by Lee Bond
Barnabas had described working with King’s Will to bend Dark Iron to your own will similar to tiny tremors under the skin. The more tremulous the flesh when working on a specific piece, the more precise the control, the more … present and moldable King’s Will was, resulting –given decades of experience and an ungodly amount of patience and creativity- things like pneumatic hammers and sniper rounds that could fly around corners.
For Garth, though, when his efforts at forcing the Cloud to his rudimentary control had finally taken effect –nearly two hours in- the sensation had been more ‘Jesus, that’s goddamn electricity’ and less ‘wiggly skin’. From there, assembling the buzzblade that Barnabas seemed to hold in such high disregard had flowed as smoothly as any wonder-device he’d ever built whilst under extra-dimensional influence.
“Call it what you will,” Barnabas sniffed disdainfully, flicking the jagged-toothed device with a thick thumbnail, “that hain’t no buzzblade and certainly hain’t deserving of a nickname.”
“This,” Garth held his version of the buzzblade up, angling it this way and that so shards of ‘not sun’ could glint off the immaculate blade, “is better than your stupid buzzer. It’s got less moving parts, so it’ll be way fucking less prone to shitting chainsaw teeth all over the place when something slips inside. It’s sharper, too. And it weighs less, and it’s got some cool-ass designs on the side that I just decided to add for no reason. It’s better.”
“Oh, aye,” Barnabas nodded, “I can see all that with my own eyes, milad, but you failed to follow the standard template, as it were. There be some things under The Dome that can come in many, many flavors, and our dear absent King does permit them with the twinkle in their eyes to muck about with what he allows, true enough, but the buzzer be one o’ them things that is how it is.”
Garth gestured angrily at his first foray into Dark Iron smithing. “What the fuck? It’s a goddamn knife. What’s so wrong with it?”
Barnabas ticked the errors off one by one. “It be lighter. It be sharper. It be having … less than half the guts it should. So…”
Garth interrupted. “So what?”
Barnabas let the interruption slide. He’d intentionally manipulated Garth into following his own path to making a buzzknife, and so it was also up to him to accept the other man’s ire. It were trying, though, that much was certain.
“So,” the blacksmith said slowly, so Garth was sure to be paying attention, “there’ll be one of two outcomes when you turn that … not in here, if you please, you fool, outside. As I was saying afore you damn near curdled my brain, one of two things shall happen when you turn your ‘better’ blade on. One, and ‘tis the outcome I pray for, it simply will not work. You could take it apart a thousand times and fix all the parts and whatnot, but without Will recognizing it, nothing.”
“Oh, it’ll work, old man. It’ll work like crazy. It’ll be like a hot knife through butter!” Still, there was no ignoring the steadfast sincerity in the smith’s tone and the look in his eye. It was a rare moment, coming from the old bastard, but it really did seem like he was being honest. “All right, what’s the other thing that could happen?”
“Well,” Barnabas held open the tent flap and gestured grandly for his reluctant –and poorly mannered- apprentice/spy to join the outside world, “it shall explode in a most impressive manner. For your benefit, if I may suggest putting your wonderful creation in the middle of a large, empty field. Following that, it would possibly do you good to find a rather long stick with which to hit the actuator.”
“There’s nothing in here to explode, Barnabas.” Garth countered hotly as he shoved past the smith, causing the unpowered buzzblade to dance around his fingertips. “And besides, even if it does go boom, how bad are we really talking?”
***
“And what have we learned today, apprentice?” Barnabas wouldn’t keep his vast amusement to himself even if he were capable.
“We’ve learned that you can suck a dick.” Garth dug a clod of dirt from an ear.
The smith laughed so hard that he actually slapped a knee. “That may be a thing that I can indeed do, milad, but I was asking after your lesson with the buzzknife.”
Wiggling a pinky back and forth through the other ear –which was ringing like a goddamn bell- Garth shot Barnabas a very intense ‘leave me alone’ look. But the smith just sat there on his ‘outside lounging chair’ laughing and shaking his head and making really, really unnecessarily pointed looks at the fucking crater blown into the middle of their camp.
