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

by Lee Bond

  Light began to dawn. “So our mad King Barnabas Blake told his cylinders to eat everything it comes into contact with, only he couldn’t have possibly expected the landing spots of two of three to be so hastily changed, or that one would find itself on an angle.”

  Nodding, Garth backed away as slowly and as carefully as he could. “Which means that there’s a super good chance that somewhere way down below our feet, there is a disc of lethal energy still happily chewing away on rock and dirt and like, hidden caches of Big King parts until it, like, I dunno, bursts through the other side of the planet or something mental like that.”

  “Well,” Agnethea replied rather sunnily, “that does for that, then, hey? This plan of yours to madly attack your own body with the lethal teeth of the King’s cylinder simply will not work, so we needs must depart this place quickly. Whereupon you shall do the wise thing, Master Nickels, and allow me entry into your, er, brain, at which point, I will free you from your…”

  “Nanotech-created tentacle rape kit.”

  “Tentacular prison.” Agnethea corrected haughtily, “Then the two of us shall travel to Arcadia and cause ourselves some mayhem.”

  “You know,” Garth cleared his throat and picked a direction, “you really are six shades of awesome. I know … knew … a handful of people that would’ve adopted you into their maniacal fold in a heartbeat.”

  “And who might they be?” Agnethea had a difficult time imagining anyone –other than Master Nickels, naturally- who would find her pleasant enough to be around.

  “My … the Kith’kineen and Kin’kithal.” The words fell out of his mouth, burdened with sorrow and regret and genuine, sincere longing. He’d done them all so wrong, so terribly, bloodily wrong, and poor Lisa. His suffering was nothing in comparison.

  If the depth of her madness and loathing at the end, when she’d finally been given the one thing she’d wanted all along, was any indication of what Kith Antal had –or was still- suffered, he was in for one helluva fight.

  If he got out of Arcade City with his soul, skin and mind intact.

  “Ah.” Agnethea nodded once, somberly. She didn’t know if Garth recalled telling the harrowing, tragic story of deceit and manipulation involving his comrades, but she did know she’d be triply damned if she brought it up again. The telling of that tale was morose enough to drive anyone to the deepest layers of depression, wasn’t it just?

  “Nevertheless, I am pleased we are moving away from Sliver Hills. Poor people. Poor Estate. The King shall get his comeuppance. We shall see to it.”

  “Oh, we ain’t moving from Sliver Hills, milady.” Garth corrected gently.

  Agnethea wanted to punch Garth’s eardrum in vexation. The man refused to see the sane course of action, leading her to believe that –no matter how normal and lucid he seemed when he was not afflicted with Specter’s huge appetite for destruction- he was, in fact, stark raving bonkers.

  “If this side of Sliver Hills is a trap of heavily undermined earth, Master Nickels,” Agnethea eyed the terrain carefully, because as Garth had pointed out, the field emanating from the center of the cylinder traveled in a flat plane in all directions, making the earth they trampled across dangerous in the extreme, “then surely, the other side will be too high for even you to reach.”

  “Don’t plan on reaching it. Well, not really. Kinda? Sorta. Yeah, no, I definitely, totally have a plan, though.”

  “Your specificity is overwhelming, Master Nickels.” This time, she did whack Nickels in the eardrum, which made him laugh. “As the only sane person in the vicinity, which is saying something awful about you, my dear friend, I should like for you to explain what it is you actually plan on doing.”

  Garth explained.

  Slouched against Garth’s eardrum, Agnethea shook her head woefully. “This is madness beyond reproach! That’ll never work. The disc is nearly a mile across, Garth. Certainly, parts of what you plan will succeed, but if all goes according to your madness, you will find yourself bouncing along that field well before you reach the center to, as you put, ‘fuck the engine up real good so it turns off’. You will be transformed into glittering motes of light, quick as a wink.”

  “Agnethea,” Garth intoned ominously, “if that field is capable of destroying what I am made of, then there is no hope at all, for anyone, anywhere, ever.”

