by Lee Bond
“Is … is that all you have, Fenris?” Herrig hoped he sounded dismissive, because he certainly didn’t feel it; from the very moment the dark horse had launched his honestly terrifying attack a heartbeat ago, the Chairman had been doing his level best not to hyperventilate himself into unconsciousness.
Fenris could scarcely believe his eyes. The midget … not only still alive but … unharmed. “What is this? Nothing stands before the might of Harmony.”
“You may possess those of a god, Sa Fenris,” Herrig took off his glasses, thoughtfully and carefully cleaned the lenses with his shirttail and put them back on, “but I possess the HIM. It was designed by the Engineer to assist in the eventual birth of what he calls ‘the real universe’.”
Herrig shrugged. “Now, I am on record as being highly doubtful that we are anything but Real already, but at the end of the day, one salient factor remains patently clear; a war is coming, the end is nigh, and all of that other mystical claptrap you and yours get up to when you think no one is listening.
In case you are wondering, or are forgetful, or whatever, the HIM,” Herrig continued, “is thirty thousand years old. It was designed by and for the Engineer himself using techniques and sciences that are beyond even your ability to imagine. It is, quite literally, a machine designed for one purpose and one purpose only. To reorder the stars and galaxies themselves. If you think for one second that you can defeat the defense mechanisms built into the HIM, I encourage you to make a second attempt. But … before you do, consider one thing.”
Lokken growled, and the others quickly picked up the sound.
“What is that?” Fenris’ mind spun and whirled. The whole universe was going to come to an end and he was being schooled by an ant.
“If you are successful, if you somehow engineer a method of destroying the HIM, then you will have effectively caused the failure of the Engineer’s great plan. Huey assured me when he instructed me on the HIM’s proper usage that we’ve already lost one, and that we cannot afford to lose another.” Herrig looked over the rim of his glasses. Good. Fenris’ expression was all the understanding he needed. “And we don’t want that, do we?”
“No.” Fenris clenched his teeth angrily. Boxed into a corner. “No. The End must come.”
Herrig kept the triumphant smile from reaching his lips. The Horsemen weren’t beaten. They were at a stalemate. But it was something.
Fenris glowered, allowing the power he held to bleed from his fingertips. The air sparkled and refracted with his might, but he did nothing with it. “None of us will kneel to you. Not now, not ever. You have made an unwise choice today, mortal. Our role as pleasant enemies was one we were willing to play. But no more.”
The other Harmony soldiers turned their steely eyes Herrig’s way, their impenetrable silence the only agreement they needed to make. Their uneasy alliance had just ended.
“Very well, then. This meeting has come to an end. Be certain that the war continues on as Garth has requested. Save all the lives you can, Fenris, not just those you deem important.” Herrig turned and went to Sidra, who looked as though she’d aged another four thousand years in the last four minutes. “On your way out, please send someone in for Vasily.”
Fenris and his brothers departed, taking with them their chill.
When he was certain that they were alone –however temporarily- Chairman Herrig DuPont, the only man to stand up to Fenris and win, burst into tears.
“It’s all going to change from here, now, isn’t it, Sidra?” Herrig sobbed into her bosom.
“Yes, my love. It has. And it will. We knew this was coming.” Sidra looked down at Ute’s slumbering form and wondered.
Wondered what it was like to be dead. Wondered how it would feel inside that ancient body when Herrig brought Ute back.
Wondered if Ute would be Ute.
Herrig cleared his throat and turned to Ute. He wished there’d been another way, but he’d known that Fenris and the others would’ve looked at Sidra’s collapse as nothing but a staged event.
Ute, on the other hand … a formidable convincer. Using his staunchest ally and friend had turned the tables instantly.
“Ute.” Herrig whispered, knowing that the HIM was present in the room, always listening, always ready to follow his commands. “Ute. Rise.”
Ute’s lifeless body twitched.
