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

by Lee Bond

  Agnethea looked out over the horizon, then back over Garth’s broad shoulder to see where Ickford lay. Her heart sank as her colorless eyes fell upon the black smoke trickling thinly into the sky. This far out, it was naught but a thin, slender reed of darkness, but it spoke of so many things. So many vanquished gearheads, so many needlessly slain settlers.

  The King well and truly deserved whatever it was that Garth intended. And then –though this was something she would never say aloud, never to anyone, not even Garth himself, who undoubtedly harbored worse thoughts- if they were tremendously lucky, Garth Nickels would destroy The Dome, either freeing those who remained alive or giving them the gift of true death.

  Better dead than … than how they were now. In the fullness of time, they’d become nothing but hollow mockeries of their once mighty Arcadian selves.

  “I do believe, Master Nickels, we are on the right path. It’s been some time since I was a lobber or shooter, but if I do the geometry correctly…” Agnethea chewed her lip thoughtfully for half a moment, “the cylinder should be near about Sliver Hills.”

  Garth’s reaction was anything but the one she expected: her man-turned-robot friend shook his head angrily and muttered –though when you are several hundred feet tall, a mutter is more of a shout than anything- something about how everything was complete and total, total, utter bullshit.

  “What is it?”

  “There is no such thing as coincidence in my life, Agnethea. I came in through the Geared Door at Sliver Hills. Again, I am being brought back to the beginning. Things aren’t quite what they seem, here ‘neath the Kingly Dome of Gears. Something is off, somewhere. I’m missing something important. I always do.” Garth shook his head. He spied a boulder and kicked at it. The heavy stone sailed through the air and disappeared. “But I suppose I owe you a tale, now, yeah?”

  Agnethea nodded. “Aye, Master Nickels, you do. A tale of why you would prefer to suffer with the white hot rage that Vicious Elixir summons up in you rather than take the King’s Path to freedom.”

  “You won’t like it, my Queen. I promise you.”

  “Try me.” Agnethea rather liked it when Garth called her ‘my queen’, though it did of course break her heart just the tiniest little bit.

  Garth took a deep breath. “There is a War brewing past The Dome, Agnethea, a war that has been in making since the very beginning of this wretched Unreal Universe…”

  ***

  It took many hours –not to mention the destruction of three more Shaggy Men warrens, the surprise flattening of what was most likely the last troll in all of existence, and the evisceration by shocking means of a wandering Widow’s Peak who’d thought perhaps to move further inwards- for Master Nickels to relay enough of the story for Agnethea to understand what he meant by ‘War’ and ‘Unreal Universe’.

  The daunting thing was, though he’d nearly spoken for seven hours straight, without pause, without … anything –sorrow, rage, regret- Agnethea couldn’t shake the feeling that there was so much more to the man’s life, that in order for the whole of what he’d done and what he planned on doing to be relayed properly, one could spend their entire life doing nothing but listening and walk away feeling as if they’d missed some vital bit right at the beginning.

  Daunting, indeed.

  Agnethea’s head swam with images so alien her melon were buzzing. Vast beings, vaster than anything she could even imagine, hovering just out of sight –Garth had offered to explain concepts like ‘extra-dimensional’ to her, but smart as she was, the descriptions never sank in- eagerly waiting to destroy everything was … she shrugged.

  Since for her –and everyone she knew, or had ever known- ‘everything’ was all that was beneath The Dome and that was it, the idea that not only was there infinitely more out there and that someone wanted to do for the whole lot didn’t make much matter. It wasn’t that the notion was beyond her, far from it; Agnethea accepted and recognized that there were things such as planets and all that, a bristling, jostling grab bag full of things and more besides, but when you got right down to it, destruction was destruction, whether it were a Domed over city or, well, Master Nickels’ Unreal Universe.

