by Lee Bond
Dom went to consult Book on the matter at hand, cursed himself for a fool, before recalling he’d been successful in liberating Garth’s stolen Book. Excitement percolated through him. While the tome might not be able to access The Matron’s network of information that whizzed invisible above their heads, that Book had been far more operational than his own.
“Might have the answers to what ails my suit right in my own head.” It were reasonable. He’d been about and done quite a lot of things in his time. Not as much as Chevy –which reminded him, finding Chevy, now that Nickels was undoubtedly dead and buried somewhere, was of paramount concern, following which there would be a rousing argument concerning leaving versus staying- but enough to possibly have half-heard some tidbit of news concerning Geared Armor turning to dust.
Now … where could Book be? Vague memories surrounded by a great deal of terrified screaming and brilliant blue energy filled his senses, making a right mess out of what would ordinarily be a fairly coherent timeline of things following the firing of the weapon, but there was one thing Gearman Breton recalled with utterly clarity.
He had not let go of Book. Not after all the hell he’d gone through getting hold of it in the first place. The very second the ancient tome had popped free from Master Nickels’ wrap job, Dom had held that thing tight to his chest, intent –at the time- of being turned into cinders if need be, so long as that piece of Kingtech stayed in the possession of someone rightfully permitted to touch the blasted thing.
Now where could …
Dominic flared his nostrils. He spat bitterly.
Of course. There were only one place in all of Ickford that the Book could be, and it just had to be in the pile of festering gearheads. It were like everything around him was trying to make things as difficult and as needlessly complicated as possible, like his patience were intentionally being tested or summat.
A vile waft of putrefying stink latched itself onto a breeze to swarm Dom’s senses for a brief moment. Stomach roiling all topsy-turvy, Dom leaned over a shattered wall and retched for a good long moment. Spitting until the foul taste was clear of his mouth, Dom walked –a bit unsteadily, but he were doing it, mind- over to the corpse-pile.
“Seems as though now your Elixir is gone, you’re all turning to way of all things a might bit quicker than normal.” Dom nudged a body with a booted toe. If he were lucky –which didn’t seem likely, all things considered- displacing one empty gearhead vessel might very well dislodge the whole lot, until at last, Book came tumbling forward, all ready to be assimilated by a proper owner. It did happen that way in the fairy tales, hey? The righteous and noble knight did get a break every now and then, did he not?
Thank the King that his boots were still intact! Were he barefooted, the Gearman knew for certain he wouldn’t be able to do what needed doing. Nudging the corpse a second time showed that he was going to have to get in there and do it himself, full-on and with no dilly-dallying.
Taking a deep breath and holding it tight, Gearman Breton grabbed hold of two dead, lifeless hands and pulled for all he were worth, heaving and straining against the weight; even as he yanked the dead gearhead loose of the pile, it took Dom a minute to realize his difficulty lay in the fact that his armor were broken.
“No more strength, hey?” Dom booted the corpse near his feet. “All your fault. If you lot hadn’t decided to piss the King off by not following his Gauntlet, not a one of you would be here, hey? Them Gunboys wouldn’t have drank you dry of Kingsblood and you wouldn’t be here in this pile of rapidly decaying flesh. No, you’d be off somewhere doin’ summat else entirely. Assholes, the lot of you.”
Dom booted the lifeless corpse until it fell away then resumed the arduous and nauseating chore of digging Book free.
***
As she bolted through her broken city of dreams -much slower than she was used to- Agnethea tried to keep from thinking of all the fun times she’d had building it with the various gray old ones, them like Old Mackie and The Mysterious Missus.
Tried, and failed.
If she were capable of properly crying, bitter tears would be streaming down her cool flesh, bitter, sorrowful tears. Oh, not at the loss of Ickford itself, no, that would always be on Young Luther’s plate; the moment he’d come to town, twisting and whispering perverse lies into the ears of her followers, seducing them with things that they, the truly elder Obsidian Golems, should be above.
“No,” Agnethea sobbed loudly in lieu of tears, “I weep for my people.”
