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

by Lee Bond

  The Eye and all it’s systems, cut off from all but the merest of trickles of power –since The Dome had a terrestrial address, it was still connected, however tenuously, to the Unreal Universe and would’ve been until the moment the King powered it up fully- had … had worked on decryption software, running so far in the background that the code had taken more than a month to complete.

  “No.” Garth rest a gentle hand on Agnethea’s chest. The spasms were slowing down now. The simple word ‘no’ had been deciphered by the computational unit Agnethea had been turned into as a command to shut down.

  Garth supposed the moment when Dave had blown the two of sky-high had been a linchpin moment for the quadronium OS. Following the same hardwired principles of success as his defunct Kin’kithal heritage, The Eye must’ve used the remnants of it’s month-long charging process to deliver the code to a more suitable host, properly reasoning –in a terrifyingly clinical and horrific way- that anything heavily infected by Cloud particulate was, at base, nothing more than a complex collection of nanotech machines.

  A perfect and fertile source of both energy and diagnostic resources. No matter that Agnethea had been a friend. The Eye had seen through to the truth of things where it’s host had refused, and had done it’s diligence in protecting that stupid host. Driven by success and a need to deal with the Dark Iron King, it’d looked to the future, after that moment when Barnabas Blake was defeated and both The Dome and the Cloud Generators –wherever they were- would need shutting down.

  Agnethea was a Dark Golem. A creature of The Cloud. Without proper quadronium shielding, she would not –could not- be able to function in the greater Unreal Universe. So with pure rationale and conscious thought towards protecting the Engineer and the stability of his thirty thousand year old plan, The Eye had done what needed doing.

  It’d transformed Agnethea into a machine capable of dealing with the various remaining threats, only … only a month hadn’t been long enough to properly code resources capable of dealing with everything, and … well, Garth guessed absorbing all the matter that’d been the Platinum King had been too much for the system.

  The spasms stopped altogether. Garth picked Agnethea up and held her close. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Agnethea whispered, once-musical voice a hash of sound. “System overload. Absorption of Platinum King 001 overriding safety protocols. Recommend reboot and shoot.”

  Garth laid Agnethea back down to the ground, tears running freely down his face. This. This was why he did as he did. People around him died. When he tried to spare them, the overwhelming need for success at all costs –hammered into him by the Ushbet M’Tai- buckled and warped that necessity into something that would still be of benefit.

  Backhanding the tears away, Garth bent down and whispered into Agnethea’s ear. “Command Protocol Alpha. Reboot. Shoot denaturing codes. Shutdown.”

  Agnethea’s seemed to smile. “Command Protocol Alpha received. Rebooting and shooting.”

  Then the light in her eyes went out and her body grew still.

  Queen Agnethea the Vile had been given the one thing she’d spent her entire life hunting.

  God Save the Queen.

  Straightening, Garth looked at the sole remaining feature of Arcadia. Glittering like a fierce diamond in the sky, Chadsik al-Taryin’s home beckoned. Face hardened against the sorrow burning in him, he spoke. “You better have answers, Chad.”

  Garth N’Chalez -Kin’kithal Warrior, Engineer for Reality 2.0 and Specter- started walking towards his final destination. There was no need to hurry now. There were only three people left under The Dome.

  And they could goddamn well wait if they got there first.

  He had some shit to process.

  23 King Moron of Moronspace

  The Armory.

  Garth remembered the first time he’d seen it like it was yesterday; fresh out of the Door, standing next to Nicked Jimmy who stank of hot oil, acrid rage and venomous desperation, the Armory had glittered and shone, a glowing spike floating high above Arcadia. He couldn’t remember who’d told him that you could see The Armory from all points in the Domed City, not that it really mattered, not to Garth.

  All that mattered was that it contained the one person in all of Arcade City who allegedly knew how to kill a King that was both master of all-pervasive nanotech particulate and something known as a CyberPriest.

  The Armory was home to Chad Sikkmund of Taryn, hero of Arcadia and The First Brigadier.

