Dark Iron King Volume I: Thy King's Will Be Done (Unreal Universe Book 1)

by Lee Bond

  Dave ran his hands across his face once more. The devastation was total. It was impossible to imagine. And the things he’d seen. Nicked Jimmy had made a dreadful mistake. The worst mistake imaginable, when he’d decided to initiate Fishy-Fish to the brotherhood against the man’s will.

  And Dave himself?

  Well, it really were all his fault, weren’t it? His legendary cowardice come home to roost once more.

  Hands, spread wide against Nicked Jimmy’s bruised, battered and bleeding face … shocking black tendrils waving out from the fingertips, flensing skin clean from the bone. Dave retched and did his best to throw up politely when he finished reiterating that particular bit of nightmare.

  What was their Fishy-Fish?

  Dominic was taking notes, looking up every now and then at Chevy, who was picking his way through the carnage. This sort of thing was a gaggle’s primary way of blowing off steam, as it were, but this was … this was excessive. This wasn’t boisterous gearheads having a bloody –literally- laugh, this were someone wanting everyone to go away and never come back again. “How many do you figure?”

  Chevy paused by the stairs, debating whether or not it was even worth hopping up to the second floor; from the looks of things, a small group of men and women had held off their attacker up there for at least ten minutes, disassembling the steps for handmade weapons. Deciding against the effort, the Gearman instead gazed thoughtfully at one of three holes in the ceiling. He shook his head. That was strength. That was a lot of strength. “Seventy?”

  Dom licked the end of his pencil and entered the number in the margin provided by Book. More information flowed onto the page, and, as always, Dom got a bit of a thrill when the numbers and letters swirled into place. The King made for miracles, yes he did. Sure enough, the older Gearman had –once again- gotten to with three of the true number. Experience was one thing. What Chevy had was summat else entirely.

  “Any sign of reassembly?”

  Chevy kicked at a severed wrist. It bounced off a far wall. He pulled a pair of reading glasses from a pocket, grunted angrily at the bent frames before shoving them back, then knelt. Instinct said what he was about to do was safe as houses, but he shot Dom a look anyways. The Book Club Regular shrugged and went back to looking at the data coming from Book.

  The Gearman removed one of his gauntlets and ran a finger through some of the spilled blood. He shook his head. “Very little grit.”

  “Say … an eighth?” Dom’s pencil was poised above the column.

  “Less.” Chevy wiped his bloodstained fingers clean on a surprisingly untainted stretch of cloth attached to something that might’ve been a leg and stood. He put his gauntlet back on before heading returning to his partner. “Sixteenth, if we’re lucky.”

  Dom plugged the number in and the data shifted, shaking his head at the estimate. A sixteenth of a percentage of Dark Iron per ounce of blood meant that this lot had gone through a hell of a lot of punishment in a very short time. Doing so was one of the few ways you could ensure that your enemies –or victims- weren’t going to come back and do for you that didn’t involve a splashgun. Took a lot of skill, a lot of strength, and a lot sheer bloody-mindedness to do just a few hardcore warriors. That much damage kept Dark Iron from working, spreading what were inside too far apart to do anything at all. Doing for one or two or perhaps even three weren’t unimaginable, not with the right lad.

  A whole room full? That was another level altogether.

  The Book indicated the file was complete and spat out the name of the most likely culprit. Dom closed the Book shut with a snap and the two Gearmen converged on the bartender.

  Dom spoke to Chevy whilst the bartender discovered his tongue. “Book says the gearhead as tore through your old horse was most likely Nicked Jimmy. A rogue around these parts, by all accounts one or two Kingkills away from fully grey around the old gills. He …”

  Dave interrupted. “No, er, no. Not … it weren’t … weren’t him.”

  It was never wise to interrupt Gearmen. While their clockwork suits were magnificent pieces of art, and worth a fortune, there coursed a King’s Ransom of purer Dark Iron than anyone around these parts had ever seen, and that stuff acted the same for them as it did them with it in their veins.

