Dark Iron King Volume I: Thy King's Will Be Done (Unreal Universe Book 1)

by Lee Bond

  The King watched on for a bit more, ideas churning in his head. Erg was not yet ready to slap his hand on the Door, the others would be some time in following after their missing brother, Chad was only just put to possibly good use and all else was just a matter of waiting.

  Barnabas nodded once, quite firmly. His mind was made up. “Aye. I’ll do it, I shall. One last trip through Arcade City, hey? And in the meantime, I’ll deposit myself somewhere along this man’s path to see what can be learned of the outside, won’t I? See if he works for Trinity or summat else. Just for me own edification. For as I learned thirty thousand years ago, hain’t nothing in the Unreality as can beat this particulate.”

  The King took a peek at the area surrounding the Door his target was destined to exit into. He frowned. “Bollocks. Bloody damned Nicked Jimmy’s on ‘is rampage. Shoulda done for him when I run into him, I should’ve. Twisted outsider bastard, hey? This fella o’ mine runs into Nicked Jimmy, well, with his implants and enhancements and augments all gone offline, that bastard gearhead or one of his crew’ll do for him in a twinkling. Well, much as I hate it, there’s nothing for it but to crawl inside that bastard’s poisonous old brain and get to whispering a bit.”

  And so King Barnabas Blake the One and Only did set his mind into Will, and set Will into whispering inside Nicked Jimmy’s brain, filling the twisted gearhead with enough of a plan to see that this strange new fish who represented a curious change to the world Outside survived long enough for a random encounter with a wandering blacksmith…

  6. Nicked Jimmy’s Perpetual Revenge

  This was a good crew. This was the best crew. They’d been hounding the King for a solid day now, never giving up, never stopping. Other, smaller gaggles had swarmed in from the nooks and crannies thinking to steal their prize, and that was when his crew truly proved their worth; instead of freaking out and pulling all their resources away from whittling the King down to size, his mighty crew spread out, switched roles. All the crunchers and thumpers pulled back and away from the King and took care of any stupid gearhead gaggle or wastrel of wardogs as appeared to steal their thunder, and all the pushers and prodders pushed harder and prodded faster, keeping their lumbering monarch dazed and confused ‘til them tough lads and lasses made their way back.

  That were the trick, Jimmy thought, to a good King killing. You never let him relax, never let him rest. And that was why this crew was best. The crunchers and thumpers took care of a crew that wanted their prize then came back fast as they could, then they’d all start whacking and whomping away, always and forever forcing the monster where he, Nicked Jimmy, demanded.

  Jimmy’s job –as leader of the crew- was, well, to lead. To lead, and to know how to kill the King. More or less. Under normal circumstances, issue orders to the hitters –his thumpers and crunchers-, telling them when and where they needed to hit. Jimmy was good at his job. He could take one long look at the howling King, one long whiff of the burned metal and oil washing off their monarch, and know when it were time to go for the jugular. Or the brain pan. Or whatever it was that needed to happen next.

  Jimmy was always the sort to be good at what he did, even back … back before. In his previous life, he’d been a crooked accountant who’d gotten sick and tired of helping an even more crooked King’s Son deplete the life savings of old people who were, in that man’s own words ‘not goin’ ter take it with them, hey?’. As an accountant –crooked or not- you were successful only if you paid attention.

  And so when he’d killed that King’s Son for ruining the lives of people that reminded Jimmy of his old mum and dad, when he’d found himself delivered through those doors and into the terrifying world of Arcade City, he’d discovered early on that there was very little difference between following the money and following the King.

  Dark Iron helped, naturally. Kingsblood. The Vicious Elixir. The old crudey-crude. He remembered his first time, spluttering and choking and convincing himself that he was going to die and then … oh and then the Dark Iron had taken grip on his soul and that, as they say, had been that.

  Jimmy jumped to another rooftop and bellowed orders through his homemade megaphone. The King was doing that thing he did, yes he was, where he twitched and shivered along his arms. He was trying to rebuild. Down there on the ground, it’d be a maelstrom of tiny little bits of metal you hardly ever noticed. All those tiny bits would be jumping across the ground like they were alive, and if you weren’t careful, the King would eat those bits of metal, just absorb them right into his royal skin and then? Well.

