He lifted his Absence Gun, double-cocked it, and leveled it at the clowns and the freaks who had gathered themselves between him and Brother Albrecht. He saw a pretty little pale-faced girl standing directly in front of the Grand Freak. She had straggly brown hair and a long floral dress with a lacy collar. She gave him a hesitant smile, but when he looked down at her feet he realized why she probably wasn’t afraid to die. She had the black-and-tan paws of a German Shepherd, instead of feet.
He thought that he would probably be doing all of these people a big favor, canceling out their existence as if they had never been born. But he knew that it wasn’t his call.
Xyrena stepped up beside Dom Magator, and said to Brother Albrecht, ‘Don’t you have a conscience, Mister Grand Freak? You’re responsible for all of these people. You wouldn’t want to see them hurt.’
‘I have seen them hurt!’ they heard Brother Albrecht shout back to them, although he was barely visible behind the jostling crowd of freaks. ‘I hurt them myself, and often! And mutilated them! It’s all part of the show! All human life is pain and suffering and disappointment, no matter what lies God tells you! Pain and suffering and disappointment are the price we have to pay for being born!’
Dom Magator aimed his Absence Gun and tried to get a fix on Brother Albrecht’s head, but the freaks kept moving and nodding and leaning at different angles so that he found it impossible.
‘What you are trying to do is fruitless!’ Brother Albrecht added. ‘Now I want all of you to leave my dream and never come back! You will see it again, soon enough, when I bring it to the waking world! You will hear our music and see our black flags waving, and you will know that we have come to preach the truth about God, and the fallacy of human charity, and the pleasures of endless agony!’
‘Not a fricking chance,’ said Dom Magator. He nearly caught Brother Albrecht in his cross hairs, but the pale little girl moved her head into his line of fire, still smiling at him.
‘Man, I think you should go for a shot whatever,’ said Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘How many of these freaks are goin’ to survive, when this circus breaks up? Most of them, they’re only dream people anyhow. You can’t hurt nobody who’s only a dream!’
But at that moment Brother Albrecht shouted out, ‘Flammen! Flammen! Geben Sie mir Feuer!’
‘What?’ said Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘What in hell’s name he talkin’ about?’
They soon found out. The fire breather came stalking toward them, stiff-legged, his face still smudged with soot from his last display, like a marionette which has just been snatched out of a bonfire. His cheeks were swollen, his eyes were watering, and Dom Magator suddenly realized that he had a mouthful of lamp oil.
‘Hit the deck!’ he shouted, and at that instant, with a soft roar, a huge ball of orange fire enveloped the Night Warriors, so that their armor and their costumes were set ablaze. Xyrena was the most vulnerable: she wore only a crown instead of a helmet, but Dom Magator spun himself around as the flames rolled toward them and shielded her face with his upraised hand. All the same, Xyrena yelped as the fire singed her hair.
Zebenjo’Yyx blew out the flames on his forearms, and then twisted around and around, furiously trying to see where the fire breather had disappeared to. ‘You all right, Xyrena?’ he asked. ‘You not burned or nothin’? Everybody else OK?’
Jekkalon had swung back from the rear of the big top now, and he landed on the stage next to Jemexxa. Small flames were still flickering on her legs but he quickly smacked them out.
Dom Magator looked back toward Brother Albrecht’s contraption, to see if he could manage to get a clear shot this time. For a fleeting second he saw Brother Albrecht’s face, in profile, and Brother Albrecht looked angrier than ever. All this tussling was holding up his eighth sacrifice, after all — and not only that, Zebenjo’Yyx had killed his surgeon and one of his snakes. Dom Magator saw him sharply in his sights, and was just about to fire when an elderly woman with blood-red eyes deliberately blocked his line of sight. She had an expression on her face that explicitly challenged him, ‘Go ahead, if you dare — kill me! There’s nothing I’d like better!’
Zebenjo’Yyx came up to join him, still stiffly sticking out his right arm, ready to fire. ‘Where’s that fire-eatin’ mother? He almost choked me.’
Before Dom Magator could answer him, there was another soft roar, from the other direction this time, and for a second time the Night Warriors were enveloped in a huge ball of flame. Zebenjo’Yyx fired off five or six arrows, two of which were blazing, but the fire breather was far too quick for them, and pushed his way back into the crowd. Dom Magator checked his infrared sensors to see where he might have gone, but for the few vital seconds in which he might have located him the ambient heat was far too high, and all he could see was dancing black ghosts, like a Balinese shadow-theater.
‘Nobody hurt?’ he asked.
In the confusion the clowns and the freaks and the children had all started to drag Brother Albrecht’s contraption back toward the rear of the stage.
‘I still say take the goddamned shot!’ shouted Zebenjo’Yyx. ‘Back in Hamtramck, you wanted to waste somebody, you just cruised by and you sprayed the whole street, no matter who was standin’ there! Sometimes it’s the only way, man, believe me!’
But Dom Magator looked up toward the ceiling of the big top and said. ‘I got a better idea. An-Gryferai — you hear me?’
‘I hear you!’
‘Can you cut your way in through the roof?’
‘You bet! Be glad to! You don’t know how stormy it’s getting out here!’
‘OK, then — do it! Then fly straight down here to the stage and grab the guy in the orange flame outfit! He’s a fire breather, and he’s being a royal pain in the ass! Take him outside and drop him as far away as you like, and from as high as you like! Just get rid of him!’
‘There’s a pretty murky-looking pond in the woods,’ An-Gryferai told him. ‘I could drop him in there. That would put his fire out.’
Within just a few seconds, Dom Magator heard a rippling, rumbling sound overhead. An-Gryferai was slicing open the thick black canvas with one of her claws, and the wind was making it flap like a sail.
She made a cut over twenty feet long, and then another cut diagonally across it, in a star shape. The howling of the wind and the sudden cold spray of rain on their heads made everybody in the auditorium look up. Without any hesitation, An-Gryferai folded her wings and came plunging through the cut, head first like a skydiver.
Down below her, on the stage, she could see the flame breather in his orange leotard, circling around the back of Brother Albrecht’s black contraption. He was obviously trying to reposition himself so that he could spurt out another blast of fire at her fellow Night Warriors. He was filling his mouth with lamp oil from a large glass flask and he was almost the only performer on the stage who wasn’t looking up at her.
She came soaring down, and as she did so, with a brisk clicking noise, she extended her mechanical claws. She hit the flame breather in the back, her claws crunching deep into his deltoid muscles, and with three strong beats of her wings she lifted him clear off the stage and high up over the audience. He tried to shout out in shock, but his cheeks were bulging with lamp oil and he breathed most of it into his lungs.
She lifted him higher and higher, while he spluttered and choked and kicked his legs in a vain attempt to wrestle himself free — even though he would have dropped more than seventy feet if he had managed it. An-Gryferai beat her wings harder and harder, until she had almost reached the ceiling of the big top. But as she rose nearer and nearer to the star-shaped cuts she had made in the canvas, she realized that the fire breather was much heavier than she had estimated him to be, and that she would have to spread her wings much wider than the cuts she had made in order to be able to lift him out of the big top and into the open air.