  The -Agnethea could just hear a strange click or hum or summat similar in the way Master Nickels pronounced the name of his most dire foe- M’Zahdi Hesh wanted to do for the whole Universe and to drink deep of the power released from that death. Stopping something like these … Heshii were important. Of course, it’d taken likening the Heshii’s dreams of Universal destruction and the consequent feast of energy released afterwards to that of a gaggle doing for a King’s inky prize for it all to make proper sense, but she had the gist of it now!

  If she understood Master Nickels’ story, he’d spent his whole entire life to the planning and execution of doing for these invisible, powerful monsters. It was easy to see the journey was exacting a horrible toll.

  A fool could see that, though no fool alone could understand the whys and wherefores.

  Oh, and the coin he’d spent on the road, moving from one toll to the next!

  He’d lied to loved ones, tricked them, cheated them, caused more than his fair share of deaths and was like to cause more before he was finished.

  The worst part were –and this area had needed covering several times over to make certain she hadn’t done herself an accidental brain injury- was that the man who suffered and ached and agonized over all he’d done to be right where he was planned on doing the exact same thing!

  Victory for him meant the end of it all, though –as the main claimed- ‘in a totally better way’.

  It seemed a bit odd, a bit backwards, that part.

  “So, Master Nickels, you plan to destroy everything in just the right way?” Bemusement crept into the Golem’s tone. Agnethea couldn’t help it. Never in her life had she heard of a concept so … twisted as that.

  “Yep.”

  “And how does that work, then?” Agnethea peeked out from her hidey-hole inside Garth’s ear; it was the best place to hide when he went savagely Specter, and the closer they got to Sliver Hills, the more savage he grew. Less frequently, certainly, which was nice, but the damage being done to the surrounding area had grown exponentially. “This destroying of things, but in the right way?”

  “It’s complicated.” Garth responded quickly. Agnethea was bright as anything, but even with the advanced education she’d received in her childhood, King Barnabas Blake had done everything in his power to cripple his citizens.

  The intentional dumbing-down was similar to what Trinity was doing when It prevented people from digging into specific areas of technological advancement, but on a much grander scale. Agnethea accepted that there were things called planets, but Garth could tell by the tone of her voice that she –like every Arcadian- was more or less humoring those who came from the outside, that deep down in their hearts, they believed every prisoner who walked through a Geared Door was trying to pull a fast one.

  The King’s people were brilliant when it came to tactical stuff, but that was it. Explaining the birth of a new Reality, complete with Many Worlds connected to one another like leaves on a tree … Getting any natural born Arcadian to swallow that story whole was impossible.

  Agnethea booted Nickels in his eardrum. “I am no fool, Master Nickels. I have been thinking on that particular thing for some time, this idea of destroying your so-called Unreal Universe to make way for a better one, and I think I have the right of it.”

  Garth gestured grandly, his broad metal arms sweeping wide across the sky. “Try me, then, Queen Agnethea the Learned.”

  “For that sarcasm, Master Nickels, I shall do precisely that, but then you must tell me the one thing you’ve not yet told me.” Agnethea held her breath a bit; during the part of his grand story covering the Heshii, her roboticized traveling companion had skipped over many, many things, and it was there that she suspected the root cause of his eternal self-loathing lay hidden.

  “Oh? What might th
at be?”

  Agnethea nodded. “I can tell by the tone of your booming voice, you giant metal moron, that you know bloody damn well what it is, and I can assume also that you will hold to the bargain and fess up. Else when I am done, I shall continue haranguing you on King’s Gauntlet until The Dome falls all on it’s own.”

  “Okay, Queen Agnethea, have it your way.” Garth sighed brassily. “Explain to me your idea of what I’m trying to accomplish is, and I’ll tell you what you want to know. I’ll give you the real reason I need the darkness in me and it won’t be the whole ‘because it keeps me focused enough to get the job done’ line of bullshit either.”

  The Queen nodded once more, then sat cross-legged, with her back against the inner ear. “What you intend for the Universe is no different than what the King intended for his people, once upon a time, before he lost his marbles and started killing everything in sight. No, don’t interrupt, I can tell by the sounds your giant metal body makes you plan just that, but hold your damn peace.

