by Lee Bond
“Spill!” Garth insisted, still turning over the King’s activities in his mind. Obviously, the bastard couldn’t know with one hundred percent certainty where his quarry was hidden, so was relying on the ragged edges of Arcade City’s dissolution to force him to move, but how much land did Barnabas intend on leaving untouched? A swathe ten miles wide, leading all the way to Arcadia? A mile? Two hundred feet? Too little and any forces he sent after them would be just as hemmed in as they were. The King might not be a tactician like his metalheaded demonspawn, but he wasn’t a complete halfwit, either. “Spill.”
“I shall have to keep it brief, Master Nickels, for the whole telling of this tale does in truth stretch across more than twelve thousand years.” Long though she’d been in the habit of playing fast and loose with the extent of her life in Arcade City, Agnethea had to admit –if only to herself- that doing so in Garth’s presence seemed … childish; while he made no claims of any special age, or having lived through epochs as she had, there was summat about the man as made it seem –from time to time, when he thought no one was looking- as though he were the eldest thing, not just in the room, but anywhere. “The moment the land stops moving, Davram, like as not, will return wi’ haste, insisting we move on Arcadia.”
“That’s something he and I will agree on, then, yup.” No, Barnie would have to leave enough room for his troops to move. A strip of land, then, no more than ten miles wide, no less than five, though that seemed too little. Be as brief as you need, but, not, like, too brief.”
There were things both of them could be doing to prepare for this new Gauntlet but gut instinct, some thing perhaps left behind from his exposure to the King’s hungry dreams told him this was a tale he needed to hear.
“Very well, then, Master Nickels. It’s been some time since I’ve done a proper Once upon a time affair, so bear with me.” A grin on her lips, Agnethea adjusted her posture and bearing until she looked, for all the world, like an old-time school marm.
Garth applauded, and she blushed. “Now then. Once upon a time, a terribly long time ago indeed, the world was different than it is now. How different, you wonder? Well, you were in my private chambers, and though many of the things your eyes fell upon did seem to distress you considerably, they were all parts of my life before. Thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, when I was still a girl on the verge of becoming a woman, there was more than just Arcadia to the north. There was Avalon and Ys and Lyonesse and oh so many others. Proper cities, unlike poor Ickford, and back then, the whole entire world was open to all who wished to travel, to revel in that which our King, who was a proper king back then, had wrought for all to see.”
“Wait,” Garth said slowly, “back in the day Barnabas wasn’t a fucking lunatic?”
“Interruptions!” Agnethea swatted Garth on the leg. “And no, he was not always as he is now. Our King back then was proud of his handicraft, and would often engage in massive displays of his creativity and ingenuity, and, more often than not, would encourage others to attempt the same. While it was not necessarily a Golden Age, the time of my youth was one of excitement, of wonder. The story of the first Platinum Brigadier, now I think on it, also marks the decline of Arcade City.”
Agnethea shook her head before resuming, catching the thoughtful look on Garth’s face as he gazed –apparently unthinkingly but just the opposite- out across the calamity King’s Will was creating. “Around about my eighteenth birthday, the King did begin issuing challenges to all who would take up the gun and the sword. This was no big thing, mind, as this was summat that Barnabas had always done down through the ages. Every ten years or so, our King would devise a new Gauntlet, whereupon he would entice all men and women of a certain age to test their mettle against all that was within. But know this; in the twenty thousandth year of Arcade City’s existence, nearly every single man and woman who was martial-minded already held within their grasp skills and abilities to make most gearheads today seem as children. Knights from Avalon, soldiers from Ys, warriors from Lyonesse, battle-masters from Lanta … thousands upon thousands of the best and bravest and most powerful rode off. There were schools, Master Nickels, dozens and dozens of schools who would open their doors to those who could afford the fees, all with the promise of being able to transform anyone into a warrior skilled enough to enter King’s Gauntlet.
And it was worth it, oh yes. The King offered those who survived wealth enough to live out the rest of their days in comfort but those who won … those who won received special favors. They were permitted to live in Arcadia, with true nobility, and to learn and to see things that which none other were permitted.”
