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

by Lee Bond

  “Get on with it, milord!” Davram wanted to smack the man in the head.

  “Aye!” Agnethea barked. The horde had grown in size since it’d stopped chasing after them. There had to be close to twenty thousand beasts. “Do as you must! We will carry you forward.”

  Garth took a deep breath, held it. He commanded the assembled Will to flow forward across and through the disintegration field like the exhalation he was about to make.

  He exhaled.

  Purified nanotech scoured across the wicked border, a furious wave of dark power that bit and struggled mightily with enemy. The racket was terrific. Thick tendrils of blackened smoke poured from his fingertips, grinding against the unseen edges, pushing, pushing, pushing.

  “Come on come on come on, you fuckers!” Garth bellowed, trembling against the strain. This was His Will against King’s Will and he’d be damned if that fucking ass was going to win. “Come on you motherfuckers! Don’t … you … be … bitches!”

  Just as he thought he couldn’t do it, as he began to fret that no matter how hard he pushed, how much of himself he threw into the effort, his Will wasn’t the match for Barnabas’ after all, a giant pie wedge of solidified night flexed into place, jamming the disintegration field up quite nicely.

  King Barnabas Blake the One and Only’s dreadful death engine shrieked in purest mechanical fury.

  “I’m awesome.” Garth toppled forward. “You guys might wanna…”

  ***

  “How far does it go down?” Agnethea couldn’t stop staring down at the whirling saw-toothed blades inside the King’s cylinder. They certainly lived up to their potential.

  None of the three adventurers were looking much further than their little mechanical oasis; just past the deadly sea of energy surrounding them on all sides, the monsters that’d been trailing them for the last day or so had assembled, a literal ocean of tooth, blade, and anger. King’s rage percolated and boiled through the air as -perhaps too late- Barnabas Blake high in his heavenly perch, had come to realize just what their plan was.

  “Honestly?” Garth was looking at his fingertips. They hurt like motherfuckers, and there were tiny abrasions nicked into the tips. Caused by expelling all that Will, or by literally rubbing them against an actual disintegration field? The former made more sense, but only because the latter was the more impossible of the two. “Either all the way down, or only a few feet. Or both.”

  “That hardly answers my question.” Agnethea cast a wary glance at Davram. Their Brigadier was currently pretending that the task he’d set for himself was proving to be more difficult than anticipated, when in fact, they were merely waiting for the right moment to … assist Garth in seeing the best course of action.

  Garth showed his palms to Agnethea, then motioned for her to come closer so he could explain what was happening beneath their feet better. When the Queen complied, he began. “There really isn’t one. One that makes any sense, anyhow. That’s how this stuff works. If it only goes down a few feet, the depth we’re seeing here doesn’t, uh, go properly down through the earth and stuff, but more like between things. Or …”

  “Is this going to be more ‘atom talk’?” Agnethea demanded, stepping close enough to Garth that she could feel his breath on her cheek. Davram surreptitiously tapped the side of his nose. Things were going to happen quickly now. “Because I won’t have it.”

  “Hey, uh, hey now.” Garth went to step backwards and nearly teetered over the edge. Agnethea grabbed him and pulled him tight. “Uhm? We … had this … conversation? Sort of? Hey! What in the fucking fuck is this fucking goddamn bullshit, Davram?”

  Davram Solan, the Last of the Platinum Brigadiers, ran a bare hand across the tenuously thin quicksilver bubble he’d spun around the only two friends he would ever know again. The surface rippled and ran but was otherwise absolutely solid. He smiled wistfully at Queen Agnethea, who returned his sorrow with a slow nod. He was not certain, but he thought he saw glimmering light through her protective eyewear.

  Garth started hammering at the shield, the points beneath his fists thickening to near opacity with each blow. “What in the ungodly fuck is this, Dave?”

  Davram performed an apologetic bow, sweeping his forehead against the metallic floor. When he stood, he gestured outwards, towards the angry horde. “We seek to destroy these, hopefully the last of the King’s monsters, in such a way that Barnabas Blake will have no recourse but to deal with you in person. This is the plan, yes?”

