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

by Lee Bond

  The Lady of the Weeping Eye’s heart leaped once in her chest when sudden, brutal darkness crashed into her and her slumbering-unto-death charges, but only once; as guardian of two important men, there was nowt in the world that could bother her. She would fight and die if need to make sure any enemies coming their way fell before getting too close.

  Sudden darkness was as nothing. Besides, her nature and her one good eye adjusted to the inexplicable nightfall with a twitch. One second, bathed in cloistering, claustrophobic black, the next, the usual pale monochrome flashes.

  And out there, oh so far away now it seemed an impossible journey, Chad Sikkmund’s Armory and the King’s Flying Monkey.

  “Big things happening over there in Arcadia.” The Lady said to her sleeping men. They’d need to know what was going on when they opened their eyes in the outside. She couldn’t know how this would happen, but knew it she did. And when they did wake up in a strange new world full of things that made no sense, well, the Lady just knew that if they remained ignorant of what’d happened to their old world, they’d be left miserable. “For days and days, the King did send waves of monsters after him we call the Engineer. ‘twere unlike anything I ever did see, e’en before, when I were a Dark Golem. More worrisome than the black lightning and the dying lands, in truth. But what’s going to happen over there in the old city, I warrant we three stand at the end of time.”

  Thinking of the first bout of Kingly madness sent a shivering thrill through the maddened Dark Golem.

  The Lady wiped seeping fluid from her ravaged eye socket and wiped it absentmindedly on what remained of her once-beautiful clothing. Those black bolts of purest Kingly rage, lancing and arcing down from the sky, they had filled her with trepidation, oh yes they had indeed! Assured and as certain as she was that there was nothing ‘neath The Dome that could do for her until the two Gearmen were given the opportunity to begin the next grand adventure in their lives, she had nevertheless feared mightily for all three of them the moment she’d spied a section of old farmstead disappearing in a puff of blackened smoke.

  “But,” the Lady of the Weeping Eye looked down at her slumbering charges, “we survived that, didn’t we? I stood brave and tall and howled at the lightning as it took all that was unimportant away from Arcade City, didn’t I? My shouts, my screams … kept the lightning and King’s rage at bay.”

  The Gearmen said nothing. Of course they said nothing. They were nearly dead, but the Lady imagined that if they were able, they’d nod and congratulate her on her bravery.

  It were only just.

  The Lady turned her gaze back upon the only two things to remain; airship and Armory and she smiled and smiled and smiled until the dried goop on her face cracked. “Old King’s on a collision course with The Armory, my friends. I can tell e’en from here that our most illustrious monarch’s grand steamship is w’out power. There’s summat happened to the thing behind King’s Will, hey? And now that great ship will crash into The Armory and our great friend, the Engineer, well, he’ll do battle with our King, won’t he? Great and furious battle, two men of unlimited power and even greater anger, bashing at one another ‘neath The Dome. Whosoever shall win?”

  The Lady of the Weeping Eye wanted it to be Garth Nickels, the stranger from the Outside world, him who’d come to Arcade City for some strange purpose, him who had nearly been driven mad by the excesses of the bottled world in which they all lived, but had survived. A finger stole up to her damaged, shattered eye to run along the vicious pockmarks left behind by that damnable shotgun.

  She wanted him to be the victor. For if he won, well, that final light stabbing down from the heavens would disappear, blanketing the whole of Arcade City in utter darkness.

  “But only for a time, only for a time, my friends, only for a time.” The Lady of the Weeping Eye threw her head back and cackled like a true maniac; Flying Monkey had just slammed into The Armory like God’s own vengeance. Over there in dissipated Arcadia, there’d be a rain of machine parts like no one’s business. The battle would soon be joined, she was certain.

  “Only darkness for a time.” The Lady of the Weeping Eye repeated as she settled down to wait for what came next. “For if Master Nickels wins, The Dome will fall, and new light shall be seen, light that will bring you back. And I, well, I, being a beast not changed enough by his hand … I will crumble into dust.”

  The Lady of the Weeping Eye smiled and looked down at her charges. “I cannot wait.”

