A Circus of Brass and Bone

by Abra SW

  It hurt to watch.

  “Don’t die, sweetheart,” Commissioner Guirard begged. “Please. I’ll do anything.”

  Chapter 22

  ~* * *~

  The Final Reckoning

  Ginger, the Whitefaced Clown

  Port Rumsey, New York City

  “Don’t die, sweetheart,” Commissioner Guirard begged. “Please. I’ll do anything.”

  Mrs. Guirard tried to smile, but pain pulled her lips so tight that it was almost a grimace. “Nothing you can do,” she gasped. “Not even you. Nothing anybody can do. Sorry.”

  “There must be something. I can’t lose you. Tell me! What should I do?”

  The answer revealed itself to Ginger in a flash so bright that he might have been struck by lightning. His vision refocused slowly. Once he could see again, he stared at the ships, looking for one distinctive silhouette in particular.

  He found the creature he sought staring back at him over the bow of a nearby ship. Gears jolted into motion as the aether-powered dog-monkey scuttled jerkily along the deck of the ship, keeping watch. Its loose patchwork coat of dog hide bunched and stretched as it moved. Only one ship could have such a grotesquely misshapen mascot. Beauty’s Reward was painted on the side of the hull. Seeing it, Ginger remembered Captain Angie saying that that was the name of her ship.

  He pointed. “There!”

  Everyone ignored him.

  He seized Commissioner Guirard’s shoulder. “We have to—”

  Commissioner Guirard shrugged him off and rose with a violence that set Ginger back a fortunate step. Fortunate, because as Commissioner Guirard surged to his feet, he lashed out with the butt of his revolver. He missed. Before he had a chance to correct his aim, Ginger spoke.

  “I can save her,” he said quickly. When Commissioner Guirard didn’t immediately strike him down, Ginger took it as permission to keep talking. “The captain of Beauty’s Reward has a small supply of bone aether. If we act immediately, it is possible to heal your wife.”

  Commissioner Guirard’s eyes sharpened. Then he shook his head. “Not enough time. Yes, we could probably kill the ship’s crew and take the ship. We would have to fight off attempts to retake it, though. My wife would die before we could slaughter enough sailors to discourage them.”

  He said this without any attempt to prevent the seamen surrounding them from hearing him. The sailors looked at each other with Did he just say what I thought he said? expressions on their faces. “Now see here,” a short, burly fellow said as he hefted his fire ax. “What’s to keep us from—”

  “I was thinking we might ask politely,” Ginger interrupted. “The captain’s a friend of mine,” he said, adding some shine to their relationship, “and likely to listen to reason. A merchant sailor, you understand?”

  “Traders.” Commissioner Guirard muttered it like a curse.

  “Yes, and you should be glad—” Ginger began, but Commissioner Guirard had ceased to listen.

  “Take her shoulders,” Commissioner Guirard barked at Ginger. He hunkered down beside his wife and looped his arms around her knees. “We need to keep her as level as possible. Hop to, man!”

  Ginger did as he was ordered.

  “I’ll help you,” a young man said as he pushed his way through the gathering crowd. He had the kind of cheerful, open face that Ginger instinctively distrusted. “I’m Pablo Virgo, crew on the Beauty’s Reward. Let me lead the way.”

  Commissioner Guirard nodded brusquely. “Hurry.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pablo said. As he passed Ginger, he added in an undertone, “This I have to see.”

  Mrs. Guirard screamed when they lifted her, but she fell unconscious before they reached the Beauty’s Reward. Above them, the aether-golemed monkey had been joined by its mistress, Captain Angie Endo. She watched them from the bow, unmoving, a forbidding figure with her arms crossed under her breasts. Still, she hadn’t ordered the gangplank pulled up. Ginger considered that a promising sign.

  The boards of the gangplank creaked underfoot as they carried Mrs. Guirard onto the deck of the ship.

  “I don’t recall ordering a fresh corpse,” Captain Angie said, raising her eyebrows and smiling a smile that showed her sharply pointed teeth to advantage.

  Ginger winced. “Captain, I know that you can heal this woman if you choose.”

  “Why should I?”

