by Lee Bond
Having encountered more than anyone’s fair share of Enforcers out there in Trinityspace, Chad couldn’t figure out why King Blake would make such devastating weapons for the systemic AI. With such an arsenal as that at his fingertips, the FrancoBritish ruler could take over entire galaxies before Trinity could say boo.
Chad looked away from the gossamer light in the bottle. Blackened, wetly glistening metal was beginning to dampen the glory of that graceful illumination. He addressed his unwanted host. “You was about to continue on wiv ‘ow Arcadia’s become a piss pot.”
“After the King left, and once the deaths of the Platinum Brigade were over with, it was the Kingspawn Points, Chadsik.” Mistress Taint smiled. “Before, when you were but a child, they were around, but never in such amounts. In the outer rings, you needed to travel as many as a hundred miles to find one, and in places wild and distant. Further in, there were even fewer, and even farther apart, yes? You yourself went out there into the environs to try your hands at taking down a Big’un, yes?”
Chad nodded. Wild fun, that. Fightin’ alongside them bad boys and girls, reeking of hot metal and shining with bristling black metal under their skin. Crazy blokes. Chad guessed that was where he’d picked up some of his more … excessive habits. Though he’d never once touched a dollop of the crudey-crude, oh no. Some drugs was just too much for a fella to ‘andle. The ex-assassin nodded wistfully. The only thing to compare to that time, running wild and free with the wardogs of this blasted city, had been the shenanigans with Huey and Gwyleh.
Mistress Taint well understood Chadsik’s love of the outside world. He’d become a legend out there in the wilds, but that’d come to a crashing end when the King had called him home. The Nanny reflected somberly that perhaps the King’s methods of bringing his wayward son home had directly influenced Chadsik’s abrupt departure from Arcade City. “That changed overnight, my young master Chadsik. Kingspawn points blossomed out of the ground like nefarious mushrooms, all over the landscape, with very little space between some of them. Travel less than a day in any direction and like as not, you’d trip over one.”
“That don’t make any sense, Mistress Taint.” Chad had never really understood King Blake’s reasons behind allowing the citizens of Arcade City a chance to kill any of the robotic simulations that those DNA scanners could bring forth. Even more confusing –if he were being honest wiv himself- was their tyrant’s gift of the so-called Kingsblood after murdering their ruler in effigy. “Wardogs and them as turn into true gearheads are dangerous fellas. That many points …”
“Aye.” The robotic nanny nodded. “Crews swelled from a hundred to ten times that many. A horrible thing. More Kingsblood has been spilled these last years than nearly the whole time Arcade City has been about.”
Chad tapped a lip thoughtfully, wishing Taint would allow him a pair of field glasses so he might survey Arcadia better. He couldn’t imagine why she was keeping him from seeing his old home clearer.
A soft chiming note filled the air, drawing Chad’s pensive gaze out the window back to the Soul Machine. The essence was done ‘cooking’ enough for safe delivery; the metallic Dark Iron coating the King insisted was necessary for transport glistened and gleamed with –for Chad- a heartbreaking inner darkness. Soon, the pure quintessence that was an alternate Chadsik al-Taryin from some wild and wonderful destroyed Reality would be gone forever, trapped inside metal, bound with weapons, serving the whimsy of Trinity.
Chad turned his eyes back to the city. He’d rather look at that devastation. “And Arcadia?” he asked after a long moment of silence.
Mistress Taint’s face curled with an unreadable emotion. “There is the Platinum King down there, lad, all puffed up and full of itself. Does for anyone who looks into his twisted eyes for a hundred years now. The Matrons do as they can to keep his excesses limited, but without the King, there are challenges for everyone.”
Chad considered the venomous hatred evident in Taint’s voice whenever that liquid metal King was brought up. In his absence, the mad nanny had gotten herself quite the emotional vocabulary.
“Crikey.” Chad whispered. It were nearly impossible to believe his hasty departure from Arcade City were the sole cause of such misery, madness and mayhem. It had to be true, though; for all her faults and treachery, Taint had little reason to lie about summat so grim.
