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

by Lee Bond

  “Good.” Marc slapped Quick Wit on the ass and told him to get moving.

  ***

  Nighttime was Garth’s least favorite time at the best of times, but in Arcade City, it was worse still; trapped alone in his own gloomy thoughts –Barnabas locked himself in his tents and didn’t come out for any reason at all- and forced to deal with the hot oil stink rising from his own fucking skin and the deep rage percolating just below the surface, and below that Specter … peaceful sleep under The Dome wasn’t going to happen.

  Before Arcade City, nighttime led to a continual cavalcade of doubts about Reality 2.0’s successful birth. There were so many things left to deal with, a cavalcade of enemies, a seemingly infinite number of surprises waiting to pop up at the last moment … this close to the end, did he really think he’d be lucky enough to have only two or three major players looking to oust everyone, or was it worse than he could even imagine? Were there ancient Offworld races sequestered deep inside their own solar systems and Galaxies, champing at the bit?

  More to the point, what if these not-all-that-theoretical species proved to be just as capable as the Dark Iron King? Or the Emperor-for-Life? Or Trinity Itself?

  What else was he missing? What other things was he not even considering?

  And when his scumbag brain got tired of that, his mutinous worries looped back in on themselves and Garth discovered a dark urge to fall backwards into vicious mayhem and torrential bloodshed.

  Violence and the craving to use bloodshed as a means to an end was and always would be something he’d struggle with and against for the rest of his life. He was Kin’kithal. The need to conquer was hardwired into his DNA and there was no escaping that reality.

  Beyond that, truly important, heartbreaking matters bubbled to the surface amidst the roiling witch’s brew of angst riddled doubt; where was Naoko, was she with Jordan Bishop, was she ok? And his friends in Latelyspace? How were they? Were they managing all right against Trinity’s forces? How were Herrig, Ute and Huey dealing with Fenris and his ancient brothers?

  Were the so-called CyberPriests stepping up their game out there, finally moving and shaking with the rest of the big boys? What manner and direction would their efforts take? Were they blazing big and bold across the stars, snuffing out planets or were they creeping behind the scenes, manipulating others to do their dirty work?

  Arcade City concentrated those fears, magnified those woes, alchemically transforming them from niggling irritations into full-blown crises, using foul Dark Iron as a nanotech crucible.

  Whether it was a byproduct of the inky Kingsblood tattoos ticking out their inscrutable machinations across his flesh or the very painful realization he’d well and truly shat the bed this time in terms of preparation and organization, Garth didn’t know and was constantly worrying he’d never know.

  When you got right down to it, though, Garth really didn’t care one way or the other if those particular issues were ever resolved. More than anything, he wanted to be rid of Kingsblood. Without the nanotech poison ramping everything up, controlling himself –and his concerns- should be easy enough. But...

  Vicious Elixir had him running red all the damn time, turning him into a hotrod engine pushing past the limits every step of the way, playing on instinctual fear and loathing every time his eye fell on twisted metal flesh. Not since the bad old days across The Cordon had he itched to leave a swathe of destruction in his wake, a monochromatic swathe of grey-black, thick as molasses, pooling at his feet...

  Here, under The Dome, that way was expected. Not to mention accepted and nearly demanded.

  But … it couldn’t be his way. As many people as possible needed to be alive at The End. They all deserved a second chance at a normal life, and the more people he killed, the emptier Reality 2.0 would be. Garth was holding out against fear that Arcadians would be permitted to number amongst those added to the roster of fresh souls for a new Universe.

  The mostly ex-Specter was incredibly grateful the nanotech virus had yet to find a way to bridge the gap between his coarse flesh and the divine-like quadronium implants. If the Kingsblood particulate found a way to crack into the limitless power inside those molecular machines formed from a proto-Reality … chaos.

  Sheer, unbridled chaos.

  Garth knew himself. He’d had that kind of power before, and failed the tests of will in brilliant form.

  So far, the only saving grace –and it was by the slimmest of hairs- was that his particular instance of crudey-crude affliction seemed to respond to actual, imminent need as opposed to supposed need.

