Queens of Wonderland, page 21
“We needed that army,” the pirate said.
“We needed that army to lay siege to this world until its borders weakened enough for me to cross out of it.” It sneered at the Lady. “Her coming, however, accomplished the same thing. You have my thanks, Alice.”
“You don’t think I would let you get away so easily, do you?”
The Cat’s laugh shook the ground. “Merlin could barely stop me, little girl. You won’t even be an obstacle.”
“You might have almost defeated Merlin, but you never tangled with the Lady of the Lake.”
Ghostly chains shot out of the wall, wrapping around the Cheshire Cat. For a moment, it smiled as the worms writhed, but then its smile faded. It struggled against the chains, but even the worms that weren’t restrained seemed paralyzed.
The Lady grunted. “It’s stronger than I expected. I can’t hold it and fight Hook at the same time. Sir Vanessa, you and your squires destroy the pirate if you can. Keep him busy if you can’t.” She gave Michael a small smile. “This is what you have been waiting for. I will handle the Cat. Do what you need to do.”
She pointed, and a bolt of blue lightning shot out of her finger and struck the Cat. It yowled and tried again to break out of the chains. This time, darkness congealed around the bindings. The Lady shuddered as one of the links shattered. The Cat leaped at her, but a wall of blue light appeared in front of her. It bounced off the wall with a flash of energy.
Hook shot forward, once again armed with a ghostly blade. Michael lifted his sword and parried the attack. The two exchanged half a dozen furious blows before Vanessa got there. She tried to attack from behind, but another spirit, a stout man with a large nose, rose out of the ground and intercepted her attack. Vanessa took a step back.
“Smee.”
“I bet you never thought you’d see me again.”
“I rather hoped you had been destroyed.” She slashed, but the dead bo’sun moved faster than he ever had in life. He sidestepped her strike and slashed into her side, sending a wave of cold through her, and half her body went numb. Will threw himself at the pirate. Vanessa half expected him to pass through the ghost, but the wisp dust had still not worn off, and he took the spirit to the ground. He untangled himself, managing to get a few cuts in before getting to his feet. Vanessa moved to stand next to him, but before they could close in, two other ghosts came at them. Will nodded to Vanessa and moved to intercept them while Vanessa crossed swords with Smee. The dead pirate seemed to be enjoying himself. If she hadn’t been numb from her attack, she would have destroyed him easily. “You’ve improved. You were never a warrior.”
“Yes, well, you’d be surprised how quickly you can learn when you’re not bound by flesh.”
“You were always a fool, though.”
“What?”
A spear of white steel cut into the spirit. Smee’s jaw dropped as he looked down. For a moment, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He touched the point gingerly with his fingers before collapsing into motes of light. The White Queen smiled as she turned her weapon against another ghost.
Will had acquitted himself well. Only one of his enemies remained, and it was clear that Will was the more skilled. Michael, on the other hand, wasn’t doing so well. Ice chips had formed on his clothes where Hook’s sword had cut into him, and he favored one leg. Vanessa and Will approached from different sides. The three struck at the same time. Hook caught Vanessa’s sword on his hook even as he batted aside Michael’s blade with his own. Hook twisted, catching Will’s weapon with Vanessa’s. He ripped the weapon out of her hand before cutting at her stomach. Vanessa cried out and jumped back. Her knees felt weak, and she felt like throwing up.
Michael tried to take advantage of the distraction, but Hook moved like the wind. Michael had gotten in a lucky blow when they had faced off in the catacombs of the Knights. He had managed to cut into Hook’s throat with a sharp rock. Before that, only Peter Pan himself had been able to stand against Hook in single combat for more than a few seconds. Since the closest thing to a god here was the Cheshire Cat, Vanessa doubted that would do any good. They needed an edge, and the only one she could think of hung at her waist.
