by Lee Bond
Chevy squinted. It was hard to see properly, even with the augmented view afforded by his high-tech helmet, but he were positive that the air around Master Nickels was being bent somehow, as if …
As if it were keeping him aloft, a full and flagrant violation of King’s Will!
“Crikey.” Chevy cursed a second time, though not as colorfully as before. Nickels’ armor was keeping him afloat long enough, the Gearman presumed, for the deadly –not to mention dangerous-to-use- sniper rifle growing to full size out of his left arm to reach full charge.
From such a vantage point, it were obvious Garth aimed to take the head from the one-armed Gunboy, who even that second coalesced into zoomed view…
“Fuck me improperly!” Chevy howled. He couldn’t believe his fucking eyes. “Fucking Dominic! You twat!”
Much as he wanted to leap from his safe vantage point, to do something to stop his idiot friend Dominic from attacking Garth Nickels while in mid-flight, Chevy stayed rooted right where he was.
That Heartsniper was too powerful to be anywhere near. Four city blocks demolished and a de-limbed Gunboy were all the testament anyone should need in order to practice the time honored skill of not getting killed.
In point of fact, the only safe place to be when it fired was directly behind it.
Chevy shut his eyes the moment Dom slammed bodily into Garth, overwhelmed with emotion. The Book Club Regular was certainly done for.
***
“What in the actual fuck!” Garth head-butted Dominic hard enough to regret the decision; though he’d definitely dented the Gearman’s armor-plated skull, he also succeeded in splitting his own forehead open. Gross black and red blood began trickling down his face, putting him in the running for winner of the Yearly Middle Earth Uruk-Hai Death Mask and Barbecue Cook-Off Challenge.
: power reserves at 15%. Aerial stability waning. Heartsniper almost ready to fire. Warning. Warning. Warning. Firing weapon will result in severe integrity issues. Likelihood of full damage, 75%, likelihood of partial…:
“Shut the fucking hell up!” Garth had no choice but to krang Dom –who was clutching at him for dear life- in the head again, though he feared –as he pulled his head back- the only that would probably happen was yet another in a long string of self-inflicted concussions.
“Give. Me. The. Book!” Dom howled, wrapping his fingers around the edges of the stolen Book. He could almost feel it tearing away from the expertly tied leather ropes. All he needed to do was work at it a little more.
“Not on your fucking life.” Over Dom’s left shoulder, the Gunboy lumbered ever closer. Garth checked the suit’s reserves, glumly reflecting that he should’ve brought some Dark Iron with him. Super-powered nanotech suit it might be, the fucking thing was nothing more than a gas-guzzling Shelby GTO burning through enough fuel for a dozen compact cars.
The ex-Specter took a deep breath and cleared his mind of everything around him, including Dominic, which took some fucking doing; the spastic Gearhead now had both hands curled around the back end of Book and actually had both his armored feet planted firmly on his thighs, and was yanking away at Book as though it were a leather-bound Excalibur.
All that existed was the Gunboy. It’s massive backlit eyes burned with pleasure of the hunt. It’s mouth was wide open, a salacious smirk curling the edges of it’s lips, giant, stainless steel teeth glimmering brightly like shiny metal tombstones.
Dom continued hammering and pulling, pulling and hammering. The suit countered the added instability, burning through the reserves faster than ever.
DB informed him that the Heartsniper was ready to fire. It took control of all the stabilizers it’d manifested to keep Garth afloat long enough for this moment to come to pass. His arm locked rigidly into place.
Garth shut his eyes. He had no desire to see Dom turned into burning bits of Gearman.
He sent the command to fire. As with the last time, everything went noisy and apocalyptic and all sense of everything was lost in the cacophony.
The whole of Ickford bore witness to this second firing of the Heartsniper, a brilliant, sapphire eruption of fire and lightning bright enough to send light into the furthest, darkest corners of the damned city.
Wherever they were, no matter what they were doing, no matter how hard they dried to focus on their own pressing problems, the few remaining inhabitants of Ickford turned their eyes Domeward, praying that the fountain of light was something working for them and not against them.
