CHAPTER 44

T HEY HAD reached the outskirts of the Doomsine camp without incident, had recovered Hatter’s top hat and coat and backpack from their buried hiding place without trouble. But to enter Wonderland, they would have to join the thousands clashing just over the border.

“We’ll fight the rest of the way to Talon’s Point,” Hatter said.

The Point offered the best chance of safety for Weaver and Molly. Hatter’s plan was to ensconce them there, then return to the war and Queen Alyss’ aid. He didn’t doubt that all-out war had begun. Seeing Glass Eyes and Boarderland tribes fighting together, he assumed Redd Heart was the likely cause, though from his present position he could see only her troops, no sign of the mistress herself.

He slipped his backpack from his shoulders and handed it to Weaver. She put it on and shrugged; daggers and corkscrews poked out, ready for use. Molly flicked open and closed the wrist-blades she was still wearing, made sure the quiver of mind riders was easily accessible. She nodded, and they started out from the shelter of dead trees in which they’d been concealed. Before them: the hindmost of Redd’s advancing army. No use putting off the inevitable, Hatter figured, so-

With an underhand snap of the wrist, he sent his top hat blades spinning into a thicket of Gnobi and Awr warriors. The blades sliced through four of the warriors as Hatter launched himself over the rest in a straight-bodied somersault. His wrist-blades coptering, he struck two Awr while in midair, landed, and caught his top hat as it boomeranged back to him, using its blades as a shield against the crystal shot and razor-cards and swords that came at him.

With Hatter attracting most of the enemies’ attention, Molly steadily and accurately flung mind riders at the Gnobi, Awr, Scabbler, Maldoids, and Doomsines, so that more and more of them turned on one

another-darts protruding from their heads, angst serum pumping through their brains. “Molly!”

In all the clank and clatter and air-searing gunfire, the girl hadn’t noticed the Gnobi death-ball rolling to a stop not a spirit-dane’s length away from her. Weaver leaped in front of her as the weapon burst, releasing a supernova of crystal buckshot.

Tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet-tet!

The death-ball spent itself and Weaver dropped limp to the ground. Unharmed, Molly lowered to one knee and bent over her mother, snapping shut her wrist-blades and leaving herself vulnerable, open to enemy fire.

“Mom! MOM!”

But the life had already drained out of Weaver’s body. A short distance away, Hatter had fallen still in

the midst of fighting three Shifog, his eyes on his unmoving beloved, his blades held in front of him as if he hardly cared for their protection.

Molly’s bottom lip trembled, and- “Aaaaagh!”

She ran straight at the nearest warrior, her wrist-blades hacking and slicing. She ran straight at Astacans and Glebog and Scabbler, the Milliner weaponry she wore never put to more efficient use while, with her free hand, she stabbed mind riders into any bodies fool enough to come within reach.

No cry of anguish escaped Hatter. His top hat blades ricocheting among the warriors, he activated his belt sabers and spun, cutting through Boarderlanders as if through a field of winglefruit, maintaining the silence of a master assassin, his expression as steely as his blades. What was left of the tribesmen quickly escaped into Wonderland-probably, Hatter thought, to connect with Redd’s other soldiers for a march on the capital city. Hatter folded closed his weapons, stepped over to Weaver’s body and lifted it in his arms.

“We need a crystal communicator,” he said.

Molly removed the keypad and ammo belts from a dead Four Card, father and daughter not yet daring to say more than was necessary, nor to look directly at each other, lest any word, any direct glance, let loose a grief neither felt strong enough to survive.

The wind carried the sound of explosions and hoarse cries-the military outpost on the second-highest peak in the Snark Mountains was raging with bloody battle. But in the cave near the top of Talon’s Point, all was solemn, quiet. Hatter laid Weaver’s body on the ground and cracked open a fire crystal for warmth. Molly covered her mother with blankets left from earlier days, and she and Hatter sat for a time, each absorbed in silent thought, gazing at Weaver’s stilled chest as if in hope of seeing it rise and fall

again.

“It’s my fault,” Molly said. “Everything that’s happened. I was given a chance no halfer ever gets-to be the queen’s bodyguard-and…” she glanced at her mother’s body, “…I did this.”

“Arch did it,” Hatter said. “And Redd. Not you.”

The usual toughness, the defiant jaw-clench, were absent from Molly’s expression. “Dad,” she said, crying, for the first time not trying to prove herself an adult in need of no one.

Hatter went to her and held her close. “I didn’t know,” he said. He lifted her face to his: the watery eyes in which he saw so much of Weaver. “Your mother never wanted to leave you.” There was so much to explain, to try and make up for. But they didn’t have time. “Please stay here, Molly, and keep watch over your mom,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“Up.” He was donning the Four Card’s keypad and the ammo belts whose inner circuitry comprised the crystal communicator. “I won’t be gone long.” He folded his top hat into a stack of blades and sealed them in the inner pocket of his coat. He removed two crowbar-shaped weapons from his backpack, which he left next to Weaver, and stepped out of the cave.

Thinking back on his last time here, he remembered nothing suspicious, nothing that hinted at why Arch and Ripkins had come to Talon’s Point the day they found Weaver. But there was still one part of the mountain that Hatter hadn’t considered before. Arch had wanted him to climb the tallest spire of Heart Palace; and Arch had been here, at the highest elevation in Wonderland. Why? Hatter stared up at the icy rock that narrowed to a point somewhere above the clouds. He slammed the short, chisel-like ends of his crowbars into the ice and rock and began to climb, placing his feet in crags and outcroppings for support whenever possible. Higher and higher he climbed, entering the cloud layer in which he couldn’t see even an arm’s length above him. But still he slammed the weapons into the rock, still he climbed.

At last, he pushed his head above the clouds. The summit was within view, but not until he nearly reached it did he sight what was beyond belief: a gigantic web made of different colored caterpillar thread stretching as far as he could see toward Wondertropolis. A yellowish thread had been wound around the point, its other end obviously secured to some other high spot in the land, just as the orange and green

and red threads that crossed it must have been secured to the tops of volcanoes and skyscrapers.

Hatter pressed the dispatch button on his communicator’s keypad. “This is Hatter Madigan!” he shouted into the raw, whipping wind. “I must speak to Queen Alyss immediately!”