  To many, the difference was infinitesimal, an unimportant smidgeon of control. To Garth, it was the difference between hulking out into Specter at the next rank whiff of gearhead and just beating someone senseless. The moment that changed, the second his Kingsblood reacted to his overwhelming loathing of gearheads and their maladies…

  Garth snorted derisively at his own morose thoughts. There was a lot more going on in Arcade City than his own random, emo bullshit.

  Like the thunderclap, for example. That was an inexplicable and almost certainly City-spanning occurrence and like it or lump it, Barnabas got a sour-lemon look on his homely face that all but screamed ‘that never happened and I am quite freaked out by it so stop hassling me’. Then the old prick got all sorts of testy and started rattling off the various tests –all of them with Kingsblood at the core- he’d like to run. It was getting difficult for a poor outsider to dodge that particular onus. About the only thing keeping the smith tolerant of his companion’s reticence at experimentation was the older man’s indulgent attitude towards blacksmith training.

  Frustrated at the Ferris wheel his thoughts were on, Garth rolled over onto one side, clanging his precious steampunk hat on a makeshift nightstand. The hat hadn’t been designed with sleep in mind and it did some weird torqueing thing to his neck every time he moved. If he was forced to wear it for the entire time he was in Arcade City, by the time they got to the fucking King, his neck would be able to suplex Macho Man Randy Savage into next week.

  Garth laughed at the vivid fantasy springing to life; him, running around, hollering Randy Savage’s catchphrases at bad guys, body-slamming people left and right … now that would be more fun than his continual –and mostly pointless- fretting.

  There were real things to worry about, things like The Dome. The great, indestructible Dome sealing them away from the outside like the world’s largest Tupperware container. What was it made of? What was its purpose? What powered everything? What about the empty space between the walls, the blankness behind the gears, the curious silence inside his own body where the OS used to roam?

  What about …

  What about those whirling, gnashing, crushing cogs that’d risen up out of the Vicious Elix…

  Suddenly and out of nowhere there was a sharp knife to his throat.

  Training and instincts kicked in instantly. He shut his one good eye quickly and lay there as boneless as possible, thanking his lucky stars he’d rolled away from the tent flap. The other way around and whoever had a softly chuckling buzzer close to his throat would’ve been hard-pressed to miss him being a moody bitch.

  Sonorous words from the vaunted Kith Antal rose up out of the murky darkness that was Garth’s past. “Too many fools waiting for ambush betray themselves, boy, by stiffening in anticipation of that blade slicing across their throat, or by holding their breath. Don’t do it. Never. Hard as it sounds, just lay there. It’s harder for someone to dig deep into your neck once they’ve started. Stay limp, take the cut. Then you strike. Better a shallow cut than a groove through to your spine.”

  Staying boneless while a dude is rolling you over with a humming buzzknife to your throat … expert level skill. The Kin’kithal supposed his old man’d be super proud, if he weren’t a stark raving ex-dee poisoned mega-lunatic ready to destroy the whole of everything for a pack of evil space locusts who’d completely fucked everything up.

  “Don�
�t know what Marc sees in the hat.” Quick Wit muttered to himself. “It ain’t all that special. For what we got in crude and what we’re likely to get for you, my soon-to-be-dead fake apprentice, why, I don’t doubt for a moment Mickel or Harvard could whip one up that were a hundred times fancier. And that’d fit over those stupid thumpity-thumps coming out of his noggin. Well, let’s see what you got in your pockets before I slice you wide, friend.”

  The harrowing pressure of the buzzknife scant millimeters away from turning his throat into so much chunky meat was replaced by hands picking through pockets, giving Garth a chance to recognize his would-be assassin/thief: Quick Wit.

  What with his flaming crop of brilliant red hair and being so comically short and slender it was too easy a joke to make, the gearhead looked more like a temporally-lost Irish pickpocket from the 20th century than any kind of Kingkiller. According to Barnabas, this particular fiend was one of the fleetest and fastest Kingkillers ever to trod dirt under The Dome, capable of moving like actual wind when the need was on him.

