by Lee Bond
They trundled past the rocks. For the first time since he’d put on the mantle of blacksmith, King Barnabas Blake the One and Only wished that he’d chosen to violate one of his own Wills; the huge jumble of boulders was a perfect landmark, and if Nickels didn’t like the answer that hovered on tonguetip, it was no mean feat to imagine the damned Kin’kithal insisting they stop so he could bury his Dark Iron.
“For those,” Barnabas began haltingly, “for those who wish … Agnethea can be summoned so she can directly vouchsafe your belongings.”
The King prepared himself for one of Garth’s now well-known and legendary fits.
“So, what?” Garth realized he was dying for a Slurpee. A root beer one mixed with cream soda. How was that fair? He knew there was no such thing as Slurpees anymore. His body knew it. For the most part, the simple technology behind building the machine alone didn’t exist anymore, and Trinity –as part of Its effort to ensure Humanity didn’t turn into a bloated pack of morbidly obese space-faring couch surfers- had outlawed the concentrated sugars making them so delicious. Making matters worse, there was no damn way for him to even guess at how to make them properly. “She comes down off her high horse, you show her your stuff, she goes ‘neat’, makes a list and wanders off? Everyone’s cool with that?”
“She does. They are.” Good. They were far enough away from the rocks that if Nickels decided to be damned bloody Nickels, he could kick up enough fuss over how difficult it is to back the train up that they’d be another mile along before they got to the end of the argument.
A root beer/cream soda Slurpee mix and a nearly poisonous hotdog. He’d give half his Dark Iron bounty for that. His sudden craving for sugary beverages and high sodium snacks reminded him of all the delicious wonderfulness that’d been hidden behind n-dimensional shields in Bravo. All, lost. Hell, lost without even the opportunity to try them; one of the first things he’d done to get the engines for Bravo up and running was deactivate almost all n-dimensional features of the ship.
Everything he’d stored thirty thousand years in the past had ceased to exist with the flip of a switch.
“When I am king of the universe,” Garth muttered sullenly, as he did every time something wasn’t going his way, “I’m inventing time travel. So I can travel back to the 20th century and have Slurpees and hamburgers and shit whenever the fuck I want. I won’t even mess with the timeline.”
“What was that now?” Barnabas demanded loudly, ice crawling through his ancient veins. Had he misheard? A quick thought showed he had not. Was that it? Was that simple, off-the-cuff remark the unvarnished truth? Was Nickels here for his own benefit, and not that of Trinity? “What was that?” he repeated, just as loudly, just as frantic.
“Hm?” Garth thought back. “Oh. That. It’s just a thing I say. You know, when stuff’s not going my way. I’m positive I’ve said it a million times in your presence. Like, I want food that doesn’t exist here, but if I was King of the Universe, I could totally do what-the-fuck-ever I wanted, right? Like make food appear out of thin air, see? Anyways. Agnethea. Seems like quite the powerhouse. Everyone trusts her. Everyone follows her lead. She’s just an artificer, no? I get that someone as creative and, um, buildy as her might garner a lot of power, but you’re talking like she’s also the one to fear. Why?”
Barnabas glowered at Ickford’s black walls. He’d sworn, nearly fifty years ago when he’d discovered the foul place perched against one of His Walls like a leech, sworn that he’d never return.
When he’d made the promise to take Nickels to meet with the woman, never in his wildest dreams had he envisioned such a thing actually happening; Garth’s inner demon, that beast he called ‘Specter’ was to’ve risen up fully long ago and by now, the two of them would’ve moved on to different things altogether.
Being here, now, so close to Ickford without all that happening … it disgruntled the King that he was being forced down this alternate path, even though –through inaction, curiosity and distraction- it was one of his own devising.
Beyond that, the foul miasma generated by Obsidian Golems in massive concentration was starting to nag on his nerves. Soon enough he’d be all but blind to King’s Will, and departing Ickford in the usual manner would take some doing.
“Agnethea is an Obsidian Golem, Garth. The oldest of her kind. The people do not trust her so much as fear her, and what she can do should they cross her.” Barnabas spat to rid his mouth of the foul taste. Obsidian Golems! Judging from the invisibly thick taint, there was more than just her there now, a fact which reinforced his desperate hope they were treated only to Agnethea’s foul presence; though she was eldest and worst by a large margin, she was also the only of the awful breed able to maintain any sort of civility in his august present. Were one of the younger ilk to arrive on the scene, Barnabas worried –what with the miasma draining his patience and weakening his powers to a fearsome degree- he might just lose his temper in Kingly fashion if said theoretical younger and therefore less evolved Obsidian Golem prattled on as they oft did. Which, naturally would be catastrophic.