  The Armory was also home to Chadsik al-Taryin, galaxy-class assassin and stark-raving loon.

  Garth scratched at his jaw and continued staring up at the brilliantly lit chip of diamond and the vast gear-engine that was set into the base of it, wondering what the men and women living in Arcadia –when they weren’t spending most of their time being overly concerned with the Platinum King in their midst- had thought and felt when Chad’s lights had come back on after so long. A hundred years, unlit until one day, it suddenly blazed brightly, a moon in a moonless sky.

  Had they been afraid? Garth thought so. The tale of the night the lights had gone out consisted almost solely of the terror of their raging King storming through tiktok streets, savagely murdering the noble Brigadiers and leaving all humanity ‘neath The Dome to their own devices.

  “And look how that worked out.” Garth sighed. Most of the world called Arcade City, rendered back unto base components, everyone save three people dead, one of whom was a relic from the War against the Heshii, one some form of genetically superior supersoldier transformed into something else altogether, and one with some seriously excellent hair.

  Arcadians, afraid, when the lights had come back on? Absolutely. Garth knew Barnabas pretty damned well after only a month, and while the ‘blacksmith’ had done everything in his power to keep his temper tantrums under control as they’d traveled together, it’d be a severely blind or ignorant man to miss the fact that the older Arcadian had himself a wicked temper and even worse ability to handle said temper.

  “Were you afraid he’d come back to chastise his Son for leaving?” Garth asked the remembered images of all those tortured Arcadians, digging a smooth cobblestone out of the ground and hefting it in his hands. “Or were you afraid that he’d stay away?”

  Garth chucked the stone upward. For The Armory to be seen –even in theory- from every point in Arcade City and to also keep unwanted visitors and/or looters from swinging by when the lights had been out, Chad’s home was suspended some four hundred feet in the air via some cunningly hidden anti-grav nodes.

  The cobblestone sailed merrily upwards, smashed into a pneumatic piston, and broke into pieces.

  The Armory didn’t do anything. According to the Platinum King, Chad was no longer right in the head, which was saying a good goddamn lot about the state of the assassin’s mind. Insane well before somehow leaping through The Dome, finding himself back in the worst place in the Unreality had to’ve unhinged an already wobbly fuck further.

  Twitching his mouth this way and that, Garth strolled out from underneath The Armory’s shadow to see if the King’s airship was any more visible than it’d been fifteen minutes ago. The Engineer knew he should hurry things along, especially with a possibly immortal, definitely crazy, indubitably powerful crackpot winging his way down from The Dome on a giant steampunk sky boat, but … he wasn’t in the mood.

  Too much had happened. Too many awful, sorrowful things.

  He hadn’t had a chance to process much of it. Davram’s suicide –beneficial though it’d been, instrumental in ways even he hadn’t imagined when deciding to do for himself- were shackles around his heart. Clear indications that something in his Kin’kithal nature was operational under The Dome, Davram had been one of the only good men he’d ever met in his entire life, and he’d needlessly squandered his life in pursuit of someone else’s goals. The nature of his quest to bring a new Universe into the light typically meant that everyone he met was almost always going to be m
en, women and things either vehemently opposed to the prospect of losing their place in the Unreal Universe or the sorts of men, women and things capable of going toe-to-toe with the aforementioned bad guys, making the second type only marginally less bad than the first.

  Davram, Huey, Ute, Herrig. Dead Jimmy. Naoko. Staring thoughtfully into the sky, watching the tiny black smudge of steam grew ever so slightly larger, Garth wished he could add Armageddon Troop One into the mix, but you didn’t get to be a Specter by being a good guy.

  That was it. Five people. The whole time he’d been alive and kicking in the Unreal Universe, he’d befriended five good people, and one of those was an AI he’d personally tagged to be a deity in the new Universe.

  Garth scoffed. The lack of truly decent people was endemic of the Heshii Condition.