“Your people?” A snide voice called out from the darkness, a high-pitched castrato tone or … an ancient man trapped forever in the body of a child.
Agnethea stopped running. As much as finding Nickels was of paramount concern, there were some things that needed dealing with, no matter the cost. Besides, she smiled wryly, Master Nickels is more than capable of taking care of himself.
“Young Luther.” Agnethea put a hand to her mouth, cupping it like one would a megaphone. “Come out, come out, you wee bad little boy.”
Young Luther did just that. He stepped out of the shadows, intentionally making it seem as though he’d literally materialized out of thin air. For him and for the others who followed him, it was all part of the game to trick normal people, regular people, stupid people into thinking them more than they were.
Agnethea laughed at the stupid parlor trick, though only half-heartedly. Her ears were picking up screams, horrible shouts of fear and loathing. Worse, though, were the bouts of laughter threaded through. It sounded as though two men were sharing a single voice.
Oh aye, King’s madness had finally passed to the people, hadn’t it just?
No matter. The Queen of Ickford turned her attention back to Young Luther. “Parlor tricks, Luther? I was stepping in and out of shadows when the King still allowed ships to ply the skies above our heads. I was also the voice from nowhere, the strange figure walking behind you in the night, all these and so many more things … why,” she grinned cruelly, gesturing at her foe’s grimy clothes, “it does seem as though you’ve had yourself a rough go of things.”
Young Luther ruffled at his torn, stained robes. They were no longer immaculately white. He felt unclean, his skin crawled at the filth touching his holy personage.
Nevertheless, he put on a smile and nodded. He swept his young hands about, drawing in the whole of Ickford. “Of the two of us, though, you are worse off than I. The King finally took particular exception to this burg of yours.”
“Believe it or not…” Agnethea tracked the sounds of fearful hilarity with the precision of a hunter, drawing in her mind a map. Her fraught heart thumped in its cage. Sadly, the screaming man had to be none other than Master Nickels himself, for it seemed to her in her mind that –whoever it was- he was running directly from close by where the Gunboy had fallen against The Wall towards the nearest of the still surviving monsters.
The Queen’s heart seized up. Just for a moment, but it nevertheless froze.
There were but few things in this world to cause a man like Master Nickels to be quite so full of fear. Or hilarity, for that matter. Agnethea knew which one plagued the man so; the thing … the beast the man from Outside called Specter … no true separate identity but his own dark rage and anger –things he buried deep and foolishly, too- had somehow been given leave to rise up, the kindling caused by exposure to Kingsblood set ablaze at long last.
But still, he ran towards danger. He was still master of his soul.
For the time being.
Agnethea narrowed her eyes shrewdly, at Luther, who stood there, staring right back at her, contemplating all sorts of dark actions, no doubt, and at the strength Nickels possessed to force his darkest yearnings –and she had little doubt that Garth’s predisposition towards violent outbursts was great, perhaps greater than any other man or woman or beast or King under The Dome- into behaving, even for a little while.
“Well, Queen?” Luther produced a buzzblade and switched it on. It’s Wil
l-driven engines chuckled quietly. “Believe it or not what?”
Agnethea flicked her eyes to the chuckling blade and smirked. One good thing to come out of her aloofness, of her decision to separate herself from the Golems, was that they –like the rest of Arcade City’s denizens- had little notion as to what was fact, and what was fiction.
“Believe it or not, Young Master Luther, I have little time or interest in dealing with you.” Agnethea rolled a hand regally at her shattered city magisterially. “As you can see, there is much going on, things that require a Queen’s time more than a simpering fool who believes himself to be some sort of child-god. You may have all of Ickford, save my home. Do with it what you will. That is, so long as you thrown down your blade and promise to be a good little boy from now on.”
Young Luther had had it. Decades of being forced to sit idly by, listening to his loyal followers whisper in the dark about the power and might and glory of the First Obsidian Golem. Even as late as this morning, they’d spoken about her in the hushed tones normally reserved for an actual god, not the ancient, out-of-place hag she truly was.
