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

by Lee Bond

  Something bit her, right in the chest. Shooty Jane looked down at the blossoming spread of black-tainted blood staining her best shirt with gore, literally reeling. “By the King!” she gasped raggedly. “He done threw my own bullet into me bosom!”

  There wasn’t a single long shooter under The Dome that could do that, in the dark, with a gun. Not with this precision. And their man had done the trick with his bare hands.

  Oh, they’d all made a dire mistake this night in chasing after this mystery. They were all paying for it. Well, all except for her. No, no, not Shooty Jane. She’d fled gaggles before now, she’d bloody well do it one last time, wouldn’t she just?

  Jane looked at her bullets scattered around the dirt, decided to leave them. Anyone who found ‘em could keep ‘em. The terrified shootist rose smoothly off the ground, shouldering her rifle, set on leaving Mental Marc wherever he was cowering –surely he’d seen through his precious field glasses the same as she- and whoever survived to their own devices.

  She was a world-class long-range shooter. Dozens of crews would love to have her, wouldn’t even ask about her old gaggle. She could snipe a King’s brain from a thousand feet away. Finding a new gaggle was down the road a bit; right then she needed to find a nice quiet place to hide so Kingsblood could do its business in peace.

  Looking nervously over her shoulder back towards the blacksmith’s slaughter-filled encampment, Shooty Jane collided bodily into Barnabas.

  “B-b-blacksmith …” Jane stammered, face flushing with guilt. Attacking a smith… no matter the prize, what had they been thinking?

  “Jane.” Barnabas smiled with cordial grace. He took a deep breath and let it out, laughing suddenly as one of Thumper’s pained moose bellows filled the night air. “Interesting evening, yes?”

  Jane pushed past the blacksmith. “Leave it be, blacksmith. Your maddened monster down there is one of a kind. A unique thing. We wanted it. We failed. All’s fair. Leave me be and I’ll never darken your shingle again.”

  “Actually,” Barnabas grabbed Jane’s elbow tightly, eliciting a squeal of outrage from the woman. She wheeled around and slapped him. Hard. “Actually,” Barnabas repeated himself, “no. Nothing under The Dome is fair except King’s Law.”

  Jane opened her mouth to laugh. She didn’t even have time to wail in surprised pain. Her body fell to pieces, then the pieces turned to brief bursts of fire, then the burning motes faded.

  King Barnabas Blake the One and Only wiped his hands clean of the last bits of Shooty Jane before hastening back to camp, running over the tale he would tell Nickels.

  The bullet, thrown by Specter, killed Shooty Jane stone cold dead. No. Not good enough. The suspicious prick would want to see the corpse.

  The bullet pierced her heart, aye, but the damnable fiend was no doubt escaped into the night, hey, never to haunt anyone ever again. Aye, that were plausible enough and suggested a journey that Garth with his need to avoid Kingspawn points could not properly take.

  Mental Marc? Well sure enough, the stress and shock o’ seeing such fearful combat did cause them head-pistons of his to burst right through the last bit of skull, hey, turning what else remained of the original thinking organ into drippy drops of grey goo. Where be the corpse? Well, like as not somewhere out there in the wilderness, crawled into a ditch or summat. Hain’t worth the effort of hunting that sad sack down neither.

  The monsters and such that crawled through the underbrush waited for gearheads to be separated, didn’t they just? And like as not, one of them had already been at Mental Marc. Not worth the effort of checking on that body, not at all.

  Barnabas picked up the pace, eager to see which mind would win the footrace, the prize of which was dominance of the outsider’s existence.

  ***

  Garth stared down at the bodies, then at his hands. This was incalculably worse than the slaughter at Kingspawn Pub. A thousand times … no … a million times worse. Last time, when the slender threads of Dark Iron had crawled out of his skin to feast on Nicked Jimmy, he’d fled into the night and run a hundred miles or more, horrified and repulsed at what he’d done.

  This time … this time as the Specter had risen through him on a hot surge of Dark Iron … this time he’d let it happen. Let it happen and enjoyed it. Had thirsted for the vampiric draining of spare Iron in his victim’s blood and bone, had reveled in the blackened swelling of power.