“Sounds familiar.” Garth snorted.
“Interruptions!” Agnethea hissed prettily, flexing her hands as a cat would to expose claws.
“You haven’t mentioned Vicious Elixir or Kingsblood yet.” Garth grinned craftily at what was coming out of his mouth next. “And I thought you said you were going to be brief.”
Agnethea opened her mouth to deliver a hotly phrased rejoinder, biting back the words at the last second. She wouldn’t rise to that challenge; Master Nickels was definitely a man of two minds about her, and the coy teasing right now –while enjoyable- would only lead to frustration if she pursued it. “I have made no mention of Kingsblood, Master Nickels the Interrupter, as it was not in use. Until after this tale I am trying to tell. The Tale of the First Brigadier encompasses this, amongst other things.”
“On with it, then.”
“The scene is set, then, yes? Gauntlet, prizes, wealth, fame, fortune, all that a man or woman could hope to want for the rest of their lives?” Agnethea smiled when Garth nodded. Continuing on, she said, “but this time, this Gauntlet, there was a new, special prize, one for a proper winner, an opportunity available only should someone prove to be flawless in combat.”
“And what was this special opportunity? Oh! Hey! Back then, was there, like, suns and shit? Wind and birds and, like, bees and things?” Garth grabbed hold of Agnethea’s hands, ignoring the faint tremor pulsing through one of them. He gazed deep into her odd eyes. “It’s seriously important.”
Agnethea snatched her hands away. She cleared her throat and did her best to hide her embarrassment. “Yes, of course, Master Nickels. So long ago, there were still such things as birds and bees and, as you so eloquently phrased it, suns and shit.”
Garth leaned back in his chair, finally content for probably the first time since coming to Arcade City. He let out one long, slow sigh of purest relief. “Okay. Good. Been driving me nuts since I got here. Phew. All right. Special prize?”
“That was more important to you than the tale I’m telling this very moment? You would rather know about birds and bees and all those things as opposed to the genesis of the Brigadiers?” Their man Nickels was a study in opposites and contradictions. “Birds and bees and weather hardly compare.”
“Well,” Garth saw his impromptu question had derailed the Tale of Platinum Brigadier, making it his responsibility that things got back on track, “it’s like this. King’s Will isn’t magic…”
“We’ve been over this, I know this, I haven’t forgotten.”
“The elderly,” Garth began wittily, unable to help himself, “are universally known for their forgetfulness, Queen Agnethea. I was merely, you know, giving you that in so you wouldn’t be left out.”
Agnethea let out a gasp of exasperation as she climbed to her feet. She pushed and pulled all day long, trying to get the slightest bit of attention from the man, which he ignores left, right and center, but the moment she started explaining something that was truly interesting? “If you weren’t the one to do for our Mad King, I would pull your eyes out of their sockets and eat them. With chocolate syrup.”
“Sounds like something you’ve done before.” Garth joined Agnethea at the stairs and watched King’s Will continue to rip apart the land. There were dozens of black lightning lances ripping down from the heavens now, shearing whole chunks of la
nd into puffs of sparkly mites that floated upwards. “Why gold?”
“Hm?” Agnethea blinked. She hadn’t been watching the display at all. In truth, she’d been thinking about the last time she’d eaten someone’s eyeballs. A most cruel creature, back then. “Oh, I don’t know. This is something new. I’ve only ever been witness to the black stuff, or them cubes that eat the ground up in a hurry when the King’s making his Will manifest in a hurry.”
“Like the Gunboys.” It was easy to recall the landscape surrounding Ickford, even though he’d been in the guise of a Gunboy himself at the time. With that hellish terrain brought to mind, it was all too probable that, wherever the lightning struck, the land out there was thusly transformed.
“Aye.” Agnethea fell silent once more, ears pricking up now and again when Nanny Primrose cackled to this particularly loud crack of ebon lightning or that colossal flume of light arcing for The Dome.
