(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes)

Eviction Declaration

The coerced accord was signed, and in it a plan of attack. What none of them were prepared for was the degree to which mobilization of their military machine would make it clear that the experiment of Pilgrim’s Anchor was coming to an end. Should they succeed, in erasing the Bickyplots’ claims on Pursuitia and its inhabitants, the remaining Founders would then be free to attempt their Second Declaration, intended to return them not only to the American colonies, but to the exact moment they had left so they could resume their plans for a true revolution in a world they at least thought they understood.

If that happened, nothing needed left behind. So it could all come down, apart, and then alight on the wheels of war if it would be of any help in this singular assault. Everyone began to strip the stores, the walls, the cabinets and cupboards. They entered a kind of mania where they couldn’t stand to see anything with hinges closed. Anchor needed to spit up its contents, disgorge its secrets, and splinter inside out to make sure no rusty nail bent away from Bickering Hall.

Every last young soldier was mobilized, as well as the few Freed and Lenape adults who were strong enough to march with them. No uniforms had ever been made for them, so they wore badges of carved anatimal antler, from the same antlers that had finally prodded Anchor into unsettling action.

Founder Edward Rutledge was the only one in Independence Hall young enough to go, but he could not, as the Liberty Bell had already been conscripted. With less care than they were capable of, resulting in a few stray notes that fouled the Founder day, the bell had been removed from its nest and loaded into a wagon.

Their hope was that its crack would not mitigate its ruinous effect on the Bickyplots. If not, they could essentially fire a cannon into those thirteen chests all at once, and every few seconds, incapacitating the lot and ending the battle in minutes. This meant none of the Founders could be near enough to hear it, debilitating as it was to them now too.

The bell’s wagon was to be drawn by two tin horses, while the other eight would pull everything else pried out of Anchor. Every tin haunch had been cleared of drafting, the documents rewritten, with full riding permissions now given to every young soldier, most of whom had never gotten to sit on one’s back without being forcibly ejected into a stable ceiling by entitled and affronted magics.

Harnessed in their regalia were Fiddlegreen, Happystance, Harlequill, Smorgasguard, Applecandy, Workhenry, Mothlantern, Praytheday, Loverspat, and Coverdragon. The troops would be mostly on foot, so the horses were pulling munitions, kites, Leyden batteries, battlefield-grade drafting materials, provisions in case of encamped stalemate, tamed anatimals, and, of course, the Liberty Bell stood in an arch and silenced with a blanket in case of rough terrain.

And one wagon would be devoted to a most onerous burden: their large prisoner Cadavawing Wighthall. His most agreeable head had never been knocked off, and so remained, but every test confirmed he was still loyal to his brethren, and would aid them in any way that became available.

He could be killed beforehand now that their research on him and need of him as a bargaining chip would soon be over, except this was strongly believed to be information Bickering Hall would remotely sense via preconceived drafting. If they knew he’d been killed they would wonder why, and come to expect an attack.

First instinct was to pretend the Bickyplot wasn’t in their custody, to destroy his reduced kin and then return to finish them and him off, but that wouldn’t do for Kidd’s true objective, which required all thirteen in proximity to the doorway between this world and theirs. He would have to go in a wagon, bound in chains, head entirely coated in hardened wax so he could not hear, speak, or know when to react. If worse came to worst they could possibly reveal him from under a board and negotiate a retreat in exchange for his life.

Other measures the Anchorites had never before taken were implemented, wherever a way was found to convert their everyday belongings to military aid. Pots and pans were melted to make thin armor plates that could be worn under the uniform and would perhaps block a flurry of pellets at mid-range from a Bickyplot blunderbuss, though that depended entirely on whether their foes had recently loaded them with gravel, silverware, or the contents of a sewing drawer.

Spare textiles were cut into strips for bandages, fire starters were converted to flash bombs, beeswax became a lotion that could stop toxic Bickyplot blood from being absorbed into the skin, and spare wheelbarrows and carts were made up to look like another front advancing, but were actually just distractions and decoys manned by Lenape and Freed to scatter Bickering Hall’s attention.

Then there was the matter of drafting specific protections for the attack, something rarely done given the mostly chaotic encounters of Pilgrim’s Anchor with Bickering Hell peppered between the two strongholds. The last time they might’ve wanted such blanketing magic stitched by quill was the string-snapping, and none of it could be applied thanks to the presiding magics of the Bickyplots on their own lands. If they’d gone to the trouble and approached that property line all of it would’ve scrunched at the very edge like a soiled rag and been left behind for them to trip over on retreat. Once they destroyed the deed however, then whatever the Founders wrote would be on them as yet more armor.

For the first time since the cracking of the bell, the old men put themselves to a task with full grit and determination, and the young did not fear jealous sabotage or reprisal for their stunt with the sharpened antlers, as everything their forebears yearned for also rode on this one concentrated campaign. If the young failed now, with all the weapons on their fallen bodies, with the town gutted to outfit them, the Founders would have nothing to fight with and nobody to fight with it.

So the inkwitches brought out the finest inks in the smallest vials: shades of white, black, and red that would rewrite reality and inflame it. Thomas Jefferson, who had drafted the First Declaration, who was long at work on the second, would lead the remainder of his revolutionaries in putting the tips of their miniature swords to Pursuitian paper strong enough to withstand them.

The charms and legalized incantations set forth were of a similar stripe to those often applied to their weaponry, ensuring proper firing, backfiring in enemy hands, fortitude when used to defend, and lightness when carried. Each document was to be perforated and feathered at the bottom, so that signed tokens could be torn loose and affixed to the young’s uniforms. Both the larger document back in Anchor and the smaller one on their person would communicate, cross-reference, report on the verity of statements writ upon themselves.

To word everything as soundly as they could, to cut the straightest lines, to provide the most coverage of all the weaknesses the limits of this world would allow, the Founders toiled away with their hands, drying eyes, and bent backs for three full evenings; Independence Hall was alive and irritated with their internal arguments. For a moment it seemed they were not just their old selves, but selves the young had never been allowed to fully see, always locked out of the dignity of official drafting ceremonies.

They seemed like distracted fathers, men remembering passions set aside in the name of family, and though they were glued to the page as sure as the devil’s palms were stuck to his throng and pitchfork, the young still saw the closest thing to kindred spirits they had ever seen from the men that had dropped Pilgrim’s Anchor and raised a cloud of confounding alien sediment.

-This soldier of Pilgrim’s Anchor shall feel the benefit of all elder concern upon the soles of their boots, finding the perfect traction, never slipping, and this shall extend to the soles of their bare feet as well should the need arise, as when a child falls the powers have long seen fit that their elders shall help them up, and as this is not feasible in the coming days, this declaration will be permitted to take effect.

-This soldier of Pilgrim’s Anchor will not have ammunition spill from their pockets even if turned upside down, a benefit of luck long afforded by gravity, and of little consequence to make certain here.

-This soldier of Pilgrim’s Anchor, and any ahead, shall not suffer friendly fire; their aim shall be true. This is consistent with their lives up until now, as they have never betrayed one another, never let slip a vital secret, to the point of operating a government in treasonous secret.

-This soldier of Pilgrim’s Anchor will gain a preternatural sense of awareness regarding the location of the heart within each Bickyplot. It stands to reason that once one has found their enemy, it is in the spirit of fairness to begin the engagement immediately, not delay the proceeding with a secondary search inside the first.

-This soldier of Pilgrim’s Anchor is my daughter. She will not perish until after her father, as that is nature’s way. Any blow that should strike her would strike me instead, just as if I was there, shielding her with my arms. She is loved by her father, who declares here that love, as any other force, should have tangible power, that which we all have already felt, coursing in the touch of a loved one.

All told, through a jungle of fierce work and overgrown days they could not properly weed, the denizens of Anchor managed to finish their preparations and take a much needed day of rest and recuperation two days prior to the heart-pouring: March 30th.

United as they were that misty morning, silver threads of dawn penetrating, no fanfare bloomed at the gates. Solemn embraces and handshakes were shared, passed around unenthusiastically as the bland but stomach-stable breakfast of oatmeal and raisins had been.

The final checks were made, dotting I’s, crossing T’s, bucklings, belt tightenings, and charge checks by the Master of Sciences himself. After he’d confirmed the readiness of every kite, battery, rifle, and hatchet, Franklin surreptitiously and rakishly offered to Blueberry his electric cane for the journey, which she graciously declined.

I should’ve told him goodbye. No other Founder would get one from me. All my goodbyes march with me now, and there will be so little time for them in the fires of conflict. The only solution is victory, and I must force it to take shape, as it has been stubbornly amorphous for months now.

She referred to the one tool which was key to her specific strategy. It was Kidd’s plan, top to bottom, though she had deferred to every expert available to fill out the sides. None of that had altered her primary goals, which were more specific than destroying the deed and then the Bickyplots.