  Long Live the King.

  Under normal circumstances, Jimmy’d be telling this crew, his best crew yet, his absolute best crew, to smack the King right round the head a few thousand times. Kind of a convincer to get their lovely monarch to stop from eating in the middle of a fight.

  This weren’t ‘normal circumstances’.

  Oh no, not at all. For when Jimmy did for a King, it weren’t never normal. Never.

  This were Warden Peemes’ turn to funnel prisoners into Arcade City. Once a year, anywhere from ten to a hundred stupid fools who’d done something to upset someone they shouldnt’ve came through the Doors. Other days, other doors, but Jimmy knew Peemes’ schedule like he knew the back of his hand. And his arm. And one of his legs; Jimmy counted the days of the year with a faithful nick in the skin, and when he counted three hundred, he started working on getting a temporary crew of the best boys and girls he could find, worked on getting them up to speed, fed them a steady diet of King-killing and Dark Iron Blood, then called them up to go hunting a Big King.

  It were easy to call up a Big King these days. Every gaggle as hadn’t given up for Ickford were still doing it at least once or twice a month. Why wouldn’t they? The benefits well outweighed the risk. Four gallon tubs of Dark Iron shot from High Above to land at the feet of the victors, a big metal drum with glass sides full of shifting, shimmering, swirling deliciousness…

  “Listen up you lot!” Nicked Jimmy hollered through the cast-iron megaphone, his voice echoing through the empty courtyard. “Get him movin’ left! When he’s done that, come up round behind and start working on his backside!”

  The people of this little burg had figured out twenty years ago that once a year, they’d have a King staggering through their homes, so they were … elsewhere. They’d all gone off to visit their friends at another Estate or whatever it was they did when he came stompin’ along with his Big King.

  They weren’t here, and that was the important part. Just like any other place in Arcade City, this little burg whose name Jimmy had never bothered to learn looked vacant when the men and women weren’t around. That were key, because what he were doing, herding their Big King towards the Doors … it weren’t, strictly speaking, allowed.

  Jimmy jumped to another rooftop and trained his glasses on The Dome. Then he looked back down at his thumpers and crunchers, his pushers and his prodders. The best. The absolute best. With a crew like this, one could start moving inward, start fighting against better crews, start calling up smaller Kings with their even better elixirs.

  The notion of moving inward all the way to Arcadia weren’t something he much thought about, because, truth to tell, he were well and truly intent on making Old Peemes’ life as rotten and miserable as all get out, for now and forevermore.

  Closest he’d ever come to movin’ inward was to get to them beasts as lived out by Ickford, and well, that’d left more than foul taste in his mouth, hadn’t it just?

  With a crew as he had right then, though, well, Nicked Jimmy reckoned they could take the whole of Arcade City by storm, moving inwards bit by bit, hey? Roll on up to and through them bastards as lived in Ickford, reminding them as had treated Nicked Jimmy poorly of why it paid to have good manners. From there, work inwards as all them old fellas used to talk about, back before they’d all lost their stones until they came upon them fabled doors leading into fairest Arcadia.

  Jimmy licked his lips. It were wo
rth thinkin’ about, it really were. There hadn’t been nowt to make that journey in a hundred years or so and there weren’t no more Platinum Brigadiers neither.

  Jimmy licked his lips a second, a third, a fourth time. Wouldn’t that just be about the best thing? Draught by draught, sippy-sip by sippy-sip, changing the rotten Kingsblood fouling him in ways barely imaginable into that glorious silver prize? Jimmy never understood why them old fellas who skulked and scurried in Ickford didn’t move inwards. They were easily the match of any next tier in, and they surely had to be as tired as he were of this rotten life. They muttered summat about betrayal and all that, then smacked you silly, didn’t they just?

