by Lee Bond
Thom dropped the old man’s head on the table, watched it bounce off and roll away. One of his companions found that well hilarious and tittered uncontrollably until someone slapped some silence into her. He reckoned the one beset with humor was Ada, the slapper, her beau, Darby.
Thom pointed a bloodstained finger at Agnethea, the soon-to-be deposed Queen of Ickford. Their lord and master, Young Luther, was out there in the city right that moment, securing bases of power. No matter that strange green giants lumbered through the outskirts, destroying everything they came across. When the time was right, they, the Obsidian Golems, would storm those monstrosities and bring them down. “We wouldn’t serve you if you was the last person under The Dome.”
Agnethea made a small, sad face. “Oh, Thom, if I was the last person under The Dome, I would have no servants at all, now would I? You really should think these things through in your head before you say them aloud. It will help you in the future, should you have one.”
Ada burst into laughter once more, and unlike last time, some of the hilarity spread through the crowd of Golems, lightening Agnethea’s heart somewhat, though she supposed it didn’t really matter if she made old friends turned enemy laugh or not; whether the half dozen or so Golems who had –right up until yesterday morning- been in her camp found her jabs and barbs funny or not, they’d chosen this morning to throw their lot in with Luther and his camp, something that she would not … could not … forget.
Or forgive. She’d told friends and boon companions her dreams in an effort to get them excited for a future where they could be seen, not as monsters or enemies and predators in the night to be terrified of, but as … not that. She hadn’t quite managed to think of a role the others would be able to play in Ickford once the level of Golem-acceptance had risen to appreciable levels, but it’d been on her mind constantly.
Until now.
A terrible thump that had dust falling from the rafters and more than a dozen Golems leaping about, weapons drawn, looking about warily, distracted everyone from the problem at hand. There was a precarious moment where the whole structure groaned and moaned like a tortured animal, but Agnethea didn’t move, didn’t fret: Castle Ickford had been built with King Blake’s anger in mind.
There was little that could be brought against her home that would bring it down. Though Agnethea did wonder what it was that’d slammed against it with such violence.
Thom motioned for everyone to calm down. “Ada, my pretty pet, totter off and find something else to do, yes? You’re distracting the others and quite sincerely, if you laugh at me one more time, we shall find out precisely how much pain you can actually endure.”
Ada –legendary in the Golem community thanks to her enduring fascination with how much pain an immortal being could withstand before cracking- grabbed hold of her equally cracked lover Darby and the two of them flounced out of the room with nary another word.
Thom visibly relaxed. “Shame she did those experiments on herself.” He said by way of casual conversation. “Though because of her we do know most precisely the line between pain and sanity, yes?”
Agnethea itched to be outside, overseeing those men and women and gearheads who sought to protect Ickford. In the back of her mind, she wondered how King would react to that: this was –to her certain knowledge- the first and only time in all of Arcade City’s long and tortured history that flesh and Iron had worked towards the same goal.
Oh, if Barnabas knew, he would surely be livid to the point of glowing in the dark. Such a notion was more than enough to kindle heat in an old Golem’s icy heart, yes it was.
“Is that a threat?” Agnethea demanded icily, drawing herself up to full height. Some of the taller Golems snickered at that and she wished –not for the last time- that she had at least another inch of height. Being barely five feet tall did lessen any apparent threat she might bring by a considerable amount.
Thom spread his hands wide, apologetically. “Were it not for your collusion with this … Master Nickels gentleman, wherein you gave up the names and locations of those who stand against you, perhaps things might have gone a different way, Agnethea. But alas, you did just that, did you not?”
Agnethea shrugged. She’d always expected the plan to backfire. Her kind was too suspicious, too cynical.
Too eager to be rid of her and bring down everything.
Agnethea looked at the Golems sitting at her table, enjoying the comfort of all that she’d built or caused to be built, how callously they doodled in the blood left behind by Willem’s brutally savage murder, how they ate and drank the good food that he’d laid out before her inevitable departure to deal with the Green Men. He’d been a kind old man, one of the kindest she’d ever met life. During his servitude, she’d made no bones about hiding who and what she’d been from him, not once.
