(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour)

Work the Ass

“I could give it a good jab,” Elizabug proposed, this time feasible despite that being her suggestion for most things: part of the philosophy that if a problem couldn’t be solved with a prodding stick or a whacking stick it couldn’t be solved at all and was better treated as a feature of the natural landscape.

“No no,” Darnette said as they both stood just out of its reach. When it extended its claws that reach was increased, forcing them to take another step away from the hole in the wall they hoped to be their portal into the main convention hall of Stained Atlas. “A hungry cat with this many prospective meals about will be an impatient creature. Give him a moment; he’ll grow bored of not murdering us and wander away.”

Tapping her foot in her own impatience might have given the myrmidon away, so she kept still, trying to enjoy the light breeze from the feline’s swipes. Only its arm fit through the hole in the wall, so they were in no danger. Thrice the deadly paw retracted so an eye could peer inside, but the pair were stood at an angle safely out of sight.

The team’s nerves had been steeled against the possibility of cats. Not just cats. Mousers. Natural hunters, domesticated until they didn’t want to be, cruel and aloof in their play, they made ideal enforcers at the boundaries of Little Wars, capable of spotting, capturing, and digesting deserters before they were even missed.

Only the most reliable had been brought to Stained Atlas, by various countries and interests. These were elite mousers capable, sometimes by magic, of knowing exactly who they were and were not permitted to maim and/or eat. The mouser lanes ran between the larger battlefields built into the floor, as opposed to the skirmish variety made from converted billiards tables, so any small beings that walked them were fair game. And anything sniffed inside a mouse hole.

The claws currently missing Van Winkle and Inarug by half an inch belonged to Edwin the Persian, here as part of Britain’s representatives. His mixed coloring and flat face endeared him to the ladies of high society, but behind the askew eyes of an idiot pike ran the cool mind of a prolific and practiced murderer of chickens and eggties alike.

Ukridge Farms had been his haunt, and one of those he had haunted was none other than Zamshy Lamshy, the vengeful cockatrice that had briefly usurped Hestia’s smoldering hearth-throne in Minimil. Having escaped alive, the creature returned to his home coop and took it over with his new husband, promptly turning out all the mousers that had terrorized his family. Edwin was scooped up by a ratcatcher and pressed into the service.

Darnette was right about him. It quickly stopped making sense that he would paw at nothing behind a wall when there was easier prey about, so the Persian retracted his invitation to death and sauntered off, quietly remembering the smell that had drawn him to the hole in the first place, for later.

After a few minutes it became apparent the cat was not doubling back, so the myrmidon and the homunculus emerged under a table, next to its draping cloth, much like gargantuan theater curtains to them. If their assessment of the layout was correct, the buffet spread for the eastern half of the building was up there, and was an excellent point to stowaway among socialites their own size as they were set down by their human transporters and picked up again.

“Up you go,” Elizabug instructed Darnette, alongside a tap on the carapace between her shoulders. Without complaint the homunculus wrapped her arms around the myrmidon, she was very good at wrapping her arms around people, like a friendly tree growing around you, and together they began to climb. A myrmidon’s ant-like claws and strength made the task elementary, and the back half of the pin through Elizabug’s chest made a functional seat for her passenger.

Conversation was the only way to liven up each handful of cloth, so the bug woman made it clear it didn’t fatigue her more to speak, asking Darnette what it was that Hestia did not like about her that got her ass shoved into the Wicky Sticket.

“I’ve been a nuisance, that’s for certain,” the woman sighed, tossing her bouncy curls back and relaxing her neck, as if she expected Elizabug to have an ant’s third set of limbs and for her to use them to wash her hair. “Lately I’ve been so nervous, about the possibility of Rip waking from his long nap and tracking me down.”

“Why lately?”

“Sleep is like the weather. There are years where it’s typical, years where it’s more or less, years where it is strange. I have a sense of the global condition of sleep, thanks to my upbringing. Currently it is… disturbed.”

“People jaw that I is disturbed. Never paid much mind. What’s it mean for snoozers?”

“For one it means that cycles of sleep longer than those of man might be coming to a close. A bee wakes up and the consequence is a flower is visited. A man wakes up and an empire might rise. Scale that up once more and you get a workday that could change everything. Technically it has already happened. Did you hear that the king under the mountain has awoken?”

“I deal more in scuttlebutt. If its butt don’t scuttle it’s no concern of mine.”

“Well it’s a major development. He is called Frederick Barbarossa. Last time he was awake he did have an empire, a mighty one. I hear he’s quite large, larger than a man, so he might have giant in his ancestry. There was a tiff between gods and giants back then, and while the giants were defeated most of them did not die. They decided to sleep instead, under oceans and mountains, which are but bedding they can pull over their great heads.

Barbarossa slept, forsaking his empire. Men like that dream of little else, so he’ll want it back, and that’s just for breakfast!”

“You mean to say that we could be drownin’ in giants any sunshine nowsabout?”

“No… well… probably not. The world has seen stranger things than an early rise, but we’re talking the scale of the lithic age. Assuming Barbarossa is only part giant, it makes sense he would rouse first, and it could easily be another hundred years before the first full-blooded one casts off his mountain range quilt.”

“That’s a relief, almost cost me my appetite,” Elizabug said as she pulled them over the ledge, where there was plenty of cover to quickly scurry behind, perhaps less if the myrmidon decided on a snack: bowls of chilled and cubed fruit, fried shrimp fritters, caviar with spreadable cheese, and a punch bowl so big the both of them could easily bathe in its ladle.

Now it was time for Darnette to take the initiative. Her partner kept a hold of one homunculus shoulder, that way she could be pulled back behind the punch bowl if any perceptive eyes turned their way. Thus Darnette was free to closely examine every human milling about, and hopefully find a target on which they could stowaway and gather information via party gossip.

Talk would have to give their target away, as Hestia didn’t call it the Hidden Body for nothing. It carried no flag. It did not play its national anthem as its Little Wars pieces were unloaded and deployed from a converted pet carrier. None of its terms or intentions were declared openly, always whispered over a threateningly tight handshake moments before the match that would see them achieved.

The agents of the Hidden Body had absolutely nothing in common, aside from being among the large. Two other recent conventions, each only half the size of Stained Atlas, had been partly derailed by sudden announcements that the Hidden Body was about to be a competitor. It was always after the match was locked in, conditions only alterable by the two present participants. Thing was, these matches were supposed to belong to countries that swore up and down they’d never heard of the Hidden Body.

Spain, Italy, and Japan had all had matches hijacked, betrayed by their own agents, who played perfectly dumb after the fact, never giving up why they had instead fought Little Wars on behalf of a country that appeared on no map. Jailing them and torturing them both achieved nothing.

And in those three matches the Hidden Body had won. Concessions in trade now belonged to it, without any indication what kind of goods would be traded or in what volume. Additionally, its agents now had carte blanche to serve in Little Wars without any repercussions, charges, or extradition, officially recognized by a third of the heavy-hitting parts of the globe. Wielding outsize influence on the game of warfare when of diminutive size yourself was the role of Minimil, so Hestia had responded to this growing threat swiftly.

