by Lee Bond
The King did so enjoy the irony of ‘Priest versus Enforcer.
“If I may say, milord,” Taint gestured from her screen to the King’s monitor, “the man does seem mightily changed. Is it not … endemic of the CyberPriest condition that they cannot actively pursue violence? That the fight must be brought to them, and that even then, the method of their reprisal falls more to the defensive side of things, as they say? There are memories in Chad’s mind of an odd encounter with this man on Hospitalis, in Latelyspace, and…”
“I know.” Barnabas had looked through those memories more than a few times already, mystified as to the changes made to the last of the CyberPriests to roll of the factory floor. Why, he’d even tried digging through the lad’s memories just before then as well, to see firstly how the odd duck that was Erg had made it to Hospitalis and why he’d attacked Chadsik, but damned near every moment of Chad’s life was an utter, utter hash. A combination of reckless drug use, interference from the cunning ‘Priestly possession and just plain old illuminant lunacy made everything virtually indecipherable.
“It is safe to say, Mistress Taint,” Barnabas waved a hand and the colossal metal monitor dissipated in a burst of black flecks, “that our lad Erg has been through some changes indeed, hey? I warrant ‘twere Trinity as grabbed him up a century ago and gifted the dazed CyberPriest with the false personality known as Kant Ingrams, and it is a dead certitude that in the ‘employ’ of the machine mind, he did encounter many a strange and bizarre thing, any of which could have wrought both these strange changes to the ‘Priestly protocols running their lives, but also to the powers he does possess. But it matters not.”
“No?”
“No.” King repeated adamantly. “He is back on Earth. The clarion call of My Dome sings in his veins, Taint. There is nowt he can do about it, just as there was nowt a century ago, hey? The workings of The Dome thunders and ticks in his veins. He’ll arrange, soon rather than late, for a round of fisticuffs on this here shore, won’t he just? And once that happens, well, like as not he’ll do for whichever Enforcer as hunts him to fair Arcadia. Reckon that final act, that taking of a life in true, will free him up somewhat, give old Trinity pause for concern. And then, just as he did so long ago, well, he’ll stroll right up to the Geared Door and slap his hand atop it, won’t he? Only this time, only this time, instead of falling unconscious and being scooped up, the Door will open and Erg1 will stroll through.”
“And?”
“Welladay, it’s as I been planning since the … for that selfsame century, hey?” Barnabas looked around as if he were losing his mind, hopefully making the point to Taint. “And then the other brothers shall come when they can, and the reinvigorated plans for My Dome shall commence. We’re close now, Taint, closer than ever before. Compulsions and compunctions abroad will set everything else in motion, won’t they just?” Barnabas leaned back in his metal throne and thought on the future.
The loss a hundred years ago had set him down a perilous path, to be true, but with things coming back to him the way they were seeming to, well, proper powering of The Dome would finally allow him to do all that he’d planned on from the very beginning, hey? Barnabas rubbed his hands together with excited anticipation.
It were about time.
Taint dipped her head in acknowledgment of the King’s grand and wonderful plan. “And your Son, milord? What should I do with him?”
Barnabas truly did not like thinking about the odd thing his First Noble Son had become, not truly. It were a pure example of why things had to be done the way he’d planned. Before leaving, the lad had been perfect, a scintillating creature of shining light, and the ‘Priests had turned him mad, and the Unreality had made him something madder still.
“Are they still in there?” Barnabas asked aloud, at long last; two solid years of wanting to ask that question, two solid years of seeing Chad’s ruined flesh and abused mind flicker and wane like a candle guttering in a strong breeze. Taint’s thoughtful, careful administrations had brought the boy back from the brink of certain death, but …
Taint’s face clicked and clacked thoughtfully. “They are, milord. But … near as I am able of telling, they know where they are. They know, and … are quiet.”
“Hm.” Barnabas stroked his beard. The lad’s brain was probably still fractured like a mirror dropped from on high. Breaking through The Dome not once, but twice alone had to be the cause of some of that mental malaise. It was why things had been … restructured for a different kind of pilot and power source.
