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

by Lee Bond

  Reason two was even simpler, and far more Garth-centric, and therefore tolerably more acceptable: the Gearmen tattoos. Each one of the marks scored into his back was capable of summoning a Big King from any nearby Kingspawn point, and all without any of the normal methods needing to be used.

  To hear Barnabas tell it, the entire damn countryside was littered with the fucking summoning pedestals, which was the other reason they weren’t running around the countryside Indiana Jones-ing the utter shit out of all those old ruins. Through various means and ways, Barnabas had learned the location of very nearly every single one of the pedestals and had already –to hear the old prick go on about it- rearranged their traveling path so heavily it was going to take a damn Christmas miracle for any Gearmen to find them as they wandered hither and yon.

  Reason three was something to with Ickford, but where Nicked Jimmy had waxed almost eloquent about how vile and odiferous the place was –without giving any specifics beyond ‘it was awful and terrible and I hate it’- the crabby smith shut up almost as quick as he did every time questions about how the King ruled Arcade City were raised.

  Grumpy and irritable about how little control he seemed to have in his life, the ex-Specter turned blacksmith’s unwilling apprentice pulled out the damaged Kingspawn circuit board and started giving it a proper going over, Tech Expert-style. Which involved a fair bit of whapping and smacking, jiggling and poking of fingers at various crudely rendered circuits and such.

  Barnabas let out a wild squawk the moment he saw how roughly Garth was treating the ancient, battered piece of tech. “I’ve already asked you three times not to mess about with that … circuit board … as you call it, and for very good reasons. Stick it away, if you please!”

  Garth turned the board over in his hands, trying to imagine what an undamaged one looked like. All the interesting pieces had either been destroyed by ‘it’s’ spastic Big King or had eroded away to nothing thanks to all those years as a goddamn sign, making it impossible for anyone to figure out how it did it’s scientific magic. Either way, the fact that it was undeniably a circuit board was downright impossible to ignore. A weird, totally unnecessary circuit board given the King possessed the only working nanotech in town, but whatever. The absentee monarch did love his fripperies and pointless Baroque weirdness, and since he was King, that was how it went.

  Where there was one, there’d be others. Once he got his hands on one that hadn’t been stomped flat and then left out for a bazillion years, he’d be rock solid! With an undamaged board, it’d be zero time at all to get things up and running with him in charge. Of that, there was one hundred percent certitude.

  Garth rattled the board at Barnabas. “It’s busted. I won’t know if I can make it work until you decide to let me start using your equipment.”

  “I’ve yet to come to that conclusion, young apprentice.” Barnabas spat some seed husks onto the road, eyeing his companion. “While there does seem to be summat about ye that suggest ye might be good enough to smith for a living, I guarantee if you mess about with that board, you shall not lay a hand on any of my tools.”

  Garth looked over his shoulder at the train of partially motorized cubes that Barnabas stored his gear in. They trudged forward on thick metal half-tracks eerily reminiscent of ancient tank treads.

  They moved at about two miles an hour. Off the top of his head, Garth could list about eighty million different ways to improve everything from turn radius to top speed, using nothing more than some chewing gum and twist-ties, but Barnabas had a burr up his ass about even trying to flout ‘King’s Will’. To hear the tale, anyone fucking around with anything that the King took super seriously was to invite a Universe of hurt down on your head before you knew what the fuck was going on.

  Just like a random AI overlord, but on a smaller, seemingly pettier scale.

  Garth weighed the pros and cons of fucking with Barnabas.

  It was fun, especially since Barnabas kept needling him for permission to ‘test’ his Kingsblood ‘oddity’ without revealing anything worthwhile about Arcade City or how things actually worked. On more than one occasion, the ancient bastard had literally clamped his mouth shut, refusing to talk about anything at all like a particularly strong-headed crybaby, all while still demanding quite stridently he be allowed to poke, prod and spindle one handsome ex-Specter until answers to his unique condition materialized out of thin air.

