sense of the other players nearby, the HawkEye cradling the whore as he retrieved her from the cockpit of the burrower, Das signalling him in a generous wave of panic, the blood bag that was once D’Angelus, split open on the rocks, a feast for the squatting wolf girl.
Despite the swine man’s grotesque appearance, Jaxx judged him an excellent opponent. The swine took the bite of the whip to his arm, his chest, and he cried out like the man he once was and not the pig he had become. There was pleasure in their fight, thought Jaxx, taking the weight of the swine’s fist against his jaw and tasting his own blood. He smashed his butting plate into the pig’s snout at full force and saw the blood gush, the small piggy eyes water.
But their battle would be concluded some other time, Jaxx decided. With the magnificent calm that was so characteristic of his violent culture, he stepped back and bowed.
“Blood enough for this day,” he said, and turned sharply on his heels. At his back, the swine attempted a final weak swing which didn’t connect then seemed to come to terns with the pause in their battle.
Hearing the burrower clear its throat of dust and rumble into life, Jaxx ran across the rock plain. He climbed the metal ladder in two steps and swung inside the cockpit. Das slammed the glass hood back in place, shutting out the bugs and freaks.
“Jeepers, Jaxx. Thought I was gonna have to leave you.” Das sighed heavily and peered over at Jaxx from behind his insectile goggles. “D’Angelus is gone. So’s the rest of the boys. Reckon me and thee should scoot.”
Jaxx nodded. Through the wind shield he saw the woman who had disguised herself as a Zen monk, then lain with him beneath the stars. She was standing in the lake, a short way out from the shore, the black water up to her knees. Her hands were raised in supplication, as if commanding some unseen force. Or was it in homage to the slain queen whose carcass sprawled across the opposite shore? He remembered the terrible waking nightmare he had experienced when he’d pressed deep inside her. Men torn limb-from-limb by demons. Had that been a vision of Hell, or a window on the future he’d just caught up with?
He dismissed the fact. It was a diviner’s trick. He’d found the warmth of her body a far more fascinating gift. Not that she was his to rescue at that moment. She had another lover, whom she searched for in this shadow-land. Their time together had run out.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Das snapped up a couple of switches in the control bank, tugged on and lowered a large lever by his hip, and eased the drive column forward. The burrower rattled over the sheet of rock. A few metres short of colliding with the circus tent, the machine lowered its nose and drilled down.
“Come now, Rust! Leave off your meal. Swarm’ll dive any second.” Pig Heart lolloped towards the wolf girl, sweat pouring off his jowls.
The girl glanced up, mouth blackened with visceral, hands burrowed in the man’s stomach. Her eyes were dazzlingly bright.
She ran towards Pig Heart, strong limbs powering off the rock, and together they charged in at the tent flap.
The pitch crew worked to wind in the hose. Inside Cyber Circus, the air felt swollen and humid. The boiler fizzled away below the calliope. Large bubbles tumbled against the glass or popped when they reached the surface near the rim. Everywhere inside the tent was given over to preparations to fly. Pitch crew clambered high up on the gangplanks, double-checking the newly patched hide. Herb was installed on the calliope’s balcony like some goblinesque Maharaja watching over his domain.
“Everyone inside?” Pig Heart hollered at the ringmaster.
“Apparently so.” Herb nodded at the HawkEye, who stepped in at the tent flap, Nim’s prone body slung across his arms. “She dead?” Herb called down, voice tinged with sadness.
“Alive,” the soldier shouted back. “Paralysed by a locust’s sting. There a cure for that?”
Herb looked lost suddenly. Pig Heart joined Rust in eyeing the ground a moment. The idea of Nim spending the remainder of her days locked inside an inanimate body seemed a brutal way of existing.
But then a woman’s voice rang out. “I can heal her. I need bobbisroot, lock lime and a whole lot of rock salt.” It was the woman who had posed as a Zen monk. She’d ducked in at the tent flap an instant before it was stitched shut, wearing such a look of sorrow that Pig Heart thought she might just crumble to dust and blow away on the spot.
The woman walked towards backstage, where the pitch crew stood ready to roll shut the great steel shield. She paused and glanced back. “We should get moving. The locusts won’t mourn their queen for long.”
Pig Heart tried to make sense of the woman’s place on their craft – was she a prisoner still, or one of the crew? He dragged a hand across his jaw and slopped away the drool that hung there. While the ringmaster merely nodded, the HawkEye strode backstage and Rust bounding after.
Stopping just inside the gateway between the circus ring and backstage, Pig Heart ordered his men to stay their hands. “Herb!” he hollered across the vast expanse of the tent. “What about the Scuttlers?”
His question was lost to the suck and drawl of the ship’s giant bellows in the engine room, the bubble of steaming water in the boiler, the gentle flood of air to the float bladders, and the pipe of the calliope.
“Roll ‘em to,”Herb told the crewmen and the great steel shield rolled shut.
High up in the eaves of the cavern, Ol, Tib and Rind watched Cyber Circus pitch once then settle and drift away into the caverns beyond.
“Bye, bye,” said Ol. She rattled off a little dance with her knock-knees.
“Won’t get no key to heaven from the nice lady now.” Rind shook her head sadly.
“Won’t need one either. We’re gonna stay put, bed down with these shitters. Me and Ol will be their shepherds, and you can be their Queen,” said Tib. He gave Rind’s shell a gentle stroke with a claw. “Queen of the swarm.”
Rind smiled, a queer show of teeth in her little old face.
With her brother and sister following in her wake, Rind clattered down the cavern wall and went to meet her people.
NINETEEN
Deralisee was a bustling hive of people, beasts and colour. The Festival of Saints was in full swing. Garlands crisscrossed the streets, strung from gas lamps and the windows of eateries, brothels, salons, general stores, alongside the printing press, farrier, barber, tanner, jail and schoolhouse. Statues of the Saints stood on every street corner – forlorn sculptures made of dirt and dung, then painted pretty. Pilgrims cluttered up the place, come to sample the sacred waters at the natural spring. Saint Azena herself, giver of clarity, was said to have rested at the spot once and partaken of the liquid on offer from a small rift in Deralisee’s bedrock. Cashing in on the fact over the centuries, the citizens of Deralisee had established a shrine over the site and developed itself into quite the religious destination. Zen monks milled through the crowds like silent demons. Children gawked. Parents shuffled their families quickly by.
While the Sirinese had their magic men and the Jeridians their sacred spirits, both cultures were happy to congregate at the festival with a common aim. To relieve the pilgrim of his or her dollars. Jeridians paraded, waving great etched banners proclaiming, ‘Warrior for hire’, ‘Have dust? Can handle’, ‘Gang Stock’, and the like. The Sirinese, meanwhile, were more subtle. They kept to the shadows, where they engaged in wagered wrestling bouts or took a rich man’s coin and told him his fortune. Come festival time, Deralisee was ablaze with shame, sin, and piety.
“And punters!” Herb had declared when the circus finally took to the western trail again, having waited out the worst of the dust storm at the caverns’ entrance. “The dimes flow freely when a man is Saint Blessed,” he’d told the company.
And it had sounded good. To haul up for the remainder of the Hamatan season in a spot that was ripe with passing trade. A night’s passage it had taken, during which Nim had been ministered by the woman and sweated