  Wit was –in the esteemed eyes of the smith- certifiably insane. The fiery topped Kingkiller was a bomber born and bred; there were few in Arcade City who could run straight up a King from bottom to top, tossing bombs into earholes or chucking them up noses or straight down throats and get away again with most everything still intact, but Wit, being the fastest of them all, was both best and maddest.

  Insanity. Everyone in Arcade City was fucking mental.

  Preparing to jam his own knife into Quick Wit’s neck, Garth spared a moment to wonder what the fuck those first Kingkillers had thought about what they were doing. In some kind of bizarre moment of pure clarity, with a King stomping and roaring all around them, had they been lucky enough to realize that taking on gigantic robotic simulacra of their King was right the fuck out there in terms of legendary madness, or had they –as they all seemed to do now- just shrugged their shoulders, kept calm, and carried on?

  Either way, there was one thing Garth knew for goddamn certain. He had zero fucks’ worth of intentions in getting anywhere near a Big King. Not now, not ever, and if that meant strolling halfway across Arcade City to make it fifty feet inwards, then he was goddamn well going to Bill Bixby that shit.

  “Nothin’ in your pockets, hey?” Quick Wit whispered jovially to the sleeping man. “No wonder you’re a failed gearhead, lad … sleeping through this. For shame.”

  “Who,” Garth replied quietly as he pressed the buzzer he’d built with his own two hands against Wit’s exposed throat, “said I was sleeping?”

  The smaller man’s Adam’s apple bobbled above the jagged ripsaw edge of the buzzknife like a fishing lure on stormy waters. “Now, now, now,” Wit, still straddling Garth’s waist, “now … this isn’t what it looks like.”

  Garth watched Wit’s eyes dart around the tent, saw the man quickly assessing his options for escape. A flicker of disappointment showed the speedy gearhead saw there was no way out but a fight. “It looks like you’re here to steal me and sell me off to a tinkerer. Fucking Thumper.”

  Wit flashed a grin. “He’s not the brightest, hey? Here, how about this, you let me go and I run away very quickly and tell our friend Mental Marc you copped to the scam well ago and was waiting? Could e’en say you was up and ready, hey, and I ran away quick as a wink? How’s that grab you?”

  It was an option, to be sure.

  But it was the wrong one. No matter how convincing Quick Wit could be when the pressure was on, Mental Marc and his fucked up brain were set on a singular goal now. No matter what, shit had to end before it spiraled further out of control. Barnabas’ camp was the perfect battleground.

  Garth grimaced and whispered a Hail Mary for his diminishing soul. Before the speedy gearhead could move a muscle, the vicious buzzsaw blade tore rudely and jaggedly across Wit’s exposed throat, slicing him from ear to ear, grinding through flesh and bone with grisly efficiency. A piteous mewling sound burbled up through Wit’s new breathing hole.

  As life began to steal away from him, a most disgusting thing happened.

  Quick Wit shrieked like someone possessed by a howler monkey demon hybrid. His body followed suit quickly after by jerking back and forth with escalating tremors. A second howl –this one closer to a steam engine’s piercing whistle- burst forth, seemingly drawing all the life out of Quick Wit’s gasping face; the already pale mug grew slacker and slacker with each passing, piercing second. Thick oily blood fountained forth from the great, painful looking gash in the gearhead’s neck, coating Garth’s head and upper chest with blackened Kingsblood.

  Finding one last jolt of strength, the three-quarters dead gearhead bolted from the tent, pulling half the room with him and yanking the tent down on the way out.

  “Fuck. My. Life.” Garth moaned as various tools and accoutrement to the blacksmithing trade came crashing turbulently down. When every piece of Barnabas’ equipment stopped trying to do Quick Wit a fucking favor by caving his goddamn skull in, Garth counted to ten before pushing everything off.

  This, he did as carefully as he could when every instinct in his body urged him to hurry his ass outside; knowing Barnabas as well as he already did, Garth couldn’t discount the possibility that the smith would turn into a towering bitch if there was even the tiniest of scratches on otherwise OCD-level immaculate tools.