  So really, Barnabas the Blacksmith was begging to be harassed by virtue of failing to live up to the unspoken contractual obligation between two dudes roaming a vastly unimproved English fucking countryside; namely, having a proper fucking conversation without flying into epic bitch-spaz territory every time tough questions were asked.

  On the flip side, though, Barnabas had suggested the possibility of really educating him on Arcade City smithing techniques, which was honestly pretty goddamn awesome, even if it meant having to work directly with Kingsblood and dealing with the heavily mutated, absurdly weird … weirdoes long enough to focus properly.

  That offer was something Garth couldn’t pass up; somehow –either accidentally or intentionally- smiths and artificers of a certain degree were actually able to manipulate the Cloud. Though it sounded like the effective range of these oddities was pretty limited, it was a definite plan ‘B’ should the easier, more circuit board-y plans fall through. If Kingsblood allowed itself –however minutely- to be manipulated by ordinary peons, it was entirely possible that said miniscule amount of power could be … improved upon.

  Besides which, as the spaz had just said, if he monkeyed with the board too much more, not only would all offers of smithy education would be rescinded, it was highly likely the smith would boogie on down the road, leaving one fairly aggravated outsider to his own devices.

  There was no way in hell he’d be able to navigate Arcade City while simultaneously avoiding Kingspawn points.

  Beaten. Again. Bright side, though, was that Barnabas’ insistence on doing the whole creepy doctor thing generally just seemed to be a sticking point when their arguments grew out of hand rather than a genuinely serious demand.

  The ex-Specter jammed the board back into the rucksack Barnabas had given him. “Fine. I think your concerns that the thing is capable of summoning a Big King out of the ether is pretty far-fetched, but whatever. You’re the boss.”

  “Indeed!” Barnabas bellowed happily. Egad the man had –not to be too on the money- iron self-control. There simply had to be a way to increase his traveling companion’s stress levels to the point where the ‘Specter’ hiding behind those off-colored eyes came rushing to the forefront.

  If the man’s body truly was a perfect, living vessel for Dark Iron … oh, the things that could be done with such a prize!

  Barnabas crowed triumphantly once more. “I am indeed the boss! Now, come. We shall see if you are as smart as you imagine yourself!”

  ***

  “Dude. Dude. I get it.” Torn between his desire to dropkick Barnabas across the forehead and to tinker around with everything in the blacksmith’s tent, the only escape available to Garth was –sadly- to be kind of a dick.

  “Oh, you do, hey?” Barnabas sniffed. “Is that the truth of it then? In a single afternoon you have gleaned all there is to know about working with Kingsblood, which is in truth known properly as Dark Iron? Not only that, but how to use another man’s tools so that when you are done and this kind, warmhearted smith does go to use those tools, he is not immediately killed because you forgot to turn a flange? Or that he accidentally walks into a gaseous cloud of Dark Iron fumes because you neglected to turn on the aerator?”

  Barnabas flung his hands in the air and stalked around the spacious smithy tent, honestly angry, sincerely upset. Why? In all truth –though it should be all but nearly impossible- it did indeed seem that Garth Nickels, Trinity spy or summat similar, really did ‘get it’. The few bits and bobs he’d set the lad to tinker with -just to get a feel for the mechanics of Will and how that majes
tic source of power drove all that worked under The Dome- had responded quite readily to his touch.

  Continuing his tirade, Barnabas started rummaging through one of many large wooden containers full of this and that, the sorts of odds and ends a wandering smith might pick up during the long years of travel. “And pray tell, Master Nickels the Knowitall, prior to coming here, prior to being foolish enough to do for a legendary King’s Son somewhere out there in the outside, what is it you did with your time that should give you such special knowledge of a world that is and always ever shall be naught but mystery and legend?”

  “Stuff.” Garth doodled on the wooden table with a finger. The direction the Cloud Nanotech had taken here in Arcade City had gone down a direction that was –to put it bluntly- fucking spectacular. Even in the middle of designing the machinery and coding that would turn a solar system into part of a weapon, never once had he considered being … creative.

  The Goreene Cloud did what it was supposed to do, and had Trinity not managed to circumvent Its own programming, well. No goddamn matter eating zombies, for a start.

