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

  “Erm,” Dom stepped forward, arm protectively covering Book, “if it’s about the man we’re hunting, Mistress Primrose, we’re doing our best. We really are.”

  Chevy wanted to swat his earnest young friend on the back of the head hard enough to have his brains come shooting out his nose. You never apologized to a Mistress, least of all Primrose. If she starts talking about her garden, the eldest Gearman thought woefully to himself, I shall run for the tree line and do for the best I can, e’en if it comes to tripping this great stupid twat in the meantime. “What he means to say, Mistress, is …”

  Great gouts of steam rushed out of Primrose’s head, brilliant white plumes that puffed into the sky with a metallic shriek. The Mistress waited to see if either boy would react, smiling another clickety-clack smile when neither did. Of course not, these were the best boys.

  “No man at all, your quarry.” Primrose replied sweetly. “No man at all. We of course have been following your progress, devoting our much wiser and quicker minds to understanding this Specter when time permits. In between what recently befell our fair world, we made a discovery.”

  This piqued both men’s interests.

  Matrons hadn’t involved themselves in anything happening in the outer ring, not in a long, long time: the King’s angry disappearance had started the trended and the honey pot that was Ickford had sealed it.

  Dom and Chevril exchanged Cheshire Cat expressions. There was no telling if they were truly in trouble or not. It was obvious now, sadly well after the fact, that Barnabas and Garth had been en route to Ickford the whole time, but only now; their circuitous route had weaved a serpentine trail across hundreds of miles, weaving back and forth hither and yon as if old Barnabas had been blind drunk most of the time. With a winding tail like that, they could’ve been bound for anywhere at all ‘neath The Dome.

  Chevy found his voice first, if only because he was tired of listening to the chunking collision of gears inside Mistress Primrose’s huge frame clanging about like mad. “Oh?” he asked simply enough.

  Primrose nodded. “Indeed, Chevril Pointillier.” The Mistress leaned forward, ever cautious she not get too close lest her steam broil the boys inside their longcoat armor. “In all honesty, lads, we were growing quite, quite concerned about your inability to track down this Specter fiend. None of us could understand how you two, the best and brightest boys we have, were always a step behind, always trailing, never leading. It’s why we started digging ourselves. We went back and forth, the other Matrons and I, all the way back to the beginning when the Door opened and all those unwashed heathens from the Outside spilled in, only to get chopped up by that devilish Nicked Jimmy and all.”

  “All the way back?” Dom wondered aloud. “I…”

  This time, Chevy stopped Dominic from apologizing by stamping the lad’s foot with one of his own. While the younger man bit back a healthy curse that would have Mistress Primrose reveal herself in all her metallic fury, he spoke hurriedly. “Surely, Mistress, there weren’t no need for that. We conned to the fact that our lad is en route to Ickford yonder a short while ago. Beyond that, we do think we sussed out the reason for the switchback trail he and the blacksmith took this whole way. They were …”

  “Avoiding the Kingspawn points, yes, that was immediately obvious.” Primrose let a touch of scathing scorn into her voice with the revelation. Even though such a thing should be impossible, the smartest Book reader and the wisest old man should’ve come to that conclusion right from the start. “As should’ve been their destination.”

  Chevy hung his head but didn’t say anything. He wanted to rise to the bait in the worst way. Some Matrons liked to rile their Gearmen up, to test their mettle. Others did the same, only for much darker reasons. Primrose was on the fence. Some days, some Gearmen, she got them boiling mad until they started yelling and screaming and the weird old Nanny laughed and clapped those terrifyingly petite hands and called them good boys.

  Other days, she got her Men screaming, and she pruned them for her garden.

  Dom bit back a retort, though he could tell from the queer way Primrose was putting one of her great shiny eyes on him that she well knew how irate he was getting. He cleared his throat of words better left unsaid. “Apologies, Mistress Primrose, we been hunting Specter for overlong, and it has gotten the better of us.”

  Chevy offered his partner a cool nod of thanks at the wisely chosen words.

