by Lee Bond
Firstly, Deezy Cue et al. There was no way of knowing if that group of bedraggled gearheads were going to keep their yappers shut, none at all. Barnabas held the opposite opinion, but of late, you could say the ‘sky’ was blue and the smith would abruptly announce it was orange, turning everything coming out of the man’s mouth into contrary bullshit. Garth didn’t mind. It made the man so much easier to ignore. The gaggle’s sob story of hard luck had much to do with being killed by their King as soon as ‘The Noisy’ had torn through Arcade City. Once a crew of twenty strong, Deezy’s gang of smashers and crushers had fallen to six in a matter of seconds.
One thing Garth had learned from Nicked Jimmy was there were few crews of less than ten that could take down a fully realized King, putting the crew that pulled that gag off at the very top of their game.
That in no way described Deezy and friends.
Finally getting proof that people all over the City had been adversely affected by ‘The Noisy’ had been just the ticket to start a terrific fight between smith and apprentice; Garth had switched from casually discussing what to do about Deezy right into a fierce discussion on the underlying cause of the strange event.
Barnabas –probably because no matter how good a smith he was, was also kind of a dumbass who couldn’t admit when he didn’t understand a thing- had spazzed right the fuck out, throwing shit all over the place like a hormonal silverback before dialing it down to ‘sullen bitch sulk’.
Thus; Barnabas at his melter, stirring the revolting slurry of dead gearheads up to a nice turn, acting like a bitch and Garth was involved in doing something he knew was stupid-ish and not caring one way or the other.
Garth tapped the Wall again. A jolt of electricity shot down the metal rod, up his arm, then down his leg. “Ouch.” His thoughts returned to the more pressing matter.
If Deezy and his merry band of Ironed Misfits were lucky, they’d make it to an Estate or one of the market zones and find employment in, well, pretty much anything that caught their eye. The looker could easily find work at one of the Door Estates as a teacher, and Garth knew that where there was commerce, there was organized crime, which meant that the Smitty and Ron would slide right into the roles of leg breaker or enforcer without little or no hassle. Molly and Criss had stricken Garth as eminently capable, and would do the best out of all of them. Fatass Patterson would be least well off out of the entire gaggle; with no ‘sblood in him at all any longer and literally being shaped like a mound of cookie dough with teeny-tiny eyes in an even larger head, the geek would be best off looking for a sideshow carnival wearing a sign that said ‘This is what happens when you eat too many carbs and don’t have proper exercise’.
That was if they kept their yappers shut and never said anything about what they’d witnessed.
Garth stepped three feet to the left, raised the baton, and then jumped. At the apex of the leap, he tapped the wall. Lightning jolted down his arm. “Ouch.”
Barnabas stirred the slop once more, nose wrinkled, breath held. He’d been doing this for a number of years that certainly counted as ‘forever’ and in all that time, he’d never gotten used to the rank odor. “Why are you doing that? I told you the Wall bites.”
Gods, he hated pretending that he was a backwoods blacksmith with zero knowledge of anything. Especially around someone who knew things like electricity existed. Around the simpletons who waged endless war, it wasn’t that difficult and the ‘ignorance’ slid from his mouth like warm honey.
Garth made that difficult.
“You did indeed.” Garth moved three feet again. Instead of jumping, this time he started digging, unable to turn his mind from Deezy. Something about the guy … his attitude screamed ‘I really don’t like working hard for a liv… hey, I have the awesome fucking battle story to barf all over the place in exchange for free food and drinks, what the fuck am I doing trying to work?’.
The story of a ‘golden-armed man’ doing one on one battle with a ‘fully-armored’ Big King would net any teller of such a tale Dark Iron by the ounce, that was for sure. It wouldn’t be enough to transform them back into a full-scale Kingkilling squad right at once, but it’d be a start. And if Deezy or Molly or whoever started doing tours, actually taking people out to where the fight had taken place, well, that’d make for extra crudey-crude for certain; there was no mistaking the impact point of the stupidly large Dark Iron assembly unit, or of where he’d spiked his King onto a tree so he could climb out of the fucking head before the whole thing had exploded like no one’s business.
