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

by Lee Bond

  Mostly. In a Universe of limitless possibility, Garth supposed it was naïve to ignore the possibility that someone, somewhere, across one of those leaves in his imaginary tree, might not just create a portal to another leaf before the invention of cellphones … but that was where Huey came in. The God in the Machine. Huey was perfectly adapted to monitor never-ending iterations of a theme, and should something like that happen, well…

  Garth shrugged. There was no knowing what’d happen next. The plan didn’t exactly call for him to be hanging around at the end, now did it?

  None of that would come to pass, though, if King Barnabas Blake the One and Only wasn’t dealt with properly. And now that Garth knew precisely what the monarch of Arcade City really and truly was, it was more important than ever before that he get it just right.

  The Brains of Bravo hadn’t known much about those weird things calling themselves the CyberPriests. First and foremost, their dossiers on the ancient cadre of cybernetic freakazoids had indicated that they possessed access to a kind of shattered Harmony, a weird … splinter … of essence. Hypothetically, the ‘Priests were an experiment from the Armies of Man, and even more hypothetically, that splinter came from one of the other Spheres of Existence.

  Wherever their powers came from, they were a dangerous threat, and a risk the Armies of Man should never have taken, regardless of their desperation or their fear.

  It was hard to wrap your head around the desperation involved in that decision. Or, for that matter, the science behind drilling through the Unreality without causing the whole fucking shebang to end right there on the spot. Garth was totally stoked to hell and back that whatever method those mad scientists had used to drill through the Unreality hadn’t caused dissolution right there on the spot. Like always, though, it turned out that there totally were things out there that were way fucking worse than the spontaneous collapse of the Universe.

  The CyberPriests fell... No. The ‘Priests swan-dived into that category with a double-barreled ‘fuck you’ to every living thing in the Unreality. Including every other random superpower that sought to destroy the goddamn thing for their own purposes, which was precisely why they were so terrifying.

  Unlike the Heshii or Trinity, the CyberPriests had absolutely zero interest in doing anything at all with the surge of energy that would come with the End of the Unreality. Except –and it was a shitstorm nightmare idea- possibly use it to unravel the Spheres that formed the Harmony.

  All they wanted was the end. Of everything.

  In an Unreal Universe, where everything and anything could and probably had come to life in one form or another, the CyberPriests were unique. Truly alien. The shattered Harmony boiling away in their souls made it impossible for them to connect with anything.

  Another gentle breeze passed through the tall grass behind Garth. Nearly half a mile away, his steamhorse grazed, somewhat impatiently; the moody Engineer gathered from the horse’s dismay at being left so far from it’s ‘master’ that Davram had embedded protective protocols deep inside it’s animal-like brain. He didn’t care.

  These thoughts needed thinking.

  Garth rooted a heavy stone from it’s earthy prison, unsurprised that no ants or spiders or earthworms milled about, shocked and frightened by the change to their local existence. If the King found birds and suns and moons and rain too fucking complex to maintain, the endless world of insects would be an unfathomable mess.

  Hefting the rock back and forth between rough hands, Garth took time to marvel at the purity of the stone; when you got right down to it, even a simple thing like a rock in Arcade City was amazing. Over the course of thirty thousand years and with the King’s incessant tinkering but with the very landscape itself, the chance that the stone he was juggling idly back and forth between two hands wasn’t even a real stone anymore was really high.

  It felt like a rock, it had the heft of stone. If he felt like being a weirdo, he could lick it and there was every possibility that not only would he automatically regret it for a number of reasons but that it’d also taste … stony. Odds were, though, that it –and everything else from trees to grass and all the stuff between- was denatured nanotech. Same thing, but different, too, by a small matter of degrees.

  Garth sent the stone zipping out into King’s Blackness. “For a guy who wants to destroy everything, you sure spent a lot of fucking time and effort in creating.”

  A football field away, the rock hit a disintegration field and puffed away.

  It was as simple as that. At the end of the day, that was all it took. The right combination of science and willpower and you could create or destroy with the press of a button or the blink of an eye.

  Of if you preferred melodrama like an old King, a flash of golden light.