  Commissioner Guirard’s face flushed red. “If you don’t, my men will burn this boat to the waterline and use it as a pyre for your—”

  Ginger jerked his chin in a warning movement. Commissioner Guirard managed to bottle the rest of the threat, although the effort empurpled his already colorful cheeks.

  “It’s a devil of a risk,” Ginger told her, keeping his face and tone sober but letting a gleam enter his eye. “You’d be betting that the brutal, bloodthirsty autocrat who would have used Strider tanks against his own civilians is also a man of honor who acknowledges his debts.”

  “I like a gamble, at times,” Captain Angie drawled.

  Ginger smiled internally. He’d hooked her. Beside him, Commissioner Guirard practically radiated tension. Ginger suspected that he held on to his self-control by a rapidly thinning thread.

  “The stake for that bet is enough bone aether to heal the lady,” Ginger said to Captain Angie. He shrugged. “Of course, you could also play it safe and shoot him now. Without their commander, the police might lose the heart to fight.”

  Commissioner Guirard could take it no more. “Shoot me if you must,” he burst out, “but save my wife! She is innocent.” He looked down at his unconscious wife. She hung limp in his grasp. His choler fading, he added quietly, “Enough innocents have died.”

  Ginger nodded. “There’s that, too.”

  Captain Angie shook her head in wry self-mockery. “I always was a sucker for long odds. I guess I’m all in.” She gave a shrill two-fingered whistle that summoned a matronly woman with silver-salted hair who wore trousers under her skirts, a combination of propriety and practicality that Ginger thought spoke well of her. “Mrs. Hobbes will see to it. She patches us up around here.”

  “And I’m a dab hand with sailcloth, too,” Mrs. Hobbes said dryly. “Lay her out here on the deck where I can see what’s what.”

  ~ * ~

  Ginger, the Whitefaced Clown

  Beauty’s Reward, Port Rumsey, New York City

  Ginger shifted in his chair and attempted to nap. Whenever he found himself in a safe place with nothing else to do, he tried to sleep. That wasn’t one of the rules for how to be a clown; it was plain common sense. He wasn’t having much luck. He shifted his weight again and leaned a little more to the left. The chair, being bolted to the floor of the cabin, couldn’t be moved to accommodate him, so he was having to do all the moving for both of them.

  In the bunk beside him, Mrs. Guirard slept untroubled. She breathed deeply and evenly. Mrs. Hobbes had aligned Mrs. Guirard’s innards and administered the bone aether. After the healing took hold, she’d sponged the blood off, dressed her in a billowy white nightgown, and tucked her into a bunk. She’d shooed the menfolk away during the latter duties, even Commissioner Guirard.

  He would have returned to sit by his wife’s side, but Captain Angie had pointed out that his men were likely to get nervous if he disappeared for too long, and she wasn’t that much of a gambler. Commissioner Guirard had grudgingly agreed. That didn’t stop him from coming belowdecks “to see how she was doing” every quarter-hour. Mrs. Hobbes popped in even more frequently, listening to Mrs. Guirard’s breathing and laying a hand against her cheek to check for fever. And Ginger sat vigil, still awake despite his best efforts.

  As he closed his eyes again, he heard two sets of footsteps in the corridor. “Commissioner,” Ginger heard Mrs. Hobbes say, “there’s hardly room for the both of us in there. I promise that I will tell you if there are any changes in her condition. Won’t you wait on deck?”

  The cabin door creaked open. “After you, ma’am,” Commi
ssioner Guirard said, his tone polite but inflexible.

  With a put-upon sigh, Mrs. Hobbes walked across to the bunk where Mrs. Guirard lay. “Her breathing is fine.” Pause. “No sign of fever.” Pause. “Her stomach is not unusually swollen.”

  “She will recover,” Commissioner Guirard stated firmly.

  “How could she not, with you here to give her her marching orders?” Mrs. Hobbes asked.

  “Don’t fight,” murmured a drowsy female voice.

  Ginger cracked his eyes open a sliver, enough to see but not enough to draw attention to himself. He had a hunch that this scene would play out better without his interference.

