Dark Iron King II: Arcadia Falls (Unreal Universe Book 5) Read online

  ***

  They’d moved from the museum to yet another one of the many rooms in her home devoted to sitting with people simply because it was obvious that the longer they stayed surrounded by those ancient relics, the more likely it was that Garth would turn from upset to angry.

  Agnethea didn’t want her guest and unwilling assassin to be angry. They had a lot to go through before he understood the necessity of killing her peers, and it was all too probable that Garth Nickels’ barely contained rage would blow through the top of his skull when how Golems were born was explained to its fullest and how, in a world of travesty and injustice, Luther was somehow the worst of them all.

  Garth sat across from Agnethea, eyes straying to the weapons propped up against the end table every few seconds. He’d been in the woman’s home for a few hours now and not once had she tried to kill him, and now he had her most prized possession cradled in his lap like a child.

  She could be on him in an instant if she chose, moving fast as teleportation…

  “Go on, Master Nickels.” Agnethea nodded indulgently. She told herself to be brave, reminded herself that if the cost of freedom for her people was Book and a journey that could lead ultimately to her death, it had to be worth it. “Open it, if you can. Book is special, you know. Sealed against casual prying eyes. I tried for years before giving up. But I think you might suc…”

  Garth popped the book open with the flick of a thumb, quickly and smoothly as yanking off a bandage. No sense in farting around. The protocols streaming across his peripheral HUD jounced and juddered a bit and a few green ‘connected’ lights popped, but other than that, whatever currently passed as an OS for his various –and bizarre- ‘cybernetic’ systems kept on trucking.

  Agnethea’s heart sank even as it soared. At long last! Book was open and being used. Her greatest treasure, given new purpose. She would always and forever remember hunting down the Legend of Lost Book, patiently weeding fact from fiction, listening to stories out of the mouths of peasants –when they would talk to her- and interpreting the songs of minstrels when they would not.

  “That particular Book, Master Nickels,” Agnethea took a long, desperate sip of whiskey, its faint trace of fire ever-reminiscent of Dark Iron, “was lost to Arcade City for over three hundred years and it is still the pinnacle of King’s Will.”

  “You … you got that right.” Flipping through the pages was to behold a miracle; as he stared, each heavy, gilt-edged page filled themselves up with dark amber ink-scratched lettering as if written by a techno-ghost. On one, an exploded diagram of the horse’s eye lens grafted to his face like a cybernetic pirate patch. On another, technical specifications for the shotgun. Garth flipped a page and Book started working on the Heart Sniper, though here, whatever … whatever sentience existed between the nearly magical book and DarkEye slowed to a crawl.

  Hah! Garth pulled a mental fist-pump. Something more complex than the particulate had seen.

  “Amazing, is it not?” Agnethea took a deep breath, held it for a long count before exhaling slowly. “How words and pictures, diagrams and explanations flow across the page?”

  Even greater than the Legend of Lost Book had been the Tale of the Talkative Shaggy Man; to whit, once upon a time, the first of the Shaggy Men to roam the deep and dark woods had only been beast part of the time, only transforming into the rough, shaggy monster at certain moments. Elsewise, this beastly Man hid in plain sight, managing to fool man and woman alike until one day, the whole village was Shaggy.

  Then, they disappeared, into the night, leaving behind empty homes and shops, a mystery strange and terrible enough for a Gearman to come out to see what was what. Being a Gearman, so the story went, the man sent to discover the truth of the empty village found the underground warren after only a year of hunting. Being a Gearman, the theoretical hero of the tale descended into the subterranean lair to do for the pack, as this pack, led by a Shaggy Man with the intelligence of a man and the cunning of an old predator, was too close to people and could not –no matter what Matrons or King insisted- be permitted to roam free.

  And thus, the Gearman disappeared, the pack moved, bringing with it the treasured prize of Book, and fact became fiction became story became legend, for the Talkative Shaggy Man did have the wit and wisdom of a Man and knew instantly that more Gearmen would come.

  “Seeing something like this,” Garth commented, genuinely impressed, “is enough to trick a guy into believing in magic.”

