“Do you speak?” he asked. She was tangling herself in his lap now, easing onto his sex and pressuring down. He gasped, eyes coruscated and drawn to the dome of stars overhead. He went to buck against her, but she pressed her heels to the ground behind, leant back on one hand and forced her own movement, a rhythmic rocking like a grain sheaver passing its blades over crops.
“Do you..?”
The nut of a nipple was crushed into his mouth. He wanted to bite down, feel the choke of its red heart inside his throat. Resisting, he lapped the dappled areole, felt the agonising, glorious tug and slide at his groin, and smashed his hands up beneath her buttocks, clutching her to him.
A name escaped her lips. It began with V, tailing off to a whisper. She broke his mouth feel of her breast and her tongue was a wisp of flavour at his inner cheek, a probe where his top lip met his teeth. He shivered as his mind flooded with snapshots: a huge gridded eye, tiny strands of sensilla at mouth parts, a chitinous thigh. More images came, torn and grainy like burnt-edged photographs. A fibrous wing taking out a slice of teeth. Crabbing insectile limbs that battered and suffocated. Bright blood sprayed against stone. He heard such screaming – the screaming of men – appalling, protracted, dying out. At that same instant, he clawed the soft skin beneath his fingers, felt the high blaze of release, tensed, and at last, softened.
The woman unsaddled. She stood awkwardly, legs cramped, and stretched out.
Jaxx was crying. As tears drained from his eyes, he found it hard to pinpoint why. He forced himself to stand and dress, then stagger over to the spot where her robe lay.
“Here.” He offered it.
She gathered the robe to her but didn’t attempt to put it on. Jaxx understood that once the mask was back in place, the silence would flow again between them. He rubbed the wetness from his eyes.
“Zen monks are eunuchs. You are not ordained into the order.” His waist-length black hair had slipped free of its band. He bunched it back and retied it. When he got no reply, he stared at the woman with a new level of demand.
“Did you see the future?” she said in a rush of words. Softly though, as if the noise of them might cause the sky to fall.
“Future?” He was cautious. He had heard of men returned from the desert and lost to rambling incoherency. Men who claimed to have imbibed fantastic potions, or tasted the lips of seductresses, or bargained away their soul to a crone.
“Did you see him? Tall as a porch post, just as thin. Eyes like lead shot.”
“I didn’t see a man. I saw... death.” The grotesque images were still laid across in his mind: the crisp fold of a wing case, the slash of flesh, chalk mess and shit across a rock face.
He refocused. “Lead shot? That’s a rare breed of ammunition. Most folk rely on rock shot or the blade since the civil war. You’re a stranger. That much is in your accent.”
“The land changes but the dust is everywhere. And it breathes. You hear it?”
Jaxx listened. He could have sworn he heard the long ahhh of air where there was no wind.
“Why the guise of a Zen monk?” His raised eyebrows pressured against his brow plate. “Silence is a dark undertaking. Just you alone with your mind.” To Jaxx, the idea of squashing up inside the flesh case he walked around in was abhorrent.
She was more girl-like then. Generous mouth loose, her mind on other things. “Zen monks accompany the mining worms below ground, and that’s where I lost him. So I search the bore tunnels and, one day, the caverns...”
“The caverns?” Jaxx was still haunted by the mess of images she had conjured in him. “Who’d take you there?” No one in their right mind navigated the caverns. Stories told of a warren of natural caves, otherworldly and bioluminescent. Home to dark things that crawled.
“Not many,” she admitted. “There are places I haven’t managed to explore yet. Wormholes where only a child would fit. A child without bones,” she added eerily.
“Who are you looking for?”
He knew even before she answered that she searched for a lover. Her use of him had demonstrated her loss, alongside a need to remember the taste of masculine skin and feel another’s pulse inside her belly.
“I suspect he’s salt and ore and other minerals by now. The flesh will be gone,” was all she managed on the subject before striding over to him. She touched a hand to his cheek.
“You and I, we’re in the wrong place,” she said softly.
Jaxx felt the world tip. His mind battened down. A great wind howled, dust blew against his skin and he drifted into blackness.
ELEVEN
A hand settled on the bar. Hellequin looked down to see red skin and the whorls of tribal scars across the knuckles.
“This is a good bar, ya?” said Asenath, the Jeridian who’d taken over from Pig Heart to head up the pitch crew. With that evening’s performance concluded, it was she who suggested an expedition to one of the city’s drinking holes. Hellequin had agreed to come once Nim had.
“It’s an interesting choice.” Hellequin eyed the Jeridian. In her buckskin vest and pale leather jeans, she looked no different to any other itinerant worker. Except she’d an edge that came from more than her Mohawk, scarification, piercings, red skin, or the gang tattoo at an ear lobe.
Asenath nodded to the bartender.
“Another shot, Solomon.”
The bartender whipped his cloth up onto a shoulder and retrieved a bottle from the shelf. Uncorking it, he poured himself a measure.
“Let me guess. It was your idea to bring the HawkEye here, Asenath.” He threw back his shot, slid the cup over to Asenath and poured her and Hellequin a shot each.
Hellequin regretted the heat of the liquor in his guts. The Jeridian woman had suggested the midnight jaunt to the bar, which indicated what? His eyepiece zoned in on the beads of sweat at her upper lip, her tongue moistening dry lips.
“What you got me into, Asenath?” he said with a dark tone.
“I’ve a score to settle,” she admitted.
“And I’m gonna help out how?” Hellequin focused on the sickle tattoo at the woman’s ear lobe again. The steel lens captured the image as a photo-plate. He shifted his gaze to the left ear lobe of the bartender; the photo-plate shifted angle to overlay the man’s matching insignia. Hellequin also recognised the way the man’s tongue flicked out to moisten his lips.
“Does all your family live in Zan City, Asenath?” he asked.
The two Jeridians exchanged a glance.
Asenath told him, “My brother and I are the last of our family. Zan City’s blood worms took our parents and older sister when the Showmaniese sold us out. Sometimes I come back home to remind myself of the stink of those fuckers. Solomon abides their patronage. This bar is his living. I, however, am under no such restrictions.”
Hellequin reeled in his gaze. He stared at Asenath. “And my role in this?”
“To help me add a Showmaniese head or two to my collection.”
“And why would I break the bodies of men I don’t know?”
“For love’s sake,” said the woman bleakly. She swallowed back the slug her brother had poured and indicated the far side of the bar with her empty cup. Nim was attempting to shrug off the wandering hands of a gang of drunks – suited Showmaniese with lemony skin, womanly hands and tight black shining eyes. They reminded Hellequin of large desert cats he’d seen sprawled over rocks, bellies to the sun. At the same time, Lulu returned from the shitting pit outside. His flushed face suggested either the Jackogin had addled his brain or he’d pressed flesh with another in the minutes he’d been gone.