“There,” Darnette said, pointing. Elizabug’s antenna turned to track what the finger did. Both were honed on an exuberant young woman in a dress so large it almost made her hairdo look within an acceptable size range. But it wasn’t. It was a beehive found in an abandoned rusted out automobile with an effective pollination zone of twenty square miles. It was taller than most wedding cakes. It was, this time quite literally, a luxury hotel.

All the rage in Europe since the first years of Little Wars, ladies brought on the arms of politicians, generals, and grand masters of game were often the facilities for and steeds of ornamental socialites and celebrities who were, on average, no taller than a finger puppet. Darnette’s selection had built into her towering hair a ringing balcony, several bedrooms, a kitchen, servants’ quarters, and a tower from which a Lilliputian belted out opera at their full volume, just a whisper of class added to her mount’s aura.

“Why her?” Elizabug asked, as they didn’t have a good view of those little folk milling about on her woven balcony, who would be their next hurdle if they managed to board the young lady.

“She’s starving, so she’ll be over here any moment, but I can see she’s not the sort to let anyone see her even nibble a scone. She’ll try and fill that space with punch instead.” The girl turned, almost mechanically to avoid upsetting her passengers, even more mechanically thanks to the segmented whalebone support rod feeding through her hair, flat against her neck, and into the assemblage of wires, knots, and lattices that kept her inflated and gliding. Her latest practiced shuffle was indeed toward the punch bowl. “I expect getting herself a glass will be a more involved process than a giraffe drinking at the waterhole, so we’ll have plenty of time to get on.”

“Get on me first darlin’,” Elizabug instructed, pulling Darnette’s arm back and around her shoulders once more.

“Hoo! Riding you is quite fun you know.”

“That’s what they all say.” Too smooth to climb, the exterior of the bowl itself couldn’t be their way up, so Elizabug kept in its shadow, unable to stand on all fours like most myrmidons because of her pin, but still so capable of loading power into her legs that Darnette could feel it through the pin as a rising tension.

Once beside the table the girl had to rotate ninety degrees. Bend her knees twenty degrees. Extend her arm completely. Tilt. Grab the ladle. Transport two loads to a neighboring glass, without spilling a drop. Tilt upright. Rotate twelve degrees. Tilt back down. Claim glass. Tilt back up. Retract arm. Extend knees. Rotate ninety degrees back. Shuffle out of the loading area. And finally, sip.

It was just after the arm extension step that Elizabug had sprung from the shadow and latched to the underside of the girl’s sleeve, climbing hand over hand and at an angle that would make any human climber miserable just before it made them dead. The pair was on the dress’s back before the second delivery of punch to the glass, and had climbed over the most recessed corner of the balcony’s sterling hairpin railing just in time for the knees to extend to their full height and give them their best view of Stained Atlas yet.

Their ride was only one of several, and the others could be seen drifting through the crowd like dollhouses pushed across an ice rink. Occasionally miniature fireworks were launched from these occupied hairstyles and top hats, to make sure the person carrying them was getting enough attention.

Pleasant distractions these were, as the horrors had already begun between and beneath the people. Little Wars was active on several boards and tables. They had their own little fireworks, only red for a moment, then lingering charcoal, wisps of acrid stink. Mousers pounced whenever anything left the board. Referees tooted on whistles, chopped and swept with their hands, guillotine shadows lining up with the spaces on the boards they oversaw. Elizabug and Darnette only heard opera, and the sipping of punch.

While they were distracted by the dissonance between sights and sounds, someone emerged from the hair tunnel behind them with a pair of hedge clippers. The young woman’s efforts were only half the battle in keeping her look pristine; some of the other half belonged to this Lilliputian hair gardener, whose own hair was unkempt, filled with nothing but air and potential. A lacquer of sweat kept it out of her eyes as she searched the curve of the tunnel for strays and grays. Shick. There, back to immaculate, no thanks to that punch-fetching maneuver, which was well beyond the recommendations of the hair architect. Her sweep of the whole facility would have to be complete, ear to ear, before she could retract back to the card game with the other service staff, deep in the coif, where the young lady’s scalp warmed their feet. Sheathing her shears, about to move on, she spotted two more strays.

“Hey, you two! What are you doing up here? You’re not with us.” Darnette and Elizabug turned; the gardener noticed the myrmidon’s dangerous pin when it swung wide, dangerous not just because it was technically an unauthorized hairpin nowhere on the manifest, but also because of the greasy food skewered and bunched along its length. One wrong move and she’d have to break out the shampooing can. The shampooing can was too heavy.

“We’re with somebody,” the myrmidon said, as if saying leaves were green. “It’s just a wee sightseein’ miss.”

“We have a guard you know.” She reached behind her back, into a nook of a floppy overloaded pack, and drew both a dandruff trowel and a long-necked comb that might’ve had sharp teeth. “Not that I need to call them.”

“Woah, hold your seahorses miss.” Elizabug approached, choosing to brandish not a weapon from off the rack of her pin, but a sleeve of cinnamon honey crackers. “We’re with Minimil! My friend here just wants to jaw with the uptighties for a while, talk shop. I’d be tickled under my exo to jaw with you and yours. Fancy a biscuit?” The gardener’s pause resulted in her putting away her makeshift weapons. Technically this wasn’t her responsibility, seeing as they weren’t rooted in the young lady’s crown.

“Minimil eh? Suppose I shouldn’t interfere with any Little Wars business. My business is keeping out of Little Wars business.” The sleeve was extended toward her, and already open, very easy to smell, and smelling much better than the cloying perfume concentrated in the woven confines of the servants’ quarters. “Come on down,” she said with a flick of her own unruly hair. “Nobody will notice crumbs in there.”

“You’re set?” the myrmidon asked the homunculus as the gardener led her down the tunnel.

“There’s the game,” Darnette said of the battlefields below, “I’m set,” she looked across the balcony to where the socialites were clustered with their own drinks and chatter, singling out one Lilliputian with a mustache of silver needles, “and there’s my match.”

After splitting up the homunculus inserted herself into the party seamlessly, gliding behind the attention of most of the women, drawing the eyes of most of the men, landing right next to her target. Up came a red reservoir: the young lady lifting her punch glass to serve her decorative associates. The mustached man dipped a crystal goblet.

“Would you be so kind as to pour me one?” Darnette asked, voice softened into a wind, brushing like autumnal lace doilies. About to ask who she was, his words were stalled with one look at her face, transfixing him as if he’d been screwed into the balcony. The punch reservoir was retreating; he almost missed his chance. The seesawing lunge to both grab a second goblet off a passing tray and fill it nearly took him over the edge. Darnette had to pull him back.

“Oh thank you,” he spluttered. Then there was a sudden need to justify. “Didn’t spill a drop!” Soon as he said it, he spotted a droplet rolling down the side of her glass, and in a panic to prove himself right he licked it off the side. His eyes went wide as soon as he realized that was the wrong move.

