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

by Lee Bond

  Nanny Primrose howled once more, only this time in pain; Davram Silverhelm tore one of her arms free from her body and tossed it behind him like a discarded toy.

  “Yes.” Davram went to it properly, doing battle with the one thing in all of Arcade City that none of his kind had ever done before. “Yes, I think that shall do quite nicely. Now. Me and thee shall dance like in them olden times stories, hey?”

  And dance they did indeed, both Matron and Brigadier, ‘cross the whole length of the bar and back again until only one did stand.

  9. All the King’s Soldiers

  Agnethea bent her head down to her task, loving the smell of the crisp, fresh paper, the smell of the ink, and most importantly, the sound of her quill going skritch skritch skritch, leaving behind in its wake a summation of memories.

  It was something she’d started doing from the moment she’d realized what she was, and –when she thought about the underlying reasons- was also quite probably why she’d retained even a vestige of sanity. Hidden throughout the world of Arcade City, in underground warrens, in long forgotten and utterly buried Old World buildings, wherever she’d stopped for more than a night, there she’d hidden books of her life, in the hopes that when … if … future generations discovered them, they would come to, if not forgive her her sins, understand why she’d done as she had.

  Learned men of science and philosophy down through the ages had tried to understand, had commiserated, had even acted as though they understood but the sorrowful truth was that not even gearheads –her poor, distant cousins of the Iron- couldn’t fully comprehend a Golem’s eternal torture.

  Since coming to build Ickford from the bones of those abhorrent crimes, though, Agnethea had constructed a massive library hidden beneath the Museum, and it was here that she wrote, surrounded by those ancient memories; surrounded on all sides by the terrible long life she’d held, there were still nevertheless tomes left out there in the world beyond Ickford because … why not?

  Let those who found her books feel her sorrow, behold her rage, and hopefully understand.

  Skritch skritch skritch

  Agnethea reread what she’d written about Master Nickels, staring oddly at his last name. It didn’t look right, not at all and as the Queen of Ickford sat there, considering the different ways to spell such a simple last name, a faint sound reached her ears.

  “Not possible.” Agnethea said to herself. The library was built to the strictest of codes. With the doors shut and the room properly sealed, nowt from the outside world could reach her ears, and for very good reason; this far along in her advanced years, there were some afternoons where recalling what she’d had for breakfast was considered a major achievement. Remembering something from five thousand years ago took a little more effort, and silence quieter than a grave helped.

  Nevertheless, Agnethea put her quill aside, closed the fresh tome she was writing in, and tilted her head to one side.

  There. There it was again, just on the periphery of her hearing.

  Sudden concern seized the Queen of Ickford. For noise to be reaching this far down into the bowels of the earth was … less than ideal.

  “Oh, Master Nickels,” Agnethea pushed herself away from her chair, “what have you gotten yourself into? I wanted you to do for those Golems so my city would be saved, not do for the city as well.”

  It was time to take herself to the Astrological Tower. From such a vasty height, it’d be simple enough to spy on her erstwhile assassin and his methods of dealing with unwanted monsters in her kingdom of fiends.

  ***

  Agnethea stared through the carefully crafted lenses of the powerful telescope, icy cold fists gripping her insides for all they were worth. Her mouth was dry as bone and tasted only of ash.

  She could scarcely credit what she saw, and yet, throughout her lifetime, Agnethea had learned to trust her colorless eyes envisioned with absolute implicitness.

  Master Nickels was not the cause of the disturbance. Not at all.

  King Barnabas Blake the One and Only was the root source of the terrible noise that’d reached into her utmost private rooms, and it seemed at long last that the ruler of Arcade City had grown weary of her little city within a city.

  “Such … wonder.” Agnethea breathed the word out, half sigh, half regret, all amazement. It’d been an Age since the King had last deigned to treat his subjects to a show of his true power. Whether her poor citizens were aware of it or not, they were witnessing a true miracle.

