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

by Lee Bond

  “Aye, Master Brigadier, that is the sum of it, though the last of these Gunboys, the one that run away…”

  “The one that turned into the visage of a man? The one who sings such songs of wonder, with music as none of have never heard afore now?” En route to Ickford as he’d been, Davram had heard the strange sounds, a thing forcing him to slow his arrival by several hours; as the last Brigadier, one who was still certain that the King would be rightly pissed to learn lived on, the strange and the unanticipated were things to be avoided at all costs. Having never in his entire life heard music of that sort before, Davram had to admit his mind had spun the weirdest of fantasies.

  “That’s the one…” The Lady nodded.

  Davram sighed again. “Then somehow, in some way, some strange, impossible way, the man you made your enemy is the one who clambered up to do for that Gunboy, only instead of yet another dead summoning, we now have a gigantic, metal version of that same man running about all over the place. Is that right?”

  “Aye.” And with that, the Lady of the Weeping Eye fell silent, for her one good eye had spied summat in the pile of Brigadier’s rubble pile that he himself had obviously missed. She pointed one long, slender finger at what captivated her.

  Vexed beyond all reason that one simple act of … well, Davram supposed it were self-preservation, when you got right down to it … that one simple act of self-preservation in a bar full of gearheads could blossom into the death of a city with worse yet to come, the Brigadier turned to see what was bothering his Lady of the Weeping Eye.

  “Bollocks.”

  Two Gearmen, two Gearmen he recognized very well indeed, frozen solid in a tableaux, hands wrapped around a Book, dead as doornails, were wedged into his pile of debris. Nowt but madness and grief had befallen Ickford if these two fast friends had fallen against one another this day.

  Davram licked his lips and reached out to touch the tome himself. Over a shoulder, he spoke a warning. “Mind your manners, now, Lady.”

  The Lady of the Weeping Eye held her hands up high, nodding assiduously. She had well learned her lesson when it came to attacking people. She said as much, adding, “And also, too, Master Brigadier, I were to try and do for you, you would most certainly do for me quick. I hain’t what I used to be.”

  “Well.” Davram’s fingers brushed against the cool metal of Book’s cover, wondering what would happen. He knew the legends, had read the stories, had heard the whispers.

  Touching a Book against owner’s will brought swift and thorough death. Cracking the pages saw your mind drank down in a single draught, leaving your grey matter smooth and blank as fresh paper. All this and more followed Keepers of the Book.

  Nothing had happened yet.

  Cautiously, still mindful of the Lady of the Weeping Eye, he extended some bit of himself into the battered and broken tome, a tiny smidgeon of Brigadier essence. His hope was to bring the Book to life, for mayhap within it’s magical pages it held answers as to the dementia as had fallen this town.

  Nothing.

  Book was dead, dead as the two men with faces frozen into pure reflections of their last feelings and thoughts under The Dome: Dominic Breton, him who’d been known as a wit amongst those who followed his scholarly inclination, his face was a furious snarl. Davram’s heart sank at that, for while Book Club Regulars were still Gearmen, they more often than not walked on a more even keel than their barrack brothers.

  Even with the helm on and channeling some of the King’s Rage that trickled down from on high, Dom Breton shouldn’t bear the countenance of a snarling animal.

  Davram tsked woefully. “Poor old Dom. What pressures on you, hey? For you to crack like an egg?”

  The other Gearman, Chevril Pointillier, was a man he knew personally, though the poor dead man always forgot; the oldest Gearman ‘neath The Dome –and by a fair margin- had come to the pub on a regular basis, one world-weary officer looking to get his head down with the darkness on t’other side of the door grew so dark nowt could be seen but your own inner demons.

  Always quick with a joke, faster with a barbed word, possessor of the keenest intellect the Brigadier had ever encountered, The Pointer looked … sad. Sorrow and regret were etched deep in the seams of the old man’s careworn face.

  “This does break my heart, milady.” Davram said needlessly to the sobbing Golem: behind him, the crazed immortal was all wordless moaning now. “What happened to these men out here?” Davram mused aloud once more. The Lady shuffled her feet nervously, suddenly all moaned out.