No one knew the circumstances, and thus the minds, of their foe better than her. In her own deferred-to expertise, an all-out assault with their entire arsenal, including the sharpened element of surprise, and pulling the experiential rug out from under their feet, would not be sufficient to win the day on its own.

Take stock of what they are without a manor, without guns, without a lick of drafting to their name. They stand more than two men high. Only the heart is vulnerable, and it is nimbler than a rat knuckle, fiercer than a fisher’s muzzle, and located not in the left of the chest but wherever it damn well pleases.

The blood is a paralytic first and a deadly poison second. Their strength is several times ours. Blades and blunt instruments are built into the body in individualized arrangements. Holes in their flesh seal within minutes. We do not know if they are actually required to sleep.

A controlled burn from a kite brigade cannot be organized at a distance, and we would be equally destroyed under such a strike. We must engage hand to hand after our projectiles are spent, and our hand to their hand has its bones ground to crumbs.

We must assume the bell will fail in the face of an unexpected trick of theirs or a worsening of the crack, and that we will lose in the long run… that is why we must incur into their realm, with myself as guide for a small elite unit, and find a solution there. There were holes, punched right in the world, hung in the air, where our Bickyplots belong. Fast as we can, we will find a way to return them there.

Stashed away inside a tiny cupboard on the inner side of the unmarked rod, which rode her toward their fate as surely as she rode Coverdragon, was the fluid piece of Bickering wood she had used to enter their world the last time, as it took the shape of whatever it was pressed against, including the realm door’s thirteen hand-print locks.

It meant she had to stay alive, as burdening anyone else with the unmarked rod, which might have been the only item capable of confusing, and thus holding onto, that slippery wood slime, was unacceptably cruel.

Even after all their planning, after drawn maps, strikes on straw dummies stacked Bickyplot high, target practice, and sparring duels with bayonet and hatchet, Blueberry still felt there were a hundred details to discuss with her soldiers. But they’d already set off into the chill and mist.

Quiet was to be maintained as much as possible, in the case of Silhouettes set in the trees as sentries or drafted and disguised eyes that conserved their power by only opening at the sound of human speech.

Their pace was also extremely deliberate, taking the long way around Bickering Hall to avoid pitfalls and other traps, with the eyes at the front checking the forest floor for them regardless. This meant they occasionally missed the hangervane worms hovering inert in the mist, like hibernating seahorses.

When bumped by human heads the worms rolled their faces in dramatic exaggerated agony, then settled into pointing the way to intentional north. Wait. That’s not intentional north, not if we’re approaching Bickering Hall from the side. Ah. I see. We’re traveling with such ferocious and refined intent that we’re throwing off their senses. They’re pointing the way to Bickering Hall. I think Pursuitia has long wanted to be rid of the Bickyplots as well. Today we will end its long sickness. Then we will address its persistent cough, the dry dusty blowhards called the Founders, leaping out of opened books to scold you for being a reader rather than a writer.

Traps became more likely in the latter hours of their march. To address this one of the tin horses was unhooked and a new order posted to its saddle. Pomposity was their primary purpose, but each horse had a specialized function within that, rarely used since only Founder Rutledge rode them outside Anchor most of the time.

Mothlantern’s specialty was a combination of a nimble step and its mimicry of intelligence, more honed than that of the others, probably owing to the knowing expression they’d managed to cast into its eye. It was the best one they had to test for traps; the new order bade it do so. Disturbing nary a burgundy leaf, it flew into the mist, lithe as a fox, appearing as nothing but a faint orange glow a moment later.

Casting tin horses was a process that riddled them with imperfections, gaps in their hide like tide pools or quarries, and Mothlantern’s namesakes were several spherical lamps jammed in the holes that went all the way through its midsection, which lit the rider’s way in the dark and attracted innumerable moth wing and antennae anatimals.

I will soon be that glow in the mist. Only I have the experience of Bickering. Whoever suffers at my side will need my guidance through those lands… but I don’t know what my experience is worth. Going back could disorient me just as much the second time, and it’s less disorientation and more building a raft out of temporary insanity.

If you were here Mustard I know you could hold down the Bickering Hall fight until I found my bearings. You would gift me time as you always did, along with any other privileges the Founders weren’t looking at.

We have to be enough. Love, intellect, rage. They all come to nothing if you’re not enough to assert your footing in whichever world you find yourself in. We are always stuck defending on foreign soil, with no home to retreat to. Home is what my friends must have to live, to be weak and free at the same time.

Like the swell of violins in a symphonic lull, Mothlantern’s light grew in the mist. The horse leapt into the open and landed sideways, again disturbing nothing. Even the hangervanes it nudged didn’t unfurl as they glided away. Edward was right where Mothlantern’s flank halted, so he read the order to see if the magic had recorded any sprung traps.

He gave the all’s well.

When they broke through the mist next they would be at the edge of the Bickering Hall property, and it would be time to destroy the deed. Edward took to readying the papers while the rest of them loaded and steadied the weapons that would open the fight.

Franklin muskets were checked, rechecked, and properly slung. Hatchets were shined one last time, mostly so the young could examine their own reflections in the broad of the blade. The drummers inserted their fife-sticks and began slowly cranking the springs that would launch the kites while the Lenape and Freed adults split off with their decoys to approach from the most distracting front.

Parting mists revealed the outer fence, a section of metal bars through which they saw the manor of the aristocratic abominations. Black roof tiles scuttled about on seven legs. A cauldron-mouthed chimney belched smoke wrapped in oil’s rainbow. Mismatched windows of green glass withdrew and protruded in no pattern at all. Yet most notable was an absence; no guard was present by the front doors.

It was impossible to hear if they’d been noticed, as the house’s endless snoring would’ve drowned out gasps, even big ones that came out of Bickyplots like eruptions. All they could do now was move fast and hope the element of surprise was intact. Edward flitted to the front and handed the internally-promoted Corporal Blueberry Kidd the deed to Bickering Hall. She placed it against the fence and aimed the unmarked rod at the center of its vulnerable preamble.

“Today,” she told her compatriots, “Pilgrim’s Anchor does not rest. It swings!” With no trigger to pull, Kidd concentrated at the rod, told its fallen creator that she needed it to work now, and would accept it working at the least opportune times later if she could make effective use of it on that single day. Something inside it fell, rolled, and triggered the spin of a wood panel on what might be called the barrel if someone considered only the angle at which she held it. Between spins a glob of jellied fire was spat out onto the fat front page of the deed.

A hole ate through. Red hot cinders chewed ravenously at the edges, layer by layer, and in seconds the deed was mostly ash, with the rest being wisps of nefarious magic that crystallized and shattered upon attempted escape. Longstanding drafting was integrated into physical reality season after season, until stability was interwoven between it and its subject.

Thus the Anchorites saw that the Bickyplot claim of ownership was indeed undone, as the section of fence behind the ashes drooped, parted, and broke down. Their foes would no doubt feel something in their bones, just as the fence felt it, but they would only be alert, not aware. Pair after pair of boots quietly surged through the gap, bearing hunched backs toward the front doors.

Remember, they can’t swallow us this time. And we’re not going in first; they’re coming out. Her shoulder attached to the wall as her forces pooled around her. A quick glance at their hole of ingress showed the wagons were lining up there properly for the launch of the largest and most powerful kites: sometimes called bronze thunderheads.

Tin horses passed her in a line, electric lances mounted on their sides, threading spinning up. That was her cue to give the drummers, who had lined up themselves, the hand signal. Quietly pre-cranked, they launched their kites immediately with the sound of discus slicing off angel wings. As the blades of the machines extended and began the rotation that would keep them aloft, Edward handed her the next document in their assault, front page already flapping in the chugging pant of the kites’ electric bloodlust.

We the people declare sovereignty over this domicile and the surrounding lands. All unauthorized residents must vacate immediately regardless of prior claims or current activity. Trespass will be met with due violence, no heed paid to its duration and no ground ceded to any invader. Only native Silhouettes are not subject to this eviction notice.

The Founders had filled it out with plenty of subsections and clauses to give it the precision of a scalpel, but as Kidd posted it to the broad side of Bickering Hall the effect was more like a fumbled explosive.

Just prior, the front door swung open, the curious mop-head of Lady Impestle Hissmidge dropping into view like an unsecured drawbridge. One of her clustered eyes barely peeked through the faded rainbow of her stained locks, spying the hopeful evictors, before the notice went into effect.

Her shrill screech was about to raise the alarm when several of the windows behind her shattered, sneezing snotty glass in all directions, and also disgorging several of her fellows. The ones vomited from the upper floors landed in a fashion exactly opposite the pad anatimals of the cat: wrong side down, limbs broken and plunged into the dirt, faces bearing as much weight as physically possible.

