The spider knows the fly’s home.
I didn’t like that thought. I also didn’t like how the air was suddenly close and warm, almost balmy with a slight edge of
humidity. It even smelled wrong—no clean tang of dry desert, no metallic ring from the river or any of the hundred other little
components that make up a subconscious map of my city. You spend enough time breathing a place and it’ll get into your bones—and
when it isn’t what it should be, that’s when the uneasiness starts right below the hackles.
It was also—surprise, surprise—more crowded inside than out. There wasn’t a crush, but it was work threading my way through.
The flat shine of the dusted on Trader irises, dazed incomprehension on the shuffling normals, rubbing shoulders and shuffling
feet. I saw men in pajamas, a woman in filmy lingerie with her hair in pink curlers, a fiftyish man in work clothes carrying
a dripping-wet hammer and wandering walleyed and fishmouthed like he was six again.
The midway bloomed around us. Pasteboard and flashing lights, buzzing strings of electric bulbs.
“Throw the ball, win a prize!” This was an actual ’breed, female in a red cotton peasant dress. A sleepy-eyed teenager stopped
in front of her; she licked her pale lips and smiled at him. Her white, white hands touched his shoulders in a butterfly’s
caress, but she saw me watching and pushed him aside. He stumbled and rejoined the flow of the crowd.
“Catch a fish!” A Trader in suspenders, a white wifebeater, and a newsboy hat, his ears coming to high hairy points, motioned
at a crystal bowl. The fish inside glittered too sharply to be anything but metallic, globules of clear oil bubbling from
their mouths. “Win a dream! Lovely dream, freshly colored! Catch a fish!”
A woman hesitated before putting her hand in the bowl. I silently urged her not to, and turned away before she could make
her decision. There was a wet, deep crunch. The fish-catcher’s savage cry of triumph rose behind me, and I let out a sharp
breath, my stomach turning over.
This was what the Cirque did. It separated the weak and suicidal from the just vaguely disaffected. I caught sight of a young
woman, mascara dribbling down her cheeks on a flood of tears, mouthing words that seemed to fit the dim seaweed sound of the
calliope. Something like “Camptown Races,” married to a more savage beat.
Doo-dah, dooo dah.…
She shivered, and walked slowly toward an open tent exhaling a flood of beeps and boops like a video arcade. God alone knew
what waited for her in there.
Funny, the music should be louder.
I shivered, kept pacing. They parted in front of me like heavy molasses, drawing slowly away.
The normals didn’t look at me, lost in whatever the calliope was whispering. But the Traders flinched aside, and the ’breed
sometimes bared their teeth, or fangs. One, dolled up like a fortune-teller and outside a tent swathed with fluttering nylon
scarves, a chipped crystal ball on the round satin-draped table in front of her, actually snarled.
I stopped and stared at her for a good twenty seconds, unblinking, before she dropped her yellow gaze. Her eyes matched her
tongue, a jaundiced, scaled thing that flickered past thin lips and dabbed the point of her chin before reeling back into
her mouth.
“There’s a lot of them,” Saul murmured. He kept close, the comforting heat of him touching my back. The silver in my hair
was shifting, and the carved ruby at my throat spat a single, bloody spark just as he spoke.
“There always are.”
And when the sun rises, maybe a third of them will make it home safe. Those who decide they do want to live after all—or those
smart enough to run like hell and make no agreements. Even implicit ones.
And here I thought I was such a cynic. Probably a lot less than a third would get home.
Lean four-legged shapes slunk in the shadows. Their colorless eyes flashed, and they followed us through the midway. The Ferris
wheel rocked at one end, another light winked out, and I heard a shapeless scream, like a man waking from a nightmare in a
cold bath of sweat. The calliope music surged, swallowing it. Paper ruffled at our feet—wrappers still hot from popcorn or
sticky with cotton candy, gnawed sticks still holding traces of corn-dog mustard or clinging caramel. A man’s gold Patek Philippe
glittered, flung carelessly on the packed, scuffed dirt. Thick electric cables creaked back and forth under the slow warm
breeze.
The entrance to the bigtop was huge, easily as big as a triple garage door. Oiled canvas rubbed against the ropes; tattered
pennants fluttered and snapped on seven high-peaked poles. Crowd-noise swelled, and for the first time I heard the rumble
of Helletöng bruising the air.
