Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  Mirabelle tumbled awkwardly backwards a few dozen feet, head over tails and the whole nine yards, smacking her head on loose rubble hard enough to see pinwheels and popping stars.

  Herald had won his freedom, aye, but at terrible cost to himself, that much Mirabelle knew for certain, so as she climbed to her feet –albeit unsteadily- with blood now trickling freely out of her mouth, the displaced Obsidian Golem displayed for the Herald, who were turning around much slower than he’d ever moved ‘ere now, that which she’d brought wi’ herself during her backwards flight.

  Chunks of metal, ripped from the chest by e’ergrasping and be-clawed fingers, rained from her hands, landing clink clink clink on the resolute floor ‘neath her feet. Quick eyes spied the extent of the damage done the moment Herald were done spinning around to greet her face-to-face and a wide, curling smile crossed her countenance.

  With blood-stained lips and furnace eyes, Mirabelle knew she were quite the sight.

  “Well now, Impertinent Herald,” the Lady of the Weeping Eye tossed the last few bits of armor to the ground triumphantly, then pointed to the long, narrow gashes torn into the breastplate, “it does seem to me that you are in need of repairs. I think me that you will be on the hunt for an approved blacksmith for some time to come, and that towards the end of your journey, you will find that none exist.”

  When the Herald said nothing, Mirabelle tilted her head to one side. Had she damaged the man’s powerful armor to the point where nothing worked? Though she weren’t the brightest bulb in the house, she’d divined early enough into the fight that the armor the man wore could be brought to a point where it would no longer function, thereby ending the fight quickly enough, but she didn’t think that moment had been reached just yet.

  Lady of the Weeping Eye opened her mouth to taunt or tease Herald once more. She knew it weren’t precisely fitting, especially in light of the new role she were trying to take upon herself, but ‘twere a thing they’d all of them done back ‘neath The Dome, hey? Once your opponent were on the down and outs, it were practically part of the rules that you did poke and prod and jibe your mostly-fallen foe.

  Granted, that were for the benefit of a proper crew, either one formed of Golems or gearheads, and them as stood behind her were not the sort to indulge in that sort of thing, but tradition were tradition.

  Mirabelle closed her mouth, ignoring the taste of blood that had her tongue in an uproar. There were … aye, there were summat occurring around the skin o’ the armor, hey? “If mine eyes are not deceiving me, it does seem that the air itself is being dimpled, is it not? I wonder what comes of this?”

  High above them all, a tremendous –and unexpected- explosion ripped the air, drawing Mirabelle’s attention away from the critical moment in time to witness the Enforcer who’d been watching all from a safe distance blow apart at the seams.

  She turned back to address the Impertinent Herald, a wry expression on her lips, when all unexpected like, said Herald did punch her so hard in her face that her bell were rung quite spectacularly.

  The scream that followed were one of incandescent outrage.

  ***

  Ragar watched on as more of Mirabelle’s people fell unconscious from the sonic attack with a sinking heart. If the battle were not done soon, there’d be none left to assist the others in fleeing the Enforcer. “This goes on too long.”

  Marshak sucked at a tooth, the soaking battlefield up. “Oh, I think we’re about done here. That last sock to the jaw’s loosened our Lady up pretty decently.”

  “I hope so.” Ragar muttered sorrowfully as he trained his eyes back on the Lady and the Enforcer. They were exchanging blows now, back and forth, proper duke ‘em style. Where Mirabelle still moved like lightning in a bottle, wreaths of fog drifting this way and that, Enforcer was somehow managing to keep pace, even with more than half his chest gone. “I hope so.”

  “Still,” Marshak said with a nod towards the armored Enforcer, “you’ve got to appreciate the resilience of those things, hey? That’s an impressive feat. Our boy here is hanging on for dear life.”

  “Let’s hope Mirabelle turns him into gruel. Elsewise I think it clear we’re all dead in our socks.” Ragar clapped hands over his ears when he saw Mirabelle working to pull in another double lungful of sweet air.

  “There you go again,” Marshak followed Ragar’s lead and plugged his earholes up, “talking like an Arcadian. I think you have yourself a bit of a problem, don’t you just?”

