Cyber Circus

by Kim Lakin-Smith

  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 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. Queen? She liked the sound of that.

  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 out the poison, her Jeridian genes helping her to heal. Swinging in over Deralisee’s permanent carnival pitch, Cyber Circus had descended out o
f one of the last blue skies of the year, a colossal beast of brass and biomorphed flesh, to take centre stage amongst Deralisee’s bountiful celebrations.

  * * *

  The lights dim. All is hushed inside the green-tinged underworld of the circus tent.

  A soft melody begins to pipe from the calliope. Notes that are fine and sweet, like longed-for rain. She appears – a figure in white beneath the blaze of a spotlight. Her dress is enticingly translucent; it skims her ankles and clings to her thighs, waist, ribs and breasts. Her hair is a cascade of orange flame.

  When she dances, Desirous Nim seems to ripple like a petticoat pegged out to dry in the wind. So beautifully she arches her bare feet, lifting and lowering her arms like water flowing – and isn’t she divine? This exquisite desert flower. This fragile reed.

  The drums start to beat. Soft at first, as a steady heartbeat. Building and building over time. The lights dim further so that the crowd are forced to squeeze up their eyes and peer into the gloom. The drums grow ever more agitated, rolling over themselves into sonic waves.

  Boom! Boom! Boom! The base drum kicks in. Nim sets herself ablaze and the drums turn tribal. She’s shining now from beneath her made-new skin – a light storm of purest white.

  Which is when a second figure takes to the stage. An offbeat beauty. Eyes set wide. Mouth slashed like a scar. Her clothes are pinned tighter at places it won’t show, petticoats and a scarlet corset borrowed from Nim. Her stage name is Charm, Conjuress of Seasons. She steps up into the circus ring, and her hands lift and the dust across the ground begins to dance.

  The drums beat ever faster. The dust swirls, a magnetised cobra. It breezes out past the edges of the ring, lifts and swooping over the heads of the gasping audience. In time, Charm brings the magic grains back inside the circle and waltzes with them spilt out over her two hands. At the centre of the ring, Nim continues to flood the circus tent with her gleam while Charm directs the dust to ripple in beneath the courtesan’s feet.