Big Bad Betty

Though the outpost’s soldiers and the coming of the morning had efficiently whisked away any trace of the ruined, squirming body that Alisabeth had seen fall and fall and fall down from atop the tower, the sight of it would not so easily disappear from her mind. The image had imprinted upon her eyes, a photonegative exposed each time she closed them. She saw it when she blinked: the crushed turtle-like shell, the still moving mouth, the ooze of black and rotted sludge-blood coming out from both. The Deacon Culbart writhed—writhed like and into and out of the similarly destroyed soldier, the two sights becoming one—writhed and grasped at a death made impossible to attain by some horrible curse of Underland’s nature. In death, it seemed, these beings—these Underlanders—became undying, in the most terrible way possible. But then what of the other soldier whom the underwock had eaten? Was it possible that that creature still lived inside of the monster’s stomach, being glutted on for eternity? Or could it be that those horrid underwocks truly were the only sort of “end” in this place of perpetual corpses, of gruesomely immortal unlife—the only escape, after such an untold multitude of decades as those that made the deacon weep so?

The rotted, gored, moving forms and the underwocks and all of mortality shadowed Alice as she trekked after Taxis, roving on and on over the fields and beneath the shifting grey-black sky. They followed behind her along every crest, down into every dell, and further still until a cluster of white structures came before them: familiar towers, yes, but guarded behind them, countless great vaulted buildings; climbing arches, crowds of warped and distended mausoleums, and in the centre of it all, rising above everything in obelisks and spires and pikes, a palatial cathedral unlike anything Alisabeth had seen in life or in this land of death. 

“Do close your mouth! Why, you are simply begging for flies,” Taxis said. Alice hadn’t realized his mouth had been open. He closed it, and Taxis sighed. “All covered in dirt and underwocky blood… and I’m supposed to present you like this, to the High Templar herself!”

Alisabeth passed over the complaints that Taxis had been making ever since they had first met—there were more pertinent questions at hand: “Well, pardon me. So, what does ‘High Templar’ mean, anyway?”

Taxis scoffed. “The High Templar of the White Order, the great Tasseographer’s right hand! I suppose you don’t even know that Big Betty Duchess is her name; she likes more to be called such to her face, rather than her title. It’s somewhat odd—she’s eccentric, most definitely, but surely worthy of respect. Certainly worthy of cleanliness! Although she herself… well…”

“What?”

Again, Taxis sighed. “Even you’ll see, I’m sure.”

The chessboard grass soon gave way to blocks of veined stone beneath their feet, the rabbit’s wooden paws softly clacking against it before Alice’s heavy step. Soon enough, the same stone was all around them: the strange city of marble and death—a necropolis, in the truest sense of the word—enveloped them completely. Underlanders populated the streets, their visages and forms twisted and coloured in all possible manners of inevitable decay and injury—but all clothed in the same white and yellow linens worn by Taxis, and the cleric Mauri, and the deacon. It was eerie to begin with, but the way everyone who saw her coming stopped what they did and just stared—perhaps shocked, perhaps reverent—set Alice deep into a morbid awareness of how she lived in the hollow of her body. Her breathing became a weight, a heavy mallet slamming against her ribcage. It dawned on her then that she was likely the only one breathing in the street, in the entire necropolis. Inhalation became, then, a painful and solitary dread.

The outer turrets and mausoleums fell to grander complexes as all the while the cathedral loomed closer. Taxis rounded the path through plazas and laneways, coming close to the massive place before veering away to a hulking structure that looked like something between a temple and a stable. Though the place was lined with white-clad soldiers, chills cold as a morgue in their gazes, they melted away from the doors as the two of them approached, opening the stable-temple with their movement. Ears close to her head, Taxis led the way in. Alice followed after, staring into the dim depths.

Few places in Underland had been at all warm. This was one of them, and perhaps the warmest one yet. The gloam was heavy and humid upon Alice’s cheeks, the whole atmosphere like a hot breath blown into one’s face. Such was also true of the smell; it was as if the very air was rotten, rancid, and stale, belched up from the insides of some cavernous and putrid thing. It was strong enough for Alice to taste on her tongue—not that she wanted to. 

It was fortunate that she had smelled worse in her line of work, but even that was less revolting because it was silent. This place, however—this place was far from silent. It thrummed as if groaning constantly in dull agony, an agony that was all the more painful because it was creeping and miniscule, encroaching on the mind as much as the flesh. Only by the faint and yellow glow of the scattered fungi that hung all about the place—colonizing the straw mounds on the floor, the hollowed carcasses hanging from the ceiling, and the moving bodies all around—that Alisabeth realised the groaning agony was distributed amongst countless half-conscious beasts of all kinds, all piled into far too few pens, lining the strange and grotesque building with delirious suffering and yellow eyes. It was disgusting, disgusting in a manner that even Alice had never been disgusted before. If anything in Underland was “extremely unseemly,” it was this foul place.