  Nicked Jimmy didn’t know as much about them gearheads as lived in Ickford as he knew he ought, but he did know if he did go back that way again, it’d be with this crew, right here. They may not be as grey in the gills as them others, but they had skill. Skill enough to teach a right proper lesson to them as had treated Jimmy poorly so many years ago.

  Ahhh, the sudden thought of it all, of having … all the rottenness that came with Dark Iron poisoning, all the mad voices, the weird hungers, the forgetting, the blistering skin that sometimes came out with metal fibers … all of that disappeared.

  They said that when you guzzled that final prize, you grew strong, you grew smart, you grew into the person you could’ve become if only your entire life had gone the way it was suppose to’ve gone the first time around. What a prize. What a treasure!

  What a dream.

  Aye, with a crew like the one Jimmy had now, well, after so long fighting the King, he figured it’d take no more than a handful of years to get to Arcadia. A few meager years, backing and forthing, moving inwards, learning them new ropes as and when. Getting better and better at who you were and what you did…

  A few years and he could be rid of the seventh and eighth fingers on one hand.

  A handful, no more, no less, and he could get his eyes freed from the shards of metal that impeded his vision if he wasn’t careful.

  Two. Three. Mayhap no more than five or six. Not so long. And while them fools in Ickford were happy with their crude, laughingly talking about bouquets and hints of motor oil and they made a mockery of properly doing for a King, he’d turn himself into a proper gentlemen, one of them pure blokes as had been gone for a century, a true and for real Platinum Brigadier.

  If, that is, them in this gaggle he so admired managed to hold themselves above all that were bright and shiny in Ickford, what with them fanciful smiths and tricky artificers and them whorehouses and all that. He’d tried before now to explain to previous gaggles the whys and wherefores of how dangerous a city like that really was, making the mistake of talking about economies and how Agnethea were a full blight, that she were in truth wrecking the whole of Arcade City from top to bottom, and well, hadn’t they just looked at him as them in Ickford had done, upon a time?

  This time … this time if they went that route, he’d say nowt about Ickford, save to make the place a drib, foul drablet of a city, whilst just on the other side of them doors … paradise beckoned.

  It were a definite possibility, hey?

  Nicked Jimmy looked at the metallic slivers in his skin. Perfect reminders, them.

  Every time he nicked himself to count down the days until his next successful vengeance, the cut sealed instantly, a tiny little seam of dark black metal that shone from the inside out. The glistening tracks grooved into his flesh were a solid reminder of how things had gone down, out there on the outside.

  Make the journey to Arcadia? Hah. Not likely.

  No. He’d spent decades punishing Peemes, he’d spend decades more. That bastard had promised to let a younger Jemalen Pelt free if there was any money to be had, and oh, had there ever been money; a molar in his mouth, of all things, a molar full of encoded data hiding about a million dollars in the FrancoBritish Trust of Stars’ Hollow.

  Well, the money had been given and he’d been thrown, bound and gagged, through the Geared Door. And now that missing molar was a goddamn grinding drill bit in the back of his jaw. It was more functional than a tooth, to be certain, but …

  “No.” Nicked Jimmy shook his head then hurried to catch up to his crew.

  Some things tasted better than Kingsblood, no matter how pure it might be.

  ***

  Garth opened his eyes again, wondering as he did so why they kept closing. Was it a function of the passage they were in, or was there something wrong with him? The absence of The Eye had him –not necessarily petrified, that was stupid- … concerned.

  Yeah. He could work with that. He was … concerned.

  Concerned over the fact that nothing, anywhere, was making any goddamn sense.

  The other prisoners trooped miserably beside and around him, every step a shuffle, every whisper a moan.

  Early on, once they’d all been through shoved through the doors, a handful had tried going back out only to discover that the huge clockwork door was gone. Garth had wasted precious breath explaining that they weren’t in Kansas any longer, only his warnings had fallen on deaf ears; these were hard men and though they weren’t about to fuck with someone who’d damn well karate chopped the fucking Dome so hard it looked like it’d nearly cracked in half for a second there, they were damn well going to try anyways.