  Dave could see the miracle liquid pulsing and coursing here and there through the fancy bits of their armor and took a surreptitious sniff. No. No smell of hot metal coming from either, which meant that though they’d come into the shattered shambles of his pub all riled up and angry, they’d calmed themselves down somewhat.

  Such carnage did have a tendency to put a damper on flagrant passion, oh my, yes.

  Which was why he’d interrupted with serious misgivings.

  Chevy raised a hand to strike the bartender but lowered it a second later. The bartender flinched and looked like he was going to wet himself. He had seen a bloodbath take place on his premises, giving the Elder Gearman reason to give a bit of latitude, though the man was lucky they weren’t helmeted. “What’s this, barkeep? The man who took my horse from me is not Nicked Jimmy?” Beside him, Dom was already back at Book, flipping through the pages.

  “Well I know it weren’t Sally Ahoy,” Dom said with a grin, “unless this here fight got her so riled up she went x chromo.”

  Chevy laughed, then rolled for his partner to go on.

  Enjoying himself, Dom continued. “And he wasn’t Mistar Ch … what’s a EuroJap doing in Arcade City? I should’ve liked to seen a proper one from the outside world. Wonder if they’re any diff … it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. So it must’ve been this All-Points Eric lad, but Book says he’s only been around for about as long as it takes to pour a pint.”

  Dave shut his eyes. Mistar Chang, the one everyone kept calling a EuroJap, had been the first to die horribly at Fishy-Fish’s hands. The small, tanned man had caught Fish in a deadly sparring match using fighting styles no one else in Arcade City had ever seen before, an awe-inspiring dance back and forth across the barroom floor, all kicks and punches and … it’d been so graceful, so fluid that for a time, none of the other gearheads had moved. Dave relayed this to the Gearmen, eyes shut tight so he wouldn’t forget none of what needed to be said, no matter how awful, finishing with, “And then the … Chang, he produced a blade from beneath his jacket when Fish wasn’t looking and tried to stab the man in the neck. Got the blade in about a quarter inch when Fish … snapped. Grabbed Mistar Chang bodily and … and … and yanked him to pieces. The show over, everyone went back to the task of trying to kill Fish.”

  Chevy was reading over Dom’s shoulder, thinking he should maybe get over his reluctance to carry a Book of his own. The things were useful. He now knew, for instance, that the fighting styles referred to by their lugubrious barkeep as ‘a dance of fists and feet’ was actually called ‘karate’. He pursed his lips. The outside world was a funny old world, true enough. Give him a splashgun and a mace or what have you and he was happy as a clam. None of this punchy-kicky stuff for him, no sir.

  “What we don’t understand, or can’t find out, Dave,” Dominic closed Book and put it away again, “is who is this ‘Fishy-Fish the Blacksmith in your story.”

  “You make it sound like this lad was a maniac stuffed to the gills on a thousand gallons of the shit that passes for Kingsblood in these parts.” Chevy took one long, meaningful look around the charnel house. “Only … only Book don’t have the name of anyone like that.”

  “Besides,” Dom interjected, cutting Dave short, “it is a fact that blacksmiths do not use Iron. If they do, they stop being blacksmiths and start being wardogs, and from there, well, we in the Gearmen do know for a fact that them as have talent to be smiths but take that sip do slide quicker than anyone right down the barrel to gearhead. Happens every time. Same thing in ‘em as makes ‘em good with the tools makes for some terrible mean metalheads.”

  “You won’t find Fishy-Fish in that Book of yours.” Dave nodded at the brass-bound Book connected to
the one Gearman’s long coat through a cunning array of clamps and cogs. “Because he’s a fish. He’s new. Just came in today, or close enough to it. Got enough brains upstairs to be a blacksmith, which prompted Nicked Jimmy …”

  “Where is Nicked Jimmy?” Dom and Chevy asked simultaneously.

  Dave swallowed a surge of bile. Oh, Jimmy had gotten the worst of it. As horrified as Fish had been at what the black tendrils of living Dark Iron coming out of his fingers had been, he hadn’t stopped doing for Jimmy. “Was his hand you booted about the room.”

  Dom held his hand out at Chevy, who shook his head. “Book.” He insisted, waving the tome about tantalizingly.