To stand there -broken, bruised and looking so terribly weary- giving him permission? It was too much to bear.
Young Luther, changeling child full of dark promise and product of the twisted dreams of soul-ruined men and women, leapt at his Queen, the terrible teeth of his buzzblade slashing the air.
Agnethea caught Young Luther about the neck and held him there with a grip hard as their King’s blasted heart. She shook the demonic child hard enough to kill lesser beings, shook and shook until the blade clattered noisily to broken cobblestones. Either luck or damage caused the deadly weapon to turn off.
Agnethea pulled Luther in close, fighting the urge to vomit at the cancerous stench roiling upwards from his gasping, childlike mouth, laughing at the urge all the same. It was funny, in a weird sort of way. She, for the longest time, for thousands of years, had been one of the greatest nightmares of Arcade City, and yet, in her hand, she held something that she found truly, epically, magnificently revolting.
“What is so funny?” The strength of his Queen was unspeakable!
In preparation for the time when they might come together in an epic collision, Luther had had his followers test him, giving them leave to use whatever they might to cause him harm. In due course, he’d withstood physical punishments great and painful, hurts put on him by Golems more than three thousand years old, and come out the victor.
But the Queen’s strength … was unrivalled. The skin around his neck was beginning to split open ’neath the unbreakable porcelain of Agnethea’s fingers.
“You. Me. This.” Agnethea laughed again. “Our entire world is collapsing around us, Young Luther, and still you fight for things that don’t matter.” Garth’s screaming laughter grew louder. “That, I see now, never really mattered. At all.”
Luther stared into Agnethea’s nearly colorless, whirling eyes. How could he have been so wrong-headed, and for so long? He’d visited Agnethea’s castle, had seen the bloodbath, the carnage, the bodies of his most loyal servants ripped to pieces, shredded into paste and imagined himself above that.
Imagined that he could do for the Queen all on his lonesome, with nothing but a buzzblade and strong words.
So wrong.
“Let … let me live.” Young Luther pleaded. “I’m … I’m sorry. I’ll…”
Then the abomination understood the look in his Queen’s eyes.
“Oh, poor Young Luther.” Agnethea clucked her tongue sadly. “If I had the time, and the patience, and the belief that The Dome would stand for another thirty thousand years, I might just find it within me to give you the chance to undertake penance. Perhaps to rebuild Ickford, brick by brick, stone by stone, cog by cog. But I don’t, and I am certain The Dome will fall before too much longer now. And the man who is, somewhere behind us, laughing and screaming and so full of both revulsion and jocularity … he needs warning. Warning that that the lumbering beast is a trap.”
“I can…” Young Luther didn’t have a chance to speak his offer. His Queen revealed her strength in all its fullness, squeezing his bastardized demon-head clean from his neck as one would do with a rotten fruit.
Agnethea dropped Luther’s corpse to the ground, flinging the other bit away, a bloody Frisbee flying off into the distance. She wiped gore-soaked fingers on her stained, rumpled and thoroughly disheveled dress and ran off towards Master Nickels.
Time. She hoped there was enough.
***
Chevy could scarcely believe his eyes.
He’d been a Gearman for very nearly a thousand years, and in that time, he’d seen things that’d driven lesser men mad. His old Gearmaster Hollister Lane had commented on a then-young Gearman’s seemingly supernatural ability to deal with the awful and the strange, to which Chevril Pointillier had just shrugged and said ‘well, it’s just how it is, innit?’ and off he’d went.
In the last month, first on the hunt for a maddened beast dubbed Specter only to find there was no beast, but a man with the most impossible case of Dark Iron affliction, he and his partner, Dominic Breton had seen the strange, and worse.
Nothing like this, though. Nothing in the years, nothing in the training, nothing in the dark, quiet times at night when you lay abed thinking of all the grimmest things your mind could conjure up …
Nothing had quite prepared himself for Gearman Dominic Breton, wading through desiccated gearhead corpses, muttering to himself, armor all torn up.
