by Lee Bond
“Go on.” Dave felt that old familiar curiosity welling through him once again. He caught himself praying that this time, that keenness didn’t result in similar circumstances as last time.
“When I asked if you’d spoken with anyone from outside, my next question, before I got sidetracked imagining you doing for Kings all rude with the crude, was to’ve been ‘did aught of them, at any time, attempt to explain the true nature of outside’?” Worlds. More worlds than she could think of, all spinning about, all full of people doing their best and their worst.
“Once or twice, aye.” Dave gestured weakly, trying to encapsulate the width and breadth of the explanation. “The one fella, Strange Tim, he went on at great length about it. Used to be something called a ‘pilot’, which were a man who flew some sort of craft about, ferrying the rich and wealthy hither and yon. Accidentally did for a King’s Son during a crash. Got tossed in here quicker than gossip travels through Arcadia. Anyways, according to Tim, outside is … vast. Wide open and apparently we drift through a thing called ‘space’, which is a deadly dangerous void as can kill anything. And in this ‘space’, there are planets and suns and moons and all else. I confess I can’t quite recall all the words he used. Before the Kingsblood grabbed full hold, he would get quite excited about it all and would lapse into jargon used by his profession.”
Agnethea burst out laughing. “I can well imagine what that was like for you, Davram. But your man Strange Tim did explain it right enough. Our slumbering guest over yon said almost similar. Do go on. Did Tim mention the people, and these things called Offworlders?”
Dave furrowed his brow. Where discussion on planets and moons and suns and all that had been easy enough to grasp as purely theoretical stuff –Tim had once laid stones out on the ground to make it more understandable- it all fell apart when it came down to numbers.
“That he did, that he did.” Dave smiled weakly. “Barely could wrap my noggin around it all, if you must know. But our Tim, he said there were more worlds in the outside than there were people in all of Arcade City, and that on those worlds, there were ten, a hundred, a thousand times as many people. On each. And that in some places, they weren’t people at all, but these … Offworlders? Offworlders that you made mention of, and where gearheads and all the monsters and challenges that the King did set forth for us were strange enough by themselves, some of these beings were properly odd. Beings made of glass with lights twinkling inside them, or great brutes with fangs, or … well. Tim didn’t start talking about Offworlders until after his fifth King, Mistress Agnethea, and by that time, we were both well under the spell of Kingsblood. Could’ve been making it all up. But what’s this understanding of outside to do with Master Nickels?”
A slow, breathtaking stab of heat slid through her brain right then, a flaring white-hot spreading of liquid fire that Agnethea could do nothing but hold a finger in the air, signaling for the Brigadier to wait. Steeling herself against all outward expression of pain or fear as only an eleven thousand year old Obsidian Golem could, Agnethea counted the seconds, filling her conscious mind with sights and sounds from times long gone.
When she thought she was able without shrieking in agony so loudly that the King himself would come down to see what ailed her, Agnethea began her story properly. “What I am about to tell you may seem as the purest fancy ever imagined by any storyteller you ever met in your long life, Master Brigadier Davram. I assure you, that when Master Nickels began sharing it with me in bits and pieces as we traveled across Arcade City, I thought much as you soon will.”
“Well, I am intrigued now. More than that.” Dave rolled a hand for Agnethea to begin.
Taking a deep breath to settle her nerves –and to quieten her worrisome brain- Agnethea spoke softly, gently, so that if Garth were truly awake, he would take no offense. “There is a war going on outside, Davram, and at the center is our new friend, Garth Nickels…”
***
Garth sat on the opposite end of the fire, listening to Agnethea’s retelling of his life story, both appalled and glad he’d spilled so many of the secrets he’d been carrying so close to his heart to someone like her; the Queen of the Golems was the sort of woman who not only understood the merit of secrets, but had more than a few of her own. That she was choosing to tell Davram –who Garth held no ill will against for his decisions spoke volumes about his trustworthiness.
