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

by Lee Bond

  Chevy sighed. The younger generation. Then he chuckled at his own wandering thoughts. Before putting on the last coat he’d ever wear, he’d been just like Dominic, brash, idealistic, disrespectful of elders. But … if you wore the Gearman coat long enough –and if you were lucky and cautious, that could be a long time indeed- you eventually wised up and learned to take a longer approach. Dom couldn’t understand why someone would choose not to use Book because Book was all he’d ever known, and was having a hard time understanding how a man could match technology.

  Chevy jerked his head. “Come here.”

  Dom looked warily at the older man.

  “I ain’t going to hit you, son. Though I could, for all the teasing you been doing. Come here.” Chevy wiggled his fingers come hither.

  “We could’ve been done an hour or more ago if you’d let me consult The Book straight off.” Dominic muttered sullenly, eyes on the ground, trying to see what it was that an old man could see that he couldn’t.

  “Leave off, son. With the longcoat on, we got near all the time in the world.” Chevy indicated the stretch of ground he’d been staring at for a good five minutes. The indentation hadn’t grabbed hold of his attention because it defied explanation. Oh no, the huge groove, with cracks radiating outwards, had drawn his interest as it had because of who’d made it, and the general unlikelihood of any smith taking Thumper down without severe loss of property.

  Even one such as Barnabas would have a difficult time doing for Thumpy.

  “What d’you see, hey?” To help with the education process, Chevril stepped out of the way to allow Dom a much better view. “And don’t just pretend to look whilst you wait for me to lose my temper. I seen you do that three times today already and I’m not having it this time. This is an easy one. And no sneaky Book peeking, neither.”

  Dom made a point of coughing quite loudly as soon as Chevy lit up one of his foul smelling ‘victory’ stogies. “You ain’t smoking one of those on my horse. The stink gets into the works.”

  Chevy laughed around a mouthful of smoke. “In your own time, young master Dominic.”

  The Gearman clipped Book back to his chest in a rather pointed manner, gesturing with both hands precisely what he thought of Chevy’s miraculous intuitive powers. Then he got about the business of trying to do as his partner had done, because when you got right down to it, what Chevy had done was amazing.

  “I see,” Dom dropped to his haunches as Chevy had done, eyes tracing the impressive groove and the surrounding cracks to the firm bedrock, “I see … an impact point. A big one.”

  “He sees!” Chevy offered a salute to The Dome. “He sees, and begins to understand. And what do we know about impact points?”

  “Well,” the younger Gearman rose to his feet, tilting his head left and right as he took the cracks in, “we know that the only thing as does them are hammers. Them pneumatic ones made over yonder in Ickford. But …”

  “Oh?” Chevy puffed heavily on his stogie and smiled at Armand the horse. The horse huffed steam at him, as if it somehow knew someone other than his master would soon be driving him about whilst they hunted their true quarry.

  “But this is a big one. Only one or two big enough to swing it properly in this area.” Chevy itched to pull Book out to consult for names, but instead he screwed his face up in concentration. “There’s Big Maude, and there’s Thumper.”

  Chevy clapped warmly, ignoring the dribbled ash falling onto his coat sleeves. “Which do you think it might be?”

  “Could be either, I reckon.” Dom ran a hand over the top of his skull. Thinking was harder than he might’ve imagined. It’d taken nearly every ounce of concentration and racking of brain cells to come up with those two names, and he’d only remembered about Big Maude on account of he’d heard a story about a Gearman knocking her up with child a hundred years ago and how she’d split his skull with her pneumatic hammer.

  “It’s Thumper, you git.” Dom tossed Chevy the flattened bullets he’d picked up off the ground when his partner had gone off to do Nature’s business over half an hour ago. “Them as what you have in your hand are bullets.”

  Dom held one of the weirdly flattened bullets up in the air, squinting thoughtfully. Could a King have been in the area? The Gearman looked away from the bullet for moment. No. The landscape would be squashed flat. “I know what bullets are, you arsehole.” He tossed them back to Chevy, who let them fall to the ground. “I give up. Look, Chevy, you obviously know what’s going on here and I’m sick to death of playing this game. Book says you won. Kingsblood! I never would’ve bet had I known you’d be this good.”