By a fucking buzzknife.
“That were the biggest yet, boyo.” Barnabas was impressed. The lad had obviously done a lot of thinking and pushing and prodding of the old King’s Will, corralling a fairly surprising amount of it into the blade for it to go off like that. Had the fresh-looking knife worked properly, it would’ve done precisely as Garth had boasted.
Trinity spy? Plausible. The old machine mind knew he had King’s Will, and were no slouch when it came to thinking deep thoughts, so it was entirely possible the Leader of Mankind had figured out a way to teach It’s newest spy what to expect, and how to manipulate things.
“You fucking got that right.” Garth hawked a glob of dirty spittle onto the smoldering grass. “That’s completely mental, Barnabas. There wasn’t anything explosive in there!”
Oh, how he longed to give the smug, arrogant man a precise explanation as to why the buzzer had gone off as it had, but that would be giving away too much.
So, the King simply shrugged, adding quite enigmatically, “The King Wills as he Will.”
“Yeah, well. That sucked.” Garth booted a clod of dirt back into the hole. “What now? Can I go again, try and build a ‘proper’ buzzknife that weighs ten pounds more than it should and has a goddamn operational period of less than three hours before it breaks pretty fucking spectacularly?”
“But of course, apprentice.” Barnabas nodded with all the benign grace of a legendary blacksmith. “You need to learn all you can.”
“Sweet. Let’s dig through them boxes…”
“Actually, boyo, there won’t be no more diggin’ through my personal stash.” The smith laughed at the bitter look on Garth’s face. “Them pieces I gave to you are still all about, son. The metal as goes into making proper weapons and all are quite … resilient, you see.”
Garth surveyed the smoking crater. “You’re serious. You expect me to hunt for fucking gears and things smaller than my pinky fingernail?”
Barnabas yawned and closed his eyes. “Aye, lad, I do at that. Unless you’d prefer to barter some of what I want from you?” He opened one eye slyly. Oh, how the man was stewing!
“No. No. This is fine. It’s no problem. I’ll find all the pieces in no time.” Garth hopped down into the hole, shouting, “You go on ahead and have your old person nap. You’re getting on in years. It’s important to get all your rest.”
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only howled with laughter. Oh, he was having some fun with this Trinity spy, and it were only going to get better. Sooner or later, all the harassing and haranguing would either have Specter out in force or it’d cause Nickels to break his cover.
Either way, it was good to be King.
***
“Put on the hat.” Barnabas held the hat in question out to Garth.
Garth eyed the hat like it was going to grow legs and come scuttling at him like some kind of mechanized monster from The Thing. He shook his head. “I don’t like the hat. I feel like a gimp. You might as well ask me to wear a full body rubber suit and a ball gag. I feel ridiculous.”
Barnabas pointed at the gaggle coming up the road with his free hand. “Get the hat on before they arrive or there’ll be trouble. I don’t want trouble, Nickels. Hain’t no normal man as comes this far deep ‘less he be a smith or a wardog, and you move like one ‘o them more than a smith. They’ll suss out your skill in walloping on things in the hiss of a metal clock’s single sweep.”
Barnabas s
hoved the hat into Garth’s hands and stalked towards the approaching gaggle, throwing his arms wide and greeting them with loud joy.
Garth stared at the hat with loathing.
Barnabas was right. With the hat on, people would be less prone to stare. Unspoken –and never needing to be spoken of- was the other, more salient reason for the utterly bullshit disguise. Barnabas had learned from gossiping gaggles whilst they waited for work to be done that the survivors from the pub were the minstrels and singers.
All it’d take was a single song or poem about that night –about his solid ebony eye- and he’d be a goddamn celebrity.
And that was something he’d had his fill of, thank you very fucking much. Never again: ‘fame’ under The Dome could only be worse than fame in Latelyspace.