  “Surely you are flesh and bone, as all outsiders are.” Agnethea jested.

  But Garth said nothing. He was taking a tremendous risk, and between now and the moment he did as planned, he needed to stay focused. Specter was right alongside, and part of him didn’t want to be free of the Dark Iron saturating his blood.

  ***

  Agnethea felt a coward, and it wasn’t something she liked. At the same time, she knew deep in her ancient bones that what Garth aimed to accomplish was tantamount to suicide.

  The Queen of Ickford kicked at a rock and watched it sail merrily through the air. Off in the distance, in the direction she’d kicked the stone, Garth Nickels lumbered ever close to the danger zone, music pouring once more from his broad, metallic body.

  “Foolish man.” Agnethea sniped. He was. He was the most foolish man she’d ever met in her entire life, and in that life, it was fair to say that she’d met basically every single person who’d ever drawn breath. The Obsidian Golem cupped her hands together and shouted the insult once more.

  No amount of discussion, no level of rational arrangement of ideas… nothing had worked.

  Master Nickels was going to attempt to use the reclamation cylinder’s … what had he called it now … the disintegration disc, yes that was the phrase, the disintegration disc to somehow cut himself loose of the giant metal body he reluctantly wore.

  When her case for the stupidity of the attempt had swung from logical discourse to shrill words and vile epithets, Master Nickels had literally turned the heat up across his body to levels that’d burned footprints into the grass and stone, neatly forcing her to the ground, whereupon he’d admonished her to stay out of harm’s way before resuming his death-trek.

  Agnethea stomped a foot. “Damn fool!”

  And then, because she knew she was being foolish herself, moved closer to the edge of the road so she might witness Garth’s vainglorious efforts in person.

  “All the better,” Agnethea snapped archly, raising a cross eyebrow, “to spread the tale of the man who could’ve defeated the King but instead chose to chop his own head off!”

  They’d traveled together for more than a week now, him dancing back and forth between Specter and Garth, each ‘personality’ sharing stories and telling tall tales, and in that time, Agnethea had grown –not just fond of the man, that’d happened nearly instantly- to admire the outsider. A great deal. Plans to recreate the Universe in his own image were narcissistic to an outrageous degree and equally troubling, just as the realization that if everything he’d unveiled during those story telling moments was true had been a moment of clarity too profound for words.

  She, and everyone who’d traveled far enough in Arcade City, had always ‘known’ that there was an outside. If you wandered in the right circles, you ran into the fools who got into it with Kings Sons all the time, but not once had any one of them ever really bothered to consider the truth of it.

  There was an outside. It was –as Garth had explained it- damned near as infinite a thing as a thing could be, and it was … full. Of life. Of death. Of stars and planets and strange things that made no sense. There were beings out there amidst those stars, living on those planets, beings who made the strangest-looking gearhead seem normal.

  Agnethea paced back and forth nervously. Master Nickels was trailing one of his vast hands across the edge of the disintegration field now, filling the air with brilliant golden sparks that popped and flared and stuttered wildly.

  From where she stood, it was just this side of breathtaking.

  Almost. For those winking golden motes were all that would remain of Master Nickels soon enough.


  It was as he’d surmised, then: she had been under the illusion that the invisible teeth emanating from the actual, blinding white-hot teeth set into cylinder was paper thin, an unseen razor slicing through everything. Master Nickels had set her right, suggesting that a field that thin could –in theory- be overwhelmed by the amount of matter collapsing downward into it’s ever-hungry maw, eventually –and catastrophically- causing the machinery to erupt.

  As ever when explaining something technical, Master Nickels had used an awful lot of big words and lofty ideas, but Agnethea had come to figure out a method of deciphering what the man meant, and to take no offense when he did explain things. Just as he was a vicious warrior with a mind-blowing understanding of the battlefield, so too was it the same with concepts running both deep and heavy.

  “Damn fool!” The Queen hissed. The idiot’s hands were high above his head now, and the … particulate … falling down the invisible field to the cylinder was a veritable stream, a glittering, golden stream that had to be as bright as those stars Master Nickels spoke so lovingly about.

