A Circus of Brass and Bone

by Abra SW

  “If I let him go, there’s nothing to stop him from taking whatever he wants. The only leverage we have is what we hold. If I let him go, we have nothing.”

  She’d stopped shouting. She sounded calm and she made a logical argument, but her eyes were wide and staring. He might have talked her back from the ledge, Ginger thought, but she was still on the rooftop.

  “The commissioner is a man of the law,” Ginger told her, feeling his way toward an argument that might work. “I am certain that we can trust him to abide by any agreement he makes, particularly with his own men as witnesses.”

  Lacey scowled at him, but she eased the hoof pick away from Commissioner Guirard’s neck. Just a fraction, just enough that the point no longer dimpled his skin, but enough to give Ginger hope. After all, he didn’t particularly care what Commissioner Guirard agreed to, or whether he planned to honor that agreement. Ginger’s aim was to keep Commissioner Guirard unharmed—mostly unharmed, he amended—until Mrs. Guirard could bring gentler methods of persuasion to bear on her husband.

  “Sir,” Ginger said, “surely you wish to speak with your wife and reassure yourself as to her well-being! I understand how much you must have feared for her safety, once you realized she was missing. This is all an unfortunate misunderstanding. Lacey was also in fear when she seized you.” Ginger continued talking, painting a picture of fragile, terrified womanhood, as he eased toward the not-at-all-fragile and increasingly angry-looking woman holding Commissioner Guirard hostage. “You know how impetuous women can be when their protective instincts are aroused. I’m sure she realizes that it was a terrible mistake. If you reassure her, Lacey will put down the hoof pick. Perhaps if you give her assurances that her horses will remain untouched and that the circus can depart your jurisdiction as soon as—”

  Commissioner Guirard and Lacey both responded angrily and at the same time, their sentences stepping on top of each other.

  “You can’t—” “I will not—” “—trust a man who—” “—bend to a threat simply—” “—hangs his own civilians!” “—to protect myself!”

  Lacey jammed her weapon back against Commissioner Guirard’s throat with such force that a fresh trickle of blood ran down his neck. Commissioner Guirard’s face was red with rage and his hands were fisted tight by his legs. They both glared at Ginger. The air thickened with the promise of violence. Ginger saw Commissioner Guirard’s gloved right hand twitch, beginning to signal his troops.

  Ginger had gambled everything, and he’d lost. Soon, the silence would shatter. Nothing he could do would change what was about to happen.

  That knowledge felt like freedom. Because it would make no difference, he broke the final and most important rule of how to be a clown, Rule Number 20: Look only at what you wish to draw attention to, because your audience’s eyes will follow yours. For those in a more dangerous line of work, that translated to, “If you don’t want your enemy to see what is precious to you, ignore it.”

  Ginger looked at the circus. He looked at the patched tents and the bravely gaudy circus wagons, at the painted canvas posters with their cheerfully outrageous lies. He looked at the men and women who put everything they had into making those lies real. With hand-sewn sequins and endless practice, they transformed cheap canvas tents into an enchanted wonderland, if only for the length of a show. He feared not all of them would survive what was coming.

  Chapter 21

  ~* * *~

  The Killing Ground

  Ginger, the Whitefaced Clown

  Port Rumsey, New York City

  Because he was already looking in that direction, Ginger noticed clown-in-training (and probationary ringmaster) Christopher Knall peer around the corner of the fat lady’s tent. The tent used to belong to the fat lady and the skeleton man, but now—. Ginger cut off that line of thought.

  A moment after Christopher pulled his head back, a beak poked around the edge of the tent.

  Ginger grinned so widely that his cheeks hurt from the unaccustomed strain. Training Christopher had been a good use of his time after all. The young man had seized on the same idea that had crossed Ginger’s mind earlier, but he had been in the right place to execute it.

  One … two … three … four ostriches stampeded away from the circus tents, their feet thudding against the ground, their plumes bouncing, hissing like a sack full of angry cats. As a distraction, it worked. Commissioner Guirard froze mid-signal. The policemen fell silent, their attention arrested. The seamen’s weapons sagged along with their jaws. The Sasse family halted their approach and the storklike guard paused in his attempts to arrest them. Everyone stared, from the most battle-scarred sailor right down to Miss Anderson, the Sasse family’s sickly cousin. The spectacle seized her attention so firmly that she ignored everything else, including the shining trail of saliva that dribbled down her chin.