“No, thank you,” Darnette said, smile never faltering. She took the glass, holding it where he had licked, and sipped from it. Men didn’t want to be shamed, not in the open anyway, only in their dreams. Undercutting their fears undercut everything that kept them from instantly falling in love. “I’m Darnette.”

“Looeynine Tradfife,” he managed to say before looking around chaotically in search of someone. “I’m here with my daughter… widower! I’m a widower. More on the industry side of things. My little Carlottle is the real chandelier socialite.” Just then he found her, sparkling in the crowd, Darnette able to follow his gaze.

Chandeliers at parties such as these were often hanging low, so the guests could see their hosts’ stable of little folk waltzing in what was to them a circular ballroom of crystal. They often wore excessive jewelry, turning themselves into animated additions to the fixture’s radiance. Carlottle Tradfife was no exception, her ears loaded with diamonds that stretched the lobes, a necklace upon her breast that could cap a magnate’s molar.

“She’s lovely,” Darnette said before turning back to the convention, leaning her own breast over the railing to reel Looeynine’s gaze back that way. He took the bait. “I’m more interested in what’s going on out there though. My country Minimil has much stake in the matches taking place this week.”

Their deployment of honesty was questionable, but the whole purpose of the ghosts of the Haeve-Maen seemed to be deniability, and if they failed Hestia could go ahead and denounce them. Darnette had little use for lies, awash in fantasy as she had been most of her life. No affection of hers was a lie. Unlocking the affection between herself and any other being was her truest power.

“Oh Minimil, you don’t say! What luck. I said I was on the industry side, and that’s the side of the converted pet carriers industry. We buy them, we refurbish them, and now twenty percent of the armies here at Stained Atlas are sleeping in them. Business in Minimil eludes us however. You wouldn’t have any connections on that front would you, Miss Darnette?”

“I do, but mostly because I’ve just forged a connection with you Looeynine.” She giggled and sipped again, luxuriating in what he had provided her. For his part he forgot he had his own drink, swallowed air with an open mouth instead. “But I could ask around. Allow me to practice my questioning skills on you?”

“Yes, of course, happy to help.” With her free arm she took his bicep, leaned him further over the hairpin railing, so much so they bent it outward, anchored as it was only in tightly woven locks.

“Somewhere out there… is the Hidden Body.”

“Ahh,” Mr. Tradfife said, slightly crestfallen, though not because of her, “that band of spies. I know them mostly as people who specifically aren’t clients. Taking up space here and borrowing other nations’ carriers. Disgraceful.”

“Then you and Minimil are aligned, which aligns the two of us further,” she said with some rapidity, pulling him downhill emotionally. “We’d like to be rid of them too, and if you could assist I’m sure there’s a medal in it for you, and in the reflection on that medal a handshake, the closing of a deal brokered by you, transferring several top of the line carriers to our fair barnyard city.”

“It would be an honor.” He finally remembered his drink, if only to put something in his mouth while he found the next thing to say. “But they are as hidden to me as anyone else. What is it called, the desk-globe strategy? Yes, that’s the name. Are you familiar?” She shook her head, only to let him explain it. It wasn’t a lie; ‘familiar’ could mean so many things. “It’s this idea that, assuming Little Wars is the law of the land, nations need not be the best at it. A religion could try their hand, or a corporation, as some have, but the dream is for one person to master the game, and thus the world. They would have the whole planet at their fingertips, like a globe on the corner of their desk.”

“That’s what the inventor was trying, I suppose, that challenging gnat.”

“Yes,” he agreed with a nod, “and it has worked out about as well for the other would-be tyrants. I don’t think it can work. One person with every nation at their neck won’t have the room to breathe. But… a small organization perhaps. Something that diffuses the risk, where the members can compete in visibility to shift the thousand knives and garrotes to their fellows, that could ruin Little Wars, the world, and themselves.”

“Do you think the Hidden Body is such an organization?”

“This is all armchair politics mind you,” he tempered, but one look at the fascination in the boundless cloud-white of her eyes turned it back to bluster, “but, of course, Little Wars is armchair warfare, so why shouldn’t I follow my instincts? Yes, I do think so. In fact, I’ve got a suspect, and they’re here.” He used a finger peeled from his glass to point out a very tall and fat man who was watching one of the matches, not competing. “See him there?”

“How could I not? I imagine when he was born the whole hospital saw him.”

“And that’s part of his disguise, believe it or not. That’s Sunday, of the European Dynamiters. Fa-” He was about to ask if she was familiar again, but Darnette’s expression answered him, urged him to never stop parading around the arm of the chair. “They might call themselves the European Anarchist Council. Men who want ruination. They think all structure is a cage, and they’re too thick to recognize their only pleasure exists in tearing it apart. Once they’ve destroyed everything else they’ll destroy themselves.

Their names were once a bit of silly secrecy, but after Little Wars they came out in the open, the wider open that is. This hydra always has seven heads, each named after a day of the week. If there’s a dominant head it’s Sunday, and might I say the meatiest neck for the rest of the world to chew on. I think I saw Thursday and Friday here as well.

They have no little army, on paper anyway, but they do show up to these things, claiming they’re only gambling on the outcomes. They make a lot of claims, for one, they claim to be anarchists, which they are.” This time the confusion on her face did not have to be amplified. He glanced down and chuckled. “Yes, very silly, I know.

It was their thinking, before they revealed themselves, that being a loud street corner anarchist was very good cover. Nobody takes them seriously as anarchists because all they ever do is shout and pontificate; they never take action. Thus, by shouting their anarchistic intentions, they are completely free to plot their slightly different anarchist intentions.

“Anyway, what I know for sure is that they like dynamite. Little Wars is good for them, because it means smaller bombs for smaller targets. Saves on complexity, resources, concealment, you name it. I’ve headed up several refurbishings of bombed-out carriers. You have to replace the lining entirely to get rid of the smoke smell.

The Dynamiters could be your Hidden Body, if you’ll allow speculation. These kinds of shenanigans, where a mask is pulled off to reveal an identical face, seem firmly in their wheelhouse.”

“Very interesting theory,” Darnette said, making note to communicate all of this through the lady of the lake to the other ghosts as soon as she was able. “It makes me wonder if I am in the wrong place though. I don’t suppose our carrier,” she tapped the railing daintily, “will be doing much flirting with such aged men with beards for fuses.”

“No, no,” Looeynine said. His eyes caught another interesting figure, inevitable given that he had just taken to one of the stages and was readying to make an announcement. “I imagine we’re about to head in that direction. Our ride, pride of Peru, has long set her heart on that young man right there, Prince Rudolf VI of Ruritania.” As if misconstruing his statement atop her head as one of her own thoughts, the young lady surged forward, toward the magnetic prince.

The closer they got the greater the level of detail on the not-quite-as-young man. His cinnamon suit was boldly parenthesized by large black lapels, which were then italicized with a pattern of creeping golden vines. Wavy slicked-back hair, crested with the foam of a gray stripe, gave him the look of someone who had just dove into a sparkling lagoon. His emerald eyes were down, checking that not a hair in his angular mustache was out of place, and that the microphone was in working order.

