by Lee Bond
It took to the streets, cautiously and cunningly at first, killing here and there, taking the lives of a handful of Arcadians every now and then, but, emboldened by it’s continued freedom and strengthened by the certain knowledge that the Matrons were far too busy working to keep Arcade City from falling to pieces around their collective cybernetic ears, it’s depredations grew wickeder and wickeder until…
Until the Gearmen arrived.
Under the guidance and tutelage of the Nannies, the clockwork-armored policemen had been geared with weaponry specific to detaining a wild beast as had never run before. Too late, the Platinum King realized it’s folly had been one of hubris, and it was trapped, hemmed in, held safe, fast and secure behind prismatic walls, right in the center court where it’d once done valiant battle with hopeful gearheads.
Held fast for a hundred years, sufferer of jeers and taunts and heckling catcalls by a wise citizenry degraded down, down, down until they were in truth barely better than those outside the walls, the Platinum King had grown to loathe the sight of every man, woman and child who came into that courtyard. Where before it’d killed out of boredom, seeking respite from the empty loneliness of being unable to fulfill it’s manifest destiny in being the whipping boy towards another being’s apotheosis and desperate to find someone –anyone- in Arcadia capable of doing for it, it now hated.
Fair Arcadia had fallen on rough times indeed, but when a giant hungry cylinder had fallen from the sky to crash into the Matron’s stately Warm House to do for them all –not to mention ten full blocks of homes and businesses and all them inside- those times had grown even more rough, rude, and painful.
When the rainbow-lit, prismatic walls that’d formed it’s home for a hundred years fell, the Platinum King greeted those citizens standing outside –mouths agape, signs of inbreeding and opulence run wild for too long visible everywhere it looked- with bended knee, the sweep of a long forearm, and bloody, bloody death.
Then it moved onwards and outwards, intent on emptying Arcadia of all life, knowing that there was no one within the walls to stop it’s murderous rampage, that there wouldn’t be anyone to even come close until the two who even then flew through the air in a silver bubble.
It had to make certain that the King’s most precious city was empty as the sky overhead, for Garth N’Chalez and Queen Agnethea the Vile could have no support, no distractions, no allies, no enemies save those already handpicked ages ago.
For there was more than one King ‘neath the Tiktok Dome sure enough, and more than one plan.
***
Garth came to in the slowest fashion, which was … different. Every other time he’d been whacked unconscious, the very nanosecond the various elements of his body became capable of supporting his monumental ego and his egregious daredevil attitude, the Kin’kithal in him acted like smelling salts, jamming itself like a white hot spike of ‘wake the fuck up, dude, someone could be gnawing on your leg right now’ and he’d do just that, spluttering and snorting and generally looking stupid. Nine times out of ten that automatic-consciousness boot-up had proven to be right on the money, because if there was one thing Garth knew about himself, it was that he had a tendency to be in situations where lazing about unconscious was a good way to die.
But, not this time, which was … weird, because he knew for goddamn certain that in all his long, hoary years both in the current century and the 24th, there’d been scant few times where his life had ever been more in danger than right that very second. Those who knew his life story might beg to argue, highlighting the Matter Eating Zombies of Goreene, Shoemacher’s Grave and Tannhauser’s Gate as being not only prime examples of personal threats to his continued existence but also Universally threatening, but … not so much. After all, he’d had the secret side of him, plugged fully into the extra-dimensionality, peeking his manipulative head out every now and then to see what was what, nudging things here and there along the way, hadn’t he?
But not here, not under The Dome, and so, as he lay there, staring into freshly cut grass, inhaling the deep, rich scent of earth, Garth thought … why the fuck not?
He certainly deserved a moment to himself, even if one nostril was stuffed with grass.
“There are times,” Garth rolled slowly over onto his back, amazed at how stiff and sore he was, even with having wrapped himself in carbon armor when it’d dawned on him that landing in Dave’s Magic Super Bubble was going to be less ‘gentle descent to the earth in stately fashion’ and more ‘holy fucking shit this thing is like a Superball on cocaine and when we hit, it’s going to be like a fucking comet’, “when I genuinely wish I’d listened to Meechy.”