  Garth ran a hand through his hair, wondering at the chain of events that’d led Barnabas Blake to this point. If only Bravo had unearthed more data on the creation of the CyberPriests; at the time of their … interment … inside Bravo as nothing more than disembodied brains, those representatives of Man had only been peripherally aware of ‘Project Songbird’. It hadn’t had legs back then, had seemed impossible, and had had more than enough opponents to crush it dead in it’s tracks.

  Obviously, though, that’d changed and Songbird’s fallen volunteers had taken flight. The whys and wherefores of the brotherhood fleeing into the night and staying hidden for roughly ever was one of those nuggets Bravo hadn’t been able to dig loose

  It just didn’t make sense. Their goal was annihilation alone. Their dreams hadn’t been locked into place by his Great Con like every other player in the game.

  Why had they waited so long to try?

  The grass stirred gently one more time.

  “There wasn’t a breeze that time, motherfucker. Prepare to …” Garth spun, a cocky grin on his face. He wasn’t surprised that Barnie had sent someone or some thing after him; the obfuscation field generated by the three oddest things left in Arcade City –next to the King himself- was mighty powerful. Start separating people, and it weakened. “Are you fucking serious? Frankenstein’s Monster?”

  The Bolt-Neck grinned a cadaverous grin and reached out with arms that seemed to go on for days.

  ***

  Agnethea put a hand gently on Davram’s shoulder. Tension and strain to ride out to Master Nickels had the Brigadier’s muscles vibrating in place. “Hold, Brigadier, you must hold.”

  Dave cast a hand at the scene unfolding not more than three hundred feet way. “That is a Bolt-Neck, Agnethea! Few grey-skinned gearheads can handle one of those lumbering monstrosities. Even I am sorely pressed in singular combat against those green-skinned beasts. Of course…”

  Agnethea wiggled here eyebrows. “You wouldn’t get that close, would you? Astride Planty there, you would no doubt pinion our Bolt-Neck to the ground with a lance summoned from the very air. Whereas I would get in nice and close.” She thumped her arms. “Very durable.”

  “Well now,” Dave inched his horse forward, “you have aptly described how the two of us would deal with that fearsome creature. But as Master Nickels either has no power or does not know how to use what he possesses, he is in dire trouble! We must ride.”

  “We cannot.” Agnethea pushed Monsieur Platine until they were literally blocking the Brigadier’s path; Dave snorted and gestured to either side, indicating he had more than enough room to go wherever the hell he wanted, but didn’t go anywhere.

  “Tell me, then, milady, why are you so insistent we allow this man to commit suicide when by your very own tale, he is the most important man in the whole … Universe? That is the word. Yes. Why are we doing this?” Davram kept his eyes trained on the Bolt-Neck and Master Nickels, itching to flow forward to dispatch the lumbering cadaver just as Agnethea had implied.

  Thus far, they were slowly, warily circling one another, which was a bit of good news. Bolt-Necks possessed above normal intellect, meaning that the one squaring off against a lone man at the edge of Arcad
e City surely had to be reasoning out why it’s Lord and Master had sent it against Nickels in the first place: it wouldn’t press the attack properly until it believed it had Garth’s measure.

  “Every man and woman under The Dome goes through a gauntlet, Master Davram, be it the Kingsblood route or the apparently simple yet fiendishly difficult task of just living your life in relative peace and quiet.” Agnethea pointed to Garth, who was scooping up rocks and bouncing them, one after the other, off the Bolt-Neck’s vast forehead. “Master Nickels is no different.”

  Dave furrowed his brow. “He is immune to Kingsblood. I …”

  “Were you not listening?” Agnethea hissed sharply. “He is anything but immune.”

  The Brigadier’s face went red as his bedamned brow furrowed deep enough to plant corn in the rows of his ignorance. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  Agnethea rubbed her fingers together, remembering the one time Master Nickels had allowed her touch him, how the Kingsblood under his skin had felt … softer than normal, filled with a tremendous heat. So unlike any other instance of Dark Iron she’d ever encountered. Then, of course, there was the strange thing happening to her, because of him. “Out there in the outside, Master Brigadier, Garth Nickels is a man of overwhelming power. Perhaps one of the most powerful men to have ever drawn breath, throughout the whole stretch of time, since the very beginning. His parents, his father in particular, were literal Titans, juggernauts of pitiless strength and merciless power, resulting in our man over yonder.”