  As sure as he was ever going to be concerning the state of the tools, Garth counted to ten a second time. Satisfied neither Wit nor any of his gaggle-buddies were going to come bursting into the tent with fucked up steam-guns or some other weird-as-fuck bullshit, Garth crawled out into the campsite, buzzblade clenched in his right hand vibrating like a fat, angry, steroidally-enhanced murder-bee.

  A thick trail of steaming Kingsblood led into the center of the camp. Garth rose to his feet, tried to ignore the stinging low-level ache on his chest and face, and set about stalking his would-be killer, ever mindful that there were more on the way.

  “Barnie wanted a chance to see how this all works.” Garth muttered, tossing the knife back and forth in his hands. “Well now he’s going to get a closer look than he wanted.”

  “Barnabas.” The aged blacksmith hissed before moving from his hiding place between two tents. “My name is Barnabas.”

  ***

  “You’re certain ‘twas Wit?” Marc demanded, disbelieving his ears. Maybe his pistonbrain was working on his hearing now. “Not t’other fella?”

  Shooty Jane nodded defiantly. “He come running out of that tent like he was on fire, spilling blood from this great huge gash left to right.” Jane shuddered, firebright hair spilling across her face. This was why she was a shooter, one of the longest-range ones. She didn’t like the idea of getting close enough to someone for them to use a buzzer on her lovely skin.

  The longer the gun, the less chance of that ever happening.

  Marc spat. Then he cursed. The shriek coming from that fool Wit could’ve woken the damn dead, let alone a peacefully slumbering blacksmith in the next tent over. Nice and easy and quiet with a mystery to solve was out the window. “Fine. Send the rest in. Send the signal.”

  Shooty Jane rolled her eyes and then lit the candle she carried in her pocket to test wind currents.

  ***

  Thumper, Eddard, Elton and Emmy looked at one another, then at the twigs cupped in their hands. Eddard was grinning ear to ear and didn’t care you were supposed to hide your tells; he had the longest of the twigs and weren’t going anywhere near that alleged bullshit blacksmith until the very last moment because of it.

  Dank Eddard cleared his throat. “Let’s get this over with, hey?”

  Everyone nodded, then revealed their twigs.

  ***

  “Now ain’t the … ain’t the … Jesus this stuff fucking stings.” Garth muttered, running his free hand over the goop covering his face and arms. Kingsblood was grosser than regular blood by far and away, and for added hysteria, the fact it was swimming with nanotech particulate was doing noth
ing to soothe fraying nerves.

  Barnabas examined the man he’d chosen to take as ‘apprentice’ broodingly, and not for the last time; Garth Nickels was an interesting mystery to say the least. If only he could dare using his Kingly prerogative! So much simpler to evoke answers right out of the dust than to fiddle around with all this … talking.

  Ready to make some pithy comment about life, death and nature and all of that, Barnabas Blake spied summat about Nickels that the man himself –with all his whingeing and moaning- had obviously missed.

  “How do you feel, hey?” Barnabas reached out to grab Garth’s arm. Predictably, the fool yanked it away.

  “This ain’t the time, Barnabas.” Garth gestured towards the center of camp with the buzzblade in his hand. From where they stood, you could just make out the temporary corpse of Quick Wit. There was no set regeneration period for gearheads or their lesser companions, which was why, when you fought against nanotech poisoned Mad Max rejects, buzzknives and ‘swords were –realistically- your only weapon of choice; the whirring shark’s tooth weapons ripped and shredded flesh for half again the width of the blade’s edge, forcing whatever Dark Iron that flowed like tree sap to the wound to work twice as hard to seal the gash, resulting in everything from thin black scars to the sorts of things that made Garth want to wash his eyes out with bleach every time he saw something … off-putting.

  Buzzblades were small, leaving perhaps a two inch trail of torn skin and flesh, but Garth had dragged deep, old-school SpecSer style. The Iron in Wit’s blood would have to do a lot of restructuring to close that kind of trench and even more to bring the jabbering goof back to life. For the rest of his unnatural life, Wit would have a three inch long, two inch wide glittering seam of red hot Kingsblood stretching from ear to ear.