  Four crevices in the ground, four darkest black seams of crawling voraciousness, four patches of flickering hunger spreading outwards, breaking all that they came in contact with into tiny black motes that swarmed to join the crevasse-cauldrons.

  Agnethea murmured wordlessly at the sight of each, never more in awe of the King than right that moment.

  In the center of each … spot of emptiness … a head. Big around as any Big King’s metal wrapped skull, though as Agnethea watched the matter being pulled into the center to give unnatural life to what grew, she knew in her icy-clawed guts that these gigantic beasts were different than any other thing summoned up by King’s Will. Not once in her eleven thousand and some years had these monsters been seen. With the First Son back to home, him in his glittering shard prison, well, Ickford’s demise would be –in part- his doing, wouldn’t it?

  Four heads, and thus, sooner or later, four bodies, destined to rise up out of tortured earth. Malefic swirls of coruscating King’s Will, black but reflecting vicious streaks of lambent red as matter was ripped apart to feed these new and powerful colossi began pulsing and flickering, spreading like diseased veins across the unsullied terrain around her poor city.

  It was as breathtaking as it was terrifying.

  Agnethea risked a look to parts of her little fiefdom. Though she ached to watch the beasts be ushered from their earthen wombs, they were her people. They deserved more attention from her than anything else. Wry curiosity had her spying upon where Young Luther and his coterie of fools spent most of their time when they weren’t out terrorizing innocent Ickfordians.

  A wicked smile curled her lips as the abandoned church swam into view; they were as frantic as ants milling around their hill. Back and forth those so-called ‘chosen ones’ ran, hurrying furiously to prepare themselves for the worst when none had any true inkling of what awaited. Even if they’d been to the walls and back again by now –and some amongst her ilk, while foolish enough to heed Luther, were not that foolish- and had seen with their own eyes the dark lightning and the brood cooking within, they couldn’t know of the danger, not like she did.

  She and she alone out of all her brothers and sisters had seen this kind of wroth before.

  “Good.” Agnethea’s voice rang, cool and unflinching as a glacier. “Hopefully they try to flee, and are caught in the savage grip of this new threat.” She spied old friends and new down in Luther’s ‘secret camp’ but alas, no Luther. Him in his immaculate whites was no doubt busy hiding as deep underground as he could find.

  A roar rose up from one of the pits, deep, mammalian fury that seized the Queen’s heart tightly.

  Agnethea turned her eyes back to one of the ‘birthing areas’, and panic chewed at her calm demeanor; one of the colossi was already gripping the edges of its hole, trying to pull itself out even though it had no legs to stand on. Yet. Instinct and knowledge told her these Kings-that-weren’t were going to be bigger still than she’d already imagined.

  The weather above each of the massive constructs was turning foul, the air spitting lightning like as hadn’t been seen since the King had decided ‘weather’ was something Arcade City could do well without. King’s Will seemed to be in a turmoil now as well, ripping and shredding through all available earth and rock and whatever else remained, a growing black stain of a mess, the edges forming into that familiar cubic shape the further away from the metallic invaders things got.

  “This is no good, no good at all.” Agnethea pursed her lips s
peculatively. Not only were the King’s newest children going to be bigger than aught else ever seen in Arcade City, watching them grow so swiftly, it seemed to Agnethea that their dead eyes spat and sparked with great intelligence.

  The world suddenly filled with a torturous cracking sound, filling the already lightning-suffused air with dust and dirt and all manner of things.

  When visibility returned, Agnethea felt her lips press tight of their own accord. Ickford’s demise was guaranteed!

  The whole of the earth surrounding Ickford had been consumed, and to such great depths! The perilous paths that remained would be more than a match for e’en the least sane, most powerful gearhead! The ever-so hungry lightning flitting to and fro deep in those shuddery crevasses would strike anyone, possibly e’en Golems, stone cold dead.

  The only way out, if any man or woman would even bother taking the risk –the Queen thought not, given everyone’s feelings on the King and his world of late- was through the Geared Door leading further inward.