“Ouch.” Garth went to suck his fingers, momentarily forgetting he was still clad in armor. The taste of cold brass and earth made him inexplicably sad. Without turning his head, Garth shouted Barnabas a question. “How far down you say this goes again?”
Barnabas flashed a wise smile at Nickels’ back. Oh, the outsider did indeed know his traveling companion knew more than he was letting on. Definitely one of the many reasons why he was such a continual pain; Nickels was trying oh so desperately to catch him in a lie, a tactic that would never work. “Never did.”
Garth rolled back on his haunches, mouth lousy with the taste of dirty metal.
Specter –never too distant- wanted to hunt Deezy and the others down and kill them, a desire which in turn made him sick to his stomach. Realistically, it was the only acceptable response to someone or something posing an immediate threat to long-term survival. Hell, the concept was a basic tenet of Special Services: ‘don’t leave people who can fuck your op alive if you can help it’.
That one came direct from Old Man Politoyov, and that crusty Offworlder insisted random deaths be kept to a dull roar wherever possible, so you just knew when he said it, it was probably a good rule to follow.
Though there was little chance any regular person hearing the story would think ‘hey, this golden-armed dude sounds lots like that fuckin’ guy that did for a whole tavern of gearheads, holy shit, I should find a Gearman’, there was every chance a Gearman –or Gearmen in this case, because Barnabas would occasionally muse out loud his ponderings on where the Men hunting his irritating and ungrateful apprentice were at these days- find such a story incredibly interesting.
There were no similarities between the two accounts save one: him.
Garth N’Chalez.
As Specter, he’d killed more souped-up gearheads than any King, and as … as himself … he’d done something no regular mortal had ever done.
Shit like that would interest the utter fuck out of Gearmen.
Irrationally, though, it was all about his Kingsblood reservoir, which awesomely brought him back around to the other major problem in his life; thus far, he’d been uncannily lucky in keeping his Dark Side at bay, a fact for which Garth remained eternally grateful. Beyond a soft, manageable insistence he hunt Deezy and gang down, it was more that it was a continual urge that was the worrying part.
Just a few days ago, Specter’s grim urges had waxed and waned, but now … now ‘he’ was there all the time, just off in the background, humming with this ‘aw shucks, let’s murder some folk’ look on his face, espousing in that one image all the worst hungers and desires passed down from Kith and Kin.
Garth clenched his jaw and inspected his handiwork at the wall. The furrow was about four feet deep. Garth rocked forward until he got as close to the wall as possible without touching it, then peered downwards. Man, he really wished DarkEye hadn’t crapped out during the Big King’s explosion. Having an inorganic and way more cautious voice of wisdom around was kind of permanent need in his life, specifically because they were always going ‘stop, this is ridiculous’ and ‘if you stick your finger in that plasma discharge vent, there is a nine thousand percent chance you will probably hurt something’.
Over a shoulder, “You sure you never heard of anyone getting underneath this thing?”
Barnabas shook his head. Nickels. Unless something was done to get him under the yoke of Dark Iron properly –no matter it were likely to be only briefly-, the
man would be the ruination of Arcade City. Luckily, that would all change once they arrived at Ickford. Or shortly thereafter. Barnabas Blake the One and Only King wasn’t yet sure: would he even bother allowing Garth to lay eyes on the sociopathic Agnethea, or would it be better to arrange for the ‘apprentice’ to fall afoul of the true desperados as hid deep inside foul Ickford?
Blake gave a mental shrug. He supposed the answer would fall to that moment when the choice had to be made, and not before. Until then, he’d occupy these last few idle moments with different scenarios wherein Nickels first became a proper slave to Kingsblood then a dissected corpse on a slab.
The blacksmith King cupped a hand and bellowed his response. “As I told you not ten minutes ago, lad, the further down or the higher up you go, the worst the bite is. Men have long tried to get over or under, tried and failed. Why, I did hear a tale of one daft fool who did try to burrow his way directly through. Some say you can still see his leggies all stickin’ out, though I find it more likely summat did nibble ‘em away to nubbins ‘ere now. Don’t quite know where that’d be, though.”