Hissmidge bent toward the commotion with her long drooping neck, but a moment later her whole head was a palm tree caught in a hurricane as a gale borne of the flapping pages of the eviction notice attacked her from within the hall. Once she was entirely horizontal in the air her grip on the knob failed, sending her into a flight interrupted by a collision with a launching Franklin kite. It took the wind out of her and kept its own, wobbling to a proper height.

The artist, decorator, and event planner of the Bickyplots became little more than a flag with a large spider caught in it, her whole body and ridiculous ruffled garb flailing on the end of a neck pole and head stuck in Pursuitia. Joining her in humiliating expulsion and confounded contortion were Pumpwine Cult-on-Sea, Questinking Spywulph, Voluptogast Devalming, Oolbook Dudgewhistle, Incontible Bludgehaven, Middlebitch Flaywood, Hamishand Glazemouth, and Xylofont Phanny-upon-Twone.

Three are missing. Where are the draftsman, the whipping boy, and my dear sweet captor Eggnonce? Blueberry was answered by bangs and yelps from within the manor, which interrupted the stream of howling wind. The enchanted force that blew the first batch of Bickyplots loose had to work harder to expel Impestle, so its efforts would be sustained inside until every last one was dislodged. She pictured Chattelpool with his arms wrapped around that alien tree in his menagerie, bird-brain dangling in the wind on its stretched umbilicus.

Whether or not the set was complete, they still had opponents to fight. Unlikely as it seemed, they could forego their excursion into the other world if they destroyed the Bickyplots utterly here and now. She held off on the order to fire, wisely, as the most effective first blow would be dealt when they tried to stand.

Nasty among the nasty, and a ninny among ninnies, Xylofont was the first to do so, coincidentally having the ripest head for it thanks to its branching metallic structure of twisted wire.

“You little toothpicks! I was right in the middle of-” Now he was in the middle of getting struck by engineered lightning, alloyed, sharpened, and polished compared to the natural variety. He had crossed the threshold height that drew the ire of their kites, taking bolts from the three closest. The metals of his head’s piped casing remained intact but grew red hot in a flash, carrying annihilating heat to every leaf, each of which was a flat eye or snaggle-toothed maw. They popped and spewed white boiling gobs of him.

His shoulders turned black behind a clawing red wave and collapsed into messy briquettes that disappeared inside the hollow of his chest. To the knees went the rest of the body as the forge-hot head fell and mostly disappeared into him. The whiniest Bickyplot’s cardiolic self was probably cringing in the toe of one foot, choking on smoke from its own instantly-cremated remains, a golden opportunity for the assailants, but it wasn’t safe to move in while so many kites were firing.

Bludgeoning bolts did much the same to the huntress, the jailer, the concubine, the cook, the wiggling toes of the artist, and the head of staff, incinerating large portions of their bodies and revealing the hollows. Much of their blood was boiled away, only a wrinkling purple syrup left behind at the edges, and the more concentrated it was the harder time it had soaking into human skin.

Once they were sufficiently reduced the electric hail would cease and the charge could begin. Troublingly, two Bickyplots were unharmed save for the window glass embedded in their faces. They were Spywulph, smart and humble enough to never rise out of his kneel, on which he now shuffled forward and drew a scimitar at level, and Mr. Cult-on-Sea, the groundskeeper, who kept that ground lecherously in his esteem. Never before had Kidd seen it so fully displayed as the gourd-headed Bickyplot snaked through the topsoil, mouth torn open and swallowing, trowel-crest stabbing and pulling to propel him toward the humans like a shark determined to try its first ear of corn.

“Fire!” Corporal Kidd boomed, followed by the many muskets that had constructed a semicircle around the evicted Bickyplots. A cresting wave of white smoke dispersed, with little to show from the musket balls, as the shuffling Spywulph had deflected several with his sword, the others hardly worse than mosquito bites on his towering frame. Pumpwine too had mostly escaped harm with his lower profile; what rounds did make it into his body had been swallowed along with the soil, passed through, and excreted out some back chute they wished never to identify in his efforts to propel himself close enough to take a bite of Anchor.

But next the young army drew from the kites with raised bayonets. “Fire at will!” Dodging horizontal lightning was much more difficult for Questinking, impossible in fact, since he was struck squarely in the eye and blinded as the webbing keeping it strung up burned away. The dual gnashing horse-heads that shaped his open cranium snarl-whinnied in protest of the pain.

Where’s Pumpwine!? In the sting of mixed emotion she felt from seeing Spywulph’s face obliterated, he was the most civilized of his ilk after all, she had neglected to keep an eye on the gardener, and was forced to assume by the abrupt end of his trail that he had submerged. They couldn’t wait for him to resurface, especially as the kites had ceased firing on their own. It was time for the full commitment. With their bodies half-burned away, mostly the halves that could see, think, and hear, her army could surely kill a few of them before the others regrew and regrouped.

Blueberry led the charge with a war cry, her weapon already drawn since the unmarked rod, with its snapping turtle commitment, had never let her rest since she first escaped Bickering Hall. Perhaps when she was finished. Perhaps when everyone had escaped, was freed, never again faced tyranny or incarceration… Then I can live without weapons.

The weight of the rod made wielding her bayonet difficult, so instead she relied on it in her right and a hatchet in her left, which she defiantly raised into the air so it could drink deep of the electric fluid of their most deadly watering hole. As an obedient bolt struck the flat blade it was illuminated blue-white, the fleeting flag of the Junior Congress, who would’ve never been anything more than a sparkle in the Founders’ eyes if they didn’t fight for themselves.

A collective roar answered her standard and followed into battle. Like the stabs of hungry crows, the kites fed their raised blades electricity. Just like Kidd’s hatchet, those fed spun until their corners disappeared; they became blurring discs of singing death. Their commander rushed by Spywulph, considering him the least dangerous while he was both slightly reluctant and blinded.

Her first target was Flaywood, fiercest fighter of the Bickyplots if not the most skilled. She was on her feet, but hunched enough to avoid further electrical pelting. Her head was a burnt haunch of meat in her hands, claws raking at it, aerating the tender juicy tissues in an attempt to speed healing.

Blueberry infiltrated the lady’s shadow. Aside from general aim, the unmarked rod could not be tamed, so she did nothing more than point her arm up toward Middlebitch’s open scratches. The rod chose to extended something that was more rust than blade in a shower of red flakes, piercing to the center of Flaywood’s hollow roasted head. If she’d struck the heart directly the whole evil construct would’ve collapsed, but she must have nicked one of its tethering tendrils at least, for the Bickyplot recoiled and raged, contracted arms striking at nothing like a bat trying to claw its chest pains away.

If I hit it, it would retreat. There’s nowhere to go but the chest. The rod’s rust retracted, creating room for her to swing her hatchet. Its rotating blade sliced cleanly across the huntress’s burnt clothing and flesh alike. Two more strikes completed a triangle, which Blueberry snagged with her weapon’s edge and pulled loose. There was almost enough room to crawl inside; she could hear the terrified heart pounding in the knothole stench. So close… But suddenly, with the kind of terrible timing that always made a Bickyplot guffaw, another one of them came oh so close.

A bang from inside Bickering Hall was followed by a crash, and three more bangs, and cursing of the kind that only made sense in another world, and where it would be considered uncouth enough to bury the curser alive. Eggnonce Chattelpool had finally lost his grip on whatever fixed object had allowed him to resist the draft of their eviction notice. He emerged from the highest floor, was rolled down the roof tiles by the creatures underneath them, perhaps intentionally, and dumped to the grounds where he nearly squashed a Blueberry.

This sort had legs, and was able to break away at the last moment, losing her advantage against the huntress. Chattelpool only took one hit from the kites on the way down, a glancing blow to his belt buckle, and by ripping the object off and discarding it he kept himself in fighting shape. Craftiest among them, he knew not to rise to his full height to avoid frying the naked bird-thing stuck in the antler-cage of his head.

“Well well, if it isn’t my pet,” he crowed through the bird-thing’s beak at the sight of her. “Do you miss your place under my analysis?”

“You should’ve dissected me when you had the chance,” she threatened, “now it’s my turn.” She stepped forward to make good on it, not with the precision of her hatchet, but the insane and profoundly unscientific evisceration of the unmarked rod. Before she could make mashed mincemeat of him he struck with his own greatest weapon: his intellect.

“Oi!” he shouted back through the broken windows of his deconsecrated home, in a tone quite unfamiliar, lacking the refinement of his usual. “If you want to stay you’d better get out here this instant and fight for it!”

Kidd’s forces were mostly too busy carving burnt Bickyplots to watch, but some of those closest overhead the unnaturalist and turned toward the jagged green portals. Who is he talking to? It can’t be the Silhouettes; they’ve nothing but peace in their hearts. Tell me Cadavula does not exist in their actual ceiling as well. Something answered his ultimatum, creeping up from the shadows, reaching with withered black fingers and burl knuckles. The distinct smell of sour waxy cheese stewed with rotten weeds spilled out alongside.