Worse still than being recognized by someone who might feel some strange onus to dead brethren were the Gearmen, those police-like men who patrolled Arcade City. Barnabas wasn’t letting up on their possible, eventual, dire appearance on the scene, saying that there ‘weren’t much they could do if them lads in the copper underpants showed up’ and not much else. If more gaggles started disappearing, well … it was hard to hide that kind of stuff. Trails of dropped bodies would only make the Gearmen’s job easier, and why should anyone but him get an easy anything?
“I completely shat the bad coming here.” Garth shook his head at the stupid hat. “Fuck, man, this is worse than when I landed on Hospitals. There, I had ex-dee to keep juicing me up. Maybe I should, like, open a taco stand and do that instead saving the whole universe. How much trouble could I get into selling tacos and gorditas and shit? People love them some tacos.”
Garth sighed, turning the battered felt top hat over in his hands, feeling the rough fibers of the old fabric. A quick progress check showed Barnie was almost done with his spiel which meant there was little time left, not if the current goal was to avoid being mistaken for anything other than ‘one of the guys’.
Well, there was a quick solution to that!
Garth ducked out of sight behind one of Barnabas’ huge construction tents so he could continue feeling sorry for himself.
Garth fiddled with the mechanisms on the hat. Under normal circumstances, the rotating and oscillating binocular lens that fit perfectly over his Dark Iron infested eyeball would be one of the coolest things he’d ever seen. It was a bona fide fully functioning piece of steampunk majesty and if this were the 20th century in Reality 2.0, there was every chance someone wearing the damn thing would be instantly elevated to Nerd God status merely by clapping it on. From there, nerds of all sexes, sizes and shapes would indeed swoon, yea verily.
Here, though, in the Unreality, it was an aggravating enigma that kept him up at night.
Risking a peek around the corner, Garth watched Barnabas deal with his prospective clients for a minute. The old blacksmith had been at the game of repairing weapons for the redoubtable Kingkiller breed for considerable time; the broad metalworker was perfectly at ease around the heavily mutated and high strung Dark Iron addicts, so much so it was … it as almost as though Barnabas feared nothing these maniacs could do.
From the way the smith was dealing with these clients, Garth gathered everyone knew everyone else from old, but there was just that extra bit of…
Garth blanched when Barnabas shot him a particularly dry and condemning look right in the middle of his sales pitch, pushing the ex-Specter further into the collection of tents that housed the blacksmith’s wares.
The transformed eye bothered Garth more than he could admit. Even though the older, ‘wiser’ man had already taken a few long looks at the blackened orb and the fine traces of Dark Iron coursing just under the skin around the eye and the temple, declaring after an absurdly long five minutes of silent inflection that the infection ‘be temporarily halted, odd as that is, hey, odd indeed’. Following which, Barnabas had dropped right back into character, demanding he be given permission to try a few new ideas he had on how best to ‘get that rough and black crudey-crude out from under yer skin, won’t hurt nowt much at all, I am certain’.
All while brandishing a metal syringe the size of Mosquitor, God of Mosquitos, a bloody damned blood-sucking brass proboscis right out of a goddamn Clive Barker book.
A request to which Garth had suggested –pleasantly- that Barnabas go fuck himself sideways and through the ear, an invitation sparking a terrific fight full of screaming and cursing, resulting –in Garth’s humble and not at all incorrect opinion- the cockamamie gewgaw Barnabas was insisting he wear as a ‘disguise’.
Running a thumb across the thick lens of the unlikely contraption, Garth mused on whether or not the glass’s origins were true. As with everything Barnabas used, the extremely well-crafted half-orb allegedly came from a destroyed Gearman horse. A brief description of the horse as being ‘a large, vast beast of galvanized metal, a true steam-snorting, piston-driven monster upon which them crazed Gearmen ride about dispensing justice’ had convinced Garth everyone under The Dome was totally fucking bonkers.
It also convinced him he’d like to see another one, though from a distance, and without him running right the fuck through it.
Garth frowned and clenched his jaw.
There was no getting away from the fact that –if he really wanted to improve upon the basic techniques Barnabas had condescended to teach- he was gonna have to put the stupid fucking thing with the stupid goofy horse eye on his fucking head and go on out there like some kind of retarded red-headed step-gearhead and be on his best behavior.
