by Lee Bond
Be herself. Hah. She wasn’t the she she thought she’d been, hey?
If Agnethea didn’t know better, the slow crawl of heat was akin to what gearheads felt that first time, only at a glacial scale.
It were obvious from his manner, sitting there in the chair, content to look around the commons room, remembering here and there tiny facets of the bloody slaughter his alter ego had gotten up to, that he truly had no memory whatsoever of what he’d done before becoming truly conscious.
Agnethea would damn herself to hell rather than risk The Engineer’s displeasure.
What was their Master Nickels, truly? He weren’t Specter. The Engineer had been quite clear on that beast as well, oh yes, yes he had. She could tell that whatever grim hungers lurking behind the eyes had been put to rest with the arrival of this other Garth, this ‘Engineer’.
He weren’t the good man he desperately wanted to be, that much was plain as the nose on his face, but he weren’t the evil man he imagined he was, neither. Somehow, he were both! Before now, Agnethea would’ve sworn on every minute of her life ‘til that point that men and women and all others as were capable of thinking only came in two flavors. Black and white, good and bad, right and wrong.
‘twas how it was, ‘neath The Dome.
Master Nickels, though, he weren’t like that at all. He were both. Good and bad and tussled up inside one brain.
No wonder he came off as an idiot most of the time. Too busy juggling opposing passions.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Garth wished Davram would hurry the fuck up. The ‘bartender’ had disappeared into the back almost as soon as they’d walked through the front door, muttering something about everyone needing a good, solid meal in their bellies. Being left alone with Agnethea was never a good idea, especially …
Since there was some kind of weird tension between the two of them now. Garth didn’t know what it was, and since they’d shared so much death and destruction in such a short time, there was no fucking way to pinpoint precisely when whatever had happened to make it weird between them had actually happened.
Christ, for all he knew, she was blaming him for, like, the destruction of her creepy skull and crossbones garden.
Agnethea made to answer, only Davram clattered through the doors leading into the kitchen, bearing massive plates of food, one balanced carefully on each arm.
“Not your typical bar food,” Dave said as he lowered the plates skillfully onto the table, “but I think you’ll agree that it was worth the wait.”
Agnethea pointed at various foods on the two plates, salivating like mad. “That there is lamb roast from nearly the other side of the world, Davram, and these twice-baked potatoes I do recognize from Grallinger Estate, which hain’t …”
“I’m sorry, did you say potatoes?” Garth’s demand drew puzzled looks from his companions, so he explained. “Look, on the outside, potatoes haven’t been a thing for, like, twenty-five thousand years. They got replac… look. It doesn’t fucking matter. You two can eat everything else on this goddamn table, but if either one of you get anywhere near those potatoes, I’ll kick both your asses, one-handed. Because the other hand will be cramming potatoes into my mouth.”
Agnethea gestured grandly at the steaming potatoes while Davram merely shrugged as he sat down.
The Queen spoke, “I was merely saying, Master Nickels, that our friend, who has spent considerable time hiding who he was, seems to’ve come to some sort of decision.”
Dave nodded around a mouthful of hot lamb. When he was able, the Brigadier explained. “Aye, ‘tis true. With all that’s gone on, with everything I suspect is about to take place, there’s little reason for me to stay hidden any longer.”
“How d’you mean?” Garth asked, mouth full of potato. Agnethea quirked an eyebrow at his table manners. He gave a big old starchy grin and continued chewing.
“The two of you were, er, gone by the time I arrived at Ickford. Off on your … journey?” Dave smiled gratefully when Garth took no offense and continued on. “The swathe of destruction at Ickford, the reclamation cylinders, the giant…”
“Gunbo… ack …” A rebellious wad of deliciously awesome twice-baked potato wedged itself unceremoniously in his throat in such a manner as to prevent proper swallowing.
Hammering Garth on the back to free his airways, Agnethea couldn’t help but take a jab. “And this is what happens, Master Nickels, when we dispense with proper table etiquette. While I certainly do not care how you choose to eat your food, Master Brigadier Davram here was once nobility. Though that nobility does of course prevent him from taking you to task for eating like a barbarian, I am certain his sensibilities are nevertheless ruffled.” The chunk launched out of his mouth, hit the wall. Garth took a deep, ragged breath. “There. Now. I do hope from this moment forward, you will eat like a grownup.”
