The statue reared upright, clutching at the vicinity of its ear, immobile for a moment.
Malik saw the opportunity. “Run!” he screamed to anyone still standing, stunned, in the area. He waved his arms wildly, then glanced about him. “Sally? Sally darlin’! Sally, where are ye?!”
“’Ere, Malik,” answered a small, terrified voice behind him as Duckfoot Sally appeared on the step of one of the wagons, logjammed with the others trying to make their way out.
At the sound of her voice, the enormous man stopped, then turned sightless eyes toward her that in the gleam of the torches of the remaining wagons shone blue and milky.
Then began to stride in her direction, following the sound of her voice.
Malik was between them, and saw the intent in the statue’s stride. “Run, Sally!” he screamed, interposing himself in the statue’s path and grabbing hold of a broken tent pole. “He’s coming fer ye! Run!”
The giant slapped him away like a leaf in the wind, shattering his bones and flinging them into the snow in several discrete sections.
Duckfoot Sally and the freaks crowded around her screamed in unison. The sound seemed to infuriate the approaching titan; its speed increased, along with the menace in its stance. For a second there was jostling on the porch of the wagon; then the freak known as the Human Bear seized Sally from behind and tossed her over the railing into the statue’s path.
She squealed as she tumbled to the ground, then looked up to find two unearthly eyes, eyes whose scleras were stone, but whose irises were blue with filmy cataracts, staring down at her intently.
Choking on her horror and on her own tears, Duckfoot Sally skittered backward a short distance, hampered by the rustling tatters of her many layers of skirts and aprons. Under her breath she began to mutter soft prayers she remembered from childhood, even though their meaning was long lost to her.
The titan continued to observe her, unmoving. It watched her as she began to sob, then slowly knelt in front of her, oblivious of the arrow fire that was glancing off its back and sides.
One of the statue’s enormous hands curled into a fist, eliciting a gasp of horror from Sally and every other freak who had been trapped on the wagon’s porch or by fear.
Silence fell over the devastated ruin of the camp, save for the crackling of the remaining barrel fires and the soft moaning of the dying.
The titan reached out slowly and ran the back of its stone knuckles over the cheek of the terrified woman, brazing it slightly from the roughness of the stone, but wiping away the flood of tears that had cascaded down her face.
Exactly as she had always done for him.
No realization came into the terrified woman’s eyes.
From his wagon across the campsite, the Ringmaster finally emerged, tucking his nightshirt into his striped pants, the double-pursed woman behind him.
“What is going on here?” he shouted, his voice thick with rum, unspent arousal, and annoyance.
The shocked silence broken, the freaks and carnies, Duckfoot Sally among them, began to shriek again.
The statue’s head snapped upright.
For a moment Faron had been feeling a sensation that had not been present since he had been encased in the body of Living Stone. It was the sensation of sadness.
She no remember me, he was thinking.
There was something devastating to him about that; without Sally and her kindness, there would be no one now in the world who had known him as he was.
Had loved him as he was.
He put his free hand up to his ear, where the lucky shot had torn a chink in his flesh; there was no pain, just a sense that the damaged area was drying in a way that the rest of his earthen body was not, as if the stone was no longer alive.
Suddenly he could hear the sound ringing clearer, the song the scales emitted.
His head jerked up at the realization, but as it did, the garbage noise, the interference that deadened the song of the scales, rose to meet it, blocking its sound, hindering him from finding it.
He shook his head, trying to clear it of the noise, but that only made it grow louder.
Loudest of all seemed to be coming from immediately in front of him.
His balled fist opened, his fingers wrapped around Duckfoot Sally’s neck, and squeezed until the noise she was making stopped.
In horror, the remains of the Monstrosity watched the titan rip Duckfoot Sally’s head from her shoulders and drop it idly on the ground to its side, then straighten up and turn slowly in the direction of the Ringmaster.
The Ringmaster stumbled down the steps of his wagon, barefoot in the snow.
“Do something, you misbegotten idiots!” he squealed at the remaining guards, but the carnies were running, fleeing out into the darkness of the Krevensfield Plain along with whatever freaks could still move. The woman he had been attempting to fornicate a few moments prior gaped raggedly and ran back inside the Ringmaster’s wagon, a miscalculation apparent a moment later when the titan grasped the rail of the porch and hurled it over the Ringmaster’s head, blocking his exit as it smashed to the ground.
The Ringmaster froze. He glanced wildly around, looking for any exit he could find, but behind him his path was blocked by his shattered wagon, the bi-pursed woman’s broken body sprawling from what had once been his window.
Before him was a giant angry shadow, formed of stone but moving now as a man.
A man with murderous rage in his eyes.
Quickly the owner of the Monstrosity dug his hands into his pockets, searching blindly for whatever valuables he might find, knowing there was little likelihood that anything so destructive might be bought off with gems or gold, but not knowing anything better to do.
His trembling hand caught hold of something sharp and rough at the edges; it was the tattered blue oval he had removed from the belly of the fish-boy a long while back. He kept it in his pocket for good luck, and because the vibration it emitted had a warm and sensuous effect on his nether region. He seized the scale and tossed it into the darkness at the approaching titan’s feet.
Faron stopped in his tracks on the snowy ground.
The scale gleamed before him, reflecting the fires and the crazy light of the moon. It was the scrying scale, the blue talisman etched with the picture of an eye surrounded by clouds on one side, the convex one, and obscured by them on the other, the concave one. It was the scale in which he had first found this place, had tracked the woman with the long hair over the sea at his father’s insistence, had helped his father keep track of his fleet of pirate ships on the sea. It was possibly his greatest prize, and the loss of it had left him bereft.
Now it was lying, unobstructed, at his feet, singing its clear and bell-like song.
Reverently Faron bent down and scooped up the scale, then held it aloft in triumph to the light of the cloud-draped moon.
Then he turned away, lost in the joy of a treasure recovered.
Behind him, the Ringmaster let out his breath in a ragged sigh of relief.
Faron stopped in midstride.
For a moment he had almost forgotten, in the reverie of the scale’s recovery, the torture that he had endured, the agony of the scale being torn from him, the teasing to force him to perform, the endless abuse and isolation in the darkness of a bumping circus wagon. He did not understand his torment then, nor did he understand it now.
But he remembered it.
He thought back to the image of Duckfoot Sally, swinging her nails like a sword in his defense; the Ringmaster had belted her into unconsciousness with the back of his hand. In his primitive mind Faron did not even remember what he himself had done to Sally, but the rage of the memory returned, along with that of all the other torment he had suffered at the hands of the man in the striped trousers.
He turned and was on the Ringmaster in a heartbeat; the man didn’t even have a chance to open his mouth to scream before Faron backhanded him into the broken wagon. Then, for the first time since gaining this new body of living earth, he attacked for the sheer, sweet pleasure of revenge, pummeling the man’s lifeless body into jelly, then flinging it out into the night where even the carrion did not recognize it the next morning.