Spoken aloud, told from someone else’s point of view, the War Against the Heshii and the things he personally had done to ensure that the Unreality would have a chance to be made Real was an eye-opener, that was for certain.
The fire popped loudly as it hit some pitch or sap in one of the logs, and the tally for King Barnabas’ attention to detail rose a bit more. Sap. In trees that really didn’t need it. But the King’s illusion had needed as much reality as possible so his children might one day grow into warriors with flesh and souls strong enough to handle the darkness in the heart of Kingsblood.
Garth shifted his thoughts back to Agnethea’s tale. She sped past much of the death and dishonor he’d done in the name of the Unreality, but lingered long on recounted stories of his time with Armageddon Troop, all but ignored the kick-ass constructs he’d built in favor of highlighting the fractious nature of his early days with Huey about the Meadowlark Lemon.
The two of them laughed uproariously at how badly he’d handled his arrival on Hospitalis, taking time out from their jocularity to make pithy comments on the nature of age and relative skill in manipulation.
Garth opened his eyes. He didn’t need to hear the story. He’d lived through it. Though Agnethea’s recitation seemed to make him less of a monster and villain and more a man trying to do the right thing, the weary Engineer didn’t have it in him to listen to someone trying to paint him in the right light.
A brief moment of awareness from Agnethea and Davram said they knew he’d been awake the whole time, and a hushed dip in the conversational flow gave Garth the opportunity to interrupt, to ask them to stop, to give orders.
Garth ignored the moment. There was something out there in the darkness he needed to take a look at. He muttered some sort of excuse, encouraged Agnethea to continue on so Davram the Last Brigadier could have a clearer picture of why the only King anyone under The Dome had ever known needed to be killed so badly that his death echoed through time and space for all eternity, then went to wake up the horse.
Sensing the presence of the one whom it’d been told was it’s master, the horse opened it’s great eyes. Dim illumination from the fiery glowing orbs flickered, setting the ground afire. The other two horses stood where they were, though Garth knew from previous experience that all the steampunk horses never truly slept; twice now, each of the tremendous steeds had split the air with harsh screams, early warning systems designed to alert them to oncoming foes.
Garth ran a hand across the horse’s withers, and it responded by pawing the ground with one great metal hoof. The soil tore apart like it’d been assaulted by a giant earthmover. “We’re gonna go take a peek at something, okay, boy?”
The horse nickered, dipping it’s front legs forward a bit so it’s rider could climb with ease aboard; when he’d caused the great, clamoring mounts to rise up out of the earth, Davram’s direct control over Will hadn’t been at it’s finest, giving birth to metal horses close to ten feet from hoof to withers.
If anyone had survived the King’s assault on his own land, they’d take one look at the gleaming platinum horse with eyes that were routes directly to hell more than they were eyes and they’d go running the other way so fast their feet would leave marks in the ground, a la Looney Tunes.
“If they got close enough to see these fucking things.” Garth swung onto the horse. “Bitches are noisier than Optimus Prime on his way to get the oil changed.”
And they were. It was an ‘unavoidable feature’ of the steeds. Davram had apologized most profusely, saying it was beyond his power to create anything outside King’s Will, and
as the horses were more properly equipment belonging to Gearmen who needed to strike fear into the hearts of gearheads and monsters everywhere, they needed to be as daunting and as imposing as possible, adding that earlier iterations had not only had the great glowing eyes, fearsome features and diabolical sounds issuing forth but literal horns and spikes growing out of the head.
Riding across a midnight landscape atop a demon horse while an angry demigod King stared down from on high sounded like a goddamn blast, but his mission tonight was more of a personal one, just a moment of understanding and reflection on the nature of annihilation.
He planned on destroying everything so everything could be born again. Out there, on the boundaries of land left behind, there was a prime example of what the nothingness looked like.
Garth geed his horse into motion and angled the great steamhorse towards the nearest border between this world and the next.