Still, though, the assassin held little real remorse in his bosom. The things done to him in this very chamber … no amount of suffering felt by those beyond the walls of the Armory could ever hope to be the match of what King had done to son. Not in a million years.
Mistress Taint made to respond, but the Soul Machine flashed and flared and sang its song. Chad’s latest masterpiece vanished and the machine grew hungry for another. “Time to start up, my child, time to summon forth another piece of art so wondrous that mortal men would weep at its vision.”
Chad set his jaw like a petulant child. “No.”
Mistress Taint pulled out her cattle prod, set the air spitting with electricity. She watched as Chadsik crossed his arms and shut his eyes. Faint sounds of ‘Hail Britannia’ reached her ears. The robotic Matron set her own jaw firmly and started in.
Artists needed encouragement, after all. She had it on good authority that for some, sufferance was a requirement for creativity.
13. Hair of the Dog
The two riders sat astride their dark horses, watching the antics happening inside Kingspawn Pub through a pair of field glasses, talking quietly about what they were witnessing. Every now and then, one of their horses would snort, sending a great gout of super-heated steam hissing out from cast iron nostrils, scorching the earth.
Any wandering gaggles catching sight of the two men on horseback would turn tail and head the other direction, most likely for days; across the back of each man were two weapons that them with the Vicious Elixir driving their thoughts learned to recognize straight off, and from a fair distance.
One was a blunderbuss –often called a splashgun by those who used it- that could turn even the strongest and Ironed-out fool into a puddle of steaming black goo with a single shot. Gearheads and wardogs didn’t much like the gun for that reason, but since it was a close-range weapon only, they turned and ran more often than not, simply to avoid any trouble.
The other was a sniper rifle, of sorts, and it was this weapon that Kingsblooded fools feared more than anything other thing. It fired … tattoos. Simple, cog-like tattoos that burned themselves deep into the skin, tattoos that smoldered like dark fire … tattoos that summoned up a bloodthirsty King the moment you got too close to a Kingspawn point.
And that King would chase you wherever you went, no matter how fast you ran. A King called that way was tougher, meaner, and more vicious than anything a gearhead had ever fought before.
Of the two, Kingkillers preferred the splashgun over the cogshot in every way; you were done for before you could even blink when a Gearman used a splasher, but the long gun? Kings crawling out of the earth to do for them as had the tattoo on their body were the worst thing imaginable. Them Kings took their time doing for the afflicted, didn’t they just?
In any event, Gearmen were best to avoided at all costs because, with the Brigadiers long gone in the dirt for decades upon decades now, they were prone to surliness on a fair regular basis and had been known of late to fire their blunderbusses without provocation, turning whole crews into metallic slurry beneath cruelly spiked boots.
“You ever been out this far?” Dominic asked, wrinkling his nose in distaste as his eyes flicked over the closeness of The Dome walls. Arcadia born and bred, he’d never once actually seen the great and immense walls outside of a Book. “It stinks out here.”
Chevril took a great, lusty inhalation. “That’s farmland, that is. Good, proper work. Your fancy Book’ll say that for certain. Shame it’s gone to pot like this. Them gearheads. All gone mad on Kingsblood toxicity, I warrant.”
“You think Book might also say why it’
s got to smell like an outhouse?” Dom couldn’t handle the reeking stench of fresh … everything.
Chevril snorted and glared at Dominic. “Can’t speak to that, but I warrant Book does say why you’re a ponce.”
Dominic pointed a gauntleted hand at Kingspawn Pub. They’d only been in the area for ten minutes and already they’d witnessed two men and one woman rocketing through the roof of the blasted drinking establishment at what Book was saying was ‘dangerous’ speeds. “I say we let whatever’s happening in there play itself out, go in, turn the floor runny with goop.”
Chevril made great pretense of thinking about that for all of fifteen seconds. “We been summoned by a brass button, lad. Nowt to do but see what’s what. We’re bound by that old law, hain’t we? Probably the last one in existence, truth be told. Besides which, I’m curious as all get out over this whole affair.”
Dominic looked like he wanted to argue the point, but he closed his mouth. As much as he didn’t like being this far from the center of their little world, the older Gearman was right about one thing; they’d been summoned by a button and that fact had all the brother Gearmen right wound up. They were all waiting to hear how such a powerful tool had gone unused for so long, just as they were hoping it’d been used –finally- for a good reason.