  “No.” Chevy stepped close to the barkeep and grabbed hold of the man’s collared shirt. “You’re telling us that a man who walked through the Geared Doors sometime in the last twenty four hours suddenly became suffused with enough Dark Iron and skills to kill not just seventy of his peers, but also Nicked Jimmy, a fiend Book refers to as ‘so saturated with Dark Iron he is more metal than man’? Is that what you’re telling us?”

  Dave reckoned he was just going to make shirts that had proper grips on the collars for moments like this, because if this was a trend, he’d rather not have to keep changing shirts. “That is what I am telling you, sir.”

  Chevy made a happy face at being called sir, then wandered around the room in search of three unbroken chairs. After a few minutes of squelching across blackened bloody floors, he returned, dragging his prize. He arranged the chairs in proper interrogation fashion, waited for Dave and Dom to sit, then followed suit.

  “Now,” Chevy said with extreme earnestness in his voice, “you are going to tell us everything you remember about this Fishy-Fish the Blacksmith. Everything he said, everything he did, everything. Because what you are saying is impossible. And Dom, if you try to correct me with the word ‘improbable’ I will steal your Book and beat you in the head with it. Begin at the beginning.”

  Dave’s mouth went dry and he wished he’d had a moment to pour himself another libation. Better still if he’d chosen the hard road and prevented the whole mess from happening in the first place. Oh, he’d made a huge mistake. Getting through this interrogation with his secrets intact was going to take a lot of verbal dancing, yes it was. Both Gearmen were the top in their fields, and with legendary Chevy the Pointer around …

  “It started when Nicked Jimmy…”

  ***

  Vast, broad shapes burned through him, clicking, clacking, thunking, thundering, rending, ripping and tearing. Heat hotter than the output of stars flaring in the endless void of space boiled through him and off him, a furnace of agony threating to bend and warp his quadronium-infused bones like so many spaghetti noodles.

  He could not open his eyes. The fever dream of gears held him tight, held him close, gripping his soul like an angry Titan clasping a doll. Mottled, vehement rage tore through him, snarling alongside the perpetual shriek of machine-fueled madness that seemed eager to shred the sky.

  The machinery continued its endless journey, pulling him along for the ride, eternally swirling between the walls of The Dome of Gears, surrounding some kind of … some kind of … invisible …

  “Nothing!” Garth gasped awake, sitting bolt upright and startling someone nearby so intensely that they bolted into the vegetation. Looking around muzzily, trying to hold on to the dream that’d been raging red-hot through him, Garth tried futilely to figure out what –if anything- was actually on his mind. Faint tremors in the bushes nearby said someone or something lurked just out of sight but the … Kingsblood-driven terrors dominated his every thought. Nothing physical in Arcade City could compare.

  Something about machines in the walls, about the barrier The Eye had encountered … but … it was gone, little more than a whisper of a dream.

  Garth’s focus shifted from the gossamer nightmare to his outstretched hands. Now that … that was something he wasn’t likely to forget, not in a million fucking years.

  Had that really happened?

  Had thin tendrils of poisonous Kingsblood, trapped beneath his skin, flowed outward from each fingertip, a serrated monofilament fan?

  Grim memories of Nicked Jimmy’s fearful face falling to pieces beneath his grasp flickered upwards through the murky recollection of the Iron Madness that gripped him and he shuddered with utter revulsion. He’d done an awful lot of terrible things on the path to bringing Reality 2.0 to fruition, but killing Nicked Jimmy that way … it was light years beyond repulsive.

  Turning filthy hands this way and that, hunting for signs that murderously whisper-thin nanotech filaments had indeed broken through the thick callouses on his fingers, a part of him refused to forget that someone was skulking in the bush no more than five feet from where he sat.

  Given Arcade City’s war-torn, violent lifestyle, it was a pretty fucking good guess his mysterious voyeur was armed to the teeth.

  Given the state of his war-torn flesh, Garth feared the worst might happen a second time if things went the way Nicked Jimmy had said all such random encounters did.