  “Ah, don’t be sour, friend. I been a Gearman for an awful long time.” Chevy dropped his spent stogie on the ground, crushing the smoldering end under his boot heel. “So we got Thumper smashing the earth in what must’ve surely been the most ill-advised overhanded blow in the world and we have ourselves a long-range shootist firing bullets at something strong enough to flatten said rounds but small enough not to change the scenery beneath his Kingly boots.”

  “Name of the crew that got dead first, please.” Dom pulled Book loose and opened it. He wanted to smack himself in the forehead. The answer was right there. Of course it was Mental Marc’s gang of misfits and freaks.

  “Cheater.” Chevy snarked merrily. He held up a hand when his partner got ready to go off. “I know, I know, you capitulated. Yes. This was Mental Marc’s crew, and this was Barnabas’ camp.”

  Dom wanted to throw his hands up in the air. Instead, he walked over to put a loving hand on Armand’s withers. “You keep saying ‘this is Barnabas’ camp like that means something.”

  Chevril took a deep breath, held it for the count of five, then let it out in a long, slow exhalation that lasted well over ten seconds. When he was certain that his temper was under control –really, it was all he could do to keep from screaming at Dom sometimes-, the older Gearman went over to where his partner stood. “It means a great deal, friend. Barnabas travels alone. He don’t let no gearheads or wardogs to stay at his campsite under any circumstances. He don’t travel with anyone, don’t take no apprentices.”

  “So he did for Marc’s crew?” Dom asked quizzically.

  “He could’ve, sure, yes, but there’d be much more damage to the surrounding area.” Chevy leaned against one of Armand’s thick legs. “Why, I remember once, there was this lass, Tricky Mel, they called her, one of the only gearheads in all the world to transition to blacksmith successfully. Something in the Iron makes most of ‘em too fidgety, definitely too inclined to use their manner of payment on themselves instead of fueling their machines. Anyways, I hear tell Mel blew her entire site up with some sort of weaponized Dark Iron. Vaporized two crews into splotchy black mist.”

  “You’re doing my head in.” Dominic moaned. “And I suspect you figured out who or what did the killing right away. Mister Smarty-pants. Go on then, prove to me how smart you are.”

  Chevril poked Dom in the chest angrily. “You are taking all the fun out of this. When I travel on my own to all these crimes, I hain’t got no one to be brilliant in front of. All the people in them Estates and those in the market zones and what-not, they all leave me well alone. Treat me like I’ve got some kind of sickness.”

  Chevy waited for Dom to issue some sort of apology for ten seconds before coming to the conclusion that he could wait all damn day and not get even a blink of an eye as way of saying ‘sorry, mate’. “Barnabas will put up with prolonged company for one thing, and one thing only. Rare and curious manifestations of Dark Iron alteration.”

  A curious smile stole onto Dom’s face then. “You tellin’ me…” he trailed off, nonplussed. They’d come across the campsite during the course of their investigation into the case of the Killer Specter; the Matrons wanted this mysterious, crew-killing monstrosity out of Arcade City by any means necessary and as soon as possible, which was why the investigation had he and Chevy together still.

  “Aye.” Chevy
nodded. “Somehow, Barnabas come across our Specter and either convinced the man to travel with him, or the smith captured him. Either way, now we know something we didn’t before.”

  “Well,” Dom snapped Book to his chest excitedly, “let’s get on with it, then.”

  “Not quite yet, my son.” Chevy shook his head. “Gotta figure out which direction to go.”

  “We follow the tread marks, obviously!” Dom indicated the grooves worn into the earth beneath their feet. Now that he knew what to look for, the path was quite easy to spy.

  “Nope. Campsite’s at least a week old, Dominic. After this kind of murdering, ole Barnabas will be looking to protect himself, and the one he’s got with him. Reckon once we get out onto the roadways, we’ll find our smith took himself a long, spiraling route. Mayhap wasted a whole day laying down false trails.”

  “Now why,” Dom admitted to himself that Chevy’s assessment of the smith’s behavior was all too likely, “would our smith go to such trouble for a violent beast like Specter?”