  “The fucking plan,” Garth booted the shield, “Dave, was to evaporate these fucks and go on to Arcadia. All three of us. Us, Dave.”

  “That was never the plan, milord.” Agnethea replied gently, stepping as far back from Garth as was possible; the bubble in which Davram had captured the two of them was perforce very tiny indeed, for the Brigadier wanted to preserve as much of his power for the moment of destruction, so the space betwixt her and the raging Nickels was mostly imaginary. The anger burning from his skin was hot enough to boil eggs.

  “I’ll fucking talk to you in a goddamn second.” Garth pointed at Davram, who had seated himself cross-legged at the apex of the machine. “This isn’t necessary, Dave. We can find another way. There’s always another way!”

  Dave looked over his shoulder. “Not this time, milord. This time, I shall do as I should’ve a hundred years ago. I shall give my life for the lives of my friends, so that they may carry on and do great and wondrous things. I am old and I am tired and for a century, milord, I was nothing but a coward hiding on the edge of the world, lamenting my lot in life. I am filled with regrets and burdens so deep I thought I should never see the end.

  And then you came into the bar, all fish-like, with the cruel Nicked Jimmy and though I cannot say for sure why I thought then as I did, I see now that my curiosity about you, not to mention my pure cowardice in not dealing with that cruel gearhead was perhaps the wisest thing I have ever done, for it has brought us here, to this point, where you are a true Master of Will.” Davram smiled slyly. “I do wish we had had more time to travel together, Master Nickels. You are a great man, though you refuse to see it. No, do not deny it, do not shout my words down. You are great, but you are full of second guesses, something a man in your position cannot afford.

  You say there is a war coming, and that is a thing I can conceive of quite readily, but I am too small a man to envision the scope of it. I cannot contain even a single percent of that which you fight for, or even the why of it. Here, in Arcade City, our lives suddenly seem so terribly small to what else is out there. But in thinking on this war, this conflict that contains the whole scope of something infinite … what I do now will give you the chance you need to meet your greatest enemy. Though I am small, though I am a coward in all ways that matter, this small thing will echo throughout the Universe, I think.”

  Dave held up a hand, and it shimmered and shone, a vast quasar trapped between all-too human fingers.

  “Please! Davram! Don’t do this!” Garth slammed his fists against the resilient silver bubble. “Don’t you fucking Highlander 2 me, man!”

  “Sacrifices, my good friend, the one who I willingly follow to Death,” Dave pulled more of the power he held, and the brilliance from his fist grew so great that even the beasts clamoring at the edges shied away, “are sometimes necessary, for the greater good.”

  “I am not a good man.” Garth spat the words out, but they bounced right off Dave’s face. The Engineer couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen a man –any man, any time- so at peace with himself. Bathed in brilliant light, the Last Brigadier was the very personification of tranquility.

  “On the contrary, my King.” Dave pulled the globe of all he was until it was held between both hands. No Brigadier had ever done anything like this. “You are the greatest man I know. Else I would not do this. Remember me to your friends, my King.”

  Agnethea shut her eyes as Davram dropped the liquid power from his hands while Garth howled with an anguish so heart-rendin
g she thought she would rather have been outside with the Brigadier.

  Everything erupted. Davram’s bubble lurched and skipped across the annihilation wave like a fishing lure on the ocean, it’s occupants hammered unconscious by the frenzy.

  And high in his heavenly hideaway, King Barnabas Blake the One and Only screamed and screamed and screamed.

  Davram Solan, the Last Brigadier, rest in peace at long, wonderful last.

  ***

  King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, the first CyberPriest to roll off the assembly line, him who had once been known as Watt the First, howled and screamed. The very air shivered and flexed under the dissonance as his rage waxed incandescent. Black, diaphanous flames spread outwards, grasping nanotech tendrils of fire that wrapped around the few machines that remained untouched and ripped them loose, setting them ablaze until each thing –a monitor, a generator, a harmonic calibrator and so on- finally did shiver back into the molecules from which they’d come.