“Traitors!” Bonfire shouted cleverly, both alerting everyone and overcoming their dismay with an igniting sense of vengeance. At least one cardiolic Bickyplot was skittering around, dodging bayonets, but the humans had to pull away and form a line for a second charge if they didn’t want these unexpected reinforcements to penetrate deep into the battle unopposed.

The blackened butter mummies of Virginia Dare were too low to suffer the wrath of brass thunderheads, posture at least bent if it wasn’t contorted into a total wheel and encased in ancient curds of white cheese. They carried no weapons, which was more frightening than if they had, as the Anchorites kept imagining the diabolically nauseating things they might do with their undead nails and teeth to the supple weak spots of life.

Charges met. Dare’s bog beasts neutralized their bayonets by allowing themselves to be skewered through the chest, which only did significant damage if the blade was spun up. Then the line behind crawled over the first wave to grab and claw at the young.

Why are they here!? And why would they help the Bickyplots over their own people!? Mustard… He told us he gave Spywulph directions to the bog in the information exchange. They were looking for Wighthall’s first head to prevent us finding the deed.

Dare could have negotiated with them. She was playing every angle that might return her to her post in a semi-civilized town square. The head was with her when she came to us, so she thought she would test us first, and if it went poorly she would side with the Bickyplots against us.

The numbers bore Kidd’s theory out. At Hart’s murder it had been noted Dare only brought about half her force with her, and at the time they’d assumed it was just to avoid committing everything to one engagement. In all of Anchor’s preparation no one had considered that, without their alabaster figurehead, the bog mummies might still be capable of making decisions and acting out revenge. It was hoped they would simply sink and get back to the business of decomposition.

Numbering around three quarters of the human force, the army of Dare’s Bog was both smaller and much weaker, but neutralizing any one of them completely was almost as painstaking as a Bickyplot, and while they did little damage when not aggressively outnumbering, their primary purpose was to act as a sponge, absorbing blows and time better spent on smarter and deadlier foes.

Foes that were now regenerating from the lightning burns, picking themselves up, but not all the way up, lesson learned. We need reinforcements of our own. Blueberry whirled around, kicking a solidified column of bog stench over to better see the battlefield. Where was Honey? Have a little more faith in her! She was right to do so, as when she looked to the drummers she saw Honey nearby, issuing a hand signal that was translated into fife song and drum rhythm.

Those manning the wagons in the back knew what each section of song meant, and the latest instructed them to unbolt the door to Honey’s wagon. Out poured a tide of anatimals, a plethora of species, multiple parts from many of them. Anything she could train up enough to distract or bother the Bickyplots had been loaded into that wagon, door only closed by the collective strength of ten people pushing.

Gigantic udders of both cow and goat, overgrown by similar techniques to the one that produced Emperor the pig-ear butterfly, rolled free as boulders and targeted the Bickyplots. Between them issued thousands of fluttering insect segments, led by Emperor itself. Acting as the swarm’s shadow was an infestation of chicken and turkey feet aerating the ground with their countless stabbing talons. Three or four might put up a good fight against a Bickyplot heart, but none were loose at the moment, so they instead broke against the enemy’s ankles like a surf of mating crabs and climbed up into the burnt shreds of their clothing.

“They itch! Get them off!” Bludgehaven bayed, dancing no worse than Bickyplots usually did to try and extricate them. His discomfort must have been exaggerated, for a moment later the ground next to him erupted, producing the top half of Pumpwine Cult-on-Sea, who himself produced both halves of a half dozen blunderbusses. Tunneling under the mansion, that’s where he’d gone, and he’d known right where to punch through the floor to get some guns to fall down.

Bludgehaven ceased his stomping and took one, immediately loading it with a mix of chicken feet and gravel from the lip of Pumpwine’s hole. The first booming report was as bad for the humans as the first volley of lightning was for the Bickyplots. It likely paralyzed a few with fear, but that was nothing that couldn’t be undone by a little humor, provided by a pink udder almost Incontible’s rival in height bowling him over and bouncing.

Blueberry ran up and took his gun as he dropped it, forgetting it was not so easy to take, long and heavy as a log. Even as she dragged it away from its owner, Cult-On-Sea tossed several more over the black arms of the bog mummies and into the kleptomaniac clutches of his brethren.

While she dragged the blunderbuss she figured she might as well load it, so she popped its breech and tilted it so it would swallow up loose rocks and musket balls. It had no drafting posted to its barrel or stock, no engraving either, leading her to believe it and the others were spare guns kept in storage somewhere. Nothing magical would make them backfire, so they could be turned against their creators.

Once it was loaded and closed she pulled it alongside the path of a galloping tin horse; only one of their metal mounts had the strength to fire a Bickyplot gun without shattering half a skeleton. It was Junior President Windstorm astride the magnificent Praytheday, a horse adorned with Christian iconography, a cathedral upon four hooves, floated in this red tide of war on twin pontoons of corkscrewing electric lance.

One deft pull on the reins from Windstorm got the horse to reach with its neck and grab the blunderbuss by the trigger. Blueberry dove backward to not catch any of the force when the object whipped into the air.

From there young Jefferson demonstrated his devotion to a plan that wasn’t his, nobly overcoming one of the primary weaknesses of a father who had a sharp pen glued to his hand. He aimed his horse at Lady Devalming, which aimed the gun in its mouth at her as well. Metal teeth clamped down.

Kthoom! The giant red lips framing Voluptogast’s mask were perforated, flesh flying away in rivulets like a downpour in a muddy ditch. Cracks across her eyes blinded her, made it impossible to avoid Praytheday’s trample. It had dropped the gun, increased speed, to skewer her on a rotating lance and drive it all the way through.

The manufactured mount had the strength to pull her across the field, but Jefferson stalled it, pulled the reins to make it go in tight circles, so that he might disorient the lady further and strike at her torso with his electrified saber. Other silvery horses passed on either side, obscured his success.

I need to fight, not watch! Kidd reprimanded herself. Before she could get back into the fray, her first turning step caught a lump and tripped her. Expecting the grasping hand and chortling maw of a Bickyplot, she was struck cold by the truth. It was the body of one of her soldiers: Connor ‘Pup’ Stone. His injury was not apparent, nor was his actual fate, so she reached into his clothes, sighing when she found a heartbeat. Something else discovered the boy at the same time, never saw him coming despite his prone form and closed eyes.

“Oof! Excuse me air! I didn’t mean to forget you’re not solid.” Blueberry rolled to the side and saw the flat marble-eyed face of a Silhouette slither up onto Pup’s chest. It took her several seconds to understand what was happening, but she had the time, as it took a Silhouette several seconds to realize its last thought was complete and that the next one had started.

Glancing over its innocent expression and pursed little mouth she saw the busted windows of Bickering Hall once again, for the third time now, disgorging a new faction into the battle, like an inexperienced chef tossing in herb after herb. The Silhouettes who served as the Bickyplot’s house slaves were the latest addition, leaning out of the tall frames and falling forward, right out of their rags and into their serpentine shapes.

The natives of Pursuitia only occasionally rose off the ground and folded their bodies into other configurations, but their masters demanded they have the ability to grab and carry items all the time, so Blueberry had rarely seen them slithering rather than waddling in a stubby bundle of mostly empty space.

“What did Lord Eggy say?” one of the worms still in raggedy uniform asked another.

“He said if we want to stay we have to get out.”

“Stay where? Out where? I’m having trouble holding both of these questions.”

“I’ll take one for you friend. He said we would want to stay, so it has to be a place where the staying is good, and that’s this whole beautiful world of ours.”

“Hmm, I say Hmm… I must thank you for taking that first question off my coils, but now I find the remaining one has gotten bigger! Out where, when the stay is the whole world?”

“Lucky us, now that I’ve dismantled that first question I’m free to have a go at that second one too! Just call me the question expert.”

“I will, thank you very much question expert.”

“Out of Bickering Hall, because that’s where Lord Eggy was when he said it. So if we want to stay in the whole world, we need to get out of this dreary old house. I’ll go first. What kind of question expert would I be if I didn’t demonstrable faith in my answers? Here I go.” The Silhouette fell forward, out of the window, out of their clothes, into a wormy slink alongside dozens of others now weaving their way through the battle.

“We weren’t talking to you you addled morons!” Oolbook Dudgewhistle exploded at them, spewing dust from his pages the way a dragon would breathe fire. “You’re not dismissed! Get back inside and… and launder something!” He grabbed up a Silhouette by the tail and wielded it as a whip, battering both his slave and a human interloper.

The eviction notice won’t have freed the whole species from their grasp, but it seems to have freed the house staff from their contracts, seeing as the manor itself is now insolvent. There’s no estate for them to work for.

