He watched the beast of a woman tear up the ground between them. Wasn’t she magnificent? How her claws ripped over the dusty rock!
“Come to me, bitch,” he cooed.
The shot when it came was at close range and to his chest. D’Angelus looked down, hands puddling in the red gore. He glanced questioningly at the she wolf. She bounded up onto the nose of the burrower and paused alongside the HawkEye, who stood there, a curl of smoke escaping his rock rifle.
“But... but...” D’Angelus’s lips produced a childish puff of air then gaped. He fell off to the side. Seconds later, the soldier’s boot kicked him hard, exploding nose and cheekbone. And then he was face-to-slavering-face with the wolf girl.
Through the agonies that wracked his body, D’Angelus tried out a bloody smile. She was here at last, dragging him down off the burrower into a crush of limbs. And then her face was so very close to his, the tangled mane ticking and arousing his bleeding skin. Something drove into the depths of him, unravelling his inner workings.
“My love,” he said, and meant it as the savage girl showed him his guts between her teeth. Biting down, she began to feast.
The whips sliced into Jaxx’s face, creating two fresh scars – good and evil etched into opposing cheeks. He gritted his black teeth. When the ladyboy next lashed out, he grasped both whips, withstanding their terrible sting against his palms as he did so, and began to reel the ladyboy in. The swine man charged. Jaxx yanked on both whips, ripping them from the ladyboy’s hands. He dived forwards onto his stomach – avoiding the swing of the swine man’s fist in the process – and spooled in the whips, taking hold of the handles. Flipping back up onto his feet, he revolved the ropes about his waist and kept the ladyboy at bay with a couple of slashes. The kid seemed to know he was beat and charged for the circus tent, avoiding Jaxx’s whip cracks with a show of nimble acrobatics.
He was alone with the pig then. The awareness of witchcraft derived from his Sirinese roots told him that some force was keeping the swarm at bay for the time being. Out the corner of his eye, he saw the creatures clumped against the walls. A thin pall of dust cocooned the circus and the area immediately outside of it. He’d a sense of the other players nearby, the HawkEye cradling the whore as he retrieved her from the cockpit of the burrower, Das signalling him in a generous wave of panic, the blood bag that was once D’Angelus, split open on the rocks, a feast for the squatting wolf girl.
Despite the swine man’s grotesque appearance, Jaxx judged him an excellent opponent. The swine took the bite of the whip to his arm, his chest, and he cried out like the man he once was and not the pig he had become. There was pleasure in their fight, thought Jaxx, taking the weight of the swine’s fist against his jaw and tasting his own blood. He smashed his butting plate into the pig’s snout at full force and saw the blood gush, the small piggy eyes water.
But their battle would be concluded some other time, Jaxx decided. With the magnificent calm that was so characteristic of his violent culture, he stepped back and bowed.
“Blood enough for this day,” he said, and turned sharply on his heels. At his back, the swine attempted a final weak swing which didn’t connect then seemed to come to terns with the pause in their battle.
Hearing the burrower clear its throat of dust and rumble into life, Jaxx ran across the rock plain. He climbed the metal ladder in two steps and swung inside the cockpit. Das slammed the glass hood back in place, shutting out the bugs and freaks.
“Jeepers, Jaxx. Thought I was gonna have to leave you.” Das sighed heavily and peered over at Jaxx from behind his insectile goggles. “D’Angelus is gone. So’s the rest of the boys. Reckon me and thee should scoot.”
Jaxx nodded. Through the wind shield he saw the woman who had disguised herself as a Zen monk, then lain with him beneath the stars. She was standing in the lake, a short way out from the shore, the black water up to her knees. Her hands were raised in supplication, as if commanding some unseen force. Or was it in homage to the slain queen whose carcass sprawled across the opposite shore? He remembered the terrible waking nightmare he had experienced when he’d pressed deep inside her. Men torn limb-from-limb by demons. Had that been a vision of Hell, or a window on the future he’d just caught up with?
He dismissed the fact. It was a diviner’s trick. He’d found the warmth of her body a far more fascinating gift. Not that she was his to rescue at that moment. She had another lover, whom she searched for in this shadow-land. Their time together had run out.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Das snapped up a couple of switches in the control bank, tugged on and lowered a large lever by his hip, and eased the drive column forward. The burrower rattled over the sheet of rock. A few metres short of colliding with the circus tent, the machine lowered its nose and drilled down.
“Come now, Rust! Leave off your meal. Swarm’ll dive any second.” Pig Heart lolloped towards the wolf girl, sweat pouring off his jowls.
The girl glanced up, mouth blackened with visceral, hands burrowed in the man’s stomach. Her eyes were dazzlingly bright.
She ran towards Pig Heart, strong limbs powering off the rock, and together they charged in at the tent flap.
The pitch crew worked to wind in the hose. Inside Cyber Circus, the air felt swollen and humid. The boiler fizzled away below the calliope. Large bubbles tumbled against the glass or popped when they reached the surface near the rim. Everywhere inside the tent was given over to preparations to fly. Pitch crew clambered high up on the gangplanks, double-checking the newly patched hide. Herb was installed on the calliope’s balcony like some goblinesque Maharaja watching over his domain.
“Everyone inside?” Pig Heart hollered at the ringmaster.
“Apparently so.” Herb nodded at the HawkEye, who stepped in at the tent flap, Nim’s prone body slung across his arms. “She dead?” Herb called down, voice tinged with sadness.
“Alive,” the soldier shouted back. “Paralysed by a locust’s sting. There a cure for that?”
Herb looked lost suddenly. Pig Heart joined Rust in eyeing the ground a moment. The idea of Nim spending the remainder of her days locked inside an inanimate body seemed a brutal way of existing.
But then a woman’s voice rang out. “I can heal her. I need bobbisroot, lock lime and a whole lot of rock salt.” It was the woman who had posed as a Zen monk. She’d ducked in at the tent flap an instant before it was stitched shut, wearing such a look of sorrow that Pig Heart thought she might just crumble to dust and blow away on the spot.
The woman walked towards backstage, where the pitch crew stood ready to roll shut the great steel shield. She paused and glanced back. “We should get moving. The locusts won’t mourn their queen for long.”
Pig Heart tried to make sense of the woman’s place on their craft – was she a prisoner still, or one of the crew? He dragged a hand across his jaw and slopped away the drool that hung there. While the ringmaster merely nodded, the HawkEye strode backstage and Rust bounding after.
Stopping just inside the gateway between the circus ring and backstage, Pig Heart ordered his men to stay their hands. “Herb!” he hollered across the vast expanse of the tent. “What about the Scuttlers?”
His question was lost to the suck and drawl of the ship’s giant bellows in the engine room, the bubble of steaming water in the boiler, the gentle flood of air to the float bladders, and the pipe of the calliope.