  “Fuck me sideways.” Garth wanted to put his hands against his face to weep, but couldn’t stand the sight of the offensive things crawling across the backs of his hands. The tattoos still ticked and tocked on his skin, but less furiously, less angrily. It didn’t matter. Didn’t matter at all that Iron ink seemed to be languid now.

  What mattered was the fucking things weren’t going away. What mattered was the King’s fucking nanotech Cloud had found solid purchase in this fight by draining his victims of enough Iron to spread.

  What mattered was that now … now Kingsblood might find a way to dig into the quadronium, to begin the process of conversion.

  If that weren’t already the case.

  What mattered was that if that happened, if he became in truth a fully Dark Ironed Specter … no one anywhere would be safe because the adaptive mechanisms in his body could quite possibly consume all the Kingsblood under The Dome. Moving forward, best practice was to avoid fighting gearheads at all costs, even if that meant getting his ass beat so bad he wound up looking like Elmer Fudd. Even if that meant dying, because the alternatives were worse than all that.

  “Woe betide the world, then.” Garth muttered woodenly, unable to take his eyes off the bruised, battered, shattered corpses lined up in a row. That’d been the last thing Specter had done before Garth had managed to swim his way up through the grotesque rage in him; his ‘alter ego’ had lined the corpses up in a nice, tidy row, presumably to remind the more Jekyll-like Nickels what you were supposed to do with your enemies.

  Garth didn’t want to know what he’d been planning to do next.

  A twig snapped, and Garth spun, expecting Shooty Jane or Mental Marc to be there. He almost heaved a sigh of relief when he saw it was Barnabas, pale and ashen. The DarkEye lens –which he needed to get off his damn head soon as he was done jibber-jabbering with the ‘smith- sputtered and sparked.

  No great thing, then. Obviously whatever weird amalgamation of operating systems currently at war in his body had failed to properly connect. The moment the hat came off was the last time it’d ever be on his head anyway, so malfunctions didn’t fucking matter.

  Garth cast a condemning hand at the pale corpses. “Get an eyeful, Barnabas? Did you see what the fuck can happen? I need this fucking shit out of me!”

  Barnabas frowned at the bodies. Such a waste. “I did, Garth. I did indeed see, and it was … awful. Amazing.” He raised his hands in defense. “No, I apologize, my son, but it is the truth. Never in this world of Arcade City have I seen or heard of Dark Iron tech like this, and I have traveled nearly everywhere, heard nearly every story. There have been monsters spawned under The Dome that only come once in a thousand years, great beasts with amazing and strange things at their command, but never have I heard of this.”

  Puling his thick, heavy smithy gloves on, the King crouched and stuck his fingers deep into an open wound on Thumper’s chest. He dug around a bit before pulling blood-stained fingers out. Barnabas took a sniff, rolled the tatty blackish bloody around. The sharp, familiar stink of hot crudey-crude was barely there. “You pulled the Iron out.”

  Amazing.

  Garth retched then, spitting out rancid slobber. He pretended Barnie’s eyes weren’t gleaming with avaricious excitement over what’d just happened. “Fuck off. Just … fuck off.”

  Barnabas rose. “Well, we best be dealing with these bodies and getting out of here, my young apprentice.”

  “What do you mean?” Garth couldn’t take his eyes off the bodies. Horrific. Unbidden, his gaze strayed to his hands.

  “Soon a
s you did for Thumper here, I took a quick look around.” Barnabas gestured to the trees. The lad was too distressed about what he’d done to worry one way or the other about absent bodies. “No sign of Mental Marc or Shooty Jane. Like as not, the leader started running the moment Quick Wit come out of your tent vomiting blood out of that necktie you gave him. And Jane? Well, as I can attest to have seen with me own two eyes, you caught one of her rounds and tossed it back the way it come. Warrant she’s out there in the wilds, bleeding to death as we speak. If she’s lucky to avoid the feral beasts and all long enough to heal up, well, lad, I’ll bet my forge she’ll not look for you nor me ever, and my total belongings she’ll say nowt about what happened here this night. What say you on that?”

