A slug embedded itself in an upright landing mat close to Pig Heart’s head. The pitchman tore back his lips, baring yellow tusks. The sniper was tucked behind one of the flats at the far end of the backstage area; Pig Heart suspected an illustrated sand hill, where the faint plume of discharged spark powder lingered in the air. He dragged a hand across his nostrils. Before he could concentrate on the sniper, there were three more chumps to sock it to.
“Saints alive, you’re a sight, ain’t ya!” shouted a two-tone in a rag waistcoat and pants a size too big. He rocked from one foot to another, a knife to his young hostage’s neck. Pig Heart recognised the belt of dry rat remains at the kid’s waist. The hostage was the one-time exterminator who had ridden the lift rig with him earlier.
“Only one thing to do with a pig. Slit his throat and make him squeal,” said a second, a Sirinese with brow locks that flowed either side each eye and a butting plate stitched into his forehead. His rock rifle was trained on a number of the pitch crew who were spread-eagled on the ground, faces in the dirt.
The sniper took a second shot. Pig Heart felt the slug nip his ear. The sting of it, alongside the blood which oozed down his neck, made him let back his head and loose a tremendous snort. Crumpled at the bottom of the silk drop was the man he had killed first. Pig Heart yanked a rock rifle from the man’s dead fist. Swinging the butt in tight to a shoulder, muscular tissue bulging, he ran at the Sirinese.
“Take the pig out, Gribson!” called the Sirinese, presumably to the sniper. He kept his own rifle trained on Pig Heart’s men and showed his black teeth.
Pig Heart had the measure of the sniper’s angle. He kept the two-tone and the kid hostage between him and the gun. When the sniper failed to take him out, the Sirinese aimed his rifle at the nearest pitchman and fired a slug. The man’s skull cracked open like an egg.
Pig Heart kept on coming. He and the Sirinese clashed with the force of two rhinehorn bulls. Pig Heart brought his club of a rock rifle slamming down. The Sirinese blocked the blow with his own rifle, braced between two hands. A slug of rock ammo pierced Pig Heart’s thigh. He drove forward with new grit.
“Get up, you gimps! Drive these shitters out,” he roared at his pitch crew.
“Easy, freak. Else I’ll dust your boy here,” shouted the two-tone while the exterminator kid yelped, “He got me, boss! He got me!”
Pig Heart wouldn’t be held to ransom. He shunted the Sirinese in-between him and the sniper, with the vague idea of rescuing the kid once he’d disentangled himself. It was an idea which melted the instant he heard the zip of knife passed through flesh. The kid gurgled and fell.
It was distraction enough; Pig Heart felt a crush of pain and the world flooded black. He stumbled, blood draining from his split nose, the same cherry red smearing the butting plate at the Sirinese’s forehead. The man’s victory was cut short. Pig Heart crushed the butt of his rifle into the Sirinese’s windpipe, heard him wheeze like a pair of bellows. The whip of a pocketknife near his jowl told him the two-tone was on him. A slug from the sniper punctured the ground where he’d stood a second earlier.
Convinced his crew had deserted him, Pig Heart cursed them as yellow-bellies. But then the two-tone started to shake violently as if suffering from a malady. It took a second glance for Pig Heart to see the splay of blood at the man’s chest and the protruding curve of a scimitar. He didn’t stop to thank his backup but charged at the painted sand hill.
Shoot me up, chump! Just you shoot me up, he dared the sniper. There was a whistling noise and a rock took a second chunk out of his already bleeding ear. Pig Heart tossed his head from side to side while snorting, and powered his muscular limbs.
A red figure streaked by – the Jeridian he’d encountered earlier on the lift rig – and she was phenomenally fast. Inside seconds, she made an arrow of her body and leapt over the flat, twisting into a revolving bullet as she travelled and so avoiding the two rock slugs the sniper peeled off.
D’Angelus’s man knocked down the sand hill flat and started to run. The Jeridian landed in a roll of muscle, ripped the scimitar from the sheath at her back and flicked it clean through the sniper’s neck. Pig Heart watched the head fall.
Earl didn’t like being close to hoppers. He pressed back against the thick canvas wall as one of the two nymphs landed on a nearby tent pole, claws scraping the dark metal, wings folding with a rough clack-clack. The nymph was the size of a small burrowing machine – in fact, as Earl noted, its taupe and black exoskeleton had a lot in common with the panel work of those machines abandoned by the government at the country’s inactive mines. That the creature was alive did little to detract from its stiff easing out of segmented femur and tibia, or the clockwork bob of its head. Resembling large black pustules either side the skull, the eyes appeared all seeing while the bright green cornsilk poking from between the forewings betrayed the creature’s botanical DNA. The same plant feed which had turned Humock’s farmland to dust was responsible for the crossbreeding of the original hand-sized greenkicks with a strain of air plant. To a man like Earl, the idea was as ludicrous as it was terrifying.
“Nothing natural about you,” he whispered, pawing the canvas at his back as if to scale its height. The hopper twitched its head in his direction. Earl could’ve sworn it absorbed him with those huge swimming eyes.
With a brittle rub of motion, the hopper took to the air and joined its twin in circling the tent.
Forcing himself to move, Earl mauled the leaf lump in his mouth and eased around the edge of the circus tent to the backstage curtain. Having forced Nim to drain his juice, he’d thought it good for morale to let his boys poke the whore; they’d never afford D’Angelus’s rates otherwise. “Swift as virgins getting their first tug-off,” he’d warned, and slipped back out front to keep an eye on the boss.
But the minutes were dragging and the men were taking their sweet time. D’Angelus and the heavies he’d kept back were eating up the hoppers’ act, but Herb reckoned the ringmaster would be rounding things up soon.
Finding the edge of the curtain, he pulled it gently aside. He needn’t have bothered with subtleties. Jaxx, the Sirinese, came tearing through the curtain, followed closely by the swine man, sweaty and mad-eyed. Earl slunk back into the shadows as the pitchman leapt onto Jaxx’s back, the two men careering into the ring.
There was a moment of hush as the crowd seemed to presume it all part of the act. Then a statuesque Jeridian woman strode out from backstage and raised her arm, the hair of a severed head intertwined with her fingers.
“Ahoj na vás, vražedné Bolesť Earth svině!” she cried in her native tongue, and the still of the crowd transformed into violent alarm.
Earl’s eyes were tight bobbing beads; they scooted to the far side of the tent, settling on D’Angelus and his reserve of men. D’Angelus showed none of the courtesy he’d shown earlier, slamming the Saint Sister aside as she tottered out of her seat and tried to force an exit. His men crushed around him, marking out a path through the crowd with their fists.
Earl dribbled his wad of leaf onto the back of a hand and slopped it aside. Devil in Hell! Where were the men he’d sent in? And what now? What as the Jeridian threw the severed head into the dirt and took on the first of D’Angelus’s men to reach her? What as the swine who’d pocketed D’Angelus’s dollars a short time earlier took the full thrust of Jaxx’s butting plate against his forehead and reeled, only to power back inside the second?
All around the ring, the townsfolk stampeded in a bid for freedom. The noise of panic was bloodcurdling. Having escaped to the calliope balcony, the ringmaster, that squat plug of fat, was hopping and gesticulating. Because the hoppers were still loose. Which meant the exit was stitched shut, Earl realised, his insides curdling.