“Oh, it’s not air, silly old worm,” the Silhouette beside Kidd and atop Pup chuckled. “It’s a human.” Heated combat did nothing to reveal the displaced earthlings to them; it was yet another contract that had made the alien Bickyplots visible. “Pardon me human.”

“Excuse me,” Blueberry blurted, halting the worm. They turned to look at her voice. “I’m another human. Would you help us? Any humans on the ground are wounded. They need medicine. Could you and the others take them out of here and give them some?”

“Oh dear, wounded! That’s not good. The Bickyplots say we can’t help you, but what they say isn’t very sticky right now, so it shouldn’t be any trouble. What flavor medicine do they like? Goop? My friend makes excellent goop.”

“They’re not picky,” she answered quickly as she wrestled with the pelvis and legs of a bog mummy. “Whatever kind they can have the quickest, please and thank you!”

“You’re the most polite thing I’ve never seen. We’ve been through so much together these past few chats on this air, oop, sorry, human. Goodbye.” Blueberry subdued the mummy legs, rent them socket from socket, all the while watching as the Silhouette coiled around Pup and dragged him toward the forest. Hopefully they would pass the message on and take some of the burden of their casualties.

The second she was on her feet her tin horse Coverdragon came to a halt beside her and knelt with mechanical efficiency so she could mount. She’d requested it because it was the one that most resisted tarnish, that was best at keeping its drafting free of muss and smudge. Presently it resisted bloods both red and purple, the colors streaking down its legs together. The purple must flow until we can’t see the red.

A squeeze of her thighs sent Coverdragon powering back into the fray, and for several minutes the fight raged with no clear upper hand. Not a single Bickyplot had been felled permanently, but the bog dwellers were being reduced to twitching limbs and slippery butter puddles. The young had taken several hits, with new weapons added in from the wagons to keep up the pressure.

A freshly charged kite. A swoop from Emperor on the outskirts, expertly avoiding the lightning field. False musket fire from a distance provided by the Lenape and Freed, turning fat Bickyplot heads that should’ve stayed right where they were. If they could succeed before their arsenal depleted they might not have to risk the structural integrity of the Liberty Bell at all, which had borne a most serious crack since the day the Founders took its toll.

But, though the Bickyplots had taken many mutilations, the ear of Hamishand Glazemouth was still operable at the worst crossroads of circumstance and vulnerability.

The Silhouettes had continued to do as Corporal Kidd asked, even reentering the battlefield to bump into more invisible wounded. One of the worms was taking another unconscious soul to the hole in the fence so that the back lines might assist them; in so doing they passed under a wagon, and it was not the one containing kites, or the one emptied of anatimals, or the one where portable writing desks had unfolded and spilled ink of five different luminous colors now staining the sides. It was the one containing the bound and gagged

“Excuse me Lord Wighthall,” the Silhouette said as they passed between the wheels, through the shadow. There was nothing to see, but the worms could sense familiar intent like many Pursuitian creatures. And even through Cadavawing’s many iterations of personality since their last encounter, the worm still recognized the mean spirit beating in the Bickyplot’s heart.

“Eh?” Glazemouth sputtered as he overheard. The porcine nature of his hammy head did nothing to slow him. The cook sprinted out of the fight at a stunning clip, swinging his blunderbuss by the barrel, knocking everyone in his path to one side or the other. Those at the wagons were wielding quills, cranks, and bandages, and were unprepared for such an attack.

The Bickyplot’s plan was no more complex than raw force; he intentionally fell over at full momentum to drive his shoulder into the wagon. Splintered. Collapsed. Long body wriggling. Glazemouth’s head was adorned with lit candles. Once he had his hands on Cadavawing’s shoulders their flames flared, then grew thick and poured onto the compacted wax encasing the architect’s head. After a brief mutual struggle the prisoner was freed of all his bonds and hoisted to his feet.

“Home!” he shouted through a mouth shaped exactly like the doors of Independence Hall. The bony bell in his crown clacked back and forth. “The one called Kidd has been to our home!”

“What?” the apoplectic Hamishand, Middlebitch, Oolbook, Pumpwine, Impestle, Voluptogast, Incontible, Xylofont, and Eggnonce sputtered. “Get her!” The young surrounding most of them were suddenly barely there, less irritating than moths, as the Bickyplots barreled through them and started to converge on Blueberry. They fear me; that means my plan will work.

Her next thoughts had to be shunted to evasion, not something that seemed possible after the fourth Bickyplot joined the others to create a mobile fence of bumbling flesh. Luck saved her via diversion, and did much worse to their draftsman Blacknib Bileby as he was expelled from an upper window, only able to suction onto the frame with his many cranial tentacles long enough to be draped over the gutter. Then he fell.

Landing flat as paper, his inkwell head cracked and spilled black-gray-purple humors. While he seemed unconscious, it didn’t stop one of his hands shooting into the air and waving about crushed rolls of velum. Notices. She was in no position to stop them being added to the Bickyplots’ advantages, just as the guns had, just as the bog bodies had.

Pumpwine snatched one out of Bileby’s hand and galumphed with it to the corner of the manor, where stood a haphazard mound of flaky firewood. One splinter was large enough for him to drive the notice through, thus affixing it and activating its enchantment. The pile quivered, dropped a few top logs that were then picked up again. Several from the bottom shot out, but didn’t keep going, instead tilting the pile in an attempt to lift it off the ground.

Every hour the best tinsmiths spent on their majestic horses was an hour the Bickyplots spent lounging about sipping on barrel-scraped shrub, in respect to their shacklerams. The rams could be made out of any old thing, the older and the any-er the better, better here meaning more likely to result in the shredding of the flesh on anything trampled.

The towering groundskeeper helped it along by shooting the kindling, away from the notice, blasting it into smaller twigs that could rearrange into a quadrupedal shape faster: their equivalent of one tap of the sculptor’s chisel. Doubtless those myriad splinters would puncture anything astride before it had finished assembly, but Pumpwine paid no heed. His pained howl when he sat on it was confined to his mouth, the rest of him not reacting in the slightest.

The shackleram’s first charge knocked down Happystance, luckily riderless at the time. A large chunk of wood was lost, but remained almost magnetic, its shards trailing behind Pumpwine as a deadly train of caltrops.

Not far away, Bonfire attempted to get to Bileby, who was still prone upon the ground, tentacles waving weak as kelp in a tide pool. An almost divinely clear path opened between them, which she swiftly navigated with her bayonet. Her force was equal to the launch of a coiled narworm, the most lethal animal of Pursuitia. Unfortunately, force alone did not matter when diffused right into the flank of a loose shackleram as it passed.

The musket was pulled from her hands, leaving her face to lifting face with Blacknib. His striated black beak clicked a threat, both his flat lidless eyes pressing against the glass interior of his face. Though not the best of their fighters, he was still armed many times more than her, owing to his additional boneless appendages.

But Bonfire had knowledge of Pursuitia, while Bileby knew only what he read, and he wrote almost all of what could be read in Bickering Hall. This cannibalistic circle of pulped knowledge did not prepare him to understand what the girl did next. She bent over, took hold of something lodged in the dirt with both hands. It had been created minutes ago, and was only loosened enough for her to extract by the tilling effect of Cult-on-Sea’s lewd burrowing.

The Bickyplot assumed some of his own blood had smeared across the glass, and that was causing the blur. There was no way this compact human, this book louse without the book, had the power to grab precious stones and draw them in an arc like stirred honey.

Sapphire was the stone he thought he saw, but it was a lighter clearer blue, the exact shade of the Earthen sky she had never seen. If it counted as a gem it was artificial, produced by a lightning strike from one of the larger kites that had connected with ground rather than Bickyplot crown. The energy had been driven deep, smiting heat fusing silica in the soil into a lance of wrung glass, what would eventually be called a fulgurite.

Before Blacknib could make any useful observations, Bonfire forced them by driving it into his left side. Now he knew that it hurt. Light for its size while still being heavy, the young soldier managed to withdraw it and strike again. A glance in the first hole caught her a flash of flailing red. They needed to start getting hearts if the day was to be won.

None of them ever considered they might get too many. As long as they had been alive, since before Anchor had dropped, there had only been thirteen. A vile number, cursed and stilted, the precise floors of Satan’s palace of torment, but familiar. Thirteen was always far less than their ranks, and it allowed every human to know the name, habits, and weaknesses of every individual enemy.

The Anchorites could be forgiven for thinking the Bickyplots were lazy, that they might’ve won this petty war years ago if their heads were fully in matters of strategy instead of bobbing for crab-fruits fifteen-years soured. There was truth to this, but also more planning than they knew, overlooked because of the vast differences in their perception and their processes of life.