Chevril retrained his field glasses on the pub. Dominic had peered through Book en route so as to get a clearer picture as to what was going on, learning that the person or persons responsible for had a lot of Dark Iron in them. Book had a difficult time working along the outer edges of Arcade City, but the wise old tome seemed to think that whoever was doing all that damage had more Kingsblood in him that was sensible, or even reasonable, which was … saying something.
This close to The Dome Walls, every lad or lass as could properly lay claim to the moniker ‘gearhead’ had veins black as night with blood thick as treacle, black as molasses. Making matters worse, to a one, each and every Kingkiller –gearhead or lesser wardog- ought to’ve moved inward long ago. Whether they knew it or not, the crudey-crude was killing them quick as any old Big’Un, and far less merciful, in the end.
For Book to even hint that them doing such terrific damage to Kingspawn Pub had more in ‘em than was wise … well. Both Dominic and Chevril couldn’t help but imagine slate grey-skinned fiends, could they? Had one o’ them from Ickford come all this way, all curious, and was now having summat of a reckless tantrum?
Dominic’s thoughts ran oddly parallel to his on-again-off-again partner’s, though from different angles; as a Book Club Regular, he was chiefly interested in the awful forms Dark Iron addiction took, this far out. Their thoughts twined when each considered the depravity those afflicted with their awful addiction dealt with, how deep and unsubtle the changes were. “Holy shit, would you look at that!”
Chevril turned his glasses to where his partner pointed, whistling low. Someone had chosen to depart the premises posthaste via running straight through a wall, tearing half of it down in the process. Wooden flinders and broken brick tumbled this way and that, pulling down the old chimney spiraling up one side of the old alehouse in the process.
That someone, if his glasses were showing him what was really happening in the real world instead of choosing –for no real reason- an insane hallucination, was running right at them.
More specifically, the howling maniac –indubitably the perpetrator who’d initiated the barkeep to summon them in the first place- was making a beeline right at him. And that didn’t make no sense, none at all. They weren’t hard to miss, sat astride their horses as they were, right up high on the horizon. Blind men could hear their great steamhorses huffing and chuffing like majestic engines. They’d even picked the bloody spot to give them fools down below a proper fair chance to spot trouble on the rise, hadn’t they?
Not e’en someone in the worst throes of Kingsblood-enhanced rage would be that foolish. Preservation would reach right up through that blackened haze of virulent anger and throttle the old brain ‘til proper thinking got done, wouldn’t it just?
“I should get off your horse if I were you, Chevy.” Dominic kneed his horse. The majestic metal animal responded by prancing a few feet to the left, whickering and snorting steam.
“Nope.” Chevril set his jaw. He set his horse to staying right where they was stood. “Not a Kingkiller alive who doesn’t know what the horse means.”
The howling grew louder, eliciting a small thrill of concern from Dominic. The sound, echoing across the flat plain, was full of endless, animalistic rage. That was normal. Gearheads were always angry. But there was a keening edge to the roar, a … sickened sorrow. That was something neither man had ever heard before.
“I should really get off your ride, Chevy.” Dominic moved further away. “Our man is running right at you and I expect he’ll not stop.”
Chevril thrust his chin out. “Everyone knows the horse, Dom. He might be full of Dark Iron rage at the moment, but somewhere in that blacked out brain of his there’s a sense of …”
Chevril’s horse, a steam animal of cunning design, took the brunt of the collision like a champ. Chevy flew through the air, a comical look of exasperation creasing his grim face. The steam stallion neighed, whickered, and lashed out with it’s back feet as it’d been taught to do, but the screaming madman kept on, Dark Iron-driven fingers clawing through the join in two riveted plates.
As Dominic watched his partner land with a heavy thud fifteen feet away, Chevy’s horse erupted fiercely, sending it’s intricately manufactured guts fountaining upwards and outwards.
The fiend was back on his feet and running as if nowt had happened.