Garth recognized they were on a subject that Barnabas would speak no further on and decided it wasn’t worth the effort of pursuing. In all honesty, though, the ‘big reveal’ -that Agnethea was an Obsidian Golem- wasn’t as shocking as he gathered the smith had been hoping for; Old Meechy primed him for the eventuality of running into one of the fearsome creatures before he’d even clapped eyes on The Dome. On top of all that, everything Barnie had done and said to make both Ickford and Agnethea just about the most rotten things under The Dome, it made perfect sense that the ruler of the hated city was a golem.
Just what form would a woman capable of cowing nearly immortal and nigh on invulnerable gearheads take? From the way Barnabas talked ill of Agnethea and Meechy’s rabid degeneration, it sounded like they were best imagined as demons, with pitchforks and split tails and the like. Though their travels hadn’t taken them close enough to any of the places where monsters allegedly dwelled, with the weird shit he’d already seen via crudey-crude affliction, the sky had to be the limit with a fearsome Obsidian Golem.
“What about weapons? Can I walk around with my stuff?” Swaggering through the weird and unruly Ickford with two guns strapped to his back seemed like the best course of action.
“The vast majority of people in Ickford are gearheads and wardogs, my son.” Barnabas answered. “Though Agnethea encourages people to go about weaponless, it is one thing she doesn’t enforce with any kind of regularity.”
Garth scratched his nose, cool metal fingertips brushing against flesh. In that moment, he wondered if he’d ever be free of the Dark Iron plague. It wasn’t much, not in comparison to what gearheads willingly –most of the time- consumed, but it was more than enough for him.
Without the frigid arms of the Geared Armor drinking deep of the virulent nanotech plague trying to root itself deeper into his body, Garth held little doubt he’d be a maniac like all the others with Kingsblood burning like gasoline in them, fueling the deepest rage a man could feel and still remain even partially sane. Without the armor shielding him … Specter grinned and chuckled from the dark places within.
The armor would last until he was free of Arcade City and the Kingsblood madness.
It had to.
“I take it, Master Nickels, you have no intention of dismantling your sniper rifle?” Barnabas knew precisely how the conversation would go, so abandoned all efforts to convince Nickels otherwise; it just meant that the Kings rising up from Ickford’s steaming soil would need to be better prepared for such a deadly weapon, didn’t it? With all that he knew, with all that Chad had seen on the outside, well, it shouldn’t be too difficult, hey?
“Nope.” Garth shook his head once and that was it. Thinking about being trapped with Dark Iron in his blood had put him in a foul mood. He no longer felt like talking.
Barnabas steered the smithy train, and the two men trudged on towards their destination in silence for a
stretch.
***
Ickford. Home of gearheads and wardogs, prostitutes and pimps, artificers and the artless. Entryway into the next stage of Arcade City, it was itself a city, though one made dark, grim and twisted by the rampant and oftentimes unfettered appetites and hungers of the men and women who were themselves twisted and made mad by Kingsblood toxicity.
Ickford was home to the lost, the wandering, the lonely, the destitute, but those who lived there didn’t think of themselves that way. Oh no, they imagined –sometimes, if rarely, correctly- that their broken or lost luck would return, and when it did, well, there was smiling Agnethea, the eldest Obsidian Golem, to help them lose that luck once more. She had a way about her, she did, of convincing you in your darkest moments that you’d not fallen afoul of rough times, but that you’d enjoyed yourself and hungered for more, for better, stranger, wilder.
You could find anything you wanted in the fifty square miles of iron-walled city, if you but knew where to look, who to ask, where to go. And if you were willing to pay the price. Everything could be had for a price in fair Ickford, from a pound of flesh to a human life and just as you could find what you wanted, you could find someone willing to give it to you.
The trick was to keep your eyes peeled for those who wanted you. Ickford was a thing that’d never been meant to be, never; proper urban living –in the loosest sense of the word ‘proper’- was a concept that did strange, warped things to gearheads and their lesser equivalents. Powerful strong warriors destined from birth and commanded by the weight of history to hunt and kill Kings and the other myriad beasts that rose up out of the darkness and mist to plague the land sometimes lost interest in doing so, choosing instead to torment their own kind, going from mildly respectable –again, in the loosest of terms- hunters to tyrants, killers, murderers, psychopaths.