  “Not good at all.” Agnethea trained her telescope to Tinker’s Square. Hopefully Havilland Harvard and Twisted Mickel were finally throwing caution to the wind. Their not-so-secret secrets –their midnight tinkerings done under presumed blankets of darkest night and staunchest security- might just have a place in saving Ickford, if such a thing were even possible.

  ***

  Twisted Mickel nodded as cordially as he ever had to Havilland Harvard before addressing the gearheads assembled before his shop, half an ear trained to the words already flowing out of his competition’s gob.

  On one side, Lady Bullet was busy uncrating most of her wares, setting them up with a slight tremor in her hand; she’d never once been this close to anything so dangerous as a King, though with her exposure to the worst sort of gearhead one came across her in the line of work, you might’ve expected her to be immune to terror. No matter the chit’s hands were trembling like leaves in a storm now, all her wonderful guns shone in the bright light of Arcade City, glinting and gleaming as though things alive and ready to be used.

  On his other side, Doctor Sharp was doing the same with his melee weapons, whispering out his sales pitch even though they weren’t selling nothing today because that’s how he’d been taught to do it. He licked his lips and his ears twitched, and every time one of those booming, echoing screams split the air with ferocious vigor, Mickel thought the boy’s heart would stop cold in his chest. Mickel flashed his great apprentice a quick wink and the lad flushed at the encouragement before tucking his head back into the game.

  Twisted Mickel raised his hands and called for silence. Hopefully he could get all of what he had to say out of his mouth before whatever was crawling out of the earth screamed once more. “All right, lads, now I know as some of you lot have already been out to the walls and back again, and some of you have rightfully expressed your fears and your doubts about our King’s … sanity.”

  Angry catcalls and more than a few vile imprecations reached Mickel’s ears, but the master smith let them break against his iron-hard sense of self; this was no time to let them weird freaks hold fast and true to their colossal egos and besides all that, if what some of his more loyal customers were saying were true, well, they had little time indeed. Either way, there was no way ‘neath The Dome that he himself would go near enough to see them beasts clambering free of their earthy wombs.

  “It’s true,” he hollered back, thrusting his chest out and pointing at the crowd, “and you dozy bitches know it to be so. Our King is gearing up to do for Ickford, and if what’s coming out of the ground hain’t some kind of demonic Big’Un, well, I reckon I don’t know nothing at all, now do I?”

  Some of the quicker witted in the audience had been keeping their eyes on the weapons and various tools of the trade being uncrated under Mickel’s roof and under Harvard’s, as well. Nor had it gone amiss amongst most that where Mickel was almost verbally abusing his crowd, Harvard was all milk and honey.

  Both men, though, were striving towards the same goal. As ever, from different ends.

  “Wot you doin’ wiv alla that?” A faceless voice from the audience cried.

  Mickel rest a booted foot on an ammo crate and grinned from ear to ear. “Well, that’s a damn fine question, sirrah, a damn fine one indeed. I don’t know about the rest o’ you lot, but I like this dirty, shabby, murderous little city we’ve got here. Certainly wouldn’t know what to do with meself if I were to go back to the Estate I come from, hey?” He threw his hands wide in the air, and weren’t it just a grand old coincidence, but yet another tortured birth-scream rattled through the air, all metal and anger and groaning, burgeoning promise. The audience shied away from the sudden gesture, while Mickel grinned and stomped his boots.

  Twisted Mickel leaned in real close, as close as he’d ever got to a pile of hot motor oil reeking maniacs, some of them so heavily twisted by their Dark Iron affliction that they seemed more machine than man, leaned in real close and whispered. “So here’s the deal, my bonny gearheads and wardogs, my saucy lads and lasses, for real and for true.” He turned as sober as a judge, though he’d never met a sober lawmaker in all his years. “Kings are coming. Kings are coming and there’s naught we can do about any of that, hey? This be our land, whether he likes it or no. I say we fight for it, hey? I say we rise up against these four metal monstrosities growing outside our fair city like angry mushrooms and do for them in ways that’ll make the King in his heavens quake like a scared five year old.