Garth had some pretty strong doubts about the tall tales Barnie kept spinning about the walls separating the different ‘levels’ of Arcade city from one another. Rising swiftly to his feet –with nary a creak of bone or muscle, surprising after the go-around with Kingzilla- Garth dusted dirt from his arms, legs and chest. He’d had to barter like a Wall Street broker trying to con retirees out of their pension to get fresh clothes from Barnie. Keeping them clean and not destroyed was high on his priority list, right up there with ‘not dying’ and ‘get the fuck out of Arcade City, bro, seriously’.
Squinting at the top of the Wall, Garth did some quick and dirty estimations. “This wall is only … sixty-five feet high. You could build a catapult easily enough.”
“Well,” Barnabas pulled the heavy stirring stick from the soup of melted flesh and bone and held it over the melter so everything could drip off, “I don’t know that word, but if you mean a machine as to launch foolish gearheads over the top, then aye, people have tried...”
Garth turned to Barnabas, eyeing the melter warily. He was going to have to address the topic of repairing his armored extremities, and Garth knew for certain that the moment he started asking for supplies, old Barnie was going to counter with a severely unrealistic level of remuneration for access to the grotesque treasure trove in that melter.
There had to be a way around acquiescing to Barnabas’ frankly creepy need to poke and prod his flesh. Had to be. Garth quirked an eyebrow at the smith’s unfinished sentence. “And?”
Barnabas shrugged. “And the wall grew higher. Or, as was the case of Airborne Andrew, who, to hear the story, went up near on two hundred feet, the Walls Bite just snatched him right out of the sky. His friends, who did have enough crude to purchase passage to the next tier, went and hurried to him quick as they could. Of course, by the time they got there, all that remained were … remains. The Wall kills even the toughest gearhead stone cold dead, apprentice, something a fellow with no proper Iron in his blood would do well to remember.”
“Especially,” Barnabas added darkly, “if you plan on goin’ on into Ickford on your lonesome as you’ve been saying. They don’t much care for folk who gawp and gape at the crudey-crude afflicted, and they do use their patch of Wall as punishment.”
Garth thought a few choice curse words at the smug blacksmith but plastered a smile on his face. The crotchety old bastard could spin as many tales of terror and fear over what happened inside Ickford all damn day long. Their ‘partnership’ –uneven and awful and just … no fun- was coming to an end. “Speaking of Iron, you never told me how much you were going to extort from me to repair my arms properly.”
“Ahhh!” Barnabas heaved the heavy stirring stick onto the grass and started wiping it clear of goop. “Now that is a good question, hey? How much do I indeed intend to ‘extort’ from you for those arms of yours to be fixed, hey? They’re more than damaged, lad. Even you can see that. You’ll be lucky if you can salvage an eighth of what’s left, mark my words on it.”
The smile faltered, but Garth valiantly held on to the false mood he was trying to employ because it was important he keep his temper, both now and when they began bartering in earnest and for one simple reason.
Barnabas was right. The arms were damn near fucked beyond belief. A furious bout of MacGyvering the living daylights out of the busted-up steampunk cyberarms had resulted in repairing an abysmal amount of functionality to the right arm.
And that was seriously troubling: the Kingsblood drawn from his own body to power it had been returned from whence it came, leaving him highly susceptible to aggravation. One misstep, one flare up, and Specter would be ignited.
Barnabas knew this and was –in his underhanded, sneaky way- attempting to exploit that concern for his benefit.
Regardless of motivation, the arms need repairs. They needed more awesomeness and functions built in. Garth’s hope there was that the more complex the arms grew, the more likely it was that the machinery would completely deplete the crudey-crude in his veins. It was just a matter of looking at his body as a smith would a machine.
As the only source of both material and equipment, Barnabas was bound to get what he wanted, one way or the other.
Barnabas flashed Garth a calculating look as he clipped the stirring stick onto it’s holder on the side of the melter. “Your question begs the question: ‘what weight of small gears do you need?’. Tell me that and I can answer.”
