by Lee Bond
Barnabas tilted his head and stepped in to take a closer look at the clockwork coat’s collar mechanisms, fingering the impressively designed array thoughtfully. “This is Harvard’s work, hey?”
Mental Marc went to nod, but stopped himself short; when the pistons in his noggin started up of their own accord, the only thing as kept him from bouncing his brain silly was the stiff metal collar of his coat. If he moved his head too far back or too far forward, it set the whole thing out of alignment and that was no fun. “It is.”
“Went all the way to Ickford then, hey? Said like as not you weren’t goin’ there never again, I recollect. Warrant you paid a pretty penny, too, for all that fancy filigree and whatnot. Why, I reckon as well you spent more of your Iron there than you wanted, and all on things you didn’t really need nor want and you lot regret it now, don’t you just? ‘s why you’re all the way out here now, lookin’ to do for some long-unsummoned Big’Uns?” Barnabas stepped back; some of Marc’s crew were getting fidgety at his close proximity to their ‘looker’.
“Aye, we did.” Marc laughed along with the rest of his crew. That were how it always was when you made the run to Ickford. You were certain this time you was going to get what you needed, then right out again with Kingsblood in your pockets left over. “Ran into Harvard as you say, he saw my headgear were causing me grief. As you say, too, the man charges more than a pretty dollop for his work.”
Barnabas nodded solemnly. Marc had taken a serious head crushing a few years ago and the Dark Iron had grown right out the top of his skull with those brain-hammering pistons. Every few months, they grew a bit more. Sooner or later, the literal gearhead would have no brain left at all and frankly, the King couldn’t wait to see if the man was still capable of thought. “Still an’ all, Harvard’s work is passable, I suppose. Spends too much o’ his time on making his gearwork as fancy as you please instead of functional. Could of done the same work for half the price, me.”
Mental Marc snorted. “Sometimes, Barnabas, it hain’t about the functional of it all. As you hain’t a gearhead, you hain’t got no clue as to the pecking order amongst us with ‘sblood running through our veins.” Behind him, the gaggle laughed.
It were true. Anyone as didn’t kill Kings really didn’t get what it were like. There was peer pressure like a normal man couldn’t believe, and when two gaggles ran into one another, sometimes it weren’t about who had more Kingsblood in the veins but about who looked fanciest. And that meant running to Ickford, but it also meant being good enough to have enough Kingsblood for the likes of Havilland Harvard and Twisted Mickel.
“You never told me any of this when you walked up here, Mental Marc.” Barnabas motioned for Garth to step forward. When his ‘apprentice’ was at his side, the blacksmith continued fiercely. “You never told me you met with Harvard, never told me you built you that fancy new filigreed neck holder, neither. You never told me what you ate for breakfast this morning nor did you tell me what you squatted out afterwards.”
Mental Marc’s pistons gave his old brain the biggest triple-thump they’d ever given before stopping and his right nostril belched out a great plume of blackish smoke that set some of his crew coughing. “What’s this got to do with anything?” he demanded nervously, fearing suddenly for his brains. That last punch to the grey matter had been intense. He were seeing colors that he suspected weren’t rightly real.
“Nothing at all.” Barnabas said grandly. “Nothing at all, just as my sister’s cousin’s boy from Colony Estates who thinks he’s a smith has anything to do with anything, either. I didn’t mention him because it don’t matter. I can see as how, all the way out here in the wilds like you and yours are running hotter under the collar than normal, and you all be on your guard, but kindly mind your P’s and Q’s, hey?”
“The hell I don’t matter.” Garth interjected hotly, unable to take his eyes away from the solid metal pistons growing out the top of a man’s head. His skin was crawling. The shit that could make a man’s brains turn into gears and clockwork was inside him.
Specter grinned from deep inside his Dark Iron prison and urged Garth onwards to grand things.
The others in Marc’s crew weren’t as badly mutated as their looker was, but still, there were some pretty obvious outgrowths of Dark Iron scattered here and there, weird eruptions of the clockwork theme that started on the subatomic level. Were they replication errors? Did the intelligence running the nanotech plague do it intentionally, or did this happen on its own?