  How those metallic hands remained intact was something of a mystery. All else falling into the field had dissipated within seconds, yet Master Nickels’ converted Kingbot appendages appeared to be relatively untouched.

  “Please, don’t do this.” The words came out a whisper. “This is the same as suicide.”

  As if he’d heard her from nearly a mile away, Master Nickels turned his head and gave her a big wink. Then, just as he’d said he would, he grabbed hold of the indiscernible edge of the disintegration field and pushed with all the strength at his command, intent on getting the angle of the field to a more … decapitation-friendly position.

  Heart hammering in her chest enough to cause an actual heart attack, Queen Agnethea of Ickford had no choice but to stand there and watch as Master Nickels forced the reclamation cylinder to a more agreeable angle. Though he struggled and strained with the effort, the attempt was proving successful; brilliant streams of light were now flowing even more freely from the hands, but also from areas all over the disc as those buildings and structures spared the initial bout of annihilation were now fed to the King’s awful device.

  Surely, the light stabbing towards The Dome was visible across the whole of Arcade City. Gearheads and Gearmen and all manner of beast would come flocking to this location soon enough, as would the King Himself, once he realized what was going on.

  Well, that was fine, Agnethea supposed. If Master Nickels somehow succeeded in the dual act of both freeing himself from his metallic prison and the dismantling of the cylinder –not to mention the implausible task of surviving- the Golem reckoned she’d sadly be the one to greet those lookee-loos.

  Master Nickels’ titanic struggle to shove the disc up to a level where he could behead himself with greater ease eventually proved successful; as Agnethea watched, frantic, dismayed, heart hammering in her chest still. The fear that he’d erupt into a volcanic rush of golden particles without any kind of warning wouldn’t leave her!

  The towering robot man stepped backwards at last and –as any handyman would do after a particularly dirty job- wiped his hands clean.

  Agnethea’s much-strained heart gave one heavy hammer then lodged itself firmly in her mouth as those hands, hands proven to be the match of the disintegration field, shattered into so much fine black dust, dust that drifted quickly to the ground.

  And then, as she looked on in morbid awe, thick gouts of Dark Iron pulsed out of the open holes at the ends of the man’s wrists, dual rivers of Vicious Elixir. The soil beneath his feet drank deep of the poisonous effluence, the very earth reacting to terrible quantities by suddenly erupting forth with strange, jagged-edged shapes that rose and fell, rose and fell, all around him until whatever devilry as was responsible faded.

  “This is beyond belief.” Agnethea held her breath, convinced that her companion would bleed out right there on the spot.

  But of course, Master Nickels did nowt but give a determined shrug as if to say ‘here we go’. He squared his shoulders, stepped forward, angling his neck so it met with the infinitely sharp edge of the disc.

  Thick, invisible teeth bit into green metal.

  Agnethea’s china-white hands stole to her thinly scarred neck.

  The sound filling the air was agonizing!

  It cut through everything, setting Agnethea’s teeth on edge to the point where the agony blazing through her pounding skull grew exquisite as diamonds. For a perilous moment, it was all she could do to stay upright. Keeping an eye on a man’s suicide attempt fell to the wayside.

  Oh, this were worse than The Clamoring by far, and e’en as things somehow grew worse still, Agnethea caught herself wondering at what Master Nickels himself endured inside that vast body. The Golem dropped to her knees, shuddering, wishing for silence, convinced that her ears –if she survived- would ring from now ‘til Judgment.

  Out of nowhere, the keening, wailing sound doubled in intensity, then just as swiftly, trebled, causing the very heavens to shiver and tremble under the merciless onslaught. The clamoring between Agnethea’s ears grew worse and worse until the Golem felt her eyes judder in their sockets as well.

  “If you kill me as well, Master Nickels,” Agnethea clamped her hands to the sides of her skull, pushing hard as she might to keep everything where it ought to remain, “I shall be royally pissed.”