  “Oh, boys, it does this old heart of mine good to hear proper apologies, proper and sincere and all those things good little boys must say.” Primrose’s hands fluttered at her bosom. “On to why I came all this way, out here to the treacherous wastelands of our once fair City, so close to the venomous, rotten city behind my back.”

  Chevy gestured magnificently for their gracious host –who could turn into a shrieking devil-monster two times the size, shooting flesh-melting steam from every orifice or worse if she felt she wasn’t being given all due accord and then some-, Dom following suit a heartbeat later.

  “The man you are hunting is no man at all.” Primrose announced grandly. “He is some new form of Obsidian Golem.”

  “The hell he is.” The words leaped out of Dom’s mouth before he was even bloody aware of what was happening. As soon as his damnfool ears processed what’d come out of his traitorous mouth, he went paler than the snows found up North, then just as abruptly, green around the gills.

  “King alive!” Chevy shouted, rooted to the spot. He looked sideways at his partner to see if the fool even knew what’d come out of his mouth, and what the likely response would be to such imprudence. To his credit, Dominic was pale as freshly driven snow and looked fit to weep.

  The sound of heavy machinery shifting internally reached the two Gearmen’s ears and they prepared themselves for the worst, each man separately trying to convince themselves of their relative importance in the grand scheme things and hoping that Primrose would remember that.

  Primrose smiled a crafty, beguiling smile that was not at all at home on a face made of shifting gears and whirling cogs. She knew it, as did those who sat in her garden, and now Dominic Breton and Chevril Pointillier knew it as well. To drive home the severity of the younger lad’s unfortunate slip of the tongue, the Mistress allowed some color to flash through the webbing of her chassis. It were a deep, rich vermillion that had both boys trembling in their armor.

  “When all of this is done with, young Master Breton, we shall have words concerning that sharp tongue of yours.” Mistress Primrose snapped out harshly, her words hard and biting. “That is not to say I do not understand your reaction. The other Matrons and I were quite taken aback by this, the only possibility, but there is such a thing as propriety.”

  “I … I …” Dom’s witty tongue, just moments ago capable of calling a Mistress a liar, suddenly found it monstrously difficult to get even a single coherent sentence out. Ashen-faced and heart hammering, the Book Club Regular hung his head in monumental shame. And fear.

  Primrose nodded at the man’s discomfort and continued on. There was much to do, things to see about, and these boys needed to get with their own journey as well. “Now as I was saying before so scandalously interrupted, this man, this Garth Nickels who also calls himself Specter, he is a new form of Golem.”

  Here, Primrose paused to give Dominic a long, thoughtful gaze, all but asking him to interject with that foul mouth of his a second time. When the young Gearman continued staring at the ground, she continued, a pleased little half-smile clickety-clacking quickly across her many-pieced face.

  “It took quite a bit of doing, boys, to discover this truth, and it was the effort we undertook that finally became the key to turning this stubborn lock.” Primrose gestured, and the earth between her and the two Gearmen started skittering and jumping. Solid cubes of stone no bigger than a thumbnail started spilling up out of the ground, filling the air with a sound of water rushing noisily over pebbles. “This is your quarry, yes?”

  Dom and Chev
y watched the figure of Specter grow from the stone, lips pursed, watching pensively; this right here was purest King’s Will in action, and for any of the Na… Mistresses to be accessing that power outside Arcadia spoke to the dire urgency they were facing.

  “It is, Mistress.” Both men said in unison.

  “Though he is without his armor.” Chevy said into the still quiet. Strange, to see how much a man could change in a single month. The elder Gearman stared at the fresh image of Garth Nickels as he must’ve been –had obviously been- moments after walking through the Geared Door.

  It was almost impossible to imagine such a fresh fish could take to Dark Iron smithing like, well, like a fish to water. Chevy narrowed his eyes slightly, but kept the sudden flash of insight to himself; he suspected he knew how the Matrons had come to their decision, and if he were forced to guess, the quick flinch traveling through young Dom said the Regular was on the same page.

  Primrose was quite proud of their collective realization that the beastly Specter had to be a new Dark Iron-spawned abomination like Agnethea; prior to that shocking discovery, they had been working under the same misapprehension. Everything about this ‘Garth Nickels’, everything coming out of his own foul mouth, pointed at him being a fresh inductee from the outside.