  Destroying your Universe so that another, better one may rise in it’s stead is just what the King does with his Gauntlet, and with the ’sblood. At it’s heart, Master Nickels, it is a purification of the men and women who are suffused with the stuff. When they are first drawn to Kingsblood, that which they take into them is wicked and brutal. Well, you know that firsthand, don’t you just?”

  Garth chuckled along with Specter.

  He did indeed ‘know how it was’.

  Now that Agnethea had started up with her idea, her path was clear. Out of respect for what she was trying to do, he held his peace, just as she demanded. In a roundabout way, Agnethea wasn’t wrong. “Do go on.”

  “Oh, I shall.” Agnethea replied mock-haughtily. She was enjoying herself; Garth was more … interactive than he had been in some time. Was it possible that discussing his grand scheme had somehow managed to soothe or otherwise control Specter? Fears that the man’s darker soul would override all conscious intellect still lingered, but barely; the duration of violent outbursts may have decreased alongside the actual scope of destruction’s geometric expansion, yet …

  Yet the man’s mood was improving!

  According to everything she knew about Kingsblood, everything happening to Master Nickels was wrong. E’en if the man were for some reason lying about the volume of Vicious Elixir being pumped into his altered flesh and ‘twere only a fraction, still…

  Master Nickels should be a raving lunatic by now and not calmly discussing plans for the death of this abstract he called ‘The Unreal Universe’.

  Agnethea shook her head. No matter. “Well, then, as I was saying, the similarities between your ‘Unreal Universe’…”

  “Why does everyone do that?” Garth groused suddenly. “So few people believe me. It’s like, this whole thing. I can hear you saying ‘Unreal Universe’ in quotes, like it’s just this thing I made up.”

  “Well, I cannot speak to others who’ve chosen to sound skeptical about this version of life you portray,” Agnethea said, “but as for me, I have a difficult time imagining a sun, around which circles a planet, let alone many. To me, a universe full of the things, trillions upon trillions? Impossible. How do they all fit? What properties govern their rotation about these suns? Do they rub up against one another? How is there enough air for all them folks? But these are questions you may answer on different day. For now, I hope to get out my explanation before nightfall.

  As I was saying, Master Nickels the Interrupter, the similarities between what your Unreal Universe,” Agnethea grinned impishly as the giant man snorted at her forced attempt to sound as though she believed in the idea implicitly, “and what happens here, in The Dome, with the gearheads is similar. Where your –do not interrupt, do not make mock, just remember, by comparison to a child from your world, I am even more naïve- where your Engines of Creation seek to create a perfect Universe of order and harmony, a universe where everything is at it should be, so too does King Barnabas try the same with those afflicted with the crude. The older and more successful a gearhead becomes, the more likely he is to move inward, and so becomes exposed to a finer grade of Dark Iron, which in turns begins to remove some of the crudeness in his very soul. And as I’ve said many times before, so on and so forth until the penitent stands before the gates of Arcadia itself, wherein, if our mythical gearhead is extremely good at what he does, he could slay the Platinum King himself and gain elevation to the very heights of our small, enclosed world.

  This weeding and winnowing process that your Engines get up to, creating things, then destroying them when they fail to work, using the same patterns again and again, fine-tuning things? Little difference. I suppose it’s a matter of scale. Barnabas works on people, this all-powerful Engine works on … what was that word? Galaccies?”

  “Galaxies.”

  Agnethea nodded. “Yes. Them. The Engine works on galaxies. Same thing, really.”

  Garth made noises of agreement, if a little … light. “Your explanation is actually pretty accurate, Agnethea. I …”

  Agnethea booted Garth in the eardrum again, listening the racketing, echoing boom that ensued. “You will not renege, Master Nickels. You will tell me what it is that has you burning with a self-afflicted rage that puts even mine to shame. More to the point, you will tell me why you refused to be cleansed.”

