ArchEnemy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CODA

  Dial Books

  An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published by The Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2009 by Frank Beddor

  All rights reserved

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Logo D

  S.A.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beddor, Frank.

  ArchEnemy / by Frank Beddor.

  p. cm.—(Looking Glass Wars)

  Summary: Virtuous Queen Alyss, who has lost the power of imagination,

  and her murderous aunt Redd battle for control of Wonderland.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14875-4

  [1. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. 2. War—Fiction. 3. Imagination—Fiction.

  4. Characters in literature—Fiction. 5. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B3817982Ev 2009 [Fic]—dc22 2009003609

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my little princess Ava

  PROLOGUE

  Oxford, England. 1875.

  Alyss of Wonderland raced up the front walk, using her imagination to unlock the door and turn the latch. Inside the house, nothing had changed. The umbrella stand and hat rack, the family pictures hanging in the hall, even the gouge in the baseboard marking where she’d thrown her ice skates one winter afternoon: Everything was exactly as it had been when she’d lived there . . . so long ago, it seemed.

  “Please, what do you want?” the dean’s voice reached her from the back of the house.

  She sighted them in her imagination’s eye: the dean and Mrs. Liddell, Edith and Lorina. Their clothes a good deal ripped, they huddled together on the drawing room sofa in fearful silence while Ripkins—one of King Arch’s bodyguards, and a deadly assassin—stood ominously before them. Ripkins: the only Boarderlander who could flex his fingertips, pushing deadly sawteeth up out of the skin in the pattern of his fingerprints.

  “Please,” the dean said again.

  Fingerprint blades flexed, Ripkins moved his hands fast in front of him, shredding air. Mrs. Liddell flinched. The assassin took a step toward the dean, the sisters each let out a sob and—

  “Hello?” Alyss called, walking directly into the room. She had imagined herself into Alice Liddell’s long skirt and blouse, her hair in a tight bun. “Excuse me, I didn’t know there was company.”

  She tried to look startled—eyes wide, mouth half open, head tilted apologetically—as she thought her double would. Wanting to catch Ripkins off guard, she pretended to be meek, cowed, and let him grab her and push her toward the Liddells.

  Where he’d touched her, there was blood.

  Ripkins’ hands became a blur in front of him, churning air and moving in toward the dean’s chest. Alyss had no choice but to expose her imaginative powers in front of the Liddells. With the slightest of movements, she conjured a deck of razor-cards and sent them cutting through the air.

  Fiss! Fiss, fiss, fiss!

  In a single swift motion, Ripkins spun clear and unholstered a crystal shooter, firing a retaliatory cannonade. Alyss gestured as if wiping condensation off a looking glass and the shrapnel-like bullets of wulfenite and barite crystal clattered to the floor.

  The Liddells sat dumbfounded, their fear muted in the shock of seeing their adopted daughter engage in combat, producing otherworldly missiles out of the air—flat blade-edged rectangles resembling playing cards, bursts of gleaming bullets. She conjured them as fast as she defended herself against them, what with the intruder making expert use of the strange guns and knives strapped to his belt, thighs, biceps, and forearms.

  “Father!”

  A fistful of mind riders—ordinary-looking darts infused with poison that turned victims one upon the other in rage—rocketed toward the family.

  Alyss threw out her hand and the weapons changed trajectory, shooting toward her. She annihilated them in midair with a pinch of her fingers, becoming like gravity itself, pulling whatever Ripkins hurled at the Liddells toward her until—

  The wall pushed out a score of daggers. Ripkins, knocked backward by a steel playing card as big as a man, slammed against them and slumped to the floor.

  Silence, except for the ticking of a grandfather clock.

  “Oh!”

  In the doorway stood Alyss’ double, the woman she had, with utmost effort, imagined into being to take her place in this world: Alice Liddell who, with her gentleman friend, Reginald Hargreaves, stared at the dead assassin and Wonderland’s queen. The dean, his wife, and his daughters looked from Alyss Heart to Alice Liddell and back again.

  “I—?” the dean started.

  But that was all he managed before Alyss bolted from the room and out of the house, sprinting until she was well along St. Aldate’s Street. Certain the Liddells weren’t following her, she walked briskly in the direction of Carfax Tower, toward the portal that would return her to Wonderland: a puddle where no puddle should be, in the middle of sun-drenc
hed pavement behind the tower. But even from this distance she could see that something wasn’t right. The portal was shrinking, its edges drying up fast. She started to run, her imagination’s eye scanning the town.