  Even Lacey lost her focus for a moment, gawking at the ostrich stampede and letting her hand drop slightly. In that moment, Ginger moved. As smoothly as he could, he covered the last few steps to Lacey and her hostage. He lifted the hoof pick out of her grasp as casually as if she’d passed him the table salt.

  She snapped back to awareness too late. Her grab after the hoof pick would have ended with its point embedded in her palm, if Ginger hadn’t reversed the blade as he pulled it away. “Nooo!” she cried.

  Commissioner Guirard reacted immediately, striking Lacey with a hard elbow to her solar plexus. It knocked the breath out of her and sent her stumbling backwards several feet. Ginger tucked the hoof pick into the back of his waistband, beside his bowie knife, and spread his open hands in front of him peaceably.

  The ostriches hissed as they bolted past. Their closest escape route happened to be the alley chosen by the Sasse family. The family stared with dawning apprehension at the three-hundred-pound birds headed their way.

  The storklike patrolman reached out and grabbed the arm of the nearest member of the Sasse family, who happened to be Miss Anderson. Miss Anderson responded by grabbing the patrolman and sneering—no, snarling. Comprehension hit Ginger hard.

  “Watch out!” he shouted.

  Miss Anderson whipped her head around and growled at Ginger. Strings of drool dangled, swaying, from her mouth. Her hand tightened possessively on the patrolman’s arm, clawlike fingernails digging deep enough to make the patrolman cry out and attempt to pull back. Ginger held her gaze without blinking. Showing weakness seemed ill-advised.

  Miss Anderson’s stare shifted to Commissioner Guirard. Her nostrils flared, as if she were scenting the air. She bared her teeth. Ginger remembered the trickle of blood on Commissioner Guirard’s neck. With the memory came a wave of bowel-loosening apprehension. The clarity granted on a battlefield before the combatants engage descended upon Ginger. It would last for only a few moments, but in those moments, he knew precisely what must be done.

  “Mrs. Guirard!” he shouted. “Hide behind the—” he quickly measured the distance between her, the seamen, and the policemen, “—sailors. Do it now!”

  Confirming his estimation of the steel she kept hidden behind fluff and nonsense, she reacted instantly. Without hesitation, she dashed toward the sailors. Not just any sailors, Ginger saw; she chose an exceptionally well-armed, nasty-looking crew.

  With his most important asset safe, Ginger moved on to his secondary goal: keeping the rest of them alive.

  “Seamen!” he shouted. “Fire to port only! ‘Ware cross-fire!” They stared at him like he was sunstruck crazy, but that was all right. They’d figure it out soon enough. Time to warn the other side. “Police officers! Keep your aim to the right!”

  Commissioner Guirard’s eyes widened as he put the pieces together. Miss Anderson released the storklike patrolman and loped toward the commissioner. He had time enough to either direct his men or retrieve his weapon from where it lay at his feet, but not both. “Fire at target—only if you have have a clear field!” Commissioner Guirard bellowed, pointing at Miss Anderson. Then she was upon him.
Her skirts wrapped around his legs as if they were embracing, and she leaned in for a kiss that would rip his lips off.

  Before that could happen, he threw a haymaker that crushed her nose and snapped her head back. Blood fountained from her nose as she reeled back, her hair flying up in a parody of a young girl’s flirtatious hair toss. Despite all that had happened, most of the men present winced to see a member of the fair sex treated so brutally. Commissioner Guirard didn’t even pause to shake the sting from his hand. He stooped, seized his revolver, and fired.

  Ginger guessed that Commissioner Guirard was aiming for Miss Anderson’s head, but the punch must have affected his hand after all. He missed. His shot blew out her throat. A bloody red mist sprayed in all directions as she curled forward and clutched her neck. For a moment, Ginger allowed himself to believe that it was over. That they’d won with a single shot. That the aether sickness hadn’t granted her the same kind of freakish abilities as they’d seen in the deer-monsters during the battle on High Bridge.

