Dark Iron King II: Arcadia Falls (Unreal Universe Book 5)

by Lee Bond

  Garth smiled toothily. “Of course, squire, of course. I’ll be less than an hour or so. God’s honest.”

  Al tucked the Iron away. He was going to have to get to one of the banks as soon as possible. People’d been known to get themselves killed for a third of what he had on him now, and he weren’t hardly in a condition to save himself. “All right then, what you working on? Name’s Shackled Al, by the by.”

  Garth flipped the man a two fingered greeting and introduced himself. “Garth. Well, Al, I am working on this.”

  A small hoot of fear shot out of Al’s lips as Garth yanked a deadly looking shootgun from his back with the skill of a highly trained professional. Flushing with embarrassment and feeling a right fool when the other man’s lips quirked in amusement, Al stepped forward to take stock of the shiny weapon the moment it hit the table.

  A deep, gnawing sense of jealousy mingled with awe rose up in Shackled Al then, in a way that it hadn’t since he’d grown used to Mickel and Harvard parading about the Square as they tried to outdo one another. Big days, those, huge draw as those who couldn’t normally even afford to walk by their shops got to fiddle with this or play with that for a bit. The other displaced smiths were forced to close up early on those days because no one wanted to look at crude but effective hammers or buzzknives when the flash bastards were waving intricately designed impact hammers and humming swords that chimed in the air with deadly music.

  Shackled Al stole a sly glance over his shoulder then turned his gaze loving back to the street sweeper before him. “Quite wonderful, mate.”

  And it was. The exposed gears alone, all ticking and tocking in perfect harmony, forming a kind of sweeping wave down the barrel and across the stock of the shootgun rivaled anything Havilland Harvard would work up, and the deadly efficiency of the weapon outshone much of what Twisted Mickel could do on his best day.

  Garth beamed with pleasure at someone’s honest opinion. He was his own worst critic and hadn’t been happy with the gun from the moment he’d finished it, but it was nice to see that –in comparison to what everyone else was making- the damn thing came out on top.

  “I know, right?” Garth ran a hand lovingly across the shotgun. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  Shackled Al watched as Garth started twisting a few gears and cogs here and there across the frame of the shootgun, mouth halfway open, wondering what was going to happen next when suddenly, the whole entire mechanism started opening up, hidden gears and other machinery inside the gun basically pulling itself apart in an astonishing display of technical beauty.

  Al ran a hand across his bald head, an actual tear pricking his eye. The man had built something no one had ever seen before. Even Mickel and Harvard would have to work at pulling something they’d built apart by hand, using a wide array of tools, toiling cautiously and carefully to ensure that they didn’t bend or warp summat vital every single time they unscrewed a piece. The failing blacksmith thought that even Agnethea herself would find it difficult –if not impossible- to knit a contraption together in such a way that it could do as he’d just witnessed with his own two eyes.

  “Can it … can it … put itself back together?” Al whispered.

  “Now that would be magic, my son, magic indeed.” Garth tilted his head this way and that as he stared at the pile of parts on Al’s workbench. The answer was yes, but that yes was solely dependent on gaining full control of ‘King’s Will’. “But, no. No it can’t do that.”

  “That were beautiful.” Al wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Part of the reason he hated the two across the way was that they had an eye for beauty and the talent to make those sorts of things whereas he, poor old Shackled Al, could only hammer out the bare necessities. “I should keep myself away from Mickel and Harvard, were I you. Them two’d either kill you or try to use you in some way.”

  Garth picked up one of the square tubes and stuck it up to his eye. Yeah, combined with the big cylinder and a few badass looking pneumatic joints added to the body, it was going to be the matter of an hour or so to turn his lame ass front-loading musket into a proper shotgun; with a little patience, Garth bet Arcade City was going to get a look at the world’s first auto-shotgun.

  Wouldn’t they be surprised?

  The Engineer got to work, Shackled Al at his side, watching on with mystified awe.

  Around them both, unseen but felt, King’s Will fizzed and snapped and crackled like a thing alive.

