Dodge spoke in a tense whisper, as if to raise his voice was to unleash unappeasable fury: “Redd must have survived. You should have let me go into the crystal after her.”

“We don’t know that it’s Redd,” insisted the general. “How else could the Glass Eyes be attacking us?”

It was a good question. Alyss looked to Bibwit. He shrugged. His ears swiveled sideways, as if abashed. “Learned albino that I am, I hate to admit ignorance, but in this instance it’s all I have.”

Alyss closed her eyes and cast the gaze of her imagination around Wonderland’s borders, glimpsing one military outpost after another…

In a shady jungle of Outerwilderbeastia, a Seven Card was battling a couple of Glass Eyes with his crystal shooter, getting the better of them until an orb generator exploded against the cache of munitions he was guarding and he lost his life.

In a quadrant of black rock in the Chessboard Desert, pair after pair of card soldiers stumbled choking out of a half-destroyed bunker, managing to escape death by fire or asphyxiation only to be skewered by waiting Glass Eyes.

And at one particularly distant outpost, situated between a scrubby edge of the Everlasting Forest and the lava geysers of the Volcanic Plains, Alyss saw the aftermath of a battle the Glass Eyes had clearly won; wherever she directed her imagination’s eye, card soldiers were splayed in various attitudes of death, among them a Two Card whose hand was on his still-holstered crystal shooter, and a Four Card who, if she was to judge by the bodies surrounding his, had taken out a respectable number of the enemy before giving up his life.

“It is the Glass Eyes,” she said finally. “But I don’t see Redd.”

“She’s not going to show herself with the front line,” Dodge said, impatient. “She’ll wait for a better opportunity.”

General Doppelganger nudged Bibwit and jutted his head forward, urging: Tell her. “Is there something else?” Alyss asked.

“Jack of Diamonds has escaped the mines,” said the tutor.

Just what she needed: on top of everything, to worry about a renegade brat of high birth and large buttocks who believed that the world owed him…the world. “Are his escape and these attacks related?”

“There’s no intelligence to prove it,” said the general, “nor rule it out.”

She trained her imagination’s eye on an outpost in an icy quadrant of the Chessboard Desert, where an entire platoon of card soldiers was about to be annihilated by a cascade of AD52 razor-cards. In the Heart Crystal’s chamber, she swung her scepter. Dodge, Bibwit, and the general jumped, startled. But the motion of Alyss’ arm rippled across great distances and the razor-cards suddenly changed direction, as if bouncing off an invisible force field. The Glass Eyes responsible for the attack stood in momentary shock, but the card soldiers, finding themselves still alive, shot round after round of their own razor-cards at the enemy and ran for cover behind the charred remnants of a bunker, surviving for the moment.

“Send as many reinforcement decks as you need,” Alyss told General Doppelganger. “Ready the chessmen, if you haven’t already. Use every means necessary to keep the violence out of Wondertropolis. Bibwit, issue a warning to citizens: There is scattered fighting on the distant edges of the land, with little threat of harm to any of them. But to be safe, they should remain indoors whenever possible.”

She would again test the limits of her imagination, use her powers to aid each and every outpost. Too bad she couldn’t kill the Glass Eyes simply by imagining them dead, but such a thing wasn’t possible. Glass Eyes were, in their limited way, willful. Imagination by itself, no matter how powerful, could not kill

those who possessed the will to live.

“I’ll do what I can from here,” she said. “That is all.” Bibwit and General Doppelganger turned to leave. “And me?” Dodge asked.

“A guardsman’s duty is to guard the palace,” she answered, knowing he wouldn’t like it. “However…” Something in her tone made Bibwit and the general stop and turn. The queen stared only at Dodge. “…as for Redd, we should expect the worst.”

CHAPTER 8

“T O BE embarrassed of me ’cause I’m a halfer!” Homburg Molly complained as a pair of

imagination-stimulant dealers came at her, each wielding a Hand of Tyman-five short blades rising from the handle grip. She had never fought against Hands of Tyman before, but what did that matter? She could deal with them. She could deal with anything.

“Not to let me show them what I can do!”

Somersaulting over her attackers, she shrugged open her knapsack of blades and corkscrews, landed on her feet and jumped backward, felt the momentary resistance of Wonderland steel entering flesh.

She would lose points for that.

She had noticed too late: Her so-called assailants were only two hungry men hoping for charity; what she’d mistaken for Hands of Tyman were alms cups. She pulled away quickly, before her blades could do much damage. The men stood with stricken faces, their hands pressed to their wounds.

“Sorry,” she said, backing away from them. “I’m…sorry.”

She continued down the street, had hardly gone the length of a jabberwock’s tail when her homburg started to vibrate. She ducked left and-

A rock whizzed past, barely missing her.

She turned, assuming one of the homeless men had thrown it, but they had vanished. Her hat vibrated again. She ducked right and-

Weesh, weesh, weesh, weesh.

A rusted garbage can lid hurtled by, nearly taking her head off. That’s when she spotted them: indistinct figures in the dark at the left edge of the street, taking cover behind a half-tumbled wall and the rotted hulks of what she guessed were transports of some kind. (Where was she anyway? This street was like none she’d ever seen in Wonderland.) She flicked her homburg flat and held it over her head, shielding herself from the hunks of masonry, weather-rotted window-panes, and other junk scavenged from the surrounding buildings being thrown at her.

“Probably Black Imagination enthusiasts,” she mumbled. They always seemed to be the least gifted in imagination.

Clang! Bongk! Dink! A sleet of debris pelted her homburg shield.

But what if she was wrong? What if those bombarding her were simply innocent civilians who were afraid

of her, a stranger with a curious arsenal at her disposal? The question was, should she use the full force of her skills to combat them or was she just supposed to warn them, to hint at what they’d endure if she

gave free rein to her abilities?

Clangk! Thonk th-thonk thonk thonk!

More street-waste was raining down around her than before, as if the number of her antagonists had grown. Yet they weren’t closing in on her; they stayed hidden, under cover.