  Shaking his head ruefully, silently marveling at the kind of epic hubris required to make thirty thousand yearlong plans, Garth walked back under The Armory and resumed staring at the amazing and perpetual almost-collision of the engines. Somewhere within was Chad Sikkmund, a man whom Agnethea painted as hero and savior, a veritable icon of all that’d been good and proper in the world, the King’s first Son and the very first Platinum Brigadier to roll off the assembly line.

  Garth waggled a finger at Chad’s unseen form. Prior to first fighting alongside then fighting with the cybernetic super-assassin calling himself Chadsik al-Taryin, Garth was honestly at a loss in trying to come up with any … any being offering up as much as a personal challenge as Chad.

  Little wonder, too, now that he’d seen where the man had grown up, had witnessed firsthand the kind of relentless violence and unending warfare a true citizen of Arcade City had to endure on a daily basis. The regular men and women, those who lived in the Estates and other smaller villages that were more myth these days than fact were nothing more than bit players in the lives of gearheads and wardogs: it was those Kingsblooded freaks the King loved –had loved- more than anyone else, and the entire terrarium-world in which they lived had been skewered by nanotech particulate. Anyone not welded to the Iron was a second-class citizen, weren’t they just?

  Garth trailed armor-clad fingers across half-remembered wounds delivered by the man in The Armory. He remembered the encounter with immaculate clarity, remembered –even as he’d been having his ass more or less handed to him on that rooftop amidst desperate wishes for a full moon and a lightning storm to round out the effect- wondering how it was that someone with such … prowess could be content to be just an assassin. Garth still wondered that, when it was obvious on the far side of things that the King had –intentionally or unintentionally- bred himself a soldier unparalleled.

  Chadsik al-Taryin.

  Garth harrumphed. They’d spoken of the cybernetic madman in Ha’Penny House, though rarely; as much as regular FrancoBritish loyalists did their level best to mind their P’s and Q’s around King’s Sons and worked diligently to never say anything untoward about a monarch they’d never met nor seen, they also only ever whispered of Chadsik al-Taryin, the chattering, nattering, multi-minded maniac, all out of dread fear him in the long fluttering black coat would appear out of thin air to do for them all.

  Agnethea painted the man as hero, yet Chad had painted himself in quite another light altogether. Obviously, his experiences under The Dome, held in The Armory, had changed the man in ways profound and probably quite sorrowful, but …

  “Is it enough for me to forget everything?” Still running absentminded fingers around some of the worst wounds delivered at Chad’s hands, Garth let out an exasperated grunt. “To forgive or to ignore?”

  It didn’t matter if the man in the tower was a reincarnated or resurrected Chad Sikkmund of Taryn, hero to the people of Arcade City or a displaced Chadsik al-Taryin, mad assassin who saw nothing wrong with killing boatloads of people to get to the one person actually on the man’s list.

  All that mattered was that King Barnabas Blake the One and Only was descending from his aerie and that in all the world, there was only one person who’d managed to even come close in thirty thousand years of doing for that monarch.

  “If I get out of here,” Garth promised himself firmly, “I am finding out way fucking more information about the Emperor-for-Life, because this is bullshit. Someone, somewhere on the outside had to’ve known about this festering madhouse. People with gears for brains, screwdrivers for fingers, shifters for throats! Frankenstein’s Monsters and stupid goofy werewolves that are about a zillion times more dangerous than they appear. Incorrectly envisioned Lady of the Lakeses. Lakeii? Lakes? Lake. Fuck it. Whatever. This place is … I’m done with it.”

  “And you,” Garth pointed a stern finger at The Armory, “better have some fucking answers for me, Chad old boy, or the King won’t be the only fuckin’ guy getting done this day.”

  With that, because there was no obvious way of getting to his goal, Garth N’Chalez did the only thing he could do, which was perform a little of that old magic called King’s Will; hands outstretched, intellect digging through the layers of particulate floating everywhere, riffling instinctively –thanks, he supposed, to the unwanted ministrations of the Platinum King- through protocols and codes until a cachet of untainted nanotech was discovered, Garth commanded a spiral staircase to grow forth from the ground.

