The Ninth Nightmare

then to decline, and our teeth to drop out, and finally our hearts to seize up, and our bodies to become a tumbling mass of maggots! Don’t you call that sick?’

‘Listen, bro — are you goin’ to let us through or what?’ Zebenjo’Yyx challenged him, raising his right arm and clicking the elaborate wooden levers that prepared his arrows for firing.

The white-faced harlequin shook his head from side to side and made a tick-tocking sound with his tongue as he did so. ‘The Grand Freak wants you to stay here. The Grand Freak wants you to join his circus. Think of what wonderful attractions you would be! The fat man and the bird woman and the black archer and the glittering twins, not to mention the naked woman who isn’t naked at all!’

Out of the side of his mouth, Jekkalon said to Jemexxa, ‘How much lightning do you have left? We could cremate this idiot in two seconds flat!’

But inside their helmets Dom Magator quickly said, ‘No, Jekkalon! This close to the portal, one of your lightning strikes could short it out. Then we could never get back.’

High above their heads, An-Gryferai was circling and circling through the clouds, sometimes appearing, sometimes disappearing. ‘Hey, D.M. — how about I dive down and grab him?’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t survive a drop of two hundred feet, would he? And then we’d be clear to go.’

But Dom Magator looked at the crowds of clowns assembled on the other side of the portal. If An-Gryferai swooped down and hoisted this white-faced harlequin up into the air, and let him drop, the rest of the clowns would fall on them like a human tsunami, and six Night Warriors wouldn’t stand a chance. For all of their arrow storms and wave-function rifles and intuitive throwing-knives, they would be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Brother Albrecht could dream up as many clowns as he wanted to, and they would never be able to kill them all.

‘I’ll make you a deal, OK?’ Dom Magator suggested to the white-faced harlequin. ‘You let us go through that portal, and out of your way, and I won’t use my Absence Gun on you.’

‘Your what?’ croaked the clown.

‘Oh — you never heard about Absence Guns? You know what an Absence Gun can do? It doesn’t kill you. It doesn’t even hurt you. It simply makes sure that you never existed, ever. You get hit by an Absence Gun and your parents never had you.’

‘I’m not making no deals with you, tin man,’ the clown retorted. ‘The Grand Freak sent us here to bring you back to the circus, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.’

Dom Magator hesitated. Zebenjo’Yyx could easily take out the white-faced harlequin with a quick storm of arrows; or Dom Magator could use a weapon against him that posed less of a risk of damaging the portal than the Absence Gun. But it would be suicide. If they brought down the white-faced harlequin, the rest of the clowns would never let them escape. They would either tear them to pieces right here and now, or tote them triumphantly back to Brother Albrecht’s circus, where they would be cut apart, and sewn back together again with limbs taken from all kinds of animals and reptiles, and that would be even more unbearable than death.

Inside Dom Magator’s helmet the seismic sensor quivered again. George Roussos was stirring, which meant that he had only minutes to make up his mind, if that. But before he could decide what to do, Xyrena came forward and touched his arm.

‘Let me try, John,’ she murmured. ‘Maybe this is one situation that can’t be solved by firepower alone, if you know what I mean.’

‘What the hell can you do against all of this rabble?’

‘Watch me.’

Without saying anything else, she walked right up to the white-faced harlequin, her crown glittering and her gilded cloak idly flapping. The white-faced harlequin stopped whirling his scimitar around and around and looked her up and down, his eyes restless with prurient interest. Raindrops were quivering on her gleaming metallic breasts and the sensual curve of her stomach, and dripping from between her legs.

‘So, my lovely lady… who are you?’ he asked her, in his frog-like voice.

Xyrena reached out and laid her hand on his sloping left shoulder. ‘You don’t need to know my name, Clown. You want me. Isn’t that enough?’

He stared at her for a long time with those kohl-blotched eyes. Xyrena was the least heavily-armed of all the Night Warriors, but in her own mesmerizing way she was one of the most lethal. And she was fearless, too. To approach the harlequin so closely, and to start stroking his white-painted cheek, that took ice-cold nerve, especially since he was still gripping his scimitar, and he could have slashed her throat at any moment.

‘You want me so bad, don’t you, Clown?’ said Xyrena. ‘So what if it’s raining, and so what if hundreds of your fellow pranksters are watching us. What do you care? You want me here and now — right here in the grass.’

‘Jesus, Xyrena,’ said Dom Magator.

But Xyrena murmured, ‘Get ready, John. As soon as he’s distracted, you guys make a dive for the portal.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m a big girl, John. I can take care of myself.’

All of the Night Warriors had heard her. An-Gryferai circled down closer, and said, ‘I’m ready, Dom Magator. Just give me the word and I can fly straight through.’

‘I’m not sure I like this,’ said Dom Magator. ‘In fact I don’t like this at all.’

‘Well, neither do we,’ Jekkalon retorted. ‘But what choice do we have? You want to end up with some orang-utan’s face, instead of your own?’

Now Xyrena was untying the ruff around the white-faced harlequin’s neck. She whirled it teasingly around her finger and dropped it into the grass. Then she started to unbutton his sodden wet clown suit. She tugged it off his shoulders, revealing a narrow white chest with a prominent ribcage. He neither helped her nor resisted her, but his nostrils flared and he began to breathe very deeply, his chest rising and falling, and his eyes never stopped roaming over her gold-plated breasts.

Uneasily, Dom Magator looked around at the crowds of clowns gathered on the slopes. He would have thought that they would have started to become restive by now, especially since their leader seemed to have temporarily forgotten what the Grand Freak had sent them here to do. But they were all staring at Xyrena with as much fascination as the white-faced harlequin, and some of them were clutching their clown suits between their legs and rhythmically squeezing their fingers.

Xyrena knelt down in front of the white-faced harlequin and wrenched his pants all the way down, tearing the thin white cotton as she pulled them over his shoes. Now he was completely naked, except for his white conical hat. His penis was standing up as stiff and white as a bone, with only the faintest tinge of purple on the glans. His scrotum had shrunk so tight that they had almost disappeared inside his body.

‘Lie down,’ Xyrena ordered him, but she said it very gently and warmly. ‘Lie down, Clown, and you can have me.’

The white-faced harlequin lay down in the long wet grass. He looked thin and vulnerable, more like a boy than a man. Xyrena unfastened the buckles that held her armor in place, and opened it up, like a golden seashell. Underneath, she looked exactly the same, except that now she really was naked — her breasts were real breasts, that swung when she moved, and her nipples knurled tightly in the rain. She laid her armor on the ground, and then she approached the white-faced harlequin as he lay in the grass in front of her.

‘Come on!’ she taunted him. ‘How much do you want me?’

‘I want you more than any woman I ever met,’ he croaked back at her.

‘Do you want me more than diamonds? Do you want me more than gold?’

‘Yes, yes!’

‘Would you go blind for me?’

‘Anything!’

Xyrena smiled and said, ‘That’s what I needed to hear.’

She tossed back her cloak and then she knelt astride him, her head held high, with a strangely serene smile on her face. With her left hand, she took hold of his erect penis and guided it up between her thighs, until the glans was nestling between the parted lips of her vagina. She looked down for a moment in satisfaction, but when the white-faced harlequin attempted to force his penis deeper inside her, she gripped him very tight, so that he couldn’t.

He struggled for a moment, bumping his hips up and down. ‘What are you doing to me?’ he demanded. ‘I