Barnabas thumped Garth in the head hard enough to leave the man’s ears ringing. “Now, Marcus, now we’ve established that my idiot relations has as much bearing on our discussion as do your bowel movements and I’ve chastised him for speaking out of turn, let us complete said dialogue without further ado.”
Marc stared sullenly at the fella in the top hat. “I don’t want him workin’ on me, Barnabas. The others, them as have only got a bit of the drippy-drop, that’s fine. But me, I’m paying top drop, I want you.”
“And I,” Barnabas clapped a fatherly hand around Mental Marc’s shoulders and, careful not to dislodge the neck brace, steered the looker towards the drafting table, “would have it no other way. My idiot relations will talk with the rest of your crew, take their work orders and set them their prices. That much he can do on his own, I hope.”
Garth returned Barnabas’ over-the-shoulder glare with one of his own. He didn’t like the situation and wasn’t one hundred percent certain he could even trust the blacksmith and the ass had just saddled him with a whole fucking crew. The rest of Marc’s crew swarmed around him, stinking of hot metal and filling the air with their demands, driving all thoughts of trust out of his mind for the time being.
If he could focus on the work, ignoring everything else tugging on his frayed nerves, he might just get through the day without killing everyone.
***
The thing, Garth had learned from Barnabas that very first morning, was that science had taken a bizarre turn in Arcade City. Things didn’t work the way they allegedly did outside The Dome, and oftentimes, two things that were supposed to work the same way did not; Barnabas attributed this to King Blake’s Divine Will and would speak only of the man’s amazing abilities and generous heart. The worst part was, Barnabas was probably right in being so adoring, so loudly, so often. A being hooked into the Dark Iron Cloud the way this King was had to possess the ability to hear anything said about him, anywhere in Arcade City, at any time. It wouldn’t even take effort. You could write a goddamn piece of code and insert it into the Cloud. The nanotech would take care of the rest.
That sentiment, Garth would find throughout his journey across Arcade City, was shared by very nearly everyone. There was every reason to worship an apparently absentee King who let things like pistons grow right through the top of a man’s head, or a King who intentionally turned his most adoring citizens into fiends addicted to something as perversely awful as Kingsblood because failing to do so was asking for trouble.
Creepy as hell, because from an outsider’s point of view, what went on inside Arcade City was one great big ball of messed up. The day-to-day weirdness and the random bizarre shit you could come across just walking down the street was so off-the-charts strange it was no wonder those wardogs who won their freedom were one hundred percent more crazy than everyone else. Yet from the inside, it was the same old, same old.
Garth feared he wouldn’t last long as a blacksmith’s apprentice, fake or otherwise; such close proximity to Dark Iron-infested wardogs and gearheads had his skin crawling so badly it was all he could do to pretend to listen to the guy who’d gotten him thinking about the violation of physics that was Arcade City in the first place.
Then, of course, there was the other reason.
Specter hungered for release and would probably continue rattling the cage until Barnabas got around to seeing if the Kingsblood could be removed without demanding more Bizarro death-syringe experiments in payment.
Pulling his attention back to the matter at hand, Garth eyed the heavy metal whacko requiring the services of a blacksmith thoughtfully.
Both his name and his chosen Kingslaying profession was ‘Thumper’, and the man fit the bill in every way. Garth was pretty sure Thumper wasn’t a pure FrancoBritish citizen because he had a Slavic build that put the generally slimmer FrancoBrits to shame, and was about as close to a God soldier as you could get without, you know, standing next to one.
Thumper’s body wasn’t badly ravaged by Dark Iron … well, Garth didn’t know what to call the things on the guy’s arms because they sure as hell weren’t cysts or cancerous growths, but whatever they were called, at least there were no pistons coming out of his head or flywheels for eyes or 4 cylinder engines for hearts.
Thumper, God bless him, wasn’t smart. Next to Stupid Ferd, Thumper was probably one of the stupidest people in Arcade City, which was something of a rarity, at least for Kingslayers; according to Barnabas, stupid gearheads were used for cannon fodder and were happy to do it for the whole length of their ridiculously short lives.
