by Lee Bond
“Awful name, that.” Chevy looked to the trees pensively. “They denying King made a man-sized monster designed to kill gearheads?”
Dom watched ink flow across the page. He nodded. “Just did.”
“Okay then. We know it’s not Kingmade, then. Matrons don’t lie, and if they’re finally getting’ involved as they are, they’re worried about this fella-me-lad making his way inwards to Arcadia. This changes things a bit, now don’t it?”
“It does?” Dom hated the way his forehead crinkled when he didn’t know what was going on. He felt his forehead crinkle and sighed. “How so?”
“It is well obvious Barnabas knows our lad has Gear tattoos on his back. How else can you explain the meandering path that they’re taking across this fair land of ours? The blacksmith is attempting to get Specter –or whatever his name really is- to Ickford, to see if Agnethea there can remove the remaining tattoos, and has been adjusting their path to avoid Kingspawn points. With all that crude Specter no doubt received from doing a King on his own … he can buy his way in through the Dark Door no problem. For all that, he can probably finance a trip all the way through to Arcadia. What he wants there is … problematic at best.”
Dom turned his eyes to Book and back to Chevy. “Is that even possible?”
“Which?” Chevy returned Dominic’s dubious look with one of his own. “Having the tattoos removed, or this Specter doing for the Pure King that’s been terrorizing Arcadia these last hundred years? Both are ridiculous to imagine, and yet, here we seem to have a man hell-bent on proving us wrong no matter which way we turn, hey?”
Dom took a deep breath. This was a huge deal. Probably the biggest case in the history of Arcade City. The Pure King in Arcadia had been on a rampage for a hundred years, as Chevril had pointed out, growing stronger, meaner, more deadly with each passing year. Aye, the Matrons kept the monster from doing too much damage, but even the firmest jailer had to let the prisoner out into the yard for … exercise, didn’t they? And with the number of gearheads actually bothering to move inwards diminishing down to none now at all, that King would be ripe with purest Iron. Not to mention, nigh on impossible to kill, even were a full gaggle primed towards Brigadier-hood show up at them pearly gates, all broad smiles and knowing winks.
“Can you imagine the amount of Pure Iron someone would get from doing for that King?” Dom whispered, slotting Book back into his chest. “More than a thimbleful I bet. No telling what’d become of a man as consumed all that. Might become as the First Brigadier, all them millennia ago, hey?”
Chevy watched Armand the horse pretending to crop grass for a long, silent moment. A man like this Specter even trying to do for the Pure King in his roost would devastate Arcadia. Missing or not, driven to the point of madness or not, such mayhem in Arcadia would surely bring their King out of hiding, for better or worse. So long gone, Chevy reckoned it’d be worse, aye, worse and worse still, given what ‘e’d done before leaving.
Specter’s hypothetical success wasn’t worth considering, and for all for the simple fact that, no matter how powerful he was with all that crudey-crude in him, or what it’d done to him, he was still a lone man. The Pure King had done for double handfuls of Platinum Brigade hopefuls, powerful men and women transformed and uplifted by ever-purer Kingsblood until they hovered just on the precipice of perfection themselves.
No one man could be their equal, let alone their better. Doing for squalid and sorry gearheads out here, on the ragged edges of Arcade City, well, that were a big thing, but in comparison to the Pure King in Arcadia, it were mayflies against … well, against Kings.
Chevy dismissed the question. “Let’s make camp. We’ll wait here for my horse, then ride on for Ickford with all due haste. We’re well behind them, and for that, I accept full blame. I thought this was just a regular old case, nothing much to worry or concern ourselves with. Arcade City has spat out some oddities in it’s time, but nothing like this. Like as not, Barnabas and Specter will make it to Ickford ahead of us, but Agnethea is turning into a crotchety bitch in her old age. If she’s willing to deal with Barnabas, coming up with a way to unravel our tattoos will take time, effort, and undoubtedly a great deal of Dark Iron. We will have time to fix this.”