  The tattoos on his hands were mesmerizing. They were actually moving. Garth ignored the smith in favor of working on not freaking out.

  Barnabas repeated himself patiently. “Lad, we do need to deal with these here bodies, boyo. Them Gearmen may still be on your scent, and with these pretty corpses here, they may crank up the search. There’s things been done here hain’t never been seen before. It’s their job, you see. To do for monsters and other things as overstep their boundaries, and like as not, summat doin’ for this many of the metal-headed brethren is wont to upset the Nannies of this here world.”

  Barnabas bent down and grabbed Thumper by the shoulders. “Now, be a lamb and help an old man get these here dead ‘uns over to yon melter.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Garth followed the request, though, grabbing Thumper roughly by the ankles. “Melter? The fuck is a melter?”

  “Why,” Barnabas flashed a pearly grin at Garth, “however did you think I acquired all the spare parts I have at my disposal, young master Nickels? Gearheads and wardogs are littered with tiny gears and cogs, little pumps and pistons and all that. It’s just a matter of … getting at them. Best way I found to get ‘em is to melt all that messy organic goop right off usin’ acids.”

  Garth hung his head. His life had gone completely off the rails the moment he stepped through the yawning Geared Door.

  19. I Spy With My Little Eye

  When Mistress Taint wasn’t being a bollocky twat with her insistent demands that he continue working –which was precisely ninety-six percent of the time-, she allowed Chad the luxury of wandering around much of the tower in which he was imprisoned. There was a lot to explore, a lot of memories –some good, mostly bad, given who his Old Da was- attached to each level of the spiraling tower that blazed with a light bright enough to be seen across the whole of Arcadia.

  Most of it was gone to shit, now. When the King had first brought him here as a wee lad, the work had been rare, playtime far more frequent, the old monarch cajoling a young, naïve and eager to please lad to separate portions of his soul for awful uses with toys and games and books and fancy things like that. And oh, how it’d worked, hey? So well, so perfectly, all the time. Young Chadsik had been desperately eager to please the King of the World.

  There were entire rooms stuffed to the tits with fluffy toys like Big Ole Scruffy down to Wee Miss Bliss. And the games the two of them had played in those lowers levels! Shoot Em Up and Doctor’s Off His Rocker and Where’s the King Gotten Too, Now, Hey? Those times had indeed been amongst the best of his life.

  Or so they’d seemed. Now –in retrospect- all those voices, all those lives, lost to him, given to a madman. Hardly a fair exchange on the far side of things.

  When fun and games had waned and the slack time grew shorter and the Soul Machine grew ever hungrier for Chad’s particular type of fuel, the levels and rooms full of games and toys had been replaced with women, alcohol, drugs. It became less about fun and relaxation and more about getting a few seconds of downtime where nothing could get through to you, because the one thing Good Old King Blake had never understood –Chad figured it was an intentional ignorance, a willful unconcern- about the process of summoning a Chadsik al-Taryin from some other when was that it hurt.

  Hurt his soul like a motherfucker, because right there at the end, with a him gasping on the hook like a choking fish, that other him had figured out what was going on and the sadness of betrayal tore through his soul faster than any bullet, sharper than any knife. It were a pain he’d endured thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands of times, and never once had it been less than blistering.

  Chad leaned against a wall, staring at the stairwell leading down into all those rooms. He was smoking a cigarette and dandling Wee Miss Bliss from a thumb and forefinger, her perpetual bee-sting mouth and widened eyes somehow managing to convey concern.

  Then the ex-assassin’s eyes flicked to the ladder leading to the roof. A sly look stole over his face. Chad pulled Miss Bliss to eye level and spoke to her most seriously. “Now, we is goin’ up, Miss. Got to ‘ave a look at wot ‘appened to The Dome, yeah?”

  Miss Bliss’ comically wide eyes suggested that this wasn’t a good idea.

  Chad looked over his shoulder into the workroom. The Soul Machine was down at the moment. Had been ever since the great fucking gonging tralala had knocked everyone fucking stupid. Even him, right in the middle of calling up a Chad. Knocked him right off the machine and into stupid Mistress Taint, who’d shrieked and caterwauled like he’d done it on purpose. Until her stupid ears had heard the great noise.

