by Lee Bond
Garth gave Agnethea a single, curt nod. The last two natural citizens of Arcade City were courting dates with Death, resigned some time ago to accepting a fate that he didn’t fucking agree with, not at all. Between him and the King, they’d killed a small world. Millions of people, or thereabout. Didn’t matter one goddamn bit that Barnabas’ culling was one of those things that would’ve happened one way or the other, because it had happened with one Garth N’Chalez to stand witness.
That asshole would be brought to task for his unnecessary cruelty.
Queen Agnethea of the Golems and Sir Davram the Last Brigadier were not going to die. Garth was bound and determined to see to that, even if it meant … he really wasn’t sure what he could do until all three of them were facing off against the King, but for their help, for their assistance, for their blood, sweat, tears and broken hearts, Garth N’Chalez would bargain with the Devil himself.
“Goodness!” Dave looked over his shoulder, shaking his head. “The King is mightily determined, hey? Well, at least you’ve been proven on another of your theories, Master Nickels.”
“Which one would that be?” Garth demanded dryly; the closer the Brigadier got to his imaginarily necessary death, the more sarcastic and wry he became, so talking to the man in the platinum colored armor was always tricky. “The one where I am super awesome and have great taste in music, or the one where your sense of humor needs a surgical operation to implant actual humor?”
“Neither!” Dave laughed. This was a good time to be alive. Chased down a narrow alley –metaphorically- by thousands upon thousands of beasts, all hungry for the marrow in their bones. His death would be a glorious one and King Barnabas Blake the One and Only would see what it felt like to have someone arrive and snatch everything you held dear to your heart away in a bloody tangle of flesh and bone. “The one wherein in the King wants us alive! Were he sincerely interested in doing for the three of us, he would begin taking away the land before us. Trapped as we are on the forefront of a veritable tsunami of monsters and beasts, more than even we indomitable three could now hope to vanquish on our own, ‘twould be a simple thing. A single whip-crack strike of that ebon lighting of his. Acres of land, gone, with us tumbling down, down, down.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Garth checked Agnethea’s face to make sure he wasn’t experiencing the gloomiest fucking hallucination ever. From the way one artfully sculpted eyebrow was perched high on her forehead, he saw that nope, he wasn’t. “Dude. That was probably the most melancholy fucking thing I’ve ever heard, and I lived through emo. Agnethea! Check his fingernails for black nail polish while I root through his closet looking for albums by The Cure!”
“Make mock all you want, milord Nickels.” Davram shouted over his shoulder, eyes burning fiercely. “But it is the truth and you know it! Which is why …”
Agnethea interrupted, as she was closer. “Which is why, Garth, we have a plan to strike a blow against the King’s forces. Such a blow, in fact, that he will most assuredly…” she caught the look in Garth’s one blue eye and relented, “that he will most hopefully decide against further swarms.”
“Plan.” Garth’s metal horse leaped over a fallen tree while Agnethea zoomed around to the left. When the Queen reoriented to match up with him once more, Garth looked right at her, dubious as hell. “You guys have a plan that’s gonna piss off the King so badly he flips the table and walks away long enough to get all three of us to Arcadia? That’s some plan.”
“Aye!” Davram slowed his charger enough so the three of them could ride abreast once more. Ickford was just over the next hill now, and as the King had proved he weren’t too interested in doing for them, it were equally likely then the wall of monsters would keep apace until their plan was revealed.
And by then, ‘twould be too late.
Davram tiled his head back and laughed. “Such a plan, too! Now, be on the ready, for our steeds must make certain, hrm, maneuvers to assure our safety ‘cross the blasted fields outside ruint Ickford!”
***
The memory of standing atop a hill –now blasted away into nothingness- alongside Barnabas Blake, looking worriedly down on that black city of gears and Kingsblood was one Garth would never forget. As that foreboding feeling so long ago had insisted, everything had indeed changed the moment the two of them had crossed into Ickford. For the worse in every way possible, and yet … some good had come of it. He’d met Queen Agnethea, a woman as old as time itself, once twisted and black as any evil beast aspired to become, but also a woman desperate to find some small part of good inside her soul, somewhere, somehow.