  ***

  Twisted Mickel watched ‘Doctor’ Sharp –an apprentice with a keen eye towards producing some of the wickedest blades imaginable- display his equally appreciable talent in wielding said weapons by hacking up a large hay-King effigy. The crowd, both normal and gearheads, oohed and ahhed in all the appropriate places, the blade humming and buzzing with impressive fury.

  Doctor Sharp himself was a homely ragamuffin with a distressing shock of red hair and the palest eyebrows Mickel had ever seen, and came from the disreputable place of having been born inside Ickford. Despite his dubious provenance, when he set the lad down in front of a workbench and said ‘make me a pretty axe’ … the axe that came forth several days later was not only a thing of beauty and elegance, but one of rage and hunger. Quite possibly some serious inbreeding as well, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, now could they?

  Mickel suspected that somewhere deep down inside that slightly inbred mop there was the soul of a trapped gearhead, eager and waiting to rip through the thin flesh and join the real world.

  “Now, when you cuts, yeah, you gots to be certain, right, that you don’t get it stuck in the joints, all right? On account of how the buzzing and spinning bits might get jammed up in there. Tough spots, joints, they are, so if you’re goin’ for a joint, lookin’, okay, to cut off the arm or whatever, don’t. Twisted Mickel don’t do refunds and we don’t feel bad if one of you gearheads gets a bit hurt.” To prove his point, Doctor Sharp swung his whirring and buzzing and menacingly maniacal sword at the Effigy King’s right shoulder. It’d been reinforced to provide just this sort of lesson.

  The crowd grimaced at the hideous squeal of tortured metal on metal as the sword gouged into the fake flesh but got bunged up nice and tightly inside the articulated shoulder joint. The angry, high-pitched sounds filled Tinker Square until even Havilland Harvard’s lot on the other side of the plaza stopped what they were doing.

  Doctor Sharp was wrestling with the sword, making all manner of sound effects as he pulled this way and that, imagining in his feverish brain the sorts of things he’d do to a King if he ever ever got the chance.

  Mickel, thoughtful eyes roving across the square, always watching, always hoping to see some new idea on the backs or in the hands of a gearhead –that’s how it worked for him, he saw something and it sparked the old idea engine inside his own noggin-, caught sight of a thing he’d never expect to see, not when he and Harvard were out doing their thing.

  Someone was in poor old Shackled Al’s pathetic tented smithy! That in itself was a thing so improbable that –for a long moment- Mickel thought he might be hallucinating; one of the downsides to long-term blacksmithing –especially if you used a lot of Dark Iron in your creations- was the inhalation of fumes, or, when you got older and a lot less careful, accidental exposure to the crude. It happened. Why, his old da had been a smith for over thirty years until one day he’d woken up an addlepated moron screaming about scything blades behind his eyelids. They’d put him down, naturally, and ever since then, Smithy Madness was a malady often on Mickel’s mind.

  Doctor Sharp mercifully shut the blade down and the crowd sighed appreciatively. He stepped out of the way to let Mickel’s other apprentice, Lady Bullet, to take center stage, as it were. He walked up to his employer, who was staring into the square with the level of concentration the man usually reserved for smithing.

  “Wot you lookin’ at, boss? Hey?” Sharp stood beside his boss, puffing himself up until he managed to add a whole extra inch to his height. Gaunt, thin Twisted
Mickel stood naturally at nearly seven feet tall, and Sharp always felt extra tiny around his employer.

  Mickel jerked a chin at Al’s smithy. “You see anyone in Shackled Al’s tent?”

  Sharp looked about. Everyone was busy watching the saucy Lady Bullet flaunt her wares. Today she was showing something she called a ‘repeater gun’, a deadly weapon capable of firing twenty bullets without needing to reload. It were well cool, but not as cool as a sword. The redheaded smithy apprentice pulled out his glasses and peered through them; everyone made fun of him for his vision, his hair, his … everything.

  Except his blades, of course. Them as bought his wares never complained, oh no they didn’t.

  Shackled Al’s tent with its dim illumination swam blurrily into view. Sharp squinted and the scene resolved itself further.