  I know some of you lot have been wanting to try out a Twisted Mickel toy for as long as you’ve been comin’ to the city, and well, today, the whole lot is being given out.” The revelation –as fiscally painful and unbelievably foolish- drew excited shouts from nearly everyone. Mickel winked at Harvard, who’d reached the same point in his pitch, though with considerably more panache. His poor counterpart looked positively green around the gills to be letting loose with all his good stuff with nothing to show for it but an appreciative … nay … greedy crowd, but Mickel had put it thusly; what good, sitting on expensive merchandise when lumbering Kings are wrecking the place?

  Another voice, different from the last, shouted to be heard over the growing cacophony of clambering hands and fiends ‘calling’ their weapon of choice from what Bullet and Sharp were arranging for all to see. “You say ‘we’, smith, and in your own world you may be well hard, but their hain’t no softy as has done for a King, not never.”

  Mickel feigned a mortal stab to the chest. “I’ll be damned if I hain’t going to do my piece, you clanking collection of badly Ironed flesh! Me and mine…” he gestured to Sharp and Bullet, who were doing considerably well under the circumstances. The crowd in front of the two premier smithy shops had swollen to epic proportions, filling up the whole of Tinker Square and there were more gearheads lining the roofs, shouting down progress reports drawn from all sides of the city.

  “Me and mine,” Mickel resumed, placing a fatherly hand on Bullet’s neck and grabbing hold of Lady Bullet’s clammy, sweaty hand, “we got our own toys, don’t we just, things we built in secret, never to show no one, never you worry about that. See, boys and girls,” Mickel could feel Harvard’s worried eyes looking his way, but the crowd needed consoling, else all would go to shit in a hot second, “proper smiths learned a thing some time ago, and that’s why me and the pretentious git hawking his overpriced wares have become the best of the best and why we’d rather die here than work somewheres else.”

  “What’s that, then, hey? That you two love each other and’re plannin’ on ‘avin’ unnatural mechanical babbies?”

  Mickel pulled his handgun, a gun he’d carried on him since its wondrous perfection had been assembled, held it up to the light for all to see. Unlike every other piece them as had had the luxury of wielding their own iron-thrower, his gleamed with pristine straight lines. It held no gears, nor cranks, nor clamps, nor e’en weird spinning things or bits and bobs as clicked and clacked.

  Micke
l waited until every last one of them fucking gearheads saw what it was that he held in his hands. Havilland Harvard’s bitter look of resentment was enough to burn flesh from bone, but it were done. When Twisted Mickel was well certain those in front of his shop were paying all the attention they’d ever paid in their miserable Dark Iron lives, he looked through the crowd until he found the one who -like as not- had implied he and his were going to hide in their shops. He took aim.

  The crowd laughed. They all knew the truth of it, one way or another, either through stories or through seeing smiths on the road try what Mickel was trying right then; they knew that no matter how well built, how perfect, how certain it was that the machine would do the job, it would either simply not fire, or would explode in a most undesirable fashion.

  And then they’d be less one wondrous smith. Many who’d developed a need for Mickel’s weapons of wonder shuffled their feet and wondered if they should do summat to stop the man from suicide by King’s Will, but in the end, not a one did nothing because a man’s life was his own, hey?

  The gearhead being targeted, one Rabble-rouser Raphael, obliged the Master Smith by holding himself as still as possible, going so far as to sticking his head up a bit more so Mickel was assured of not missing.

  Mickel pulled the trigger. The gunshot rocketed around the enclosed square, thunder stamping the unruly chatter flat as pancakes. When the blue, hazy gun smoke dissipated, everyone turned to Rabble-rouser Raphael, who had sprouted a third eye right betwixt the two as King had given him upon his birth. Thick black blood that was more machine oil than bright red stuff pulsed out of the wound, forming a fierce looking mask.