A gangling scarecrow of a male hellbreed lolled in a chair next to a post holding one end of the tattered red velvet rope
barring the way. His top hat was pulled down over his eyes, and his spiderlike fingers—six on each hand, and a thumb too,
bones and tendons flickering under the mottled skin—twitched as I halted.
I eyed him. Threadbare, skintight burlap pants straining every time a skinny leg moved. Biceps so thin I could probably have
spanned them with thumb and forefinger. For all that, it was a hellbreed, and usually they aren’t so flagrantly unhuman.
Usually they’re beautiful, and they like to show it. Except Perry. This one could be a surprise too.
I stepped forward, my heels clicking on gravel, and eyed him. The hat lifted a little, and mad silvery eyes gleamed under
a hank of silky dirt-dark hair. The fingers twitched again.
I held the ’breed’s gaze for maybe fifteen long seconds, the calliope music drifting up around me in skeins of etheric foulness.
The hounds, slinking in the shadows, drew nearer. Saul didn’t make a restless movement, but I could guess maybe he wanted
to.
“Cut the act.” Silver jangled, underscoring my words. “Get me the Ringmaster.”
The ’breed tipped his head back further. A pointed chin, hollow cheeks—he was a walking skeleton with mottled skin stretched
drum-tight over bones, and I suddenly knew what he was. The knowledge made my hands ache for a weapon again; I controlled
the urge.
“Are you sure you want to see him? He’s not in a good mood.” The ’breed smirked, pointed yellow teeth flashing for just a
moment. Strings of thick saliva bubbled behind his lips. I was almost sorry I’d eaten.
“Snap inspection, plague-bearer. And the mood you should be worrying about right now is
mine.
I’m giving you less than two seconds to haul that skinny ass of yours up, and less than ten to bring me the Ringmaster. Or
I start shooting ’breed and Traders. Your choice.”
It was a nice bluff. Technically, a hunter can snap-inspect any part of the Cirque at any time, and serve summary judgment
on any ’breed or Trader caught breaking the rules—for example, pressuring a victim into making a bargain, or in my city, playing
with anyone under eighteen. That’s pretty much why the Cirque obeys the strictures—first there’s the hostage, and then there’s
us,
swallowing bile and watching, waiting for them to step out of line.
Of course, people vanish all the time. It’s a goddamn epidemic, and whenever the Cirque finally leaves town there’s a lull
in exorcisms, disappearances, and other nastiness. They eat all they can hold in each town, I guess. And with the pickings
so easy once the calliope starts singing, they would be foolish to take any unwilling meat.
Hellbreed aren’t fools.
He jolted to his feet, elbows and knees moving in ways human joints weren’t designed to, and I almost twitched toward a gun.
But he just capered over the red velvet rope and into the bigtop, leaving his chair rocking back and forth, a bloom of powdery
yellow dust left behind, eating little holes in the painted wood.
“Plague-bearer?” Saul murmured.
“You don’t want to touch that stuff.” My nerves were scraped raw, my back crawling with the thought of so many of Hell’s citizens
in one place, a cancer in the middle of my vulnerable city.
My apprentice-ring cooled, turning to ice on my finger. It twitched, sharply, twice. It was the first time since I’d met the
Cirque outside town that it had made any sort of motion at all.
I tilted my head, listening. The calliope music surged, screaming puffs through chrome-throated pipes. I shut it away, despite
the plucking underneath the music—
come in, come in, lay your troubles down, play a game, become one of us, one of us, just give in, stop struggling.
My attention turned, coasting through the flood of sensory information. Dust, hot frying fat, screams, chewing noises, stamping
feet, a horse’s screaming whinny.
And a long, drawn-out rattling gasp.
I came back to myself with a jolt, spun on my heel, and leapt into a run. Saul’s footsteps were soundless behind me.
The bigtop blurred past on one side, yards and yards of canvas. It drew away like a wave threatening to crest, and I plunged
into a network of tents and alleys, half-lit. Here was one of the older parts of the carnival—the air was thick with a reek
of spilled sex, and the tent flaps were always half-open. Moans and ghastly shrieks ribboned past, the calliope suddenly crooning.
