Seeing Redd by Frank Beddor Read Free Book Online Page B

“By whom we don’t yet know.”
    â€œWe know,” Dodge said, a vengeful, dissatisfied look about him, a look that Alyss knew had everything to do with Redd, The Cat, and Sir Justice’s murder.
    â€œSeveral of our outposts have been routed,” the general continued, “and several more are engaged with the enemy as I speak. I have ordered the deployment of reinforcement decks to prevent any attacks from penetrating farther into the queendom.”
    Under attack? Outposts routed? They were waiting for her to say something.
    â€œThere are reports,” Dodge said.
    â€œOf?”
    â€œWe have reason to believe that those attacking us are Glass Eyes,” Bibwit informed her. “We’re in the process of verifying the intelligence.”
    â€œGlass Eyes?” Alyss echoed in disbelief. After Redd’s downfall, attempts had been made to reprogram them, but this proved a more difficult task than Wonderland’s engineers and programmers had originally supposed. Only a small number of them had been successfully reconfigured when she and her advisers realized that the populace was too used to being terrorized by them to ever view them as a safeguarding element.
    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.”
    â€œWe don’t know that it’s Redd,” insisted the general.
    â€œHow 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.
    â€œIt is the Glass Eyes,” she said finally. “But I don’t see Redd.”
    â€œShe’s not going to show herself with the front line,” Dodge said, impatient. “She’ll wait for a better opportunity.”
    General Doppelgänger nudged Bibwit and jutted his head forward, urging: Tell her .
    â€œIs there something else?” Alyss asked.
    â€œJack 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?”
    â€œThere’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