Somewhere off to his right, “I don’t think it would’ve done you any good, Master Nickels. Your destiny demanded you come here.”
“Huh.” Garth pointed Domeward; from here, right in the middle of Arcade City, it was real easy to see The Dome itself. Faint illumination spread outwards from a singular point –a point that was presumably where King Barnie Blake hung his cowardly crown when he wasn’t down amongst the mortals being a prick-, forming a pattern that he recognized immediately as circuitry. “Would you look at that? Circuitry. So, like, something happened to flip the gears into something more scientific-y.”
“Scientific-y is not a word, Garth.” Agnethea grunted as she, too, made the effort of rolling onto her back. Behind her, she could feel the great gates of Arcadia all but looming at her; other than the one time –to witness Chad Sikkmund’s terrible victory against the King- she’d never once been closer than right that moment to the wondrous gates of Fair Arcadia.
The Golem struggled until she was sitting upright, then settled against the cool metal gates with a weary sigh. Her life had taken some turns, hadn’t it just?.
Back against the metal fortification, it took but a few seconds for Agnethea to catch wind of something dreadfully awry with the King’s most-favored metropolis.
Silence.
Dread, unearthly silence, but it were more than that. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that with the cylinder’s arrival in their city, the destruction caused would be more than enough to convince even the most boisterous of citizens at home with their heads down, all the while wondering if their world was doomed but this quietude held awful comparison to her own lost city of Ickford.
Arcadia was silent as the grave. She was about to say something when Garth spoke first, gesturing idly at the glowing lines so far above their heads.
“Circuitry, see, that’s not really a thing the King does, right?” The Engineer gave his head a shake when stupid parts of his brain tried connecting everything together into some kind of pattern. It wouldn’t work. What he saw in his field of vision comprised –at best guess- less than twenty percent of the entire diagram.
And that was assuming that The Dome’s was a Dome, and not a sphere tucked into the skin of the earth like a tremendous nanotech cyst.
“Well, that’s not entirely true, and you know it.” Agnethea said calmly. “Have you forgotten my Museum?”
“No, I didn’t.” Garth hoped he didn’t sound as aggravated over his traveling companion’s obsession with lost artifacts, but when said companion is also eleven thousand years old, it was best to just hope that she chose to ignore his pissiness. “And, well, uh. Hey. I just realized,” he flipped over on his stomach so he could deliver the apology face to face, “all that shit is …”
Agnethea didn’t even have time to move before Garth was upon her, a feat that sent curious thrills of fear and excitement squirming through her; few came close to matching her speed, let alone beating it, and she hadn’t even seen the black metal scales of his chosen armor ripple out from his skin as he swarmed at her.
Mouth agape, trying to figure out what Master Nickels was holding her arms above her with a single one of his, grip close to cruel but not too cruel, tilting her head this way and that, muttering unhappy, it took Agnethea a solid fifteen seconds of confused excitement to figure out what had him s
o disconcerted that he’d drop his idle discussion of the King’s oddities.
Agnethea winced, deeply embarrassed, when her eyes fell upon her lacy eye-shield, not far from where they were. So long wearing it, it was hardly there, making the only time an old Golem knew she wasn’t wearing it was by the reactions of those around her. Every one of her kind knew well the disturbed looks, the secretive glances, the worried crinkle when they strode about with their colorless, nigh-on invisible eyes visible, and covered them up when they sought to ‘hide in plain sight’. It’d taken Arcadians centuries to learn the lesson of the eye-shield.
“When?” Garth demanded, heartsick and angry all at the same time. He stared bitterly into the softly shimmering liquid light that lurked deep in Agnethea’s once ‘empty’ sockets.
“When what, my Lord?” Agnethea whispered gently. She gasped when Master Nickels rattled her bound hands against the metal walls.
