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

by Lee Bond

  And what’d he done? Fucking slaughtered a roomful of gearheads and wardogs, that’s what, when the only ones who’d truly deserved any kind of payback for their crimes had been Nicked Jimmy and Staunch Mel.

  There wasn’t any way to know for certain how far he’d traveled during that night –a night four fucking days past- but that trek had taken him far enough to see significant changes in scenery. Where the land from Sliver Hills to Kingspawn Pub was a flattened wasteland, his current surrounding fell into the ‘ridiculously idyllic English countryside’ category.

  Green, rolling hills, flowers here and there, the occasional copse of ash or oak. Off in the distance, thick white smoke reached for an impossibly blue sky. Garth pretended –pretty well, he thought, given … everything- not to be irritated as all hell by that blue sky. Or the fact that there was no fucking sun.

  “Only thing missing is a goddamn beautiful golden yellow orb.” Garth framed the scene with his hands as an artist might when considering a new landscape. “I call it ‘Rural Madness’.”

  “Why madness?” Barnabas asked from where he squatted.

  “Because this place is fucking batshit insane.” Garth realized his deadly hands were out and tucked them back into his armpits. “This peaceful scene … it isn’t real.”

  “Oh you’d think that, right enough, especially coming from Sliver Hills as you do.” Barnabas groaned as he got his feet out from under his ass, sighing as he stretched out properly on the grass. “That whole area is poisoned on account of one man’s rage ‘gainst his jailer.”

  “Nicked Jimmy.” Garth turned his attention to where instinct and half-remembered memories said he’d come from; the lush, rolling hills of the local area prevented him from getting a proper look at the route, and as much as he wanted to get a better clue of whether he’d committed further heinous acts, losing sight of Barnabas seemed like a potentially bad idea. The old ‘blacksmith’ was totally content to lay on the ground, chewing on a stalk of grass like this was fucking nineteenth century England, a thing that was one hundred percent legit. For normal people.

  In Garth’s personal and broad experience, no one was innocent enough to pull that shit off properly.

  “Met him, did you?” Barnabas chuckled, raising his hands in defeat at the gloomy warning on Garth’s face. “All right, yes, to your unspoken question, I do indeed already know all there is to know about what happened at Kingspawn Pub, am already fully up to date on the carnage, the slaughter, the mayhem. Four days is a long time, hey? Spent all that time just over yon, I did, keeping an eye on you as you slumbered, hearing tall tales from customers as they waited for me to ply my trade. Seems not all as were in the pub that night fell to this cruel Specter, and them as have the knack for storytelling be passing the word to all other gaggles and the like.”

  Garth moved back to their impromptu meeting circle and sat down cross-legged, ignoring the popping sounds from his knees. He’d run a hundred miles in a night, then slept for four. He was getting off lucky. “And?”

  “Well.” Barnabas wiggled a fresh stalk of grass between his fingers. “That depends on which ‘and’ you’re asking. Is it ‘and why am I still here and not being handed over to the Gearmen’? Is it ‘and why are you in my presence when I am quite clearly a hairs ‘breadth away from being a raving lunatic’? Is it ‘and did you tell anyone else about me? Or is it perhaps ‘and why did I bother?”

  The word ‘Gearman’ stirred interest in Garth. It didn’t take much to reason that whatever else ‘Gearmen’ might be, there were Arcade City’s equivalent to police. ”Take your pick.”

  Barnabas chewed thoughtfully on the stalk of grass for a time. “Well,” he said at last, “I reckon it does all boil down to curiosity. You be a great mystery. As I said, I’m a blacksmith. Have been, oh, for a long number of years, I suppose. Long enough to’ve seen more wardogs and gearheads than most all blacksmiths combined. Means I’ve seen near about every kind of Dark Iron infection a man or woman could have, starting with the gross perversions that afflict people like your dismembered friend Nicked Jimmy and ending with the purity that comes with those who’ve supped on the unsullied Kingsblood attainable in one place only.”

  Garth’s mock-pleasant smile turned brittle. “And?” he demanded coolly, wondering if Barnabas was aware of the fact that he was rubbing a dangerous man’s nerves wrong in every way.

