inside an emerald. Pendulous gas lamps hung about walls, exuding a rich green glow. In the centre of the room stood a brass bath. Pipes wreathed around it, concluding in four flower-shaped spouts. A rustic patchwork of clothhod hides lined the floor.
To one side of the room stood a desk with a thick brass writing slab, numerous drawers and letter slots, and an inkwell. The accompanying chair seemed to grow up out of the floor, plush and faintly tumour-like.
On the opposite side of the room was a second round door – leading to a water closet perhaps – and a small stove in one corner, the chimney of which rose up and through a hole in the upper storey and presumably kept on rising. In between these main fixtures, one wall was decorated with tiny clockwork counters, a brace of heavy iron levers, and a large glass globe. Inside floated a rubbery green organ with flesh tubes running off of it. It reminded her of a specimen kept in a jar. She peered in at the thing, mesmerised, leaping back as a thin covering retracted in the centre of the organ, revealing a great eye of dull green glass.
A sound – like something rolling over the metal floor grid outside – caught her attention. She froze. Waited. Nothing intruded.
Relaxing, she felt a new awareness of her filthy skin under the sackcloth robe. She’d sweated in the act of coupling with the Sirinese, kept up that heat while crossing the salt plains to Zan City. Arriving just ahead of dawn, she’d come upon the circus in its last half-hour of slumber and slipped inside. Traversing the huge circus ring, she’d seen the rigs and unlit spotlights craning overhead like long thin birds and, way up, a trapeze, the swing of which seemed to keep time with some underlying rise and fall of breath.
Backstage had been curtained off by a large steel screen. She’d laid her hands then ear against it. Had she heard a faint heartbeat? Unable to progress further, she’d wandered the circus ring once more, only to hear the hushed arrival of strangers at the tent’s entrance. They had come in, strange elfin folk. A pig man and a red-skinned Jeridian woman, doing their best to carry a girl who sparkled with living colour. In their wake came a HawkEye soldier. Thin as a reed. Magnificently tall. He appeared worn out in every way, from the faded frockcoat he wore to the angry adjustments of his bloody eyepiece. His emotions too – she sensed those were awkward and weary.
Approaching the steel screen, the Jeridian had left the girl in the pig’s care to work a key into the lock. The screen drew back on well-oiled runners and the small gang made their way backstage.
She’d followed at a distance, through the mess of props and stage flats to a drop of flimsy fabric serving as a wall along one side. She’d watched them slip behind the gauze, their outlines dancing behind the curtain like outsized shadow puppets.
As dawn broke, and the crew began to yawn and scratch and rise, she’d been the first to use the lift rig. No one noticed her step out onto the second level where Herb’s private quarters were housed, or when, finding the ringmaster already risen and absent from home, she’d slipped up the brass stairs and through the circular door.
Now she took a long deep breath, inhaling the scent of brewing coffee from the canteen below. It wide-eyed her slightly. But her shoulders and feet still felt world-weary from her travels. It didn’t seem so very strange then to twist the stopcock and have steaming, greenish water glug out of the flower faucets. The temperature inside the room rose a few degrees; she luxuriated in the noise and feel of the piping water. When the tub was full, she closed off the stopcock and undressed, her robe and grotesque mask things to be shed.
She fed a toe into the bath, stepped in and lowered herself down with a pleasurable gasp. The green water immersed her. She slid below the surface.
“A mermaid.” Rind nosed at the tiny window. The glass was thick and densely entwined with brass piping, restricting the view.
“Nah, a nimblejack fresh out the grave.” Tib’s eyes were bright buttons. “I seen it moving. Smooth it goes. Not rumble tumble like me and she and thee.”
The second girl, Ol, made a queer pop-pop sound as she crept down the roof, beetle-like. “It’s a Saint. Come to catch sinners and chew down on their bones.”
“We’re good ‘uns. Let’s leave it be,” whispered Rind. She clattered away from the window and rolled off a short way. Unfolding, she snouted the air for any indication of danger.
Ol was less timid. “I ain’t hiding in my shell. I got a blessing owed me since them up in the heavens let Papa breed us this way. The Saint needs to say he’ll take my soul on up when I die. Other two of yous as well if he’s willing.”
“You’s gonna roll on in there and ask it of the one that’s bathing?” Tib became edgy, tipping back onto the base of his shell, segmented limbs waggling. He lifted his face, jabbed out a stubby pink tongue and nodded. “Steam’s in there and the stink of soap shavings.” Fascination drew him to the steps towards the circular door. He stretched a pincer towards the handle.
“Mermaid’ll dazzle you with her shine,” Rind hissed. She put one leathery foot onto the first step however.
“First sin you’ll be judged on is prying where bogey noses ain’t wanted,” chimed in Ol. She followed his lead though, pushing ahead of Rind.
Tib turned the handle and pushed open the door. Each child blinked, grew accustomed to the light and hobbled forward.
“Hello, my beautiful boneless children.” The woman soaped her naked breasts with Herb’s washcloth, bathing in the ringmaster’s tub as if she was no less of a fixture in the house than the stove, desk, or mechanical motherboard.
FIFTEEN
The sleep of a HawkEye was a ragged, bruising experience. To the government who had commissioned the thirty HawkEye, each in charge of their own platoon, it seemed wise to keep their metalmorphosed soldiers on constant alert. With no facility to close down the implant, the HawkEyes entered a world of endless sight – something only the Saints should be blessed with, so the religious element of Humock had complained. And certainly it did seem the HawkEye acquired the perspective of gods; the eyepiece granted them the ability to process visuals in seconds, to zoom into 1000° degree magnification, and to access multiple views on impulse. But hardwiring the soldiers’ brains into a state of eternal visual stimuli was not without consequence. Far from retaining their elite status beyond the Civil War, HawkEyes turned drunkard, addict, lunatic and suicidal. In the past three years since he’d joined Cyber Circus, Hellequin had never encountered another like him, and he was glad of the fact. The mess of hardwiring in his brain might dull his emotions, but it never entirely erased the suffering. Meanwhile, the resultant sleep deprivation served to exasperate the condition.
Slumped in a chair alongside the bed where Nim lay sleeping, Hellequin dipped in and out of consciousness. He dreamt of his parents’ farmstead, his family out on the porch. The land around the house was desolate, but the family smiled and waved. Hellequin felt a rush of half-emotions as his mind played snapshots from his past. Collecting peckers’ eggs as a child, hand-in-hand with his mother. Soothing his twin brothers with spoonfuls of clothhod curd. Tearing the ribbons from the sisters’ hair ahead of church. Feeling his father’s disappointment like a gob of spit to the face.
And he was in his lung basket suddenly, staring down at the farmstead as he shot the flare to give the order. Soldiers spilt in from all sides and they brought with them the great lime dust guns designed to raze the Soul Food crops to the ground in minutes. Except, the dust drifted on a sudden, freakish gust of wind. He saw his family wave on, flesh melting off their bones like dripping wax.
“ Mi smo victorios!” he cried. Asenath’s cry of victory.
“Hellequin.” The voice was soft. It bled inside his mind, closing off the fantastical nightmares and bringing him back around. While his natural eye blinked, the HawkEye implant fed in its compound spread of images – the fold of Nim’s knees as she sat up, legs slung over the edge of the bed; the tentative placement of one of her hands over the fabric which bandaged her rewired arm.
She put her hand to her throat. “Is there water here?”
He was already handing her a metal cup. His shoulder pulsed angrily where the ex-soldier, Lars, had stabbed him. Asenath had stitched the wound then charged him with the role of acting bodyguard to Nim. It had made