***
“Do you think we should follow him?” Agnethea wondered, already up and moving towards Monsieur Platine. Master Nickels had refused to name his horse on the grounds that it wasn’t a real thing, to which she’d merely arched an eyebrow; he’d caught his own accidental irony in that shapely twitch of a brow and had laughed. Laughed, but refused to name his own steed.
Davram considered the question, staring deep into the flames. “’tis a tricky question, milady. It’s obvious that our man wants to be well alone, else why would he wait for us to be engrossed in discourse? From the angle of his departure, I would say he’s off to look at the End nearest us here.”
Agnethea rubbed Monsieur Platine’s withers affectionately. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this close to any kind of a horse. As far as she could recollect, the King had outlawed all horses –indeed, all types of animalistic locomotion- thousands and thousands of years ago. She truly loved Monsieur Platine. It didn’t matter one whit to her that the noble beast had clambered up out of the ground at Davram’s command, or that it was no real horse.
Platine behaved like one, and that was all that mattered. Agnethea wished she had some sugar cubes.
“I’m sorry, Master Brigadier,” Agnethea mimed giving Platine some sugar cubes, and the steamhorse obliged the fallacy, “I distinctly recall wondering if we should give chase to Master Nickels a second time in a single day, not what he wants and where he’s going. You do forget, I’m roughly ten times older than you, if not more. I knew Master Nickels was going to do this before you were even born.”
Davram snapped his fingers and the fire puffed away in a flash of sparks. “Before I was born, Mistress Agnethea, you were busy terrorizing the Northern Plateaus into believing you were a Wicked Witch of some sorts, were you not?”
“Oh my!” The Obsidian Golem feigned an arrow to the chest. “I hadn’t thought it in you.”
Davram approached his own horse, Sir Plantagenet the 15th, producing a sugar cube out of thin air. Planty scarfed it down appreciatively. “In the ranks of Brigadier, milady, ‘tis not enough to have the powers of a god, nor even how to use them best to aid humanity. ‘tis also important to be able to ride your brothers and sisters so mercilessly with dry humor and outright sarcasm ‘til they either drew down upon you or return with their own. Why, I remember once Sonnensfeld, our very own Poet Brigadier, did craft an eighteen page poem to Harland’s amazing skills as a Brigadier and read it out at one of our epic dinners. Everyone thought ‘twas a grand honor, none more so than Harland himself, until Sonnensfeld got to the last page and we all realized the epic struggle depicted within was naught more than a particularly difficult bowel movement overheard after a night of heavy drinking.”
“A wonderful story, Davram. But it doesn’t answer my question.” Agnethea shook her head. Poetic potty humor. Not surprising. You could take the man away from the gears, but you couldn’t take the gears away from the man.
“Oh, aye, that I do, milady, that I do indeed.” Davram swung onto Planty. “The three of us together provide enough cover through our various perturbations of Will to make it plenty difficult for our Mad King to see us. Perhaps even two of us provide enough miasma to accurately pinpoint our location. But singly? Master Nickels is the most important of us all, and I assert that the King will find him soon enough.”
Agnethea nodded, then held out a hand. When Davram stared at the lovely hand in utter confusion, she snapped her fingers impatiently. “Sugar cubes. For Monsieur Platine. I can’t sodding well create stuff out of thin air like some people in the area, Master Brigadier, and you have made my horse jealous.”
“Ah. Yes. Apologies.” Davram willed some sugar cubes into being and handed them over to the Queen of the Golems, who accepted them gratefully. “Now, shall we hie ourselves thither, to save the fool from his own damned deep thoughts?”
Agnethea slipped a cube into Platine’s eager mouth. Ferocious jets of steam scorched the ground with blistering hot wetness. “I do. Though not too quickly. The fool … the fool needs to come to grips with what he is, now, before too much time has gone by. Else I fear the King will succeed.”
***
The edge of the known world loomed. It was mesmerizing, in a weird sort of way. One second you were walking through tall grass –or galumphing astride a giant metal horse, whichever- and the next you were confronted by a razor-sharp end.