Garth held up a hand, cutting Thumper short with nothing more than half a syllable out of his broad mouth. The hat was irritating the living fuck out of him and the man’s donkey-voice was drilling right through his last nerve. And he was ashamed to admit he hadn’t heard a word the bulky giant with trapezius muscles the size of a Buick had said for at least five minutes. “Tell me what the problem is in small words.”
Thumper held out a brass war maul that was nine feet tall if it was inch. The grip was easily six inches around and carved across every spare millimeter with fantastic grill work that revealed, with tantalizing peeks, a complicated arrangement of pulleys and some kind of engine. “It’s broken. Look.”
Garth squatted down to get a closer look inside the grip. The stench boiling off Thumper was ugly. He smelled like a gas station built on top of an open sewer that’d been left exposed to the sun for about a billion years. Scrunching his eye shut for a second, Garth willed himself to at least get through this without pissing too many people off; Barnabas was adamant that he play the role of smithy apprentice to the fullest because the man was notorious for not accepting travelers like other blacksmiths.
If he failed to con this gaggle because of his issues with Cloud nanotech, all hope of first getting rid of the Dark Iron under his skin, second surviving three Big Kings and third, finding the fucking proper King, would be lost.
The inner workings of Thumper’s massive war hammer was … well, it was heartbreaking in its purity. The precision of how everything meshed together to drive whatever engine existed in the hammer’s head was breathtaking. To imagine that someone had constructed this, all by hand … as a man who’d come up with a way to engineer the physical restructuring of the entire Universe to meet his own demands, Garth N’Chalez was nevertheless humbled by the engineer who’d crafted this piece of art.
Garth stood, rubbing dirt off his knees. He looked at the top of the hammer. Following the premise that ‘bigger is better at hammering the absolute fucking shit out of a King before it kills you dead’, the beast was monstrous. It had to weigh at least three hundred pounds. Being cranged in the skull by something that big would be enough to convince anyone to lay down and be really quiet for a while. When you took into consideration that Thumper’s hammer had enough machinery inside it to do something else to you when it came crashing down into your face … it was the sort of thing to convince you God existed.
“I would’ve loved to have the time to build shit like this for my dust-up with Chad.” Garth murmured, running a hand across the head of the hammer. The artist-engineer had continued on with the very nearly relentless profusion of scrollwork that he –or she- had started on the grip, filling the broad weight with enough delicate-looking engravings for a million doilies. Everything came to a fine point on the face of the hammer’s head, which was … Garth chuckled. Then he laughed, throwing his head back.
A giant ‘X’. The artist-engineer who’d built Thumper his hammer was awesome.
“Who is Chad?” Thumper asked, trying to puzzle that out, and why the man in the hat was laughing.
“Just a guy I fought once. Blew a hole through his chest with my finger.” Garth made a gun with his hand and pulled the trigger. He felt immediately stupid when Thumper first flinched, then grew darkly angry as he realized he’d been made to flinch. Garth quickly brought the topic back to the broken hammer. “What is this supposed to do?”
“I swing.” Thumper flicked his hand at Garth and nodded once when the blacksmith moved out of the way. He looked around for the nearest big tree. He attacked it, swinging his big hammer around one handed, pretending he was going to take off a King’s head. He hit the tree full force with his vaunted war hammer and about an inch of splinters filled the air.
Thumper came back, clenching his teeth. His hammer was broken. “I swing, head hit, grip goes ‘ka-chunk’, head goes ‘boom’. Tree explodes. Only not right now.”
“Haha no way.” Garth shook his head. Dealing with nanotechnology meant all bets were off, but that was ridiculous. Thumper was gigantic, sure, and stuffed to the gills with Dark Iron, but still; the moment the head exploded or did whatever it really did –given Thumper’s lack of IQ, it could be anything at all- there was that whole action-reaction thing to deal with.
Swinging a hammer at an object and then having that hammer slam kinetic energy or whatever into it meant that the hammer’s face, which was just an inch or two over two feet wide, would jerk backwards, yanking the fucking zillion-ton hammer right out of Thumper’s hands, probably pulling the guy’s fucking arms out of their sockets like he was in a goddamn Merry Melodies cartoon in the process.
