The bartender, Solomon, pointed to the group of men. “One of you take the big one’s head for me. He’s got a mouth on him.”
The ‘big one’ was a foot taller than the rest of the Showmaniese. All were tattooed under the throat with a fat ‘V’. In the case of the largest man, the tattoo looked like a clothhod yoke. His face was fattened up like a baby’s.
“And HawkEye, if the whore won’t entice you to fight alongside my sister, here’s added incentive,” said Solomon – and while Hellequin could pre-empt physical impulses, he couldn’t read minds. The bartender shouted up, “You’re the son of Jackerie, purveyor of Soul Food, you say? Well, there’s an interesting thing.”
Hellequin swung around on his stool, taking in the reactions of those surrounding him – rage tucked into creased foreheads, sneering lips, the pinch of muscle between eyes.
The Showmaniese were first to react.
“Son of Jackerie? In this hell hole?” hollered the largest. He approached the bar, the crowd parting either side.
“You the spawn of the bastard farmer who killed the land ‘n’ pocketed our dollar and left us to choke on the dust?” The giant did not direct his gaze to Hellequin. Instead it appeared that Lulu had been taken as the devil’s offspring.
“Lulu’ll never survive. You’ve stitched me up, Asenath,” Hellequin muttered as the Jeridian reached over a shoulder and drew her scimitar from its harness.
“Maybe. It’s written into your Daxware to protect your platoon. You’ve admitted that much. Which means you’re stuck protecting Cyber Circus and all who sail in her, which includes me.” Asenath glanced at Hellequin. Her face was ablaze, not with fear but anticipation of the fight.
So be it, Hellequin told himself. The steel eyepiece interacted with the wires in his brain to map the arrangement of bodies in the room. Directly ahead was the largest Showmaniese. Over by the rock tables, Nim had closed in on herself. Crowded either side were the rest of the Showmaniese, nine men with fight stars, tin swords and wooden handled blunt blocks. To the right of the room were the whores of both sexes and their liquor-pinked Johns. Nothing to fear from those lilies and their overlords. To the left though – and all this taken in by Hellequin’s lens inside the millisecond – a figure in the shadows as well as five Jeridians – three female, two male. Mohawks caked in green reed sap and baked hard. Piercings at the throat. Sickle tattoo at every ear lobe. Friend or foe? Hellequin caught a snarl at one woman’s lips, her gaze bearing down on the Showmaniese in the centre of the room. Friends, he concluded.
Drawing his bowie knife as the largest Showmaniese powered forward, he sliced in front of him and cut the stub of the man’s nose clean off.
His attack acted as a clanger to start the fight. Lulu slid across the bar and ducked under it. Solomon stayed put while Asenath stood her ground.
The giant ignored the spill of blood from his nose to career head-on into Hellequin. An outsized fist mashed Hellequin’s wrist; the HawkEye dropped the Bowie knife, an instinctual reflex to the crush of pain. At the same time, Asenath drove her scimitar towards the giant’s neck. His forearm blocked her attack, the power behind the blow forcing Asenath down. She pivoted on the ball of a foot to avoid slicing into her belly with her own blade.
Dodging blows, Hellequin was distracted by the figure in the shadows. What was it about the silhouette that seemed so hauntingly familiar? Regardless, the figure chose to remain incognito, unlike the remaining Showmaniese who muscled in on the fight against the five Jeridians.
Hellequin refocused. The neuro-feed off his HawkEye enabled him to take in the movements of his attacker and those of his companions. He dodged a slug from the giant, spine arching back. Meanwhile, Asenath sliced the heads from the shoulders of two Showmaniese. Each body crumpled to its knees and collapsed. Blood ran out the newly separated necks like sewage from a spurting drain.
He landed a blow to his opponent’s mouth. The Showmaniese hacked and spat a tooth aside.
“Let me alone, HawkEye,” he hollered, discharging spittle. “It’s the pansy I’ve issue with. Stand aside and let me strangle the rat.”
“Past’s dead,” shot back Hellequin, weaving between the giant’s punches; he saw the trajectory of each blow milliseconds before it landed. “Leave the lad alone. This ain’t his fight. And it ain’t yours.”