The nausea arising within Alisabeth made just how they came before the High Templar obscure: choked back bile and wavering senses, rows and rows and rows of murmuring beasts, and then her. Her stature must have been over seven foot high, and massively huge in accordance with her frame. Though her shirt was constructed of the same white linen it seemed all Underlanders wore, the overalls, gloves, and armour over it were dun and covered with a mess of glinting yellow nodes—the spores of the fungi that fed upon the entire place. Her skin was supremely mottled. Upon close inspection, one could see more spores growing from her eyelids, balancing on thin eyelash-like strands. Her countenance was intimidation incarnate, repulsion and physical dominance wound together, corded, bent over and stamping a heavy combat booted foot upon the snout of one nodding beast while she leant towards another, peppering those nodes into the second creature’s nose.

Taxis stood by patiently at first, and then nervously. She coughed a soft, “Ahem. Your grace?”

The Duchess’ fearsome head swivelled to the rabbit, deadened eyes rimmed with that same sickening glow emitted by the fungi and spores. Tusks jutted out from her twisting grin towards the two of them. Between them and her swinish nose and ears, Alice could not tell if she had been human or boar in life. “Ah,” the High Templar said, voice rich and suffocating as tarry molasses, “Taxis, again and at last. Well?”

Taxis hurriedly curtseyed. “Big Betty Duchess, it is as much an honour as ever. And you are looking very well, as always.” She spoke hurriedly, though not as if afraid—as if anxious. Her white eyes quickly darted to Alice, over his attire and person and his shovel-blade, before they flicked back to attention. “Your grace, I come to you bearing a wonderful thing: a heroic man, a strong woman, a fighter worthy of your service—the service you inflict upon such great beasts here, with your wonderful and awesome fungi. I bring to you Alisabeth Hara: a perfect candidate for servitude, or perhaps someday, after your brilliant conditioning of the mind, a fine beast amongst your ranks!” Alice was shocked instantly from all illness. What?! A—a beast amongst her ranks—conditioning of the mind—her fungi… Her fungi. He glanced between the Duchess’ face down to the hog-like thing she peppered the nose of, and all at once she knew. She knew what Taxis was trying to give her over to.

But the High Templar spoke first: “Now, Taxis,” she said, her head tilting. “I thought we were friends, yet you come in with all of this formality, and all of these lies. This fighter—she is not a simple servant or soldier. You know that, do you not? You’ve heard the Tasseographer’s great prophecy? I think you can see as well as I who Alisabeth Hara here is: she is the bonny boy in blue and white—” Her grin twisted more severe still, and her gaze fell squarely and horribly upon Alice “—and I simply must put her skills to task against my very best beast.”

Taxis’ ears shot straight back, her large eyes growing wider. “I—oh, but—but he can’t be! Surely someone so—so—filthy couldn’t be our queen, after so long! So strange! So… so wrong! Surely I wasn’t—”

“Oh, but you were, my friend. Wrong all along, and presuming as always.” She spoke as she rose to her full height, looming in the dim light: terrible, a kind of monster herself.

Alice’s rabbit seemed to shrink ever smaller. All she could muster was a stuttering, “But…”

“But?” Big Betty Duchess said. “But do you think you have any right to stand against our prophecy, our foretold destiny? Do you think you are worth anything against her, simply because you are prim and proper, because polite society supposes you good? I tell you, polite society is nothing against the Underwocky Queen! And let alone such arrogance as you cling to! But by all means: no, you should prove your worth! Perhaps you can go against my best beast then, Taxis! How’s that for wrong, little darling?”

Undoubtedly, Taxis had just moments ago tried to give Alisabeth away to the High Templar, to the terrible control of her and her glowing fungi, whatever that may mean: the groaning and perpetual agony of all the beasts around them, maybe; a loss of control over her very own mind, surely; a boot on her head and a pepper of spores in her nose, in her lungs and blood, most definitely. But undoubtedly as this too, Taxis was afraid: shaking, terrified. Undoubtedly, she had been afraid this whole time; how she had fretted over presenting Alice as he was, and how she had shoved her ears backward so automatically even as she entered this putrid domain. Most undoubtedly of all, Taxis, though she clearly had no memory of it, had been the one creature Alice had loved most of all in life, the best of the few rabbits she’d been allowed, the one comfort among the living she’d truly had, though only for so short a while. And so, undoubtedly, Alisabeth could not stand by.

“No!” she cried. “Please—just leave Taxis alone. I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by all of it; I’m sure she was just confused. I’ve been so confused too, so I’m sure things must only be worse for her. I’ll…” Alice sighed, reeking air choking her. She swallowed, resolute. Her grip on the shovel tightened. “I’ll do it: fight your beast. Just leave her alone and get it over with. Please.”

Big Betty Duchess’ eyes pulsed with that horrid, glowing yellow as she smiled, wicked above all. “I knew I liked the look of you,” she chuckled lowly. “Oh, I knew you were our bonny boy.”