Rust flinched at the door to her wagon. Hellequin broke into a charge towards the lift rig.
“They’ve got rock rifles,” he heard Pig Heart call after him. No matter if they had the burning spears of the Saints themselves, he would fill the air with their death cries.
He pulled up short of the rig. Steam continued to rise at the far reaches of the tent, which told him that Herb was keeping the calliope in action and choosing to go on with the show. The marks’ ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ assured him that the hoppers had been set grazing in the centre of the ring. Soon the handlers would whip the beasts into flight and the crowd into terrified, maniacal applause.
Oiled to keep its motion down to a low purr during show time, the lift rig would still produce enough noise to alert those below to his assent. Hellequin opted to feed his hands around the fat steel cords of the steam winch and use his boot heels for grip. He slid down, taking in a panoramic view of backstage.
A Jeridian woman by the name of Asenath was secured, a blade pressed to her throat. Two more of the crew were on their knees, rock rifles pressurising their spines. Meanwhile, D’Angelus’s men behaved like raw recruits on sentry duty at some dead outpost, talking softly and shifting from one boot to the other as if bored by their responsibilities.
Hellequin reasoned that unless they had cutting tools strong enough to slit the hide of the circus tent, the grunts would have to bring Nim through backstage and smuggle her out past the marks. Perhaps they’d brought a flask of Dream Juice for the purpose? Or perhaps they’d simply gag her and apply a rock rifle to her back. Either way, Hellequin saw no need to intercept the men below. He needed to get into the dressing rooms behind the silk curtain.
Keeping to the shadows, he eased over and under the crisscrossing scaffold where it fed behind the tented dressing rooms. Lamplight shone up through the silk; three men moved below. Hellequin guessed they’d been tasked with delivering their charge direct to the bossman. But even a hard hand like D’Angelus could not compete with the bewitchment Nim put men under. They had her at a grotesque angle between them, her nakedness betrayed by the flow of neon beneath her flesh.
Hellequin’s head jerked, neurons misfiring. Memories flashed over his steel retina - staring down from the safety of his lung basket, a bird’s eye view of a flaming farmstead below. His HawkEye homing in on the maul of weathered hands on young flesh. Out in the open. Where screams brought no one running.
The memory snapped off. He refocused on the tented silk below. Nim was silent, the acts the men enforced on her all too familiar.
His lens flicked right. He had noticed the figure approach of course.
“Whadda we do, HawkEye?” It was Pig Heart. The pitchman had slunk along the scaffold, his bulk belying the dexterity which allowed him to tread the upper gangplanks without ever disturbing the crowd below.
Hellequin wanted to crush the pitchman’s windpipe and haul him over the scaffold. But the soldier in him saw the value in a simultaneous attack on backstage and Nim’s dressing room. Better to deal with all of D’Angelus’s men at once than give them chance to spread and take cover.
A great chittering arose from the main tent. The hoppers were in flight, the crowd gasping. It was time to act.
“You take out the men backstage. I’ll deal with Nim.”
“Like hell I will. By the shitting Saints, Hellequin, they’ve got rock rifles and our arsenal is back down in the living quarters! Let’s take them out together then come back for Nim.”
Hellequin gripped Pig Heart’s stumbled chin and directed his face down to the tent where Nim was being used.
“Do you see?” he demanded in a dry rasp. “You give Nim over to
“Yeah, well, it’s not like the whore ain’t used to it,” muttered the pitchman. But he kept his gaze away from the goings on below. “Okay, I’ll cause a ruckus with the boys backstage,” he spat at last, adding, “I gotta do right by Rust anyways.”
“Right by your groin more like.” Hellequin was losing time, losing patience. “Rock rifles have to kick back against a shooter’s padded shoulder. Stay that same side of the barrel and, often as not, the ammo’ll miss.”
The pitchman nodded and moved away. Hellequin crouched down, one leg extended, fingers resting lightly on the scaffold. He homed in on the tented silk below, his mercurial eye in constant adjustment. Closer in, he zoomed. Closer, until he magnified the weave enough to see its shoals of silverfish. He found a worn patch.