  The pain … oh, she’d thought before the pain had been exquisite, but she’d been wrong, so very wrong. That pain, only seconds ago, that’d been nothing but a delightful aperitif, a slight amuse-bouche, barely a tickle on the nerves. What assaulted her now was crystal-pure violence, an unwavering, merciless violation that flayed her nerves raw. The shrill sound was the match for the fire that burned through you hot on the heels of Kingsblood torment, but where being welded to the Iron was an aching volcano of fire, this shivering, crystalline agony was ground glass across bloody skin.

  Her eyes, the only weak point in a Golem’s unbreakable flesh, continued quivering and shivering, matching the oscillating tones, driving Agnethea further and further to the ground until she was on the ground, twitching, a ragged heap…

  The ambush stopped. Drawing herself raggedly upright, Agnethea probed at the corners of her eyes, praying to some previously unimagined deity that everything remained intact. When her gritty, dirty fingers encountered no untoward wetness, Agnethea heaved a quivering sigh of relief.

  Then, remembering where she was and the cause of that arduous assault, Agnethea turned towards Master Nickels’ last known location just in time to see his giant, perfectly formed robotic head, gliding ever so gently down an invisible edge so sharp it bled atoms, leaving in his wake streamers of golden energy that flitted off into the night sky.

  It seemed to Agnethea that –even as Garth’s metal head ground itself into golden dust- the idiot winked at her again!

  ***

  Being merged with a gigantic robot body formed out of pure nanotech by way of massive, worm-like tubes with sharp, gyrating teeth wasn’t the best thing in the world, but once you got over the initial shock of being tentacularly raped and flooded with an eternal nightmare-ocean of Kingsblood that threatened to pull your immortal soul to pieces every few seconds, it wasn’t as bad as all that.

  That torrential inundation of Dark Iron, the thing gearheads and everyone else so laughing called Vicious Elixir or Kingsblood or if you were particularly banal, crudey-crude­ had swarmed through his body, finishing the bizarre transformation that’d been started in Ickford; where before, in that doomed city, his flesh had mimicked most cruelly the geared tattoos ‘inked’ into his body, driving the skin and muscle into a perverse ticking thing, now … now the ‘sblood polluting him had finally completed the job.

  There was very little left to the body he’d worn for hundreds of years. In fact, he was nothing more than an engine now, connected right to the brain of the Gunboy through a hideous collaboration of resilient Kin’kithal flesh, u
nexpected Vicious Elixir immunity and an endless supply of tubes.

  His own father wouldn’t recognize him. Hell, he was barely recognizable as a living thing, let alone human.

  Well, truthfully, even before he’d begun the adventure to end the Universe, it was fair to say he’d hardly resembled a proper human being. The realization had very little to do with him being a Kin’kithal and everything to do with who he was at the core of his being; the others … Lisa, Griffon, Arkadie … they’d all had their dark moments, their bouts with the excessive hunger and maniacal pride the scions of the Kith and Kin possessed, but at the end of the day, they’d been just normal kids with abnormal powers and an even weirder fate laying ahead of them. Chances were, their diminished levels of true, staggeringly hungry rage was a direct result of his telekinetic manipulation of their DNA: they’d only been partial paradoxes, and for that small grace, Garth was very grateful.

  Owning more humanity than him, his ‘children’ wouldn’t have been able to handle the blunt force of true paradoxical life.

  But now the inhumanity he’d carried inside was … on the outside. Which was why he’d fought and struggled and eventually resorted to dirty pool to keep Agnethea from climbing into his cavernous skull; the metamorphosis begun in Ickford, there at the end, with his flesh cracking and turning and spinning into clockwork mechanisms, was ghastly. There were no other words to describe it.

  In fact, the transformation had happened very quickly, almost immediately after that very first semi-sentient metal tentacle -complete with vicious, gnawing mouth-had chewed right into his chest, delivering a hotshot of crudey-crude powerful enough to turn the strongest gearhead first into a gibbering fool and then into a greasy stain of fire-burnt ash and maybe a few singed flywheels.