“Choke to death! Choke to death you vile and foul abomination! You are weeeeeeeds! Weeds! Not fit for the garden!”
Dave took a pull on his beer. Derbyshire Proper Stout. The last glass he’d ever likely hoist, especially if he kept the company he was with now. “I should apologize for Nanny Primrose. She hasn’t adjusted to her new living situation quite as well as I’d hoped. And with what happened in Arcadia…”
“Oh?” Arcadia was the one place in all of Arcade City that Agnethea had never been to; the closest she’d ever gotten in her long life was ten miles away, and that had been a risk, for seconds later, some of Davram’s bunch had ridden out to greet her.
She’d taken the hint and had never been back.
Dave nodded in Garth’s direction. “Aye. When our man here …”
“Turned into a giant robot man?” Garth tried to play it cool, but the memory of his time inside the skin of that beast made him shiver.
‘Just Dave-the-not-Bartender’ and Agnethea both shifted awkwardly in their chairs.
“Just so.” Dave speared a roast carrot and munched on it. “Just so. In your vast guise of a machine man, you managed to spare Ickford of two of three of those foul reclamation cylinders. One, as we all know, wound up very nearly on my doorstep, doing for the whole of Sliver Hills in a flash of golden light, more’s the pity. The other landed in Arcadia, inflicting, I should imagine, considerable damage. Sadly, the third fell sometime after you’d already departed Ickford on your quest for destruction, but there … there was little around to spare.”
Davram shot Agnethea an apologetic glance and –to the woman’s credit- the Golem did seem to be bearing the news rather well. All things considered.
“Awesome! Woo! Go Robot Garth. RoboGarth? Garthbot 2000? Anyone?” Garth high-fived himself, spilling the contents of the last twice-baked potato on the clothes Davram had magicked up out of the Cloud. “Aw. Dammit.”
Agnethea handed Garth a napkin. “Do go on. How does this affect your … your wall hanging?”
On cue. “King’s got his eye on you lot, yes he does, yes he does indeed and when the King comes knocking, you’ll allllllllll suffer.”
“Yes, well. Were I one to believe in this sort of thing, I’d almost say fate played a hand in where the cylinder landed.” Dave clapped his hands together loudly. “Smashed right down atop where the Nannies, collectively known as Matrons, hang their bonnets, so to speak. I do reckon they were all vaporized right there on the spot, eaten whole by the damned cylinder. Shame, really.”
“How is that a shame?” Garth knew fuck-all about the Nannies and the role they played, but it wasn’t too hard a guess to figure they helped Barnabas Blake in the running of his tiny little kingdom. “Fuck anything the King uses.”
“That’s as may be, Master Nickels,” Dave said quickly, “but, ah, it’s the Gearmen, you see. They’re likely dead or dying. All of them.”
“Oh. Gotcha.” Chagrined, Garth hid his embarrassment by stuffing his face full of food. No matter where he turned, no matter what good came from his deeds, always, always there was suffering.
Dave looked to Agnethea fo
r answers, amazed at how quickly used to her presence he’d become: as a Brigadier, he had, naturally, come face to face with her kind more often than not, and with each occasional dust-up, he’d been left with an ever-growing dislike for the so-called Obsidian Golems. They were as they’d always been presented to him and other Brigadiers. Animals. Vicious, brutal, barely human, hungry for the death of every single Arcadian, fanning the flames of fear until whole Estates burned.
Agnethea seemed to be the exception to the rule, and as he waited for the once-Queen of Ickford to answer, the Brigadier found himself wondering where the First Monster had gained her civility. Before building Ickford? During?
“Master Nickels here, he is … quick on the uptake.” Agnethea smiled prettily.
“The quickest, I would say. I said nothing on the hows and whys of their demise.” Davram looked over at the outsider, who –thankfully- was done inhaling all forms of potato. He’d never seen someone eat something so single-mindedly before.