Ah, if only the boy hadn’t … left. Then a poor old King wouldn’t have … wouldn’t have done as he had done, then, neither, hey? All things would’ve been done different. Done better.
“And our Dome’s power supply?” The King hadn’t visited the engine room for the vast Dome in well over two hundred years. Hadn’t needed to; that which had given the vast Dome and King’s Will energy lo these eleven thousand years was the kind of power that wouldn’t fade quickly. In fact, it were well likely that if The Dome and Arcade City didn’t need such an astonishingly impressive amount of power to run itself properly, it were probable that he could’ve used all them … batteries … to do things quite some time ago.
Alas, Arcade City was an energy whore, as they said. All them different things needed considerable power to work fully, and The Dome’s exterior protection circuits, well. If people on the Outside didn’t feel the stupid need to try and bring down the oldest structure in the known Unreality on a fairly regular basis with all that their pathetic science could wreak, then … all that power could be used elsewhere, hey?
“More than adequate to the tasks at hand, milord.” Taint bowed deeply. “Unless all hell breaks loose and things go terribly awry between now and then, King’s Will and all you command will have enough power to do as needed until The Dome is powered properly.”
“What say you on his chances for fishing more of them out?” Never hurt to have more power on tap, hey?
Taint shrugged, click-clack-click-clack. “They’re deep within. And it does seem that those he might pull forth will be lesser in nature than before. Outside had changed him. Outside has made him …”
The King nodded woefully. “Aye. Different. He hain’t the lad I raised, that is for certain. Very well, Taint. Clap him up properly in the tower, keep an eye on him. I reckon the whole damn City did see the Armory lights come on when he crash-landed so spectacularly as he did two year ago, and we can’t have him feeling any of all that, hey? Which brings to mind … them Nannies in Arcadia. What of them? Are they making a fuss over young Chad’s homecoming?”
“They are not.” Taint admitted readily. “Ruling Arcade …”
The King hissed venomously. “Running.”
Taint curtsied apologetically. “Running Arcade City in your absence taxes them sorely. Without the Brigadiers to patrol the borders and keep everyone in line, the task has fallen to your Gearmen, and … they were never intended for such. It is doubtful the Matrons, as they oft refer to themselves now, have e’en noticed the lights are on. There is, after all, their own … prisoner.”
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only thought on the cunningly alluded to ‘prisoner’ that the Matrons had to deal with. Also all his fault, in a roundabout way. Had he not done as he’d done a hundred years ago, there’d be doughty lads and lasses about to do not only for the troubles that ailed a civilization like Arcade City, but for the ravening Platinum King that were trapped in Arcadia’s central square. Had he not done as he had, why, there’d be ever more Brigadiers, too, hey?
For now he thought on it properly, it did seem to him that the last time he’d been down amongst the people in his guise as Barnabas the Wandering Smith, the gearheads and wardogs as eked out a living in the outermost ring of Arcade City had shown little to no interest moving inward.
“I hain’t the sole person to blame for that.” Barnabas ground the words out bitterly before realizing that Taint was watching on, mechanical eyes
shining with her own special brand of lunacy. “Taint. Be about your business. If the lad shows signs of recalcitrance or mulishness or e’en a spot of bad manners, well, you know your business. Most of all, do keep him from remembering.”
Taint bowed deeply, those cold metal eyes of hers shining. The screen went blank, leaving Barnabas to ponder the other … mishap … to plague Arcade City since Chad’s abrupt departure so long ago.
Another monitor flashed into being in a puff of black smoke, similar to the last, only with more gears and clicking things and less hissing steam valves. The screen flickered and flashed and otherwise refused to show King Barnabas anything at all save a few odd images.
“What’s this?” The King shouted, his voice echoing through the long, empty halls of his aerie high in The Dome. “What’s this?”
King Barnabas Blake Willed the monitor to pull backwards, further and further from the thing he was trying to spy upon came into focus, heart growing blacker and colder the greater the distance grew until –by the time summat appeared- he was a bristling ball of incandescent rage. But he held on to that rage, oh yes he did, held on to it and didn’t let it lash out, not here, not in The Dome, oh no. Doing that would invite all sorts of problems he weren’t willing to deal with, not now.