  “And,” Barnabas returned Garth’s fake smile with one of genuine pleasure, “in all that time, young master Nickels, I’ve never once seen Kingsblood do what it’s done to you.” Wasn’t that the truth? What’d happened to Nickels fell well outside what Dark Iron ought to do, which was why he were still down here in the dirt, so to speak. His decision to spy on the outsider for a bit would most like turn into a full-blown adventure of sorts, hey? “Now, before we discuss that, of more and more importantly, immediate, interest to you is whether or not I said anything to anyone.”

  An intense desire for a mirror or even a standing pool of water gripped Garth, overriding Barnabas’ pointed query: he had zero clue what he really looked like, not after … not with all that fucking crudey-crude in him.

  Was he a freak like the others now? Were there weird steampunk protuberances growing out of his face? Had toes been replaced with sparkplugs? Hysteria threatened to crest above concern and before Garth knew what he was doing, he was tapping at the hard surface of his one lost eye with a fingernail.

  Gone was the curious fibrous-like spread of quadronium threads. Nearly invisible yet indestructible, the thin tendrils of alternate Universal matter had felt like oddly resilient dandelion puff under his fingers. Replaced, Garth realized with a sinking feeling, by a solid lump of crudey-crude.

  He felt … he felt nothing at all.

  The rapt, vaguely amused expression on Barnabas the Blacksmith’s creased old face said it all.

  Garth snatched the probing hand away from his weird new eye.

  Ignoring what’d just happened –for now, like so many fucking things on his immediate to-do list-, Garth looked upwards, praying instead for a set of binoculars with a zillion times zoom and a BattleSystem to link the data to; if he could only get a proper look at the whole of Arcade City’s Dome, at how the entire expanse of interlocked machines worked together … that could very well be the first step in figuring out just what it was that this Mad Goth King planned on doing with his stupidly dangerous Cloud. Was he going to do something to, for, or with the M’Zahdi Hesh? Or, since the realm of impossibility was all around, did the King plan on throwing his hat in with the good guys? It was a pretty damned important thing to find out!

  Still staring upwards, only now looking for some subtle hint of a light source, Garth addressed the blacksmith once more. “Did you tell anyone? And if you didn’t, why not?”

  “Your last question, young master Nickels, ties into my fascination with your particular case of Iron Madness, and that, dear boy, is a discussion for another day.” Barnabas hopped to his feet and proffered Garth a hand up, smiling at the younger man’s wary dismissal of help.

  Untroubled by such early signs of mistrust, Barnabas tucked his thumbs into his waistband. Watching on as Garth struggled to his feet, the blacksmith continued, “And obviously I did not tell anyone where you were, and for those very same reasons. I shall not do so, as long as you travel with me, neither.”

  “Why,” Garth demanded, bent over, hands on his knees, wheezing and gasping and appalled at how truly shitty he felt, “why in the fuck would I do that?”

  “A great and vast number of reasons, my new friend, great and vast.” Barnabas threw his hands in the air, ragged voice booming across the fields. “It is obvious you are different than any other man who’s come through one of the Geared Doors, Garth Nickels. I’m a student of the human condition. You need to be, as a blacksmith. Or, rather, if you want to remain a blacksmith for the whole of what is hopefully a long and fruitful life. Fail to understand your customers and they’ll pull you to pieces quick as a wink
. I may know nothing at all of life outside the Tiktok Dome, but I know a man who’s got purpose in him from a thousand miles out.”

  Garth stretched his back until vertebra popped. It didn’t feel like there was any weird nanotech shit in him. He just felt … hung-over. Which sounded like a good thing, but simply couldn’t be. He was full of alien nanotech bullshit. He should feel it. “That’s not all of it.”

  Barnabas clapped a friendly hand on Garth’s back. “Of course not. There are them as might be coming after you. Friends of them pointy-headed Kingsblood addicts you did for, mayhap. I confess, my boy, I’m most curious to see how you’ll fare a second time. Then, of course,” The blacksmith laughed loudly, angling his new apprentice towards a path that would take them both to his temporary smithy. “There are the three Big’Uns you’ll have breathing hot on your backside, hey?”

  “Say what the fuck now?” Garth pulled up short.