  And still he screamed. He howled and screamed and stomped his feet so colossally that the miles thick metal floor beneath those Kingly appendages creaked and groaned.

  How now, my King? Erg whispered from the trembling air.

  Barnabas struggled to breath, forced himself to calm down, and reminded himself that here, on this side of The Dome, the precious mechanisms inside it could be damaged easily enough. Persist in his petulant temper tantrum long enough and the very thing he sought to use for destruction would be destroyed.

  Gasping, wiping anger-spittle from his kingly jaw, Barnabas found his voice. “I have been better, disembodied sprite. Better by a long shot. Look you upon my technological kingdom with your own phantasmal eyes, if you have them.”

  Davram Solan’s denouement, the Last Brigadier’s swansong … it still … it still overwhelmed the King’s senses. That any man who possessed such power should do such a thing as that … Barnabas admitted that when he’d realized that there’d been a third person traveling with N’Chalez and the Whore Queen of Babylon and that that person had been a Brigadier, well, he’d lost his temper then, hadn’t he just? One of the old guard, still alive after all this time.

  Under his nose! For so long!

  Oh, back in the day when he’d done for the Brigade, he’d known one had either fled or had been out of the city or summat similar to all that and had done his diligence –so to speak- by informing the Matrons of the missing lad before doing his own disappearing trick. Then he’d promptly forgotten about the coward for one simple reason: Brigadiers couldn’t –didn’t have it in ‘em- stay hidden. Arcade City was full of injustice, rife with things needing the stern hand of a Brigadier and with that certain knowledge, the King had been comfortable in leaving for a bit of a vacation.

  Since that Brigadier had done nowt to save any man, woman or child in the span of a hundred years, Barnabas had honestly thought –after about twenty years or so- he last of the pure soldiers had gotten himself done for in some way.

  Not so, not so, milord King. Erg whispered, a hint of glee to his incorporeal tone. Davram Solan, out there in the wilds all this time. Hiding in plain sight, cowardly to an incomprehensible degree.

  Barnabas stamped a royal foot, splitting a floor plate in twain. “Damn this place! The whole lot of them, degenerates from the beginning! All save my bonny boy, Chad, only look at him now, too. A wretch, all wrung out, buried so deep inside his own brain I doubt he’ll ever open them eyes of his again. The whole lot, useless. And now. And now. That foolish coward …”

  The King trailed off, speechless.

  When the trio –hero, villain, and succubus- had decided amongst themselves to make a mad dash for Ickford and beyond, Barnabas had been intrigued by the desperation inherent in the risky flight. Who would not be? Sure, he’d copped to the fact that they all three of them had figured out soon on that there was at least one in their little vanguard that would remain alive until the very end, but still, it’d been the chase, as well, hey?

  There hadn’t been a Brigadier afoot on Arcade City’s soil in proper fashion for a century, and well, he’d never really witnessed a Obsidian Golem in action either, so the goon squad had chased just behind, taunting, teasing, pulling one or two or all three out every now and again for a quick spot of derring-do, but overall, he’d been content to let them enough space to ride.

  Seen through the eyes of the monsters, the three had flickered and shone like stars in the starry night, only as if seen through a dark, dark filter; each of them –Garth, Agnethea, Davram- owned their own special form of miasma preventing anyone with access to Will from seeing them full on, unless it were with natural born eyes.

  Davram, purified Platinum Brigadier, had been as all the others: a mist-shrouded bit of shining light, with strong bursts of brilliance piercing through the obscuring field every now and then as he dug deeper into his reservoir of Will-spawned ability. Not as bad as them damned Golems, as you could usually find your intended Brigadier wi’ a bit of effort.

  Agnethea, damnable Queen of Golems had –in all honesty- been the least interesting: as she’d fought and killed beast after beast, she’d been nowt more than a mere smudge, a thin layer of ghostly activity, just as always. Barnabas did wish he’d had more time –had devoted more time, earlier on- into figuring out the strange twists and turns in Kingsblood that could do something so … antithetical to his grand plans just so the powerful curiosity burning through him could be slaked at long last. Didn’t matter now, no, not at all. The risky disintegration field worked well enough on the perversely resilient flesh of that bitch succubus, and so should the … surprise … waiting for them in Arcadia fail, there was always that option.

