Hellequin went to work on a third man wedged between two slabs of rock like a meat filling. But the blood spill had attracted the locusts in number now. Hellequin fired his gun up at the brittle black mass – just as a fourth man launched a shot at him. The HawkEye dodged the fire which broke open the skull of a locust at his back. Before the man could take another shot, Hellequin speared him up under the chin with his blade. Dragging the knife free, he prompted his eyepiece to assemble a number of views across his retina – insects coming in to land among the boulders, the burrower reigniting its engines and ploughing head on at the circus tent, the pimp riding in the open cockpit alongside a driver and the Sirinese fighter, Nim shooting a locust an instant before its jaws struck and being showered with the poisonous head feathers...
Hellequin was already on his feet and speeding towards her. At his back, the remainder of D’Angelus’s ground crew fell victim to the honey trap he had set – the bodies of their fallen colleagues arousing the gore sensors of the hundreds of locusts. The men’s screams echoed through the cavern, sharp and terrible and phenomenally lonely. Hellequin shut out the noise and raced back towards the tent.
The majority of the pitch crew had retreated inside. He saw Nim collapse, the burrower sledging towards her while Pig Heart and Lulu drove back the scoreless locusts that hovered and dived overhead. Battling against the agony from his freshly wounded shoulder, Hellequin brought up his rock rifle as he ran and tried to keep the flesh feeders at bay.
Two figures leapt free of the burrower as it struck an extra large boulder a few metres short of Nim. The huge machine idled; the HawkEye lens pierced the dense glass of the windshield, which had been slid back into place. He saw a man’s head, not D’Anglus and not the Sirinese. The driver, he concluded. No doubt the fellow had been instructed to hold steady while the pimp retrieved his precious runaway – who happened to be lying prone in front of the circus tent. Hellequin saw the pimp kneel down, slip a hand around Nim’s neck and bring her lips to his.
The HawkEye cried out in unfamiliar rage. His voice was lost to a harsher, wilder sound.
“Caa-ri!” said the voice. Rough-edged. Locust-like. “Caaree-caa-ahn!”
Hellequin whirled round, his magnifying lens drilling into the honeycombed cells among the walls, off to the inky lake, up to the canopy of great black clattering insects. He came full circle and stopped short of D’Angelus, that sour devil of a man. The pimp had reeled around on the spot, his eyes frantic, rock pistol shaking in his grip.
“What the fuck?” D’Angelus wrestled Nim up in his arms and started to drag her back towards the burrower, all the while staring out at the shadows all around him. Pig Heart and Lulu were too distracted to come to Nim’s aid. The Sirinese had launched an attack against them, oddly controlled in his disposition, as if the strange new voice was just another piece in the mystery that led to Desirous Nim.
Hellequin was raising his rock rifle when the voice got louder, then louder again, beating up the dust so that the atmosphere clouded.
The woman stepped out from the heavy canvas flap. She knelt down and felt for the hose. The fat worm pulsed beneath her fingertips.
“Almost done drinking?” she said softly and patted the hose affectionately. Standing, she stared out at the luminescent cavern. She’d heard the call from inside Herb’s cabin and shrugged off the ropes which bound her wrists. The carnie folk could bind her to that world no more successfully than a Zen monk mask could make her truly holy. She’d made her way through the blacked-out tent, steps soft as the whispering air through the caverns. No one saw her. She was ghost-like, a shadow out of step with all that surrounded her.
“Go to the lake,” the Scuttlers had said. The shadow you asked for dwells there behind a great rock slab. The voice too – she had recognised her lover’s cadence. His low sweet rumble as he spoke her name.
Dust reacted to her every step. A locust drove at her through the gloom, its jaw blooded. The woman raised her hand. Dust sprang up before her like a wall of hot grey glass. The insect was shredded inside its element.
She moved oddly, in tight little rushes of steps. Not quite in time with time itself but a millisecond ahead so that she sidestepped the bullets skimming by. She held up her hands and the insects were stopped short in their attack by a squall of dust that built and towered around her,
The two fighting factions slowed in their motion by the smallest degree. Only the HawkEye soldier appeared to follow her advancement to the lake with precision; his steel eye flicked between her and the unconscious courtesan in D’Angelus’s embrace.
She forgot him, concentrating on the shadow behind the crystal wall – long and thin, with soft wavy hair in silhouette, and holding up a lantern.
“Virgil!” She cried and wadded into the black water.
“Ca-ca,” replied the shape of her lover, making its way to the side of the crystal wall, lantern waving to seek her out.
“What the shitting Saints is that?”
She heard the rough cry of the swine man, glanced back and saw him duck to prevent the butting plate of the Sirinese from caving in his skull. Others among the circus crew gasped – the male acrobat with the pretty girl face, the pimp, even the HawkEye – and it seemed for an instant that time had shifted again and they could see the way of things before her.
The woman stared back out across the lake, heart enraptured as the shape of her angular lover extended from behind the crystal wall, the lantern emerging first as a huge black obelisk of a head, two vast orbs protruding either side. The body followed – a colossal slug of a thorax that took several seconds to finish materialising. The creature was wingless, its undercarriage looped into many small udders and terminating with a long, clear ovipositor which squeezed off eggs now and then, like glossy white sausage meat.
The queen ca-ca’ed in the woman’s direction, and the sound bounced off the cavern. “Carrie-Anne, Carrie-Anne.”
A shot rang out, tugging back the head plate of the queen in a spray of lemony blood. The woman spun around to see that, having wrestled the courtesan inside the burrower, D’Angelus had launched a grenade from the nose cone of the machine.
“No!” shrieked the woman.
Her bubble burst.
“Saintless crawlers.” D’Angelus spat out the side of the cockpit, as if ridding himself of the taste of murder. All around him, the locusts clung to the walls, newly petrified. “Show ‘em fuckers who’s boss, hey, Das?” He gave the navigator’s elbow a knock.
From behind his bug-eyed goggles, Das looked far from certain. He went back to messing with the controls. “We gotta get out of here, boss. There’s too many of them and we lost all those men...” His voice hitched and trailed off.
“And now I’ve taken out the crawlers’ queen.” D’Angelus showed his dead men’s teeth. “I got the whore. Only thing I’m down on is the wolf girl.”
“You mean the rabid dog coming straight for us?” said Das, voice aquiver. He shrank down into the foot well of the cock pit among the peddles and levers.
D’Angelus, though, was frantic with excitement. His eyes ate up the bounding form of the wild girl, the pendulous teats that swung beneath her lean brown body, the savage show of her. So thoroughly naked. So utterly abased. He longed for her, every thread of him stretched to capacity.
Below, the Sirinese was calling something in between deflecting the blows from the swine man and the lashes of the ladyboy’s sharp whips. Something about danger and the need to slide the glass shield of the burrower back into position, lock it and seal out the wolf girl. D’Anglus was impervious to the cry.