: power reserves at zero. Warning. Impact imminent:
Garth opened his eyes. “Impact against what?”
And then, because he’d forgotten all about action and reaction –not to mention his failure in considering the likelihood of the suit’s hovermech systems failing at the precise moment of firing- he slammed directly into the second Gunboy’s back, hard enough to shatter the precious geared armor he’d spent so long working on, the armor keeping Specter at bay, armor meant to keep him alive long enough to figure out what the fuck was going on in Arcade City and how it related to the greater war waiting to happen.
The Gunboy cut loose with a bleated burst of surprise as it was suddenly and unceremoniously given just enough momentum to break it loose. It lumbered forward, immense feet grinding against tough Ickfordian stone.
Garth N’Chalez fell to the cobblestones amidst a rain of gears, unconscious, bleeding, broken.
The Dark Iron tattoos covering his body shone fiercely.
***
Agnethea had never been a fan of falling from high places. Of all the damage that the tough, miraculously resilient flesh of a Golem could endure, collision damage was amongst the most difficult to brush off.
In this instance, though, as she fell backward towards the ground, watching as Crudesucker’s head was vaporized by a literal bolt of blue lightning that bathed her in stinging sharp beads of light, the Queen of Ickford was perhaps willing to accept the pain and discomfort.
Just this once.
“Good show, Master Nickels, I say.” Agnethea hit the already shattered cobblestones amidst a hail of broken parts; it was a true testament to the King’s interest in seeing Ickford and Nickels done for that even pieces of that monstrosity’s head remained intact after being hit with Garth’s doughty Heartsniper. She coughed up dust and a bit of blood. “Good show indeed.”
Agnethea lay there, battered and bruised arms shielding her face from the smattering of copper and brass junk, musing on the inelegance of a death perpetrated by a rain shower of sprockets and springs.
It was as she lay there, ruminating on this and many other things –most of which centered on her severe hope that Luther was already dead, as she wasn’t entirely certain she’d be up to snuff, as it were- other, stranger, sounds reached her eyes, a sort of high-pitched, hissing snarl.
Her Queenly curiosity was piqued. Nowt in her city made that noise and it weren’t anything the Gunboys would get themselves up to.
What, then, could it be? Certain her city was more than half in ruins thanks to Crudesucker and the others, Agnethea was reluctant to move from this spot. Her one chance at redemption had been thoroughly ruined.
Agnethea sized up all that remained of Crudesucker. The one-armed, headless beast wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, Master Nickels’ titanic shot had done more than just remove head from shoulders, it had frozen the lumbering fiend mid-stride. From the looks of things, all that could fall from the metal corpse had already done so.
“As long as you do not fall on me, Master Crudesucker, you may topple any which way you like.” Agnethea picked herself gingerly up off the ground and surveyed her immediate surroundings.
Damn, but Ickford truly was done for. She hadn’t seen a city die like this in thousands of years, and that’d –as this- been by King’s Will. Whole swathes of … she was in Grammercy District, home to, if she recalled, some fairly decent people, the first group of men and women and gearheads to live together with truly earnest camaraderie.
> All gone. All destroyed by feet as big as the King’s ego. Agnethea imagined King Barnabas Blake the One and Only somewhere high above them all, laughing and laughing and dancing that ridiculous little dance he did when things were going his way.
It bothered her. It bothered her greatly, this loss of the Ickford, and it took a long, penetrating minute as she drank in the destruction for her to figure out why.
“The difference, old woman,” Agnethea hopped over Crudesucker’s immobilized foot, “is you weren’t attached to those other places. You and them old grey ones, you built this city with your bare hands. You did summat real and right for the first time in your miserable black life as a Golem. Gah. This is awful.”
