“It’s worth the risk, isn’t it?” the generals said as one.
Alyss again took on the blank stare of a remote viewer, the eye of her imagination descending into the Valley of Mushrooms, scouting for the faintest wisp of hookah smoke, the slightest evidence of the caterpillar council’s whereabouts. But it was no good. Wherever she trained her imaginative eye, she saw only the damp shade beneath mushroom caps and the many-colored stalks so thick she wouldn’t have been able to wrap her arms around them. She saw only the giant fungi that had given the valley its name.
“Dodge is right,” she decided. “Our uprising against the Clubs should wait. Before I use my full power to free imaginationists, we should try to expose Arch’s scheme against us. Whatever we decide, we cannot allow him to know where I am, nor my imagination to compromise our precarious position. We’ll know better how to proceed if we learn his plan.”
Mr. Dumphy, returned from his most recent errand, was preparing for his next, sliding a crystal shooter into each boot and tucking AD52s into his waistband beneath the hang of his coat. He didn’t think it his place to eavesdrop on a meeting between his queen and her advisers and he was humming to himself to drown out their voices until—
“Mr. Dumphy,” Alyss said, “I’m sorry to report, freedom for our fellow inmates will not be as imminent as I’d supposed. It
will
come, but in the meantime I hope they’ll continue to keep their imaginations to themselves. And if others inform the Clubs of imagination’s return, the prisoners might at least avoid harsher treatment by not showing it off.”
“My queen,” Mr. Dumphy said with one of his little bows, “you are surrounded by friends and supporters here. I know you won’t forget us and I’m confident we can unimaginatively tolerate incarceration awhile longer if it will forever defeat those responsible for it.”
“I promise you, Mr. Dumphy, I will effect your release, and that of every imaginationist, as soon as seems wise.”
Turning back to her advisers, Alyss made a point of including the tinker in further discussion. It was quickly settled: She would imagine a passage through the dolomite wall and she and Dodge would escape, after which she would immediately close the passage to avoid exciting other prisoners or alarming the Club soldiers. Mr. Dumphy would remain behind and, by means of a conjured crystal communicator, periodically report on the imaginationists’ morale.
“Redd might provoke Arch in a way that compromises us,” Generals Doppel and Gänger said.
“In a way that compromises Alyss,” Bibwit qualified.
The generals nodded, but Dodge made a face. “She can only do so much without an army.”
It was a reasonable assumption. But with Redd, one always knew: If Her Imperial Viciousness could be a problem, she would be.
CHAPTER 25
Oxford, England. 1875.
T
HE CLOCK showed five after six. The fire in the hearth crackled and Dodgson busied himself with trifles—boiling water, warming the tea kettle, setting out cups and saucers, sugar and cream, to avoid thinking on the larger problems that had presented themselves at his door.
“Hatter M-Madigan is it?” he stuttered, though he of course remembered the name.
The Milliner inclined his head. “And this is my daughter, Homburg Molly.”
Dodgson had already been introduced to the girl twice. The tea steeped. The fire in the hearth crackled.
“Th-this is highly unusual,” he said finally.
“I couldn’t think of anywhere safer for my daughter,” Hatter returned.
Dodgson thought he saw Molly cringe slightly—embarrassed or annoyed, he couldn’t tell which.
“Do you i-i-intend to stay?” he asked, pouring the tea. “B-because, you see . . .”
He was about to say it was neither proper nor allowed, but he had experienced what Hatter and his blades could do. Would such a man care for the rules of a provincial college?
“. . . because, you see, I hope I have enough blankets.”
If Hatter was concerned about the reverend’s possible lack of blankets, he didn’t say. He told Dodgson of King Arch, of WILMA and how even in her compromised state she had affected the Heart Crystal, virtually snuffing out imagination queendom-wide. His tone remained even and unemotional, but the Wonderlander who epitomized the Millinery ethic of never uttering more than necessary had uncorked himself. From anyone else, the quantity of his words would have been unremarkable. But as Molly sat listening to a recitation of events she wished she didn’t know, the guilt she felt all over again was tinged with something new; she had never heard her father speak so much.
“Queen Alyss and Redd Heart are both without their powers,” Hatter finished.