He’d simply shrugged his shoulders and said ‘people’re people, miss, don’t matter none whether you’re ten thousand years old or fifty. Me own da stove me mum’s ‘ead in with a pipe one year right in front of us, an’ I reckon that were the worst thing I ever did see.’
And promptly proceeded to learn how to be the best butler she’d ever had the privilege of knowing, following her around the countryside, enduring harsh and trying times as she gathered the goods to lay Ickford’s bones down in the dirt… Willem had been with her, now that Agnethea did the math properly in her head –something Golems tended to stop doing- for more than fifty years.
“Fifty years.” Agnethea hissed into the clamorous noise of the wicked Golems. “Fifty years!”
Thom, under the impression that their ‘Queen’ had been trying to come up with a way to break free or bargain for said freedom, quirked an eyebrow. “Say again, my queen?”
“Willem. My butler.” Agnethea ground her teeth. That was a lifetime for a normal man, more so for someone tethered to her hip. “He served me with pride and distinction for fifty years.”
Another loud rattle jostled the castle to and fro, and a few paintings clattered noisily to the ground, precious glass shattering. Thom smiled thinly. “The price you pay for betraying your own kind is the price of blood, Queen Agnethea. Had you simply laid down to let this Master Nickels fellow do for you before moving on to do for us, we wouldn’t be in this foul mess, now would we? Your butler would still be alive, dealing with your eyeless corpse instead of being,” Thom laughed, tilting his head back and opening his mouth wide, “everywhere!”
The crowd of Golems cheered their approval, raising silver-and-bloody-red glasses to toast what they perceived to be a valid point against their unwilling hostess.
Fifty years. For any one of the beasts at the table, five decades was a blink of an eye. Each one of them had admitted to feeling that –if they were to stand still and wait- the whole of time would fly by swift as the wind, and they’d blink, and the end of everything would be upon them.
Agnethea knew the feeling well, better than any of them could imagine. Time for her was swifter than the fastest river, more fleeting than the quickest wind. For her, a blink heralded the passing of an Age. If she didn’t take care to meticulously hoard mementoes of the time in which she lived, time would surely end.
Poor Willem had been a living memory for her, one she’d never really appreciated.
“Each of you,” Agnethea spoke softly, forcing the others to stop their revelry so they could hear her, “represents an Age gone by, a time of wonder and delight this Dome will never see again, not in the way you remember it. Each of you holds within your minds memories that could be used to help men and women who do not and cannot wed themselves to Dark Iron become true citizens of this world. You could, if you chose, give them knowledge, wisdom, power. You could do more damage to the King by reminding them of proper irrigation techniques, of how to pour concrete, of math.
But you don’t. You dismiss where you came from. You diminish it. Not one of you at this table can sit there and tell me that this world, this dark, shattered mirror of a world, is better
than the time you were born. I am first. I am oldest. I remember cities shining in the night, holding millions upon millions of people. I remember great engines flying through the sky. You may not have had the joy of seeing such things, but amongst you number Golems born in the Age of Steel and Sand, and of Bright Moon, and Water and Fire. Great, amazing times. Instead of using what you know and who you are to guide people that the King has clearly chosen to grind into fine dust, you do his work for him. You torture, you maim, you kill. You turn yourselves into caricatures, evil demons whispering in the night, stealing children from their parents. You claim to hate the King for allowing Dark Iron to steal from you a chance at a true and proper life … don’t deny it. Don’t you dare! We all have felt that way at some point. If only Dark Iron did not exist. If only we had not tasted its viciousness. If only we had not woken up twisted in on ourselves, with no outlet for the rage now boiling ‘neath our nearly impenetrable flesh. If only. If only.”
Thom clapped slowly, sarcastically, face twisted into mockery. “Such a poignant speech, Queen Agnethea. Your points are as valid now as the last time you made it, well over a hundred years ago. It will not save you. It will not get you free from this room. There are six of us and one of you. As much as we might like to be out and about, Young Luther has tasked us with keeping you right here. He wishes to do for you himself. It is the right thing to do. When he takes your eyes, he will become King.”
