place. He saw a man’s head, not D’Anglus and not the Sirinese. The driver, he concluded. No doubt the fellow had been instructed to hold steady while the pimp retrieved his precious runaway – who happened to be lying prone in front of the circus tent. Hellequin saw the pimp kneel down, slip a hand around Nim’s neck and bring her lips to his.
The HawkEye cried out in unfamiliar rage. His voice was lost to a harsher, wilder sound.
“Caa-ri!” said the voice. Rough-edged. Locust-like. “Caaree-caa-ahn!”
Hellequin whirled round, his magnifying lens drilling into the honeycombed cells among the walls, off to the inky lake, up to the canopy of great black clattering insects. He came full circle and stopped short of D’Angelus, that sour devil of a man. The pimp had reeled around on the spot, his eyes frantic, rock pistol shaking in his grip.
“What the fuck?” D’Angelus wrestled Nim up in his arms and started to drag her back towards the burrower, all the while staring out at the shadows all around him. Pig Heart and Lulu were too distracted to come to Nim’s aid. The Sirinese had launched an attack against them, oddly controlled in his disposition, as if the strange new voice was just another piece in the mystery that led to Desirous Nim.
Hellequin was raising his rock rifle when the voice got louder, then louder again, beating up the dust so that the atmosphere clouded.
The woman stepped out from the heavy canvas flap. She knelt down and felt for the hose. The fat worm pulsed beneath her fingertips.
“Almost done drinking?” she said softly and patted the hose affectionately. Standing, she stared out at the luminescent cavern. She’d heard the call from inside Herb’s cabin and shrugged off the ropes which bound her wrists. The carnie folk could bind her to that world no more successfully than a Zen monk mask could make her truly holy. She’d made her way through the blacked-out tent, steps soft as the whispering air through the caverns. No one saw her. She was ghost-like, a shadow out of step with all that surrounded her.
“Go to the lake,” the Scuttlers had said. The shadow you asked for dwells there behind a great rock slab. The voice too – she had recognised her lover’s cadence. His low sweet rumble as he spoke her name.
Dust reacted to her every step. A locust drove at her through the gloom, its jaw blooded. The woman raised her hand. Dust sprang up before her like a wall of hot grey glass. The insect was shredded inside its element.
She moved oddly, in tight little rushes of steps. Not quite in time with time itself but a millisecond ahead so that she sidestepped the bullets skimming by. She held up her hands and the insects were stopped short in their attack by a squall of dust that built and towered around her,
The two fighting factions slowed in their motion by the smallest degree. Only the HawkEye soldier appeared to follow her advancement to the lake with precision; his steel eye flicked between her and the unconscious courtesan in D’Angelus’s embrace.
She forgot him, concentrating on the shadow behind the crystal wall – long and thin, with soft wavy hair in silhouette, and holding up a lantern.
“Virgil!” She cried and wadded into the black water.
“Ca-ca,” replied the shape of her lover, making its way to the side of the crystal wall, lantern waving to seek her out.
“What the shitting Saints is that?”
She heard the rough cry of the swine man, glanced back and saw him duck to prevent the butting plate of the Sirinese from caving in his skull. Others among the circus crew gasped – the male acrobat with the pretty girl face, the pimp, even the HawkEye – and it seemed for an instant that time had shifted again and they could see the way of things before her.
The woman stared back out across the lake, heart enraptured as the shape of her angular lover extended from behind the crystal wall, the lantern emerging first as a huge black obelisk of a head, two vast orbs protruding either side. The body followed – a colossal slug of a thorax that took several seconds to finish materialising. The creature was wingless, its undercarriage looped into many small udders and terminating with a long, clear ovipositor which squeezed off eggs now and then, like glossy white sausage meat.
The queen ca-ca’ed in the woman’s direction, and the sound bounced off the cavern. “Carrie-Anne, Carrie- Anne.”
A shot rang out, tugging back the head plate of the queen in a spray of lemony blood. The woman spun around to see that, having wrestled the courtesan inside the burrower, D’Angelus had launched a grenade from the nose cone of the machine.
“No!” shrieked the woman.
Her bubble burst.
“Saintless crawlers.” D’Angelus spat out the side of the cockpit, as if ridding himself of the taste of murder. All around him, the locusts clung to the walls, newly petrified. “Show ‘em fuckers who’s boss, hey, Das?” He gave the navigator’s elbow a knock.
From behind his bug-eyed goggles, Das looked far from certain. He went back to messing with the controls. “We gotta get out of here, boss. There’s too many of them and we lost all those men...” His voice hitched and trailed off.
“And now I’ve taken out the crawlers’ queen.” D’Angelus showed his dead men’s teeth. “I got the whore. Only thing I’m down on is the wolf girl.”
“You mean the rabid dog coming straight for us?” said Das, voice aquiver. He shrank down into the foot well of the cock pit among the peddles and levers.
D’Angelus, though, was frantic with excitement. His eyes ate up the bounding form of the wild girl, the pendulous teats that swung beneath her lean brown body, the savage show of her. So thoroughly naked. So utterly abased. He longed for her, every thread of him stretched to capacity.
Below, the Sirinese was calling something in between deflecting the blows from the swine man and the lashes of the ladyboy’s sharp whips. Something about danger and the need to slide the glass shield of the burrower back into position, lock it and seal out the wolf girl. D’Anglus was impervious to the cry.
He watched the beast of a woman tear up the ground between them. Wasn’t she magnificent? How her claws ripped over the dusty rock!
“Come to me, bitch,” he cooed.
The shot when it came was at close range and to his chest. D’Angelus looked down, hands puddling in the red gore. He glanced questioningly at the she wolf. She bounded up onto the nose of the burrower and paused alongside the HawkEye, who stood there, a curl of smoke escaping his rock rifle.
“But... but...” D’Angelus’s lips produced a childish puff of air then gaped. He fell off to the side. Seconds later, the soldier’s boot kicked him hard, exploding nose and cheekbone. And then he was face-to-slavering-face with the wolf girl.
Through the agonies that wracked his body, D’Angelus tried out a bloody smile. She was here at last, dragging him down off the burrower into a crush of limbs. And then her face was so very close to his, the tangled mane ticking and arousing his bleeding skin. Something drove into the depths of him, unravelling his inner workings.
“My love,” he said, and meant it as the savage girl showed him his guts between her teeth. Biting down, she began to feast.
The whips sliced into Jaxx’s face, creating two fresh scars – good and evil etched into opposing cheeks. He gritted his black teeth. When the ladyboy next lashed out, he grasped both whips, withstanding their terrible sting against his palms as he did so, and began to reel the ladyboy in. The swine man charged. Jaxx yanked on both whips, ripping them from the ladyboy’s hands. He dived forwards onto his stomach – avoiding the swing of the swine man’s fist in the process – and spooled in the whips, taking hold of the handles. Flipping back up onto his feet, he revolved the ropes about his waist and kept the ladyboy at bay with a couple of slashes. The kid seemed to know he was beat and charged for the circus tent, avoiding Jaxx’s whip cracks with a show of nimble acrobatics.
He was alone with the pig then. The awareness of witchcraft derived from his Sirinese roots told him that some force was keeping the swarm at bay for the time being. Out the corner of his eye, he saw the creatures clumped against the walls. A thin pall of dust cocooned the circus and the area immediately outside of it. He’d a