To everything.
From a distance, coming to grips with the fact that there was a point where all matter in Arcade City ceased to exist had been much the same as dealing with the oppressive burden weighing down atop your head, pressure from the trillion ton Dome spanning the heavens. So long as you didn’t have to confront it, it was just there, over the horizon, and whatever was going on didn’t matter because you couldn’t get to it.
Garth had found the trick to ignoring The Dome was to pretend it didn’t exist, though truthfully, it hadn’t worked very well. Every few seconds he’d had his damn head tilted skyward, trying to see the vast engines at work, trying to plot where the light was coming from … any number of things. So, now that he thought on it, Garth had to admit to himself –looking over the lip and down, down, down into nothingness- that he hadn’t really conned himself into ignoring The Dome at all.
That fallacy didn’t really extend to … The Nothing. It was vast and it was pervasive and try as he might, Garth’s pop-culture laden brain couldn’t think of a single fucking humorous thing to call what he was looking at, so it was The Nothing.
Or … nothing.
“Hah.” Garth spat over the edge, chuckling some more over his lame joke. “I knew I’d get there eventually.”
The glob of spittle disappeared a few seconds later, flecking into a paltry burst of poor copper light; not enough matter to be properly reabsorbed into the King’s storehouse of material.
Garth recalled stepping through the Geared Door with nearly perfect clarity. Everything had seemed so … amazing. Yes, even though gearheads and wardogs, for as grotesque and personally revolting as their own metamorphoses were, there was a kind of terrible awesomeness about what King Barnabas Blake’s so-called Will had wrought.
In truth, there was very little about Arcade City, The Dome, the Big Kings, and all the rest that wasn’t awesome. Under The Dome, the true scope of power held by someone possessing the keys to nanotech was unveiled in a way that his own foray into reshaping matter couldn’t possible manage.
His project, the machine to drive the birth of the Universe, was too big. There were maybe a handful of men, women and aliens in the entire Unreality that could see the scope of it, and even then, the functionality of the machine was just that.
Functional. Barnabas Blake’s terrarium universe was the inverse; it was more about the form than the function, and from what Garth had seen in Agnethea’s private museum of forgotten memories, it’d been that was for longer than most civilizations had even been around.
“Am I jealous?” Garth asked the empty void, taking a step back as he did so; the formless black … emptiness was spatially d
isorienting. You couldn’t tell how far or close you were to the edge without looking down at your feet. One moment of laxity and your inner ear could have you tumbling over the edge in seconds.
Then you’d be nothing but golden atoms, flowing towards the apex of The Dome, destined for some inscrutable purpose.
No, he wasn’t jealous. Well, not much. When he’d bent to the task of coming up with a method of creating a machine large enough to move galaxies around, there’d been no time for fripperies. Were there anyone on the outside of the Unreality looking in –say, some notoriously silent Engines of Creation, perhaps- they’d better goddamn well be amazed at the fact that a fairly normal dude had created a machine to move galaxies around.
When you pulled something like that off, you really didn’t need it to look awesome.
It was fucking awesome incarnate.
Garth pointed a finger very seriously at The Nothing. “And that, motherfucker, is what I can do. No one can touch that level of cool. Not even Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark!”
And it was cool. Then there was also what happened after those galaxies were shuffled around.
Reality 2.0.
If he was right and everything went the way the Ushbet M’Tai had seemed to believe it would, that wondrous new place would be a million times more amazing than the Unreality, and not only because it’d be real, but because … because.
Mankind, alienkind, and things too weird and bizarre to even properly imagine … they’d all have a chance to properly explore and experience their surroundings. Unlike everyone in the Unreality.
Garth took a deep breath, held for it a while, then let it go slowly. That was the most important thing, he thought, about Reality 2.0. Everyone would have the chance to explore. To see things that would otherwise be nothing but dreams and fantasies. It would take a long time for all that to come to fruition, but that growing awareness of the universe around them would grow apace with their maturity.