“Hungry,” the skeletons chanted, stepping off the stage and moving among the tables. “Hungry, hungry, hungry.”
One gentleman who’d been gulping absinthe with abandon mumbled that magic was only harmless illusion. He got to his feet and began to dance with the nearest skeleton, reached out to twirl his skeleton-partner and-
“Gaaaaaahghg!”
The skeleton’s jaws clamped down hard on his hand. With a relentless turn of the skull, it tore off three of the man’s fingers and swallowed them and they clattered through its rib cage and fell to the floor. Shouts erupted. In an instant, tables were being overturned, glasses broken, drinks flung into the air, torches knocked from the walls, setting fire to the puddles of spilled alcohol. The iron gate remained locked, the audience trapped. Again and again, the skeletons lurched at them with hungry jaws. Yet the dead were unable to fill their bellies. Every swallow of living flesh passed down through their empty rib cages and splatted on the floor.
“Hungry,” they chanted. “Hungry, hungry.”
Sacrenoir gazed upon the carnage with pride. Marcel continued to play his violin, though his melody was now drowned out by screams and moans. Redd and The Cat remained with Vollrath in their alcove, its curtain pushed completely open so that they could get a better view of things. The last guest collapsed to the floor. Marcel set down his violin and for a time there was only the sound of the skeletons chomping desperately on the wealth of fresh kill, then-
“Bravo,” Redd called out, bored, with a single clap of her hands.
Alerted to her presence, the skeletons turned, started jigging toward her, the snap and clack of their jaws answered by the eagerly chomping roses of her dress. “Hungry, hun-”
The Cat sprung from his seat. With a single swing of his arm, he shattered four skeletons into so many pieces that all of Sacrenoir’s powers could not have put them together again.
“Don’t waste your strength,” Redd yawned.
The Cat stepped aside and watched as, motioning with a finger from where she sat, his mistress sent one skeleton careening into another. She again gestured with her finger and two skeletons slammed together and fractured to crumbs. But Redd was not known for her patience, so she sucked air deep into her lungs, imagined the heat of jabberwocky breath as her own and exhaled, her breath hot enough to
disintegrate every bone of every skeleton to dust. And even before she pressed forefinger against thumb to douse the numerous fires burning around the catacomb, Sacrenoir was bowing before her.
“Forgive my former rudeness, Your Imperial Viciousness. I didn’t realize the extent of your powers, to which mine compare as a candle flame to the great fire of London. If you’ll accept of it from such an undeserving wretch as here kneels before you, I offer you my eternal allegiance.”
As Redd considered, she turned to Vollrath. The tutor inclined his head and smiled, having expected his pupil to grant her proper respect all along.
“You were right not to subordinate yourself too readily, Master Sacrenoir,” Redd said at length. “I would find no value in the allegiance of a fool ready to give himself up to any old hag of Black Imagination who presented herself. I will accept your allegiance. For now. But if I ever decide you’re useless, you are a dead man.”
“To be killed by you is to be desired more than a life excluded from your service.” “Bravo,” Her Imperial Viciousness laughed with genuine feeling. “Bra-vo!”
Hardly ten hours removed from the crystal, Redd Heart had found her first two recruits. And if Vollrath and Sacrenoir were any indication, the army of ex-Wonderlanders and talented earthlings she was determined to amass would be a stronger military than the one she’d used to wrench the crown from Genevieve. With the discipline and single-minded purpose she would instill in troops so gifted in Black Imagination, she would not, could not, fail to overthrow her nauseatingly well-intentioned niece.
CHAPTER 19
Doomsine Encampment, Boarderland. Six lunar cycles earlier.
W HEN KING Arch learned that the newly crowned Alyss Heart had ordered the annihilation of all Glass Eyes in her realm, his scheming brain went into hyperdrive. He had occupied Boarderland’s throne for more than half his life by remaining several ruthless steps ahead of his enemies. To what particular use he might put an army of Glass Eyes, he wasn’t yet sure. But to have access to such a military force without anyone knowing he had it was an advantage he could not let pass.
Lounging in his palace tent with wives numbered eleven, six, seventeen and twenty-eight, all of whom were trying not to look or act depressed, he called Ripkins and Blister to his side.
“My ministers have informed me that Alyss is ridding her land of Glass Eyes.” “Her people can’t control them,” confirmed Blister.
“Overriding the imperative that Redd embedded in them is harder than she thought,” added Ripkins. “In other words, they’re designed to kill and nothing more.”
The bodyguards bowed that this was so.
“Perhaps the trick is not to override their imperative,” Arch mused, “but to reprogram them to acknowledge a different master. Everyone in Wonderland-even the otherwise rebellious Redd Heart-is, was, or always has been occupied with inventing things. But what good are things if there are no clever schemes in which to use them? I put things to unexpected and imaginative use.”
The man wasn’t named Arch for nothing. Arch politician. Arch tactician. Arch strategist. By the age of
seventeen, he had risen through the ranks of his birth tribe, the Onu, to become Boarderland’s first sovereign. Before his ascension, the country’s nomadic tribes had been completely independent, with nothing in common other than the landscape over which they traveled. He had forced them into having something else in common: the honor, respect, and obedience they showed to him. This, he often reminded his ministers, was what united the tribes of Boarderland. His subjugation of them gave the nation its identity, its focus and culture.
“I’m a uniter, not a divider,” he would laugh.
By the time he crowned himself, he had amassed his own tribe, the Doomsines, having siphoned off from the Onu and others the most skilled fighters, the smartest intel ministers, the most beautiful females to become his wives and servants. He had also recruited numerous wayward souls and misfits from Boarderton, Boarderland’s de facto capital city. Among the Boarderton recruits: Ripkins and Blister.
“Leave us,” he ordered, shooing his wives toward the exit.
Promptly, and with a tinkling of jewelry, the women removed themselves from the tent.
“You are to enter Wonderland and capture a Glass Eye,” he commanded Ripkins and Blister. “I want it fully intact or it will be useless to me. That means every pore of its engineered skin, every swath of its manufactured muscle and tissue, every nanochip and filament in its brain: all undamaged so as to be properly dissected and understood. You must bring back a live one.”
Ripkins nodded, but Blister stared coldly at nothing. Impossible to know what he was thinking. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Blister?”
“I understand.”
It had been an annoyingly peaceful time in Boarderland, Blister cranky and depressed because he hadn’t filled anyone with pus for nearly an entire lunar cycle. Only the previous day, Arch had found him in a spirit-dane corral, blistering the creatures to the point of death, such was his need to touch and destroy.