Bickering Hall had not searched for electric industry, or ink alchemy, or their enemy’s founding documents. Their true heads were in their hearts, which were sometimes in their nethers. The most fundamental way to colonize was to multiply. Your offspring were your weapons, born entitled to conquered lands. Stabbing roots, brutal, yet shockingly innocent. The second generation would be faster, smarter, raised on wounds they took as the natural terrain.

The string-snapping. The heart-pouring. Both immense occasions for celebration at Bickering Hall. The attackers only learned why when Licketysplit Godswallop finally lost his grip on a heavy wardrobe and was evicted from the groaning mansion. At first he got stuck, pressed against a window in the roof like a blemish about to be drained with a square tool. Kidd was far enough away to see that high.

His head isn’t that fat. What now? When it finally squeezed through she saw that it was, in fact, presently that fat. His face had always been featureless, all his words pained muttering piped out the fleshy tubes atop a peanut-shaped crimson mass. But they’d never seen it so swollen that it was nearly equal in size to the body holding it up.

Not currently held up, it and the dangling body bounced down the roof, the former suffering an ominous and sickening degree of compression each time. Every bounce made a sound, bubbles slowly popping in a broth made of breath, and though they weren’t louder than anything in the battle the whole thing came to a stop, heads turning to watch what they sensed.

He fell next to Bonfire and Bileby. Right on his head. The tendrils of the cardiolic self. Were they attached to the body wall, you might call them strings. They could snap upon maturation.

Lickety split. The sound like the dislodging of a whale’s eyeball. His body, tipped with long red shreds, collapsed into a sit against the manor’s wall. Left at the impact was a horrifying mound of red nuggets, slithering and skittering on countless tendrils like fine bloody hair. No sooner had they vaguely comprehended it than it began to come apart, collapse apart, roll apart.

“Slay them!” Bonfire screamed, once again doing Kidd’s job while she tried to keep her head on straight. More hearts. They made more hearts somehow. Some thought had been given to Bickyplot breeding, but it had always been assumed that Lady Voluptogast Devalming, the courtesan, the concubine, would be the bearer of bad new beings.

Godswallop was the whipping boy, a broken pony of punishment, kicked as greeting, thrown as goodbye, and only complimented with a shove into a shed of sharp rusty gardening tools. How then had he become the vessel for their spawn? Their world is pure intent, and what intent leaves more of a legacy than malice? Every punch and slap was like a man’s thrust, delivering into him the heady venom of fecundity. Only when he had suffered a generation’s abuse could he then generate them.

Master Godswallop’s great fall had burst the pressure, caused the heart-pouring to occur prematurely. The brood was no less viable by the look of their speed, or by the glisten on their conical white teeth.

Bonfire followed her own order, snapping off the tip of her fulgurite spear yet lodged in the draftsman’s thigh so she might use it to crush one of the passing hearts. She destroyed it with one drive. More went by on both sides, spiderlings fleeing their mother’s squished abdomen. Again and again she snapped off the blue glass and ended another one, until she was surrounded by studs of crystallized clear sky, wielding only a dagger of it.

And there were enough left to flood over her and bury her completely. Presumably, each had the potential to become a fully fledged Bickyplot. Would this take days? Hours? Minutes? The appearance of the familiar ones, as shambling collections of loosely associated objects overgrown with fleshy veins and sensory pustules, indicated that the hearts would surround themselves with items and weave them together with excretions into an enclosed mobile nest.

They probably couldn’t do this very well with the sticks and stones and dried worm husks of Pursuitia. Nearly all of its intent was deferred or mimicked. Meanwhile, the tools and playthings of the house were statues depicting their own purposes, the polar opposite of the abstract. With that solid intent they would build their identities, and Kidd sensed they would do so as quickly as a cockroach fled the light and found a crack in a cupboard.

She turned and delivered a hand signal, instantly translated into drum and fife that told all the young what they had come to. It was time for the Liberty Bell. Only the ring of freedom seemed capable of immobilizing all their enemies at once. Hopefully it would endure; they prayed the crack in its side was merely a stitch from laughter.

Duh-rong! Duh-rong! So tolled the Liberty Bell!

Bickyplots dropped to their knees, hands to wherever they had the most ears. Their backs hunched as the tortured hollow within tried to vomit up the reverberations. The remaining mummies were affected as well, thrown back, eye and throat chasms widening in a new type of terror. The spreading pile of cardiac vermin stilled, its constituent organs flopping like landed trout. Bonfire broke free, gasping for breath.

The young gave their war cries and surged forth, picking up anything they might use to tear or smash, even rocks and mummy bones if weapons were not nearby. Their commander couldn’t join them, not yet; she had to look back to the wagons where they had the bell and see their signals. Someone appeared, holding the mallet with which freedom was rung. They gave the signal, but the look on their face said it all. The crack had grown, from a solitary strike. It was large in the first place, so it would take only a handful more before splitting in twain. That was now the ticking timekeeper counting down to their defeat.

The surprise eviction had failed. The enemy force had actually grown mid-battle, twice. Now the only hope was another expedition to the realm of Bickering. That meant they had to get inside. She signaled her final set of orders. The music changed. Sterner forward drums. Swooping driving fife.

Contained in her orders to the bell keepers was the increment: the exact number of minutes they should wait between rings of freedom. It was a delicate balance to strike, keeping the bell in one piece but also giving her enough time to infiltrate their world and learn what compelled them all to try and kill her specifically as soon as they knew she’d already been.

The increment would be kept to only if the young cold hold their own. Should the Bickyplots and their shrieking children advance, freedom would have to ring again, as long as it could.

Next she had to get inside. Protective drafting was already stripped away, so if she could get to the doors- A crack. Roof tiles scattered more than the recovering brood. The young were forced to step back from their growing piles of broken hearts as the entire facade of Bickering Hall, battered internally by flying Bickyplot bodies, weakened by the toll of the Liberty Bell, collapsed.

The walls had always been more full of slime than dust, rather the slime had eaten and kept the dust, so there was no need to wait for a cloud to settle. There was the Bickyplot dining hall, the recessed walkway above it, the foyer, and a selection of rooms they’d never seen on the opposite side of the doors, save for those searched inside the head of Cadavawing Wighthall.

“Retreat!” Spywulph ordered his kindred, taking the lead in leaping back into their home and rushing toward the kitchen. His first steps made clear that, now that all the Bickyplots had been evicted, they were free to return. They would not be able to reinstate much of their old drafting however, and would have less of the home advantage.

The others quickly joined him in retracting into their shell like hermit crabs, mummies and hearts included. Their progeny would, in all likelihood, begin constructing bodies from the clutter immediately.

“Let freedom ring!” Corporal Kidd roared, raised hands suddenly full of hatchets she didn’t remember collecting. Two bolts from the kites charged them, the last power she would have for a while, as the devices would be out of range under Bickering Hall’s intact roof until new ones could be launched within. Wagner emerged from her collar, waving its stumpy end back and forth, along with it a banner of bravery Honey had gently affixed. Her troops followed her again, into what felt like an entirely new battle, with no rest between.

The Bickyplots really didn’t flee much; it was the inner heart that did that. So it came as quite a shock that they were so good at disappearing into the recesses of the hall. The young had to break into smaller teams at any split path and doorway; no corner could be left to fester unchecked.

This presented another problem, as only a handful of the young knew the layout of Bickering Hall precisely. It had been dissected after the deed had been claimed, closely examined with hand lenses, but that wasn’t the same as viewing each room and passage with your own eyes.

Kidd’s most reliable friends were the best choices to lead the splitting groups. Edward was already doing so, and was nowhere to be found. Fool’s Gold found her, but she waved him off to where he was needed. Honey should remain behind as well, to manage the anatimals that were still in the fight.

Being the commanding officer, Kidd had the right to order any of her fellows to follow her through the portal. Why can’t I select anyone then? They don’t know. You can’t know what it is until you’re there. Until long after you’ve left. No one can reasonably volunteer for what they can’t understand.

The decision was made for her when the hands of two of her friends found her arms and pulled her through Bickering Hall’s kitchen, deeper into its recesses. Glancing at her sides, Blueberry saw Bonfire and Crow Eyes.

“Show us the way,” Crow Eyes encouraged her.

“Windstorm will keep up the fight while we’re gone,” Bonfire added. Arguing served no purpose while a curt nod served many, one of which was expediting their winding path through the building’s bowels. Several times loose cardiolic Bickyplots scurried by, but they didn’t feel they had the time to stop and kill them, not even the one greatly slowed by a stack of belongings adhered to its back: bone dice, dried tripe of worm, shattered tea cup bases bearing pooling gray-green stains, and a precariously balanced telescope.

All of the Bickyplots had clear roles in their towering yet miniature society, and it seemed that ambitious heart planned on becoming a fortune teller or oracle, as its collection of tools were all used in the messy arts of augury. Its lingering lumbering filled the trio’s heads with a dark vision of a Bickyplot metropolis, no two horrors the same, yet each niche just as murderous and tyrannical as the others.