That Queen rode silently beside him, refusing to look anywhere but at the back of her horse’s head.
Garth kept the bitter sigh from his lips, instead casting a fleeting nod to Davram; the knight rode on the other side of Agnethea, whispering soft words Garth knew he couldn’t utter aloud no matter how badly he might want to.
Ickford, a place she’d literally built with her own two hands –tremendous help from aging, grey-skinned, Kingsblood-poisoned gearheads never to be forgotten- was a shambles. Worse than that. Garth could think of very few cities that’d endured this kind of punishment that hadn’t led to the destruction of the entire planet.
It was total. Garth remembered very little of those last fateful few hours, so this was all new to him: running to stop all the Gunboys from ravaging Ickford, running from the maddened Gearman Dominic Breton, trying to keep Specter from rising up and doing his best to make sure everyone left him the fuck alone had pretty much been an ‘all cylinders focused on survival’ kind of thing.
Then, obviously, his transubstantiation into Garthzilla… yeah, none of his time in Ickford –save perhaps the quiet dinner with Agnethea- had been filled with anything remotely ‘fun’.
“Wow.” He whispered. The Gunboy he’d accidentally crashed into like an asteroid still hung from the Wall, though finally diminished; either the King didn’t care or the systems powering the nanotech wall were too complex to shut down easily, but the Gunboy dangling from the neck had been insanely ravaged by endless rivers of electricity ripping through it’s gigantic metal frame.
From a distance, the corpse was a fallen giant, vast metal bones gleaming with just the faintest hit of hot electricity.
“’tis nothing.” Agnethea whispered, equally aghast. She did not want to be here, not at all. This had been her home for the longest time, for even before she’d begun construction in the physical realm, she’d built it inside her own mind, filling it’s homes and squares with people happy to have a place free of King’s Will. “All things are meant to pass. ‘tis the way of all things. In a normal world, we are all born to die, milord Nickels.”
Fire raged everywhere, flickering fitfully in the wind, long, ashen grey and black tendrils reaching for the impartial sky. Buildings –homes and businesses and theaters and all else- that’d once been filled with laughter –aye, true, other emotions as well, for her people had been nothing if not mercurial and prone to outbursts- were nowt more than jagged, skeletal fingers, broken teeth, shattered beyond repair. And out of the corners of her eyes, beneath their massive steamhorses, everywhere you cared to look, desiccated gearhead and wardog corpses, stripped clean of their Kingsblood poison, transformed into creatures light as dust, blown hither and thither, their once-hard faces now weak, empty, sorrowful. More than that, too; the regular townsfolk, them as had been promised a good living, good customers, happy lives, stable and free from the hungry beasts that grew ever bolder at the Estates, their bodies lay everywhere as well, though unlike their geared counterparts, they were … they were …
“’tis nothing.” She whispered again, training her eyes on the back of Platine’s head. She thanked the … Agnethea was thankful she could shed no tears. Her paltry deceit would be proven immediately for the sham her two friends saw through.
Davram wisely kept his mouth shut. Hunting through Ickford for survivors, he knew there was worse than this to be seen
; mounds of bodies, piled high by the Lady of the Weeping Eye, penance for moving against her Queen and for her temerity in thinking she would be the one to do for Garth Nickels. The Last Brigadier hoped with every fiber in his being that the despoiled and cracked Golem had done as she’d said, and was nowhere to be found in the city limits, and for more than just a distinct desire to keep her away from both Garth and Agnethea; Gearmen Breton and Pointillier deserved no less than to be spared the cataclysm that was truly about to befall Ickford.
“We must quicken our pace somewhat, milord, milady.” Davram put as much warmth and support into his tone as possible; from her countenance and body language, the Queen of the Golems felt quite the opposite of ‘’tis nothing’. If he knew the woman at all –and he fairly thought he did, given their time together this last little while- she had grown quite introspective, and was thinking of something long past, some moment her in Ickford that was special to her.
His plan, the plan to get her and Master Nickels to the front gates of cherished Arcadia, would transform what little remained of her pride and joy into scoured earth.