His Peruvian admirer was beneath him, in the front row of his audience as he polished his first words with silken tongue. Nervously she sipped her punch, forgetting to hoist it up for her passengers, several of whom scoffed in disappointment and returned to the dance floor with empty glasses.

“Good day to you Stained Atlas,” the prince began, gesticulating with a cup of his own, which appeared to be empty. “You might expect me to say I’m open to negotiations. After all, Ruritania is spread thin on the board of Little Wars. Our tin soldiery are like a fine cheese that way; we can’t stand to see them go to waste.

You’re all salivating, as usual, ready to pick me apart with tines of fine print on a pact, because you know I’ll endure it to avoid playing the game proper. Well not this time you vultures.” His words drew more attention; it was clear this was not a typical address for such a convention. “This time Ruritania has an ally. Their experience in skulduggery, in back alley assault and robbery, and their equivalents on the national stage, where I currently stand mind you, is so invaluable here that it gives even me the confidence to go instead to the battlefields.

Yes, I see you there. That’s not a woman staring at me dumbfounded ladies and gentlemen, that’s half the Balkans. She was so looking forward to defeating us; now she will have to lose in less than an hour’s time. Lose to Ruritania and… the Hidden Body.”

Looeynine choked on the last of his punch, badly enough to kill him, if not for the expert woman’s touch of Ms. Van Winkle, who gave it the form of a slap to the back that cleared his airways.

“I might be in the right place after all,” she commented, eyes nowhere near her companion’s rupturing cherry of a face. She knew he was embarrassed to be so wrong so quickly, but he needn’t be, as she still did not discount his theory. The prince had just revealed himself as another collaborator, but not the Hidden Body itself. She caught a glimpse of Sunday, simple given his mountainous height and girth, to see he too was paying close attention, without a hint of displeasure.

Prince Rudolf kept speaking, having finished with his informative statements however. Beyond his collaboration he exposed nothing but his desire to be challenged, issuing some of his own to specific members of the crowd, most of whom were unsettled enough to wander off rather than engage. The significance was not lost on them, as this was the first time the Hidden Body had exercised a degree of direct control over a head of state rather than a lower military representative.

“Our enemy grows bolder,” Darnette mulled. A tremble earthquake from their mount got her thinking; there might not be a better opportunity to address a collaborator directly. Once they were back on the floor, among the mousers, they’d have to do this all over again to merely achieve eye level. Mr. Tradfife could again be of use, she decided, especially now that he was breathing almost regularly. “He’ll be stepping down as soon as he’s finished Looeynine. I tell you I must speak with him. Can we, hmm, can we get everyone up here on the same page enough to inform our veranda of the importance of it?

If I can have a word with him, state to state, I can then fade into the background and allow her to take over. She’ll have an excellent opportunity to wrap him around her little finger.” Off balance, but not enough for paralysis, he led her onto the dance floor where they singled out his daughter, who displayed no awareness of what had just transpired and had to be informed, though she was appropriately stunned once she absorbed the information.

The unwieldy diamonds on her ears waggled as she flitted back and forth, tapping shoulders, whispering, giggling, until the group of socialites was united enough to take a collective action. Woven discreetly into Veranda’s hair, as Darnette had expeditiously named the giant Peruvian girl, was a copper funnel her decorations could speak into that would amplify their voices and pipe them straight down to her ear.

She was told of the opportunity, and of her stately stowaway. Darnette knew she would cooperate before she responded, as their ship adjusted course and picked up speed. Veranda did not first target the prince, aware of protocol as she was, instead finding one of his assistants she already recognized by sight, to whom she conveyed the offer for Minimil to speak with Ruritania.

About this time Rudolf was stepping down from his tirade, chest still so full of bluster that he might’ve stepped instead into the air and drifted like a hot air balloon. The assistant buzzed straight to him, took his ear like a letter from a mail slot, and somehow conveyed the relevant details in what looked like no more than five words. His nod was their ticket, and Veranda’s surge at being waved over the voyage.

Off to one wall there were curtained communication booths bearing radios and telephones, and next to them open stalls with mechanical seats and standing devices meant to facilitate interaction between large and small. Prince Rudolf held out his hand and smiled, ushering Veranda into one of them.

Once both were squeezed in, seated face to face, she began fiddling with a tiered lens on a brass arm, positioning it at the edge of hair’s railing. Darnette was rushed over and placed by Looeynine, Carlottle, and half the dancers’ hands on her back, though they didn’t need to be shooed away, as they understood what was at stake when the handsome prince’s capturing eye came into focus on the horizon like a harvest moon. Veranda’s little finger pushed another one of those brass funnels up beside the homunculus as Rudolf held a corded bell to his ear.

“Greetings Prince Rudolf of Ruritania,” Darnette said, hands behind her back. When there was little to offer, it was best to offer one’s self, and portion it accordingly. If he gave her one of the inches she wanted he could then have the gift of seeing her immaculate hands. Men were always looking to be fed, and both Darnette and Veranda knew that only amateurs thought of that as a purely literal sentiment.

“And to you, little Miss Minimil. What should I call you?” His voice for a beautiful woman was different from his voice for the crowd. She heard an intense hunger fully tamed. Yet no one could domesticate their desires perfectly until after they’d been entangled with a woman of someone’s dreams. Darnette winked at him, in one of her special ways, making it a statement. “Wink?”

“And a nudge dear prince, into an alliance. My nation is very interested in your ally. We could do incredible work… together.” Her invisible feet shuffled her closer, made her larger in the lens. Apart from her effervescent radiance, none of Darnette’s features separated her from a Lilliputian, except for the degree to which her chest could heave, proportionally rivaling a magnificent frigatebird. Her language was stately while her simultaneous body language erupted with erythrismal love. If her powers of seduction were to project light, the lens between them would’ve lit his lips on fire.

“I’m afraid not.” The prince’s words stunned Veranda and all her civilized lice, Darnette included. No available man of any size, provided his interests were with women in the first place, had ever resisted her, not even initially. Automatically her suspicions were thrown to the Hidden Body, and her efforts, like the cock to her hips, doubled.

“You’re free to make the proposal,” she tempted, aura blushing. “I’m an excellent listener.” She read his expression, found a fox’s fed cruelty in his smirk and vacancy about the eyes. What could produce such a state? He looked as if he’d just consumed the last piece of chocolate cake in the universe, all the recipes swallowed by a black hole.

“What’s better than a proposal is an ultimatum,” he said, “which I’ve just given to the entire convention. Besides, I can tell you the Hidden Body has no interest at all in negotiating with Minimil. It strictly allies itself with the larger class in Little Wars.” That was information at least, filed away, but Darnette’s shame over this new kind of failure scalded the inside of her skin.

The last stops were pulled out: pupils dilated, weight balanced on big toes, breath fluffed like whipped egg whites, and sparkles dappling a pouted lip that could cushion and halt a runaway barge. Beside her, and beside himself, Looeynine grabbed his daughter’s handkerchief and fanned his collar, entirely unable to look away despite seeing her only in profile. Most of her effect on him came from just the back of one ear, and the veins within, which he assumed a divine artist had arranged the same way they arranged the tilt of the fiddleheads every dewy morning.

