Without a twitch of exertion, Redd sealed his lips with glue. “Who wants to kill him?” she asked. The Cat raised his paw. Siren and Alistaire raised their hands.

“Mmmmm mmm mmm,” protested Jack.

Arch was breathing as heavily as an overworked spirit-dane, the glint of hatred in his eye directed at Jack. Redd noticed this and said, “In view of his recent demotion, it seems appropriate to let my friend Arch have the honors.”

In desperation, Jack started to run, but Redd conjured a thick black rose vine that tripped him and bound his wrists and ankles.

An assortment of weapons appeared before Arch: AD52, scorpspitter, Hand of Tyman, whipsnake grenade, basket of mushrooms. Arch recognized a deadly fungus when he saw it. He could sate Jack’s appetite once and for all. He took a mushroom from the basket and stood for a time over the squirming Wonderlander.

“Any last words?”

“Mmm!” Jack begged, eyes wide. “Mmmmmmm!”

Arch knelt down and pressed the mushroom against his mouth. “Good. Because I didn’t want to hear them anyway.”

The roots of the fungus forced Jack’s lips open. Fed by his saliva, they worked their way down his throat and strangled his heart. Arch stood and wiped his hands. A mushroom cap poked out of Jack of Diamonds’ mouth: his heart had stopped beating.

“And now,” Redd said, “for war.”

CHAPTER 43

A LYSS HAD taken up position in the crystal chamber, standing on the viewing platform halfway to the floor and facing the pulsating glow of the Heart Crystal, reaching toward it every so often for a fresh surge of imaginative energy. Behind her, Bibwit sat at a control desk. By means of viewing screens and speakers and talk-back controls embedded in the desktop, he was able to monitor enemy progress, troop movement, and communications among Doppel and Ganger, the Ten Card lieutenants and chessmen. “The demarcation barrier!” the tutor called.

“Yes,” Alyss said, because she had already viewed it-a large segment of the barrier had been knocked out of commission, and Redd’s mercenaries were pouring into Outerwilderbeastia.

Redd was attacking with her usual intelligence, sending Glass Eyes at card soldiers and chessmen in a kamikaze-like first wave and immediately following it with a massive battering by orb cannons and cannonball spiders. Then came the tribes: the Astacans with their stick-legs and ability to negotiate steep, rocky ground as easily as the billy goats of Earth; the Awr with their gossamer shots and their

scutes-the hard, bony backsides impervious to blades and razors and crystal shot, under which their heads and limbs would retract whenever necessary; and the nineteen other tribes, each with unique

weapons, with physical traits that had evolved over generations of adaptation to Boarderland’s various terrains.

“Decks at crossings 32-a and 29-d are to converge!” Alyss heard the generals’ voices through the speakers on Bibwit’s desk. “Converge on the breach!”

But more of the barrier will be left unguarded.

“Chessmen fall back!” the generals shouted. “Tighten the lines around Wondertropolis!”

Alyss conjured a rainfall of orb generators to drop on the Glass Eyes and tribal warriors advancing through the defunct demarcation barrier, then turned her imagination’s eye on Dodge for the swiftest of glances. He was standing outside the palace’s front gate with his guardsmen, his hand on the hilt of his father’s sword, his face stonily alert.

He hates having to wait for The Cat to come to him, hates-

“Alyss!” Bibwit shouted, because her orb generators were, inflicting no harm whatsoever upon the enemy.

Kccrkchsshk! Pfoooghaashhh!

Redd had conjured orbs to collide with Alyss’, causing them to detonate uselessly above the heads of the warring soldiers.

“Another breach!” Bibwit reported. “And they’ve penetrated the Everlasting Forest!”

They were working their way toward the palace, Alyss knew, toward her. She reached out for the Heart

Crystal, stiffened with the influx of power that coursed through her, but the Boarderland tribes were

adept at blending in with their surroundings and she lost sight of them. Where the forest’s edge faded into Wondertropolis’ outskirts, she imagined finemeshed nets of blade-proof fibers-a mine field of camouflage nets resembling fallen foliage. The Boarderland warriors would have to pass this way in their push to the capital city. They would set foot in the nets, which would fold shut on them like the petal-jaws of a Venus flytrap.

Alyss redirected her imagination to the border battles. She sensed something: Redd watching her. With her scepter, Alyss tried to shoo away her aunt’s sight, to block it-once, twice, she tried, but Redd remained there, in her imagination’s eye, staring.

“One of the forest bases has been hit!” Bibwit called. “Our Snark Mountain post is outnumbered!” Alyss began to exert herself with greater effort, moving her scepter left, right, up and down, conducting

an orchestra of defensive cocoons, automatic cannons, low-drifting energy clouds that exploded with

Glass Eye-piercing lightning, and every form of weaponry she’d ever seen in Wonderland and on

Earth…

Clashing with Onu and Scabbler warriors in a quadrant of the Chessboard Desert, the white knight and his pawns were nearly surrounded, losing bodies and ammo fast, when an energy cloud unexpectedly dropped in front of them. Lightning bolts flashed out of it, struck dead enough warriors to create an opening, and as the knight and pawns fought their way to relative safety, unmanned bayonets formed in the air to aid their escape…

At a forest military base, Maldoids and Gnobi were driving the white rook and a hand of card soldiers into a dry-goods storehouse. The Maldoids’ kill-quills lodged into the storehouse’s front wall, the

warriors yanked hard on the coils extending from the quills’ butt ends, and down came the wall. The Wonderlanders let loose with all the firepower they had, but the Gnobi rolled a death-ball into the storehouse. The rook and card soldiers had no defense against the melon-sized weapon. If they moved, it would sense them, and the holes on every gwormmy-length of its surface would spray out crystal buckshot with such speed and force that they’d be killed. Too bad then that a Three Card breathed a little too heavily. The death-ball fired off its rounds. The rook closed his eyes, expecting death, but the projectiles altered course, flying toward the Maldoids and Gnobi as if preferring the heat and breath of Boarderland bodies…

Haze was emanating from the Heart Crystal, fogging Alyss’ vision. She tried to fan it away. Then she sniffed and realized: smoke. The blue caterpillar was at her side, toking on his hookah and basking in the crystal’s glow as if to tan himself.

“Extraordinary,” Bibwit gasped. “Unprecedented. A caterpillar showing itself now?”