  ***

  Warning signs. All around him. All the lights turned from either wavering green or blacked out … black, transformed into seething red and amber and even the occasional announcement highlighted in a kind of terrifying black neon. Suit’s voice droned on in the background, tenaciously listing all of the systems that were being driven offline by the utterly abusive workaround he’d developed to get power to those very same systems.

  “Environmental controls, down to three percent. Life support, offline. Comm systems, offline, though it doesn’t really matter at this point, not with Clint blown into five or more pieces. Hierarchical archiving, offline. No one is going to know of your great sacrifice. Full recording suite, offline.”

  “Shut up!” Abby dodged a ragged, open-clawed sweep from Mirabelle’s left hand then stepped in to nudge her backwards with a pneumatically-driven shoulder bash to the chest. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  “Still,” Suit persisted doggedly, “inverting the repulsor emitter arrays and hotwiring them into the non-functional quantum absorption blanket to provide a hot and ready source of power to the remaining systems was quite ingenious. I’m trying to broadcast the information to Terrex, but as you can see, the lines are down.”

  “Dammit!” Even as he bonked Mirabelle backwards, her other hand appeared out of nowhere to slash raggedly across his helmet, long, thin claws glancing off the rounded surface but leaving behind a few seams that’d easily turn into exploitable damage. “Shut up!”

  “If she screams at us again…” Suit tried displaying a simulation of the expected damage, but the images popped into pixels and trailed down the side of the damaged HUD. “Well, I don’t need to tell you what’s what. You are bleeding from the ears, after all.”

  “Shut up!” At this point, it sounded like Suit was doing it’s level best to distract him from the fight, and that didn’t make a lick of sense. Abby stepped backwards out of the way of a punch, tried lurching back in to pop the horrid Arcadian bitch right in the stomach –blood was still trickling out of the woman’s mouth, so his intention was to rupture everything on the inside- instead managing to catch an impossibly delivered spin kick to the back of his head.

  “Down we go!” Suit shouted merrily. “She really is very good, isn’t she?”

  Abby bounced his forehead off the cushion so hard he saw stars. He took a moment to just lay there before getting off his ass. Warm blood dribbled from his abused ears, slid down his jaw, each drop splatting against the inside of his damaged HUD. “For the love of everything, if you could just shut the fuck up. I’m trying not to die here.”

  “You’re doing a remarkable job, all things considered.” Suit’s tone was warm and approving. “Um. It looks like she’s … yep. Here it comes, squire. Ready yourself and all that.”

  ***

  Mirabelle pulled air into her lungs. It was time to end this. She were sore, she were tired, all her people were either driven unconscious from her verbal assault or were suffering in other ways, and ‘ere the battle continued overlong, the Lady had little doubt there’d be none left to follow her the rest o’ the way.

  The Golem knew not where this strange power came from and understood even less about the curious transformation that’d fallen upon her from the moment the battle had been joined, but she weren’t about to question it.

  Not here, anyways, not as she were stood above immobile Herald. In the here and now, anything that were of assistance were to be used, and used well.

  Some inner se
nse chimed, telling her the breath she’d pulled in were ready to be delivered as one of them screams that could cause metal to rattle, bones to shake, blood to boil.

  She let loose, eyes burning like incandescent red lanterns that’d lead you right to hell.

  The sound burrowed into the Enforcer’s armored back.

  At first, there were nowt at all worth seeing, just metallic plates rippling a bit ‘neath the assault, looking almost like waves on water, but if there were one thing Mirabelle knew about waves, it were that e’en though they looked insignificant, if you were to climb into water and see for yourself, you’d learn soon enough that them little ripples atop the surface weren’t even hints as to what were going on ‘neath it all, so she kept at it, leaning into it, putting all she were worth into the effort.

  Oh and aye, as she’d learned a long time ago, them little waves and ripples in the metal suddenly sprung loose into chaos, bits of metal and who knew what else, long and short, wide and thin, torn asunder from the armor, becoming a blizzard of deadly sharp metals.

  And still Mirabelle kept on, shielding her face with one long, slender hand. With backside ripped loose to reveal nowt but some kind of metallic skeleton and a man’s thinly dressed backside, the Arcadian knew she were victorious.