But Ickford. The source of his rage, his blackened, soul-searing ire… Ickford was twice, nay… three times the size it’d been only fifty years ago, and the … and the bloody damned miasma boiling up from the filthy rotten conurbation told the King that there were more of them than simply bloody damned Agnethea the Vile within the walls now, as few as a hundred but more like as not, all of them save one or two.
Ickford. A blackened plague of a city, built on a foundation of Dark Iron and the bones of gearheads. A city unlike any he’d ever permit to be built.
Had he the power to stop it, to tear it down, oh, he would, wouldn’t he? Appear on the horizon, both hands flaring with the power of purest Will, he would pull that god-awful blight apart brick by brick, piece by piece.
“Yet I cannot.” The King ground his teeth together so fiercely he thought he might break his jaw. “Self-styled Queen Agnethea and her coterie of Obsidian Golems and their bedamned miasma. When I first discovered her nearly ten thousand years ago, oh, I should have devoted every ounce of my essence, every bit of Will I command to ferreting out how such a twisted and perverse thing as an Obsidian Golem could even come to be. Alas, I am only a single monarch, and Chad were going through a difficult time, adjusting to his lot in life so long ago. I chose, and I stand by my choice and e’en though Ickford has well and truly buggered my world in all sorts of ways, I reckon it don’t matter too much, not with old Erg getting ready to get that chain rolling once more.”
King Barnabas Blake Willed the feed to move closer and closer, idly curious to see how pervasive the miasma that futzed his powers until they were naught but a shadow of his true might was; he could get full coverage of the tumorous outgrowth nestling like a cancer ‘gainst one Wall from four thousand feet high, and … aye. ‘twere as he expected.
Three thousand four hundred feet away and all fell to hash. Near upon all the Golems were in that city that drained the will from gearheads and wardogs alike, pulled honest, King-fearing citizens from Estates and small villages throughout the realm to it, prevented anyone and everything from achieving proper growth.
“Damn you, Agnethea. Had I known this would come from you, e’en could I not bring your death, I would’ve clapped you irons and tossed you down some deep hole.” The King thought on their last encounter, when he’d been playing blacksmith, and had come upon –quite by accident, truthfully- ‘fair’ Ickford.
The self-styled Queen had hustled her ass out to the front gates quick as a wink, she had, hurried both to explain and to make mock of Kingly discomfort, inviting him –if he felt capable- of bringing down her city, claiming that if it were truly against King’s Will, then King’s Will would do for it just as anything could be theoretically done for.
And try he had, though only in subtle ways. Since officially abandoning his post after … after, he’d been out of the eyes and minds of his subjects, busy reorganizing The Dome’s internal workings to follow a different path to the same goal, and that’d taken nearly fifty solid years of effort to accomplish; returning with full Kingly wroth after such a time apart and so close to where the End would finally begin for true, Barnabas knew both the Nannies and all else would come clamoring to him for aid, for assistance, for guidance.
And what cared he for them all anyway, when, as and when the End did come, all ‘neath The Dome save he would be naught but fuel anyways? So he’d tried to pull down the walls, tried filling the ‘city’ with poisonous gasses, tried Pied Pipering people out through the gates, tried e’en –as he had from time to time down the eons- smiting smug Agnethea ‘twixt the eyes.
Tried, and failed, prompting prettily dressed Agnethea to laugh mockingly at her King before retiring to her travesty of a city.
Barnabas resisted the urge to fly down there and try again. There was no point. Erg grew closer and closer to the Geared Door with his name on’t, Chad was back, though would almost certainly prove to be useless, The Dome had been properly recalibrated. All was in order. All it would take was time, and a patient King. No need to muck about with Golems and their flights of fancy, for when the time came, when The Dome was turned to its true purpose, surely then, e’en the Will as had been removed from his command would return, hey?