  “No magic, that.” Agnethea rubbed her wrists, remembering how long it’d taken to crawl through the air-tunnel leading into that old warren, hundreds and hundreds of feet of dank, enclosed earth full of sharp rocks and cold, moist earth. How she’d believed herself to be an immortal thing, steeped in violence and destruction, how she’d disbelieved the parts of the story where the pack led by Talkative Tom had swollen to a hundred or more Shaggy Men. The journey inward had changed here, aye, but out again…

  The Queen blinked and spoke. “King’s Will alone.”

  It was galling that his sworn enemy could make something so cool. Garth knew that he’d’ve never come up with a Book that filled itself with writing, not unless … no. There wasn’t a ‘not unless’. Never in his life prior to coming to Arcade City had ever seen a need for something as profoundly neat as a Book that filled itself with writing, not when he’d been surrounded by AI spheres and proteii.

  Garth looked over Book at Agnethea. The woman was paler than her normal pale self, paler even than a person should be after surrendering something of such monumental value. “Is everything okay, Queen Agnethea?”

  The Queen of Ickford displayed an embarrassed smile, tilted her head off to one side, cheeks flushing. “It is … it is nothing. Securing that Book was … more difficult than I’d anticipated. Seeing you there, using it calls to mind that … that.”

  Flashing teeth, blood red eyes, claws sharp enough to rip and tear even her impregnable skin … the whole of the pack had risen up in animalistic fury within seconds of her landing like a feather in their midst, gnashing and growling and howling and tearing. Their leader had danced and capered in the background, throwing Book up into the air and singing a nonsense song. And his children, oh his feral children, they’d kept on biting and slashing and howling, filling her world with lunacy...

  Oh, how close she’d come to losing her life that dreaded morning, showing her how wrong everyone was that there was no way to kill a Golem.

  Golems could die, it seemed, if they were wounded enough. If they were filled with enough despair, enough fear, enough heart-wrenching, soul-choking terror. The immortal flesh could –and almost had- stop working if the right combination was reached.

  And yet, that moment had been nothing as compared to her flight to freedom.

  Oh no. No, it had not.

  Agnethea shook her head, fluttered a hand. Worse than nearly dying, worse than seeing grooves and gouges cut into her skin had been … had been crawling back out through that hole, Book clutched to her bosom. It’d been like being reborn. The Queen of Ickford remembered flopping out of that hole, never more eager in her long, wretched life to breath fresh air, to see green, to … to simply be.

  She remembered weeping. Weeping until she’d grown sick and then weeping some more.

  From that moment until this one, she’d dedicated her life to changing. Ickford was the result, and Ickford was being killed by people she’d once called friend.

  Garth closed Book with a thump and rather pointedly placed it onto the end table nearest him. His host was caught up in the memory of what she’d undergone getting the damned thing and from the looks of things, that effort had had a profound, life-changing impact. “As fancy as Book is, milady, if we could move along? No more dancing around the edges of this cruel business, Queen. I’ve asked and asked. Time to explain.”

  Agnethea’s lips quirked in appreciation of Garth’s casual treatment of Book. “Just so. What do you know of how Golems are born?”
/>   ***

  Garth pushed his way through the thick, heavy doors quietly and calmly, but otherwise made zero effort in sneaking in; Agnethea had been keen to warn him that because of how they were treated by those in the position to make their lives difficult, to a one, they possessed a nearly supernatural sense of when they were being followed.

  Add a recent and quite spectacularly public assassination of one of them, and it was all too likely that every damn member of Young Luther’s freak-deaky cabal knew what was going on and were moving to counterstrike.

  Besides, being sneaky added delays. Henrietta needed to be done for as soon as possible so he could prepare himself for the oncoming storm; right that second, Luther was undoubtedly gearing up for war, and it’d be a tough one.

  One Ickford might not survive.

  There was no immediate sign of his next target, so Garth moved –now following the rules of stealthy engagement- into the darker shadows cast by one of the towering racks full of the implements of Honest Harry’s trade. Book spat the names of those tools against his eye, a long list with tiny thumbnail pictures beside each one.