  The smooth cobblestones of dead Arcadia shifted and danced before finally cracking apart, revealing an antiquated and much adorned steel and iron staircase growing up out of the ground like a giant beanstalk. The air filled with groaning, creaking metal, a rude orchestra.

  “Fuck my life.” Garth set his feet on the first step and began the long climb upwards, reiterating demands that Chadsik’s ‘rescue’ bear fruit regarding the killing of Kings.

  Pausing by a grinning cherub wearing glossy pince nez glasses and holding long cheroot between two chubby fingers, Garth added an amendment to Chad’s theoretical worthiness. “And just so we’re clear, galaxy-class super-assassin who is secretly a Brigadier, there will be absolutely zero attempts at trying to fulfill old contracts, all right? You get one twitch of shady looks or twitchy fingers and it’s going to be Garth Nickels, in the Armory, with a nanotech-forged buzz-wrench. I will clobber your face so hard it falls into another dimension, right, Chubby Hippy Cherub? Yeah, I knew you’d agree. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to maybe probably certain death I go.”

  The Engineer resumed his trek up the stairs, wondering what he’d find inside an Armory that’d remained empty for a hundred years and that’d never seen visitors…

  ***

  “This is three hundred sixty degrees of complete and utter mental fucked up-edness.” Garth couldn’t take his eyes off the only thing to exist inside the entire Armory.

  It was … it was … madness. Cruel madness.

  Being who he was, Garth had seen a lot of awful things. In the War against the Hesh, he and his had uncovered numerous sites where Kith and Kin had been tasked with the gruesome chore of experimenting on Humanity for their overlords, all in the hopes that they could better understand what it was about the pale, wriggling things on a single planet that would one day allow them to stand toe-to-toe with beings that’d conquered the Unreal Universe thousands of times over.

  Those had been bad days, bad days indeed. Men and women of all ages, races, ethnicities, tied into machines that were half in, half out of the Unreality, drawing away everything from simple blood to the energy that probably constituted a soul. Griffin –against all type- had found those monuments to Heshii cruelty too much to bear. He’d taken one look at those suffering wretches and he’d burned an entire city block into vaporized steel and stone, heart and bone.

  No one had judged him or called him to task for the apparent brutality because they’d all understood. Some things needed proper cleansing.

  No effort was needed to recall the hideous conversion sacks employed by the Bruushian genetic witches. The grotesque, ghastly stench, the pathetic mewling sounds of the ensnared as their DNA was rewritten,
the screeches and breathless begging for release from life, all that would be with him for the rest of his life. That, and how the gene witches themselves had hummed and sang strange saurian songs while their pots of clay had cooked.

  Garth shook his head clear of those grim images. Moody as he was, it was all too likely that once he got on the Train of Awful Thoughts, he’d wind up riding it all the way ‘Fuck All of This-ville’, because he really had seen some terrible, terrible things his entire life.

  But all that –and Goreene, and Tannhauser’s Gate, where both sides had perpetrated foul, devilish deeds in the name of victory and conquest, and even on Hospitalis, with biochameleon units- had been … necessary? Mandated, in one way or the other exigencies of a war, or out of fear.

  “This …” Garth cast an angry hand up at poor Chadsik al-Taryin, bolted to a heavy wall with threaded screws big enough for battleships, surrounded on all sides by thick, thick glass, festoons of pipes and hoses streaming out of nearly every inch of the man’s body save his face, “is fucking unnecessary.”

  In a place like Arcade City, the means to arrive at any one particular goal was honestly no further away than willing something into being; the complications that every artificer and tinkerer needed to adhere to when they built something new and awesome were fripperies, ridiculous demands set into place by a relatively churlish and childish overlord who simply wanted to make his presence known and remembered day in and day out, over and over again. And those lesser beings had had no choice in the matter, as Garth himself had learned that very first time he’d tried building a better buzzblade.

  Explosive lessons tended to stick with him better than most.

  But that was for citizens. For men and women and the occasional Golem who sought to ply their hand at something different.

  Barnabas Blake was King. He and he alone possessed the priority codes that could allow him to circumvent his own ridiculous thematic elements to produce something clean, something perfect.