by Lee Bond
It’d gone out of it’s way to elevate his understanding of nanotech manipulation, subtly and secretly speeding his abilities to the point where he was ludicrously talented in bringing things to life through Will, but it couldn’t be that, because again, Barnabas had ultimate control.
Garth shook his head. No. His Platinum King-derived ability with Will had only ever been intended to ensure his survival in the brutal world of Arcade City.
“But that T-1000 knockoff said Chad would be able to help me with the King. It was the whole fucking …” Garth beetled his forehead. The pale-haired Arcadian had said … something … “User logs. The fucker got up to speed on what’s goin’ on in here with user logs.”
Garth went off in search of the terminal Chadsik al-Taryin had used to read through the user logs of activity under The Dome, a wide grin on his face.
If there was one thing he knew better than guns and killing, it was codes and coding.
24 The Play’s the Thing…
Sailing above empty Arcade City was to soar through the deepest, emptiest crevasses of his miserable heart; in all his time ‘neath The Dome, working on the Great Plan, ensuring that one day in the far-flung future, all it would take to end the execrable excuse for a Universe was the simple flick of a switch, never, never had his homeland been so … barren.
Oh, there’d been times when he’d stripped a portion of land or a swathe of forest or a river grown too large free from the landscape, or that one time he’d reordered the whole entirety of the North, but never once had there been so much … emptiness!
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only leaned over the side rails of his ship, Flying Monkey, and just … remembered. His feet started aching to be down there once more, plying his chosen profession once more, working the Kingsblood into the most miraculous and insane inventions his broken people could ever hope to envision, gossiping with the citizens of his fair land, listening to their hopes and dreams, their fears and concerns.
Or … or to stand before a gaggle, e’en, turning their Iron-hot twisted dreams into summat real!
In the beginning, Barnabas recalled, there really hadn’t been much call for a blacksmith, a tinkerer, an artificer, but he’d made it work, oh yes he had! In those ancient days so long gone by, Kingsblood hadn’t really been much of a thing yet, oh no, not by a longshot, because as good as those proto-wardogs had been, they hadn’t quite been good enough yet, hey?
But work as a smith he had, here and there, there and here, ‘cross the landscape, a wise old tinkerer with a knack for weapons and suchlike, always keeping an eye peeled for the best and the brightest.
Then, as the proliferation of Kingsblood took off a like a shot and the degeneration of society descended into the easier to manage Estates and farms and the occasional freemarket and an equal degrading of science and tech, well, hadn’t the profession of smith experienced a boon of work unlike anything he could’ve imagined?
Barnabas still recalled the first young lad, brimming full of rough Kingsblood –the filtration and purification systems set into The Dome had yet to even hint at purer stuff, but if there was one thing he’d learned early on was the art and value of patience- coming up to him, with a demand for the rudest, crudest weapon his feverishly addled brain could come up with; a buzzsword, the first of it’s kind, not to do for a King, not to sever through stainless steel sinew or to carve through cast iron muscle, no, no his dream was to murder the looker in his crew, and he’d figured out the best way to make that happen, with a sword possessing teeth hungry like a shark.
The old King slammed a hand onto the side rail, thick, calloused palms feeling the grain of wood even still. Oh, he’d built that blade to the exact specifications dreamed up in that fevered lad’s brain, a noisy, chuckling affair, and hadn’t it just torn right through that leader’s insides and outsides like no one’s business, flinging flesh here and there and spilling the first batch of homicidally-driven Kingsblood into the dusty soil?
“My poor wardogs and gearheads.” Barnabas sniffed, then huffed away a traitorous tear. Well, it weren’t unrealistic, were it, to miss them good old days? To cherish the advances, to bemoan the losses of those, them who’d been his first nanotech-enhanced children? He’d felt each, in his own Kingly way, had suffered and strived alongside each one of them as they’d struggled with their Dark Iron addictions, with their fear of the dark things in the night and that stuff growing deep inside their own dark minds and blacker souls.