  Garth sighed. Naturally. His opponent had gone ahead and chosen one of the only places in the known universe that had more strange and bizarre tools that could be turned into deadly weapons simply by stabbing someone. “This sucks.”

  “You shouldn’t have done for Heinrich.” A reedy voice wafted through the air, prompting DarkEye to start tracking the location. “That was a mistake.”

  Henrietta. Garth brought to mind the data contained within Agnethea’s hand-written dossiers. At least with Henrietta, the fight would be over a few seconds after they threw down; the homely –some would say downright ugly, something of a direct contravention of the whole Golem transformation process- had never spent any proper time learning how to fight. She’d relied on unbreakable bones and fairly unlimited strength instead of taking the time out of her immortal life to buckle down and study up.

  To hear Agnethea talk, most Golems made that mistake. Little wonder. It beggared the imagination that anyone would be that short-sighted.

  Hell, back on Old Earth during the War, he’d been quite literally one of the most powerful beings in the Unreality, but he’d still taken the time out to fucking learn which end of the gun shot bullets and which part of the pointy-sharpy bits of a knife to keep away from his arms and legs.

  Golems owned a staggering sense of self-importance. The meanest of them could out-awesome Tony Robbins when it came down to preaching their own value. They’d been top of their respective heap for so long they truly believed there wasn’t anyone out there worse than themselves.

  “I don’t make terribly many mistakes.” Garth called from the shadows, all but laughing at himself. He made nothing but mistakes. Probably his last non-mistake day had been that one time when he’d sat around reading comic books in the proto-Reality. Everything since that day?

  Mistake after mistake.

  Henrietta stepped into the dim light filtering through the high-set windows, eyes picking the man who’d so callously assassinated her friend and confidante, Heinrich. She motioned for him to be brave, to face one of the unkillables like a man. “Being summoned by ‘Queen’ Agnethea was one.”

  DarkEye spat and popped weirdly illuminated static when Garth turned his scrutiny on the pasty-faced, listless-eyed Henrietta and the continual flow of protocols fritzed out completely for a solid three seconds. In its time in Agnethea’s special holding tank, the autonomous nature of Book had found a way to work through the obfuscating effects of a Golem’s will, but had yet to discover the key to seeing the everlasting abominations themselves.

  “Who,” Garth asked quietly, following Henrietta’s lead by stepping out into the light, “said anything about Agnethea summoning me.”

  Henrietta eyed her opponent thoughtfully, a small smidgeon of concern worming it’s ugly way up from her gut. They all knew what the man was capable of when it came to gearheads but Agnethea’d made a terrible mistake in conscripting this man to do her dirty work for her; they all of them knew by now –the whole of Ickford did as well, in fact- just who and what the armored man really was as well as his capabilities. They’d begun preparing for this straightaway, from the moment they’d caught wind of the gearhead massacre in that alley.

  Though, Henrietta admitted to herself, none of them had imagined something as brazen as daylight assassination.

  Henrietta gazed at the being who imagined himself the architect of her death, summoning up all the frigid hostility she could muster in the process. Doing for her friend from the rooftops with that deadly gun of his had been an act of purest cowardice and would do him no good now he was down here in the dirt. Down here, she’d pull him apart.

  But the silent man in his quietly whirring armor wasn’t just about long-range, cowardly weapons, was he?

  The other gun, with its stubby grip jutting up to rest just behind the man’s ear… now that was something to fear properly. She knew from those of her brothers and sisters who’d visited the abattoir in the alley, was designed for … intimacy. He could have that out and emptying eviscerating shells into her in a heartbeat.

  Until they began fighting, she’d have to be on her best behavior.

  Henrietta moved closer, warily, clenching and unclenching her hands, eyes watching … well, one piercing blue eye, at any rate. “The whole cadre knows,” the Obsidian Golem began, “that you spent nearly the whole night with ‘Queen’ Agnethea.”

  “You bet I did, lady.” Garth let Henrietta start circling, moving into his own pattern when she got close enough. “Though not for the reasons you might think.”