  Chevy pressed his lips together tightly. The answer would never be found in Book, and the Matrons did their best to let only the older Gearmen in on the secret because of how grim the truth was. Anticipation mingled with exasperation was easily red on Dom’s face, and the younger man was about to open his mouth.

  Chevy silenced the impending tirade with a quirked eyebrow. “All right. I’ll tell you. You gotta promise not to say nothing to no one, not none of your Book Club Regulars, no one. There’s some of us as knows the truth, and well, them Nannies don’t much care for the practice but hain’t inclined to stop it, neither, so tellin’ your lads about it won’t do nowt but get you in the hottest water. Now listen, you, and be hushed whilst your elder speaks.”

  ***

  Chad couldn’t take his eyes off what he was seeing, wishing all the while that Arcadia was home to some of the imaging software and high-tech scanning devices that the outside world took for granted; while his Dad’s telescope was the absolute tits in terms of making far away things look very close up indeed, it failed totally in terms of resolution.

  The makeup of The Dome had changed. Mightily. To some, the change might seem insignificant, but Chad wasn’t some. He was Chadsik al-Taryin, the first Son of the King. To Chad, the changes were enormous, and represented a great mystery that would only grow more complicated each time The Dome changed its shape. And in so changing, some small part of his Father the King’s ultimate plan may be revealed.

  The apex of The Dome was one of the largest and most intricate collections of twitching cogs and gears to be found anywhere along the massive expanse. At the very top, more than anywhere else, that sea of motion, that eternal tick-tick-tick of the parts moving in perfect harmony, a symphony of precision … it’d captivated young Chadsik al-Taryin for hours, as much for the science as the art; one gear, one massive Gear, right above the center of Arcadia, and inside that tremendous toothed beast, spokes of other, smaller concentrations of machinery spiraling outwards from the middle, all done up in slightly different-colored metals. Once those spiral arms reached the border of the Gear in which they were housed, fractal patterns erupted across the shell of The Dome, ricocheting across their heaven. Patterns too intricate to believe, that fell out of your mind the moment you stopped gazing at their majesty.

  Chad had wasted an entire week following those trails from their source to their destination. There were fourteen arms, fourteen exhilarating spirals of gorgeous madness hidden in plain sight.

  Had been fourteen.

  Now?

  Now there were thirteen, and the … mechanical cornucopia humming above his very head was different; one whole spiral of scintillating, glittering gears was plated over now, sealed shut, the metal hiding the machinery traced with circuitry infinitely more complex than anything ever seen anywhere inside Arcade City.

  Circuitry, Chad knew, as hadn’t been seen during any of the Ages brought about by the King. This … this was summat from before The Dome had come down, from when the King had been young and the planet fresh as daisies.

  The cyborg ex-assassin rubbed his lips thoughtfully. The revealed pattern was too slim to even guess at its true purpose. But it definitely meant something.

  “Wot you doin’, old man?” Chad toggled the joysticks, started tracing the now-hidden section of The Dome’s guts to where it ended. “Wot’s all this about?”

  “You are a very bad boy, Chadsik al-Taryin.” Mistress Taint’s displeasure cracked the air with tension.

  Chad hung his head. Obviously, the old bitchbot had to show up just now, just as things were getting interesting. Dismayed at being caught out, Chad nevertheless marveled at how in the hell ye olde cyber-vagina had managed to work the ladder. For all she was a robot with an AI mind, Taint had all the pretense of an actual Lady of the House. Various images of her climbing the ladder whilst trying to hide non-existent unmentionables filled his head, and the few Chads that were still talking to him burst out laughing.

  Chad let the laugher erupt out of him. He didn’t care what Taint did. He was crazy, sure, but she was a lunatic. “Come on, Mistress Taint, there ain’t nuffink wrong wiv me bein’ up ‘ere.”

  Mistress Taint strode angrily into the room. “I specifically forbade you from coming up here without your Father present, young master al-Taryin. The machinery and equipment is not for your hands.”

  Chad looked at his hands as if he was seeing them for the first time, went through a long pantomime of being astounded at their artful creation, how the fingers moved, the whole bit. Then he looked at the joysticks. “And yet, somehow, Mistress Taint, in some way not yet known to magic or science, I managed to move them with these ‘ere fingers. Wot ever will ‘appen to the world now?”