“Then perhaps just you and I could talk,” she suggested with puckering saccharinity, “one soul to another.” The look on his face didn’t falter.

“Miss Wink, the soul is best checked at the door in places like this,” Prince Rudolf said. It would wound most to promptly depart the booth without another word, so that was what he did. Darnette felt as if roots had grown into her sternum and then been ripped out. So this was the rejection felt by so many so much of the time. It was no wonder they retreated into fantasies and dreams to conjure up creatures like herself. She almost missed, avoiding the sensation by a hair’s breadth, the possessive assumptions of Rip.

Tears welled in her eyes, blurring Rudolf as he blended into the crowd; in a desperate bid to make herself useful to the mission she tried to focus and see something of value. The prince was approaching a head above the rest of the group. Was it Sunday, another man who might be part giant? Yes, who else. What was that familiar hue on his cuff? Familiar… Rexpommel!

She expected the comforting capture of Looeynine when she whirled around and tipped over, a demonstration that her powers had not left her, but it was Elizabug who got hold of her. If not for the myrmidon’s careful aim Darnette might have skewered herself on the pin.

“I’ve been jilted,” Darnette blubbered. With great presumption she pulled the cap off Elizabug’s head and covered her face with it.

“I saw. Let’s scurry off this lass before we draw more eyeballs.” Darnette did not speak; instead she crawled around to Elizabug’s back without letting her feet touch Veranda’s hair and sat in the saddle of the pin. Once positioned the pestilent tatterdemalion found the quickest path down to the girl’s dress, starting directly over the side.

“Uhh, that was Tradfife Carriers!” Looeynine shouted after her, since he’d missed the opportunity to give Darnette his card, and his heart. “We’re in the book!” She was gone, so he turned to his daughter. “She’ll ring. Won’t she?”

“You look ready to ring her,” Carlottle giggled, waggling her delicate fingers, empty ring finger most conspicuously. “Come enjoy the party Daddy, before she sulks and rolls us all to the filthy floor.”

…

Across the vast distance and brief walk that was the convention floor, Chessica and Jack were just inside the walls, crowded together with a swarm of sweaty Lilliputians stealing Little Wars with their eyes for entertainment. Thirty faces were scrunched up against that particular crack, collectively leaning back any time a mouser sauntered by.

The match on the field in front of them was between an army of gnomes in half-geode helmets and bright red fire myrmidons that could kill on that scale with a single sting. The watching homunculus knew who was going to win. Just five moves in, and through the battleboard’s cover of garden-mimicking mossy walls and artificial hedges, it was as clear to her as a prism.

Many of the others around her were betting on the fire ants, the represented countries not even mentioned. This was just a blood sport to them, gladiators confined to a grid just to give the audience time to make their wagers. Wrongly, as Chessica would assert. The gnomes would be victorious, 138 moves in when the one with the sapphire helmet used it to crush the final myrmidon head required for the referee to declare victory.

What would be overlooked by most analysts, be they drunken wall-crawlers or primped statesmen staring down magnifying monocles, was the playing field underneath the arranged landmarks: corkboard. Myrmidons rarely wore boots because of the utility of their claws, but cork gave them sticky footing, reducing the effectiveness of direct attacks, which they were already reliant upon since the crystal armor of the gnomes made their firearms all but worthless.

Really the fire myrmidons themselves were a liability as far as unit selection. Lesser strategists were swayed by their ferocity, their dramatic candied flame color, and their lethal poisons. Chessica knew they were much more comfortable fighters underground however, and always suffered in the harsh lights of a Little Wars field. And on top of that, what good was poison when the enemy army had a thirty-three percent chance of a possessed-object composition, meaning there was no blood or flesh to poison in the first place?

It was good for her ever-encroaching boredom that she wasn’t there to watch it play out. This was simply the best position to wait for an update from one of the other branches of the team. She’d successfully spread them throughout the convention center, even covering three different elevations. Jack and herself had the lowest, and from that wall far opposite the punch bowl they had the best access to the neutral lanes between the largest battlefields, where the small could pass unhindered without worry of giant feet that weren’t permitted to so much as touch the fields. Provided, of course, those small were authorized to use the lanes in the first place.

When the gnomes and ants were another twelve moves closer to their fate, Nimuwe provided them with all the information and guesses Darnette and Elizabug could give after their adventure aboard Veranda. The lady of the lake went completely unnoticed in the crowd, as nothing short of a cat wearing a mousing championship collar would alarm such a rabid hodgepodge.

“What do you make of it Jack?” she asked the Wonderlander, who was licking the back of one of his posters much more than necessary, like a dog at a sore. He stopped at her words, talking around his tongue without separating it.

“I wuthint lithining.”

“You know there isn’t much value to an agent of chaos when you’re primary effect upon my time is that I must repeat myself,” she criticized.

“You don’t have to repeat yourself, you have to repeat the wet lady,” he pointed out, words only clear because his arm had slowly dropped, apparently by a will of its own. The man always had a posture suggesting his limbs were about to dissolve their partnership and go their separate ways as bony inchworms.

“Point taken,” she said, suppressing a self-inflicted sting. She was trying to use several expressions with the word ‘point’ casually without suffering. In her old life, cocooned in the mind of a middle-aged man of cold calculus, everything was points, and having them taken was torture. Her world was bigger now, her game too, and her emotions had to expand if she was ever going to be anything more. After slathering on a coat of patience, she summarized.

“We’ve got an agent of the Hidden Body identified now: the prince of Ruritania. Darnette has already attempted to coax something out of him, but he was resistant to her charms, a serious blow to her team value.

It’s not clear if this is redemptive or not, that would require it to be true, but they’ve also got a suspect for the body itself, some man called Sunday. We can see him from here, look.” She pointed out the largest human in attendance.

“Not very hidden,” Jack pointed out.

“It might be the principle of hiding in plain sight, or some upper-level play involving dreamers and giants, but let’s not lose sight of our most immediate maneuvers Jack. Now that we’ve got targets we should split up and follow them, then work out how to get ahead of the Hidden Body’s plan and cut it off.”

“And what about our third target?” Her face swiveled to his, practically creaking like a rusty gate.

“What third target?”

“Oh you didn’t know?” he said with a grin that definitely had too many teeth; she counted. In Wonderland anatomy was frightfully inconsistent, and one’s insides only stayed that way if they were frightened. The girl Alice who had survived it had testified as such. She had continuously consumed size-changing foods to keep her organs from gaining personalities and religions that would cause them to seek independence. “Another player just announced they’re working with the body.”

“Who!? Where?”

“Ruanda by way of Belgium. Their agent is an African wearing a green shirt. I know this, by the way, because I was listening to the flats when the wet lady was yammering.” Jack reached into his ear and pulled out a coil of the same material he’d been posting on all the walls, then reinserted it. “Green shirt’s across the way, by the tables where the mucky-muck smalls are meeting.”