Only natural he’d feel a bit of sorrow at their passing, now, when the world was little more than a single room, barren save for one naked light bulb strung from the ceiling, hey? He’d been their King, their guardian, their benefactor –yes, and their devil, throwing at them ever-more frightful monsters and challenges, but only to test their mettle, hey, to forge them stronger and brighter- for thirty thousand years.
And the reason for all that had been a good’un, weren’t it? To turn them as were worthy into Brigadiers? A noble endeavor if there’d never been one before!
But it weren’t just the rough and tumble gaggles and their miseries he found himself missing, no it weren’t, not at all; in his guise as blacksmith –Barnabas, Hansel, Eddington, Rickel, and others, all long and long and long down the years- he’d swung by more than his fair share of Estates, and where his metalheaded children were growing rougher and tougher and cruder as the excesses of the rotten thing called ‘human spirit’ were pulled out on a hot tide of Vicious Elixir, those regular folk living in the high-walled Estates had grown … bucolic, countrified, insufferably kind and patient and … homey.
Barnabas cast a critical eye at the red-tinged wastelands on either side of the Gauntlet Road he’d left for N’Chalez and the others. Hindsight were always twenty-twenty, hey? He’d overplayed his hand, there, drawing up all that matter, destroying the last of the true men and women of Arcade City, reducing them to their components to be used in the formation of an endless army of fiends and beasts to harry the merry trio unto Arcadia.
Those Estates could be built anew, Barnabas knew. Most likely would be, he decided, when he was done doing for N’Chalez; there weren’t much unaltered matter left remaining to him, perhaps enough for two or three full Estates, each with a population of two or three thousand men and women. The rest of the world would be fully manufactured at that point, but Barnabas didn’t care. It was enough to begin all over, to start from the beginning.
Those poor men and women and babies as had never concerned themselves with the comings and goings of their betters save to offer them a roof over their heads for the night or some kind words of encouragement when the road was rough would have a second chance at life, if only for a short time.
“I’ll do it better this time, hey?” Barnabas nodded. “And I do believe I have time left to get it right, yes I do. N’Chalez come here to my lovely little city to see where I was at, sure enough, somehow knowing that I was on the trail of ending the Unreality to my own goal, but I warrant I ain’t the only one in the Universe capable of doing so, no, no I ain’t for certain. There’s Trinity Itself for one, and, well, from what I’ve seen in my brothers’ memories, more than that besides. Fifteen, twenty, mayhap as many as thirty years or more, I bet, before the M’Zahdi Hesh come knocking at The Cordon. More than enough time. I’ll rebuild, aye. Start smaller, I shall, more … concentrated. I won’t muck about with Kingsblood to the extent I did, neither. That turned out just rotten, it did. Not to mention too time consuming, hey? A hundred years and more for each gearhead to work through their own personal demons until they come to stand at Arcadia, looking for that last little bit of Kingsblood, that shining, shimmering dollop as turns them into pure vessels?”
Barnabas hawked a glob of spit over the side. “Too long, too long and too much freedom. That were the real and true problem, hey? They all inherited a bit of their sire’s wildness and recklessness, didn’t they just? Concentrate the evolution, aye, but reduce the power. I shall need to look into the programming t
here, see if I can suss out what it is about the Brigadier program as ultimately went wrong. Don’t want another Davram Solan on my hands, do I?”
Oh aye, King Barnabas Blake the One and Only didn’t want anything like another Platinum Brigadier beneath his Dome ever again, no he did not. Beyond their insufferable handsomeness and their utterly inappropriate smugness over having become the best version of themselves that they could be –while it were admittedly an amazing transformation and indeed worthy of recognition, there’d been Brigadiers who’d rubbed Barnabas all the way wrong- there was their abysmal adherence to rightness, and it was that … poisonous thinking that bothered the King more than anything else in the entire world.