  The majority of the prisoners, though, had started forward at the same time, resigned to their fate. Every one of them had heard whispered stories about Arcade City. If they’d committed their crimes ignorant of what happened inside the metropolis where all FrancoBrits had originally come from, they’d arrived on that wind blasted shore being fully cognizant of what awaited. Prison guards on the ships were given leave to spin the most audacious stories they could.

  Little did they know that most of what they gleefully harangued their charges with were either the outright truth or watered down versions of what they would encounter, especially if Old Meechy’s diatribe were even an eighth true.

  The idiots bound and determined –not to mention ridiculously convinced of their success- to find some manner of escaping The Dome’s inner workings soon discovered that they weren’t to be given a chance to try at all; once the shuffling soon-to-be citizens of Arcade City got about three hundred feet from where the doors had once been, those men and women trying to alternately kick and bite their way out found themselves being shoved by an invisible force.

  Garth grinned wistfully. He’d made a huge mistake. He hadn’t done nearly enough investigation into the nature of Arcade City. He should’ve risked open communication with Trinity Itself, should’ve tried his override commands in the hopes that he could make the machine mind spill what it knew then forget about their chat. If there was anything in the known Unreality with concrete data on this … Dark Iron King Blake and the workings of Arcade City, it was Trinity.

  “You know what’s weird about all this?” Garth asked the guy next to him, a weird-looking dink with ridiculous hair and unfortunate body odor. His nose wrinkled of its own accord. Not all prison transports treated their burdens with the same level of human decency as Captain Eck.

  “The part where you punched The Dome so hard I saw lights flashing in my eyes?” Gerome tried shuffling away from the weird guy with the hair and the aggressively friendly voice, but the blue-eyed maniac steered alongside.

  “Hah. No.” Garth shrugged. “That was pretty weird, though.”

  The Dome of Gears had withstood the single most concentrated burst of physical energy ever delivered –as far as Garth knew- in the entire Unreal Universe and … shrugged it off. And then rebuilt itself. Without skipping a fucking beat.

  If that wasn’t Cloud-based technology, Garth had no goddamn idea what it was.

  “No,” Garth waved a hand around, wincing in pain when he realized he was doing so with the broken one, “no what’s weird is all this.”

  “Which part?” Gerome demanded doggedly. “The part where we’re walking through a Dome made of metal that cove
rs nearly an entire island, the part where the people inside this covered island are all apparently mad as fucking hatters and will try to strip the flesh from our bones and wear those bones on the outside of their own to frighten small children, the part where our glorious and beloved King apparently roams the streets at night killing everyone who gets in his majestic way or the part where you think something else is weirder than all of that? Because, I gotta tell you, mate, it all seems pretty fucking weird to me.”

  Garth nodded, poking his broken hand gingerly. It wasn’t hurting quite as bad, which was either good or bad, depending on whether the absentee healing factor was up and running or not.

  If it wasn’t, then there were all kinds of fucking reasons why the abrupt lack of pain spelled nothing but trouble.

  Clapping a hand on Gerome’s shoulder in an effort to cheer the guy up, Garth agreed, saying, “No, yeah, all that shit is terribly weird and I gotta tell you, I’m kind of excited to see this bit about the King. I mean, really… the actual King? Or, like, some kind of earthly representative of the King? Which is it? No, Gerome … anyone ever tell you you look like this actor guy named Gerard Butler? Well, okay, your teeth are terrible and you’ve got this awful receding hairline thing going on that no amount of combing over will hide, but yeah, you totally … hey, could you shout ‘This is Spartaaaaaaaaaa’ for me?”

  Gerome shrugged the whacko’s hand off his shoulders irately. “Can you walk with someone else, please? I swear I’d kill you if I thought I could.”

  “Nah, I’m good.” Garth gestured around them again, indicating the swarming, claustrophobic darkness that all but stuck to their skin. It went on forever in very nearly every direction except one; the only reason they all knew they were headed in the right direction was thanks to a small, gleaming bit of light off in the far distance. “Anyways. It’s this that’s weird, man. Go on. Ask me why.”