***
Though he was capable of no further tears, Davram wished he could continue weeping for those who’d lost their lives in what he called –rather unimaginatively, he feared- The Ickford Tragedy; never in his long life had the Platinum Brigadier seen such thorough destruction. Here, his own most sorrowful moment was counted.
There was nothing worse than this, and while Ickford hadn’t been the best thing for Arcade City, the men and women who lived –still lived, against all odds- within the city built and ruled by an Obsidian Golem, no one deserved this kind of punishment.
Davram wiped a soot and blood-stained hand across his sweaty brow. Two solid days in Ickford, digging through rubble, sifting through carnage, moving through mountains of the dead, hunting for signs of life, hoping to add to the ever-growing number of people who’d survived both these massive things everyone was calling ‘Gunboys’ and the crazily strange thing that’d happened to the last one to remain standing and who was –even now- off somewhere in the hinterlands of Arcade City, wreaking the most terrific havoc.
His one-eyed ‘hostess’ stood off to one side, refusing to come too close to the corpses, weeping and wailing like a damned banshee. She had –‘twixt gut-wrenching sobs- spun a tale of such madness a poor ex-Brigadier’s wits were beggared.
Men become monsters becoming giant metal things…
“Why are you even here?” demanded the Golem, half her face a twisted mass of ruined flesh. One eye seeped and wept a gross looking fluid that was continually drying and cracking, cracking and drying. She cast her hand bitterly at the mound of rubble Davram was digging through. “Give up! Go home! You don’t need to do this, all is lost and we are, too!”
Davram hoisted a rock easily the weight of three men and tossed it off to one side. The Golem, who refused to identify herself, had been following him for the last three or four hours, alternately helping him and standing off to one side, berating him for wasting his time and his energy and begging for him to find more living souls.
Every now and then, he did wonder why he was taking such an enormous risk. Being out in the open like this would surely attract the attention of the Gearmen and the Nannies, or worse…
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only. This kind of devastation only came from King’s Will. Never had the Nannies owned the stones, nor would the King in the worst of his moods ever give automata such reach.
Not long ago, Davram had spent a solid two hours gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the beast hung up on the towering Wall, listening to the hissing sound of electricity arcing through it’s colossal form, trying to wrap his head around the damned thing’s existence, wondering all the while just what’d been happening in Ickford to rile their absentee monarch so suddenly, so thoroughly. Hate the city as only a possessive King could, Barnabas Blake nevertheless must’ve been forced to leave the blighted town to it’s own devices because of the Golemic Miasma: if he found it too much effort to deal with a single Golem, bringing down an entire city built by one must’ve been considered an utter impossibility.
What’d changed? What new thing had happened? Their Lord and Master had unleashed such dreadful majesty only once before, and only then to reorder their world according to his whim, taking care to ensure that nowt a single hair was mussed on a lad’s head in the process.
This? The opposite. This was carnage. This was vengeance.
“This … this is all our fault.” The Golem wept, and the fluid leaking from her ravaged eye oozed freely. She wanted to touch the wounds. Always. To see if they’d gone away, to see if they’d healed, to see if they really hurt as much as she remembered from the last time s
he’d broken down and stuck a finger or two there.
She resisted, for now. The Brigadier kept digging through the broken city, a look of resigned determination on his handsome brow; the last living soul he’d rescued from certain death through starvation or worse had been nearly twelve solid hours ago, and she’d run towards the crevasses surrounding Ickford on all sides, risking who knew what rather than confront the nobleman.
Them that were alive had either already fled or accomplished what she’d failed to do.
Damn her resilient, immortal flesh. She’d wanted to suicide properly, but … the pain. In her damaged eye. It was intense. It was a kind of immaculate ruthlessness. She couldn’t bear the thought of doing for that other eye to free her soul. Not now.
“How do you mean?” His Lady of the Weeping Eye was a right mess, and little wonder. If you knew where to look, there were signs of chaos and madness before the rising of the Gunboys, and the crazed Golem at his side had seen some very tough times indeed. He gestured half-heartedly at the … at everything. “Summat happened ‘ere all this happened, Golem, and your statement leads me to believe you and yours are somehow at the heart of it all. Or think you are.”