Dominic nodded at Chevy’s admission of guilt and of the plan. He wasn’t too upset over the leisurely route they’d taken to come to this point; Gearmen made mistakes all the time, especially when dealing with something that their world had never seen before. Why, it’d taken his friend Demarcus a solid month to figure out what was going on with the Shaggy Men, losing three entire Estates and half a market zone before coming across the method of how to dispatch them.
The two Gearmen set about pulling gear from Armand. A horse delivered from wherever they were made could take a while, so the two of them planned on taking advantage of the respite. A nice spot of outdoors camping well away from gearheads and lunatics was just what the doctor ordered, hey?
26. Dammit, I should’ve gone with the Barter Town Quote!
Barnabas watched Garth move through the open clearing with something akin to jealousy; first as a CyberPriest, and then as King of Arcade City, he’d never taken the time to learn any proper hand-to-hand fighting techniques, or indeed how to use any weapons of any kind. He was a weapon, and there was nothing inside the Dome that could bring him harm unless he so chose. Immortal, unbelievably powerful, fueled by shattered Harmony, what point was there in learning anything?
It was the one thing that his cherished wardogs and gearheads had been forced to learn on their own, down through the long years, fighting and struggling and suffering. Their methods of combat, their techniques of domination and control, all had been developed and passed on from father to son, mother to daughter, teacher to pupil. They were the best at what they did. None could –none should- be better than his children, e’en if they were nowt but mere shadows of those as had come before.
Barnabas did not like Garth. The man represented something he couldn’t figure out. Garth Nickels had obviously come to Arcade City for a purpose, and as the man whirled and twisted and stamped and stomped, Barnabas worried and fretted.
To keep his hands from twitching, Barnabas was tinkering with a few gewgaws to catch Agnethea’s eye; there was a locket with a geared heart that would tick in time to the person who wore it, a ring with an inlaid eye that blinked slowly and looked hellaciously frightening and a silver stickpin with no Dark Iron in it but was so delicately engraved that it counted as a true piece of art that all needed final touches. Agnethea was the oldest Obsidian Golem, and the last time they’d met, things had not ended well for either party. The gewgaws might soften the initial encounter a bit, enough for him to make a proper getaway so he could get gone to his Dome and to better things.
Like laying down the framework for Nickels’ demise.
But, as his hands worked to keep from tipping the scales before he was ready, Barnabas agonized, and all on account of how stupid he’d been to let Nickels run free with both his tools, his time and all that material.
An unconscionable lapse in judgment, a terribly, terribly foolish decision and now it were well too late to undo it all, weren’t it just?
In the clearing, Garth thrust his fists into the air and two five-foot long glittering brass blades comprised of wickedly sharp flywheels shot out, filling the silent clearing with gentle buzzing. The practicing combatant amused himself by flailing about with suddenly be-weaponed hands, no doubt imagining himself eviscerating a horde of gearheads.
It was things like this … master skill … with machinery, with invention, with … anything he laid his hands on that was driving Barnabas faintly mad. Through the absorbed accumulation of all the CyberPriest’s memories, the One and Only King knew Garth was a savant of the highest order, able to take ordinary things at hand and transform them into wholly new and wildly impressive devices. The man’s gravnetic shield generators, for one, were awesome. Portable enough to plant on a soldier and capable
of saving a life or large enough to shield an entire planet.
But where had Trinity –Nickels’ controller- come up with such earth-shattering ideas? Prying into the collective memories of the ‘Priests only caused Erg1 to rise up out of The Dome’s circuitry to prevent discovery, a tactic that’d continue being successful until Barnabas could get himself up there. Damn and double damn again! This was by far too inconvenient for words.
Knowing that he seemed to be continually making mistakes where Nickels was concerned was one thing, but Barnabas also knew he couldn’t continue to berate himself.
Garth flexed in some way and the flywheels traveled quickly back up his fully encased arms. He flashed Barnabas a wink and continued moving around the clearing, tight body armor glinting in the fake sunlight.
In the glade, Garth’s wondrous dance of martial arts grew faster, the fiendishly brilliant clockwork body armor he wore drawing Kingsblood from the canisters slotted in at regular positions across the mesh. He soon became a blur, fast as any three hundred year old gearhead.