And then it was all too likely he’d be expected to chinwag with some of the most heavily Kingsblood infected weirdoes around. If only getting over the hideous physical mutations and brutally cruel transformations gearheads went through had been as easy as ignoring the perpetual stench of hot metal that rose off everything –everything- associated with Dark Iron.
Those mutations … those terrible nanotech replication errors. Fingers transformed into bent metal digits. Teeth that spun and whirred, dental drill bits instead of bright, pearly chompers. The seams, cracks and crevices of ordinary flesh all beaded up with queerly resilient Dark Iron scars. To hear Barnabas tell it, that was just the surface stuff; many gearheads hid the worst of their changes under clothing, a fact which made one surly outsider very pleased.
And that was only the stuff you could see without effort.
Who the fuck knew what else was wrong with them?
It wasn’t right. Before coming to Arcade City, he’d never seen anything worse than the Cloud-ravaged citizens of Gorensystem, and those nightmare images haunted him to this day.
Those poor shambling freaks with their dusty faces, perpetually collapsing and being reabsorbed, revealing awful glimpses of bone, muscle, sinew…
“When I find you,” Garth promised with a deadly hiss, “I’m gonna make you suffer, King, because brother, shit ain’t right.”
Garth jammed the hat on his head, twisting it around until the lens sat over his DarkEye.
Small steam engines began hissing and chuffing almost immediately. Bracing himself for the curiously worrying moment when three small brackets clamped themselves onto his face, Garth wished he were in a better frame of mind to enjoy the show. But he wasn’t, so he was doing the best he could under the worst of circumstances.
One cool metal bracket pressed itself almost too-tightly over the eyebrow, one on his cheek, one on his temple. Finally, a single long bar lowered itself down from the brim of the ridiculous stove-pipe hat with a ratcheting tiktok noise before settling into place directly against the base of his skull. Pressure increased, growing tighter and tighter until that now-familiar thrill of fear that the fucking thing wouldn’t stop tightening grew in him. The tightening stopped just short of outright pain and the fear fled. Moments later –after a thorough shaking of the head to see if the ludicrous contraption would topple off at the worst possible moment- awareness of the pressure pads decreased to the point where Garth was satisfied he wouldn’
t spend all his time fiddling with something he was supposed to be comfortable wearing.
“Besides,” Garth gave the hate one final, irritable thump, “I got deeper issues than wondering if I look like a twat.”
Specter was just there, rolling below the conscious mind, greedily waiting for that moment when he either lost his temper or fear got the better of him once more. Then that deep-seated Kin’kithal hunger would surge …
Sadly, it wasn’t a matter of if but when. A distinct and unquenchable loathing of all things gearheaded would see to that. From there, it’d be fingers dripping with cruel nanotech whips carving through flesh and bone and Dark Iron metal like a hot knife through butter.
Garth braced himself to play the role of blacksmith’s assistant and went out to meet the geeks.
***
“Who’s this then?” crowed Mental Marc, eyeing the fop in the top hat with undisguised distrust. His gaggle were all doing the same. They didn’t like surprises and some large fella wandering out from behind the tents in a chapeaux any one of them would kill to own counted as a big one.
Barnabas didn’t even bother looking over his shoulder. “Sister’s cousin’s boy.” He said despairingly. “From Colony Estates up North there. Thinks he’s a smith.”
“Why’s he here?” Marc demanded.
Barnabas looked down into Marc’s splotchy face, kindly but firmly repeating himself. “He’s my sister’s cousin’s boy. From Colony Estates. Thinks he’s a smith. Sure hain’t a wardog nor gearhead no more, let me tell you, not after him being such a fool…”
“You ain’t never mentioned him before.” Mental Marc whined petulantly. The pistons rising out of his head started thumping, and one of his nostrils started leaking steam, prompting the leader to flick a toggle switch on his lapel. The left side collar of his jacket started moving, powerful copper pistons pushing it up until it rest firmly against the side of his head, effectively stopping his head from slamming into his shoulder from the tremors.