  “Oh, my dear!” Commissioner Guirard collapsed to his knees beside his wife’s bunk and seized her hand.

  “There, there. I’m sure everything will be all right.” Her eyes opened wider. “I feel so peculiar, as if I could sleep for days. Yet my skin is fizzing with energy! And I’m so hungry!”

  “That would be the effect of the bone aether treatment, Mrs. Guirard,” Mrs. Hobbes said.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Mrs. Barbara Hobbes, crew onboard the Beauty’s Reward. I was a battlefield nurse during the War Between the States, and now I patch up whatever needs patching on this ship. Sometimes it’s the sails, sometimes it’s the people.” She smiled. “You’re lucky I wasn’t away visiting friends on The Lamprey’s Grin, as I was the last time somebody needed healing. The captain can manage in a pinch, but her technique lacks delicacy and some find her bedside manner distressing.”

  Mrs. Guirard blinked. Ginger wondered how much of that she’d followed. “Thank you, Mrs. Hobbes. I am much obliged to you for your care.”

  “Yes,” Commissioner Guirard agreed, holding his wife’s hand. “Mrs. Hobbes, I’m in your debt.” He stated it as a self-evident truth, with no hint of a grudge in his tone. He spoke as if it didn’t cost him anything at all to bow his neck in gratitude to one of the enemies that he’d been within minutes of defeating utterly. Perhaps, in comparison to the cost of losing his wife, it didn’t.

  Mrs. Hobbes demurred. “You should thank the captain, not me. I’m just doing my job.”

  “I’m in her debt as well. But tell me, Mrs. Hobbes, what would you ask of me? Name it. If it’s within my power, you shall have it. Free passage into the city? A good position in a prosperous household?”

  She looked down at her hands for a moment, and then she looked up and met his eyes. “Peace.”

  “Peace?” he repeated, taken aback.

  “Peace,” she said firmly. “During the War Between the States, I saw enough of neighbors killing neighbors. A couple of years earlier, they would have been helping each other with the haying, but there they were, trying to rip each other’s guts out. I don’t want to see that again. The young man who led you aboard? He’s my nephew. Pablo was too young to serve in the last war. I don’t want him caught up in a new one. I want peace.”

  “Peace.”

  “Find a way for us to live together without another war.”

  “That may be difficult.” Commissioner Guirard rose and paced. Ginger continued his pretense of sleeping, even when Commissioner Guirard bumped his leg. In the cramped confines of the cabin, it was like being trapped inside a tiger’s cage with the tiger still in it. “We need those cargoes to survive, and your captains have shown no willingness to sell them for what we can afford to pay.”

  Mrs. Guirard had remained quiet while Commissioner Guirard and Mrs. Hobbes talked. Now she feathered a wink at Ginger and lifted her hand. “Andre?” she said.

  Caught by her use of his first name, Commissioner Guirard took her hand and knelt beside her again. “Yes, my dear?”

  She smiled. “I may be able to help with the captains. I think you’ve been overlooking some of our resources, darling. There’s more to life than simple survival. I met quite the most amazing people …”

  Epilogue

  Ginger, the Whitefaced Clown

  Port Rumsey, New York City

  Later that night, after the policemen left the docks and the sailors returned to their ships, and after the circus put on a performance that was thankfully less exciting than earlier events, Ginger went looking for Rajesh. He found the Indian mahout sitting at the end of a pier, looking out over the bay. The inky blackness of the water was relieved only by sparkles of reflected moonlight. It was pretty enough, Ginger admitted, but the breeze blowing in off the bay reeked of raw sewage. Rajesh didn’t seem to notice.

  “I saw you talking to the captain of The Dancing Mongoose before the show,” Ginger said, stopping just behind him. “Are you thinking of leaving us?”

  “Don’t worry,” Rajesh said bitterly. “I am not going anywhere.”

  “No aether ships going to India just now?”

  “No ships going to India for a very, very long time. Maybe not until you and I are old men. No ships carry enough aether to fuel them all the way there, you see, and there is no more untainted aether to be had. The engines would explode, they say, or the ship would be left adrift in the middle of the ocean. Or both.”