The Brigadier didn’t expect any proper answers to be forthcoming; whenever pressed about the proceedings, the Lady reflexively touched the holes in her face around her nearly-ruined eye, wailed in pain, and went on muttering about dark evil things.
“We … we pushed him. And our Queen.” The words blurted out of the Golem’s mouth in a flood, and the admission of guilt actually brought a gasp to the shattered woman’s lips. “It’s all our fault. We come here, to Ickford, with our devil-spawned Young Luther, and we set about trying to take this city from Queen Agnethea. We worked long and hard at it, taking her friends, stealing people under her nose, all as Young Luther wanted. We worked and worked and worked at poisoning this city, so hard, day in and day and day in again. Our Young Luther loathed the Queen, you see, hated her, thought he were better than she was, and he promised us so many things, so very many. All the lads and lassies we could make suffer, all them we could punish for being free of Dark Iron, you see? You see? It isn’t fair, shining Brigadier, that others can…”
“I am well aware of the underlying cause of a Golem’s burning hatred of Human and gear-kind.” Davram did hate to interrupt the Golem, but he really had heard it all before; from time to time, Golems found themselves in his bar, and, all unawares of who and what he was, and in their wretchedness, they related to him the varying degrees of madness and self-loathing they all possessed, deep down beneath the poisoned core of their souls.
Arcade City were well cruel, aye, to all manner of men and women, but ‘twere no crueler to any other than the Obsidian Golems. Aching for death, hungry to punish, their inner hearts often burned to cinders because they could rarely find true satisfaction in the latter and the former filled them with a foreboding dread that stayed their hands more often than not.
They even imagined that, as they left without paying for their drinks –as they always did, every time, the cheap bastards- they also left him alive out of some misplaced goodwill. Davram snorted softly under his breath and continued digging, the anguished woman’s doubt as to whether or not he’d find anyone else alive anywhere echoing in his ears.
This last pile of rubble, he decided. This last pile, and if there’s nowt, I’ll move on to inspect them holes where the Gunboys rose up from.
“Then you know!” The Lady of the Weeping Eye’s voice echoed through the deserted courtyard. Softer, more reasonably-toned, “Then you understand, don’t you? We are torn and warped, unending hosts to burning rage. We cannot be free of it, cannot ever learn to cope with it, cannot forgive, or forget, or ignore. Everyone and everything thing, from the gearheads who have the right and luxury to move inward, to sup on cooler Dark Iron to quench the fires burning in ‘em to the men and women who can live their lives and die old and bent and happy at the long life they lived … we loathe them all. Their chance, their right…”
“Aye, lady, aye, I know. All about it.” Davram hoisted another rock then tossed it off towards where the single reclamation cylinder to reach Ickford lay. What a mess that area was! Or, rather, the precise opposite of a mess; the hungry-toothed cylinder, five times larger than any other machine built to reclaim fallen Kings, had … scoured that part of Ickford down to the bedrock, destroying all signs that anything had been there at all.
The Brigadier had thought to shut the thing down, rapidly changing his mind when pinpricks of … well, he supposed it were King’s Will … when pinpricks of hungry Will had pricked and poked at his skin, prompting a swift surge of liquid armor to pour across him.
Barnabas Blake had taken a vested interest in doing for Ickford and all who called the sour blister home, that much was certain. With the doomed buildings suffused with Miasma mostly gone or shattered, his prying eyes could be anywhere at any time, and wi’ him being stone blind stupid enough to get so close to the cylinder as he had?
The King could descend to the earth in one of them black flashes of light any second, yes he could, and that would be that.
Davram continued digging through the rubble.
“When he come to town,” The Lady of the Weeping Eye continued, “we thought he were a Gearman, only no Gearman ever wore armor like that, nor did any of t’others that came through the Gates spend as much time talking to any gearhead as he did, so then we thought he were a new type of … of … one of your lot.”