Some few Brigadiers down the long years had perforce learned of the secret truths of The Dome and Arcade City, generally through the means of slow and steady revelation by none other than the King himself, just to sort of … test … whether or not his people were ready for the day when they killed the Universe. It was one of the reasons it’d taken so long; until the last batch, which he still regretted, there’d not been a single Brigadier willing to see the true brilliance behind doing for something as vast and majestic and as broken beyond belief as the Unreal Universe.
Resulting in, naturally, their deaths. Barnabas had designed the machine to have willing men and women at the helm, so to speak. Jamming a recalcitrant Brigadier into one of the bolted down seats and expecting everything to work properly was one of those things that just wouldn’t work. Hadn’t worked. As with everything Barnabas Blake did, he’d gone ahead and done it anyways, just to sort of see how bad it could possibly get, and the answer was ‘very bad, with crippling explosions ruining important pieces of machinery that would take several long, irritable years to repair’.
“Still,” Barnabas clomped to a different portion of the ship’s deck so he could get a better look at The Armory, “better to know well in advance than on the day of, hey?”
The Armory’s internal lights flickered and shone, an unwavering beacon to those poor fools long dead and turned to microscopic bits of machinery. Ever since it’s inception, Chad’s prison had drawn people to Arcadia, literally pulled them from their homes all across Arcade City, driving ordinary and average men and women to heights of extreme risk, all so they could stand beneath it, to marvel at Chad Sikkmund’s new home, to wait and see what the King’s Son would create next.
Barnabas flickered a smile that was half irritation, half admiration for all that Chad had indeed done for Arcade City. Holding both titles of First Son and Original Platinum Brigadier, the fractured, shattered, genius minds contained within the slender FrancoBritish body had been and like as not always would be unparalleled in the creation of wonders both profound and terrible. All the monsters and demons and devils of the world, all them beasties and tricky buggers that’d plagued both Estates and homes, gearheads and wardogs, men and women … every single one of ‘em had come from the blistering mind of Chad Sikkmund.
None other. Prior to Chad giving birth to fever dreams through his innate connection to King’s Will, Barnabas had done his best to provide his citizens with amusements and nightmares, but only to a certain degree; early on in his newfound life as King, well … it were neither unfair nor untrue to admit –to himself and himself alone- that he’d not been very good at it, hey? His mind had been consumed with creation of The Dome and securing assets powerful enough to drive the engines contained within the vast walls properly, hadn’t it? Beyond all that, though …
Creation? Alien ground, oh yes, oh yes indeed. Nowt more confusing nor terrifying to a CyberPriest turned King than trying to summon things from within when it were a truth to say that within him and the others there’d been nothing at all save the vicious hunger to destroy that which had broken them. ‘Priests had never been about creation and it were fair to say that it’d taken Barnabas Blake well over fifteen thousand years to properly get the hang of it, and e’en then, there’d been days where he doubted himself mightily.
“But I can do it.” Barnabas nodded firmly, bringing his thoughts full circle. “I can do it, and do it better, oh aye, I can. Just got to do for Garth N’Chalez first. The secrets deep inside that man’s flesh are the equal of anything contained within my Son’s, hey? Never seen nothing like that, not even when I was a man in the War, nor during my time as a scientist for them, neither. Must be summat in the Kin’kithal’s miraculous body. Gives him the opportunity to do summat to his flesh that ordinary mortals can’t withstand.”
Barnabas nodded again, eyes still rapt on The Armory. “Aye, do for Nickels. Unzip his superb flesh, dig deep and root through the atoms. He’ll learn that when I said there were machines in Arcadia capable of wonders that I were only lying a bit. The machines are where I want ‘em to be. Hah. Could’ve dug through his flesh and bone whenever and wherever I wanted, couldn’t I have? Only … only I couldn’t have, hey? Back and forth I went on that subject like as not to drive me mad.”
Now he thought on it, the King realized that’d been a bit of a problem, it had, ever since doing for the Brigadiers. Since that highly irrational moment, everything he’d put his hand to, every scheme he’d worked on to bring his Dome closer to the activation, well, hadn’t he just found himself thinking ‘I should do this another way, hey?’ or ‘no, this hain’t no good at all, I shall have to scrap it and start anew’. Everything from final construction of the command rigs repurposed to house disembodied CyberPriest intellects to the power grid array for the Enforcer suits and even small things like buzzblades and buzzswords for gearheads as and when he went back down to Arcade City for a bit of relaxation … always second guessing himself.