Bickering Hall still didn’t have a treasurer, a tailor, an angler, a spymaster, a messenger, or a hundred other roles larger ones might split into. Kidd’s brain was stuck on the idea of an actor, a Bickyplot who delivered a soliloquy alongside a hammer to the skull, and this notion was only dislodged by their arrival at the strange door, ceiling high, thirteen unique hand-print locks sealed.

They weren’t the only ones to arrive either, as they’d been predicted by both Eggnonce and Questinking. The pair closed in from opposite sides of the hall, shouting at the humans in a shockingly conciliatory fashion.

“That place is full of contaminants! You’ll fall ill!” Chattelpool squawked, his beak dragging across the antler-bars of his head-cage like a prisoner’s tin cup. “You’ll be no good for study then!”

“It’s no place for humans!” Spywulph warned. “Stay here and fight the way we all know how!” Blueberry still had to convince the unmarked rod to disgorge the amorphous skeleton key, so her two companions tried to slow the Bickyplots down. Crow Eyes, with the single bolt in her musket, fired flawlessly; it passed between Eggnonce’s bars and ignited the featherless fleshling inside his head. Now he looked like he was topped with a dangerously cracked and overfed lantern. The bird-thing’s panic destroyed his balance, resulting in his outer antler prongs gouging a gash into the wall, slowing him greatly.

Bonfire had singing hatchets, five of them stashed away from the battlefield, a crucial surplus given that nobody but Crow Eyes could make another shot like the one she’d just made. Miss Paine instead opted for a glut of projectiles that would be difficult to evade in a hallway that was only narrow for its everyday residents. Her spinning blade tosses lodged in Spywulph’s knees and thighs, temporarily cutting his running muscles out from underneath him, sending him crashing to the floor.

Kidd’s opponent was latched to her own arm, making it easier to bash it against the wall until it performed as desired. A panel operated by inexplicably iridescent cogs bearing hooked teeth popped open, louder than any cork they’d ever heard. All it produced was a single glob of wood-patterned and scented slime that Kidd snatched out of the air with her free hand.

Quick as she could she molded it over the end of Wagner, the hound tail’s muscle memory recalling what to do. One by one it stretched and pressed itself against each lock, the wood conforming to the inner mechanism and making it turn. She and her anatimal companion were speedy enough, but the turning of the locks was not.

Spywulph dragged himself closer, found better footing. The burning of Eggnonce’s bird would keep him down longer, allowing both Crow Eyes and Bonfire to charge the recovering Bickyplot and keep him suppressed. The bayonet of Crow Eyes sliced through the leathery webbing holding up his single eye while Bonfire reclaimed her hatches from his flesh and hacked away at the shoulders, where she assumed the most relevant crawling muscles were located.

What eventually stopped their assault was not resistance, but awe. All the locks were spinning. The grate backing them receded into itself, out of existence, followed by the wood behind. While the rotating emblems remained aloft, everything else of the wall was now a whipping gale of unidentifiable colors.

“Don’t go,” Spywulph muttered, to an empty hall. His only company was the crackling inside Chattelpool’s head.

…

Until their return, should they return at all, it was the job of the young to keep the battle alive, with winning it outright in Kidd’s absence now all but impossible, with cornered Bickyplots pulling ever more ridiculous disguised levers and disappearing into hidden passages never discovered in the dissection thanks to the decaying collapse of membranes.

From the sound of the drums and fifes, Junior President Windstorm Jefferson knew Blueberry had stopped giving orders, which he had to assume meant she had successfully infiltrated the Bickering realm. Otherwise she was dead, and that wasn’t conducive to further planning. He took the liberty of assuming command, able to communicate with the drummers and those remaining with the wagons easily thanks to the front of the manor collapsing.

Those who took the orders did not find it so simple, as they were forced to dart back and forth, examining the place from the outside like an open dollhouse infested with termites. To a degree it was like the battlefield had been turned on its side, reducing the crowding that would hide hand signals. As it stood every room was full of requests to the resupply team, and prioritization had to be done.

Everyone wanted Franklin kites to charge their weapons, meaning those hovering in the field had to be brought back down, recharged, and relaunched much more precisely so as not to collide with any ceilings. And before that it had to be determined which room needed the kite the most.

The kitchen, where six Anchorites had to stay off the floor while Hamishand Glazemouth used a stove as a bucket and poured flames everywhere? Or perhaps the study, where the surrounded Hancock twins were putting down Dare’s mummies by squashing their heads between the covers of massive Bickyplot books? Then there was the shackleram made out of standing clocks and portraits currently rampaging across multiple floors, able to slink between them at the opening like an inverting inchworm, its rider Voluptogast cackling whether she sat atop it or dangled beneath by one claw.

The wagon detachment also had the misfortune of seeing the progress the poured hearts were making in the construction of bodies and minds capable of higher reasoning without higher decency.

One such heart was nearly complete, a sapling to the more traditional Bickyplot oak: it staggered about on a flimsy body like a broken umbrella, catching items that fell off instead of integrating properly, forcing them back into place. Studded with the precisest knives, brown bottles of acrid odor, balled-up black clothing, and a set of complicated scales, perhaps it was hoping to become Bickering Hall’s undertaker, as it looked like there would be plenty of death in the near future.

The scales were shifting, becoming its head, eyes appearing in the links of the chains that held up trays ridged with serrated interlocking teeth. But before it could extract any human organs and weigh them, it was assaulted by Emperor the anatimal, battered to the precipice of the collapse and then slapped into a fall.

Its trajectory put it directly over the Liberty Bell, brought closer now that it had to be heard inside the innermost closed closet. It struck, letting freedom ring. The would-be Bickyplot bounced off, scales twisted and inert, but the bell had been thrown back into pendulum motion. Its attendants had to catch it before it could swing and use up another precious round of melodious artillery. Holding it aloft and stilling its clapper, they saw the crack had widened again.

The dropped juvenile Bickyplot was cut open, its heart speared dead. Its ring of the bell was a minor boon to those battling indoors, while simultaneously a blow to their morale. Yes, every heart that heard it scattered or stalled, every Bickyplot dropped the piece of furniture they wielded on their toe, but the humans could hear the crack widening. When the very ideal of freedom fell to pieces, what could they possibly do in its stead?

Better to fight their hardest while the bell merely leaked hope. Those who had planned to go with Kidd into the other world, and been sidetracked by the indoor migration of the conflict, fought with the most determination, awash with unexpected relief at not experiencing what Blueberry had described as ‘having your mind poured out of a chalice and into a bag with twenty holes’.

Edward Rutledge II was with Pony Clark, Sassafras Whipple, and two others. Together they battled Blacknib Bileby in the upper west wing, where stood the window and balcony to the vomit sluice previously used to infiltrate a Bickering Hall that wasn’t missing its face. Each human had a weapon, yet they were still outnumbered by Bileby’s black tentacles. Myriad suction cups ripped the advantages from their hands and stowed them away inside the open bowl of his head.

The Bickyplot wasn’t using his brain for anything but storage, so Edward vowed to do the opposite. He made a show of being the closest, waved his bayonet around without having the blade spin up. Crucially, it remained charged. Blacknib took the bait, grabbing it out of his hands with a tentacle and dropping it into the ink where his octopus head swam. The current instantly spread throughout, electrocuting him to the point that the inky solution boiled and steamed.

“Heave!” Rutledge shouted, slamming into their enemy’s midsection and pushing. The others joined in. Thus Bileby stumbled in a backward stupor, out the window, over the vomit bucket, and down a sluice that was plenty lubricated. Quickly the monster found his ink was replaced with a concoction thirteen parts individual sick. By the time he slid and crashed into the ground the fluid was so thick and cloudy that it blinded him, leaving him to wander about the grounds until his tentacles could bail enough of it out to wipe the glass clear.

No time to celebrate for Rutledge, announced the shackleram galloping down the hall toward them, ridden by Lady Devalming, rather salaciously so, her normal porcelain-bone mask replaced by one bearing enormous walrus tusks.

Retreating to the left would send them sliding down the vomit sluice as well, a fate technically preferable to death, but which none of the Anchorites elected to take. The right was a wall already suffering the shackleram’s scrapes a short distance away. That left retreat. Rutledge hoped to produce an idea as clever as his last, realizing too late that nothing was coming to him, and with no Franklin kite present to shoot it into his mind he had to turn tail and run.

Not fast enough, it turned out. The crashing crunch of the shackleram’s footfalls thundered all the way to his back, up it, on his neck. When it made contact he briefly closed his eyes, assuming it was all over. That still seemed reasonable when he opened them, as he now appeared to be shoved in a coffin, arms forced across his chest thanks to the tight space.