“Shoot him.” Chevy seethed. His own guns were mangled wrecks. And his horse, oh the horse he’d had since he’d joined the Gearmen … it was spread out over three miles or more of landscape if it were an inch. There’d be no reassembly, not even if they could somehow convince a Barnmen to leave Arcadia for the hinterlands. The loss was too sickening to confront properly, so Chevy let the anger flow.
Dom nodded as he swung his vintage rifle over his shoulder. He put the lens to an eye and kept flicking glass down until the magnification was proper. Steam began trickling out of exhaust ports as the rifle drew in power. Dom pulled the trigger. A loud crack echoed and his target, already three miles away and angling towards a copse of trees, pitched forward as the tattoo imprinted itself on his flesh. The gearhead was up and running as if nothing had happened.
“Again.” Chevy insisted, unable to take his eyes off the crater where his horse had once stood. He’d loved that damned thing. Such a long time they’d been together. That damned horse had known more about him than any other person in the world, Dom included.
Dom quirked an eyebrow, but said nothing. He took aim again, flicking through yet more magnification lenses. The rifle drew in more power, growing warm through his Geared Armor as the engines huffed and chuffed quietly.
He fired. White smoke filled the air.
The target didn’t even fall this time, merely took the burning tattoo’s sudden presence in stride. Dom made to put his rifle away but Chevy raised a finger.
“Seriously?” Dom shrugged as his partner shot him a smoldering look. Some men really took to their rides. He’d known Chevril had been particularly fond of the clockwork animal, but was surprised at the level of devotion he was showing. “Third time’s the charm, then.”
The sole remaining lens barely found the man as he ran. Intricate hydraulic pistons steadied Dom’s arms with audible click-click-clack sounds and the rifle’s body grew hot enough at last to make the Gearman worry about his own safety.
He squeezed the trigger just as the lens lost anything resembling proper focus. A loud boom ripped through the clearing and the smoke rising up from the rifle this time was thick and black and stank royally.
The last tattoo caught their escaping madman just as he entered the stand of trees.
Dom shouldered his weapon. “That poor bloke is going to have a to
ugh time of things, Chevy. Word might get back to Matrons, ‘specially if he runs through King’s X or, King forbid, Plenipotent Row! There’s five or six Kingspawners down that way, all lined up in a neat row. Mayhem, that.”
Chevy knelt down in the crater that had once been his horse and dug a brass gear out of the earth. He held it up for Dominic to see. “He did for my horse, Dom. No poor bloke, him. ‘e’s a right mystery, this ‘un. Let’s go talk to this bartender, see what happened.”
Dominic helped his partner onto the back of the horse, sparing a glance at the trees. When the maniac came to his senses, felt the triple tattoo burning on his back, well … there weren’t a place in Arcade City the man could call home for very long. The whole area from where they stood to the next Wall in was littered with Kingspawn points, a final gift from their missing monarch.
The howling still continued, a haunting, tortured scream that got the small hairs on the back of the Gearmen’s neck tingling.
Dom geed the great steamhorse into action. Time to see if anyone were left alive inside.
***
Garth ran. It was all he could do. The howling was something he couldn’t … couldn’t stop doing. Fear and terror and anger and hunger rode him like a rough beast. His back was burning, three distinct points of white-hot incandescence that had the already fiery Kingsblood trying to dig ever deeper into his veins angrier still. Through it all, that thing he called Specter but was in truth nothing more than his own Kin’kithal nature, grinned a black-toothed grin, riding the highs and lows of terror, a spirit-ship on a psychic maelstrom.
If he kept running, maybe he could outrun what’d happened in the pub. If he kept running, maybe … maybe his hands would go back to normal. And maybe, if he kept screaming, everyone who heard him would turn the other way.
Garth opened his mouth and screamed some more, legs pushing him ever forward.
***
The bar was a mess. A true shambles. Every single table, broken. Every chair, splinters on the ground, soaking up the inky goop that gearheads called ‘blood’. Holes in the walls three feet wide. Holes in the ceiling. Not a glass in the place. Three musicians dead, though not by the Fish’s hands, oh no; every time that whirling dervish had come close to someone not kissed by Kingsblood, he’d stepped aside to brutalize someone else.