All it would take was …
“What’s all this, then?” King Barnabas Blake turned his eye on a small, blinking light he’d all but forgotten about. Set into the arm of the throne upon which he sat, said flashing light was an indicator beacon that would inform him when someone of … note were crossing through ‘tween the walls of his might Dome. It had, according to Will, been pulsing and flickering for near on twenty minutes.
“Have I truly been thinking on Agnethea for all that time?” Barnabas warranted it must be so, though in truth he couldn’t really say one way or the other. He did know that of late he did find himself wrapped up in vengeance scenarios that did steal the time, so aye, dreams of Ickford burning could easily have eaten up that time. “Well then, what have we got coming our way? Trinity spy? Saboteur? One of them Offworlders, trying to pry through to My secrets? Some new threat? Summat old? Which is it?”
Data, spilling out from the monitor now that it was tuned to Barnabas’ new wishes, was sparse. There was the usual odd’s assortment of maniacs as had done for a King’s Son in some solar system or other, a few interesting men here and there, but nowt that would have the sensors … ah. There he was; Will wasn’t at its best ‘tween the walls, owing to the disjunction effect set up by the old power source as had given life to Arcade City for the first third of its existence, but there was enough juice for Will to highlight the Outsider as had tripped them alarms.
“Hmm, well, this is interesting, isn’t it just?” Barnabas thought back to the last time Trinity had sent someone through. More than three hundred years ago, he reckoned, and it’d taken the threat of canceling their trade agreement to get the machine mind to stop Its paltry efforts at infiltration. “Big lad, hey? Six two he’s a day, I warrant. Built for fighting, too, which could do him some good on this side, too, hey? Missing an eye, though, so perhaps not all that worthwhile after all.”
The monitor fuzzed and spat, and King Barnabas whacked at the sides until things went clear again. “Do so wish Will worked better in there. Summat’s got the lad all worked up, hey? Ah, I see. Odds rolled to the empty walls, and our lad here must be trying to figure out where all the gears are. Heh. Such fun. Let’s see … welladay.”
King Barnabas pursed his lips speculatively. Will had dug slowly outwards through the protective layers of The Dome, working through the disjunction effect until it finally found the logs from the external protection protocols. Reading the new data admittedly had the King’s hair standing on end by the time he’d finishe
d, but only just; it weren’t the first time Trinity had sent –had tried sending- someone or something through that owned miraculous and devastating powers.
Why, prior to the rearrangement of their arrangement, the two of them had treated it as some sort of game, with the machine mind trying to shift ever-escalating levels of bizarre Offworlder or hilariously enhanced soldiers and spies and all through and with him seeing what sort of effects Dark Iron would have on those he allowed entrance.
Naturally, as Dark Iron was the preeminent technology inside or e’en outside Arcade City, nowt that Trinity ushered inward lasted. Dark Iron ate through implants like children through free candy. Mattered not if them implants were of the organic variety or the more traditional form. Will and Iron took ‘em and changed ‘em according to his demands and those that survived the process were transformed into wonderful gearheads soon enough. Those that failed the first step simply became matter.
Barnabas tapped his lips thoughtfully. The brawny lad with the missing peeper was an escalation. That punch he’d delivered … an order of magnitude above and beyond what any rational or sane ruler would permit a single being to possess, which meant Trinity was desperate.
Had It figured out the odd connection Erg shared with The Dome? Had It realized Arcade City’s true purpose? Or –as was most likely- were Its own plans coming close to fruition and the time had come for them to end all pretense at commonality?
“Aye.” Barnabas said after a long time watching the single blue-eyed man’s attempts to engage his fellow fish with the import of what it was they weren’t seeing. “I do think it’s the last one, hey? Trinity’s decided It wants what I have, and so It’s sent the lad in. Or mayhap some other organization, now I think on’t, for who’s to say what all is going on out there in the Unreality? Not I, for I have no use for knowing what goes on out there, not when I have my Will. Makes no matter, not really. Trinity or elsewise, the lad and his implants are going to enjoy a rough and rude introduction to Arcade City.”