“I see,” Chessica said, trying and almost succeeding to take the development in stride. “The Hidden Body is making bigger moves here than ever before. Multiple representatives… We must assume the freshest one has the newest orders, or that the traces of those orders will be most obvious. We’re the closest Jack.” She pointed again, to something worse than the mountainous Sunday, though at the moment it just looked like an empty lane of floor, separated from Little Wars by bumps of black rubber lining. Out of her pocket came a vial, which she shook up and examined; it contained a bundle of thick gray hairs. “It’s time to work the ass magic once more.”

The ghosts of the Haeve-Maen had not been afforded an actual audience with Mustardseed in the early stages of Hestia’s plot, but she played a pivotal role nonetheless, ordered to take a wiry brush to her furry patches and hand over a quantity of hairs sufficient to transform an entire Little Wars match into a stampeding braying slime mold of miniature donkeys. Only a small portion of them were set aside to create and maintain the ghosts’ disguises aboard the ship, the rest intended as weapons of espionage easily concealed in Stained Atlas’s posturing and fanfare.

The fairies’ curse would once again serve as their disguise, indirectly this time, once Chessica and Jack found a suitable patsy. Deserving targets existed all over the convention, but those would require exposing themselves to the eyes and ears of the mousers, so they settled on the nearest war peepers who displayed ignoble action: a pair of Blefuscan scammers working the wagers of the crowd.

Like everyone there they had their own stories. One was drummed out of the crustacean-armored guard that staffed the seven sand castles. He was called Vobigong Cadshuck, and had the dishonor of being canned by the new sugar-coated management himself. Afterward he turned to a life of crime empowered by every shark tooth he could forage from the shores and repurpose into knives.

He was the muscle, and the serrated edges enhanced by it, to ‘Luckbucket’ Lily’s brains. She took wagers, one arm behind her back and obscured by a draping coat so none of her victims would notice she was wearing a hollowed rabbit’s foot as a gauntlet. Its inherent luck gave her the short end of the odds, allowing even the stubby rabbit claws to rake in the dough. Should anyone notice or take issue as they took her scruff, Vobigong was there, behind, a tooth from his double bandoleers of them to the back of their neck.

Chessica Tarkower parsed their routine in seconds, all while keenly aware that their names and lives were mostly escaping her. The situation, if efficiency was to be maintained, required they be treated as nothing more than pawns, which she acknowledged, finding herself bruised in that understanding.

When she had decided to switch sides it was not the occasional homunculus jump from left hemisphere to right; it was a leap between realms of being. Far from lateral, she saw it as enlightening ascendancy, the perspective that finally allowed her to see beyond the smallest of boards and most childish of rule sets.

The true game meant knowing every pawn was a person, and caring, so it irked her to be back to her old ways, and this time so physically that she was sneaking up behind Cadshuck just as he snuck behind someone else, wrapping her hand around his mouth and forcing him to aspirate a Mustardseed hair.

One day she would be the commander, sitting in Hestia’s war room inside World Drawer One, capable not only of knowing her tokens intimately but using that knowledge to everyone’s advantage. Until then, she had to settle for cocking her head at Jack, indicating to him the shadowy corner to which they should drag their latest acquisitions, as he had struck Luckbucket simultaneously, the double action of viper fangs.

Envenomed asses emerged with them from the shadows, through a sliver crack in the shoddy walls, between two mouser patrols, very difficult to time considering that each feline stalked at a pace entirely their own.

Jack’s pack contained a few other rolled-up things aside from his listening ‘flats’, including two thin blankets they draped over the backs of the placid donkeys they started marching across the floor, toward the opening of the lane between game boards. Now they were camouflaged as two declared members of the Minimil detachment, who were merely moving the animals used for showmanship from one venue to another.

No cat employed upon the floor would’ve been allowed there without showing comprehension of guests versus deserters and trespassers. The sights, sounds, and smells of the decorated donkeys would, hopefully, keep them invisible long enough to investigate the Ruandan agent and pick up the Hidden Body’s trail.

Between then and now was a long dull walk, one where Chessica did not feel like watching the adjacent match between matchbox archers’ volley of flaming arrows and the whirlwind spins of letter opener swordsmen. Instead she turned her attention to Jack and his rug that seemed to be all ears. Even now she could see colorful shapes on its curve, moving about very intentionally, as if an experimental film had been ripped from the screen and stored away on a shelf.

“Jack, humor me,” she requested, “and tell me about your ‘flats’.”

“You know everything you need to,” he said, only one eye turning toward her. Did he not feel like talking? Or was this Wonderlander kindness, sparing her from the ten insane hyenas that were his understanding of the world, endlessly tearing at each other’s flanks? “They listen and report back to me. For now I’m their god.”

“But what are they? They don’t look like any kind of magic I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s because they’re not.” He cracked his knuckles outward, the series of cracks extending up both his arms, into his chest, and down his legs, resulting in more pops than there were joints, like someone dropping a barrel of popcorn into a volcano. Primarily this seemed to loosen his tongue more than anything else; those extra bones had to be somewhere. “This stuff is called Flatland. You know how, when a person gets icky sicky, their body fights it off with fevers and pus?”

“The immune system, yes.”

“Well Flatland is the pus of the world.”

“You mean Wonderland is the infection?”

“Bingo was his name-o. It’s senseless, and the world runs on sense, so me and mine have to be walled off from the rest.” He reached over his shoulder and rubbed a corner of Flatland between his fingers. Chessica watched a shape move directly underneath his digit and reemerge not only unharmed, but seemingly unaware. “It’s a skin that’s the total opposite of Wonderland, so instead of making no sense, it makes too much.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It’s not as complicated. It has simplified rules. The world has three D’s, and I don’t mean dunces, dames, and donkeys, I mean dimensions. Out here you can be tall, wide, and deep. In Flatland you only get two. And the flats live in it, so all they see is a line and the colors and shades in it.”

“Those shapes are alive? Genuinely alive? And smart enough to report to you?”

“They’re boring as hell, so they’re not very alive to me, but sure, I guess that’s genuine to some people. Little bastards actually, especially to each other. Shapes with more corners are considered better, so if you’re a triangle you’re either a soldier or you’re out on the street. Squares do all the paperwork. Pentas and hexas paint on fancy siding and claim to speak for me, but the circles are the ones who really get my orders.”

“How do you interact with them?”

“You just speak. They’re hearing us right now, but they won’t react unless it comes down through the chain that a circle wants them to. I’m telling you what’s wrong with their lives right now, what the big lies are, and they’re too trained to learn any of it. It’s the opposite of Wonderland alright. If you don’t go with the current there you’ll drown, then turn into what drowns.”

“So when you say you’re their god, it’s a clear-cut sort of relationship then,” Chessica explored. “When you escaped Wonderland you tore through the Flatland barrier and took some with you, cutting them off from the rest of their world like tearing a page out of a book. Whenever you split more off you’re creating islands they cannot leave.”

“It’s the only way to prove to them they have to listen,” he said. “Otherwise you’re just a voice from nowhere, and they’re happy to ignore you and go back to being ordered around by corners they can see.”