  “She wants you to kill us. Those who oppose her reign.” Henrietta licked her lips nervously. This man showed no fear. He showed no concern. “How else would you know where to find Heinrich, or where we meet … what do they call you?”

  DarkEye didn’t like being this close to Henrietta –damned HUD kept popping and skipping, a visual representation of what an old vinyl record sounded like- so Garth willed the connected equipment to focus instead on solving whatever protocols it was working on. For this, well, for this, he didn’t need combat assistance.

  “They call me Fish.” Garth laughed, and a tiny bit of Specter laughed with him. To Henrietta’s plug-ugly surprise, he shook his head. “No, but seriously, you can call me Garth. And like I said, Henrietta, Agnethea didn’t summon me. She begged for her life.”

  “Garth, you sound like no citizen of Arcade City I’ve ever come across.” The armor he wore ticked and tocked so smoothly with every motion, so fluid it was hypnotic. Few ‘new’ Golems saw any merit in Agnethea’s love affair with artificing, Henrietta amongst them, though if this was the sort of thing that could come of true skill, mayhap they were being shortsighted. “And Agnethea never begs for her life. She is the oldest of us all. No, she sold…”

  “No.” Garth barked, the sudden shock of his voice ricocheting through the empty warehouse and startling Henrietta so badly that she jumped back a few feet. The Kin’kithal, Specter hot under the collar and aching to be let loose, obliged the Obsidian Golem by following her further into the middle.

  “No.” He repeated, calmer, breathing deeply. “No. There was no selling. No bartering. No deals. I’m here to kill the lot of you, Henrietta, not just you, not just the other members of Luther’s coterie, but the whole stinking race of Golems. I was made by the King specifically for this task.”

  It was time to get this party started. Garth flexed his arms in that special way and the cog-swords obliged by sliding out from their sheaths, filling the quiet, still air with soft snarling.

  Henrietta’s eyes went wide as she understood what she was looking at. The swords were vicious. Unlike anything she’d ever seen. “Then…” her voice came out even thinner, reedier than ever before, “then why did she ask to see you?”

  “Obvious, Henrietta.” Garth stepped forward, slashing the air with a purely theatrical assortment of mo
ves that were more at home in a bad-ass kung fu movie than in real life. “The ones you stated, naturally. She wants you dead, all of you, but she also knew that there was no way I was going to let you live. She begged a favor, Henrietta. That’s all. She offered her own life, promised to lay down like a good abomination and swore she would give no fight, if only I killed you and yours first, so she could know in that blackened, wizened heart of hers that the people of this city would be free.”

  Henrietta howled like the thing she pretended she wasn’t and rushed Garth, a savage gleam in her weird eyes, fingers hooked like claws. This was going to be over quickly, and then, when the armored maniac lay dead, bent and mangled inside his precious armor, then they would –with Young Luther at the helm- move on Agnethea. She’d gone too far, offering her own ‘people’ up in favor of living a little while longer.

  Garth prepared himself for the onslaught.

  ***

  “Isn’t it pretty much the same as how people become wardogs who become gearheads?” Garth asked as he peered a window, still trying to figure out how King Barnabas Blake the Asshole worked things like sunlight with King’s Will; the sky was beginning to catch the first rays of pre-dawn, and the whole of The Dome was lighting up just as if he was standing outside, basking in the radiance of an actual, proper, star.

  “At heart, yes.” Agnethea stifled a bit of a yawn. Ordinarily, she rarely needed to sleep, but the days’ events had left her feeling quite drawn. It wasn’t every day she actively turned her back on her people. Oh, how she wished things had gone differently. She raised an eyebrow at Garth’s backside: the man was all but hanging out the window now, muttering about refraction and suffusion, growing more irate by the second. “What has got your bee in a bonnet, Master Nickels?”

  Garth pulled himself back in, chagrined. DarkEye and Book had barely made into the middle of their connectivity protocols and so was unable to offer the slightest suggestion as to how sunlight worked in a world with no sun. Settling back into his chair, the ex-Specter pointed a finger out the window, at the ever-brightening illumination. “That. Sunlight. Makes me mental.”