  Everyone ‘tween the walls of Ickford had changed. Golems afraid of blood death. Brothers fighting brothers. Gearheads fighting like noble savages to spare their spot of land. Never had there been a war like this, and Davram hated himself because of it.

  Hated himself, for all this were his fault and no two ways about it. His cowardice was a thing of legend! In that one moment, that one split second where he’d decided to wait and see…

  If only he’d done for Nicked Jimmy right there on the spot! Master Nickels the Specter would never have been born and none of this madness would’ve come to Ickford!

  “But I didn’t.” Davram licked his lips. There was a trick he could do to get Book up and running. Not all the way, mind, as even the tiny little gag he could run on the processors deep inside the magical machine could trigger alarms up and down Arcade City. Where before he’d let a little juice flow, what he had in mind would hopefully bring Book back from the dead.

  This close to Arcadia, it’d be a signal fire burning to the top of The Dome. In no time, Gearmen and Nannies and who knew what else would most like be atop him, hunting out the mysteriously alive Brigadier.

  The Lady of the Weeping Eye stepped forward. “What didn’t you?” she asked, curious.

  She remembered seeing Brigadiers before now, but only from a distance; as with all Obsidian Golems, she feared nowt under the Dome save them as had done the deed and purified themselves of all the rot that floated around inside a person’s head. They held power above and beyond what even the toughest Gearhead possessed and more, they operated autonomously from King’s Will and even ignored the Matrons. A few of her kind had fallen at the hands of the shining ones, though thankfully, none –not even them as had done the doing, so to speak- had uncovered the precise method.

  Noble to the point of austerity, them old Brigadiers. Staunch and stoic and all sorts of upper crust, too. Those were the sorts of things you could see through binoculars. Cold, too. Dismissive of all that their eyes fell upon, little different from their King though they realized it not.

  But not this Davram fellow. As he brushed fingertips against Book, the Lady wondered if his … difference … was the loss of his brothers and sisters at the hands of the King or if there was summat more to the keen-edged sorrow she seemed to feel from him?

  “You knew Master Nickels, didn’t you, Brigadier?” The Lady all but gasped the revelation. “You been in his presence ‘ere now.”

  Davram nodded absentmindedly, rubbing thumb and forefinger together, willing the power hidden just … just beyond … to well up through the pads of those two fingers. Tiny beads of liquid platinum –the hallmark of any true Brigadier- rose up a few seconds later, and as he pulled thumb and forefinger apart, those droplets of purest power transformed themselves into thin threads that swept hungrily through the air.

  ‘twere done. If Nannies or Gearmen were spying upon this abyss, he’d be easily spotted.

  “Again, my Lady of the Weeping Eye,” Davram inched the power threads close to Book, ever mindful for anything … untoward, “on your honor. What I do now puts me in danger. Should I be disturbed or the procedure be interrupted, your life may very well be snuffed out like a candle.”

  More than a bit of prevarication and mayhap a bit of an unfair thing to say to a creature unhinged, but Davram really didn’t want to deal with the Obsidian Golem in any way, shape or form.

  The platinum threads flicked out, almost like lightni
ng, brushing this way and that against the metal cover of Book. A few of the gears embossed into the heavy-duty cover spin almost half-heartedly in their casings as they were struck with power, but nothing too great occurred.

  Davram pursed his lips. Book was really broken. He needed to know why two Gearmen were dead, needed to know if they’d had contact with Nickels.

  Most importantly, he needed to know just what –if there was any such thing- Nickels planned on doing next.

  With that in mind and ever mindful that he really was risking his own life now, Davram the Brigadier pushed more power up through the slender threads. The risk he took now would draw the attention of everyone capable of looking, not just them as served the King. No, now ‘twould be Bolt-Necks in their labs, Widows’ Peaks in their aeries, and … King himself, up there in his heavenly Dome.

  Sweat popped up on his high forehead. He hadn’t done this sort of thing in a hundred years and the effort to keep the torrential force that burned within to containable limits was already tiring.