  And yet, still, she kept on, pushing the scream down and down and down, intent on ending the Knave’s life right there on the spot. Those strange senses applied to the monitoring of her fellow Arcadians and their progress hinted that the only one as were still dealing with his Enforcer were Chevy Pointillier, but that meant perilously little; though he were the last one on stage –so to speak- it did seem to Mirabelle that he were also the only one to be properly and fully prepared.

  Last in could very well mean first to Book.

  And that were summat that couldn’t happen, hey?

  Spirals of metal and other materials soon gave way to bits of blood and bone.

  ***

  Suit was screaming in his ears, a piercing, terrible scream that merged with the sinuous shriek currently flaying the skin and muscle from his back. Suit shouldn't be able to scream, should have no consciousness capable of registering physical damage as anything more than a dry list of statistics, a clinical acceptance and a steadfast preparation for repairs some time down the road.

  "Shut up!" Abercoign's voice was barely a whisper, not that it would’ve mattered much. Mirabelle's relentless onslaught and Suit's keening cry had become his entire world. "Shut up."

  Abby was only dimly aware of the pleading tone in his voice. The banshee's yowl was drilling into his skull as it had the last time, bringing with it a seething landscape of noxious colors and inescapable bursts of light that had his brain swimming in it's own juices.

  This was it. This was the end.

  The Enforcer supposed he should've known this was how it was going to go, from the very moment that Shuman had been so effortlessly killed by Agnethea.

  The sounds stopped. Finally, almost beautifully, silence consumed him.

  Had she run out of energy? Was the assault at an end? Had Terrex dealt with Chevy and come running to help …

  He felt a cold, cold hand close around the armored spinal column through which Suit did the bulk of it's communication and suddenly, vertigo told him he was up in the air.

  "Well, shit."

  ***

  Mirabelle slammed Trinity's Herald into the ground, feeling the tiniest bit bad for doing so; 'twere rotten enough she'd flayed man's back into nowt but ground meat and shiny bone, but to slam that roughly treated side into filthy stone were just insult to injury.

  Alas, it needed doing. There were words as needed saying.

  Mirabelle didn't know how she knew it, but as she gazed speculatively at the armored man, it were obvious as the nose on her ruint face that the suit were done for. Mayhap it were some sort of special sense not unlike a Golem's inward knowing the depths of Dark Iron into which a gearhead had sunk.

  Whatever the case was, from whichever realm this talent had sprung, Herald's armor were nowt more than a collection of broken metal flinders and failed hope.

  The Lady of the Weeping Eye reached out with a delicate finger, hooked it 'neath the bottom ridge of Herald's defunct helmet and curled in until sharp nail punctured the now-brittle metal. She wrenched it loose with a ear-hurting racket, then tossed the hunk of junk off to one side so she might confront the man who'd done her people an injustice.

  "Why," Mirabelle said, puzzled, "you are nowt but a lad yourself."

  "Fuck yourself." Abby tried to spit at the fiendish woman, but … nothing about him was working. Even though Mirabelle had long since ceased her otherworldly caterwauling, the colors and sounds evoked by her ungodly voice were still doing their best efforts to turn his brain into jelly.

  "Lad you may be," Mirabelle crouched down and leaned forward until her face loomed close to the Herald's, her chest aching as she caught sight of her current visage but forcing herself to continue, "but the damage you've caused this day brings you no good will from me."

  Abby tried moving one of his hands, only nothing happened. Either Suit was as inert as the ferrocrete around him or the damage done to his back had crippled him. He supposed it didn't matter. He was as done as done could be. "I was only doing my job."

  Mirabelle nodded, trailing clawed fingers down the side of the young man's exposed face. She made a regretful moue when one of her sharpened digits dug a thin but deep cut.

  "Your job is to bring nowt but death and destruction wheresoever you set your feet, Herald, and that is no good job for anyone. The bed you lay in now is the one you set to make all on your own, and after I did give you all manner of chances to step to the side. Why did you not take the offer?"

  Abby tried to find the words to explain the whys and hows of what it was to be an Enforcer, but his tongue failed him, driven to silence by the fireworks blazing through his mind. Lamely, he repeated himself. "I was only doing my job."