She drew the Vorpal Sword. She couldn’t help but smile as the euphoric power rushed into her. She slashed. Hook tried to parry, but her weapon made that snicker-snack sound and sheered through his blade. Hook flew back just in time to avoid the worst of the blow. Vanessa pressed forward, enraged beyond reason. Another of the pirate ghosts tried to get in the way, but her sword flickered forward and dispatched it without any effort. For the first time, Hook’s jaw quivered in fear. He rose up, but the Lady could apparently spare some attention from her battle with the Cheshire Cat. A ball of light splashed against the pirate and he fell to the ground. Hook scrambled to his feet and leaped into the air, but he came crashing to the ground before he had gone a few feet.
“What did you do to me, witch?”
The Lady flew through the air, shrouded in blue fire. She crashed into the Cheshire Cat. The flames reduced some of the worms to cinder, while the others flew in every direction before coming together again. The Lady gave Vanessa a look of desperation.
“Hurry, the binding won’t last for long.”
The sword hummed in her hand, and the world went red. All she could see was Hook, and she ran forward, screaming. Her weapon came down. Hook moved to one side, and the sword took a piece of his coat. He lunged forward, but she shifted her grip, bringing her sword between them, and Hook skidded to a stop. He threw himself to one side just before she would have split him in two. He turned and ran. Vanessa laughed before following. Hook stopped to face her, but before she got close, he turned and ran again. Vanessa was vaguely aware of Michael calling out to her, but the sword hummed too loudly for her to make out any words. Hook jumped to one side and landed on a raised platform. It pricked something in the back of Vanessa’s mind, but she didn’t care enough to try to remember what it was. She brought the sword down in a two-handed blow, but once again, Hook jumped aside.
“No!”
The Lady’s cry cut through the red haze just as the Vorpal Sword cut through the table that had been used to summon the queens. There was a blinding flash of light that left red dots in Vanessa’s vision. When her sight returned the table had been reduced to rubble. White bands of energy ran through it, and the air was almost alive with the dissipating energy. Hook stood atop it, but he no longer looked afraid. Vanessa slashed. He avoided the attack, but this time stood with full confidence, moving aside just enough to avoid the attack before thrusting with his own sword.
His strike caught Vanessa in her combat arm. The Vorpal Sword fell to the ground point first. It stabbed into the earth and sank in to the hilt. The wounds, combined with the energy the sword had required of her, had sapped her of her strength, and she fell to the ground.
Hook didn’t even bother to finish her off. He just walked around her and approached the White Queen. She raised her sword, holding it in a stance that suggested she was much more skilled than Vanessa would have thought. The White Queen and the pirate exchanged a series of blows, and surprisingly, she seemed to be holding her own. More than once, her sword left a shallow cut on the ghost. Hook didn’t look afraid, but he had lost much of his confidence.
Michael was moving around them, but the two combatants were an order of magnitude more skilled than either him or Vanessa. If he tried to interfere, he could just as easily get in the White Queen’s way, and he knew it.
The White Queen made a mistake. It was so slight that Vanessa couldn’t even be sure it actually was a mistake. She took a step that was just a little too big, causing her to overreach a fraction of an inch. If Hook had been armed with only a sword, the motion would have been insignificant, but the old pirate stepped in close. His hooked hand slashed across her stomach. The queen staggered. She tried to lift her weapon, but the strength drained out of her arms. Her sword started to fall, but it hadn’t even left her grasp before Hook’s weapon sliced into her neck. The queen went stiff. Ice crept across her body, and her eyes froze. She managed a whimper before falling. Her body shattered when it hit the ground.
Everything went silent. Even the Lady and the Cheshire Cat stopped their battle to stare at the remnants of what had once been the White Queen. Hook seemed unable to believe what he had just done. He threw back his head and laughed. The Cat chuckled as well, effortlessly avoiding an energy blast from the Lady. Hook jumped, and there was the sound of glass shattering. He rose into the air and flew out through the ceiling. The ground shook so hard Vanessa was thrown from her feet. A pale figure caught her, and she realized it was the White Queen. She stared at the monarch and then at the pieces that the queen had left when she had shattered. It didn’t make sense, but the queen looked alive and well even as she stood next to the shattered remains of her own body.