“Why don’t you come on out of there, hey?” Chevy tried to make the request sound like the most reasonable thing in the world. Under normal circumstances, it would be the most reasonable request any one man could make of another, but …
These were trying times.
A quick glance upwards told Chevy that the King’s mighty reclamation cylinders would hit the ground in ten minutes or less.
Woe betide the fool anywhere near the impact zone. Wisdom suggested being well the fuck away from shattered Ickford; Chevy were well convinced the radius of those cylinders would be … punishing.
“Bollocks.” Chevy cursed. The fool hadn’t heard. It was likely, given that he, Chevy, was precisely eight feet away. He’d almost been beaned in the melon by a flung gearhead arm, and bugger that all to hell and back once more. He’d been through quite enough of his own interactions with the dead this day, thank you very much.
It would take something perilously important to get him closer.
“Leave off, Dom!” Chevy hollered loudly, his voice seeming somehow dampened, flattened. Ickford had been so full of powerful noises, that unending screaming, the clanking, all of it that now it was grown quieter –not perfectly silent, mind, as there were two Gunboys remaining- a poor old Gearman’s ears were announcing their abuse.
“Leave off!” Chevy shouted once more, though, this time lamely.
He was going to have to pop in there and physically stop his best friend from rooting through a pile of dead bodies.
King alone knew what kind of grotesque diseases a man could catch from doing that kind of thing.
Huffing and puffing and make a nasty face at Dom’s oblivious backside, Chevy strode forward, watching in loathsome awe as Dom grabbed hold of a rather large midsection sans arms and head and tried to move it.
Dom flashed Chevy a quick smile. “About bloody time, hey? Here, give us a ‘and with this, yeah? Me armor’s all done for and this here piece weighs a bloody ton.”
“Is there nuffink,” Chevy waved his hands all around the place, heart sinking at the sight of the Gearman’s utterly dilapidated armor, “is there nuffink at all you find wrong in what you is doin’ at this moment?”
Dom rolled his eyes. It figured. Chevy was on his high and mighty horse again. Rather than wait for his so-called partner –he weren’t entirely certain if he was ever really going to forgive his friend for his shocking failure to step up to the plate and help retrieve the stolen Book- to give a li
ft with the limbless body, Dom sort of rolled it off to one side.
“Crikey, Dom, this is all sideways!” Chevy stepped closer, patently refusing to look at any of the heads. So long as he avoided them lifeless peepers, everything would be just fine. “You seen them reclaimers comin’ down? They hain’t like nuffink I seen before. Twice as big if not bigger, and from the view from me helmet, they got edges like a buzzblade! I reckon King’s got summat special planned for Ickford. Summat never been seen before. Fuckin’ about in a corpse pile for a Book ain’t worth dyin’ for, now is it?”
Dom whirled. “In point of fact, Chevril Pointillier,” the crazed Gearman snapped, “it is the only thing worth dying for! Much like your old horse’s brain, a Book stores everything a ‘Regular’ experiences. Everything, and more than that besides. All a man’s memories wind up in Book, you see? Then when a new Book Club Regular is christened, yeah, ‘is or ‘er new Book gets uploaded wiv loads of basic information, right? Stuff that most Regulars believe is important enough to get passed on. Well now, mine is gone and I reckon all that’ll be missing is the shite I’ve been through here in Ickford as I’m quite positive mad old Nanny Primrose did an upload. But …”
“What in the bleedin’ fuck ‘as this got to do with the Book you seem to think is in this fuckin’ pile?” Chevy bulled forward, grabbed his partner and friend by the shoulders. “This is bloody madness, mate. We got to get away from here. Nickels can do for the remaining Gunboys on ‘is own.”
Dom pulled away. “Master Nickels wore his stolen Book for a number of hours before I managed to pry it loose, Chevy. I confess I haven’t the vaguest idea how in the world Book was even made operational here, in Ickford, under the miasma, but it was. The memory acquisition is automatic.”
Chevy squinted at the revelation. He were unsure how he felt about the notion of all them Book Club Regulars having their memories recorded, wondering at the same time if it was something that they were told about straight off or it were something they found out about later on.