  “Bloody hell, Mickel, there is someone in there!” Sharp was lucky if he could remember what he was doing minute to minute when he wasn’t sitting in front of something sharp or pointy, but he was pretty certain that no one went to Al anymore. Or Boisterous Bill, Downtrodden Lucy or, for that matter, the once-great Lugubrious Hammet.

  Nope. Even if you was a broke-down gearhead with barely naught to scrape together, you scrimped and you saved until you got enough together to go to Mickel or Harvard and that were that.

  Mickel nodded, lips pursed together. Not a big deal, not really. All was fair in business. Al had about six customers a week, enough to keep the old man in food and drink and otherwise warm. Besides all that, most of them as went to the fool were street sweepers and other lowlifes employed by Agnethea.

  A kind offering, so to speak, from the Queen to a man who’d been summat instrumental in bringing Ickford out of the earth.

  No. What was a big deal, the very biggest deal, was the other thing he thought he was seeing. It were too early in his career for Smithy Madness, so if there was one thing Mickel was certain about right that very second was that if the one thing he saw were for real and true, then no matter how mad it seemed, the … the second thing must be true as well.

  “And,” Mickel said after Lady Bullet finished drilling a target over eighty feet away full of holes, an astonishing feat given she were a normal human girl and the gun she fired was kitted out with enough superfluous Will-demanded fripperies to make most gearheads look on’t and say ‘cor, love, ain’t lookin’ to haul a damn cannon about wiv me’, “and am I correct in thinking that yon downtrodden and close-to-death blacksmith hain’t working the tools, but the other man?”

  Sharp put the glasses back to his eyes; he’d gone and started staring at Lady Bullet’s ample and delicious backside. In order to keep from being too obvious about it, he’d pulled the specs away. Besides, he thought with a grin, he really didn’t need to look. That whole area were well memorized.

  The blademaster squinted once more. It were unthinkable. A smith of any kind didn’t let no one else touch his gear. That were a thing that never … “Bleedin’ ‘ell, Mickel. The other man is doin’ the work. Al’s just standin’ there, okay, like a wart on a froggie.”

  Mickel ran a hand across his mouth. What to do, what to do? There were scanty few reasons for a blacksmith of any talent coming to Ickford who also went out of his way to avoid the luminaries in the game.

  None of them were good. He remembered the warzone Tinker Square had devolved into as the smiths and artificers and tinkers had chosen sides, how they’d all fought with the very best designs and toys and weapons to prove who was best. Naturally, he and Harvard had wound up at the top, but not before Agnethea had strolled into the smoke-filled, fire-swamped, street-blasted plaza to show everyone who was really at the top.

  That’d been a lesson, too bloody right. Too bloody right by half. She’d thoroughly trounced the three ‘winners’, beating Hammet so badly that he’d lost his will to smith properly in the middle of the fight.

  Mickel didn’t want that to happen to him. Or, weirdly enough, Havilland Harvard. The two men worked on opposite ends of the fence, as it were, and their business, while cutthroat and filled with hostility, actually complimented one another. The number of times a shootist purchased a gauge or scope from Harvard before popping ‘round to his shop so it could be slapped atop a new long range gun alone justified their continued –and mutually beneficial- coexistence.

  Mickel sucked on a tooth. He turned to Sharp, who was gazing, mystified, at Lady Bullet’s derriere. Personally, Mickel would rather shag a lady gearhead than go near the doughy, pillowy sack of oddly-shaped body parts that was Lady Bullet. The girl had arms like a troll, right enough, but the rest? A body like wobbly cottage cheese, she had.

  The preeminent smith shook his head wonderingly. Love, it seemed, would always find away.

  The master smith smacked his apprentice on the back of the head. “Oi!” When the redheaded fool returned his attention to where it belonged, Mickel continued. “All right, son, now listen up. I want you to find some of your friends out there in the crowd, right? I want you to go up to them and tell ‘em that I want ‘em to take a nice, friendly stroll through the Square, okay?”

  “Sure, boss, as you like, that’s well easy.” Sharp made to do just that, stopping when Mickel grabbed hold of his collar.

  “Not done yet, Sharp, not done yet.” Mickel looked over at Al’s tent. Whatever the other smith was doing looked like it was going to take him some time yet, which meant he had time. “But what I really want them to do is take as close a look as they can at the man working Al’s gear. I want em’ to take a look and remember as much as they can, then come back here and report on what it is they saw, what they think they saw, and what they imagine they saw. You got that?”