Agnethea blinked, felt a small seam of wetness trickle down from the corner of one eye and very nearly panicked! A tear, an actual tear, dredged up through the thick black ichor that was her blood. Looking slowly at Davram, she made certain the soft fabric of her eye-shield soaked it up.
Whatever she was, she was no longer a Golem. Golems did not cry. It was not in them, nor was it physically possible. Agnethea’d give a pretty penny to … no point in going over that old bit of wishful thinking. She’d know soon enough, wouldn’t she just?
“Aye, Master Brigadier. Aye.” Agnethea pushed Platine to move faster, as did Garth and Davram. “We are not far from ending all this.”
***
Garth looked dubiously at each of his partners in turn. “You guys sure you don’t, like, wanna, uh, just … sorta … do something else? I mean, give me enough time, I can whip up something like the Heart Cannon again. Real quick. You guys saw how that worked, right? BOOOOM!” Garth mimed a huge explosion with his hands.
Dave pointed behind his reluctant friend. “What say you, milord? Can you do it in less than fifteen minutes? The horde doth approach, and mistakenly, they move through Ickford much quicker than we believed they could.”
And how!
Garth followed Dave’s platinum-coated finger. The entire assortment of monsters A through Z were monkeying through the shattered remains of Agnethea’s city like they’d spent the last six months of their lives Parkouring through an endless fucking jungle gym. There had to be thousands of the fucking things by now. Garth tried to see things from Barnie’s point of view and just couldn’t; the King had to believe they had some sort of plan or trick or whatever that’d led them to this point, that’d ‘allowed’ him to generate so many fiends, but try as he might, Garth simply couldn’t understand why the King was playing along.
If, as they all believed by now, Barnabas Blake wanted him, Garth N’Chalez alive and well for some weirdly nefarious purpose, the tidal wave of nanotech-spawned monsters currently swinging their way through Ickfordocalypse was the very definition of ‘gonna kill Garth dead, probably by accident’.
Unless Barnabas literally disintegrated all the monsters once they’d achieved their goal in killing both Davram and Agnethea. Which was stupid.
Agnethea stared straight ahead, scrutinizing the edge of the disintegration field, to see if she could, well, see anything. A despicable urge to reach out and play her fingers across that invisible line thrilled through her even though Master Nickels had warned them both to be incredibly cautious traipsed through her; whether or not they wanted to admit it, they were nevertheless still of Arcade City, and the hungry, intangible maw emanating from the disc would almost definitely strip her down to atoms, vaunted status as Queen of Golems or not.
“Okay, quick.” Garth rubbed his carbon-fiber gloves together, casting little sparks from the friction. “The plan, again. Bullet point that shit.”
“Using your newfound powers, you temporarily dismiss the field that comes from the hungry cylinder.” Davram ticked off a finger, unwilling to remove his eyes from the horde. Those beasts were moving faster now. “We run to the center.” Another finger ticked. “Then I use my Kingsblood-given powers to push the disintegration field to the point where it … what is the word?”
“Overloads.” Agnethea supplied distantly.
“Aye. ‘til it overloads, transforming this meager death-field into something much greater.” Dave smiled, nodded encouragingly, then motioned that he was well ready for Master Nickels to go on ahead with the whole ‘shutting down the field’ part of the plan.
“And then?” Garth asked slowly.
“Eh?” Dave looked to Agnethea for support.
“And then, Master Nickels, we all three of us ride off to Arcadia to vanquish the King.” Agnethea turned from her far-off misery, grabbed hold of Garth’s black gauntleted hands and held them as close to the death-field as she dared. “Now, milord, please be quick about it! I have no wish to battle that wall of monsters this close to the only thing that may very well kill us all stone cold dead.”
Garth nodded once, curtly. “Just so we’re clear. We’re all going to Arcadia.” He flashed his friends a winning smile when they all nodded. Good. He wasn’t stupid. There was something afoot here, and though he couldn’t figure out precisely what was going on, it was fucking obvious the two Moody Melodies were in cah-fucking-hoots.