“Do you not feel for the plight you’re creating? Your whims become their borders. That’s a heavy responsibility.”

“No, it’s light,” he said, bouncing his pack up and down on his shoulders. “Besides, these asses don’t mind what we just did to them. Going cow-eyed is great for most. It’s very relaxing to not be expected to take part. You get to take up space instead, just be.”

“But that isn’t your goal,” she quibbled. “You went to the trouble of breaking out of Wonderland, and as something more than a gibbering lunatic clawing at the nearest flesh. That’s what arouses so many of Hestia’s suspicions.”

“She’s right to be aroused,” he crowed, offering no elaboration other than “they don’t call me the knave of clubs for nothing” before turning back to Flatland’s role in their mission. “The flats can hear from very far away, because sound makes their whole world vibrate. I put up a poster, it hears one of the things I told them to listen for, and then they shout it to the next nearest poster, until it makes its way back to me.” The coil in his ear partly emerged without him touching it, then was sucked back in.

“Can you instruct them to listen on the subject of the Ruritanian prince?”

“Yeah, but we’re on the Ruandan now aren’t we?”

“Like glue yes, but there’s still the mystery of why Darnette’s powers of puppy love persuasion had no effect. I want all the information there is. And add this Sunday character to that.”

“You’re the boss,” he said, not as acknowledgment, more like he was affirming the humor of a joke she’d just told. Nonetheless he obeyed, bending his largest roll of Flatland forward and whispering into the center of its curl. That busied him for a while, leaving the homunculus with nothing to observe but the Little Wars around them.

Ignoring it was quickly eliminated from her options when a lustrous black myrmidon darted in front of them, turning into a roadblock when they stumbled over the rubber lining. They wore a uniform, a strap that should’ve had a slung rifle attached, and a crack between the eyes of their exoskeleton.

“Help me!” they pleaded, reaching out. “I’m not in the soldier caste! I was never supposed to-” A shoe came down and crushed them, its impact knocking Chessica down and spooking their donkeys. Luckily Jack’s Wonderlandish constitution kept him upright; he got both animals by their manes and held them in place.

Towering above them was one of the referees, striped in black and white: a jail cell with legs enough to chase down any prisoner. A whistle sat in his mouth wetly, and from it issued a piercing note that made the homunculus cover her ears. Rage and fear mingled, boiling over with the whistle. Her genius could be stomped out of existence at any time, expertise, craft, ambition, all neutralized by the indifferent matter of scale.

“Deserter penalty,” the giant referee declared. From his pocket came a cloth, not a penalty flag, but a handkerchief to wipe the deserter from the bottom of his shoe. Then he went back to his business, for which he was certainly well paid. This is Little Wars, Chessica reminded herself. This is what Bragi took so lightly, in which he literally spent chunks of his soul. She would have been the last to go, meaning she was the motive for it all.

The trauma of what she’d just witnessed kept her distracted, and she might have wandered away if not for the clear demarcation of their straight path. When it opened up she found the presence of mind to place one hand on a donkey’s shoulder and simply follow it. Jack took it upon himself to select a route once they were out of the lane, and he correctly figured they would want a good vantage point from which they would face little scrutiny, which they already walked in the shadow of.

A converted restaurant table, it had a freight elevator built into its trunk the pair could take up to its top, their donkey camouflage convincing the attendant to let them in. From their briefings, themselves informed by programs sent out by Stained Atlas organizers, they already knew this table to be the observation deck from which most small officials would watch Little Wars and relay messages.

The delegates from the Wicky Sticket, who had no idea they’d shared a voyage with the ghosts, would be there, and would serve to make the sanctioned stowaways all the more invisible as they searched for the Ruandan agent. In fact several of the ceremonial Lilliputian donkeys were there as well, penned off to one side. Jack marched theirs over and put the animals away, very visibly, alerting everyone on the tabletop that they were approved minimils.

Chessica finally got her wits about her, in time to see the mountain of Sunday gliding on by, a sinister smile on his bearded jowls. If she followed his trajectory would she find the Ruandan? Along this line she gravitated all the way to the railing to watch him part the sea of boisterous humanity, able to confirm what Darnette shared as suspicion, that his cuff links appeared to be made of the exact shade belonging to Rexpommel: the stone of Excalibur. If he wanted to, he could use its magical power to clear the entire crowd with one sweep of his arm, perfect for any attempt to flee should he, say, be identified as the mastermind behind the Hidden Body.

Her pupils dilated. Everything of the convention was taken in, as sight, as breath, as one turn of the most magnificent game she strove to master. In this she perceived several more dots peppered in the shifting horde of war collectors and mongers. More pebbles of Rexpommel. Beads in watch chains. Rings. Even a false tooth.

And its partner was there too, not just around her neck and Jack’s. Larger slivers of the one true king’s sword glinted in her expanded awareness as money clips, shirt buttons, a woman’s earrings, and a dozen other configurations. Half of Stained Atlas could tear the flimsy roof off the place and the other half could gossip with the lady of the lake about it.

She made a note to ask Nimuwe about the concentration of these artifacts at first opportunity, when next she was alone with so much as a glass of water, but for now she had to narrow her gaze back down to a spyglass, for there was a green shirt visible on a dark-skinned man. He was holding a jewelry box, modified to open from the front, which it presently did. She guessed he was showing off the small souls that would soon risk their lives for the Hidden Body, something they might’ve just learned themselves.

“The flats have another tidbit,” Jack said as he came up alongside with a finger pressed against his ear, the lobe groping at the digit like a blind man trying to identify a jellyfish by touch.

“So do I,” Chessica informed, using the tilt of her head in place of conspicuous finger-pointing to identify the agent. Jack saw, but didn’t seem to care. “I want to draw him over so you can plant some Flatland on his person. That way we can listen in for any direct communication with the Hidden Body.”

“I’ll do it as soon as he’s close enough,” the Wonderlander said, apparently not needing any further instruction. “I’ve just heard the Ruritanian won his match. The terms were changed before it started, so it was over him being able to give invites to the next convention. He destroyed somebody else’s veto, meaning the Hidden Body can officially compete on its own next time.”

“Bolder with every move,” Chessica muttered. She closed her eyes, mentally levitated over the crowd and saw the trajectories of everything her team knew, and everything she suspected, in reverse order. “I must assume this initiative will continue to ramp up…

Prince Rudolf started over there by the catering. Our Ruandan, here. Sunday is drifting along the same line, toward… the field where the representative from New Zealand is set to compete.”

“Hooh boy,” Jack chuckled, a resigned sound, as if lit dynamite had been tossed his way at the exact moment both his arms fell off. Even an out-of-touch-and-mind Wonderlander was sufficiently aware of that island’s reputation as the most fearsome hatbox platoons in the world.

“My sentiments exactly. If the Hidden Body reaches and manipulates them, it wraps up all of Little Wars with a bow. We must prevent that, and we can. This line cutting across the convention floor, straight if not for the battlefields they must step around, reveals a massive vulnerability.

