by Lee Bond
“Why?” Al looked around his shop. He … he hadn’t left except to pick up food or drink in ages. He tossed down under the worktable, for Dome’s sake.
Garth flourished the containers. Dark Iron glinted nastily under the light. “Because in a few seconds, I’m going to ram this foul crap into the applicable slots in my arm mechanisms. A few seconds after that, Dark Iron is going to try and swallow my soul. A few seconds after that, if it wins and I lose, everything and everyone in my line of sight will be dead quicker than you can imagine. Even if I’m lucky and I come out on top a second time, it will take appallingly little for me to lose my shit in a colossal way. You’re a nice guy, Shackled Al, you got the raw end of the stick this lifetime. I don’t want you to get pulled to pieces. How’s that sound? Give us a few minutes, hey?”
Al didn’t know what was going on, couldn’t figure out why a smith of Nickels’ unparalleled talent would apparently be gearing up to slam Dark Iron into his body. Weren’t a smith ‘neath The Dome as had an eighth of this man’s skill as would do summat stark bonkers like that. Man like Master Nickels had the whole of their tiny world at his fingers, he did, could make them gears and gewgaws dance like puppets.
Popping ‘sblood into hisself?
Al thought he’d seen madness afore now, but he’d been wrong, hey?
About the only thing he could figure out was that Nickels’ worries were genuine and sincere.
Shackled Al nodded and backed out of the tent, holding his hands up to keep Garth, who looked worried to death and sick to his stomach and –frighteningly enough- somewhat eager. On his way out, he obliged Garth by pulling the tent flap closed.
Garth held the Dark Iron up to the light of Al’s torch. The foul, dark stuff swam and spun in eager excitation. It knew. Somehow, the King’s particulate Cloud knew what was coming.
Lips pressed firmly shut, Garth reminded himself he was a Kin’kithal warrior. He reminded himself he had fallen through a crack in the Unreal Universe and come back through it. He reminded himself he had, for better or worse, set a plan in motion that’d taken thirty thousand years to arrive at fruition. He reminded himself that his goal was the most important thing. Ever.
Most importantly, he reminded himself that not everyone in Ickford was guilty.
Then he slotted the first of the Dark Iron cylinders into the junction above his right shoulder. Quickly now, before the Iron slid in, he pushed the other two in to the slots over his right and left pectoral.
The surge bit.
The chasm and the gears, the scythes and all shivered and screamed up at him out of the darkness. Specter screamed back.
***
Tall Tom and his crew had stood by, watching with piqued interest as Shackled Al left his tent. The man could do as the man wanted, but there weren’t a smith in the whole wide world that’d leave his gear untended whilst another man were still inside. It were one of those things that just weren’t done, and a few of his crew muttered to themselves about the oddness of it all.
“Hold on, my duckies, it hain’t nothing to worry about.” Tom crooned soothingly. His crew were on edge as it was. Some of ‘em had been in town during the Tinker Fight, and they recollected Agnethea’s words with pure crystal clarity. They really and truly didn’t want to get into it with a smith on Agnethea’s patch, but at the same time, the promises Havilland was making were well worth the risk.
Tom continued talking. “Mayhap our unnamed smith inside sent poor Al out for some food or summat. Mayhap,” the gearhead realized, snapping his fingers, “mayhap Al and this new bloke signed an agreement. Yeah, that’s wot. They’s partners, they is. Nowt to worry about, my duckies. Just stay quiet and if the man comes out and wanders off on his own, well, we follow and we do for him. Then we bring back wotever booty the lad’s got on him to Havilland, and lo and behold the wonder of it all, we get three fresh pieces for each of us, all done up nice and neat.”
Well worth the risk, that.
Slippery Helga tugged on Tall Tom’s sleeve and pointed. The tent flap was stirring.
Their mark strolled out and headed off down one of the streets.
The pack moved out, following at a proper distance.
***
Wicked Frill and crew lounged lazily off to one side. Frill, a long-time murder-enthusiast and more than content to make his home in the city, had spotted that ridiculous twat Tall Tom the ‘Magnificent’ and his crew gawking like a load of country bumpkins at Shackled Al’s tent.
