Flesh Circus

Chapter Twenty-nine

A tinkling childlike laugh. Sudden cold wetness and smell of salt and candy. And pain so immense it swallowed the world.

I’d hit something, and it had thrown me. Hard. A convulsion ran through me, muscles locking and nerves firing wildly in protest, a mutiny of the body.

I rolled onto my side, every inch of me protesting violently. Heaved and would have thrown up if my jaw hadn’t locked. Silver crackled, the charms in my hair rustling, and my eyes were full of heat and something too sticky and red to be tears.

Thunder, again, not faraway but close and overwhelming. Ozone in the air. The calliope wheezing, limping brokenly through a descant. I pushed myself up and saw the Ringmaster’s broken body trampled into sawdust. Black goop runneled his vanishing flesh. Arms and legs corkscrewed, twisting as death claimed the tissues.

I slid down the broken remains of several chairs. Gained my feet. Vomited a long string of blood. There were probably internal injuries. Where the hell is Perry? I don’t like it when I can’t see him.

It was enough that he was staying out of the way. I didn’t want to deal with him and all this at the same time.

A barrier at ringside was just a three-bar fence, it took me two tries to hop it. And there, beyond the Ringmaster, Mama Zamba lay in the sawdust, writhing. Her dreadlocks were full of grit, and a spume of it jetted up as she convulsed, harsh ratcheting breaths blowing snot out through her nose. Bones crackled, and my smart eye saw the triple-lobed shimmering in the air over her.

The Twins were occupied with their follower. I gathered myself and bolted for the cornmeal circle. Another rattle of thunder shook the air inside the bigtop, a brief flash of acid white light made every detail stand out. Ikaros wasn’t seizing anymore. He lay sprawled on the bed, chest rising and falling, the angular spiked hell-writing climbing over his flesh in fits and starts. His eyes were open, staring at the roof.

“Nooooooooooooooo!” Mama Zamba screamed, and her voice deepened, taking on a male timbre at the end. The bone-crackles took on a deeper, wetter sound, and my feet slipped in ichor-slimed sawdust. I was almost there, almost there—

Another bright-white flash, smell of ozone turned thick and cloying, and a huge warm hand cupped my back and flung me. I landed in a heap inside the cornmeal circle, looked up as I reached my knees.

Mama Zamba hung in the air, but she no longer looked even faintly female. Her face had shifted, cheekbones broadening and the smallpox scars deepening. Her eyes were now Arthur Gregory’s eyes, glowing feverish gasflame-blue and horribly sane. The caftan flapped around her thickening legs, and he hit the edge of the cornmeal circle going full-speed.

Ka-POW! Lightning flashed. The resulting explosion knocked me back into the steel-framed bed, its footboard barking me a good one in the side, where my ribs were already tender from being broken once tonight. I collapsed, trying to get enough air in, my hands came up despite me and clutched at the bedframe. I had enough time to see the tendons standing out under my fishbelly-pale skin, blood sliming the back of my left hand and dulling the shine of my apprentice-ring, before the imperative to get fucking moving! boiled through me again and I hauled myself up.

Noise returned. I realized I’d been temporarily deafened as I landed hard on Ikaros, irrationally afraid the several pounds of ammo I was carrying would crush him. Squirmed, fell to the side, wrapped one hand around a bar in the headboard and braced myself, my right hand jabbing up.

The collar’s spikes sank into my skin again. The pain was tiny compared to the rest of me. I found the release catch.

“Noooooooooooo!” Arthur Gregory yelled again, and I snapped a glance up to see him flying toward the cornmeal circle again. I couldn’t count on a lightning strike this time. Chango and the Twins had probably both interfered as much as they were able to.

The release catch was slimed with blood. I let out a hopeless sound, fingers scrabbling, caught in the spikes coming up from the collar. My apprentice-ring sparked under its mask of blood.

The catch miraculously parted. The collar opened like a flower, and I rolled off the bed, landing hard on my ass, my head hitting the frame. Silver chimed, a small noise lost in the sudden lunging scream of the calliope. Green vapor filled the air, full of the candy-sick corruption of Hell and a darker effluvia.

Ikaros screamed. So did Arthur Gregory.

I scrabbled away on hands and bootheels, muscle pulling loose of bone with hard popping sounds, flaring with pain like nails tearing my flesh. The cornmeal scattered as I plowed through the edge of the circle, and Arthur Gregory landed on the bed. Ikaros was already gone, though, rolling away on the opposite side.

The scar boiled, burrowing in toward bone. It never got any deeper, but I sometimes wondered what would happen if it did. Right now there wasn’t time. I fumbled for a gun, for a knife to fling, anything. The calliope shrieked again, belching more green smoke, its brass pipes blooming with sick ignus fatus light, spinning off fat globes of bobbing will o’ the wisps.