Realizing that she couldn’t put off the inevitable –seeing how the rest of her city was faring- any longer, Agnethea leaped to the highest building as was still upright. Her body complained bitterly at the abuse, but it was lovely to let down the pretense of normalcy; the Queen hadn’t let loose –as it were- as a proper Obsidian Golem since well before the first normal Ickfordians had set up their shingle and there weren’t no one around to complain about the fourth wall being broken, not here, not now.
Standing atop Grammercy House –a local watering hole/waypoint for more civilized gearheads who were either on their way to do some Kingkilling for her or one of the smiths or were just back from same-, hot bile and blackened anger surged through Agnethea’s guts. She clenched her fists so hard that were it possible, she’d dig gouges deep enough to see bone.
The devastation, while not complete, was overwhelming. Whole sections were smoldering rubble. Those Gunboys free from the attentions of proper guidance were injured, but not enough to make any difference; while her Gunboy had received the direct attention of not only Master Nickels but a wily pack of gearheads –who were probably all dead, now, caught beneath a booted stomp-, the two at the far end of Ickford were just stood there, making the occasional odd noise but otherwise doing nowt now at all.
Agnethea imagined those gaggles over there, fighting and dying for no real purpose, wishing their weapons were more powerful, then tried to imagine what they thought about what’d happened over here. Were they falling back now, hoping desperately that whoever or whatever had taken the head from Crudesucker was en route to them that very moment?
Her ancient heart ached at that thought. They were her children, now. They’d come to Ickford just as angry and mottled with pure, venomous spite as any gearhead had ever been. She’d let them in, prepared to bring each one down with her own bare hands should it come down to it, but the more time them gearheads spent in her city, the less violent they were.
At least within the city. Outside didn’t matter. Outside, a man or woman could do as they pleased. Outside the Walls, they needed that anger, that rage, that villainy, but here, t’home?
They were all alone over there.
She wanted to run to them, to offer support, succor, hope. But she couldn’t. She needed to find Garth. He was the only one in Ickford capable of bringing down the remaining Gunboys. Him and his miraculous armor.
Agnethea turned towards where Garth had to be, based on how Crudesucker had been done for.
“Fuck me!” Agnethea could barely comprehend what she was looking at.
It took a long moment for the individual components of what lay before her to crystalize into a single, coherent image, and when it did, Agnethea felt … faint. The Queen cast about for something to hold onto, and, failing that, did the next best thing.
She sat down on the ledge of Grammercy House and gawked, nearly unthinkingly, at the sight of the Gunboy collapsed against the Wall. All sense of proportion and distance and all those things you took for granted when you were walking about flew out the window the longer Agnethea stared, guts angrily swooning enough to have her upchuck, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the thing.
From the look of it, something had slammed into the Gunboy hard enough to propel it forward, much like a drunkard suddenly bereft of balance: the thing had even flung it’s arms outward to keep from falling face first into the low-rent district built opposite her stolen Geared Door.
And that was when things had, apparently, gotten … weird.
It was a known and well-established fact that The Wall grew to preposterous heights to prevent gearheads and any other man or woman or beast from simply hopping to the next ‘level’ in the King’s gauntlet without paying the price in Kingsblood. As Ickford’s primary method of keeping the peace, that nearly magical feature was sometimes tested on a daily basis.
It’d been a long held belief that The Wall could swell to any height needed, but they’d always feared constructing anything capable of launching someone higher than the current system; what if they somehow made a machine able to send a criminal high enough that it counted as flight? Would Kingly Wrath strike them all dead?
Well, Agnethea knew the truth of that legend now, for certain. Ickford’s inner Wall had risen up to beat the Gunboy’s legendary height. Almost. Sort of.
When the Gunboy –Agnethea wondered if them fighting this one had named it similar to Crudesucker- had fallen forward, flinging it’s arms out to save itself, both hands hand come crashing down atop The Wall’s fortifications. Whereupon said Wall had grown, as it always did.
Grown and grown and grown. Pulling the Gunboy along with it, an act, which, in turn, ripped and tore through Fool’s Town like a dervish, uprooting whole buildings and dragging the detritus along for the ride.