He shook his head and thought about sending one of his off to let Mickel know that the bombastic Havilland Harvard had his own crew out and ready to do for the smith with no name.
“Wotcha fink, Frill?” Gimp Red hissed. “Fink we orta let Mickel know?”
Frill ran a finger along the metal seam crisscrossing his neck. The Dark Iron scars weren’t as hot as they should be, which were why he and his were doing this little favor for Twisted Mickel. The others, they were taking their payment in the form of weapons and tools, but he needed Dark Iron. It’d been too long since he’d been out killing Kings and there’d been some tight dustups here and there in the back alleys of crusty old Ickford as had left him wanting.
Al walked out of the tent and disappeared in the crowd. One of Frill’s eyebrows shot up at that. Didn’t matter what Al was doin’. What mattered was what Tom was doin’, and that gangly freak weren’t movin’, so they weren’t movin’ neither.
“You think we can do for Tall Tom and his if it comes down to it?” Frill asked Gimp. There were a chance the smith would do for most of Tom’s team, else why would the two preeminent smiths be doin’ this at all.
Gimp snorted and a bit of steam shot out his nose, which got him cackling. The others at his back joined in. “Course. ‘sides, yeah, hain’t that smithy-withy gonna do it up right an’ proper-like to begin wiv, hey?”
“True, true.” Frill’s mind were made up. “We hain’t goin’ ter warn Mickel about Harvard. Our man’s got a noggin’ on ‘im’. ‘e’ll know. An’ we let our … oh, there ‘e goes, off on ‘is own, down Porter Alley, hey? An’ we let our smith do for as many of Tom and all as ‘e can afore we swoop in an’ do for the rest an’ then the smith. ‘ow’s that, boys?”
Everyone nodded their agreement. They waited for Tall Tom and all to move out before slipping out into the streets at a respectable distance.
It were going to be a fun night after all.
***
Garth opened his eyes against the darkness of roughest Dark Iron rage, opened them and struggled to slam the door on the beast called Specter. The thing that he’d become out there in the darkness past The Cordon, the thing that Trinity Itself wanted him to be, struggled and cursed and hissed and promised dark, angry retribution against everyone.
Garth slammed his hands against the nearest wall, slammed them hard and watched stone and mortar fall and break around him. The strength of Dark Iron fueling his rage, channeling energy into the Geared Armor arms was breathtaking.
He also noticed the walls were slick with thick blood. Specter howled and raged, a furious monster. It was easier to kill your opponents, use the violence, use grim purpose and gross displays of red-lined perversion to frighten away those who would turn their eyes on you.
It’d worked so well cross-Cordon. It would work here as well. Specter whispered that Garth should just let him loose for a little while longer, let Specter do what he did best, which was destroy everything that needed destroying and conquering that which needed conquering.
Garth spun and slammed his hands against another wall. More brick, more mortar. More blood, more guts. Strewn about. He looked at the shredded remains of the clothes he’d worn over his Geared Armor. Specter laughed at the sight of the bloody flywheel blades, at the slickness of the thick, simmering black bloody covering him nearly head to toe.
Specter’s chilling laughter grew quieter, though. Joy surged through Garth N’Chalez, though it was a cautious joy, and for good reason. Either the quadroni
um systems in his body was somehow compensating, responding to his desperate need by siphoning power from what powered the Cloud –as he’d long suspected it was capable of doing, if only in terribly infinitesimal steps- or Specter was being crafty.
The red hot surge of crazy rage that was Specter fell into the darkness of Garth’s soul, allowing the shamed Kin’kithal warrior to survey the damage he’d caused, yet again.
It wasn’t pretty. Not at all.
Highly trained eyes picked out the site where three gearheads had met a violent, painful death by semi-automatic shotgun. Garth’s ears rang with the memory of the apocalyptic boom-boom-boom noises as cruel nuts and bolts shredded first a capering weirdo’s head from body, then another boom-boom-boom as a quick-moving woman found herself completely disemboweled and a final, chilling boom-boom-click as a stupidly tall gearhead had lost his legs and half his lower body.
Nausea bubbled up. Garth fought, and won. He continued moving through the area, forcing himself to remember everything.