Alongside the noise of the crowd and the clatter of hoppers’ wings, he heard Nim give a sharp cry. Without further thought, he tucked in his elbows and leapt. He dropped like a lead weight. His boots made contact with the silk; it rent under him like spider’s web and he fell through the ceiling of the dressing room.
Time narrowed as his HawkEye made a series of minute observations that prompted his body to react. The pole supporting the tent was in arms’ reach; he felt its flaking rust under his palms and swung in tight while sliding down. His steel eye’s shutter motion allowed him to simultaneously catch the first few seconds of reaction below. A three-backed beast broke apart to reveal Nim spread-eagled. Her attackers were saloon heavies judging by the cut of their cloth.
Two struggled into their pants as Hellequin slid to the ground. A third was in the process of raising a hand to his shoulder where he’d slung his rock rifle.
The heavy never completed the manoeuvre. Hellequin drew his bowie knife from its sheath at his hip. The hilt was clothhod leather, the blade, mottled blue steel. It glinted wetly in the gaslight. Mashing the blade into the heavy’s neck, Hellequin severed the carotid artery. He kicked the man aside.
Shouts from the far side of the silk wall told him that Pig Heart was also making his presence known. A rock rifle fired, but it was a smaller silhouette than the pitchman’s which slammed against the silk, clutched it and slipped down. A ribbon of red seeped through; Hellequin registered the fact while driving his arm through the air and plunging the knife into a second man’s shoulder.
Blood exploded from the wound. Hellequin’s steel eye focused in on a single bead, plump as a Jewel Fruit seed, tumbling sideways. His HawkEye refocused inside a microsecond.
Nim had a blank expression. Only the eyes gave her away, brilliant with tears and reflecting the third man with a rock rifle pressed to his shoulder.
A slug embedded itself in an upright landing mat close to Pig Heart’s head. The pitchman tore back his lips, baring yellow tusks. The sniper was tucked behind one of the flats at the far end of the backstage area; Pig Heart suspected an illustrated sand hill, where the faint plume of discharged spark powder lingered in the air. He dragged a hand across his nostrils. Before he could concentrate on the sniper, there were three more chumps to sock it to.
“Saints alive, you’re a sight, ain’t ya!” shouted a two-tone in a rag waistcoat and pants a size too big. He rocked from one foot to another, a knife to his young hostage’s neck. Pig Heart recognised the belt of dry rat remains at the kid’s waist. The hostage was the one-time exterminator who had ridden the lift rig with him earlier.
“Only one thing to do with a pig. Slit his throat and make him squeal,” said a second, a Sirinese with brow locks that flowed either side each eye and a butting plate stitched into his forehead. His rock rifle was trained on a number of the pitch crew who were spread-eagled on the ground, faces in the dirt.
The sniper took a second shot. Pig Heart felt the slug nip his ear. The sting of it, alongside the blood which oozed down his neck, made him let back his head and loose a tremendous snort. Crumpled at the bottom of the silk drop was the man he had killed first. Pig Heart yanked a rock rifle from the man’s dead fist. Swinging the butt in tight to a shoulder, muscular tissue bulging, he ran at the Sirinese.
“Take the pig out, Gribson!” called the Sirinese, presumably to the sniper. He kept his own rifle trained on Pig Heart’s men and showed his black teeth.
Pig Heart had the measure of the sniper’s angle. He kept the two-tone and the kid hostage between him and the gun. When the sniper failed to take him out, the Sirinese aimed his rifle at the nearest pitchman and fired a slug. The man’s skull cracked open like an egg.
Pig Heart kept on coming. He and the Sirinese clashed with the force of two rhinehorn bulls. Pig Heart brought his club of a rock rifle slamming down. The Sirinese blocked the blow with his own rifle, braced between two hands. A slug of rock ammo pierced Pig Heart’s thigh. He drove forward with new grit.