  The two paused to look on as Garth deftly feinted away from one of the Bolt-Neck’s cautious attacks. Even from where they stood, they could see the gleam of excitement on his face. Only he would enjoy fighting something as fearsome as a Bolt-Neck on the Edge of the World.

  “Is he…” Davram squinted.

  “Yes.” Agnethea said drolly. “Smiling. He is an idiot. So in the outside, Garth is … a factor. A single man, engaged in preparing a war against immortal, powerful enemies. Though before meeting him I would have never imagined such a thing as possible, I somehow suspect that would change a man.”

  Dave’s face darkened as he tried to envision the sort of circumstances that could arise from such an awful … life, he supposed, was the proper word. He couldn’t. The nearest possible parallel was his own life, more specifically, the painful and arduous journey to transform himself from gearhead to Brigadier. Oh, there had been some desperate times indeed. “And what has this to do with Kingsblood, and how wrong I am?”

  Agnethea didn’t tease or mock. She’d missed the connection herself, the first few times she’d found herself wandering down Garth’s plan. Instead, she explained it as cleanly and neatly as she could. “Outside, he was a man who could move mountains with his mind, Davram. He has fought and slain things that make Big Kings seem like playtoys. He fought a soldier on the cusp of becoming some kind of God. The list is truthfully endless. Yet, all he has done so far had been … hmmm … on the physical level. Everything he touched, already existed. Everything he bent to his will, pardon the pun, was already there.

  Here, in The Dome, this close to the end of things, that is changing for Garth. Immune to Dark Iron? No, quite the opposite. There is summat in Master Nickels that rises to any challenge, Davram, rises to it and in true conqueror fashion, seeks to either use what assails him or discovers a way to destroy it fully. In the case of Dark Iron and King’s Will, that metamorphosis has taken longer than believable, mostly because Garth himself fought against his own nature. Every step of the way, every turn of the clock, summat happened to give him cause to imbibe more Kingsblood, to give whatever is in him more material to work with.”

  Understanding was beginning to dawn in Davram’s mind, illuminating things about Garth he’d either not considered or had just outright missed because he’d been so focused on being the kind of Brigadier he was supposed to’ve been a hundred years ago. “Outside, he is like a Brigadier.” A tiny smirk on Agnethea’s lips forced him to add, “A bloodily violent Brigadier, then. You’re saying that from the moment he walked through the Geared Door, summat within has been trying to get him to drink more Iron on purpose? To what purpose?”

  “To make him the same inside as out.” Agnethea winced as Master Nickels delivered a staggering uppercut into the Bolt-Neck’s outstretched jaw; the towering green-skinned monster’s head barely moved from the impact while their man’s hand had to be smarting something fierce. “And that is what he fears, Davram. More than anything else. He is terrified of being given the same kind of power as our King. Garth has fought long and hard to impress upon those around him that he is, at heart, no different than them. Just ‘a regular dude’. When he tells tales from his past, all his heroes, the men and women he idolizes are heroes, but to a one, they are simply smarter than the rest, have more resources to build things that can save people, towns, worlds. You were there, at the bar. You saw the bloody aftermath. He is a man full of rage, anger. Before coming to Arcade City, should he wish to destroy a city, he would need to sit down and consider the best way to achieve those ends, yes? He would need to draft the weapon’s design? Contemplate what type of devastation, how much carnage. How fast? Or does this city deserve a malingering, slow, dreadful passage to that other side. Give him the powers of our King, and all that changes. Suddenly, literally, what he wills, is. And his anger and rage, Master Brigadier, is too great for Kingsblood to touch. He fears that, with the powers of our godlike King, everything for him will change. He will go from being ‘quirky Engineer with anger issues’ to ‘murderous all-powerful psychopath’. It is quite obvious he would rather die than become that sort of person. Regardless of his wishes, however, he has somehow assimilated Kingsblood into his very essence. Like it or not.”