He fell upon a handful of gearhead corpses, all limbs severed nastily. The flywheel swords were terrifying, horrifically efficient. The jagged edges of the blades ripped and shredded the flesh as they passed through, making the wounds harder to seal, the gashes thicker than any a gearhead had ever been tasked to endure.
Naturally, though -Specter knew that, like the Kings they all killed- enough persistent damage to the nanotech network holding gearheads together caused that skein to fail. No one in the alleyway would be coming back from the dead tonight.
Garth hung his head. They hadn’t even had time to run away. They’d fallen on Specter and Specter had turned on them, a dervish of escalating violence.
Kin’kithal warrior Garth N’Chalez shut his eyes. There was no need to see anything else of what he’d done. It was as he’d always feared, even before Dark Iron, even before Specter. It was as he’d said to Doc Sullivan.
Where Kith and Kin were rage and anger and violence incarnate, their scions, their paradoxical flesh and blood were that, exponentially. For all his anger, for all his need to destroy, poor Griffin Jones had nothing on the man he believed to be a saint.
Garth N’Chalez knew he was infinitely worse than them all. Trinity had summoned up that inner violence, that inner hunger, and given him a stage to upon which to practice the art of war so that when the M’Zahdi Hesh came forth out of the darkness, It would have It’s general.
Dark Iron kept calling Specter up, kept giving that brute leave to do as he would. If it continued much longer, Garth knew he was going to have to quit his quest to see Reality born properly.
If Specter won, if Specter made it out of Arcade City, if Specter had control of the quadronium systems within … there would be no Reality 2.0. There would be no M’Zahdi Hesh, or Trinity Itself, or Emperor-for-Life. There would only be Specter.
“Queen Agnethea wishes you to have this.”
Garth whirled, articulated flywheel blades snapping out and filling the blood-and-body soaked alleyway with hungry sounds. He retracted them almost immediately.
Standing before him … a gentleman butler, of all things, dressed in the highest fashion a man could afford in Ickford. The old man’s clothes were pristine and immaculate and belonged more in a palace on a man serving a true Queen instead of in diseased Ickford, in an alley strewn with blood and guts, metal and bone.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Garth prayed desperately that he was imagining things. That Specter was fucking with his vision.
The butler flicked the white piece of paper expertly with gloved fingers. “Queen Agnethea wishes you to have this.”
Garth stared incredulously at a card that was so white it seemed to burn.
The butler turned a blind eye to the carnage dripping off the walls with practices ease; he’d been in his lady’s service for most of his life, and most of that had been spent in Ickford. “She encourages you to take this, sire.”
Garth took the slip of paper from the weird butler and stared at it as though he expected it to bite him.
The butler smiled, amused at the man’s discomfort. “I shall take my leave of you, sir.” He bowed deeply, then departed quickly, navigating through the bloody mess with skill.
“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.” Garth stared at the butler’s back, lost. Was it him, or was it really fucking weird that a normal dude in a fancy butler suit had waded through an abattoir to deliver a handwritten message without blinking an eye?
Ickford. There was no other place like it and God willing, when he was done with the King and Arcade City, there’d never be anything like it ever again.
Garth opened the note and was immediately stricken by the calligraphy flowing across the page in delicate golden script.
Then he read the content.
“Are you fucking serious?” Garth flipped the paper over to see if there was more on the other side, like maybe something written with invisible ink. Nothing. “’Find me,’” he mimicked a French accent, “’Me and thee must have words. There is summat you can do for me, and I believe there is summat I can do for you?’ The fuck!”
The ex-Specter turned his eyes to The Dome far above his head, imagined the thus far absent King laughing his ass off at the travails a poor mortal was being asked to undergo. “A side quest? Seriously? That is complete and total fucking bullshit. I am not fucking collecting fucking wolf pelts, or, like, killing a hundred hobgoblins.”
Then he thought about the fresh Dark Iron in his veins. About how close Specter would be to the surface once more, about how long and hard he’d have to focus on staying sane.
He’d thought it hard, out there in the wilderness, traveling with an irate blacksmith who’d poked, prodded and otherwise exacerbated a raging condition he’d had no real understanding of, all from curiosity.