  Big’Uns. The word was definitely the sort of quaint fucktarded bullshit nickname the patently mentally deranged citizens of the equally stupid Arcade City called the terrifyingly awful erector-set Kingbots they all liked to kill for shits and giggles.

  Barnabas’ eager smile shone. “Do you recall,” he asked curiously as they hopped over a small burbling brook, “do you recall as you fled the scene of your manslaughter three burning points across your back?”

  Garth steeled himself against the urge to run back to water’s edge, to stare into what he already knew was there. “Vaguely.” And that was the truth. Nearly everything from that night was buried under a thick layer of Kingsblood insanity.

  “You, my fine young friend, fell afoul of Gearmen about their duty. Rather than hunt you down on their great metal steeds, they shot you with up with King-summoning tattoos.” Barnabas pointed to a narrow path between two huge oak trees, following after Garth. “Three of them, in point of fact, something I’ve never heard of.”

  Garth stopped moving and turned to Barnabas. “Let me … let me get this fucking straight. On my back, there are ‘tattoos’ that can summon Kings. Three of them.”

  “Well,” Barnabas said with a wide grin, “not so much summon them forth from wherever you are. That would be disastrous! No, you are spared that. Should you come within a hundred paces of a Kingspawn point, lad, why, a King shall rise up out of the earth with naught but your name on his vast metallic brain. And that King will hunt you. Yet another reason for you to travel with me, now I think on’t!”

  “Oh yeah?” Garth demanded, amazed at how so many facets of his predicament seemed to favor traveling with a weird old guy that was far too reminiscent of a taller, chubbier Malcom McDowell. “And … can we quit with the roundabout jibberjabber? Just … out with it.”

  Barnabas grinned toothily and his eyes twinkled. A perfect trap, oh yes. He and this outsider would travel together for some time, wouldn’t they just? “Why, Master Nickels, there’s nowt another man in all of Arcade City as knows this outer ring as well as I! Well,” he laughed, “nowt save the King Himself, but he’s off doing as he does, hain’t he? Now, with me at your side, we can evade and avoid all them Kingspawn points easy as goin’ the other way when the wife and your girlfriend are coming straight at you. Them gaggles as come to my tents shan’t do a thing about you, neither, not if they wish to have my immaculate skills at their disposal, they won’t. Along the way, we shall see if you have the knack for smithing, for it’s generally believed to be true that them as come from the outsider have more of a knack for it than us poor sods born ‘neath The Dome, and I’m well proper curious to see if be true. Beyond that, I should like to see if aught can be learned about your peculiar affliction, for again, I know all there is to know about Kingsblood as what is in truth Dark Iron, and dare I say, I can conjure up some method of aid for you. You see? Perfect sense!”

  The man’s rationale did indeed make sense. The most sense anything thus far had made, but the only thing on Garth’s mind right then were the tattoos burnt into his back.

  “And I’ve got three of them.” Garth shut his eyes and held them shut. A brief image of clashing metal filled him. “Fuck me sideways.”

  “Indeed, young apprentice! Fuck you sideways! Now, come. My camp awaits.”

  ***

  “This.” Garth repeated himself, staring blankly at the weird accumulation of … of … metal cubes and tank treads and … and … stupid looking things that Barnabas referred to as his ‘camp and gear and all that’. “This is how you travel.”

  “Aye, lad, ‘tis no finer way to make haste throughout King’s, er, Kingdom.” Barnabas patted the lead cube, that which held the fancy spring-driven machinery that not only connected all seven of the cast-iron cubes together by way of a complicated drive train, but which provided power to the treads ‘neath each one. “We’ve been through quite a bit, seen e’en more, and like as not, we’ll do a fair bit of each before too long. You see, you…”

  Garth snorted. “I see how it works, dude. I was watching Road Runner cartoons before… never mind.”

  Garth took hold of one of the giant clockwork keys and turned it. The cube’s inner workings chunk-chunk-chunked in response and the ‘cube’ seemed to vibrate just a tiny bit.

  He had to admit that, when Barnabas had announced –not two hours ago now- that it was time to break camp and he’d grabbed hold of an odd ratchet sticking out one side of one tent, Garth hadn’t known what to expect. But turn the ratchet Barnabas the blacksmith had and to an outsider’s goddamn immense surprise, the whole damned thing had folded in on itself like some kind of self-solving Rubik’s cube.