  Then the spray of blood sputtered and stopped. She didn’t fall. Her hands dropped to her sides. Blood coated her arms from her fingertips up past her elbows, as if she wore sanguinary opera gloves. She lifted her head. Worms of scar tissue squirmed across her throat and crudely knitted it back together.

  Everyone stared, enemy and ally alike. Angry, hungry madness stared back at them. Once those eyes might have looked affectionately upon a child or a suitor, but the hunger had burned out gentler emotions and left nothing but coals. They should have opened fire on her immediately. Instead, they froze like mice in front of a corn snake.

  Should be wharf rats, not mice, Ginger thought irreverently. A clown always looked at all the angles in a situation to find the funniest one; this time, that was enough to shake him free from his mesmerized state.

  The thing that had once been Miss Anderson sniffed the air and snarled. Ginger guessed that she found Commissioner Guirard’s blood to be an irresistible lure. If she attacked him again, the policemen wouldn’t fire for fear of killing their commander. If the sailors also held their fire, Miss Anderson would devour Commissioner Guirard before their eyes. The circus would either escape in the resultant turmoil or be trapped in New York in the midst of a new civil war as various factions fought for power and resources. If the sailors did bring their heavy armament to bear, they’d destroy Miss Anderson and most likely Commissioner Guirard as well. In that case, those outcomes still held true, except that first the circus would have to survive the looming battle between the policemen and the sailors. The docks would be awash in blood. The only way Ginger could see to prevent that was with a little blood of his own.

  Ginger pulled out his bowie knife and sprinted toward his target. He spared a brief prayer that nobody would shoot him out of sheer confusion.

  The ostriches were running in panicked circles when he intersected them. Their leader uttered a booming territorial call to warn Ginger off. Ginger darted to the side and slashed, opening a deep, bleeding gash down half the length of the ostrich’s leg. The ostrich hissed. It whirled to face Ginger and tried to kick him with its good leg. When the ostrich’s weight shifted, its injured leg crumpled beneath it. It plummeted to the ground in a flurry of blood-splattered feathers.

  A rasping growl behind him raised the little hairs on the back of Ginger’s neck. Without even looking, he dove out of the way. Years of practice at rolling back up out of a pratfall and strolling away helped him; in seconds, he was back on his feet and running. He expected at any moment to hear a snarl next to his ear and feel teeth sinking into the meat of his shoulder.

  He didn’t.

  He made it back to the relative safety of his corner of the docks just as a fusillade of gunfire hammered the air and was answered by a howl of rage. Sailors and policemen temporarily united in unloading their weaponry on this new threat. Ginger could only be grateful that they heeded his warning and kept their fire aimed diagonally at the killing ground, so there were none of the cross fire casualties that he’d feared.

  Bullets struck Miss Anderson, jerking her back and forth like a rag doll. Blood spurted and stopped abruptly as lumpen scar tissue plugged her wounds. Scars seethed across her body, rapidly deforming her into a monstrosity more terrifying than any freak show. She snarled and screamed when she was hit, but she ignored the people shooting her. Each time bullets knocked her down, she doggedly launched herself back at the dying ostrich. After it bled out, she savaged its corpse. She ripped up gobbets of meat and gulped them down without chewing, stripping the ostrich down to the bone at an incredible rate. It wouldn’t hold her much longer.

  Bullets weren’t going to be enough to stop her. The rate of fire slowed as that truth sank home. Commissioner Guirard signaled his men to cease fire and bellowed something about bringing up the heavy cannon. The boom of the guns had partially deafened Ginger, and so he only heard bits and pieces. The sailors scurried around their ships, hauling what weaponry they could up from belowdecks. Heavy ship weaponry would be mounted and bolted in place, meant to fire to port and starboard at enemy ships, useless when docked. Even if the sailors cannibalized what they could, it would not be the equivalent of an at-sea bombardment. That was good, because a true bombardment would reduce the entire dock to splinters, along with most of the people standing on it. As it was, Ginger hoped to hell that if any of these ships had shatter bombs, their crews were smart enough not to use them. Projectile weapons had little effect on Miss Anderson, and those things had a nasty habit of going off-target and maiming innocent bystanders like himself.

