take the fiercest Doomsines,” Arch instructed him, “take the Clubs’ soldiery and anyone else you need to the Iron Butterfly. I’ll follow when we’re done here.”

Blister had hardly hustled from the chamber when—

“Something wrong, Archy?”

On the platform, not a boulder’s throw from Arch: Redd Heart. But the king wasn’t going to be taken in by
that trick
a second time. What he saw, he knew, was a construct. And instead of showing anger, he fell into the flattery he employed whenever wooing another wife.

“You
are
an impressive specimen, Rose. If I was going to underestimate a female, it should never have been you. Remember when we used to visit those Black Imagination dens together? You were, what, seventeen years old, but you insisted on ingesting as much artificial crystal as any man.”