The man with the scars came sprinting toward her from the periphery, pushing her out of the way just as The Cat landed and smashed the altar with a downward swing of his thigh-sized arms. And she was running now, her hand in his, the man whose name she would still not voice to herself. He pulled her out through one of the broken stained-glass windows and onto the street. The Cat and card assassins jumped out of the abbey after them. The London street was a blur, a confusion of shouting, screaming people. A card assassin fell onto the train of Alice’s gown, bringing her up short. With a single swipe of
his sword, the scarred man cut the train from the gown, spun around, and severed the leather harness ties that held a rearing horse to its carriage.
“Hey!” the carriage driver protested.
But the scarred man was already astride the horse, pulling Alice up behind him even as he spurred the animal at a gallop through the streets. The Cat chased after them on foot, his powerful legs making him as fast as any of Earth’s four-legged creatures.
The card assassins had come armed with glowing orb generators and, as the scarred man urged the horse this way and that, from streets to sidewalks and back again, zigzagging to make a more difficult target, explosions shook the surrounding buildings. Dizzy with all of this action as she was, it seemed to Alice that her companion had a destination in mind, for if the horse skidded past a certain street, he would steer the animal back to it and they would race along its course, past befuddled pedestrians and cursing carriage drivers.
The man did know where he was going. He had memorized the route he’d taken from his exit portal to Westminster Abbey and was traveling it in reverse. And they were getting close. A few streets still to go when an orb generator rocketed into an empty police wagon not twenty yards away, turning it into a fireball. Their horse reared, bucking them off its back, and they landed on a pile of cabbage in a street seller’s cart. They jumped to the ground and ran, the scarred man pulling Alice, gripping her by the arm.
“Where are we going?” she breathed. “You’ll see!”
He pointed: a puddle. She was embarrassed by what she said next, the first thing that occurred to her as she and this man took a running jump into the puddle, their hands clasped. “I’ll ruin my dress,” she said, and then-
Shoosh!
They were rushing down, deeper and deeper. She lost hold of the man’s hand. This couldn’t be happening, it couldn’t be…yet it was. And as she torpedoed up toward the surface, having worked impossibly hard to convince herself that the place about to be seen by her disbelieving eyes didn’t exist, she said the man’s name-Dodge Anders-and water filled her lungs.
PART THREE CHAPTER 31
B IBWIT HARTE, blue-green veins pulsing anxiously beneath the translucent skin of his learned head, waited on the shore of the Pool of Tears with two spirit-danes hobbled at his side. It hadn’t been easy for him to get here. Since learning of Hatter Madigan’s return, Redd had become more of a tyrant than ever and demanded that he spend hours every day rewriting In Queendom Speramus, glaring over his shoulder to make sure he scribbled down her venomous words exactly as she spat them at him. He had been forced to cross out entire pages of the ancient text and replace them with Reddisms, as if Her Imperial Viciousness believed that, by excising passages in which Queen Genevieve had once found strength and comfort, she might be able to destroy Princess Alyss herself.
“You don’t feel well?” Redd had screeched, hearing his excuse to forgo his secretarial duties that day. “What do I care if you don’t feel well? I’ll show you what it means not to feel well!”
“But my hand is terribly cramped and would welcome a small respite from its daily exertions,” Bibwit had corrected. “With utmost respect, I suggest…couldn’t Her Imperial Viciousness imagine the newly written pages instead of having me write them for her?”
Redd had laughed, showing her black, pointy teeth. “Bibwit Harte, you are not as cowardly as I thought. If I didn’t let you live on the off chance of benefiting from all that lore you’ve crammed inside that pale, bald head of yours, I would almost be sorry to see you die. You have until the Redd Moon rises to meet me in the Observation Dome.”
And so he had hurried to the Pool of Tears, knowing the risks: all Redd had to do was envision him in a flash of imagination’s eye and that’d be it. But this was too important; he had to come.
Ripples appeared on the surface of the pooclass="underline" a disturbance down below.
“For the sake of White Imagination, let’s hope that Dodge has met with success,” said the learned tutor, and one of the spirit-danes whinnied in response.
The ripples on the pool grew in size and number, expanding outward from a bubbling center. Dodge burst through, gasping for air. He was alone, looked wildly about him.
“Is she here?” “No. I thought-”
Something bobbed to the surface: the body of Princess Alyss, limp and lifeless. The tutor rushed to the water’s edge and helped Dodge carry the princess onto land, laying her out on the shore.
“What’s wrong with her?” Dodge asked.
Bibwit put a large, sensitive ear to Alyss’ slack mouth. “She’s swallowed some water. I can hear it sloshing inside her.”
As befitted a royal tutor, Bibwit kept many instruments of learning hidden in the folds of his robe. From an inner pocket he removed a soft flex tube, placed one end of it a short way down Alyss’ throat, and sucked mightily from the other end. Four times he filled the straw with water and spat it onto the ground. Alyss convulsed, breathed, vomited water, and coughed her way back into full consciousness. Seeing her eyes open, a bed of nearby lilies broke into a giddy song of welcome. Dazed and bewildered, Alyss sat up, chest muscles aching from her rib-cage-rattling coughs.
“Bibwit Harte,” she whispered.
The tutor’s ears twitched with pleasure. “At your service, Princess.”
She turned to her childhood friend and a faint, wary smile played about her eyes and lips. “Dodge
Anders.”
Dodge stiffened. Hearing Alyss say his name…it was like being reminded of a forgotten wound.
“Where is the music coming from?” she asked. The lilies sang louder and she saw them, swaying happily on their stems, petals opening and closing in song. “But flowers have no larynxes.”
“What’s a larynx?” the flowers said, and laughed.
It was as if she’d entered a comforting dream and for another moment she luxuriated in it, but then her features hardened with determination and she braced herself against the rich, almost palpable colors around her. “This isn’t real,” she said. “I shouldn’t remember so vividly what’s not supposed to exist. And you-all of this-can’t exist.”
Bibwit crinkled his brow in concern. “Why not?”