The hostage gained his feet in a spooky-quick lunge. He had a lot of pep for someone who had been writhing and twisting with seizures for a day or two. His eyes lit with the dusted glitter of a very pissed-off Trader. His jockey shorts flapped, scrawny-strong muscle popping out under his skin, where the mad angry runnels of hell-script fizzed, glyphs winking out of existence with tiny puffs of steam.

He drew himself up, and Arthur Gregory hopped off the bed. The caftan fluttered around his ankles, torn and stained all over now. The blond dreadlocks swayed.

Sudden silence filled the bigtop. My breathing was very loud, but so was theirs, twin gasps through constricted windpipes.

They faced each other, and my hand closed around a gun butt. I was moving through syrup.

Then Ikaros spoke. His face had squinched itself up, and he sounded very young.

“Arthur?” Tentatively. His broad farmboy paws knotted together. “Art?”

Arthur Gregory twitched.

Oh, holy shit. The last piece of the puzzle clicked into place. That’s why the attacks didn’t kill him—they were attacks on the Ringmaster, not on the hostage! And—

“Goddamn you,” Arthur hissed. “God damn you to Hell.”

Samuel Gregory spread his arms. “Already done. I’ve seen things you can’t imagine.” His face was no longer young. Instead, it was ancient and graven.

“You were here. The whole time.” Arthur’s hands dropped to his sides. He took two steps forward. The calliope simmered in its corner, a tremor rising up through the floor as if we were having an earthquake. “You were here!”

“I came here to forget it. Forget it all.” Samuel’s hands twisted together, fingers knotting. “Him. And her. Mother.” The single word was loaded with hatred, and I shivered.

“Even me?” Arthur drew himself up. His dreadlocks rasped against each other.

Samuel shrugged. “Even you. I’m… sorry.”

He didn’t sound sorry.

“I did everything for you,” Arthur whispered. “Everything. All this. I sold my soul.”

Samuel sounded unimpressed. “So did I. And you have to come here and remind me.”

A hand closed over my shoulder. I flinched, but the fingers dug in. “Hush.” Perry’s hot breath touched my bloody cheek. “Be quiet, now. This is meant to be finished.”

I pitched forward, but I was so tired. And his fingers bit down again, steel pins grinding my flesh. “I said be still.” His whisper floated to my ear, a trickle of moisture that might have been blood or condensation from his breath sliding down toward my jawline. Frantic disgust roiled through me.

They stood staring at each other. The calliope regained its voice and whispered.

“God damn you.” Arthur’s throat had closed down on him. All that came out was a rasp. And too late I saw the knife in his broad, long-fingered hand. It glittered, starlike in the green pondlight. I let out a warning blurt, but Perry’s other hand had clapped over my mouth. Dry skin against the slick of blood on me, and he drew me back.

Arthur Gregory lunged forward. Samuel collided with him, and the knife rammed itself home in his narrow chest. Samuel’s arms were spread, strangler’s hands limp and loose.

He had thrown himself on the blade. He folded down like a clockwork toy run out, and the corruption racing through his tissues distorted his face into an old man’s before finally draining away, his body twitching and jerking as it turned into a bubbling smear.

My eyes rolled like a panicked horse’s. I threw myself forward, but Perry dragged me back down again and I couldn’t get leverage. His other arm was a bar of iron across my midriff. He crouched behind me, and the heat of him was like a boiler. The smell of charring leather rose.

“Quiet!” The rumble of Helletöng scoured my ear, already half-deaf and ringing from the vast and varied noises of the night.

Arthur Gregory went to his knees. The tripartite spinning of the Twins appeared briefly, a pale oval of light. They laughed, a cruel tinkling sound, and he stretched out his arms. Their faces blurred into each other before the slim androgynous figure silhouetted in the light turned its back and danced away.

Abandoning him.

The loa are fickle. Just as much as hellbreed are. And Arthur Gregory had used up all his credit with them.

His wail shattered the stillness. The calliope answered it, shaking the bigtop. Canvas rippled and fluttered, the ropes singing in distress.

Perry dragged me even further back, duckwalking. One of his knees dug briefly into my ribs and I made a small sound in the back of my throat, a red-hot bolt going up my cramping side and exploding in my neck. The scar blazed, agony unstringing my nerves. The collar still tangled in my fist, its spikes buried in my wrist. Hot blood smeared my right hand, and pretty much every other inch of me. My back was hot, and Perry hissed happily to himself as he rose, dragging me upright.

