“You try,” she said to The Cat, who morphed from humanoid to kitten and back again, testing his own powers.
“Good.”
But Her Imperial Viciousness wasn’t done. She banged the end of her makeshift scepter on the pavement and, from the point of impact, cracks branched out in all directions, widening enough to let vines of flesh-eating roses slither out of them. Growing at a rate never before seen in nature, the vines methodically covered the entire block-buildings, lampposts, street, and sidewalk. It was then that an unfortunate butcher, hurrying to his shop at this early hour as was his custom, emerged from his apartment. He saw the roses and the menacing figures of Redd and The Cat and he tried to run, but the thorn-laden vines wrapped around his ankles and held him rooted. Thorns dug into him as the vines wound up and around his legs, torso, and arms. He opened his mouth to scream and a vine stuffed itself down his throat.
“It’s like watching an enjoyable narrative on an entertainment crystal back on Mount Isolation,” Redd said as the roses finished with the butcher. She motioned with her stick-a conductor leading her orchestra-and the roses retracted into the pavement’s cracks. “You’ve been to this world before, Cat. Take me to where I can sulk and complain in peace. Someplace suitable to my delicate temperament.”
“Yes, Your Imperial Viciousness.”
The Cat preferred not to admit his ignorance. True, he had recently plunged through the Pool of Tears and traveled to Earth in his hunt for the exiled Alyss Heart, but nothing looked familiar to him and he was certain that he had never been in this city. He led Redd through a series of turns and along countless blocks. They rounded a corner and came upon the dead butcher. They had traveled in a circle.
“You don’t know where we are?” Redd asked.
Her voice was so quiet that it made the fur between The Cat’s ears stand on end. He hadn’t risked a leap into the Heart Crystal only to die now.
“When I was last on Earth,” he said cautiously, “I must not have come to this city.”
“Tell it to the steel,” Redd snarled, conjuring the end of her stick into a blade, with which she was about to pierce him, when-
“I have only one life left,” he reminded her.
She held the spear aloft, ready to strike. With a grunt of vexation, she lowered it, imagined the blade-end back into a nonlethal nub, and jabbed it against his chest with every other word. “Then you’ll have to be more helpful in the future, won’t you? Because I might not be so lenient a second time.”
The Cat licked his paw and rubbed his eyes.
“Why do you keep doing that?” she asked, annoyed. “What?”
Redd pretended to lick her hand and rub her eye.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Your Imperial Viciousness, but I look around and everything is clear and hard. Except you. You’re…blurry.”
“You’re not so clear yourself,” Redd snapped. “It’s probably just the lingering effects of the Heart
Crystal.”
She had noticed it too: The Cat out of focus while everything around him was clear and distinct. It was the same whenever she looked at any part of her body. She seemed to exist within a soft fuzz, the edges of herself dissolving into the surrounding air. Not until she and The Cat passed a furniture shop on the Avenue de Clichy and she glimpsed her reflection in an oval looking glass did she understand the cause.
“That hack of a painter! His style was too soft! His coloring too gentle!” She exploded the mirror into thousands of fragments with the force of her anger. “I’ll kill him!”
The Cat was all for it, but neither he nor Redd could remember the way to the painter’s studio. Her Imperial Viciousness focused her thoughts, searched for him with her imagination’s eye. But she wasn’t sure where to look; no vision of the painter or his studio appeared. Instead, the eye of her imagination alighted on a crumbling stone staircase half hidden by garbage in an alley behind a charcuterie. The
bottommost steps were lost in darkness as unremitting as the grave, a darkness that, for generations, had attracted lesser beings given to Black Imagination-occultists, drug addicts, outcasts seeking a shelter devoid of society’s judgment, thieves and murderers seeking refuge from the police.
“Come,” Redd said. “I’ve found a place for us.”
Descending the crumbling stairs, enveloped by the darkness, Redd and The Cat entered a dank
catacomb whose size was belied by the echo of their footfalls. Redd conjured a throne for herself, its seat and backrest resembling a splayed-open rose blossom, its legs and armrests thick, petrified rose vines. Her Imperial Viciousness flopped down into the throne like a woman falling into her favorite chair after a hard day’s work.
“You best remember how to return to Wonderland,” she warned The Cat.
“I remember, Your Imperial Viciousness. The portals look like ordinary puddles. I’ll know them when I
see them.”
“Let’s hope for your health that you will. But it’d be no use returning to Wonderland now, when my army is at best scattered and at worst imprisoned en masse.”
Her assassin began to clean himself. “With your strength and power, you could rule as much of this world as you wanted.”
Redd’s nostrils flared with impatience. “I know it’s difficult for you, Cat, but try to use your brain, as small as it is. Why would I want to lord myself over this world when it’s nothing but a weak reflection of my birthplace? Wonderland belongs to me. I intend to get what’s mine.”
“Won-der-land!” echoed a voice in the dark. “How long it’s been since I’ve set foot on her soil!”
A flickering glow bobbed toward them from the distance of a tunneclass="underline" a torch, carried by what appeared to be a dead man, as emaciated as he was and having the complexion of a week-old cadaver. He was dressed entirely in black and wore black gloves. In addition to the torch, he carried a violin case. With him was a tall, bald albino with elongated ears sprouting from his head and a map of veins visible beneath semi-transparent skin: a near twin to Bibwit Harte, identical in every feature except that his nose was more pointed and his cheeks pitted with acne scars. Neither he nor his cadaverous companion showed signs of alarm at the sight of creatures as extraordinary as Redd and The Cat.
“Are you from Wonderland?” the albino asked.
Redd knew a member of the tutor species when she saw one. She also knew that the tutor before her must be a criminal-someone who had leaped into the Pool of Tears to avoid prosecution in Wonderland courts and make what life he could for himself in this antiquated world. She might have considered such ex-Wonderlanders sooner. She could put them to nasty purpose.
“What business is it of yours where we’re from?”
“It’s none of my business whatsoever,” the stranger answered. “It’s just that I used to have a few friends in Wonderland. The one I’m most curious about, however, I can no longer with justice call my friend.”
“Justice is overrated,” Redd brooded.
“Quite,” the stranger agreed. “But perhaps you know this former friend of mine? He’s a tutor, as am I, and he likely holds a position of eminence in the queendom. His name is Harte.”
“Everyone knows Bibwit Harte,” The Cat said. “He’s tutored three queens.”
With growing interest, Redd asked, “Who are you that you’ve made an enemy of him?”