Garth watched on, enjoying the quietude, which in turn made him wonder if he was as mad as the rest; other people found solace in watching television, in having a few drinks, in sitting on a beach somewhere watching the sun set or rise, but the last Kin’kithal?
He was finding it relaxing, standing on a porch, next to a woman who’d made no effort to deny the fact that she’d eaten her fair share of eyeballs while a maddened monarch in possession of doomsday nanotech weaponry literally destroyed the whole world.
“So, birds and bees and stuff.” Garth offered.
Agnethea turned and looked up into Master Nickels’ eyes. One was the bluest blue she’d ever seen and the other … was black. Darkness incarnate. The Queen understood –had, indeed, from the first moment she’d seen the dark orb in it’s socket- why Garth had gone to such great lengths to disguise it with that old steamhorse’s eye. Gearheads and wardogs found little that was discomfiting to them, but there was something about that dark sphere that was just that and then some.
She wondered if any had gazed into the blue eye as she had, or if they’d spoken to the man behind it. If they –like her- had, then they’d seen a thing far crueler for it’s patent disinterest in anything save his own goals.
So hard to reconcile that man with the one she spoke with now, harder still to deal with the fact that –at the end of the day- they were the same man.
“Yes. Birds and bees and all that.” They were standing awfully close to one another. Agnethea wasn’t precisely holding her breath, but close enough.
“It’s totally simple, really.” Garth nodded, surreptitiously shifting his weight back about an inch; Specter was a dim memory, buried under thousands of gallons of Dark Iron and –fairly- successfully integrated back into the psyche where all such demons truly belonged, ironically making it all the more difficult to control certain … urges. He valiantly chose not to see the slight, crestfallen flicker on Agnethea’s lovely face and continued. “The whole of The Dome and everything under it is and always has been under the strict control of direction of either the King or the autonomous systems of the Cloud.”
“Cloud?” Agnethea blinked. And just like that, Garth was … back to normal.
“Will. Cloud. Same thing. Anyways. ‘Simple’ things like birds and bees and insects and weather are anything but simple. There’s a lot … and I mean a lot … that goes into making sure those things operate properly. And not just brute processing, either. I’m talking full-time, one hundred percent continual monitoring of each individual system to make sure shit doesn’t go completely, stupidly, off-track.” He could see it now, understood thy why of why Barnabas had ‘removed’ things like the sun and weather patterns and all that from the functioning of Arcade City. He’d needed the processing power to begin work on destroying everything.
“It is different outside?”
“Yeah, yeah it is, and sometimes, well, okay, a lot of the time, shit does go wrong. Whole species die out because some asshole brought a pet bird home from Planet Who The Fuck Thinks Birds are Proper Pets, Anyways, only this bird has a mite called ‘I’mgonnakillallbeesLOL’ and then wham! Dead bees everywhere and then the flowers die and it’s a clusterfuck that gets worse and worse. But not here.” A huge stab of ebony lightning arced down from The Dome, casting a pallid light across the land. “Here, everything is a tightly coordinated system. Here, good old King Barnabas Blake can’t afford the kinds of errors that pop up naturally. Bad enough he’s got all those gearhead and wardogs looking like 80’s sci-fi rejects. Having to deal with the long-term effects of a spore that kills grass instantly? Or avian flu decimating Estates? There are no proper doctors and there’s no such thing as Medicare here, so … he gets rid of the things that might affect his experiment. Also saves on processing power.”
“Some of the things you say make no sense,” Agnethea watched as a parcel of land she believed to be Harringwood flare into nothingness with a stab of regret. She’d spent a few years there, once upon a time. “But I understand enough of it. The King dispensed with all those different animals and insects and all because it was simpler to make the snow last forever in areas where he wanted snow than to risk having the weather produce it elsewhere? The same for flowers and all?”
Garth nodded. “Yup.”