“You know damn well, Agnethea.” Garth pointed a scaled armored finger right at her left eye. The pristine quicksilver pool reflected the carbon-fiber digit perfectly. “When did I do this to you?”
“Well,” the Queen of the Golems huffed haughtily, “and who says you were the one to do it all, Master Nickels? There were more than a few times when Davram and I were quite …”
Garth slammed a fist into the wall beside Agnethea’s head, denting the ancient metal fortification so badly that several thick copper rivets popped loose. “No time to be fucking around, Agnethea. Not at all. That ain’t Kingsblood floating in your eyes. That’s liquid quadronium and there’s only one fucking source left in the entire Unreal Universe, and you’re looking at him. And not to put too fucking fine a point on things, I recognize my own fucking handiwork when I see it! So when I ask you again when this happened, please know that I am not fucking around. Got it?”
Agnethea nodded, wondering at the changes Master Nickels’ … liquid quadronium … had wrought in her; the old Agnethea -even the one from a few days ago, when Ickford had still been a thing- would’ve already returned Garth’s gift of violence with one of her own and the two of them would even then be rolling around the countryside, beating each other senseless. Excluding the pain radiating outwards from her captured wrists, though, she felt nothing. No fear, no worry, no desire to lash out.
What had he done to her? “I … I understand. Milord.”
Garth sighed deeply and released Agnethea’s wrists. “Good. Good. Now. When did I do this?” It wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be possible. Owing to the unique, out-of-phase nature of The Dome, Arcade City existed out of step with the rest of the Unreal Universe. Beyond that, the genetic link he had to the extra-dimensionality was capped with the very stuff that’d turned Agnethea’s eyes into literal pools of light.
Even if that microscopic pinprick extension into the Heshii’s worldspace had been working this entire time to summon up the … ‘other’ him, he simply hadn’t been in Arcade City long enough for anything appreciable to occur. The Kin’kithal savant side of his essence demanded full bore access to the extra-dimensionality, and the juice required to solve the problem of how best to deal with a nanotech-powered godking ranked right the hell up there with ‘designing an AI God capable of shepherding a literal infinity of Universe for an even more literal eternity’.
You didn’t get that juice in just over a month when you were basically a gerbil sucking droplets of water from one of those … gerbil-water-feeding-things.
It wasn’t possible.
Infuriatingly, the gossamer shine in Agnethea’s eyes proved he was somehow wrong.
What then? How else…
Interaction between Kingsblood and the quadronium circuited AI was a possibility. King’s Will was best and most easily manipulated by direct exertion of will, but if there was one thing Garth knew about himself, it was that he spent an awful lot of time thinking about things even he wasn’t strictly aware of; the very same Kin’kithal habit of routinely upgrading his abilities based on threats could possibly have made similar subliminal connections with King’s Will, working doggedly behind the scenes to resurrect talents necessary to surviving Arcade City.
Previous intimate knowledge of how the particulate’s superstructure’s command language was put together might’ve been of tremendous assistance in making that happen.
That implied –way back at the beginning, when he’d tried doing for Jimmy- that his subconscious mind had instantly figured out what was going on, and how best to put a stop to it.
Possible. Improbable, but possible.
“A…” Agnethea rubbed her wrists, one after the other, eager to get sensation flowing through them once more, “a … a few seconds after you and Master Davram crash landed. I sought to give you aid. I reached out to check your pulse. You opened your eyes, and grabbed hold. I … I can say no more. I … dare not.”
Garth shut his eyes and banged his head against Arcadia’s walls. The cool metal contact did nothing to ease his anguish. He’d infected her with Kingsblood-tainted quadronium. Probably not much, but any amount was too much, and whatever he’d given her probably wouldn’t be missed; there were thousands of tons of the stuff coursing through the matter that made up Kin’kithal Garth N’Chalez, would-be Engineer for Reality 2.0. If his subconscious mind had deemed it necessary to assault one of the few remaining people he could call friend without being laughed at with the stuff, dollars to donuts said it was surplus.
