He stared at the clowning freak children with their claws and hoary shells and shrunken heads. Would that he had been born such, without the weight of his desires!
Rage congealed behind Hellequin’s ribs and the internal clockwork of his steel eye. He sensed it not so much as direct emotion as a neural thickening. Nothing was as it had once been. The sucker bolts, bores, griplines and proton flasks that acted as spark plugs were hardwired into his brain, a process which meant he couldn’t recall the depths to which he had once felt fear or anger or obsession. But he knew how emotion amassed and at that instant, it was locking his fingers into fists and stiffening his jaw.
Pig Heart’s nostrils twitched. Hellequin saw the tiny movement as a widening of cartilage around breath.
“By the Saints, Hellequin, we gotta get these broads outta here.”
There wasn’t time to debate it. Nim’s scream cut through the tent. From his high chair at the far side of the ring, Herb heard it and felt a patch of dread open inside. D’Angelus threw back his head and drank in the sound. Rust flinched at the door to her wagon. Hellequin broke into a charge towards the lift rig.
“They’ve got rock rifles,” he heard Pig Heart call after him. No matter if they had the burning spears of the Saints themselves, he would fill the air with their death cries.
He pulled up short of the rig. Steam continued to rise at the far reaches of the tent, which told him that Herb was keeping the calliope in action and choosing to go on with the show. The marks’ ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ assured him that the hoppers had been set grazing in the centre of the ring. Soon the handlers would whip the beasts into flight and the crowd into terrified, maniacal applause.
Oiled to keep its motion down to a low purr during show time, the lift rig would still produce enough noise to alert those below to his assent. Hellequin opted to feed his hands around the fat steel cords of the steam winch and use his boot heels for grip. He slid down, taking in a panoramic view of backstage.
A Jeridian woman by the name of Asenath was secured, a blade pressed to her throat. Two more of the crew were on their knees, rock rifles pressurising their spines. Meanwhile, D’Angelus’s men behaved like raw recruits on sentry duty at some dead outpost, talking softly and shifting from one boot to the other as if bored by their responsibilities.
Hellequin reasoned that unless they had cutting tools strong enough to slit the hide of the circus tent, the grunts would have to bring Nim through backstage and smuggle her out past the marks. Perhaps they’d brought a flask of Dream Juice for the purpose? Or perhaps they’d simply gag her and apply a rock rifle to her back. Either way, Hellequin saw no need to intercept the men below. He needed to get into the dressing rooms behind the silk curtain.
Keeping to the shadows, he eased over and under the crisscrossing scaffold where it fed behind the tented dressing rooms. Lamplight shone up through the silk; three men moved below. Hellequin guessed they’d been tasked with delivering their charge direct to the bossman. But even a hard hand like D’Angelus could not compete with the bewitchment Nim put men under. They had her at a grotesque angle between them, her nakedness betrayed by the flow of neon beneath her flesh.
Hellequin’s head jerked, neurons misfiring. Memories flashed over his steel retina - staring down from the safety of his lung basket, a bird’s eye view of a flaming farmstead below. His HawkEye homing in on the maul of weathered hands on young flesh. Out in the open. Where screams brought no one running.
The memory snapped off. He refocused on the tented silk below. Nim was silent, the acts the men enforced on her all too familiar.
His lens flicked right. He had noticed the figure approach of course.
“Whadda we do, HawkEye?” It was Pig Heart. The pitchman had slunk along the scaffold, his bulk belying the dexterity which allowed him to tread the upper gangplanks without ever disturbing the crowd below.
Hellequin wanted to crush the pitchman’s windpipe and haul him over the scaffold. But the soldier in him saw the value in a simultaneous attack on backstage and Nim’s dressing room. Better to deal with all of D’Angelus’s men at once than give them chance to spread and take cover.
A great chittering arose from the main tent. The hoppers were in flight, the crowd gasping. It was time to act.
“You take out the men backstage. I’ll deal with Nim.”
“Like hell I will. By the shitting Saints, Hellequin, they’ve got rock rifles and our arsenal is back down in the living quarters! Let’s take them out together then come back for Nim.”
Hellequin gripped Pig Heart’s stumbled chin and directed his face down to the tent where Nim was being used.
“Do you see?” he demanded in a dry rasp. “You give Nim over to that for a fistful of dollars.” He slung Pig Heart back from the edge and wiped his hands down the worn blue frockcoat he wore at show times.
“Yeah, well, it’s not like the whore ain’t used to it,” muttered the pitchman. But he kept his gaze away from the goings on below. “Okay, I’ll cause a ruckus with the boys backstage,” he spat at last, adding, “I gotta do right by Rust anyways.”
“Right by your groin more like.” Hellequin was losing time, losing patience. “Rock rifles have to kick back against a shooter’s padded shoulder. Stay that same side of the barrel and, often as not, the ammo’ll miss.”
The pitchman nodded and moved away. Hellequin crouched down, one leg extended, fingers resting lightly on the scaffold. He homed in on the tented silk below, his mercurial eye in constant adjustment. Closer in, he zoomed. Closer, until he magnified the weave enough to see its shoals of silverfish. He found a worn patch.
Alongside the noise of the crowd and the clatter of hoppers’ wings, he heard Nim give a sharp cry. Without further thought, he tucked in his elbows and leapt. He dropped like a lead weight. His boots made contact with the silk; it rent under him like spider’s web and he fell through the ceiling of the dressing room.
Time narrowed as his HawkEye made a series of minute observations that prompted his body to react. The pole supporting the tent was in arms’ reach; he felt its flaking rust under his palms and swung in tight while sliding down. His steel eye’s shutter motion allowed him to simultaneously catch the first few seconds of reaction below. A three-backed beast broke apart to reveal Nim spread-eagled. Her attackers were saloon heavies judging by the cut of their cloth.
Two struggled into their pants as Hellequin slid to the ground. A third was in the process of raising a hand to his shoulder where he’d slung his rock rifle.
The heavy never completed the manoeuvre. Hellequin drew his bowie knife from its sheath at his hip. The hilt was clothhod leather, the blade, mottled blue steel. It glinted wetly in the gaslight. Mashing the blade into the heavy’s neck, Hellequin severed the carotid artery. He kicked the man aside.
Shouts from the far side of the silk wall told him that Pig Heart was also making his presence known. A rock rifle fired, but it was a smaller silhouette than the pitchman’s which slammed against the silk, clutched it and slipped down. A ribbon of red seeped through; Hellequin registered the fact while driving his arm through the air and plunging the knife into a second man’s shoulder.
Blood exploded from the wound. Hellequin’s steel eye focused in on a single bead, plump as a Jewel Fruit seed, tumbling sideways. His HawkEye refocused inside a microsecond.
Nim had a blank expression. Only the eyes gave her away, brilliant with tears and reflecting the third man with a rock rifle pressed to his shoulder.