  “How can it be?” she breathed, because all of the portals were shrinking, the tower puddle already half its former size when she leapt for it, closing her eyes and sucking in her breath, anticipating the swift watery descent through portal waters, the reverse pull of the Pool of Tears, the—

  Knees jarring, she landed on pavement. The portal had evaporated.

  Alyss Heart, the rightful queen of Wonderland, was stranded on Earth.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  BIBWIT HARTE, most learned albino in the land, tutor and adviser to four generations of Heart queens, bustled along a path on the grounds of Heart Palace. The flowers and shrubs he passed riffled their blooms and called out in respectful greeting.

  “Good evening, Mr. Harte!” said a purple sunflower.

  “We trust you’re well, Mr. Harte!” cried the blossoms of a hollizalea shrub.

  The tutor returned their well-wishes, though more than a few tulips found it strange he didn’t say more; Mr. Harte rarely missed an opportunity to chat. Stranger still, the royal tutor didn’t even chat with himself as he approached a hedge indistinguishable from those around it. His bald head glistening like a second moon in the evening’s light, his large ears—twice the size of an ordinary Wonderlander’s— pivoting to catch any sound that might indicate the return of expected friends, he stepped into the hedge. Its roots shifted, unlocking a hatch, and he descended through the opening.

  On a platform halfway to the floor of the subterranean chamber stood Queen Alyss, dressed in an ankle-length dress of shimmering, opalescent white. Her long, black hair elegantly dusting her shoulders, she held her bejeweled royal scepter in one hand while her other was extended toward the Heart Crystal’s unsteady pulse as if trying to physically draw inspiration from it.

  A new moon had come and gone since a web of caterpillar thread spanning the sky over Wonderland—WILMA, King Arch’s Weapon of Inconceivable Loss and Massive Annihilation—had reduced the Heart Crystal to what it was now: a sputtering, blinking, useless thing. The imaginative source for all creation, the means through which Wonderland’s most ingenious inventions passed to Earth and other worlds, had become little more than a font of frustration.

  “Shouldn’t the effects be wearing off by now?”Alyss asked as Bibwit stepped down beside her. “I can’t conjure so much as a tiny opal.”

  “You could enlist the help of an imagination enabler, Queen Alyss,” said General Doppelgänger, who sat monitoring the viewing screens at a control desk. “Someone residing outside Wondertropolis and not so affected by King Arch’s Weapon.”

  Bibwit’s ears quivered, his scholar’s robe swished at his bare feet. “It is indeed horrible for all imaginationists within Wondertropolis to have lost their imaginations on account of King Arch. And although we may find some relief in the fact that those in rural quadrants, while weaker in imagination than before, have not been left completely bereft—a circumstance I ascribe to the web of caterpillar thread having been more tightly knit over our capital city; what I mean to say, in short—”

  Alyss laughed. When had Bibwit ever given a short speech instead of a long one?

  “—in sum,” the tutor continued, “while it is possible for us to send for an imagination enabler, I don’t think we should let more Wonderlanders know of the queen’s loss than is absolutely necessary. An imagination enabler cannot help matters. The queen’s powers will return.”

  “I’m glad someone is sure of it,” Alyss said.

  “My dear Alyss,” Bibwit bowed, “in this world I can be sure of nothing so much as my own wisdom.”

  It was strange, Alyss thought, that she should seem more concerned about her loss than Bibwit and the general. True, it was her imagination, but hadn’t they always urged her to exploit it for the queendom’s benefit and for the glory of White Imagination? She had felt such freedom upon first discovering the absence of her gift and already, here she was, worrying enough for the three of them.

  Because my responsibilities as queen haven’t disappeared along with my imagination.

  Whatever freedom she’d felt had been illusory. It wasn’t just her imagination, after all. Being sovereign of the people, she was not at leisure to be sovereign of her own actions, doing what she liked whenever she pleased, no matter how much she might wish for it. Love, justice, duty to the populace—the guiding principles of the Heart dynasty and of White Imagination were a part of her. She would defend what she thought best for the queendom as long as she occupied the throne.

  “Club soldiers are amassing in Rocking Horse Lane,” General Doppelgänger reported into his desk’s talkback module. “Repeat: Club soldiers in Rocking Horse Lane. Decks one and three converge.”

  Lack of imagination throughout the realm had given rise to new problems. These in turn had brought her here, to the Heart Chamber, to try and coax a hint of her former power from the Crystal.