  "And now, here we are, you, laying cold and dead in some horrid, barren graveyard and I, moving onward with my family. How say you now about your job?" Mirabelle saw no point in giving the Herald any opportunity to repeat himself or to beg for his miserable life.

  No, instead, she flicked her deadly fingers across the lad's neck, deep as they could go. A faint gurgle, a moment's look of deep regret, and suddenly, all life was gone from him.

  Mirabelle rose, feeling … odd. The sense of impending urgency, the need to do unparalleled levels of violence in order to protect her people … it drained out of her as swiftly as the last dregs of Herald's life had pumped bright and clear onto his jumpsuit. Twitches and shivers passed through her body, and as she strode with clear purpose towards her people, the Lady of the Weeping Eye knew that she was her old self again.

  Thank the New King for small graces.

  When she grew close to silent Ragar and stunned Marshak, the Lady of the Weeping Eye paused and looked at the man who would one day become her seneschal of war. "Do not think, Master Marshak, that I am somehow unaware of what took place this day. When this is all over and done with, you and I shall talk, hey? We shall have words and words, and at the end of't, either we shall see eye to eye or there shall be a falling out, won't there just?"

  Ragar covered his head with trembling hands and looked sideways at Marshak. Were it not for the fact that they were in a terrible spot, the nonplussed look on the ex-soldier's face would've been hilarious.

  "I did try to warn you, hey?" Ragar whispered the words quiet as he could. "Our Lady, she does not miss much."

  "A burden I will bear." Marshak returned sincerely. "There is no cost too high for atonement. E'en if it means my death."

  "And what if your hunger for atonement leads to all our deaths?" Ragar's words hung empty in the air.

  The Commander and the Knight Errant

  “Nanny Nonesuch,” Chevy said around a mouthful of perhaps the best tea he’d ever had, or at the very least, in quite some time –towards
the end there in old Arcadia, King’s Nannies had sort of let some things drop by the wayside, one of ‘em being the most important of all, proper tea-, “I admit, I hain’t one to turn down a spot of tea here and there, e’en when important things are brewing. Gives a man a chance to settle his nerves, give things a proper think, that sort of thing, and I reckon I have done it on more than one occasion to drive people ‘gainst the wall, hey, but this, it be too much.”

  Nanny Nonesuch, the birdlike Offworlder responsible for the hideous-looking Babby Boy Crane-Hawthorn, looked over at the elderly man in the amazing metal coat, the smallest of smiles on an already elfin mouth. “I am sure they’ll be along at any moment, Point-er.”

  Chevy fidgeted with some chocolate biccys that were on the plate before him, long years of being doubtful as to the provenance of biscuits coming from women named ‘Nanny’ before succumbing. He popped one of the delicious teatime biscuits into his mouth and chewed most thoughtfully, half a brain irrationally waiting for the moment when he either keeled o’er in abject misery or he began spouting all manner of secrets he’d wished were kept sealed inside his gray matter.

  As it’d been with the first three, so too with this ‘un; nowt but delicious flavor, reminiscent of those long-gone days ‘ere the King had swan dived off the deep end and started shitting on everything in sight.

  As Chevy chewed, he reflected on the three bursts of color in his mind’s eye and their relationship to the last one, which he knew well enow were nowt more than Book itself. Fingers twitched, itching to lay hands on’t before all the others.

  “You are worried about the mis-sion?” Nonesuch asked, sipping at tea.

  Chevy grumbled a bit, swiping some of the biccys into one of the pockets of his metal coat in the process. He caught the mischievous smile on Nanny’s lips and flashed her a conspiratorial wink. “I hain’t worried ‘bout the mission, Miz Nonesuch, so much as I am the launching of said mission. The others ‘gainst whom I do race are near to the level whereupon it resides. In my mind’s eye, I see it sitting there, amidst an empty, ramshackle ruin, atop a pile of what’d once been a building or some other thing, calling us forward, hey? The thought of any one of t’other Arcadians getting there before me, it does fill my old man’s stomach with the worst twisting. ‘tis a thing that cannot be.”