The others in the room murmured ‘Become King’ and bowed their heads.
“So you see,” Thom continued, gesturing grandly to the empty seat by where Agnethea stood, “it would be better for you if you were to display one last attempt at the grace you tried to instill in us all. Show us how much better you are.”
“Better?” Agnethea rolled her shoulders, well aware that the others would immediately prepare themselves, which they did. They all cautiously put down whatever the held in their hands and turned watchful eyes her way. “Better? You stupid fools. You pretentious idiots. When I say I am eleven thousand years old and that I have done worse than you can possibly conceive, do you think I exaggerate? That as oldest, I simply picked a number of years to make it seem that I am that much more elder? I was alone in this world for more than a thousand years and in that time alone, I killed hundreds of thousands with my bare hands in ways your tiny little minds cannot even imagine. The nightmares you pretend to be when you’re ‘out and about’ were laid down in the souls of Arcadians by me. When you rattle windows and whisper down long dark alleys and howl in empty forests, you mimic me. Before you were born. Before your parents, or your parent’s parents, I was the true dark of Arcade City.”
“Do not think,” Thom rose warily, motioning for the others to do the same, “that we will not do for you if the need arises, Queen Agnethea. Your death by his hands is ceremonial. He might be displeased at the …”
Agnethea moved. She moved as she hadn’t in decades, a blink, a flash, a blur of light so quick and unexpected that the fools who thought they could brace a Queen in her palace didn’t even know what was happening until Thom felt her impossibly strong fingers curling around his face, long, lacquered fingernails digging into the corners of his eyes.
Thom struggled, but Agnethea’s grip was beyond anything he’d endured. Her delicate-looking fingers seemed carved out of solid metal. Her breath was an arctic wind on the back of his neck. The others moved away from the table, preparing themselves for the worst, their faces a study in disbelief and terror and the slowly growing realization that they may have –after all this time- made a serious mistake. Thom tried to will his rebellious friends to surge after the Queen, but he read –around bulging eyeballs ready to burst from their sockets- in their expressions that they had already written him off.
“Do not think,” Agnethea whispered seductively, “that I could not have done for each and every one of you, at anytime, anywhere under this misbegotten Dome. You all lived at my sufferance. I was lonely at first, and then, as I saw a way to better myself, I grew to hope that my savage breed would claw their way to the light. I was wrong. I let you live because there is nothing worse than being alone. You know that hunger as well as I do. And I was wrong to let you bastards draw breath.”
Agnethea grabbed proper hold of Thom’s head, fingers sliding deep into the eye sockets. The dining room filled with the pierced Golem’s screams of pain. The Queen of Ickford smiled knowingly at the stench of fear and then, with little effort, she ripped Thom’s head in twain. The sound of the man’s head cracking in half echoed chillingly.
Landing lithely on her feet as Thom’s messily dead corpse hit the ground, Agnethea wiped gore-soaked hands on her dinner dress before addressing the group. She smiled at the fools, who were suddenly quiet as church mice. “Now, who shall be next? I would ever so much prefer it if you all charged me at once. I have a city to protect.”
***
For expedience, the two Gearmen had split up, though towards the end of their communal agreement, Chevy had displayed some deep concerns about leaving the Book Club Regular on his own lonesome. Dom well understood his older friend’s concerns, but the pressing matter of four tremendous green giants doing their level best to crush an entire city full of more-or-less innocent people had forced the issue fairly decisively.
It weren’t that Dom were going to go running right after Nickels. He weren’t stupid enough to ignore the fact that –no matter how shockingly inappropriate and … not right … it was for someone not a Gearman to have his grubby mitts anywhere near a Book- Chevy’s assessment of Nickels was spot on; there had never been a man like Nickels in their strange little world, and for all that, they needed someone familiar with the Outside world. The man’s visible martial skill combined with the kind of world-weariness they’d only ever seen in the eyes of the oldest gearheads in Arcade City but lacking that Dark Iron madness alone said he needed to live long enough to see if he could figure out a way to do for the Green Men.
