honeycombed dermis – then he pulled away. The doctor was screaming now, hands to her face and cursing up a storm. Hellequin manipulated a wrist bone and wrenched one arm free of his restraints.
Lars was already on his way across the room, blade readied. Hellequin grabbed a chopper off the tray of operating equipment and sliced through the bonds at his other arm. It took him precious seconds to unbuckle the strap at his waist and sit up. There wasn’t time to attack the restraints at his ankles. Lars was on him, hacking out with his knife. Hellequin forgot the use of his legs, concentrating instead on each fall of the blade. His own knife was missing; he spotted it on top of a steel cabinet at the far end of the makeshift operating theatre. The mechanism of his HawkEye was soaked in the surgeon’s blood and kept cutting out. In snapshots, Hellequin saw the slash of Lars’ blade and the surgeon moving in with the second gas mask.
“I don’t want you to kill the bastard, Lars. I want you to pin him down again,” she insisted, blood streaming from her cheekbone, voice tight with hysteria.
Lars’ face shone with triumph as he drove the blade into Hellequin’s shoulder. “This fucker ain’t breaking free of me a second time.”
Hellequin bucked. His view through the HawkEye lens spattered like a lit candle stub. He tried to focus, stomach clawing as the gas mask closed over his face.
“Hold him, blood worm, or I’ll have my men outside slice and dice you without aid of anaesthetic.”
Lars heeded the surgeon. Struggling to make sense of his bearings with his natural eye, Hellequin found his arms pinned behind him. The pain from his stab wound was excruciating but he fought against Lars’ iron grip even as the doctor lowered the gas mask over his face. Hot bursts of steam escaped the sides. Wind mechanisms crunched and wheezed, automatically pulling the straps tight. Hellequin heard the eerie whoosh of gas and tried to keep from breathing. Lars tightened his grip, antagonising the stab wound. Hellequin gasped in spite of himself and choked down a mouthful of the drug. In seconds, he was on the precipice of blacking out.
The door splintered under Asenath’s shoulder. Having torn out the throat of the last sentry with her claws, Rust bounded over. Pig Heart brought up the rear, panting heavily, tusks bared against the pain he laboured under.
“Motherfuckers!” A scarecrow of a man wearing a Humock Guard duster coat leapt away from one of two stretcher beds in the centre of the room. The man wielded a bloodstained knife.
“Move away from the HawkEye,” said Asenath slowly.
The man juggled the hilt of his blade between his hands. Behind him cowered a second scarecrow, a woman once was. Now she resembled a mummified child – skin baked down into wrinkles, bird-bright black eyes – and wore a wreath of tiny bones around her neck.
“Get out!” The old woman grabbed a small hacksaw off the surgical tray. “Get out, get out, filthy street rats!”
The three carnie folk saw Hellequin and Nim on stretchers. Both wore large steaming gas masks. Nim appeared unravelled at one arm. Wires and unbolted circuits spilled out from her over a metal tray on a high table alongside her. Hellequin was bleeding through his faded frockcoat, the HawkEye lens gored.
Having made short work of the men on guard outside the room, the new arrivals took on Lars. He was agile, weaving in and out of Asenath’s attack with her scimitar while delivering a boot to Rust’s collarbone when the wolf girl sprang at him.
Pig Heart watched the fight from the sidelines initially. He’d been warned to lead the way to the surgeon then take the lead no more, his wounds making it difficult enough for him to stay upright let alone fight. But it was hard to watch the slap of the ex-soldier’s fists into Rust’s bare flesh as she ran at him again.
“Bite the bugger, gal!” he called from the sidelines.
Rust craned her mouth, revealing sharp incisors. She tore a chunk from the man’s cheek, reopening one of the two old wounds. He knocked her sideways with an elbow and drove his blade hard at Asenath’s chest. Rust ducked to avoid the surgeon’s hacksaw. She slashed out at the old woman, who fell back awkwardly, sending the tray of surgical instruments clattering down onto the floor.
Pig Heart lumbered over to where Hellequin lay prone on one stretcher. He tried to make sense of the gas mask then forced a stopcock on the cylinder stored beneath. Batting at the straps that secured it, he must have released something; there was a hiss of steam–driven mechanics and the mask’s straps un-popped.
“HawkEye!”
Hellequin didn’t reply. Pig Heart slapped him a couple of times around the jaw.
“Pig... Heart?” said the HawkEye soldier woozily.
“Yeah. I may not be a pretty sight to wake up to, but at least that crazy bitch surgeon didn’t get her hooks into you.” Pig Heart squinted over to where Nim lay unconscious. “Unlike your beau, Nim. She’s mauled and then some. Rust’ll make the doc pay though. She’ll gut that bitch good and proper.”
Hellequin tried to form words. They came out as a soft pop–pop.
“What’s that?” Pig Heart lent in. He listened and looked up.
“Rust! Incapacitate but don’t kill that doc bitch. We need her to stitch Nim up again!”
Rust’s response was immediate. She drove her claws up under the surgeon’s ribs and stopped just short of tearing the skin there. The woman froze.
“Move and I gut it,” said Rust by the woman’s ear.
On the far side of the room, Asenath was floored by a fist. Lars squatted and lent over her, blade at her throat.
“I did for your kin, Jeridian. Got that great clot of a Shomaniese to show me where the weak ones holed up. I just had to reach in and pick them off. Miss Yalda Danan was kind enough to pay me a hundred dollars a hide and, my my, the work she did with them red skins. Prettied the fuckers right up with wires under flesh and re-bolted bones and animal organs.”
“And I for one am mighty grateful.” Pig Heart inclined his head towards the surgeon. Rust kept her claws at the woman’s ribs.
“Hello there, Miss Dannan. Thought we’d find you here. Same address, same love of dabbling with what’s natural and what ain’t.” Pig Heart tapped his chest. “Ticker’s kept me up right these past few years. But there’s been a price. You see that about me, doncha?” Pig Heart showed his tusks. Savageness crept into his voice. “You saved me and re-made me, and the price I paid was to become less man than swine.” He honked in his throat. It came out as a loud grunt. “So I thank you, Miss Dannan, for the life I got given by your fair hands, and I curse you just the same.”
Pig Heart stared at Asenath. “Just gonna lie there or take that bastard’s head?”
“She’s gonna lie...”
Corporal Lars never finished his sentence. He fell over to one side, the grip on his knife slack. It clattered onto the floor and he clutched his hand to his chest. The handle of Asenath’s scimitar protruded from his left set of ribs.
Asenath stood up. She grabbed the man’s hair in one hand, put a foot to one of his shoulders and dragged her blade out his body. The ex-soldier gasped in reaction. It was his last breath. He collapsed forward. Blood seeped around him in a smooth reflective pool.
Pig Heart turned back to Miss Yalda Danan who had the look of a frightened roo rat about to be readied for the stew pot. “Now, Miss Danan. I’m going need you to put my two friends right.” He picked a scalpel off the tray and gestured to the wall with its bank of bottled oddities. “Else I may have to get creative.”
FOURTEEN
Jaxx awoke. He was lying on the sand, curled up like a child, hands pressed into a prayer against his face. The air was crisp. But he sensed the voracious heat that was to come.
He swallowed against a dry throat and pushed up onto an elbow. His head swam, a faint sense of nauseous suggesting he had been more directly affected by the drug fumes inside the nomads’ tent than he’d supposed at the time. Nonetheless, he struggled to his feet.
The rising sun flamed at the horizon. Jaxx was grateful not to have missed Dawn Prayer. Having emptied his