  Somewhere on the other side of the thin metal membrane lay a man ensnared by the wicked trap the King had ever devised. It would be no difficult thing for her to break through and see for herself just what had happened to Master Nickels. He’d alluded to being held in place by flexible pipes with tips sharp as sin, through which Dark Iron pumped in astonishing volume, but that was it.

  Agnethea desperately wanted to free Garth from his prison, but, as with everything she wanted to do, he willfully prevented her from getting too close. Why, she was surprised he’d let her this close to the inside of his ear!

  “My Father.” Garth announced suddenly. The last time he’d admitted this to anyone, he’d been a mite more cavalier about the whole thing, but it was a matter of the company he’d kept at the time; those old, stupid holograms had brought out the snarky, cocky asshole in him, and it’d been so damned easy to make what he’d done to his Father sound as if it was no big thing. He’d even enjoyed making them suffer, looking into their faithfully reproduced eyes to see the dawning of comprehension, as they’d finally realized that they’d never once been in any kind of control.

  But Agnethea, for all her faults –and there were many, and they were diverse and vicious and easily the equal to any number of psychotic world leaders- was nothing like Sullivan and the others. Tormented by nanotech-manipulated rage, the woman currently kicking him in the eardrum was still trying to break free of that poisonous affliction, where those old leaders of Man hadn’t even bothered trying. They’d embraced their own darkness, stupidly thinking that was the best way to beat the M’Zahdi Hesh.

  “Your father? What about him?” Agnethea kept herself still, reminded herself to be cautious in what she said now and how she said it. Once or twice already she suspected that she was responsible for a Specter uprising and now Garth was talking about something deeply important, it was reasonable to assume that his darker side was close to the surface.

  Garth nodded. “My Father. The legendary and vile Kith Antal. The man who raised me, the man who saw the importance of my being and the best way to forge me into a weapon pointed right at the heart of the Heshii Empire. Him. You gotta understand, he’d been in the, ah, employ of those extra-dimensional bastards for thousands of years before anyone even had an inkling of what was happening in the dark shadows. Meeting and falling in love with the woman who would become my mother was something that wasn’t even supposed to’ve been possible. The Heshii engineered their soldiers to loathe the opposite sex, and while they did a damn good job of turning them into monsters, the stuff of legend and nightmare, they somehow managed to misunderstand that they very malleable nature of the
ir DNA meant that sometimes, shit happens.

  And then, when they had me … another impossibility. Like,” Garth furrowed his brow, bleakly remembering the behind-the-scenes manipulation the Ushbet M’Tai had engaged in to ensure his paradoxical birth, “the most impossiblest thing in the world. I know how that sounds. Something impossible, in the Unreal Universe? Trust me. I am a thing that should not have been born.”

  Garth couldn’t remember if he’d ever really said it like that before, but right then, that moment, trapped in a giant metal suit with skin so sensitive he could feel the air brush across it’s broad surface, the words … the words filled him with a longing ache unlike anything he’d ever felt.

  He was a thing that should never have been born. His life, his existence, everything he was and everything he’d done had brought the whole of the Unreal Universe to it’s knees and –unless he figured a way out of this fucking robosuit- things were going to be worse than ever before. The Heshii would win, the Unreal Universe would either reboot itself for one more go-around or it’d collapse into entropic dissolution.

  And he, Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez would’ve caused untold suffering across thirty thousand years for no reason.

  Agnethea heard the sorrow in Garth’s voice and ignored it. As a Golem, she’d often felt that way. Whole centuries of condemnation and vilification, moping around and lashing out. It was a ridiculous way to live, and yet, there was no way to prevent those feelings of loathing. The mind and the heart conspired against you and made you feel worthless and a million other things and you either got out of that pit or you wallowed in your own excrement for a thousand years.

  “Continue, Master Nickels, if you please.” Agnethea tried to sound as dispassionate as possible. The only thing worse than feeling that way was feeding into it, and sounding anything other than disinterested was a full meal to the miserable. “Your father, how this ties in to your immunity to Dark Iron and all else I need to know if I am to aid you.”