It was up to him to be ready to respond instantly to their chicanery. End of story. No sequel.
Garth N’Chalez the Engineer raised his hands and pushed them against the thick edge of Barnabas’ disintegration shield. A dreadful, high-pitched scream pierced the air, echoing horrifically through the city; both Agnethea and Davram jumped clear out of their skins but recovered quickly.
“Now,” he said, closing his eyes and … willing his Will to push forward through the swirling, chaotic vortex of nano-machines that existed only to rip and rend all matter in the Universe apart, “this could get … funky. Oh, uh, and … it might not last for all that, uh, long. So get ready to run like motherfuckers.”
The disintegration disc growled deep in it’s maw, the semi-sentient coding necessary to ensure that it’s Vorpal edge did as it was supposed to do and nothing more sensing that someone was messing with it’s operation.
Davram watched a thin layer of Garth’s Will-conceived gloves rip loose and spin away into nothing. He opened his mouth to say something, but Master Nickels cut him off.
“Hey, no, that’s cool, totally, yeah. Sure. Part of the plan.” Garth redoubled his efforts, aghast at the amount of energy and nanotech Barnie had put into the creation of these ‘reclamation cylinders’; inasmuch as the Gunboys that’d come before them, the blade-edged death canisters had as much –if not more- power to them than those lumbering giants. Sudden thoughts of catastrophic overload ripping through The Dome to devour the whole earth filled him with grave concern.
Garth told his grim inner self to fuck itself sideways through the ear with a chainsaw and pressed on.
“Please, Master Nickels, if you are to do something, it should be quick.” Agnethea stepped in front of Garth, drawing the blades he had specifically created for her. She looked sideways at Davram as he did the same. “The beasts are upon us.”
Indeed, they were at that. Thousands of them, all blinking in unison. Water Ladies astride their serpentine steeds stood alongside feral packs of Shaggy Men. Widows Peaks and Bolt-Necks –clandestine enemies in every way that mattered- all but lounged beside trolls. There were giants, too, far off in the background, shouldering humungous bone-clubs. Squirming between the main threats of this world there were other things, strange things that defied purpose but crawled over and under and beside and around everything else, beasts with too many eyes or legs or feelers.
And they all watched, with great interest.
“How fare you, Master Nickels?”
Davram wished he knew how to summon forth guns, as had impeccable Harland and Abigaile. But no, he had chosen to be ‘honorable’ in his guise as Brigadier.
Another micro-fine layer of Will-spawned carbon fiber armor withered under the field’s relentless onslaught, though this time, the matte black atoms didn’t dissipate; they pooled, however imperceptibly, in a small divot carved into the destructive field. They skittered and bounce on the field like fleas on a hot tin roof.
Beetling his forehead thoughtfully, Garth made a quick, desperate decision. It wasn’t one he was completely in love with because it was stupid and dangerous and basically totally the sort of thing he did all the time, but it was the only thing he could think of to do.
It would just leave him utterly powerless for a time, just as would happen to Dave when he overpowered the cylinder’s protocols to blast everything in sight to smithereens, leaving only Agnethea to defend them should King Barnabas Blake not be cowed by their tremendous display of not giving any fucks.
“Uhhhhh.” Garth cleared his throat and began drawing forth all the Kingsblood he’d been force-fed and started consciously channeling the whole kit and caboodle to his outstretched fingertips. The edges of his hands grew inchoate and black filigreed lightning began wavering around where his fingers were normally attached, two super-charged storm fronts doing battle.
Nanotech started filling the air like a cloud, neatly sketching out the proper edges of the King’s deadly machine.
Garth pushed his demands onto the released stuff, corralling it where it was.
More. There had to be more. Garth dug deep, scouring through his body in search of more Kingsblood, some scrap of the foul stuff that refused to be pulled forth, but found nothing.
He cleared his throat again. “Uhhh, okay, yeah. So. I’m ready to go here. But … I’m basically not entirely sure I’m going to be able to … do … anything? Like, walk. Or run. Or, y’know, breathe for a little while? One or both of you guys … You’re gonna have to carry me.”