  Sharp didn’t know the difference between thinking and imagining. Didn’t matter, though. What Mickel wanted, Mickel got. “All right. Will do.”

  Mickel watched Sharp head into the crowd. Best to nip any new competition in the bud before things got too out of hand.

  The master smith applauded Lady Bullet’s gunslinging display then stepped up to show his own newest weapon, an impact mace with deadly spikes that was specifically designed to deal with the growing menace known as Shaggy Men.

  ***

  By nature, Havilland Harvard was a quiet man. He played at being loud and brash and all those things because that was what you had to as an artificer in Ickford. You stayed quiet, you spend all your time observing and assessing, and people’d walk right by you in the crowd and head on over to Twisted Mickel’s establishment.

  But quiet he was, and observant, and studious of the human condition. Or, in the case of those fine, warped individuals calling themselves gearheads, of the Dark Iron fire that burned through their fine metal bones. Harvard was all those things, but he’d learned how to be a grandmaster showman on top of all that as well, so while he strutted across his raised stage, while he twirled his engraved walking stick with an ever-turning gyroscope atop, as he spun fanciful tales of what his wares were for and what they could do for someone, Havilland Harvard watched.

  Most of the time he watched the crowd for signs of impending trouble, as did the opposition; gearheads being gearheads, especially those new to Ickford, imagined themselves untouchable and capable of doing anything they wanted, erroneously imagining that the unspoken rules of the road concerning traveling smiths and tinkerers did not apply within the blackened walls. Gearhead regulars knew what awaited, and loved it when their out-of-town counterparts acted up.

  The show was great, the show was wonderful, and it fed their appetites well enough for a bit of amusement.

  The artificers and smiths of Ickford loved it because of the wonderful opportunity to replenish their stock of gears and wires and all the important bits that made for a truly proper weapon or scope or grenado. Agnethea let it happen, knew all about it –how could she not, being who and most significantly what she was- warning all the major players in town that if slaughter in the streets happened too frequently, she’d reevaluate everyone’s position of the world.


  She was most like the King in how she restructured things.

  The crowd tonight, as far as Harvard’s well-trained eye could see, was well-behaved. No major new gearheads or self-important wardogs in the crowd, jostling their easily-manipulated Dark Iron fiends into ill-conceived action.

  Harvard smiled at his apprentice, Miss Smith, as she flashed her wares of the evening for the crowd; ever salacious, was his Miss Smith, a curvy lass from down South who had a fantastic eye for things that went boom. Tonight she titillated the crowd with double bandoliers of blown glass baubles the size of a child’s fist, each capped with special ticking timers that would ignite whatever lay inside. They were of brilliant design, worked up especially for those who went spelunking and came across slumbering hordes of Shaggy Men in their caves or for those who wanted to bring a Bolt-Neck’s castle tower down around his tremendous forehead.

  Mad bombers were the weirdest of the weird, in Harvard’s opinion. The master artificer couldn’t get his nut around those who willingly carried things in their pockets that could –with the slightest jostle- send them up in a blazing pyre of superhot flame. Still, when lobbers and bombers were in town, Miss Smith did brisk business.

  Harvard’s eyes flicked through the crowd, his dry green eyes calculating and assessing and totting down those numbers. It was an exercise only, tonight, it seemed; no one was truly in a buying mood, and besides which, damned Mickel and his squadron of misshapen apprentices were literally tearing up the joint with their displays tonight. When the wretched Doctor Sharp fired up his bloody swords, everyone stopped and gawped like addlepated chimpanzees.

  A flash of weld-light caught his speculative eye and Harvard twiddled his fingers thoughtfully. Old Shackled Al –so-called because he used to say he was shackled to his forge and would be found dead next to it, a particularly grim and ineffective sales pitch if there’d ever been one- had to be working on something for himself; he’d lasted all of three minutes in the great Tinker Square Challenge, and Ickford had a long memory for those who fell short. Ever since then, he was lucky if he got Agnethea’s cast offs.