  By comparison, the internal workings of the spring-driven engines hardly counted as cool, yet for some damn reason, Barnie was acting as though they were the hottest thing in antique tech. Garth gauged the top speed of the whole train as somewhere close to fucking Christ this will take for-fucking-ever, but no faster than Jesus I bet I could walk backwards faster than this.

  “Well, no. Yes. Whatever.” Garth moved on to the next key and started turning. “Look, my point is this. Let me under the hood and I can have these fucking things moving like greased lightning in under five minutes. It’s an easy fix.”

  Barnabas shot Garth a weary look. “And I’ve told you, somewhere in the neighborhood of seven million times now, King Blake does not allow it. D’ye think I’ve not dreamed of ways to make these things move faster? Of how to make harnesses to allow men to fly? Every blacksmith and artificer in the land capable of building anything remotely intricate thinks of these things, Nickels. It ends in disaster. For everyone. King’s Will is like the wind, young blacksmith, it is everywhere, it is in everything. Turn your hand against the Will and the Will shall smack you down.”

  “Yes, but…” Garth opened his mouth, but Barnie opened his quicker and louder.

  “But me no buts, lad, not on this nor on any other thing I do say when it comes to King’s Will. I do believe of the two of us, I been livin’ underneath The Dome my whole entire life and you’ve only just arrived. Now. Twist them twisters until they’re good and tight, hey?” Barnabas nodded his head once, just once, and quite firmly.

  Best to get the upper hand straightaway, weren’t it just?

  14. Knock Knock

  High resolution images filled the Enforcer’s HUD, a crystal clear video that might as well have been shot from three feet away instead of the eighteen thousand kilometer gap between him and the focus of his attention. Most of the data pop-ups streaming across the HUD were either blank, categorized as ‘unidentifiable’ or flat-out labeled with an excessive number of actual question marks.

  “Target acquired.” Enforcer Slate stared at the … man … they’d been trying to lure this way since Jordan Bishop’s towers in Zanzibar had fallen. Huge amounts of effort and manpower had been squandered to bring this day about, and Slate wasn’t going to risk his own life by getting any closer to the … man. Trinity was obsessed. Obsessed with the … man … in Slate’s optics.

  The man who denied proper
identification.

  Which was supposed to be impossible.

  “Is it him?” Trinity’s cool, gender neutral voice was eager with anticipation.

  This was the first time Slate had ever seen his target with his own ‘eyes’, someone Trinity referred to as Kant Ingrams, but who could also clearly not be that person; there were reams of data available on Ingrams, the missing Senior Historical Adjutant, enough information to occupy a single person for their entire lives. Kant Ingrams, who stood on the blasted shores of ancient England and stared up at the vast Dome of Gears, had been the most successful Historical Adjutant in Trinity’s employ. But there was no way that Ingrams and the being Trinity was insisting was also Ingrams.

  The two were as different from one another as night and … earthworms.

  “It is.” Slate fiddled with the Suit’s controls in an attempt to get better readings off Kant. Nothing impressive happened, which was of great concern to the Enforcer; against Trinity’s orders, Suit-wearers spoke to one another whenever possible, using a wide array of tactics ranging from coded messages left in local magazines to encrypted data spun out on the radioactive pulses of pulsars.

  Every Enforcer in the Universe knew Kant Ingrams. They knew him by sight, could identify him out of trillions by his pointy head alone, especially since random missions on Old Earth magically wound up being direct confrontations with the … freak.

  They all knew who he was, all right…

  That was all they knew.

  They didn’t know how he could do the things he did. There was no explaining how a simple looking NorthAMC pencil pusher could fight Enforcers to a standstill, and yet Kant Ingrams, ex-Historical Adjutant did just that, on a regular basis. More Enforcers hit the panic button and disappeared from the field of battle versus … versus this nerd than from any other enemy, any other time.

  Legendary Enforcer Sherrik Holmes had chased Chadsik al-Taryin around a black hole once, yet that same unbeatable Enforcer was now somewhere past the Cordon refusing to talk about his encounter with this ‘Ingrams’.