Communication is not happening remotely. If our mastermind was far off, using dispersed methods planted all throughout the crowd, then the activity leading up to taking New Zealand would be scattered, random. The line means they are here, that they physically have to seek the shortest path across both the space and reputation ladder to get to their quarry. If they’re here bodily we can stop them bodily.”

“Excuse me,” was Jack’s only response, supplemented by a hasty shuffle along the railing. Doubt as to his usefulness struck again, but then she noticed that the Ruandan happened to be making his way to their table. If he wished to negotiate with any entity run by the small, that was where he would need to be. Then Jack must have intended to follow her order and plant their listening device.

In Wonderland, anything can do anything, much to the horror of those constrained by reason, ligament, blood pressure, and the speed of light. In his generous supply of Flatland Jack saw great versatility, demonstrating it by cutting out two pieces of differing size. The larger was rolled up into a blowpipe, the second a missile tapped into the first. Having applied copious saliva to his projectile, it would unfurl and stick wherever it struck the Ruandan, and with the balloon-elasticity of his Wonderlander lungs and crosshatched rib cage he could fire it from far enough away to avoid suspicion.

Suspicion from the body’s agent, that is. Not from Minimil. The pair had been surreptitiously watched since their arrival with the donkeys, and at least one of the more open representatives objected to Jack’s suspiciously jaunty beeline. Thus he made a beeline of his own, considering that was the form he took, over to Chessica Tarkower for some questioning.

“Beg pardon,” he said, tapping her shoulder with a black chitinous claw. When she turned she recognized him as Vesperos, Greek god of love, diminished in power and size down to an upright bumblebee of pinkish collar and aura. He wore formal tailored velvet that slimmed his bumbling profile, and there was a bow slung across his back along with a quiver, one so narrow that it could be mistaken for an umbrella, except, Chessica noted, there were two handles.

“Yes?”

“Who are you? You’ve brought some of our donkeys, but you’re not with our detachment. You weren’t on the ship.”

“I’ll ask you to listen closely,” she started, eyeing Jack in her periphery, hoping to stretch this interaction long enough for him to complete his task uninterrupted. The Ruandan was still on approach. “My team and I are here on the order of your aunt Hestia. She has given us a task requiring secrecy, hence our apparent absence aboard the Wicky Sticket. We’re hunting the Hidden Body on her behalf.” Her eyes weren’t pulled from Jack by Vesperos’s compound counterparts, but by the two arrows in his quiver. Those could work; they would overcome the low tensile strength of her assets woven from disparate ruffians and fugitive flight.

“She told me nothing of this.”

“I admit we’re not anything to brag about. Expendable is the word, and the point. I’m Chessica Tarkower.” She almost winced. He would recognize the last name, which she intended to breed familiarity, but forgot he was not remembered fondly in the barn. In fact, one of his other homunculi had infiltrated the city and tried to destabilize it before scheduled Little Wars could conclude, something she appeared to be doing to Stained Atlas at that very moment.

Diplomacy was perpetually her own weakness, she had to admit. Others could not be counted on to follow reason first and their guts second. Each party’s emotions had to be catered to, and, crucially, that turn had to be taken first instead of second.

“Tarkower hmm? We’d better go and discuss this with some of the others,” Vesperos suggested, not a hint of the emotion that was definitely at play. Chessica glanced; the Ruandan was in position, bending down to show off his jewelry box to some spotted quail eggties representing a coop. Jack was rearing back, lips stretching to show the excess teeth cluttered in the back of his gums like trumpet mushrooms.

“There’s something I must ask first,” she said, halting his attempt to take her hand and pull her away, “and since I am empowered by Hestia, it is more than a request. Those arrows on your back. They are the sort you used on Zamshy Lamshy, to make him fall in love and forget all about his coup?”

“Yes,” he answered tentatively, stepping back as if he feared she would try to snatch them. “I’ve only just completed the second one since then. At my size it takes a long time to generate them now.”

“My mission requires them,” she said ravenously, avariciously. Vesperos wasn’t being catered to; She fed herself. The next move was apparent, and nothing should get in her way. Each word was a bite out of her own position, but she couldn’t stand to be confined to her current square. At least the knave had better control of himself, already on his way back. The Ruandan agent was pulling away, rubbing at his nose with two fingers.

“What under the night sky for!?” the insect asked, aghast.

“The Hidden Body is making its way to New Zealand. We can head them off, make their current agent fall in love with an opponent, neutralize their progress. Please, Vesperos. She put so little in my arsenal. I have to make up ground somewhere. Let us have those arrows.”

“Yeah, hand’em over!” Jack said as he entered their shared space, adding tension by making it a triangle. “Or there’ll be trouble.” He cracked the knuckles of forty-five different people inside his two hands.

“What’s going on here?” A square now. The addition of Ontoes Wallagog made it two on two. “Vesperos, are you in need of assistance?”

“Nobody fight!” a golden eggty pleaded, wobbling into their midst, a ruby bow tie glued to his shell under the opalescent filigree of his drawn-on face. “We’ve got talks in ten minutes and I don’t want to see any bruises!”

“There’s no fight, but we will be needing those arrows,” Chessica told Gildny Mildny, Mr. Wallagog, and the bee. Outnumbered. Perhaps she could slice her Wonderlander in half to make two and even the odds.

“You’re not getting them,” the miniature god decreed, fluster coming out in his puffing mane.

“Really, then what’s this?” Jack mocked, balancing one of the arrows on a fingertip. Everyone stared, dumbfounded, at the pink heart-shaped jewel that was its head, enchanted liquid love swirling inside in an endless waltz.

“How did you!?” The bee ripped off his quiver, saw that only one arrow remained, then hugged it close to his chest.

“You’d best be careful with that,” the fairy with the turquoise hair warned, suddenly present as well. “They’re crucial as subtle threats in negotiation.”

“Everyone, soup’s getting cold,” Drookarkus Polooko added, butting in with two cups of his finest steaming stew. “Why are we over here?”

“Hold this,” Vesperos ordered, forcefully handing his quiver over to the fairy, whose scheming eyes betrayed a desire to claim the substance in the arrow for herself. Perhaps he would’ve regretted his choice of guard, but he was already lunging at Jack. The Wonderlander let it happen for some inscrutable reason, which was likely no reason at all, just a dose of his homeland’s anti-logic, like a swimmer surfacing for air.

The pair tumbled back and forth, rolling more like dice than marbles, all elbows. The others tried to follow, knocking each other over whenever there was a sudden change of direction.

“Not good, not good, not good!” the eggty fretted, spinning into a tizzy.

“Your fault, your fault, your fault,” Tarkower muttered as she tried to pull a knave of clubs by sending her eyes in different directions to each seek one of the arrows. Before she could truly test the ability, all eyes were drawn up, to a looming shadow and stifling presence: a figure half of light and half of dark. A dangling whistle sparkled overhead.

“You know the rules,” a human referee boomed, words practically drooling out of his sinister grin. “There’s no fighting off the boards. Your penalty is to formalize the issue.” He blew his whistle, not at them, but at a distant staff member. “Bring me an arena!”

Continued in the Finale