“Did I say anything?” When Agnethea didn’t respond, he asked again, eyes still shut tight, still pressing his forehead firmly against the metal. “Did I say anything, Agnethea?”
Agnethea reached out and ran a hand across Garth’s still-armored shoulders. The ancient woman wished she could offer the man some kind of succor, wished she could explain that –no matter what he’d done to her- it didn’t truly matter; whatever the reasons were behind his immense sorrow and shame at the assault, Agnethea held him no ill will, because … because it didn’t matter.
She was destined to die, and although Garth knew this, he still berated himself.
”I can say no more, milord, please.” Agnethea’s voice hovered this side of a heartbroken sob as she miserable, bleak acceptance in how Garth’s shoulders just slumped. “Though I can tell you…”
Garth banged his head against the wall. “My eye.”
Agnethea nodded. “Aye, milord. It burned as how you described stars to me. Blue. But only for a moment.”
Garth pushed himself away from the metal barrier. “We don’t have a lot of time. We’ve got to hurry.” He set off for the intricate golden clockwork gates, all urgency and haste.
Agnethea followed quickly after. “Why? What does this mean? I’ve seen things glow before, Master Nickels, just not so bright.”
The ex-Specter wrapped carbon-fiber gauntleted hands around two thick golden bars that formed part of the complex –and probably extraordinarily awesome to watch - contraption designed to open the gates wide so followers of the Gauntlet could be properly introduced to inner sanctum known as Arcadia. The highly embossed shiny surface of the gates reflected his darkly armored form back to him, and he laughed.
He looked a villain, but he knew better. It was as Davram said. The war didn’t need nice men.
Garth pulled the gates off the hinges, filling Arcadia with a torturous squeal of metal on metal. Springs and sprockets and gears burst loose from the contrivance, littering the grassy field for a hundred feet or more. Huge steam-driven engines, suddenly bereft of controlling valves, exploded fiercely, shattering brass and copper walls on either side of the gaping hole.
Agnethea applauded dryly as Garth divested himself of the twenty foot tall gates. “Well done, Master Nickels. Now the whole of Arcadia knows we’re here. But you still haven’t told me why we must hurry.”
Garth pointed to his blue eye. “Because sister, if this thing is coming online while The Dome is still up, it means that The Dome isn’t working properly anymore. If my true inner nature risked rising up out of
the darkness to do what-the-fuck-ever has been done to you, then the danger here is greater than I can imagine. Which is … bad. Not to mention that there’re things outside that would love to get their mittens on fully functioning nanotech, things that can quite easily follow my eye right back here. Now, that can only happen if they’re in the right place at the right time and looking in the right direction, but there’s just no knowing for sure. No guarantees King’s Will’ll work on the outside, but if my various and many enemies get hold of even denatured nanotech, well. They have the time, resources and intelligence to figure it out. And if that happens, my whole plan falls to shit in a big way. Now come on. Get me to the Armory.”
“The Armory?” Agnethea followed after Garth. “Ah. Of course. If there’s anyone to aid you in defeating the King, it would be the man who’s already done it once.”
***
The Platinum King smiled into the dead, listless eyes of the bound Menagerie soldier. The echoing cry of Arcadia’s gates being torn asunder bounced through the courtyard. Garth N’Chalez and Queen Agnethea had arrived. They grinned an over-wide, gaping, mocking grin that was all teeth and madness.
So much effort, so much time, so much patience, moving quietly and stealthily down the long, arduous eons, switching from one pawn to the next, maintaining calm as only a being with true might was capable. Oh, and making the King dance to their subtle music, that had been the most trying of things!
“’tis good, then,” The King whispered into Tiktok’s ears, “that you are the last one to awaken, yes, my pretty? Now, when you are free, go to where you must be, and wait, as a good toy does.”
Tiktok the Soldier opened his mad metal eyes, fired off a clanking salute, then hurried on his way.
The Platinum King hastened to meet his guests. It wouldn’t do for them to get too far into Arcadia on their own, no it wouldn’t.
Not when things had to be explained, bargains offered, games laid out.