They flowed past us, bright eyes and twisted limbs, a tide of hellbreed. The plague-carrier I’d seen before was first among them, capering and jigging; he had found another red velvet coat somewhere. It was he who picked up the Ringmaster’s cane, stealing it neatly from under another ’breed’s questing fingers, and he twirled it neatly, cracking the other ’breed on the head and snarling. They pulled back a little, and he found the top hat too. It went onto his lank-haired noggin, and I was suddenly aware of hellbreed and Traders packing the entire bigtop, dancing in through the stage entrances, climbing through the stands, cheering and rumbling in töng.

Arthur Gregory was on his knees, sobbing. He bent over, his mouth distorted in a wet “o” of suffering. His eyes had turned dead-dark, and cold. Snot smeared on his upper lip. One of his dreadlocks came loose and fluttered to the churned, wet sawdust. Others followed, plopping free of his skull with odd little sounds.

The plague-carrier capered to Gregory’s side, spinning the cane. The green crystal shivered and crackled, and when the carrier spread his stick-thin arms, the calliope tweeted. He jabbed the cane at it, green vapor cringing away from him, and the first few notes of “Be a Clown” rippled through the air.

The crowd cheered and hissed, arms raised, cheap glass and paste finery twinkling. Their eyes were bright and avid. None of the animals put in an appearance, but I swear I heard an elephant trumpet and the yowls of big cats. Yipping dogs. Perry’s arm loosened. My boots touched the ground, finally. The shadows crawled and leapt with the Cirque’s dogs, their eyes glowing and crackling.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” It was a ringmaster’s voice, an impossible deep baritone coming from the plague-carrier’s narrow little chest. “Welcome to the Cirque Diabolique! We’re all-new and renewed! We’re pedal to the metal and shoulder to the wheel! And welcome our new hostage! What’s your name, sonny?”

The cane whirled again, and the crystal jabbed toward Arthur Gregory. Who screamed, his body buckling. He lifted his face to the bigtop’s fabric roof swimming with sick green light and howled.

Their cries rose with his. Every single one of them, Trader and hellbreed, yowled like cats at the moon. The plague-carrier danced back, whirled, and blinked through space with the eerie speed of hellbreed. Perry’s arm tightened again, but the thing just halted a bare four feet from us and gestured to the collar.

“Clip him and chain him.” Strings of gummy yellow ick crawled over sharp teeth, and the ’breed exhaled foulness. “You have our thanks, hunter.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again. Arthur howled again, the cords on his neck standing out. The plague-carrier danced backward, spinning the cane, and Perry shook me, recently broken bones twinging hard even though my body was doing its best to patch everything up.

“Do as he says, Jill.” Perry’s arms slithered away, I swayed on my feet. “He is theirs now.”

It doesn’t look like he knows it, I almost said. But the new Ringmaster halted next to Arthur, and put down one narrow hand. He smoothed the matted blond head, caressing, and made an odd clicking noise.

The dreadlocks finished falling, and new hair was growing in. Sickly yellow, and oddly feathery.

The collar jangled in my fist. I took an experimental step forward. My knee buckled, but I stayed upright. Perry made a low spitting sound, as if to chide me for swaying.

Arthur’s blind eyes passed across me for a moment, and I opened my mouth again to protest. To say something, anything.

But the Ringmaster bent down and exhaled across Arthur’s wide, now definitely male face. Which turned slack and grinning, vacant.

“It is ever so,” Perry intoned behind me. “A life for a life.”

“Life for a life,” the assembled Cirque chorused. Even the calliope, weaving notes that sounded like words between the frantic strains of a song I didn’t want to identify.

The new Ringmaster twitched, and pulled Arthur Gregory to his feet. “There,” he said brightly. “Isn’t that nice?” Foulness dripped down his chin. “Tell the nice lady your new name, my dear.”

Arthur Gregory smiled under a mask of tears, snot, and blackened sawdust. He mumbled something, his lips moving loosely.

“She didn’t hear you.” The plague-carrier glanced at me. His shoulders were tense, and I had a sudden insane vision of shooting his ass, too.

But I was so tired.

“Samuel,” he said, louder, his mouth working oddly over the word. “I am Samuel. Now. I’m Sam.” By the third time he repeated it, he sounded like he believed it.

The flat shine of the dusted lay over his irises, and I knew what he had bargained away. Who wouldn’t want to get rid of the memories he must have been carrying? The guilt, and the shame, and the murder?

The new Ringmaster watched me avidly. I’m sure something of what I was feeling showed on my face. The biggest thing, though, was weary disgust. And relief that this was finally over.

“You have one more day,” I croaked. “By dusk tomorrow I want you out of my city.”

He swept a simulacrum of a bow, grinned his death’s-head grin under the old top hat. The cane whirled, cleaving the air with a low sweet sound. “Of course.”

I clipped the collar on Arthur Gregory and left him to his new demons.