  Ginger slid out his bowie knife and held it beside his leg, tip slightly tilted forward, poised to strike. “How long have you been planning on sailing away from New York?”

  “As soon as the storm hit, I wanted to return—”

  “—to your employers?” Ginger interrupted sharply. “Did you need the ringmaster’s hidden papers so that you would have something to offer them?”

  Rajesh flinched. He looked over his shoulder and froze when he saw the knife Ginger held.

  “Who are they, anyway?” Ginger continued. “Indian or British? Your accent is slipping.”

  “Indian,” Rajesh gritted out. “I attended a British boarding school, but my loyalty is to the princely state of Udaipur. Do you plan on killing me, then?”

  “Perhaps. I suggest avoiding sudden movements. I appreciate your willingness to answer my questions, though I admit I’m a little surprised by it.”

  “My answers no longer make a difference, do they?” Rajesh asked fatalistically. He faced forward again, staring into the night. Ginger wondered if he saw the bay at all.

  Ginger shifted slightly to the side so that he could see Rajesh’s face. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Why take the papers before you knew you could escape? What was your mission?”

  “I was to come to the United States and find allies to help us in our struggle for independence. I suspected that the ringmaster had figured out that I was more than a simple elephant mahout. I needed to know what he had guessed, what he had written down.”

  Silence could be a threat, when properly used. Ginger let it linger as he appreciated the view. Moonlight glistened on the dark water like silver lace, and the smell of the bay was not so bad once you got used to it.

  “I may never see the Udaipur again,” Rajesh said. “I wonder. Is the Maharana of Udaipur taking advantage of this catastrophe to secure his power, or is he already dead? Does my mother still make chapatis for the neighborhood children? Do my sisters still consult the astrological charts of their suitors? Do they even still have suitors? My mother may be dead. Anything could have happened to my sisters.”

  Ginger had not come to offer false comfort. “Yes. You may never learn what has happened to them. I don’t know if it makes it easier or harder to have remembrances of the home you lost, but I suggest you treasure them. Your oleander plant, for instance. It must take a lot of care. It’s lovely. And quite poisonous, of course, as our late ringmaster found out.”

  “I was waiting for you to get to that. Yes, I tried poisoning him while we were still at sea. He did not die, though he was ill for several days. You recall his ‘seasickness’? I suspect he kept atropine nearby as a counteragent in case of just such an occurrence.” A wry smile crossed Rajesh’s face. “First the ringmaster, then the fortune teller. I seem to be a most incompetent murderer.”

  “You succeeded well enough later,” Ginger said blandly. “After both your att
empts to poison the ringmaster failed, you stabbed him with a hoof pick and gifted the murder weapon to Lacey.”

  “No, you don’t understand, I—”

  “And I doubt that the skeleton man will return to the circus anytime soon. Or ever. Will he?”

  Rajesh stopped protesting. Ginger saw his eyes narrow slightly in calculation.

  “Would you give the fortune teller my apologies?” Rajesh asked. “Despite the differences between us, she was never anything but kind, and I—”

  “—saved her home,” Ginger finished.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “On the bridge into New York, when we were attacked, you saved the circus from being destroyed. You saved my life too, incidentally.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “The circus is our only home, now. The world has changed, and we changed with it. Before, we were different people. What those people did does not have to be part of who we are now. It just took some of us longer to realize that.”

  Rajesh stared at him with stunned eyes.

  “We cannot afford to lose any more circus members,” Ginger said.

  Rajesh held still, listening.

  “Surviving what is coming will take all of us.” Ginger let the silence expand, waiting for Rajesh to fill it.

  For the first time, Rajesh turned away from the darkness in front of them. He looked at Ginger. “So, am I one of you now?”

  Ginger returned his stare. “I’d say that depends on you. Can you be one of us in truth?”

  “It sounds better than being stabbed in the back and dropped into the bay, which is my other choice.”

  Ginger didn’t deny it.

  “What’s the catch?”

  “I’ll be wanting the ringmaster’s papers back. They could prove useful to us.”

  “Of course. What else?”

  “You will teach one of us how to operate your aether-powered war elephant, so that we can defend ourselves even if you die.”