  He saw weaponry with the distinctive shape of aether armament being pulled up to the deck rail on several of the ships. He was pretty sure that yes, among them was a shatter bomb hurler. He began to back slowly toward the footpath that he’d used to reach the docks. Calm, slow, and steady, that was the ticket. He didn’t want to attract attention from anybody or anything.

  A golden ball flew overhead, shining brightly enough to be mistaken for a second sun. Ginger dropped all pretense of calm and bolted to safety. Behind him, he heard a deceptively innocuous crash-tinkle as the blown glass ball broke. Anything nearby would be showered by a detonation of sparks, along with small droplets of fire aether that would keep those sparks burning long past the point where they ought to turn to ash. They would melt stone. They would burn under water. Sinew and bone posed no challenge at all.

  Miss Anderson howled in anguish as she finally suffered an injury agonizing enough to break through the haze of animalistic hunger that drove her. Ginger dove into the narrow opening between two buildings and pressed his back to the wall until Miss Anderson’s screams died to whimpered moans. The sounds of weapon fire had long since ceased. When Ginger was as sure as he could be that no more fire aether splashers would be launched, he stepped away from the wall and went to see what had happened.

  The policemen and the sailors still aimed their weapons at the burning wreck of flesh that shuddered and twitched in the center of the dock, but they held their fire. Miss Anderson was dead. Her body just hadn’t realized it yet. Bubbles of scar tissue rose and fell, trying and failing to regenerate cauterized tissue. Charred pits pockmarked the planks around her, marking where aether-fueled sparks had tunneled into the wood and on through to whatever lay beneath. Flames sputtered around the edges of the holes.

  A huge wave of relief washed through Ginger. They might yet be saved. He opened his mouth and—

  “Execute clean sweep!” bellowed Commissioner Guirard. In unison, the policemen brought their firearms up and swiveled to point them at the sailors.

  The sailors were caught with their weapons aimed at the ground or at the spectacle in the center of the docks. When they were not immediately slaughtered, hands started shifting and gun barrels began to lift. On the decks of ships, seamen scrambled to redirect their armament.

  “Halt or we will fire!” Commissioner Guirard ordered them. The sailors froze, but the tension in their muscles still promised violence. “D
o not move! My patrolmen will disarm each of you individually. We will shoot the first person who so much as blinks in the wrong direction!”

  Not, Ginger noticed, “Don’t move or we’ll shoot,” but, “We will shoot.” It rather sounded as if Commissioner Guirard had decided that making an example would be useful. Ginger relaxed into an immobility that would prevent him from betraying any physical response to loud noises, or surprises, or whatever else Commissioner Guirard might have up his sleeve to provoke an “example” should one not be provided for him.

  A burly sailor moved a bit too slow when ordered to drop his Arkansas toothpick. Commissioner Guirard strode across the dock, seized a revolver from one of his men, and sighted down the barrel. Ginger didn’t react. Not everybody had his control. A commotion started nearby—and was stilled by a gunshot.

  When a woman’s scream of pain broke the sudden silence, Commissioner Guirard’s satisfaction peeled away. His face a mask of horror, Commissioner Guirard bolted toward the screaming woman with no care for his own safety. He charged at the knot of sailors gathering around her. They parted at his approach, revealing Mrs. Guirard on the ground.

  Ginger ran after Commissioner Guirard. Mrs. Guirard’s screams died to whimpering moans. She lay with her arms wrapped around her waist as if she could hold herself together despite the gut wound draining her life away. Red soaked her bodice and streaked her skirts.

  Commissioner Guirard raised his revolver and pointed it behind him without even looking where he was aiming. Ginger dodged sideways. Commissioner Guirard pulled the trigger, sending a bullet flying back to strike one of his own men in the center of his chest. The policeman staggered and dropped his weapon, staring dumbly at the wound that killed him before his eyes rolled up and he crumpled to the dock.

  Commissioner Guirard never even looked back to see if the man he’d executed were the one who’d fired the fatal shot. He knelt beside his wife. He reached toward her and then pulled back as if he were afraid his touch would hurt her. Under other circumstances, it would have been humorous to see such a big, tough man wringing his hands.