  Davram mimed a few jabs as Garth stepped in for another round of tentative punches. “Which do you think?”

  “My money, Master Brigadier?” Agnethea smiled toothily when this uppercut slammed into Old Bolty’s exposed jaw hard enough to send the head snapping backwards.

  At last.

  Master Nickels was at long last removing the mask he wore. For better or worse.

  The monster’s dismay echoed across the grassy field.

  “Somewhere right in the middle. Because these M’Zahdi Hesh he speaks of will not be defeated by a nice man playing it nice. Quite the opposite, really.”

  ***

  “What the fuck are you made out of?” Garth demanded as he danced out of the way of another slow attack, nursing his hand and hissing in pain; catching the Bolt-Neck with that uppercut had been like punching a boulder.

  The Bolt-Neck grinned a ghastly, green grin and went for his opponent, moving a bit quicker than it had just a few seconds ago. There was no real threat here, no real danger. The King Himself imagined the man to possess some kind of special ability, but beyond that single punch –surprising that it’d landed, no more, no less- the pathetic, puny weakling had nothing to offer.

  Still, King’s Will was King’s Will, and so caution was the play on the field.

  Garth skipped backwards a few feet then jigged to the left, always keeping a firm mental eye on the edge of the World. He didn’t think he could handle showing up in the knock-off version of Valhalla and having to explain to anyone that he’d fallen to his goddamn death while fighting Frankenstein’s Monster.

  Goddamn embarrassing. Like dying at the hands of an Ewok.

  While the Monster hastened to get back into range, Garth considered his options.

  Well, technically, there was only one option available to him; he could dig down into his soul and find whatever it was that all that Dark Iron had become, and use it. The whispering sensation of Will across his skin was still just as present –if not more so now he was under extreme duress- as it had ever been.

  It was just … just …

  What if? What if he …

  The Monster stepped within range and delivered a gentle love tap with a God soldier sized boot, sending Garth flyin
g backwards through the air, a human-shaped football.

  Gasping, wheezing, panting … all those assorted noises you made when you were kicked by a fantastic monster summoned up from the pages of a Victorian horror story that had never been penned in the Unreality, that was what he was all about right now. It seemed a good idea, laying in the tall grass, waiting to see if you could taste whatever weird thing the blood in your veins had become, wondering if the kick had cracked a few ribs.

  Probing his chest thoughtfully, staring up at the still invisible Dome, Garth started really quickly considering that unwanted course of action. It was pretty simple math, really. He didn’t want to die. There was the possibility of there being some kind of power boiling deep beneath his skin. It might be the kind of power that proved to be absolute, at which point there was that age old struggle with absolute power and the corruption that came along with it.

  “So either,” Garth wheezed, coughed nastily, hawked up a foul tasting lump of something he preferred to ignore, “ugh, that was fucking foul. So either I risk turning into some kind of evil demigod and open the floodgates a tiny little bit or Franky kills me stone dead. At which point, Barnabas will prolly figure out a way to power this goddamn Death Star up and turn out the lights forever. Right? Right. Fuck my life is awesome.”

  ***

  The Monster watched Garth struggle slowly to his feet, clutching his ribs and looking quite miserable. The Bolt-Neck clutched his titanic jaw angrily, felt the gears along his cheeks grind and flex. It was one of the worst monsters under The Dome. Gearheads and their ilk risked much to traverse the frozen North in search of a Bolt-Neck’s mighty, lightning-lit castle, and even more to actually do battle with the lord of such a manor. It knew It wasn’t unique in all the world, but It was a power, a great and mighty beast that drew forth the best of the best.

  And the King had summoned It back from wherever It’d been following the great rain of black lightning, knitting It’s bones back together, breathing life back into It’s iron-wrought veins, whispering into It’s ears the purpose behind It’s resurrection. A man, the King had said, a man unlike any you ever did see, stronger and faster and worse than any reeking, stinking gearhead, oh aye.