“The hell it ain’t!” the man spat against the blood pouring off his nose.
Hellequin went to drop to the floor to retrieve his knife. He was restricted by the time it took for him to bend at the knees and extend a hand. It was warning enough for the giant to step on the blade and secure it underfoot with his entire body weight.
“Leave it be, HawkEye. Maybe your kind did this world a service, but that one good deed ain’t enough to let you cut me more than once.” The giant brought his face to the HawkEye’s, bending at the knees as he did so. Few men matched the soldier’s seven foot stature let alone were forced to stoop to look the soldier in his one natural eye. “Now back off and let me do for Jackerie’s pansy son in a manner that’ll satisfy the revenge needs of all Humock,” he spat.
“The pansy ain’t no son of Jackerie!” Hellequin had enough sentiment left in the knotwork of his mind to want to admit his lineage. He owed his family that much.
“You want to settle a beef with a family member, start with me.”
His words carried through the room like dust swept up and carried by the wind. Time slowed. In the briefest instant before the Showmaniese giant brought his fist crashing down, Hellequin saw the reactions of those around him. How the Jeridian braves looked to Asenath for confirmation they were fighting on the right side. How the Showmaniese faltered, mid-brawl, their black eyes pinned wide. How Nim stared across the emotional miles that separated them. Newly distanced.
It was an instant of distraction, but it was enough to let the giant land a colossal blow to Hellequin’s head. His circuitry misfired, half his world thrown into pitch black as his steel eye failed. He experienced a queerly powerful blaze of emotion. Dread lined his stomach like quicksilver.
Again, the distraction worked in his enemy’s favour. The Showmaniese launched three hooks to the soldier’s stomach. Hellequin wheezed and doubled over, aiding the delivery of a fourth hook to his chin.
His neck snapped back. The HawkEye whirred into violent motion. Hellequin got a grip on his compound sight and forced his body to negate the pain.
He struck back, the tight knots of his fists striking the giant up under the ribs with force. The man gasped. Hellequin didn’t falter in his attack, raining blows. He pictured his father – tall as a hang man, lips that had pursed so many times when he was deep in thought that they had settled permanently into that position. Hellequin recalled his family’s homestead as it had stood before he despatched his neutralising platoon; it had looked like any other home on the plains, paint faintly peeling but with clean curtains at the windows, a creaking rocker on the porch, fingerprints of the dead and living imprinted on the door handle. He remembered trace emotions of love and fear and searing loss. And as the giant stumbled backwards, he dipped to the floor, retrieved his bowie knife and started to drive it towards the man’s throat.
Before the blade cut in, he saw a curve of silver whip across and back at the giant’s neck. He stared into the dead man’s eyes, forever startled, and leapt aside as the head toppled forward. It struck the floor heavily. A pound of flesh.
The body collapsed, pumping blood. Behind stood Asenath, her scimitar held towards the gaslight and greased red.
“Moj nagradu!” she growled. “My prize,” she told him, hard about the eye.
Hellequin didn’t dwell on the Jeridian’s victory. His eyepiece refracted to take in events across the room. Nim had been grabbed by one sharp-suited Showmaniese. The man had a blunt block resting on her skull; one tap and Nim’s brains would spill. Apparently the hostage taker had lost faith in making it out of there alive. Hellequin understood the man’s panic. The Jeridian gang seemed newl
y invigorated now the giant had fallen. As Asenath took out the ribs of one with a swish of her scimitar, the other three female Jeridians formed a lethal collective. Back to back, the women joined in the fray. Fight stars whirred in from the Showmaniese contingent; as one mass, the three Jeridians bowed back at the spine, the blur of lethal metal passing millimetres from their faces. In a deadly dance, they bent, wove and sidestepped as one. Three scimitars whipped high, down then up again. Blood glossed each blade. Showmaniese heads rolled.
“Mi smo victorios!” cried the women and they knelt down, washed their hands in the blood of their enemy and smeared it in streaks down their cheeks.
“Slice another head, bitches, and I’ll do for the whore here!” yelled the Showmaniese holding Nim hostage. It was distraction enough for one of his fellows to smash a blunt block into the chest of one male Jeridian. The man said “Oumph!” with the sickly tone of one who is shocked to greet death so quickly. He crumpled, choking on blood-filled lungs. No one intervened when the Showmaniese brought down the blunt block a second time. Better to finish it, even as the Jeridian women used the pain of loss to fuel their high-pitched eerie war cries.