“Well, that’s over and done with now, hey?” Barnabas pointed a finger at the shining Armory. “Ain’t but one choice left, one direction, one path. Do for Nickels and start over again. No dithering, no blathering, no hand-wring…”
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only squinted, thinking perhaps it were a trick of the light. He’d never really and truly gotten the proper hang of how sunlight was supposed to work without a sun. Why, there were areas of Arcade City that’d been all kinds of wonky when it came to proper illumination, and with near everything gone now, it were possible that the Sunlight Matrix wasn’t working properly.
No. It weren’t his eyes and it weren’t the Sunlight Matrix.
The Armory’s light was out. A light that needed Chad Sikkmund, imprisoned in his Soul Machine, to operate.
Lips pressed tightly together, King Barnabas Blake stomped and clomped his way hurriedly back to the controls of Flying Monkey. He didn’t want to do as he was planning on doing, but with Chad free of his prison, time was limited. If Nickels and Sikkmund didn’t try to do for one another right there on the spot, his bedamned Son would find another way loose from The Dome a second and final time, wouldn’t he just?
Noble face mottled with anger and rage, lips pressed e’en tighter together now, the King pushed his vast and mighty steamship forward, intent on –if necessary- ramming right into the fucking Armory.
No one escaped Arcade City. Not any longer, no sir.
The King grinned. He was going to prevent this, yes he was. Flooded with triumphant joy at the moment to come, it took a full minute for the King to notice that red alarm sigils were flashing across every available surface of the control panel, and when he did notice, it was too late.
The ship, his most prized possession, lost power.
A stuttering heartbeat later, the same happened to roughly three-quarters of Arcade City.
Flying Monkey had enough forward momentum to keep everything upright for a few seconds more, so as King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, would-be destroyer of the Unreality stood there, screaming and bashing his fists against the rosewood inlaid control panel, sending splinters of wood and bits of metal flying this way and that, he was treated to a sight most heartbreaking; his world, his Universe, the thing he had known longer than was even truly measureable, was turning off, shutting dow
n, as though it were all a stage, vast swathes of Sunlight 2.0 flickering out, leaving everything ‘neath that missing illumination under deep, dark black.
Some light was left to the world, though, and where a scant thump of an outraged heart ago it’d seemed like his home had been transformed into a stage, now Barnabas Blake the One and Only knew it to be true: a brilliant shaft of sunlight remained, aye, oh it did indeed, coming down from the apex of The Dome to land directly atop the darkened Armory.
The crystalline exterior caught the last remaining rays of sunlight left to Arcade City and twinkled, a glittering invitation.
Caught up in the throes of Kingly rage, Barnabas could do nothing but destroy the delicate instrumentation aboard Flying Monkey. That, and scream.
He’d missed summat, somehow.
***
The Lady of the Weeping Eye stood atop one of the last few structures left in all of Arcade City, damaged, ravaged eye still weeping grotesque fluids that dried ad cracked on her skin. At her feet were the two men she’d sworn to protect, still clutching onto the warped and battered brass-bound Book. They weren’t dead and they were dead. The Lady couldn’t explain it any other way. There was some spark left in them. It took all the skill and powers of an ancient Obsidian Golem to tell, but down there in the tiny bits of a man or woman that made them either, something still ticked.
With the world silent as stone, you could hear it plain as day. When the Engineer had stolen her mind away –along with her eye- he’d somehow done summat more to her. ‘twas why she stood as she did, guarding the two Gearmen, yes, yes that was why she was doing that.
The Lady could tell that the two Gearmen, one so angry, the other so sorrowful, had something important to do. It was why they weren’t dead, and why she stood as she did, even though with everything else she’d seen lo these past few days, she knew it weren’t likely that anything would come for them.