  The Lady of the Weeping Eye stared on, mystified, as the Brigadier played liquid lightning across the Book them two corpses held onto like it were the most important thing in all the world, hair standing nearly on end. She’d seen a lot in her life, she had, from Water Ladies rising up out of their lakes to Bolt-Necks bringing fallen brothers back to life using warped and twisted science, but never in that long life had she seen anything like this.

  Each willowy branch of flickering, spitting lightning that Master Brigadier held between thumb and forefinger gleamed and glimmered brighter than anything anyone had ever seen before, white hot brightness pushing past the darkness, flooding the area with a light that were almost holy.

  Oh, if only her kind could’ve been the chance to be purified like the Brigadier in front of her! From blackest pit of deepest dismay unto the very highest mountain of clarity of and beauty!

  The Lady of the Weeping Eye gasped as the radiance played about on her unclean flesh. Millions of needles, ants under the skin, flaming metal barbs.

  She watched on, heedless.

  Davram, unaware of the look growing more and more permanent on the Lady’s face, was wholly focused on getting the cogs and gears of Book to spin properly. Through the platinum lightning scouring the Book’s surface, the Brigadier could feel the mechanisms deep, deep inside the tome engaging, quite literally gearing themselves up.

  It was slow at first, but as those atomic-sized mechanisms began spinning faster and faster, so too did the ones above them, and above them, and so on and so on until the heavy, thick works adorning the cover of Book finally followed suit.

  “Praise be to the K…” Davram held his tongue at the last minute. The King deserved no praise whatsoever, not now, not ever again.

  Now that Book was powered up –though only for a minute, two at the most- Davram risked a look around; during the time he’d been powering the treasured item up, his mind had been running alongside the power being poured into it.

  For all he knew, Big Kings, the King Himself, and Garth the Giant Metal Man could’ve lumbered up behind them both.

  Davram smiled a somewhat sickly smile at the Lady of the Weeping Eye. Though her face was a ruined mess, it wasn’t hard to place the strange, nearly crazed look she cast his way; it’d been a hundred years or more since he’d truly used his power and longer still since he’d done so in the presence of anyone save another Brigadier.

  Oh, there’d been those odd times when he’d run afoul of other Obsidian Golems, but they hardly counted, and besides which, only one of two had walked away.

  His Lady of the Weeping Eye no doubt felt –in her broken mind, anyway- that she’d been witness to a great miracle, magic of the wildest sort. It was one of those things that the uneducated or the foolish tended to think, and the King –not to mention the Brigadiers themselves- had worked overtime to remind the citizens of Arcade City that it was science, not magic, that gave the peerage their powers. Golems may be the eldest things ‘neath The Dome, but their wits were only as fortified as the time in which they’d been educated.

  To whit, there were some Golems out there capable of tearing a Big’Un in half with thumb and forefinger, yet were incapable of subtracting one from one.

  “Are you all right, my lady?” Davram bent back to his task, lest he waste the risk he’d taken. Grabbing hold the volume with both hands, the Brigadier worked it back and forth, back and forth, gently easing it free of the dead men’s merciless grip.

  “I … I am fine.” The Lady breathed the words, though in truth, she knew she were far from it. For half a long, trembling second, she’d feared the dead Gearmen would rise back to life similar to Book, and now it were all she could think about. Living Gearmen were right prickly bastards.

  How, then, would undead ones act?

  Davram caught the surreptitious and furtive glances the Lady kept shooting at the standing corpses, a wry smile on his face. “Don’t worry about them, Lady. There’s nowt save the King himself who can truly bring things back to life. There’s not another soul in the whole of Arcade City as can do that.”

  “What about them Bolt-Necks?” The Lady countered, trying to move closer to Davram for protection whilst attempting to move further away from the dead Gearmen. “And why are they still standing, like?”

  Davram flipped to the middle of Book, cautious of the heavy-edged pages. He had no desire to ‘armor up’ to protect his hands from the wicked sharp leaves in front of the Lady. Doing so would undoubtedly either spook her or further cement her ideation that he was some form of godlike being.