Here in Ickford, things were much, much harder.
Garth tucked the paper into the bag with the rest of his stuff. “Agnethea’s request better be something simple. All I’m sayin’.”
4. A King’s Work is never Done, a Politician’s Offer and Tendrils that Need Trimming
Watt0, once known as Barry Blake, now known as King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, remembered the instant of his Enlightningment as if it had just happened. It was both a curse and a boon for the so-called CyberPriest.
A curse, because that momentary shock of pain was quickly replaced by the even worse shock of realization that everything–including yourself- wasn’t real, that everything was a lie, a falsity, a falsehood … that shock never went away. It waxed and it waned as the day went on, but when he arose in the morning, it was fresh as fresh cut grass, filling your senses with the knowledge once more.
All life was fiction. And not even good fiction, at that. Being reminded of it day in and day out, with every breath, was eternal agony. Ordinary mortals would soon forget such sorrow, such misery, become ground down by its relentlessness. From there, their heads would bow, their backs would bend, their hearts would flutter to a stop.
But not the CyberPriests. Oh no, not the ‘Priests, for they’d been kissed by the fractured manmade Harmony, and the brutal music flowing through them had kept them alive far longer than was possible or even, when you got right down to it, fair.
So the ‘gift’ of true awareness was a curse.
How could it not be? When everything you’d held to be true –including a very patriotic willingness to be transformed so you might fight against an extra-dimensional enemy out to destroy the whole of everything- was transformed instantly into festering excrement?
Nevertheless and irrespective of the countless thousands of years of suffering, of being reminded of this appalling truth with every drawn breath, of being flayed alive by the continual Enlightningment searing your flesh, being shown the truth was also a boon of the greatest sort.
From the very second the pain had torn through him, so too had the veil of lies been torn away, and settling instantly into place a plan, torn from –or so Barnabas b
elieved- right from the bosom of the Engines of Creation itself. A sort of … anti-creation, a stratagem designed to counter the M’Zahdi Hesh’s own plans by eventually leapfrogging from their own moribund domain and out into the Spheres.
Filled with rot and disgust and morbidity at their so-called Unreal Universe –which he had learned about instantly while others had still been picking around at the edges- Watt0 had done the only thing he could do.
He’d acted. Flung himself into the generators ripping through the fabric of the Unreal Universe to provide enough power for the scientists to create their own Harmony, pretending to kill himself, distancing himself from the other ‘Priests, who were only necessary for the final stages, and had begun.
First, by hiding in plain sight. By –of all things- getting a job working with the Armies of Man. After the blasted Kin’kithal and Kith’kineen had vanished into the night sky on some legendary mission that was supposed to see the end of the M’Zahdi Hesh without another shot fired, they –the august commanders of the world- had been desperate for solutions, oh yes they had, and small wonder at their desperation; at the end there, when the boundaries between the Unreal and the extra-dimensionality had worn down to their thinnest, ordinary men and women had found themselves capable of working –albeit intermittently- with N’Chalez’ so-called ‘hytech machinery’.
A realm once owned by Garth N’Chalez, suddenly … freed. For anyone. Including the enemy.
Barry Blake, once Watt0, was the product of one such worried scientific endeavor; in addition to providing full-fledged a full-fledged scenario of how to achieve the total destruction of Everything, the deadly kiss of Enlightningment had graciously provided that first CyberPriest with more than a rudimentary understanding of hy-tech construction and so…
And so Barry Blake had gone to work for the Armies of Man, an official Experimental Engineer, Hy-Tech Visions Department.
The King remembered those days with a certain kind of fondness. Before The Dome had gone up, before Arcade City had become a thriving community, before King’s Will had taken root, before he’d begun so artfully manipulating his brethren, he’d felt accomplished, working on hytech machines. With an intimate connection to the truth of the Universe curled through his very atoms, it’d been surprisingly easy construct the most miraculous things in service of the Army. Beyond discovering the first faint urges that’d eventually see him become a blacksmith of towering skill and ferocious ability, Barnabas Blake had spent much of his downtime scouring through the voluminous databanks in search of anything...