“What’s going on?”
“She lives backward,” the Lady said. “For her, the past hasn’t happened yet, though I don’t really understand how she was here before Hook killed her.”
“And your small mind wouldn’t be able to,” the Cheshire Cat said. “Not that it matters anymore.”
It extended its claws and slashed at the air, leaving three bright green lines. The Lady screamed and threw her hands forward. Energy shot out, but before it reached the Cat, it vanished into the holes in the air before they faded away. The Lady rushed to where the Cat had disappeared and ran her hands over the air. Power cracked in the spot the holes had been. She cursed and did something to the air. It rippled but then the effect vanished.
“It’s no use. It’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Our world.”
“We have to go after it.”
The Lady shook her head. “We can’t. We don’t exist in that world anymore.”
Vanessa blinked. “What do you mean? That can’t happen to us. We’re not fairy tale characters.”
“We may as well be. Don’t you understand? Hook killed the White Queen.”
“She seems to have gotten better,” Will said.
“She lives life backward. For her, it hasn’t happened yet.”
“I still don’t understand how that makes us not exist.”
“She was Merlin’s ancestor,” the Lady said.
“Yes,” Vanessa said. “She told us, but I don’t understand how that works, either.”
“She had just had her baby when I was here the first time, so for her, giving birth to her child hasn’t happened yet. That child, like her, would have lived backward. At some point even further in the past, that child would have had a child of their own with the same peculiar relation to time, all the way back to Merlin himself.”
A chill ran down Vanessa’s spine. “No, you can’t be serious.”
“Very serious.”
“What is it?” Will asked.
“Merlin founded the Knights of the Round,” Vanessa said. “By killing the White Queen before she had her baby, Hook essentially prevented Merlin from ever being born. No Merlin means no one to guide Arthur. No Arthur, no Camelot. No Camelot, no Knights of the Round. Wonderland and the Looking Glass Land allow us to exist here.” She waved a hand. “But out there? The world has changed, quite probably more than we can imagine. We might have never been born, and even if we were, we wouldn’t be Knights.” She turned to the Lady. “Is that why Hook came here? To destroy the Knights entirely?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Michael said. “I mean I’m sure Hook would love to kill us all, but he had the White Queen as a prisoner for a long time. He could have killed her whenever he wanted.”
“That wouldn’t have been what the Cat wanted, though,” the Lady said.
“I don’t follow,” said Michael.
“This world is still here. Merlin created it to exist outside of time, so eliminating the White Queen then wouldn’t have done anything—though now that the Cat has escaped, it’s falling apart.”
The ground shook, and Vanessa was nearly thrown off her feet. She wasn’t sure she understood what the Lady had said, but this wasn’t the time for discussion of the theories of time and magic. “Lady, how do we stop the Cat if we can’t even get to where it is?”
“It’s not there yet,” the Lady said. “It can’t use the rabbit holes. The twin worlds were constructed explicitly to contain the Cat, so none of the normal entrances and exits will work for it.”
“Contain the Cat?” Michael asked. “How would they do it?”
“I have no idea how,” the Lady said. “The magic of creating realms has been lost for centuries. As to the why, however, there are old beings out there, creatures so great and powerful that the mere mention of their true names could drive you mad. I always believed the Cheshire Cat was one of those. It always had a tendency to warp the world around itself. Hence, we have Wonderland. The Looking Glass Land was constructed to contain its body. That kingdom is based on a game with very rigid rules, and only by understanding it can one win. That is almost the opposite of Wonderland.”
“And we let it escape.”
“It can’t go down a rabbit hole,” the Lady said again. “The Cat has to burrow its way through, and that will take some time, but not much.”
“So what do we do?” Vanessa asked.
