not have recruited Alyss for the task I’m about to assign you, and Bibwit Harte is not physically capable of performing it. You are the only Wonderlander with both the access my task requires and the Millinery skill to accomplish it.” To his ministers, he commanded, “Give it to him.” Hatter was handed a skein of thread wrapped in cloth. “What you now hold,” Arch said, “is silk from Wonderland’s green caterpillar-oracle, in total weight equal to that of a gwynook’s wing. You are to return to Heart Palace with it. Once there, you are to scale the palace’s tallest spire. At the top, you won’t fail to recognize my Weapon of Inconceivable Loss and Massive Annihilation. You are to weave the entirety of green silk onto the weapon in this pattern.” Arch handed the Milliner a pocket holo-crystal, which showed what looked like the center of an Earth spider’s web. “You must follow the pattern exactly. If, for any reason, you fail in what I ask of you, if you tell anyone what you’re about, neither you, Weaver, nor anybody else will ever see Homburg Molly alive again. Once the mission is complete, you’re to contact me immediately. But there is a time limit. If I have not heard from you after two revolutions of the Thurmite moon, you will never afterwards hear from your daughter.” Arch glanced at his wrist, on which there was no timepiece. “Now, Mr. Madigan, I suggest you get going.”
Suspecting that he’d be under
surveillance so long as he remained within Arch’s borders, Hatter
passed into Wonderland before giving over all pretense of carrying
out the king’s mission, hiding in the brittle scrub of
Outerwilderbeastia and waiting until the last traveler had
proceeded through the official crossing. As soon as the card
soldiers were alone, he shrugged daggers from his backpack and
flung them at one of the demarcation barrier’s pylons.
Clank! Clunk clang!
The soldiers whirled, at the ready. Hatter sprinted up behind them
and, with his bare hands, rendered them unconscious before a single
one glimpsed him. On the Boarderland side of the barrier: five
guards. Fthap!
Hatter’s top hat was flattened into spinning blades and he was
about to eliminate the guards when he realized: A disturbance might
alert Arch. Better to leave as little trace of his reentry into
Boarderland as possible.
Remaining on the Wonderland side of the demarcation barrier, Hatter
walked two hundred paces in the direction of the Valley of
Mushrooms, then activated the blades on his right wrist and pushed
them into the ground. Dirt and clay and pebbles churned loose. He
pushed the rotating blades deeper and deeper into the ground, using
his left hand to clear away the debris until he had tunneled under
the demarcation barrier and emerged on the Boarderland side. He
made the fastest time he could back to Arch’s camp, approaching
from the direction of the setting suns so that he would be
unrecognizable, a silhouette, to any Boarderlander who happened to
spot him. Within a hectare of the camp, he took his top hat from
his head, flattened it with a jerk of the wrist, and folded the
blades into a compact stack, which he secured in the inside pocket
of his coat. He then slipped off his coat and buried it with his
backpack, marking the site with a melon-sized rock scarred by a
spin of his wrist-blades. Hatter glanced up at the sky. Already
half a revolution of the Thurmite moon had passed and he wasn’t
even back where he’d started. But he proved lucky. Entering the
Doomsine encampment, he came across a load of washing on a
clothesline and made away with the loose-fitting pants,
many-pocketed blouse, and hooded coat favored by day laborers:
necessary camouflage, because if anyone recognized