Thumper nodded seriously. He looked over at Quick Wit and Shooty Jane, who were lounging on a simple wooden bench, waiting impatiently for their turn. Good. He weren’t the only one unhappy at being forced to deal with the man in the hat. He looked back at the man in the hat, who was still shaking his head.
The man in the hat –who’d once been a Kingkiller himself- was an asshole. “Way. Look.”
Thumper straddled the hammer between his legs and put his big hands on either side of the hammer’s head and pushed for all he was worth. It took all of his strength, but eventually he was able to show the smug blacksmith’s apprentice that the hitting side of the hammer moved inwards about an inch.
Garth narrowed his eyes thoughtfully and was momentarily distracted by the cool metal clamps around his DarkEye; on a normal person with a properly functioning eyeball, those metal clamps and the one along the back of his head would detect muscle contractions and then begin manipulating the lenses in the monocle. So far, nothing like that’d happened.
“May I?” Garth asked warily. Sure, he was a blacksmith, and sure, Thumper and the other two were here to have their gear serviced, but not only had he gotten off on the wrong foot with this gaggle, he’d stabbed that foot with a thousand pound dickhead-sword of go fuck yourself. Better to try and even things out by being polite now than apologizing to a bunch of accusatory corpses. Thumper nodded and Garth moved to mimic the giant’s motions of a moment ago.
Thumper watched the blacksmith’s apprentice’s muscles flex and bulge as he tried to push the plate in, a big grin growing on his homely face as the bastard failed. Thumpy weren’t smart, but he weren’t dumb, neither. He knew –and he’d been told by none other than Shooty Jane herself- that the smith’s apprentice thought he was better than everyone. Served him right. “You hain’t strong enough, wee asshole hatman.”
Garth shot Thumper a hassled look and tried again.
Thumper opened his mouth to make fun of the weak blacksmith’s apprentice but clamped it shut less than a second later. He blinked his eyes three times to make sure he wasn’t crazy. He wanted to shout for Shooty Jane and Quick Wit to come over and see what was happening but his tongue had abandoned him; dark tattoos were suddenly crawling ‘neath the man’s skin, wh
irly-twirl bits and bobs like what was in his hammer, only … moving. The harder he pushed, the darker they grew, and the darker they grew … Thumper watched in awe as the hammer plate pushed in as easy as anything with the old familiar clickety-clack he sometimes used to fall asleep.
Garth stepped back from Thumper and his hammer, staring aghast at the inky black cog-swirls glinting like polished jet black metal beneath his skin. The clamps around his eye grew slick with electricity and for the briefest of moments, the tell-tale click-click-click of the hat’s focusing mechanisms reached his ears. DarkEye input flickered abruptly in the space reserved for Eye data streams.
Bereft of motivation, the Dark Iron tattoos slithered upwards until they disappeared. The lens sitting across his DarkEye stopped adjusting and just before the weird data that the Dark Iron-tainted quadronium circuits was trying to relay vanished in a spritz of hashy static, the problem with the hammer appeared in Garth’s field of view, fully-formed, fully realized intricate wire-frame schematics with highlighted areas from whence the problem most likely originated.
A worried hand flew to Garth’s mouth. He took another step away from Thumper, eyeing the Kingslayer nervously. There was no doubt in his mind that the giant had seen the Dark Iron tattoos, or how easily he’d moved that plate once the living ink had reached his knuckles.
Dealing with the stunned gearhead was far more important than dealing with a headful of unexplained hammer schematics. Garth went over to Thumper, careful not to trigger a fight or flight response in the other man. With Dark Iron still roiling under his skin like a nest of ornery bees, any untoward action at this point would set everything off again.
“How you do that?” Thumper whispered as quietly as he could, which wasn’t very.
“Like Barnabas said,” Garth replied glibly, “Used to be a lousy Kingkiller, up North.” Garth took the hammer from Thumper’s hands and lowered it gently to the ground with his help. “Like … Uncle Barnabas said.”