  ***

  It was a filthy irony, one that Garth could barely bring himself to accept.

  The computer Chad had used to bring himself up to speed on what’d happened to his home world was the very same antiquated, brass and ivory-keyed machine that his adoptive father Barnabas had used down through the millennia to spy on his captive’s literal state of mind; interested as he himself was in finding out the particulars of how the King’s masterful control over Arcade City had turned itself topsy-turvy in such a short period of time, Garth had nevertheless found himself drawn to video files eked directly from Chadsik al-Taryin’s memories.

  For a while. Only for a while.

  “I can’t fucking believe it.” Hours … no, centuries of punishment, of Barnabas Blake the One and Only either whispering poison into a shattered Brigadier’s cracked mind or the insane metal-minded simulacrum of a Mistress directly implanted into his brain, beating a helpless man with a cattle prod deadly enough to snuff out the sun.

  It was beyond cruel. It was the utter heights of absolute fiendishness, and try as he might, no matter how badly he wanted to lay some of the blame back to Chad –for after all, the man was a lunatic and a maniac and all sorts of devilish in his own right- he couldn’t. The evidence was there, to be worked through if you had the patience, the stomach, hardened heart and roughly ten thousand years of vacation time.

  Right about the time the foul bit of coding calling itself Mistress Taint had beaten Chad Sikkmund nearly to death in an imaginary tower top, mechanical face shivering with unwholesome and unappetizing delight, Garth had forced himself to call it quits.

  Chadsik al-Taryin might be a devil, might have an unhealthy penchant for gruesome displays of macabre and grotesque artistic sentiment, but he wasn’t to blame. Not entirely. You truly were a product of your environment, and using his own twisted upbringing as the bar with which to measure all … unordinary childhoods … not blameless, no, because somewhere in that man’s mind there had to be some inkling that his motives and methods were wrong.

  But … forgivable? Acceptable?

  “Tortured by a crazy as fuck nihilistic CyberPriest for umpty-zillion years who is intent on destroying the whole Unreality … shit’s bound to rub off on you.” Garth actually wished he had a cigarette. Something, anything that he could do to work off this nervous energy he’d picked up fast-forward voyeuring his way through the last month or so of Chad Sikkmund’s mental anguish.

  Garth pushed himself away from the computer to take a walk. He needed to purge himself of Chad’s horrible life before he started digging into the actual user logs. If the data contained within the auto-generated history of access and alterations was as pervasive and detailed as Chad had implied, then there was a very good chance that all sorts of secrets about what’d been going on in Arcade City would be spelled out nice and neat.

  “Wouldn’t that be fucking awesome?” Garth asked aloud. “Just once? A goddamn play-by-play, bullet pointed, easy to read, low syllable count explanation of what in the great googly moogly is happening? And a notable lack of cryptic? That alone is totally worth even a bit of complexity. Like, I for sure would trade the abundant use of big, long words that I could figure out by context for a one hundred percent absence of cryptic.”

  A soft chiming rolled out of the tiny, tinny-sounding speakers set into the King’s steampunk workstation and Garth was back at the clickety-clacking keyboard before another burst of sound filled the air. Eyes glued to the grainy monitor pensively, Garth saw what�
�d prompted the machine to issue such an understated warning:

  Chadsik had succeeded in siphoning his multitudinous selves from their energy-sucking prisons. Doing so had –as the pale haired Arcadian had suggested- shut down more than ninety-percent of the machines that actually gave full and proper ‘life’ to Arcade City. Reading quickly through the breakdown of systems affected, hammering on the fat copper space bar as fast as his thumbs could work, Garth sped through the seemingly endless list; whatever else Barnabas had been awful at, the fucking guy had been equally –if not more- terrible at designing operational architecture. Things like atmosphere and internal pressure were connected directly to something called Sunlight 2.0, and that odd connection was wired into the broadcast energy beacons powering King’s Will.

  “Seriously hating this guy. Sunlight 2.0?” Garth shook his head bitterly. The man lacked anything even remotely resembling the merest idea of what it was to have an original thought in his head. “Sunlight 2.0? Fuck me. Anything would’ve been better … oh are you seriously telling me the truth right now?”