Garth waved a chicken leg in the air, scribing a greasy circle in the air. “All connected, here, in The Dome. King’s Will, Dark Iron, blah blah blah. Barnie Blake the fuckwad can’t be assed to keep everything running on his own, so he whips up these completely mental-looking steambots to handle the bulk of stuff so he can get on with the grand design. So the Gearmen fall under their command. Which means the Geared Armor and all the little toys they use to turn gearheads into goop are run by their systems, and if my awesome homerun landed on their base of operations and turned the Nannies into sparks of flickering light, then … all the Gearmen’s, uh, gear stops working. Either they got electrocuted or whatever or the machines stopped letting them, like walk. So, honestly, hopefully, they died right there on the spot, am I right? Starving to death because your super-rad armor won’t let you, like, walk to a fucking hamburger joint would totally suck. And I would feel bad if that was how things happened. And these days, feeling bad has repercussions.”
All three of them chose that moment to sit and eat in terribly awkward silence.
“Well, this is … nice.” Agnethea floundered for a proper choice in words. In fact, it was anything but, yet nothing else popped to mind. “Three ridiculously powerful individuals, sitting in a bar, with a cackling and cracked Matron hanging on the wall, shouting epithets and trying to summon the King. This is the sort of thing that historians jabber on about.”
“I’ve got no powers left.” Garth said abruptly. Not entirely a lie. He just didn’t want to have to deal with whatever was percolating under his skin. It wasn’t something he was comfortable with at all –especially if the changes being wrought were as imagined - and both Agnethea and Davram owned their abilities as a direct result of exposure to Dark Iron.
There was no way of knowing for certain if King Barnabas wasn’t –or couldn’t- look through their eyes at any given moment. Oh, he knew what they’d say. They’d deny it left, right and center. But those denials, those cries… they could all be coming from the King, so whatever strangeness was going on between Kingsblood and quadronium needed to remain secret for as long as possible.
“Are you certain of this?” Dave asked, a tiny frisson of worry percolating through him. It was clear to see now that –whatever else had happened to the man since coming to Arcade City- Garth Nickels had chosen to come to the Domed City, specifically to do for the King. An impossible-to-imagine sort of adventure, to be sure, yet come Nickels had.
Without the queer powers Dark Iron had conferred unto the man from Outside, doing for the King was the least possible thing under The Dome.
Garth nodded, chewing. When he was positive he wouldn’t choke to death, he unbuttoned his shirt, saying, “One or both of you were too busy checking out my naked ass,” here, Agnethea barked nervous laughter and Davram suddenly found great interest in the ceiling, “to notice, but … no more tattoos.”
Davram had never seen the tattoos Garth spoke of, but by Agnethea’s response, it was clear that Nickels’ smooth, unadorned flesh was something of a problem. “How do you mean?”
“Our man here.” Agnethea couldn’t take her eyes from Garth’s body. It was easy to recall the whirring, ticking and tocking gears and clockwork stenciled into his chest and arms and back, as was her deep fascination in seeing something new under The Dome for the first time in thousands upon thousands of years. Heat pricked slowly up her hand, reminding her of what’d happened.
Agnethea blinked and resumed. “Our man here had the most interesting case of Vicious Elixir exposure I’d ever seen in my … in my life.” She’d been about to toss out ‘eternal life’, catching herself at the last second; though Davram was Brigadier no longer and hadn’t been one for a hundred years, he’d been in the Brigade for a very long time. The fact the fallen nobleman was keeping his instincts well under control was something he deserved credit for.
“Gears.” Garth supplied when Agnethea fell awkwardly silent, heat from their moment together in her offices when he’d been burning hot with Dark Iron and trembling to keep Specter under control and she’d been … well. How she’d been. “And various other forms of clockwork machinery, all hewing to the King’s insistence to form.”
“On your body.” Davram tried to think of anything he might’ve heard of similar afflictions only to fail; a long time ago, before the King had gone gothic, Arcadia had been home to strange sights not seen anywhere else, not even in the dark sister-city, poor Ickford, but to his certain memory, nothing like this. “Gears and all.”