  At first. Discount that likelihood and all that the man was and had done made perfect sense.

  Primrose gestured again, and another simulacrum rose from the earth. “You both know this rotten scallywag, yes? Traveled by the nom de plume ‘Nicked Jimmy’?”

  “Aye, Mistress.” Dom said this as carefully and as politely as he could, eager to keep from descending deeper into her bad graces. “We would have done for him, but the citizens of Sliver Hills never made no complaints to no one, and well …”

  “And the older gearheads that need seeing to require Kingly discretion, yes, Master Breton, the Matrons are aware. It is a shortsighted spot of trouble, one we strive to correct daily.” Primrose huffed at that. The King was somewhere in the world, to be true, every Matron knew this because they were still alive and running things. If the King were dead, Arcade City would die. It was a truth etched into the very essence of their Domed existence.

  Primrose motioned, and the two stony simulacra were suddenly facing each other. They began moving slowly, just as the two original men had come together a month ago, in that back alley in Sliver Hills Estate. “It took ages to find this footage. King’s Will is at its weakest at the very edges of our world, boys, though I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that, nor do I need to remind you to keep such secrets held tight to your heart. Be that as it may, from your investigations, do you both agree that, at this point in time, your foe is … untainted by Dark Iron?”

  Chevy nodded, and Dom piped up. “Yes, Mistress. Book managed to dig up proof of Dark Iron introduction in that bar and nowhere else. The reaction of the fish… er, that is, Garth Nickels, was a strong indicator that he’d never had it nowhere else. And, erm, footage of the … massacre was, well…”

  “Bloody.” Chevy added. It was. In all his years, Chevy could count on one hand similar scenes of blood and madness, and he’d seen two of them in the space of a month.

  “The reaction to which you are referring, Master Breton, is a performance worthy of a King.” Primrose pointed. “Please, watch closely and apply your considerable intellects to what you see.”

  Chevy and Dom watched the heavily Ironed Nicked Jimmy come at the fresh-faced Garth Nickels.

  “I’m sorry, and I beg your most humble pardon if I offend.” Chevy said, waving a hand in the air. “Did that happen precisely that way? Is there no way that the usual methods somehow failed to gather correct data?”

  Dom moved to get a better angle. “This doesn’t seem right, not at all.” He held his hands up in the air, as if he could literally grasp the problem with his fingers and force it to make sense. “If you could just…”

  Primrose smiled ever so sweetly and let the dark red lights flashing inside her fade to a glimmer. "Just so, my bright boys, just so. Alas, Chevril, we did hope that we were somehow wrong, but we are not. Your Specter is disarming Nicked jimmy without any Iron in him."

  Dom, head still twisting this way and that, spoke slowly. "What's the purpose of this little moment, I wonder."

  "It’s obvious, though only now that we have a larger picture." Primrose didn't mind admitting this; the whole Specter mess had everyone in a tizzy. "We believe Specter used the Geared Door and Jimmy's foul and pointless revenge as a test of his... Strange nature. In the confusion of a mass expulsion of convicts and a great rattling king, he first tried his hand at, as they say, doing for Jimmy.

  When that failed, he moved on to the second test, which was to inveigle himself into Nicked Jimmy's good graces, which he did by displaying a greater grasp of Kingtech than possible for someone new to Arcade City. From there, he essentially forced his new comrades into using much of their Dark Iron stash on him, voluntarily completing his transformation into this new abomination."

  Chevy wanted to point out that there was a phenomenal amount of supposition in Primrose's statement, but let his opinion lie. He'd never heard of an Obsidian Golem knowing they were one before that first taste of iron, not never. Dom himself was busy digging through Book in search of any such instance, leaving Chevy to hope the lad kept any evidence pointing to the contrary to himself.

  "Go on, if you would, Mistress." Chevy added politely, "this is most illuminating. Is there any indication as to the type of Golem specter has become?”