Chevy’s words of patience started echoing shrilly in Dom’s ears. Pleasantly, they were blocked out moments later by yet another giant’s outraged scream.
Dom looked across the city at the Green Man nearest him. HUD had the bellowing beast at no more than seven hundred feet away, a towering mass of mechanical frenzy who’s screams of anger, rage –mingled with the occasional bit of pain, for there were gearheads down there, hammering and shooting and banging away nonstop- echoed ‘round Ickford. Every now and then the other three … Gunboys –as was what Master Nickels called ‘em- picked up the screams and bellows themselves, leaving Dom to wonder what the rest of Arcade City imagined was happening.
Dom made some notations in Book; he was unused to having to do all this data entry by hand, but the weird nature of Ickford was preventing Book from picking the information out of the air. He frowned.
Well, that weren’t entirely true, were it? The wondrous tome was more than able to gather local data, but local in this case were literally a three foot sphere. Dom was more willing to be buggered by a troll than he was to get any closer to one of those Gunboys until he was good and ready. Let them gearheads and fools get themselves done for in the meantime!
Unbidden, Dom turned back to the fact that Garth’s Book seemed to be in full working order. It weren’t fair! It weren’t right. Book was meant to be in the hands of a man or woman who’d gone through the rituals, who’d already served in the Gearman ranks with distinction for no less than fifty years, who understood that they, above all others –with the notable exception of Chevril, who seemed capable of flouting all the rules and regulations without catching the smallest bit of flak for it- had access to wisdom and knowledge far and above what anyone should see.
A Book, able to work when surrounded on all sides by the dampening field of the Obsidian Golem miasma. Not even the King –or so they said- could counteract the vile aerial excrescence. A prize of inestimable value, that.
And it was in the hands of someone Dom found worse than any other creature ‘neath Th
e Dome!
Chevy’s dry words wormed their way into Dom’s mind as he watched Book struggle through simple projections; ‘Now, don’t you be frettin’ over yon Master Nickels, his armor nor that Book, hey? Reckon ‘e’s gonna find a way to do for these Gunboys of ‘is, yeah? No, don’t deny you got the itch to do for him, to take that Book, to dismantle that armor of his, Dom. I can see it in yer eyes, plain as day. And we will, squire, we will indeed, but only once we’re certain that the innocent people of this shithole are properly squared away and not a moment before. Far as we know, the normals in Ickford represent the last largest accumulation of ‘em anywhere in Arcade City, hain’t that right? We hain’t got no updates from the Nannies on who all is alive further in, and that? Well, that hain’t good news, is it? So do as you do, Master Breton. Watch them Gunboys, watch as them out there try to do fer ‘em, spot the weaknesses. Nickels and the troubles ‘e represents, well, they’ll still be there in the morning, sure enough’.
A particularly large explosion pulled Dom away from his miserable musings. It took a few seconds for the smoke to clear and for his helmet to piece together what’d happened. Once the Gearman had a full idea of the events leading up to the explosion, he had to applaud the bravado of the gearheads fighting this Gunboy; judging from the twitching, Dark Iron-leaking limbs strewn everywhere down by the robot’s feet, a group of half-a-dozen mad bombers had attacked en masse, toting what had to be the largest accumulation of explosives held together in the same spot since, well, if Book were operating properly, Dom would know precisely when, but he felt it had to be somewhere in the five to six hundred year range.
Lobbers and bombers, madness like none other, hey?
Practiced eyes picked the damage done to the Gunboy with relative ease. Dom pursed his lips speculatively and entered rough estimates for what he was seeing into Book, already uncomfortable; a bomb the size of the one just detonated against the foot of that Gunboy would’ve shocked the biggest of the Big Kings into tiny little nuts and bolts, and yet, here … a hole no bigger than a doorway, blasted into the thick metal armor plating.