Barnabas selected another suitable piece for the eye in the ring and resumed work.
Something had happened to that rage. It wasn’t gone. Quite the contrary. Twice now Dark Iron had successfully pulled it up out of Garth, revealing not only anger, but a vicious streak worse than anything displayed by men like Nicked Jimmy.
It was rage like that that Barnabas had been looking for the last thirty thousand years, one of the reasons –the only real reason- he’d begun this experiment in the first place. Once properly powered, fully fueled, his Dome needed a guiding force, something that could burrow through the layers of Unreality, rip and tear through the meniscus of the Void in search of the other Spheres of Reality.
That fuel was to’ve been a gearhead who’d done the proper traveling through the various stages of Arcade City. A man or woman, steeped to the brim in Dark Iron, transformed at first into a raging demon of hot metal and black blood, then slowly but surely cleansed, venerated –dare Barnabas think it- ascended into an empty vessel, into which he would pour the Pure Dark Iron, that ultimately powerful Will variant that would elevate the proper person one step further. From demon to angel to … pure emptiness. That emptiness was to’ve been the needle to prick the bubble of Existence open, erasing everything in one final, unstoppable exhalation of horrible life.
As Garth fought invisible foes, Barnabas realized he’d approached it from the wrong angle from the start and were he not already set down another path, the realization … well. Barnabas had already seen what he did when his great plans went awry, hey? Best to avoid thinking over much on it, though it were a shame, nonetheless. His great and grand scheme, the Gauntlet … it did nothing more than produce perfect men, perfect women. Those who had done as intended, those who’d fought Big Kings and then their successively smaller and more dangerous opponents to finally cross the threshold into fair Arcadia were incapable of becoming what The Dome needed by the very merit of the journey they’d taken. Which was almost certainly why he’d killed all the remaining Brigadiers that … that night. Wonderful powerful sources, aye, you could ask for no better, but without Chadsik to drive them…
When Chadsik had fled The Dome, all hope had been lost. His poor, poor boy, the one originally intended to –when all his ‘friends’ had been removed and turned to better use- become that Void Mind … ah, then, the whole grand experiment had seemed destined to failure. It was why –after doing as he’d done- he’d fled to the wilderness; lo these last hundred years he’d been searching for someone to replace Chadsik as that wondrous point of light in the Void. Searching and failing, which was why The Dome was now outfitted for broken ‘Priests and stolen souls.
Well, now Chad was back but The Dome was set for them ‘Priests and Enforcers instead of Brigadiers and a King’s Son. The sole spot of good news there was that when The Dome was powered up fully, it should be child’s play to cobble together a way to get Chad’s mind back into the thick of e’en if all Chad did was bear witness to the destruction.
Garth’s blindingly fast practice fight in the ‘arena’ slowed down once more. The fool had a great big grin on his face. Pleasure leaked from every pore.
Barnabas smiled plainly at the grinning buffoon, but did not stop work. Did not stop thinking. He couldn’t, not about how actually getting Chad into the workings would actually play out. It were as bothersome as Nickels’ mysterious intentions.
Providence had returned Chadsik to him, somehow, some way, but … he was changed. Altered. He’d fallen afoul of the damned CyberPriests and they’d damaged the already fragile man further, convincing him that they had made him the way he was. In misinterpreting passages from the bogus Book they’d worked their entire lives to see made manifest, they’d utterly ruined the only perfect thing in all of Creation. He’d fled them as well, leaping into the Unreal Universe to become an assassin, of all things. Unless –dare Barnabas think it- unless divine inspiration poured through him, the King feared his Son was too fractured to be of any use save as creator of Suits, now, and e’en then, to what point? There would be no more deliveries to Trinity and with all that’d been done to him, Chadsik’s iterations were proving too weak and paltry to be of any intrinsic value inside Arcade City.
But –and here, Barnabas admitted to himself he was skirting the edges of faith- Providence had provided once more in the form of the grinning buffoon running ‘diagnostic tests’ on his intricately slotted together clockwork armor.