  He’d come to with her standing over him, making a great show of wringing robotic hands and acting quite, quite concerned, but Chad knew the truth; if there was some way Taint could extract the essence of whatever unique talent Chad had for reaching into previous formats of Reality, she’d do it in a heartbeat.

  “Yeah, well,” Chad blew smoke rings, “she’s busy wiv the machine, in’t she?” To prove his point, Chad moved Miss Bliss so she could get a better look at Taint.

  True to his word, Mistress Taint, his very own nanny AI, was quite literally up to her shins in strewn machine parts. It was quite a mess. Chad hoped with all he were worth that that great gonging had busted that Soul Machine up forever. He hated it with a passion too deep to express.

  “See,” Chad brought Miss Bliss back to eye level, “when I was knocked off the machine, right, fings went all sorts of sideways. Machine don’t work. Reckon the me that was in there got cut loose when I was flung out, yeah, decided to do it up Chad-style on ‘is way back to wherever ‘e come from.”

  Miss Bliss looked at the ladder then back at Chad.

  “Gotta see wot ‘appened to The Dome, Miss.” Chad replied with a sly grin. “Ain’t never ‘appened, that noise. I could feel the grindin’ and movin’ all on me own.” He tapped his forehead, dribbled ash and smoke into his eyes, and spent a good few seconds coughing and spluttering for his efforts. The rest of his smug sentence was lost.

  Miss Bliss’ mouth quirked in amusement.

  “Yep. That’s right, it’s laugh at Chad day.” The ex-assassin dropped his cigarette on the floor, ignoring Miss Bliss’ suggestion that Taint would find reason to give him grief over the mess. “Old Tainty’d find reason to bitch me out even if I were perfect an’ proper. Prolly tell me I’m puttin’ on airs then box me in me ears for bein’ too smart-arsed. I know her of old, wee missy.”

  Chad tucked Wee Miss Bliss carefully into a pocket and then put his hands on the ladder rungs. “Besides,” he said as he started climbing, “reckon takin’ a peek at The Dome from the Observation Tower is likely to cause Mistress Taint a wee bit than the mild dyspepsia a squashed ciggy would, right? If I is to take a beatin’, luv, it were well best if it be for educatin’ meself proper, hey?”

  Miss Bliss had nothing to say. Her mouth was full of pocket lint.

  ***

  “Do you need to sit so tightly against me?”

  “It’s your horse, mate, not mine.” Chevy snapped irritably, scootching forward a little more. “How could you not know that it’s got a pretty serious design flaw?”

  Dominic sighed. It’d been like this for days. The Barn was behind in getting Chevril a replacemen
t horse, mostly because they were having a difficult time finding the personality cube to his old one; Barnmen were reluctant to give older, more seasoned Gearmen new horses with no memories for the simple fact that Gearmen depended on their horses for more than just transportation. Horses helped with defense and offense, were early warning systems … horses did everything.

  Chevy –indeed, all Gearmen- had pissed off a lot of people down through the long years of service to King and Crown. Asking them to remember the faces of those who might take it upon themselves to exact a little tit for tat was to ask the impossible, especially when it came to gearheads and wardogs; faces and personalities could change radically depending on experience and –more importantly- with each short-term death.

  Without the Cube, when Chevy and Dom parted ways, Chevril would be at an extreme disadvantage. All that personal data, gone. ‘course, Dom with his Book would never ever be without what he knew, as his experiences went right up to the Nannies end of each day or summat similar. Dom loses a Book, the Nannies sent the fool a new one, complete with all he’d done and seen.

  Which were the most important reason Chevy held out against getting his own Book. There were things in his brain as no Mistress should know, even if it weren’t no more interesting than the names of some obliging lady friends. The Nannies or Matrons or Mistresses could bloody well mind their own business.

  “There ain’t nothing wrong my horse, Chevy.” Dom sighed again. “It’s perfectly normal.”

  “Then why’s my arse always falling off the end?” Chevy scootched forward for the eightieth time in two minutes. “If it ain’t broke, then it’s something you’re doing. Let me drive.”