“Shut it, you fucking red bitches! What say you, Solomon? Gonna let these jackasses slice your customers?” demanded the man with the block at Nim’s skull, his black eyes buzzing every which way.
Hellequin wondered the same thing. While Lulu poked his nose over the lip of the counter, the bartender took his time, wiping up gore from the same surface. “I’m more neutral than most in this nest of blood worms. Your kind wanna sell mine out. Well, I reckon it’s fair to slice a few heads in return.” He glanced up from his macabre housecleaning. “Want my advice? You and your buddies should ease on out of here for the night.”
“Screw that! Ain’t no guarantee any of us Showmaniese are escaping this joint in one piece tonight if these red bitches have their way. I say let’s even up the odds.” The man raised his arm. “Seems this whore means something to some of you.” He started to bring the blunt block down, Nim cringing in his foul embrace.
A hand broke the descent of the blunt block. Fingers gripped the handle, yanking it aside. Hellequin had seen the way of things at the exact same instant the man had taken action. Soft as a sidewinder, he’d slunk over. By the time the Showmaniese had sensed the HawkEye by his shoulder, he was already in the process of slamming down the blunt block. Now the soldier’s hand forced the block back up at force. The Shomaniese took a face full of the weapon, nose shattering on impact. He wasn’t going down without a fight though and drove his teeth into Nim’s neck. She gave a sharp cry.
Hellequin backed off, hands raised. The Showmaniese stumbled back towards the door, passing between the terrified whores and Johns, his teeth dug in just short of Nim’s jugular. The surviving Showmaniese fell in step with him. Weapons poised, they backed up to the exit.
None noticed Asenath slink the whores and Johns in and out. She stepped up, scimitar raised, and slid the blade in at the back of the hostage taker’s neck. The man fell away from Nim like a dried up tic. Inside seconds, Asenath had withdrawn the blade and swept it around on a descending trajectory. The remaining Showmaniese lost their heads. Their corpses hit the ground and the bar fell silent.
Asenath drew Nim up from the floor. The courtesan was gasping, a hand pressed to her neck in an effort to staunch the wound.
The Jeridian delivered Nim to Hellequin, passing her into his embrace with insistence. She walked across the blood-slicked floor, interwove her fingers in the hair belonging to the giant and held up the severed head.
“Moj nagradu!” she cried. My prize.
Solomon and the rest of the Jeridians opened their throats and offered up the same strange prayer.
TWELVE
“I’m not extravagantly shy and when a nice young man is nigh, for his heart I have a try, and faint away with tearful eye!” sang Lulu.
“Are you trying to wake all the blood rats of Zan City?” Hellequin muttered.
Lulu giggled and fussed at the HawkEye’s coat sleeve as they walked.
“Word’s out by now. Cyber Circus boasts some of the finest brawlers in all of Humock.” The ladyboy stumbled into Hellequin, who pushed him up.
“How much Jackogin you had back there?” Hellequin went to take his arm away. When Lulu started to fall again, he was forced to hold the ladyboy upright.
“Oh, ain’t no Jackogin, my pretty soldier boy. Remember when I slipped outside a while back at the bar? Well, I encountered a lovely gentlemen, robust and more than a little rabid.” The ladyboy floated his hand before his mouth in mock alarm. “He slipped me a little Dazzle dust,” Lulu confessed, his strung out eyes confirming the fact.
“You don’t say,” said Hellequin dryly.
“You okay back there, Lulu?” Nim called from where she walked alongside Asenath ten metres or so out in front.
“I’m peachy.” The reply came out as slurred, accompanied by a fresh stumble.
Hellequin pulled the ladyboy back up. “He’s jacked up on Dazzle Dust,” he called.
“Ahhh, don’t tell her,” Lulu groaned. He put his forehead in his hand.
“That old poison, hey, Lulu?” Nim shook her head and gave her attention back to the uneven path of salt bricks. They were passing through one of the medina’s unlit spots, an alley thick with shadows.