“Alice told me of the Heart Crystal,” Dodgson said, recalling that afternoon on the banks of the River Cherwell, young Alice excited but terribly serious as she described Wonderland while her sisters played in the river’s shallows. “She referred to it as a s-source, I believe. Wait a moment.” The reverend dug in the cubbyhole above the desk for his old notes. “Yes. Here.” In silence, he read over what he’d written. Then, to the room at large, in astonishment: “No imagination in Wonderland m-means no imagination on Earth?”
It explained his recent creative drought, and what he’d been seeing in everyone around him. An outsized crystal in a parallel world that served as fountainhead of humankind’s creativity? The logician in him thought it quite impossible. And yet the author in him, the part of him that had created worlds out of words, mere symbols on a page, had no doubt of it. He dropped into his chair.
“Not good.”
“The absence of imagination has been Arch’s opportunity,” Hatter said. “I don’t know what’s become of Queen Alyss under Arch’s rule, but I fear the worst. When Molly and I jumped into the Pool of Tears, the queen was confined in a prison-town with other imaginationists.”
“But w-why come to me?” Dodgson asked. “Wouldn’t anywhere on Earth be just as safe for your d-daughter? Perhaps safer, since I have had some contact with . . . with a f-few characters in this drama.”
Hatter held his hat in hand, stared into the depths of its underside. “I’m not sure. But when I was here before, of all the people I met, your glow was among the brightest.”
“My glow?” Dodgson glanced down at his hands. They looked like ordinary hands. A bit dry, but certainly not luminescent.
“To my eyes,” Hatter explained, “almost everyone on Earth glows.”
“Mine too,” Molly said, hardly audible.
“Some darkly, others brightly,” Hatter elaborated. “Some strongly, others faintly. I believe these glowings to be connected with imagination. The stronger the glow, the stronger the imagination.”
“Extraordinary,” the reverend exclaimed.
“But unlike my last visit, all glows I’ve seen this time are faint to nonexistent. Even yours. It’s extremely faint right now.”
“Yes,” Molly whispered.
Dodgson wanted to add this alleged correlation between glow and imagination to his old notes on Wonderland. But welcome as this desire was, he made no move toward pen and ink. Wasn’t it precisely this sort of obsessive note-taking that had led him to commit such violence on the memories of the young Alyss Heart/Alice Liddell?
He studied his visitors. Molly pouting at the dregs of her tea, as withdrawn as any teenager he’d ever known; Hatter tormented by uncertainties and parental worry: The pair might have been from another world, but they presently appeared nothing so much as Earth-bound, human.
“Now what?” he asked.
CHAPTER 26
F
AMILIAR AS the Gnobi were with various terrain from their nomadic life in Boarderland, able to trudge through the Swampy Woods of Chance as efficiently as they could scale the Glyph Cliffs, they had never experienced anything like Wonderland’s Volcanic Plains. Wherever they went in the charred region, they inevitably found themselves at the base of an active volcano . . . or two. Their nostrils polluted with the stink of sulfur, their lungs scorched by the air, they were constantly having to avoid geysers of noxious gas, jets of flame shooting randomly from the rocky ground, pits and rivers of boiling lava.
Divided into groups and sent around the queendom to hunt for Redd Heart, their instructions were simple: Find Her Imperial Viciousness, kill her, and present her body to King Arch as apology for letting her get away from them in Outerwilderbeastia.
“Listen,” a warrior said as the tribesmen avoided yet another spray of fire from underground.
Cutting through the low-pitched rumble of eruptions, coming from beyond a cluster of fossilized lava stalagmites that looked like an oversized bed of nails: the intermittent phlegm-rattling roar of beasts and the steady crack of a whip. Weapons drawn, the Gnobi weaved carefully through the stalagmites, peered out from behind the last of them.
There she was: Redd Heart, surrounded by eight jabberwocky while one of her assassins stood outside the circle of beasts, whipping their backsides. A short distance off, the remainder of Redd’s assassins occupied a sort of natural terrace in the side of a volcano, their attention wholly on their mistress who gripped leashes of heavy chain in her fist, the other ends of which were fastened around the jabberwocky’s necks.