If he were in Trinity’s place, a man like Nickels was precisely who he’d send in, though it did seem to the King that Trinity had taken a monumental risk in educating the man as It had; for all thirty thousand years, and all the men and women and occasional thing Trinity had sent through the Geared Doors, Nickels was the first to be intimately knowledgeable of things the machine mind had struggled for millennia to keep to Itself.
Putting the pieces together, Barnabas was all but convinced that outside, Trinity was beginning Its own preparations for the End of Everything. There was literally no other explanation for someone like Nickels to come through the Doors, not now, not when The Dome were almost done. It was of great interest to Barnabas to know which direction Trinity’s efforts were going.
Would the machine mind seek to be like the M’Zahdi Hesh? Was It, too, weary of this hollow mockery of so-called life in the Unreal Universe? Did It want things to persist as they had been for who knew how long? Sadly, Barnabas realized he would never have those questions answered.
A sudden thought stung Barnabas right in his brain.
What if Nickels –working through the final kinks in his majestically forged battle armor- knew his boon companion’s true identity? What if the whole thing was a charade? What if the man’s semi-buffoonish behavior mingled with his stellar smithing skills had been designed to lull him into a sense of overpoweringly curious complacency, not to mention daft munificence? Was Nickels waiting for some predetermined moment to strike?
The Suit he wore now guaranteed success against the two remaining Big Kings, and while the thought was alien, the King did have to admit that it were quite plausible that –in the gleaming brass, copper and titanium rig- Nickels could cause even the semi-prisoned metal monarch of Arcade City considerable trouble.
The machine mind’s plan wouldn’t work, though. Not by a longshot, and for one simple reason.
At long last Barnabas had realized the flaw in his plan. Creation of the Void Mind could not come about through a slow, gradual release of all earthly concerns. All that did was create smug, overpowered Samaritans.
No. The Void Mind could only come about through abrupt, painful shock.
And Barnabas had every intention of ensuring Nickels received such a shock that his mind was stolen away, leaving nothing but a perfectly empty vessel designed to guide The Dome to the other Spheres. The King grinned craftily to himself, pleased at long last to’ve come to a final, fully formed idea on how to deal with Nickels. There’d be no more d
illydallying, nor the backing and forthing he’d been doing this whole time, neither. Why, with this firm new resolve of his, it hardly even mattered what sort of man Nickels was, or to whom he owed his allegiance.
All that was needed now was a proper method of coring the man out like an apple, leaving nowt behind save the flesh! ‘tweren’t the death the man deserved for being such a prat, aye, but it was what the man was going to get. Sometimes a King had to do what were best, not what were right.
“Pretty fucking awesome, right?” Garth came up to Barnabas, grinning and smiling like a proud new father. Super Awesome Combat Suit 2.0 was just that: super awesome. He displayed a few exaggerated flexes, thrilling to the sounds the various interlaced machines made as he did so. “Needs a bit of fiddling, but it’s the most amazing thing, right?”
“Indeed, Nickels, it is.” Barnabas pointed to the full-body clockwork Suit, envy gnawing his gut. All this, and more beyond, done in less than two weeks! From fish at the door to master craftsman in a month! Dark Iron –and thus Will- did seem to love the man, didn’t it just? Mayhap ‘twere summat to do with the strange effect Kingsblood underwent inside the man’s skin? Most –nearly all, in fact- smiths as got Kingsblood in ‘em fell quick to the inner anger, but as this outsider had shown, he weren’t one to let that get to him.
Or were it the coding left on display inside that fully-formed Big’Un? Maybe seein’ them, maybe the fact that Nickels had to know programming … maybe that had given the lad an unfair advantage after all.
Barnabas pointed to the Suit somewhat negligently. “You’ve made miraculous use of everything you gleaned from my melter.”
Garth flexed a bicep again, enjoying the dour look floating just beneath the surface of Barnabas’ pretend excitement. “Flexible metal gears, man. That’s some crazy shit. I can almost get over the fact that I’m basically wearing dead people’s skin. Because hey, I’m a badass motherfucker in this. Samuel L. Jackson would be all ‘you can say what again, it’s all good, you want some of this Kahuna burger? I’m totally full’. Speaking of gun wielding maniacs, you mind if I do some target practice?”