The strange, discomforting noise filling the air was coming from the Gunboy. The deadly energy of The Wall was slowly but surely doing for it as it did for all things as came in touch with the barricade, only slowly, so slowly.
Either unable to tell that the thing attached to it was dead –there was little doubt in Agnethea’s mind that the Gunboy now dangling from The Wall was dead, not with the deadly energy the barrier used to kill gearheads coursing through it- or unable to reason out that the Gunboy was comically attached to it, The Wall had swollen to epic proportions.
“A mile or more, I’d say.” Agnethea rubbed one of her shoulders. It were twinging like mad. If she had time to be hurt, she’d take it. But somewhere in the shadow of that Wall Garth Nickels was hurt or unconscious. Certainly in need of help either way.
Suddenly, two loud booms filled the air.
Agnethea automatically turned her head upwards. In her wonder of the devastation, she’d missed the fact that it was growing dark, but the growing twilight was dark enough for her to see the cherry-bright edges of the reclamation cylinders launched from The Dome.
There were two, and expertise said they were much, much larger than normal.
“What have you got planned now, King?” Agnethea hurried down from Grammercy House, intent on finding Master Nickels before the cylinders landed next to the Gunboy’s corpses, and for very good reason.
Crudesucker and his deceased brother were massive. There was no telling how all-consuming the devices hurtling this way would be, once they fired up and started converting all that metal into Dark Iron. There was a reason why gearheads stayed well away when the cylinders landed.
If you got too close, you got eaten.
The dark and oft undiscussed nature of Ickford’s construction meant much, much more than them Gunboys would get et.
Queen Agnethea of Ickford ran through the rubble, hunting for Master Nickels.
***
Chevy picked himself to his feet more than a little unsteadily, head ringing. Frantically, he ripped the no longer entirely loathed helmet from his head; were it not for the mind-altering metal headdress, his most important feature would’ve been squashed like an overripe melon instead of rattled about for what’d felt like an eternity, so it weren’t with full loathing that he clipped the blasted thing away.
The Gearman considered himself well lucky he’d tossed the helmet on to get a closer look at Dom and Master Nickels, and it were frankly amazing that said helmet had only popped a single gasket
, a small thing responsible for the gash on his forehead. Had he not done so…
Touching a metal-capped finger to the gash in his forehead elicited a stinging hiss, so the Gearman decided against doing that a second time knowing that the wound was as shallow and that he wouldn’t start leaking precious gray matter onto his now utterly tattered longcoat the moment he started running was good enough for him.
The Gearman flapped ineffectually at said coat. The thing had been with him nearly as long as his poor old horse had been, and he was just as upset with its relative destruction.
“Bollocks.” Chevy debated internally as to what he should do with the scruffy coat for a few seconds before choosing to keep it on; with how things were going in Ickford at the moment, the remaining gearheads would be on the … frantic side. “I love this coat.”
Chevy was in a right foul mood now, foul enough to respond with his old splashgun should it come right down to it.
“Bollocks.” Chevy repeated matter-of-factly as he trod carefully through a treacherous pile of rock and mangled gearhead body parts. The Gearman tsked fretfully at the sight of so many dead Dark Iron Bastards, but in all truthfulness, none of them had had any time to deal with the strange turn of events, nor had anyone even considered the possibility that The Wall would do as it’d done.
Oh, how quickly that whole thing had gone down! Chevy could scarcely credit it!
One second he and poor Master Pete had been standing there idly ruminating on Master Nickels’ sudden ability of not falling to the ground and Gearman Dom’s abrupt battle with lunacy, the next … a whirling, never-ending, tumultuous racket of epic proportions.
Chevy’s own memories consisted of little more than a lot of comprehensive swearing and his precious head being battered about inside the helmet like a pea in a pod. Tearing a strip from his ruined coat, the Gearman did as best he could to wipe grimy blood from his forehead while he continued surveying the colossal damage.
He were trying to rebuild the scene of the crime, so to speak, using a long lifetime of figuring out who done what to who and how and when and why and all that.