Traders with gem-bright eyes, hellbreed with seashell hips and candied mouths, lounging in the entrances to their tents, seducing
and beckoning—
I veered off to the left, my apprentice-ring pulling like a fish on a thin line. The tents gave way to trailers, and I passed
the limousine sitting still and polished under a rigged-up canvas canopy. The headlights flickered once, green, as I flashed
past.
A huge silver Airstream rocked as I left the ground in a flying kick, etheric force booming through the scar and filling my
veins with sick heat. My boot hit the door, which crumpled and exploded in. A terrible, sour-sewer smell puffed past me, and
I heard Saul’s surprised half-yell.
The trailer was small, and every surface inside was crawling. Little bits of darkness moved, fluttering chitinous legs and
wings twitched as the roaches spilled over every surface. A pinprick of laser-red light glowed on the back of every goddamn
insect, and they startled into flight as I let out a half-swallowed, childlike cry of revulsion.
Hey, they were bugs, and they surprised me.
The tide of insect life streamed past me, little hairy legs touching and brushing. Saul’s coughing growl warned me.
I couldn’t worry about the inside of the trailer just at the moment. There was something behind me, and Saul barely managed
to get the warning out in time.
I threw myself back and down, landing hard on the two portable wooden steps leading up to the crumpled door. I’d blown a hole
in the side of the trailer, and I shot the Ringmaster four times as he hung in the air over me, the crystal knob atop his
cane ringing a high piercing note as a silverjacket bullet bounced off or past it, whining until it smashed into the side
of his leering, screaming face. It even knocked his hat off.
He dropped straight down. My knees jerked up, I rolled backward down the steps. My shoulder grated hard and popped against
straining wood, the edge of a step biting the back of my neck before I made a lunging, fishlike twist and was suddenly, irrationally
on my feet but facing the wrong way, whirling and dropping to one knee as the whip flicked out. The silver flechettes tied
to the end of its length jingled sweetly before they flayed flesh from the Ringmaster’s wrist, and his cane clattered away,
the crystal bouncing down first as if it was too heavy for the laws of physics.
The ’breed was bleeding, gushes of thin black ichor flooding out from every hole I’d blown in his tough shell. The roaches
swarmed him, the pinpricks of red on their back dividing as they multiplied, and he screamed in Helletöng, a sound like the
rusted sinews of the world groaning. The fabric of reality bowed around him in concentric circles, and the little insects
burst, clattering shells puffing into sick green smoke as they hit the dust. The Ringmaster shouldered his way up out of the
curls of vapor, his eyes dripping pumpkin hellfire, and snarled. The stairs splintered and groaned.
When you get to see under the carapace of beauty, the brain shudders aside from their alienness. A hunter who’s been to Hell
has seen this before, and it gives you a slight edge. You don’t run screaming-insane every time they shed their human seeming
and show the twisted thing underneath.
But it’s awful close.
I remained on one knee, instinct fighting with cold logic. If he leapt for me, my chances were better here, where I was centered
and had some clear space, than if I tried to get to my feet now. Training won out, and I stayed where I was, gun in my right
hand and whip in the other, shaken free with a jingling sound. Saul was to one side, still growling but staying out of the
way—just where he should have been.
A choked rattle echoed inside the gaunt silver trailer. My apprentice-ring cooled, a band of ice on my third left finger.
The Ringmaster snarled and doubled over, falling to the ground with a wet writhing thump. Black ichor splashed, and the entire
Cirque stilled, the faint ever-present calliope music skipping a beat. It limped and wheezed, gaps opening between the notes.
What the hell?
The Ringmaster screamed, and his cane quivered. The thin cry was echoed from inside the trailer, and I was suddenly sure that
something else was happening I’d better take a look at.
I uncoiled, force pulled through the scar, and cleared the busted stairs and the Ringmaster in one leap. Landed on my toes,
my center of gravity pulled up high and tight, and plunged into the trailer.
A pale shape lay, seizure bowing it up into a hoop, on the frowsty shelf-bed. It was the hostage, and just as I reached the
side of the bed, wading through a drift of empty clicking shells and candy bar wrappers, the Trader began to rattle deep down
in his chest.
Oh, fuck.
The hostage was dying. And if he shuffled off the mortal coil now, we were looking at a seriously fucked-up situation.