Fair Agnethea kept tight control on her little city-within-a-City, doling out impartial and harsh justice on any who crossed the line, but that line was an ever-shifting thing, ever-changing, all to the Queen’s inscrutable whimsy. One day, one week, one hour, killing a non-Ironed shopkeeper brought swift, painful and permanent death. A single tick of the clock, a bare sweep of a second hand across a minute, and that same crime was met with an indulgent smile and a brisk nod.
Oh, gearheads and wardogs loved Ickford as much as they hated it, yet try as they might, many who spent more than a day within the walls always found themselves thinking of something they wanted to try the next time they were back, always promising, always trying to stay away. In spite of their self-made promises, regardless of their deep internal desire to kill Kings, to move inwards, to try their mettle against new Kings and different murky monsters, there was always something new and exciting inside the walls of Ickford to lure them back.
Normal men and women who lived in Ickford, who plied their trade, who dealt with maniacs and murderers day in and day out were made wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice as long as they survived; crudey-crude afflicted customers often made the worst sort of clientele, and like as not, some wealthy merchant could find him or herself in the poorhouse in the blink of an eye, and all over a poor choice in words or a lack of a certain fabric. Or, as happened most often, for no reason at all. If Agnethea was in the mood, harassed or otherwise bothered venders would receive recompense for damages. If not …
That was Ickford. More people came than went, and the city would only continue to swell, to fester, to corrupt.
***
Garth stared thoughtfully at the stone-and-iron walls ringing Ickford. He and Barnabas were waiting for a vault guard to appear, the latter stamping his feet irritably, the former reassessing his choice in paraphrased movie quotes; some weird fuck with wonky legs –the little dink was currently hopping from foot to foot more than thirty feet away- had come up to him out of nowhere to start spouting some kind of weird fucking travelogue about the place just like that weird fucking hermaphrodite Nazi-hippy dude in that movie ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’ only way weirder, and … the Mos Eisley quote didn’t cut it.
Well, honestly, it’d worried him from the start, but Ickford was -if Dinky Dinkerton, the Creepy Walking Travel Brochure had it all the way right- a city full of evil superheroes. Or whatever.
“Shoulda gone with a Barter Town gag.” Garth clenched his jaw. What a spoiled opportunity.
What sort of woman was Agnethea that she willingly housed gearheads stuffed past capacity with Kingsblood cheek to jowl with normal men and women?
Not only that, but really, Obsidian Golem holy terror in the night status notwithstanding, how in the goddamn hell did she enforce her laws? Barnabas had sent Dinky Dinkerton scrambling with a vicious backhand the moment he’d asked the wee little weirdo that very question, shooting him a wicked glare in the process.
The odd-shaped gearheaded midget refused to come back now, and the smith was being a colossal cockface about the whole thing.
“What was that?” Barnabas asked, looking up from his papers; though this phase of things was almost certainly going to see an abrupt end to Barnabas the Blacksmith, pretense needed be held for a little while longer still, and so it was he was writing down a meticulous list of items inside each cube.
Garth waved a hand, dismissing the errant words. “You wouldn’t get it.” He explained lazily. “Even less than the Mos Eisley quote. At least that one sort of explained what this place is like. The other one is a more … visual … thing.”
“Harrumph.” Barnabas ticked off another box. “One of these ‘movies’ you’re always talking about. That is a stupid word, you know, now I’ve had time to think on it.”
“You know, you’re right?” The word was a stupid word. Garth wrinkled his nose and continued staring worriedly at the walls. He wasn’t sure if it was his Kin’kithal nature wriggling through the Dark Iron or just good old fashioned instinct, but he had a really bad feeling about Ickford.
Everything was going to change once he got inside.
He could feel it.
And it was going to be all bad. Bad for everyone.
A small door set into the wall beside the rack of vaults he and Barnabas were waiting to rent opened up and a jittery gearhead in stained black and gold livery stepped out. He bowed to one knee and gestured as magisterially as he could to the door.
A woman stepped daintily out. She smiled prettily when her veiled eyes swung towards her guest, though there was the tiniest bit of a downturn to her lipsticked lips. “Barnabas! Eh bien, maître ... blacksmith. Ce qui vous amène ici? The last time we met, you swore we would never set eyes on each other again!”
“The fuck is this?” Garth demanded irately, utterly, utterly confused. This little slip of a woman, this … girl who spoke antiquated French like it was her mother tongue, this woman in a dainty dress and corset, with a lacy veil covering her eyes? This was an Obsidian Golem? “The fuck are you?”
What the fuck was going on?
Dark Iron King II: Arcadia Falls
Available Sometime Before Christmas.