Davram laughed so bitterly at that his hostess, the Lady of the Weeping Eye, took a step backward. Her foot hit an overturned cobblestone awkwardly and down she went. “There hasn’t been anyone willing to even attempt the effort of becoming a Platinum Brigadier in a hundred years, my lady. These vicious gearheads and recalcitrant wardogs broke the King’s Gauntlet as sure as anything in their rotten lives, though truthfully, he did it first.”
“Well, aye,” The Lady struggled roughly to her feet, daring the Brigadier to make a move or comment on anything at all, pleased that he said nowt, “we learned that soon enough. Them two bright and shiny artificers, Twisted Mickel and the other one, Havilland Harvard, they did spy upon the man’s armor, and they set about trying to acquire it for themselves, didn’t they just? So one of ours, loyal to us, followed behind the bully boys sent along by the smiths. And…”
Davram stopped moving rock around and turned to look at the Lady. She didn’t much like full appraisals, and little wonder; whatever damage had been done to her face was nearly all-encompassing and had transformed the sinister elegance possessed by all Obsidian Golems into a hollow mockery of itself. She was a freak in truth now. “And?”
“He slaughtered an alley full of the toughest men Ickford had to offer, Master Brigadier.” The Lady shuddered, remembering all too keenly her own encounter with man. Oh, how he’d seemed to be at a loss, how he’d appeared to be having a tough time of things, but he’d never once been anything but in complete and total control of the situation. “And as you must surely know, Ickfordian gearheads be the worst o’ the worst.”
“Indeed they are.” This was interesting, in the sort of way that something awful you suspect you may’ve had an accidental hand in causing was ‘interesting’. “And a single armored man did for them all? Not a Gearman neither, as you say?”
The Lady nodded, a hand stealing to her ravaged face.
Davram ignored the piteous cry of pain, choosing to go back to his self-appointed task, the gears in his head turning.
It were well impossible to imagine more than one man in Arcade City similar to the one who leaped instantly into Davram’s mind. The merest notion of such a thing chilled the blood solid.
E’en still. One alone were more than enough, hey?
Master Nickels had come to Ickford! The last he’d seen of the Outsider had suggested to the barkeep that the man would come to a horrific end significantly quickly.
What strange turns had that man’s life taken in the l
ast thirty some-odd days? To see him changed from Kingsblooded wraith to an armored killer of grey-skinned gearheads?
“Allow me to finish the tale for you, then, my Lady of the Weeping Eye.” Davram shifted a cobblestone and stood out of the way as a hidden cache of dead gearheads tumbled loose.
“By your leave.” The Lady of the Weeping Eye stepped gingerly out of the way. Though she was more than half mad and cracked all the way through besides which, gearheads were still loathsome and disgusting, dead ones e’en more so.
“This man in the alley, this man in the geared armor that did for those who were sent after him, he was a bulky man, just over six feet tall, with dark hair, yes?” Davram continued on when the Lady’s hand stole once more to her ruined face. “And following the occasion of that slaughter, you and your … what … cabal, either at the command of or in the interests of appeasing a child-like Obsidian Golem you call Young Luther, you attempted to … deal with this man yourselves?”
The Lady nodded, bursting into tears once more. Oh, such a dreadful mistake! The whole of it, too, not just trying to do for Master Nickels, but turning tail on Agnethea, on ruining her city, and working so hard to create for themselves a child they could all love. “He did tell us he were here on King’s command to do for all us golems. We of course believed him, believed too that he colluded wi’ our Queen. So we struck.”
Such awful mistakes. The worst of all time.
Davram sighed miserably. “And somehow you immortal lot suddenly found you weren’t so immortal, and, somewhere in the middle of all that madness, our absentee King of Kings, him we call Barnabas Blake the One and Only, got a right mad bee in his bonnet and decided it were high time to do for Ickford and every damn man woman and child within it’s walls. From there, we have these … Gunboys destroying the city and whatnot. That sums it up, hey?”