The Lady closed her eyes and mumbled something in a musical language. It sounded a little like the fairy tongue, though Vanessa didn’t understand any of the words. Just then, the ground shook. A crack formed at her feet and she backed up. Sickly yellow light bled out, and the acrid smell made her gag. The Lady clenched her teeth and brought her fists together. The light shifted from yellow to blue, and the crack in the ground closed up. The shaking stopped. For a second everything was calm, though the Lady was doubled over. Her face was red from exhaustion, and she was breathing too heavily to speak. Vanessa moved to her side to help her, but she waved the Knight away and stood up straight, taking a few seconds to compose herself.
“I won’t be able to do that many more times,” she said.
“What exactly did you do?”
“I held the Looking Glass Land together. It won’t last, though. It’s like trying to hold together broken glass.”
“You need glue.”
“What?”
Will cleared his throat. “Glue. You need something to hold the pieces together.”
The Lady gave him a half smile. “If only it were so easy. The trouble is, young squire, that some rather large pieces are missing. When Hook’s army tore into the world, they caused much damage, and we have nothing to fill the holes with.”
“Wonderland,” Vanessa said. “Whatever they did to Wonderland had made it mostly a ghostly dimension. What if you jam the pieces of Wonderland into the holes of the Looking Glass Land?”
For a second, the Lady just stared at them. Then, she laughed. “If this were anywhere but a land of madness, I doubt it would work, but here? Why not?”
The Lady shifted her stance and started speaking in that same flowing language. This time, Vanessa thought she recognized a few words. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought . . .
“Is that Atlantean?” Michael asked.
“I think so.”
“I didn’t think anyone spoke that,” Will said.
“Neither did I.”
There was a twinkle in the Lady’s eyes at that, but she continued speaking. Waves of blue energy rolled out from her. The land shuddered, and Vanessa smelled roses and mushrooms and horses as Wonderland was drawn here. The land itself seemed to cry out in response to what the Lady was doing. Wonderland resisted, but the Looking Glass Land melded in response to the commands of a Looking Glass queen.
Everything lurched. Vanessa was thrown from her feet, though when she landed, the ground was soft, almost like a bed. It was only when she heard the voices that she realized it was a bed, or at least close enough to one to count in this world.
A dandelion bit her arm and roared. Vanessa yelped and got up. The other flowers in the flower bed growled. Their petals had been arranged to look like a lion’s mane. She looked at her arm. The bite had broken the skin, though only barely. She stepped around the rest of the flowers, some of them shouting insults at her, before returning to the others.
They were no longer in the hall, though she saw signs of it. Two of the walls were still standing. The table was back, though it was made of wood. It took Vanessa a second to recognize it as the table the hatter had taken them to.
The Lady was having trouble standing. Sweat drenched her face, and it looked like she had aged a decade. Michael and Will stood at either side of her. She looked up at Vanessa and smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything quite so big.”
“Did it work?”
“I believe so. I couldn’t fill in the holes in the Looking Glass Land with Wonderland, but I did manage to do the opposite. It’s not entirely stable, but then Wonderland never really was.”
“So how do we stop the Cat from making it to our world?” Vanessa asked.
“I’m not sure we can,” the Lady said.
Vanessa let out a long breath and tried to hold in the sigh. Had it all been for nothing, then?
“Why?” a strange voice asked.
The word surprised all of them. They all looked around for the source of the voice, but the Lady simply smiled and looked down. There, at her feet, was the smoking caterpillar. Rosebud landed in front of it and chittered something, but it ignored her.
“You will forgive me, Caterpillar,” the Lady started.
“I will not forgive.”
“You misunderstand me. I was not asking you a question. I was telling you what you will do.”
“Rude.”
“And yet, you will forgive.”
The caterpillar gave a petulant look. “I will.”
“Do you know how to stop the Cheshire Cat from reaching my world?”
“I do know.”
“You will tell us.”
The caterpillar’s face twisted in concentration, as if trying to find an opening that the Lady had left, but such a simple command had left none.