  “We’d do well to remember, Alyss,” Bibwit said, “that when the Crystal Continuum was contaminated by—what shall I call it?—by Homburg Molly’s mishap, yes, any imaginationist traveling inside of it at the time found herself without her abilities. Much as imaginationists now suffer as a result of King Arch’s attack on Wondertropolis and the Heart Crystal. In the case of Molly’s mishap, the effects wore off, and the continuum is now perfectly functioning. I therefore assume the effects of WILMA will similarly wear off.”

  “Unless, of course, they don’t,” Alyss said. “I’m no stronger now than when the weapon first detonated.”

  Bibwit shared a quick glance with General Doppelgänger. “We obviously have longer to wait than we did with the continuum incident, the power of WILMA being much greater.”

  Alyss again turned her energies toward the Heart Crystal, envisioning a smooth polished rock of clear agate at her feet. The Crystal fizzed and crackled, but no agate materialized.

  “It’s not as if Arch’s caterpillar thread is still radiating its power!” she cried. “It disintegrated!”

  Nor had it ever unleashed the full extent of its paralyzing energy. She and Hatter Madigan had seen to that.

  “By now,” General Doppelgänger said, his eyes on the control desk, monitoring the movement of his card soldiers, “Redd might know that Queen Alyss is without imagination.”

  “And the only reason she continues to retreat is because she’s lost hers,” Bibwit agreed. “A confrontation at this juncture would be nothing more than brute force against brute force. Redd cannot be so sure of victory without her imagination. We should start incorporating into our military the new weapons made before WILMA’s detonation, in case we find ourselves having to cope with both Redd’s army and the Clubs.”

  Alyss lowered her scepter and turned from the Heart Crystal. “During her attack, Redd couldn’t have known about WILMA or its effect on imagination. If she had, she never would have entered Wondertropolis and made herself vulnerable to it.”

  Bibwit nodded. The veins visible beneath his head’s translucent skin pulsed, keeping time to his thoughts. “There’s a question I’ve much been puzzling over,” he admitted at last. “Where did Arch get so much caterpillar thread and the knowledge of how to use it to create WILMA? As aged as I am, Alyss, I have never before seen the thread of all six caterpillar-oracles together in one place.” Then, with a flourish of his robe, as if this could wipe away all stress and uncertainty from the land, he added, “But enough of unsettling topics. I originally came here to tell you, my dear, that I’ve received word we should expect Hatter and Molly before the next eclipse.”

  “That is good news!”

  “Yes,” General Doppelgänger brooded, “because we’ll need all the bodies we can get. The Clubs are growing—”

  The general’s desk rattled with the sound of a distant explosion, he split into th
e twin figures of Doppel and Gänger, and both of them shouted to the card soldiers converging on Rocking Horse Lane, to the chessmen patrolling the outskirts of Wondertropolis, to anyone anywhere who could help:

  “Attack!”

  CHAPTER 2

  FOR AS long as anyone could remember, imaginationists had mingled with ordinary Wonderlanders throughout the queendom, living in the same residential complexes, working at the same firms, shopping at the same stores, and educating their children at the same schools. If, in the rugged resort towns of Outerwilderbeastia or the scrubland communities between the Everlasting Forest and the Chessboard Desert, there was a higher concentration of ordinary Wonderlanders, it was owing to nothing more sinister than a group of them having settled there long before; over the years, their families had prospered. Just as there was nothing ominous about the Croquet Court Lofts in Rocking Horse Lane being home to a high concentration of imaginationists. Writers, architects, scientists, painters, sculptors, inventors, White Imagination enthusiasts—these and more had taken up residence at the Lofts, bound together by the alternating elation and melancholy, the moments of inspiration offset by self-doubt and dissatisfaction, that came with all imaginative endeavors. Lately, however, the dissatisfactions had been more poignant than usual, the bouts of inspiration less frequent, and Croquet Court’s imaginationists gathered to complain in the building’s lobby at the close of each day, much as they used to gather to brag of what they’d accomplished when their imaginations had been ripe with ideas.

  “I think I almost had a thought today,” a writer said.

  “That’s more than I had,” grumbled a sculptor.

  “There!” a stymied inventor blurted to an architect, pulling a clump of hair from his head and holding it in his palm. “I’ve just now invented this ball of hair!”

  In a corner of the room, not wanting to admit she’d suffered another clutch of unproductive hours, a painter stood before a canvas decorated with three hesitant lines, one for each of the days she’d spent with her brush poised to capture the likeness of . . . anything.