Up on their hind legs, the beasts’ small forearms—like those of a Tyrannosaurus Rex from Earth’s prehistoric times—frantically paddled the air and their claws raked at nothing. They writhed to be free of their chains. They bellowed and tried to stomp Redd into the ground. But with atypical calm, and without dropping the scepter she held in one hand, Her Imperial Viciousness avoided the slightest injury even as one of the jabberwocky opened its mouth wide enough to swallow her whole, the smallest of its teeth as large as The Cat’s paw, and—
Chhhhooooooshhhhk!
The beast shot a fireball from the back of its throat.
Redd lifted her scepter; the fireball hovered before her in midair. She blew at it as if to rid herself of a bothersome insect and it reversed directions, burning a comet’s trail through the air and grazing the jabberwock on its way to smash into a distant volcano.
“You’re of no use to me injured,” Redd said to the beast, “otherwise you would have felt worse.”
The jabberwock roared and slobbered and swung its tail, hard. Redd jumped and let it whip past underneath her. Almost before she landed, she imagined a jabberwock tail on her own backside and, as if she’d been born with it, swatted the offending beast.
It lasted no longer than a gwormmy-blink, but for the first time in Wonderland’s history, a jabberwock wobbled in a daze, cowed. Then raged twice as brutally as before while—
Amid the stalagmites, the Gnobi aimed their orb cannons; with a synchronized release of the triggers, Redd and all of her assassins would be decimated.
“On my signal,” a Gnobi whispered, but a blanket of green smoke descended upon him and his fellow warriors, and they drooped, unconscious.
The green caterpillar and his hookah floated out from behind a stalagmite.
“You didn’t have to do that!” Redd called to him. “I knew they were there! Mr. Van de Skülle!”
The Dutchman took the jabberwocky’s leashes from his mistress. Redd’s conjured tail disintegrated. She approached the caterpillar, stood sneering down at the sleeping tribesmen.
“Call it a gesture of friendship,” the oracle said. “I wanted to do something for you, however small.” He pulled and puffed at his hookah a moment. “But you will say you have no need of friendship.”
Redd, on the contrary, said nothing. She was no longer sure what she needed. And she was trying to keep her mind empty, free of thoughts she didn’t want the maddening worm to know.
“There are packs of warriors searching for you throughout the queendom,” the oracle said.
“They’ll soon find me at Heart Palace.”
“They search for your niece too.”
“Why do you talk to me of
her
?”
The caterpillar went on as if he hadn’t heard: “Tell me, now that your imagination has returned, how will you do away with Arch and gain control of the Heart Crystal?”
Descending from extraordinary imaginative power to utter barrenness, however temporary, had produced a change in Redd just now perceptible. Whereas the old Redd would have frothed, “I don’t know, slug! Why don’t you tell me how I’ll take control of the Crystal?” the new Redd felt a check to her rash arrogance and remained quiet. How
was
she going to get the Crystal? She’d yet to come up with an adequate plan.
“You told me my imagination would return and that what I chose to do then—
now
—would determine everything.”
“So you
do
listen,” the caterpillar said.
“You knew I’d get my imagination back. You know what I’ll choose to do, even if I don’t.”
“News to me,” the oracle said. And after indulging a moment with his hookah: “I do not see the future so much as all possible futures. One-tenth of a lunar cycle from now, depending on what happens, there may be a wholly different set of possible futures for you. Be glad, Mistress Heart, you no longer have the futures that were yours if you’d not left Mount Isolation before the tribal warriors arrived. For once Arch knows where you are—”
Redd guffawed. “He thinks he knows where I am right now!” She banged her scepter on the ground, smoke issued from its crippled heart, in the middle of which a lavish bedroom in Heart Palace became visible—Arch’s bedroom, with gwynook skins and spirit-dane hides hanging from the walls. Knobkerrie in hand, the king was facing off against what he clearly supposed was Her Imperial Viciousness herself. The scene played out silently in the smoke while, far away in Heart Palace . . .
“You took a big risk coming here alone, Rose,” Arch said. “Or is your feline with you? Not that it matters.”
He lunged, his knobkerrie swooping around to crack the construct in the skull, but the weapon came up short, clashing with a knobkerrie instantly conjured by Redd, and which she manipulated with her imagination, leaving the construct’s hands free.