  Taint paused for a moment, her motorized body trembling slightly beneath her Matronly dress. Without another word, she displayed her favorite choice for chastisement.

  Miss Bliss made a sorrowful face as the much smaller room lit up with lightning cast by Taint’s cattle prod.

  “This ain’t necessary, Taint.” Chad shrugged an apology to Miss Bliss, who was quite put out by the sudden escalation of violence in the room. “Let us ‘ave a look at wot’s goin’ on wiv The Dome, let us see where this armored spiral lands, an’ we’ll all go back downstairs together. You, me, the luvverly Miss Bliss. Too great a mystery, Nanny. Me old head’s fair trapped by it, and that of the great Clangin’ from earlier. No ‘arm, no foul.”

  “Plenty of harm.” Mistress Taint chanted as she advanced on Chad, cattle prod spitting arcs of blue lightning. “Plenty of foul.” She raised her arm high.

  Chad realized he was suddenly holding the heavy metal pry bar in his hands like it was a baseball bat. Sudden recognition as to what was about to happen appeared in Taint’s queer-looking eyes but it was too late. The ex-assassin turned prisoner was already swinging the bar at the Head Matron’s ever-shifting face for all he was worth.

  The hard metal pry bar collided with the side of Mistress Taint’s head with enough force to tear right through the insane AI’s rippling face with ease. Gears and cogs and springs and flywheels and all manner of miniature machine-pieces erupted outwards, filling the air with that which had once been Taint. The Matron tried to speak, to still berate Chad for being a bad boy, even as the pry bar continued ripping her head to shreds; for once in her miserable existence, mad Nanny Taint could only squeak out warped, sibilance-fed whispers.

  Chad himself was shouting incoherently at the joy of doing something he’d long dreamed of doing, from the very first time Mistress Taint had taken a switch to his behind at the tender age of five. He couldn’t believe how wonderful it felt! Those Chads who’d descended into slumber, hiding themselves away deep in the recesses of his mind over the disgust they’d felt in watching their only outlet into the true world succumb to a mad Nanny AI’s horrific requests, started rousing themselves.

  Welladay! What a feeling. With Taint out of the way, he, they, The Chads, cou
ld begin the task of getting free of first the Armory, then Arcadia, then Arcade City. All thoughts of plumbing the mysteries of what was happening to The Dome had fled as assuredly as Mistress Taint’s life; even now her robotic body was locked in a rigid pose, flickering and spitting cattle prod held aloft the only sign of power anywhere.

  “Well fank fookin’ Christ, yeah?” Chad winked at Miss Bliss, who’s comically surprised face seemed more worried than anything else. The poor girl needed consoling. En route to the wee little dollie, Chad paused only to make a thoroughly disreputable gesture, complete with tongue waggling and hip gyrations at poor, defunct, head-shattered Mistress Taint. Satisfied that his revenge was now fulfilled, Chad picked Miss Bliss up.

  “There, now, that weren’t so ‘ard, were it?” Chad was well pleased he’d risked going into the bottom rooms in search of someone he could talk to; Miss Bliss, in addition to being the source of a youngster’s primeval fantasies involving women with heavily rogued lips, was a wonderful listener.

  Like now, for instance. Chad weren’t sure, but it looked as though his wee companion had her head tilted to one side, as though she were listening to metal being scraped across the floor. The ex-assassin went to chide Wee Miss Bliss for being a worry-wart, but then cybernetic ears went prick-prick-prick all on their own.

  It weren’t possible. Just couldn’t be.

  Before even turning, Chad was cursing. “Oh, fuck me sideways!”

  The first blow from the pry bar took him right across the face as he turned, hitting him with such precise, robotic fury that he knew two or three of his lovely pearly whites would need replacing. Falling backwards against the very desk that his dear old Dad had sat at whilst his youngest Son had played with the telescope, Chad tried to dodge –which failed miserably owing to the fact his noggin was ringing like a Church bell- another savage blow, this one hammering him skillfully in the chest. Almost immediately afterwards, too fast to make any sense, another struck him on his right forearm.