  Even after the fact, Primrose -indeed, all the Mistresses- were finding it difficult to accept the evolutionary changes wrought in Specter. Their clanking hostess cleared her throat of steam and began.

  "We can scarcely credit it, but all signs point to him being able to manipulate King’s Will on a level above and beyond anything we've ever seen." Primrose fairly trembled at the admission, glad her boys had their brave faces on. "As shocking as this is, it is the only thing to make sense. Those Dark Iron tattoos of his, the facility by which he smiths... It is impossible for Garth Nickels to be from Outside. No man nor machine could grasp our world with such facility. Or be so close to immune to Dark Iron as he is."

  Dom closed Book with a thump and shot Chevy a furtive shake of the head that said he’d found no instances mentioned in the tome of any Golem having foreknowledge of their own destiny as a soon-to-be atrocity. It was impossible to know –or guess, or assume- what would happen to you when you took that first sip of Dark Iron. Didn’t matter if you were born and raised in the outer ring and got latched with the crudey-crude or you were reared in the tier closest to Arcadia and drank a thimbleful of near-on perfect Dark Iron.

  Beyond the impossibility of prescience, Dom couldn’t help but notice that Mistress Primrose was actually skirting the issue of Specter’s true capabilities. Chevril was doing his impression of a tree stump.

  So it shall be, Dom thought wearily. I shall be the one to be the whipping boy once more. “Beg pardon, Mistress Primrose, but … in your own search efforts, has he revealed any traits similar to the Golems?”

  Primrose looked to the two stony figures going through their endless repetition of movements. She clicked her fingers and the abomination and the wretched gearhead collapsed into their component parts, a jumble of blocks reminiscent of children’s toys left in a heap. She clicked them again and they began moving once more, forming something that she would really rather not have built so close to Ickford, but needs must. When the Mistress was well and truly certain that the crucible would complete itself without her direct attention, Primrose turned her attention back to the two Gearmen.

  “He has shown similar, if not worse, violent tendencies towards any man or woman influenced by Dark Iron. You boys know this. You’ve seen in person the twisted mess of ruined flesh and shattered bone.” Primrose shivered in her metallic boots. Such egregious carnage. “Further, there is the aforementioned affinity with manipulating King’s Will, though he
re, his talent is incomparable to an Obsidian Golem’s. Agnethea’s skill is insignificant by comparison, and she has had a very long time indeed to ply her trade. Beyond that, we suspect he is capable of producing the same sort of field effect that prevents proper spying by those with access to King’s Will, or in your case, Book, which is very disturbing. He has brought down a fully armored King, with little to no difficulty. Most worrisome is that, since that display, our man has built himself a full suit of armor.”

  This time it was Chevril who cursed, so fluently and so colorfully that he stood still and waited for Mistress Primrose to lose her mind and kill him right there on the spot. Armor the match of a Gearman? There weren’t nothing worse he could think of inside his own head. Dom had opted not to watch the footage of the King battle, more was the pity; kitted out with nothing more than arms and that fanciful hydraulic sledgehammer, ‘their man’ –as Primrose put it- had done for that King with panache you just didn’t see anymore.

  Primrose gazed thoughtfully at Chevril for a long moment. Such an old bulb in her garden would add … history … to its colorful display, but … the other Gearmen were out and about doing their own thing, and besides which, none but the two here and now had even a hope of doing for Specter.

  “I shall let that pass, Master Chevril, owing to what is undoubtedly senility.” She shot Dominic a frosty look when the younger man burst out with a strangled quack of laughter.

  Chevy spoke hastily to recover the conversation. “Is this why you’ve graced us with your presence, Mistress? To warn us of Specter’s progress? We’ve conned to the fact that he intends to make his way inward to Arcadia, no doubt to the Armory itself. Now that it’s online once more, to a …” his mind spun with facts on Specter, “to a … a … techno-warrior such as Specter, the facilities there must be a beacon.”

  “Techno-warrior.” Primrose savored the word. She nodded. “Yes. The Matrons agree. The Armory is his destination. Further, he has come to Ickford to ally himself with Agnethea. There can be no doubt about it. Specter is her match in many things, but there is one area in which she is and will always be his better.”