Agnethea nodded. “They whirled and twirled, Master Davram, just as anything an artificer might make. They provided Master Nickels with the strength and speed of the eldest gearhead you might hope to find, and without any of the gross changes that may occur.”
“They also allowed for me to be turned into a giant fucking robot, so there’s definitely a downside to all of that.” The words came out more bitterly than intended, and once again, the table fell silent. Garth cursed himself and shoveled more food into his mouth. He was in a rotten mood.
“I’m sorry.” Dave blurted the words out, looked around embarrassedly, and then repeated himself. “For all of it.”
Agnethea looked from Garth to Dave and back again. “What does he have to be sorry for?”
Garth rolled his eyes. “Dave here believes it’s his fault.”
“I gathered that, Master Nickels.” Agnethea shook her head. Honestly. The man had a terrible habit of assuming he was the only one with a functional brain. “What is his fault?”
“Oh,” Garth shrugged, “Dave the fallen Brigadier probably imagines that everything that happened from the moment I left his bar here a month and a bit ago until I walked right back in an hour ago is all on him.”
“It is, though!” Davram all but shouted his acceptance of unoffered blame. “When you and Nicked Jimmy did come through those doors, I knew summat was going to go wrong, go weird, and when Jimmy and that girl of his …”
“Staunch Mel.”
“Staunch Mel did come up to me with their plan to wed you to Dark Iron, I could’ve easily refused. Could’ve made them forget their ideas to have the first Elixir’d smith, could’ve had them leave the pub, never to come back again. Failing that…” Dave shook his head. The violence in the pub that night had –and still was- horrific. Never in his entire term as Platinum Brigadier had he seen anything so visceral, so bloody, and he’d been a gearhead himself, upon a long time ago. “Failing that… I could’ve stopped them. Well in advance. Given them all the boot, so to say. Let you be alone, here, with them few normal folk as I used to employ. And oh, how I do wish I hadn’t called them Gearmen here. I …”
“Enough.” Garth barked the word, shocking the other two at the table so much they jumped. Nanny Primrose cackled, hooting something so indecipherably Cockney she might as well have been speaking gibberish.
“Enough.” The Engineer said again, this time, coolly. “Dave, it ain’t your fault. None of this is on you. It’s all on me. Agnethea knows more of
the story than she honestly should and I’ll leave it to her to explain all of it later on, but, dude. I came here. Me. On purpose. I did a horrible, awful thing to probably the only honest King’s Son in all of creation, all so I would wind up sentenced to imprisonment in Arcade City. I head-butted that guy so hard his brain … it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that it was voluntary. Did I know about Vicious Elixir or Dark Iron?” Garth thought back to Meechy’s warning with a raised eyebrow. “Actually, yeah, sort of I did, only it wasn’t in any kind of meaningful context. I came to Arcade City expecting to kick ass and takes names, only I wound up being so fucking woefully unprepared it wasn’t even funny. I can guarantee with one hundred percent certainty, Dave the Bartender, exposure to Dark Iron would’ve happened. If not here, then somewhere else. Something tells me that was unavoidable. So don’t blame yourself, not ever. There’s only one man to blame for the shitstorm that’s descended on Arcade City, and that’s me.”
Agnethea wanted to suggest that, somewhere in Garth’s self-loathing, there was more than enough room to lay blame at King Barnabas Blake’s feet, though she held her tongue; the man was trying to soothe the conscience of the Last Brigadier, a man whose help they would most assuredly need if they were to make their way to Arcadia.
“That part did bother me, aye, no you bring it up.” Dave had mulled that particular bit over from time to time since Nickels had left. “Never seen anyone willingly give up all that, ‘specially a man like Nicked Jimmy.”
“We’ll never fucking know.” Garth noticed –not for the first time- that Agnethea was still favoring her right hand. Since he was keeping secrets and wasn’t stupid enough to imagine that both Davram and Agnethea were ignorant of it, Garth decided he wasn’t going to be the one to throw a light on whatever was bugging the Obsidian Golem. “And it sure as hell ain’t worth trying to figure out, or taking the blame for, or anything, ain’t that right, Dave?”