  There were a few seconds to spare while Book began assembling whatever data remained inside it’s capacious memory banks, so Davram answered both questions, though in reverse order. “The Gearmen’s armor, milady, is what keeps them standing. Folk the world over believe it’s their longcoats as have the gears and all inside, and to a point, that be true, but it’s the copper mesh what they wear ‘neath their clothes as gives them speed and strength to match you and yours. Their long coats in turn fuel those machines, and turn what is wrought by their activation to the Gearman’s cause. Whatever caused their death froze their armor in place.

  And as for Bolt-Necks … well,” Davram shrugged, looking thoughtfully at the few thumbnails that’d etched themselves into the metallic pages before him, “in a very roundabout way, milady, them plodding, thunderous men and the things they bring to life are doing so with the King’s permission, hey? King’s Will and all that, so I reckon you could easily say they do so with the King over their shoulders. Near as I can tell, it hain’t no true life. Not as the King can do.”

  The Lady of the Weeping Eye shuddered. Of all the things she’d seen in Arcade City –and at just over a thousand years old, she had seen a lot- Bolt-Necks in their castles with their strange machines that spat lightning not dissimilar to what the Brigadier wielded had always struck her as awful. Something about their pallid, ghastly green faces, how they seemed always to be so grim and haunted and miserable.

  As if they hated being alive, knowing they should be dead. Fingers stole to her nearly ruined eye, wiped the thick, awful goo that continued to seep from the open wounds. Fiery pain raged.

  She held the screams back.

  “I do wish you wouldn’t do that, milady.” Davram didn’t look up from Book. He couldn’t risk missing something important.

  There were hundreds, thousands … hundreds of thousands of thumbnails now, scribing themselves across the wondrous pages faster than he could believe. The few images he could make out amidst the blur of tiny squares as they filled Book faster and faster made no sense at all; pictures of big, brilliant orbs that burned eternally afire, a man with a face so broad Davram would’ve assumed him to be a Bolt-Neck, were it not for the lack of bolts, a fat man with glasses, a tall, slender woman with skin the same as Mistar Chang …

  “Egads.” Davram almost dropped his prize. “This … this hain’t a Gearman’s Book no more.”

/>   “Who’s is it, then?” The Lady crept forward. As with everyone in Arcade City, Books held by Gearmen represented one of the last true, great mysteries. What was inside? How did it work? What did them nasty Gearmen see when they looked?

  Davram narrowed his eyes thoughtfully; Book was slowing now, the thumbnails growing ragged, pixels spilling from the edges, pooling at the corners of the open pages. Fine cracks revealing the too-deep mechanisms that gave Book and it’s wielder access to staggering amounts of knowledge and information began to appear.

  The Brigadier was about to answer when all the thumbnails flickered, then shattered into billions of pixels that rained downwards to the edges before disappearing altogether.

  “Well, now,” Davram pursed his lips worriedly, “I hain’t never seen that before. Books’re supposed to be unbreakable, hey?”

  Then the small, fine hairs across the back of his neck stood right up on end as actual Dark Iron words flowed across the immaculately clean leaves.

  : internal communications network malfunctioning. ‘MatronNet’ disabled. locating errant signal. searching … searching … signal located. AI Unit ‘Matron Primrose’ located. chance of bootstrapping MatronNet with a single source … … … 10%. please bring Book to Matron Primrose. cloud particulate variant must be injected into Cloud 2.0 Project Rainmaker needs activation:

  “What’s all this then?” Davram mused aloud, though the implications of what Book was suggesting were great and dire.

  The Lady of the Weeping Eye sounded the words out, working through them with difficulty. “What is … MatronNet? And … A Eye? What be that, I wonder?”

  It was impossible. The internal communications network employed by King and Matrons alike had withstood the tests of time. Thirty thousand or so years of uninterrupted operation. The King relied on that network to keep the whole of Arcade City up and running. It was what the Matrons used to oversee vital operations. It was –whether or not they knew it- what allowed the Gearmen and their wonderful armor to function.