  Garth hammered the side of the bulky monitor with a fist, but the data didn’t change and try as he might will what he was being shown to be a last ditch attempt from a handful of Platinum King-affected nanotech particles, there was every indication that what the computer was telling him was happening, was actually and for really-real happening.

  “No.” Garth pushed away from the machine and nodded rapidly, doing his best not to lose his shit. It was safe to say he failed. “No, that’s totally fine. I get it. It makes total and complete sense, because why not? Every time I turn around, something’s crashing into me or knocking me unconscious, or, like, just generally fucking with me, so why not here, too? There’s literally only two goddamn features left in this entire asscrap City, so of course the King’s stupid airship is going to crash into me. God-fucking-dammit I hate th… no. It’s fine. I know what’s happening this time so I can prepare.”

  Garth walked calmly and steadily back to the computer, ripped it loose from it’s moorings and, lugging the thing clumsily between two hands, he made his way even more calmly and steadily towards Chad’s prison. Though the front was blown out, there was nothing in the vicinity that was even remotely crash-proof, and if he was careful and lucky and all sorts of improbable things happened in sequence, there was every chance he’d be free from being knocked stupid.

  Again.

  Shoving the computer in through the gap, Garth crawled inside the crystalline chamber and sat down atop his liberated machine. He grabbed hold of a few loose tubes, did his best to ignore that sometime in the very recent past they’d been connected most intimately with another human being, and prepared himself for the moment when the King’s ship struck the Armory.

  Sitting there, waiting patiently, an idea struck Garth. Wiggling his eyebrows craftily, a helmet formed around his head. A giant, cushioned helmet.

  It took up most of the remaining unassigned particulate in the area, but whatever.

  He was getting tired of his head bouncing around like a basketball.

  “Collision in 3 … 2 …”

  Something went bang. The Armory lurched like a drunken whore.

  ***

  The Dome’s powerhouse. Built almost immediately after it was discovered that a certain Platinum Brigadier possessed the uncanny ability to summon forth ‘previous versions’ of himself from facets of the Unreal Universe long since destroyed, from which, seemingly endless streams of power could be pulled forth and used for a Mad King’s personal exploits, it was a place Chad had never been but knew so much about.

  Oh yes, Chad Sikkmund knew more about the powerhouse than he’d ever really wanted; in the beginning, when he’d been ‘young’ –made to think that way by an avaricious fiend and a crudely implanted memory of a harsh Mistress named Taint- he’d had nightmares, great big huge bloody visceral nightmares that’d filled him with horror and fear about what lay high above all their heads, a room full of the dead, whispering to one another, slowly but surely being drained of all they were.

  Oh, how those nightmares had filled a shattered Brigadier’s mind, and how the King had exploited those nightmares in order to keep his most unique and prized treasure under control.

  King Barnabas Blake the One and Only had gone to great lengths to spin tales of a vast chamber, longer and wider than the eyes could properly take in, filled with moans and groans and desperate wailing sounds that were –to listen wide-eyed to a serious-seeming King- so sorrowful to hear one unprepared was to risk your very own soul. Be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a sound like that could snatch what made you you right from underneath.

  When a wee lad had grown into a tall lad, capable of mastering those kinds of ephemeral fears, well, the stories had changed, hadn’t they? From moans and groans and shrieks to corn-rows of the damned, literal corpses planted in row after endless row, the spiritual flesh from their amorphous bodies decaying under the inevitable demands of Arcade City’s endless thirst for power.

  Those horror stories had worked better than the others, for by this time in his life, Chad Sikkmund had become Chadsik, and he was filled with fretful memories of his previous life, of all the blood and guts and glory he and his friends had gotten up to in an effort to catch the eye of the King.

  “But it ain’t like that at all, no it isn’t, is it?” Chad demanded of the thin air. “Ain’t no ghosts, ain’t no zombies, and nuffink like that all.”