Bickyplots would never bury a human so respectfully, he realized. If he’d truly woken up after a defeat at their hands he would’ve been shoved into a jug of mold in the cellar somewhere, to putrefy for consumption at a later date; that was if they didn’t flay him to make riding gloves. So where was he? A pendulum jabbed him in the back. Ah, a clock. He’d been scooped up inside a grandfather clock armoring the shackleram.

The golem seemed to recognize this at the same time, as the wood groaned, closing in on all sides. The jab in his back became a stab. Rutledge spun around while he still had the room, wrapping both hands around the pitted brass pendulum and wrenching it free so he could jam it into the sides and forestall the compaction. For the moment it held, but he couldn’t put enough force into his back to bust the clock open, and no one would hear his screams over the autodemolition of a shackleram’s canter.

Had they held out long enough? Surely long enough for freedom to ring once more! Where, oh where, was Blueberry Kidd?

She wasn’t in the music hall, where Fool’s Gold Floyd was trapped, those he had led already fallen, between Xylofont Phanny-upon-Twone and Licketysplit Godswallop. The latter had disgorged a vile heap of hearts while keeping his own, his body still well animated despite his head now being a collar of ragged meaty strips. They’d never found that particular Bickyplot’s eyes, always assuming he navigated by avoiding the insults and blows hurled his way.

Floyd learned that wasn’t true. Godswallop was tracking his movement perfectly; it didn’t matter that he’d avoided running into any of the arcane instruments cluttering the chamber. Since his silence was worthless, it now seemed prudent to scramble under the biggest one regardless of noise made.

What he tried to use as cover looked like an overturned canoe, hull overgrown with domed bells instead of barnacles. Its chimes sounded like coins jangling inside his skull, a terrible distraction, not quite as bad as the pile of debris under the canoe with him that grabbed at his uniform.

It was a quarter-formed fresh Bickyplot, trying to hide long enough to build a body out of sinew and floor scraps, then becoming the undignified pet of the others crawling about on all fours. This ghoulish dream had to be defended; it flopped onto Floyd to wrestle him out from under the instrument.

He might’ve beaten it, but not with two fully fledged foes closing in. Only reinforcements could save him, and he didn’t require them to have a mind of their own. Tin horse Workhenry answered his growled prayers, making such a ruckus upon entry that it distracted all three enemies. Riderless, the notice animating it torn, Workhenry was like a wild stallion, crashing into one instrument after another, some of their death rattles loud enough to kill other instruments nearby in a chain reaction that could technically be called the playing of a scale.

“No one composes in here but me!” Xylofont screeched, tugging on the metallic leaves of his wiry head most likely to serve as ears. He lunged at the horse, vastly overestimating his strength thanks to their difference in size. Workhenry’s thrashing tossed the Bickyplot off, where its hooves proceeded to flatten his head before twisting its screaming structure into a snare.

Fool’s Gold saw this as an opportunity, the horse momentarily still enough to mount. He bashed his quarter-formed enemy with something that split its strings between two necks, then used Workhenry’s haunches to frog-jump onto its back.

“Ow!” Xylofont yelled at the twang of his cranial fibers snapping. Fool’s Gold tried desperately to control the horse, but the tear in its drafting muddled every command, partial obedience accompanied by further flaring of its simulated fury. The young man’s plan changed to holding on more than attacking.

Aiming Workhenry’s bucking kicks would have been impossible if not for such massive ungainly targets. The first one launched Licketysplit into a giant drum skin that tore and swallowed him. The next one, that actually connected, threw Xylofont across the hall and into a pile of dented and discarded horns, some of which sounded without breath in them.

A few steps had to be deferred to the crawling one, which grasped at the horse’s legs in a bid to summit it and attack Floyd again. Deterring it was trivial, but by the time he had Godswallop had snuck up again. Another kick. Another instrument exploding in a cacophony, volume so piercing that the Anchorite felt blood trickling out of his ears. Xylofont. Another kick. Another wince from the stabbing pain of their hideous music.

The tin horse had the strength, its rider the resolve, and pounce after pounce made it clear how little they mattered. Hooves were blunt instruments; bludgeoning a Bickyplot was far less effective than slicing, shocking, or burning them. Their flesh was indistinguishable from callused bruise in the first place, and the hollow interior provided plenty of space for the heart to absorb shock with its coiling tendrils. No matter how long Fool’s Gold kept this up, the Bickyplots would keep bouncing back. His ears rang, and not with the toll of freedom.

Where, oh where, was Blueberry Kidd?

She wasn’t in Bickering Hall’s meat locker, not far off the kitchen, where Cadavawing Wighthall did battle with Specialist Honey Whipple. Most would have considered her alone, armed with anatimals. From her perspective it was an army against an emptied and desecrated Independence Hall.

Blocks of ice were stacked to the walls, each bearing a notice ordering them not to melt. Slabs of stiff beef from opera worms hung on serrated golden hooks like earlobes torn by weighty jewelry. They bounced about as Honey’s spherical steed barreled through them. She hadn’t bred the giant cow udder anatimals, but the boy who had must have copied her own techniques, a theory confirmed by how readily the teats she used as reins responded to her yanks.

Wighthall wouldn’t expect her to dismount, so she rolled forward and made the udder leap with the proper application of pressure, giving the impression she had heaved and thrown the gargantuan milk bag over her shoulder. It would have knocked the bickyplot to the cold foggy floor if he had not collided with worm beef that went swinging instead. His counterattack was barbed.

“Are you the only human who treats their prisoners so poorly? Your hospitality is wanting.” It was still strange to hear his mewling, supplicating tone, borne of the personality shift of several hundred beheadings, but she reminded herself it made little difference in regard to his actions. The change was largely an adaptation to survive captivity, a ruse.

“You’re not a prisoner anymore,” she fired back, dipping a hand into her uniform to armor it in cat claw and venom-bearing snake fang anatimals.

“What are these niceties I keep using but a prison?” he seemed to lament as he stroked the outer walls of his head. “This is isn’t the architecture of my people. I’ve been beaten into good manners by your clever block-knocker. Woe unto me, the victim of your trespass.”

“I know what’s inside that head of yours,” she said icily, outclassing their frozen surroundings, “nothing but empty space.”

“There you go abusing me again, after I’ve been nothing but helpful!” The Bickyplot barreled toward her, boots crunching urchins of ice. Never had so petite a human so firmly held her ground against one of them, throwing open her coat and spraying myriad anatimals much as she had against the Bickyplot’s absurd uvula.

Wighthall managed to arrest his momentum enough to respond, grabbing a segment of opera worm and pulling it in front as shield. Most of the anatimal blast struck it and burrowed into the tissue. Honey faltered, plastered a look of dread on her face.

“Aha! Now I’ll show you a thing or two about being a good host!” He strode forward, but Specialist Whipple’s fear was already wiped away to make room for the piercing whistle she issued. It stopped her opponent in befuddlement, the whistle’s true target suffering no such thing through muffling meat.

All the anatimals lodged in his shield immediately tunneled their way back out and sprang off again, an arc of them hitting the back of Wighthall’s head, breaking through his windows and invading the hollow of the miniature Independence Hall. From there they ran rampant, if tumbling end over end, antennae over mandible, could be called running.

“Please, wipe your feet!” Cadavawing howled, grabbing his head, shaking this way and that to try and dislodge them, succeeding only in disturbing the hornets inside the nest, and in bashing a pendulum of worm beef that cam back with the same force, knocking him into Honey. The pair stumbled into three stacks of ice at different heights, to where Honey became pinned flat against the lowest and the Bickyplot braced himself on one of the higher sides.

“Get off of me you ogre!” she demanded, pushing against his weight fruitlessly.

“I’m not on you! But he is!” The Bickyplot smacked the back of his own head, forcing open mouthy doors and expelling a tethered chunk of viscera that landed wetly on Honey’s cheek. It stood, accustomed to balance on stirring flesh, and sauntered to the precipice of the girl’s eye, where it stared down into her soul like someone about to tread upon the fingers of a foe hung off a cliff.

“Not another one,” she growled at this Cadavula reborn. An attempted thrash earned her nothing, and her next whistle only made it worse. While it successfully summoned the udder back from the recesses of hung meat, all it could do on its own was press up against them, pinning Wighthall as well as its master.

The Bickyplot proper no longer had his wits about him, as anatimals could be seen chasing them through busted windows. Soon their hunt would extend down into the body, where the heart hid, and another battle would begin. The distraction was sufficient to keep the body from acting, but Cadavula had a fraction of a mind of its own, moving more fiercely than the first one they’d encountered, due not just to its freshness. Those defensive manners suppressed the Bickyplot’s irritation, stored it all away in his secret sharp tongue. Now Cadavula could express it with the claws emerging from its fleshy purple fists. Honey was hopelessly stuck as it began to strike her face, lashing and gouging over and over again, until her best counteroffensive was making it slip in her own blood.

Where, oh where, was Blueberry Kidd?

Continued in the Finale