‘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
But at that moment Brother Albrecht shouted out, ‘
‘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 —
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
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.
Not only that, the storm outside was howling even more fiercely than before, and she didn’t think that she had the strength to battle the downdraft that was blowing in from outside — not when she was carrying a struggling man who must have weighed nearly two hundred pounds.
Maybe she should do what her grandmother Gryferai had done to the Black Shatterer, and simply let go of him. But there was no guarantee that the drop was enough to kill him, and put him out of action for ever.
‘Jekkalon!’ she gasped. ‘Jemexxa!’
‘What’s wrong, A-G?’ asked Jemexxa.
‘I can’t lift him out through the roof — he’s far too heavy and the wind’s too strong!’
‘What are you going to do?’
The fire breather was close to asphyxiating now, and thrashing his arms and legs even more violently. It was only because An-Gryferai’s claws were buried so deep in his muscles that she was able to hold on to him. The wind shrieked in through the cuts in the canvas and made her dip and spin in mid-air.
‘I’m going to drop him, but as soon as I let go of him, I want you to zap him!’
‘You got it! Jekkalon?’
Jekkalon said, ‘Got you!’ He pushed his way through to the rear of the stage and mounted the ladder that would take him back up to the trapeze platform. None of the clowns or freaks made any attempt to stop him. They were too busy dragging Brother Albrecht off the stage, and out of Dom Magator’s line of fire. They were even shouting out a ragged chorus of, ‘
‘I swear to God, man!’ Zebenjo’Yyx shouted at him. ‘You just need to total the whole frickin’ lot of them!’
Dom Magator was almost beginning to believe that he was right, and that firing indiscriminately into the crowd was going to be the only way to ensure that the Grand Freak was eliminated for ever. But at that moment, high above their heads, An-Gryferai released her grip on the fire breather, and Jekkalon launched himself off the trapeze platform and performed a triple backflip to intercept the fire breather as he came down.
It was all over in a fraction of a second, but it seemed as if it took for ever, like a slow-motion ballet. As soon as An-Gryferai released her mechanical claws from his shoulder muscles, the fire breather dropped toward the stage, his arms flailing as if he were trying to swim. Jekkalon was tumbling over and over in mid-air, and as he did