  But here in Arcade City, the King –for all his probable intentions of throwing his hat in the ring for The Big Fight- had done something pretty goddamn amazing. The gearheads, though … that was stretching things to the breaking point in terms of acceptable behavior.

  “Stuff, he says!” Barnabas booted the box he’d been rummaging through out of the way and moved on to the next. “And here he expects me to not only teach him the ways of smithing, but to discuss the whys and wherefores of why our absentee King does as he does! I get nothing in return, yet am expected to risk punishment by the Gearmen or worse still, direct visitation from the King himself! If that is not madness, not to mention an uneven exchange of goods and services, why, then I am no smith at all! Mayhap I should change my name to Esmerelda and wear a pretty bonnet for you, lad, for all the fucking around you’re doing.”

  The sudden image of the coarse, slightly overweight and grizzled smith in a dress and a hat, swinging a parasol lurched drunkenly into Garth’s imagination so abruptly that he hooted in uncontrollable laughter for a solid three minutes, narrowly falling off his still on more than one occasion.

  “That’s fucked up, man.” Garth wiped tears from his eyes. “Completely. What the hell are you looking for, anyways?”

  “Well, sirrah.” Barnabas shoved the second useless box out of the way and went at the third. It’d been too long since he’d used his equipment and nothing seemed to be where he remembered putting them. “In theory, I am looking for a completed buzzknife and the various gewgaws that go together to form a new buzzknife. In reality, though, I may just slit you from groin to gullet for being so damned evasive. I asked you a sincere question, boyo. I know me and thee are like fire and an even hotter fire when it comes to most things, but I am genuinely interested, as no matter what I said a moment ago, you do indeed possess a bit of natural talent.”

  Put that way, he sounded like a dick, so with a sour look on his face, Garth gave up some of the truth. “I was a mercenary for a long time. On the ground, in the air, all that. Equipment breaks, you learn how to fix it. You steal new gear, you learn how to make it work. I got good at it.”

  Barnabas shook his head slowly and put on his best dumbfounded voice. “It still does me old poor noggin in to imagine that out there somewhere, there be … what were the word? Planets? Yes, that’s it. That out there, there are planets with millions upon millions of men and women and screaming babbies and all that mess and nonsense.”

  “You get used to it.” Garth shrugged and looked around the tent. Everywhere his glance rested, there were signs of genius at work, only … disguised behind Asperger-ish levels of adherence to ‘steampunk’.

  The aerator, for example –while being the absolute wrong word for what it did- should be a simple fan system that sucked any and all potentially lethal or otherwise toxic fumes up to the top of the huge tent, and then high enough into the air so that the wind caught and then dispersed fully. It was not. It was the absolute antithesis of simple. In order to get the fucking thing working properly, there were an even dozen different engraved brass toggle switches you needed to fiddle with, two different winder-thingies that got the steam engines set into the base of the whole fucking thing –which was easily six times bigger than it needed to be- going, and then you had to keep your eye on the hen-and-rooster weather vanes set up and down the metal rod stretching all the way from floor to tent-roof, because apparently if the hilarious old-timey cock wasn’t banging away at the hen, there was the potential for explosions.

  And that was for a fan.

  A fan.

  Getting the big welder going took a solid half hour of patience, prayer, and the kind of intestinal fortitude you’d normally only find in Tibetan monks getting ready to head-butt gun-toting soldiers. After watching Barnie go through the steps for powering the welder up three separate times, Garth had quietly promised himself that he’d only ever use the thing if there was literally no other way.

  Everything was like that. From screwdrivers to socket wrenches to rulers and what-the-fuck-else Barnabas used. Screwdrivers were complicated affairs with weird pieces sticking off them. For no reason.

  And almost everything had some kind of steam engine. Garth struggled every few minutes against the powerful urge to pull the proud smith aside to explain that not a single fucking thing in the tent that had one of those cool little steam engines that went chuff-chuff-chuff actually needed one. The true power requirements for the ‘aerator’ was several times more than the engines could ever hope to produce.