  If someone were to ask Chad specifically how he’d imagined the powerhouse to be, a place where he’d been both forbidden from ever finding and from even thinking about, well, the pale-haired Arcadian would’ve just shrugged and gone on to describe a cross between a graveyard and some sort of lab. And that would’ve been that, because ten thousand years or so of those kinds of stories will leave a lasting impression on a lad, wouldn’t they?

  Except … the powerhouse was nothing like what Barnabas had said, or even implied, or even what Chadsik’s own experiences in the outside world would’ve had him believe.

  It was nothing but a sorrowful collection of thick crystal chambers, remarkably similar to the prison his dear old Dad had kept him penned inside of when he’d grown recalcitrant. Thick crystal chambers that looked like nothing so much as old-fashioned vacuum tubes that one of him had always gone about as being the absolute best way to get the truest sound from any music you might care to listen to.

  Many of the crystal tubes were either empty, or filled with a sullen flickering light so deep within that Chad could barely steel himself to look upon them; these paltry smidgeons of light were him, Chads from other Universe, Chads from other planes of Existence, Chads as had had their own lives, with their own bits of fun and sadness and all those other things.

  Chads he’d pulled from the emptiness into which all life was thrown when it were all said and done, and to do what? Fuel a madman’s dreams of Existential Eradication. And to suffer, of course, for if these giant vacuum tubes worked in any way similar to the Soul Chamber in which he’d been incarcerated for much of his adult life, you were conscious inside, aware of the passing of time, aware of … aware.

  “Crikey, lads.” Chad ran a pale hand across a verdigris-stained vacuum tube. The flickering consciousness within batted itself against the unbreakable glass, a blind, insensate animal reacting to the presence of heat, or warmth, or somehow instinctively knowing that he was to blame was there. “I is so effing sorry about all this.”

  The rows of tubes –those with life within still- just continued on flickering, powering The Dome, given fuel to Dad’s rage.

  Walking through the rows, Chad tried to imagine how the fight between Garth and his Dad was going to go. He well remembered his own encounter with the monarch, and it’d been one of the most harrowing events of his life, both in and out of Arcade City, and were it not for the fact that one Garth N’Chalez had spontaneously created a Murder Finger of Lightning out of thin air, the duel between Chad Sikkmund of Tar
yn and King of Arcade City would’ve been permanently at number one.

  Given all he knew now –from Huey, mostly- about Garth N’Chalez, Chad still wasn’t entirely certain that the lad would survive against Barnabas. The old king and smith was a cranky fuck, aye, sure enough, but when it were all said and done, he was also the local God hereabouts and had access to the whole entirety of Will and while Will had been working actively against the monarch for a considerable time, it really didn’t mean all that much, now did it?

  Which was –as he’d told Garth- why he was up in the powerhouse, strolling through a field of batteries containing displaced spirits. Some of whom were beginning to wake up properly, if the angry cast to some of the flickering lights filling those tubes was any indication.

  The truth, though, was much simpler. Much less convoluted and far less devious and even less beneficial to anyone, including himself.

  As hard as it was to believe, as insane as it sounded, Chad missed his other selves.

  “And that’s the truth of it.” Chad shouted, shouted as loud as he could, until his voice echoed amongst the rafters and reached the far walls. There were thousands of him up here, powering everything. The soul tubes –those with hims inside as were still capable of thought after being nothing but batteries for thousands of years- grew fitful in their repose, turning from dull unsteady things into blazing, furious lanterns.

  Chad imagined he could hear all them hims, whispering their furious cries of traitor, liar, deceiver, murderer, singing an eternal litany of all the crimes he was guilty of, that he was kidnapper and abandoner and coward and fool, that he should’ve stood up to the King sooner, that he should’ve found a way to do anything other than what he’d actually done, which had been nothing at all.

  “I is bein’ all them things and more.” Chad shouted ruefully. “Ain’t I? I could of done summat. I could of found some way to stop the man, right? Could of figured out that wot I were seein’ weren’t the real fing at all. But of all, I s’pose I could of just … done nuffink. Crossed me arms and hummed ‘God Save the Queen’ til ‘e lost ‘is temper and went at me wiv a crowbar or summat.”