  And then there is Master N’Chalez himself. Erg intoned deeply. Some odd combination of both Brigadier and Golem at long last, hey? That dead Nanny, her as told your two best Gearmen that he was a new form of Golem … your cabal of steampunk thinking machines hadn’t been too far off the mark after all, hey, milord? Ah, if only you could undo your great plan to evoke Specter in full. I do believe you would give anything to stop yourself from flooding him with thousands of gallons of raw Kingsblood, wouldn’t you? What did our Queen of Golems call him? Something … ominous? The … Onyx Brigadier? Oh aye, that is it! What a grand name, hey? Almost as grand as Dark Iron King, I think me.

  “Shut it.” Barnabas flicked a finger’s worth of King’s Will at the ghostly wretch, caring little if he hit or missed at this point, because, damn his perishing eyes, Erg was right.

  Garth N’Chalez, Kin’kithal warrior and Scion of the Kith and Kin themselves, no longer existed to the peering eyes of the King. He was visible only by tracking the swathe of carnage left in his wake, by the tiny, tingling … wiggle … caused when his own remarkable intellect teased King’s Will into obeying his commands, and even that marker of his presence had begun to fade; with more practice, King’s Will would be under his full command, just as it was the King’s and forevermore afterwards he’d in truth be totally invisible!

  Not that such a thing e’en mattered, hey? For the goddamn noble minded idiots e’en nobler self-sacrifice had done the bloody job right off the bat, hadn’t it bloody well just?

  Base comparison to old Earth style nuclear weapons places the Brigadier’s detonation very close to fifty megatons, my King. Erg supplied helpfully. A very big explosion. Displacement everywhere.

  Barnabas Blake looked over his shoulder and tried to find the shimmering spot of airborne grease that was Erg. When he failed, the King pulled his lips back until he was all teeth and hissed.

  “Gee,” he demanded frostily, “you think?”

  The explosion had been a colossal one, blacking out The Dome’s entire array of complex surveillance gear –one could not rely on Will alone, after all- from almost the very second that Davram had dropped the sum total of his … Brigadier-hood into the reclamation cylinder, but that wasn’t all!

  The ever-expanding perfectly spherical orb of destruction rising up out of that mixt
ure of energies had been so totally overwhelming that even Will itself no longer functioned properly! The entire area that’d once been Ickford and most of the Wall nearby was completely dead now, the nanotech particulate acting as his Will completely … gutted, the land itself slowly but surely shivering away into a kind of nothingness that was utterly useless for any purpose.

  Dead matter, all of it! Not even reusable, leastways not wi’out serious effort.

  Beneath that umbrella of dead matter and denuded nanotech, Garth N’Chalez and Agnethea the Vile could be anywhere at all within the few hundred square miles left to Arcade City.

  They will surely make their way to Arcadia. Erg said after the King stopped acting like some kind of venomous reptile.

  King Barnabas Blake shut his eyes and considered all of the things that’d gone wrong in his life of late. There was a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t even a new thing, this calamity of errors cropping up everywhere he turned. Distanced as he’d been from the rest of the ‘Priests, he’d known very little of their lives, of their trials and tribulations out there in the Unreal Universe, but there were smatterings here and there in the accumulated memories of the dead that suggested quite strongly that it hadn’t been all peaches and cream.

  Was it possible … was it possible that though he’d all but turned his back on the energies making him a CyberPriest in favor of the more influential and impactful powers bestowed to him through King’s Will that whatever cosmic folly had plagued Erg and the others had been with him the whole time? Running apace with his grand schemes, all this while? Turning everything he worked at to shit behind his back? Making him madder and madder without noticing?

  It hardly seemed proper, it hardly seemed fair. He was the greatest of the ‘Priests. Firstborn, so to speak, witnessing in a single second the whole of everything, how it all played together, and when the end would come. From the moment of his false suicide to the moment The Dome had gone up, all had been perfect. All had worked.