  Nothing. No sign of damage. No sign of ’Vicious Elixir’ poisoning either. Garth pulled a sleeve of his tattered prisoner’s shirt back, then the other. Still nothing. The bizarre pulsing, twisting network of steampunk lace whirring across both arms and up one side of his neck to his Eye was gone.

  Garth heaved a sigh of relief before sinking back down to the soft earth. Could he be so lucky? Could the Kingsblood have burned its way out?

  High above him –nearly to the rooftop Dome itself-, wisps of cloud floated serenely. The Engineer allowed himself the fallacy that by squinting just right he could make out thin lines betraying the existence of cogs the size of cities. “Where am I?”

  A raspy voice from the bushes called out cautiously. “Very far indeed from where you started, I surmise. Very far indeed.”

  So. His … ‘host’ … was a man. A grizzled voice full of wry amusement at some joke or other than only he understood.

  Garth continued cloud-watching, still tried to pierce the veil of distance to The Dome, fruitlessly trying to resurrect some of the images that’d ridden him so rough-shod during his nightmare run through the dark. “How do you figure?”

  “You stink of beer, friend. Few bars left, you see, this far out.” The grizzled voice grew a bit closer. “And there’s only one bartender this way as has this above his door, besides all that.”

  A face to match the grizzled baritone hove into view, snow-white locks framing a seamed, scarred countenance; from Garth’s viewpoint on the ground, the man’s hair seemed to glow as it caught the light. A few seconds later, the older man dropped a rusty, corroded old circuit board onto Garth’s chest.

  Garth struggled back to a sitting position, careful not to dislodge the piece of tech that was –if you believed idiots like Nicked Jimmy- allegedly from a Kingspawn point. The ex-Specter held it gingerly in his hands, staring thoughtfully at the museum piece.

  It didn’t look like anything special, but when it came to nanotech, appearances weren’t just deceiving, they were downright unimportant; pens could become swords, dirt and earth could become giant killer roboKings the size of small buildings. It was just a matter of scale, time, and materials. With enough of all three and nanotech, you could do whatever you wanted.

  The power of controlled nanotech was unrivaled.

  “Heard there was a bit of a to do down there at Kingspawn.” The older man rocked back on to his haunches and stared at the man who’d come howling out of the darkness, covered in gritty Dark Iron blood, skin hotter to touch than anything he’d come across outside a forge, knotted tattoos flexing and coiling and crawling beneath that very same flesh.

  Them tattoos were gone now, and the damned lad had woken up afore a King could do some proper peeking as to the whys and wherefores of such strangeness, just like summat inside the slumbering fool had known Will were about to be used nearby.

  Barnabas Blake considered his opti
ons. Them as came from outside could sometimes be sensitive to Will, aye they could…

  “You heard that, did you?” Garth twiddled with the circuit board for a few more seconds before putting it aside. Figuring out what the hell was wrong with him had put everything –including busted circuit boards- so far on the back burner it wasn’t even funny.

  Garth turned his eye to the man who’d ‘rescued’ him, rubbing his bruised jaw thoughtfully. With muscles fueled by Dark Iron and endless anger, the ex-Specter supposed it was entirely possible he’d run halfway across Arcade City.

  “Aye, I did, and I’m the one responsible for the knot on your chin.” Barnabas stuck out a hand. “Name’s Barnabas. I’m a blacksmith.”

  Garth stared at Barnabas’ proffered hand before tucking his own possibly offensive mitts into his armpits. There was no telling if –or, more worrisomely, when- those inky black tendrils would rise to kill with such razor-sharp impunity a second time. “Nickels. Garth Nickels. How did you hear about the pub? That was only …”

  “Four days ago.” Barnabas interrupted. He nodded at Garth’s confusion. “Aye, the old Kingsblood can do that sometimes. Put a man under deep, it can.”

  Still reeling at the passage of time, Garth didn’t trust himself enough to keep revealing things better left unsaid, so he rose to his feet to take a better look at his surroundings. Four days. Four days. Ninety-six hours of … of that dream.

  He shivered, caught himself staring at his hands again.

  Back when the journey to bring the Unreal Universe to light –so to speak- had begun in truth, Garth had made a truly solemn vow to kill only, only, when absolutely necessary.