“Then what about the gearheads? As you say, they are rife with … errors. Kingsblood can and does wreak awful changes to them, if they’re careless with their bodies.” Agnethea could tell by the faint smirk on Garth’s face that she already … “Ah. I see what you did there, Master Nickels. Tell me. When you began your poorly timed lecture on birds and bees –leading me at first to believe we were having an entirely different discussion for a while to begin with- while I was trying to educate you on a very important part of our world, did you plan on ending things in such a way that I could pick my take up again easily enough, or was it all happenstance?”
Garth sat his ass back down and gestured to the empty chair beside him. Gallantly, he spoke. “Accept my apologies, Queen Agnethea. Bad timing, though the answer proved to be worth a few ruffled feathers. Please. Resume your tale.”
Agnethea harrumphed as she took up her chair. “I’ve forgotten where I was, you awful man.”
“Something something something, special prize. I swear, if that fucking lunatic Nanny doesn’t shut the damn hell up, I am gonna fling it into that black lightning.” Garth craned his head around and peered through the open tavern door. With everything that was going on outside, Primrose was exactly like a spastic budgie in a cage, only with the added bonus of filling the air with truly venomous shit.
“Ah,” Agnethea laughed at Garth’s irritation, “yes. The special prize. To the one who fought gallantly and valiantly against all-comers, to he –or she- who proved to the satisfaction of the whole watching world that their skill, their prowess was unparalleled across the skin of our small earth … glorious, single-handed combat with the King himself.”
“Say what now?” Barnabas didn’t look like much, but he was King. A King suffused with Cloud particulate. A regular round of fisticuffs with a dude that was basically ‘Q’ only with a seriously limited scope on how to use said powers wasn’t even suicide. It was some other word that meant suicide, but also ‘completely fucking insane’.
Agnethea nodded. People the world over back then had been just as incredulous. She said as much, adding, “Yet, the King was adamant that there would be no ill will, no comeuppance, no punishment for striking his royal body. He writ it down in stone and had the Matrons repeat the law until they, too, understood the intent and thus it was that the winner of the Gauntlet –whoever he or she was- was perfectly assuredly that, short of the beating they may or may not receive at the King’s hand, nothing untoward would happen.”
“So, back in the day, people what? Looked at the opportunity to have their asses beat by the King as a ‘special prize’?” Garth facepalmed. “Jesus. He’s got you all completely…”
“I didn’t mention the prize yet, Master Nickels.” Agnethea poked him quite hard in the shoulder. “The difference b
etween your storytelling and … everyone else’s … Garth, is we speak of things that generally need no explanation, nor interruption, for that matter, whereas the stories you tell…”
“Example?”
Agnethea made a face. “The rousing tale of Buckaroo Banzai, perhaps? There was more explanation there than in my entire years of schooling combined. Or that one about the towel? Or…”
“I give, I give.” Garth raised his hands, defeated. “I jumped the gun. Please. Continue. This story is getting interesting. Who in their right fucking mind would even think for a second they could fight the King?”
It took a full five second flat stare from Agnethea before Garth realized what he’d said. He laughed. “Hey, look. I’m totes different. I bet this first Platinum Brigadier didn’t turn himself into a giant robot. Or, like, forge the world’s most perfectest Geared Armor. Damn that suit was sweet.”
“It was ‘sweet’.” Personally –though the Geared Armor had indeed been a world wonder- Agnethea was pleased Garth had been stripped of said protective gear as soon as he had; deep in her stomach, the Obsidian Golem felt it was most important that Garth defeat the King –if such a thing were even possible- using his own talents, and not those derived from Will at all. “And no, the First Brigadier didn’t turn into a giant robot. But what Chad Sikkmund of Taryn did was and always will be beyond reproach.”
Fire sparked in his mind. Garth grabbed Agnethea by the hands and stared intently into her eyes. Fiercely, far fiercer than he wanted, he spoke. “Say that name. Say it again.”
In that second, as Garth held on to her wrists, she learned that he was lying about being powerless. The Golem couldn’t quite put it into words; certainly his grip was nowhere near the implacable, titanic force it’d been back in Ickford, no, that’d been Kingsblood-fueled strength and that was gone.