“She’s pissed now.” Lulu muttered something about the HawkEye wanting Nim and sacrificing all others. His chin dropped onto his chest, the weight of his head a burden.
“I’m a soldier. I deal with facts,” Hellequin offered half-heartedly. He could wish Lulu’s soul to Hell and the ladyboy would still cuddle closer.
But Lulu surprised him. Peering up into Hellequin’s face, he looked freshly earnest.
“Ask me, you’re more fond of us freaks than you’d like to admit. This whole ‘Daxware makes me protect you’ argument is just a way to stop us guessing the truth. That while you’re wired with electrical conductors, a small part of you remembers the man you once were.” Lulu poked Hellequin’s stomach, the other man tensing at the contact. “You’re just a soft belly when it comes down to it.”
Hellequin exhaled heavily. He put his hand to the back of the ladyboy’s neck, steering him. Staring up at the great cavern of starry sky, he muttered, “Maybe you’re right.” He felt no different inside though, only filled to the brim with nothingness.
* * *
“How’s your neck?” asked Asenath.
Nim kept the makeshift bandage of Lulu’s handkerchief applied to the spot. “Not as bad as it looked. Bleeding has eased up.”
“Why’d you let men paw you like that, like they did back at the bar?”
Nim stared over, struck by how the woman at her side seemed to take on all sorts of angles in the darkness. The Jeridian’s eyes sparkled. She’d the look of a devil.
“I’m more likely to keep on breathing that way,” she shot back.
“You could fight back. I’d teach you.” The Jeridian tapped the neck of the hessian bag she carried over one shoulder. “Plenty of men have learnt the hard way I don’t play like that.”
“And plenty of whores I’ve known have ended up buried in the dust for complaining.” Nim jutted her chin. “Could be I’ve had enough violence forced on me that I’ve learnt it’s easier just to take it.”
“That’s a bad way of living.” The Jeridian shook her head. “Might as well hold up a sign that says ‘I was born pretty. That’s my fault.’”
Nim laughed sourly. She liked the Jeridian in spite of her vile hobby of collecting heads. But it was difficult not to resent the way Asenath made her feel – as if she’d a duty to her sex to fight back against the tongues, hands and genitals. And hadn’t she fought in the beginning! With nails and teeth and bucking hips and spit. Nothing had spared her. In fact, it had only made them ride her harder.
“Born pretty is a better state of being than born bad.” The Jeridian inclined her head towards the blooded bag at
her back, her wide mouth grimly set.
“Are you referring to you or the folk you behead?”
Asenath’s lips parted. Her teeth were white as fresh clothhod milk. “I suppose I came out the womb pure as any other. The Showmaniese spoiled me when they picked off my family and sold them to the blood worms.”
Nim couldn’t imagine a nastier fate. The blood worms operated mainly in Zan City, selling out their fellow men to those in need of a fresh body or two.
“I didn’t lose family to one of those devils, but I do know what its like to have my flesh re-stitched against my will. Troubles like ours harden the heart over time.” She didn’t want to dwell on the bad times. Glancing back down the path, she stopped walking and said, “Where’s Lulu and the HawkEye slink off to?”
“Maybe Lulu has finally persuaded your soldier boy to try a different flavour.” Asenath snorted. She slung her sack of flesh down onto the salt brick path and arched her spine, bones cracking.
“More likely the HawkEye has lost patience with my old valet and gone back to the bar. Now we’ve had a glimpse into his lineage, it’s not like he’s the type to stick around those in need. We’d best go back and look for whatever hole Lulu crawled into.” Nim glinted softly in the darkness of the alley. Neon pulsed around the contours of her lips, crackled and shorted out.
“You know, it doesn’t have to be like this. You don’t have to be like this.” Asenath drew closer. She laid a hand on Nim’s shoulder. Warmth flooded Nim’s skin. “In Jeridia, we are taught to honour our enemies by preserving them. The heads? They attest to my victories. More importantly, they ensure I never forget the faces of those I have murdered. It saves me from dreaming of those same faces, turning the guilt and terror of each death over in my mind. You should find a spark of bravery inside yourself, Desirous Nim. Learn to burn the flesh from your enemies.”
Cyber Circus Page 10