Mental Marc’s coat had weighed eighty pounds, Thumper’s hammer had clocked in at just shy of four hundred pounds. Granted, not everything from the coat had made it into the cool brass exoskeleton, and Garth estimated he’d lost probably a hundred pounds or more of hammer-workings transferring the ‘pneumatic works’ during the fight …
It all depended on whether or not the pneumatic fist was even worth rebuilding. It’d been overwhelmingly effective for a prototype, if more than equally destructive to the chassis and would definitely dispel any attempts at fisticuffs from the denizens of Ickford but again … was it worth the effort?
No. The hammer was to blame for most of the overall damage caused to the exoskeleton. At the end of the day, hauling off and whanging the crap out of a Big King, while totally emotionally satisfying and all sorts of comic book awesome, was the kind of thing that just wasn’t worth the risk of perpetual –and inopportune- malfunction.
The fist was out. Easy enough choice. Now it was time to shoot for the stars and aim for the mega-big super-secret crazy plan, because why not?
“Well, boyo, I’m waiting?” Barnabas jerked his chin at the melter.
“All of it.” Garth wanted to laugh. The blacksmith got this kind of ‘the fuck did I just hear?’ look on his face and it was priceless.
“No telling how much there is in here, laddie buck.” Barnabas thumped the tub with a calloused hand. The huge tub resounded with a sploshing glong that was all kinds of unsettling. “Could be fifty pounds, could be five hundred. Some of Mental Marc’s crew, ‘specially Thumper there, were real heavyweights. I planned on selling some of this to a few tinkerers in Ickford. I’d get good return on my investments, there.”
Garth put a hand on the melter, glad for once that the grotesque heat rising from the nauseating pot of gearhead stew didn’t pass through the metal gauntlets. “That’s as may be, Barnabas, but I have need of all that’s in there. And I’m willing to bet all my Iron that there’s just a few pounds over seven hundred of gears and whatnot in this fucking wretched goop.”
Barnabas bit back a retort. Bloody Nickels. There was –in fact- seven hundred three pounds of gears and cogs and hollow metal bones and a whole assortment of Dark Iron-machined pieces that would’ve fetched a pretty price from the tinkerers in Ickford. Why, the iron skellington alone –all from Thumper- would set a normal blacksmith for three or four months of high living in Ickford.
The King didn’t know what
to do.
Obviously, it was paramount Nickels have little to no chance at repairing –or worse, improving upon- those bloody robotic arms of his, and for very good reason; the Dark Iron curled around the lad’s genes weren’t propagating, weren’t turning bits and bobs of Nickels’ flesh and bone to steel and iron. If them arms were left to run long enough, it were dead fucking certain they’d simply eat all the bedamned Kingsblood right out of the body! The damned outsider had come up with his own miracle cure wi’out e’en realizing it!
Just as obviously, Barnabas knew he couldn’t rightly refuse the sale. Their whole traveling arrangement was now predicated on the exchange of goods and services. While not necessarily blowing his cover as ‘Barnabas the blacksmith’, denying Nickels access to the wonders in the melter would definitely end their travels together, not to mention quite possibly blowing his cover. Right there on the spot.
Barnabas stood there, looking over Garth’s head, cautiously weighing the pros and cons of the ludicrous demand. Were it worth it to give –well, no, not ‘give’- the fiendishly talented outsider access to quality goods in exchange for a few more weeks of travel or just spy on the man from afar?
It did seem to the King that every time he thought he had Nickels beat, some new twist arrived to push things along in an altogether unwanted direction.
Garth smiled a fake smile. His demand for the whole kit and caboodle had thrown good old Barnabas into a quandary. Good. “Well,” the ex-Specter demanded tritely, mimicking the blacksmith’s tone from a few minutes ago, “I’m waiting, my son.”
Barnabas Blake the One and Only King did not want to give Nickels what he had in the melter. It was a sincere, frustratingly insistent desire. Now the man had fought a Big King –and a fully armored one, to boot- on his own and survived, anything he built with the accumulation of machined parts in the melter would be geared towards another encounter.
Except this time, there was little doubt that whatever it was that Garth decided to add to the already impressive metal carapace, it’d be infinitely better than the pneumatic fist.