  And then … and then … and then? Everything that had moving parts needed Dark Iron as a primary fuel source. Buzzblades had teeny-tiny little reservoirs set into the hilt that you needed to top up with an eyedropper drop of liquid insanity every few days or the fucking thing turned into a fancy-looking paperweight. The welder drank Iron like dwarves sucked back ale, making it so prohibitively expensive –in relative terms- to use that Barnie himself had admitted he only fired it up once in a blue moon.

  Near about the only thing of Barnabas’ that didn’t use Dark Iron –and was definitely the one thing that should- was the train itself.

  “Well,” Barnabas dropped a pile of stuff onto the worktable, breaking Garth’s reverie, “since it is without doubt a veritable impossibility that I shall ever see this infinite outside of yours, it is well and truly summat I won’t waste no brain matter on.”

  Garth poked a finger through the pile of parts. “So, what’s the deal?”

  “Well, my boy, since you claim to ‘get it, dude’, here is your challenge.” Barnabas waved his hands grandly above the knife and the component parts. “Take these bits and bobs and make it into summat similar to the buzzer there. A halfway decent smith can slap one of these together in well under an hour, and I’ve even seen a wardog or two do the same. Just like you, in the outside, hey?”

  “Got it.” Garth looked around for the thin but durable and resilient kid leather gloves Barnabas had oh-so-regretfully given him; they were a blacksmith’s first line of defense against accidental Kingsblood exposure. Now, sure he was stuffed up with the shit in the first place it shouldn’t matter one way or the other, but there was no fucking way he was going to let any of that shit touch his naked skin. “Suggestions?”

  Barnabas switched his lips back and forth thoughtfully. He was positive he knew what Garth was going to do, making any warning he might make a kind of challenge to do the opposite.

  So be it.

  Flashing one of his more garrulous smiles, Barnabas answered. “Aye, lad, just one. As you put pieces together, feeling your way through the construction, do take special caution to have your blade be as close to the original as possible.”

  Garth slid the gloves on eagerly. Absentmindedly, half-forgetting Barnabas was even in the room any longer, he asked, “Why’s that?”

  Barnabas shrugged, then legged it towards the tent flap. “We�
��ve talked long enough, lad. Do or don’t. No matter which way you go, there’ll be learning at the end of the journey. I shall be outside, basking in the weather. Shout when you’re done.”

  “Yeah yeah, sure sure, fine. Okay. “

  ***

  Barnabas nudged the … well, he supposed it were a buzzblade, but then again, it also weren’t. His insides were jumping for joy at the simple stupidity of the other man’s pigheadedness. “What’s all this then, hey?”

  Garth beamed joy. “It’s a buzzknife. Buzzknife Beta. The Buzzinator. Buzzkill Alpha. Something like that.”

  In the end, it’d been a blast, figuring out how to work with Dark Iron. The getting there, though, had taken considerably longer than Garth would’ve honestly imagined as a reasonable amount of time, given his previous experience with Cloud tech and, oh yeah, because he’d fucking invented the tech in the first place!

  But take a long time it had, and the Engineer was certain it had to do with all the modifications that the Dark Iron King had made to the original coding; had he been in full possession of his faculties back there in Gorensystem, Garth was certain it would’ve taken all of five minutes to ‘log on’ to the pervasive nanotech network to set himself up as admin.

  From there, it would’ve been a hop, skip and a jump to turn ‘matter eating zombies’ into ‘normal people who suddenly feel quite awkward about all the awful horrible shit they’d gotten up to while under the duress of a malfunctioning nanotech system’.

  The moment Barnabas had walked out of the tent, Garth had tried the various Alpha-user verbal command protocols that’d been left deep in the substructure of the ridiculously complex coding all to no avail. Either the Dark Iron King had seen them and removed them or they hadn’t survived thirty thousand years of tinkering and steampunk weirdness.

  It’d taken him an hour and a half to come to that sorry conclusion, at which time, Garth had admitted defeat and gone the regular route to ‘conquering’ King’s Will enough to make weapons that were pretty effing cool.