by Abra SW
In the ring, Lacey would “flee” on her mare. The other horses pursued her while maintaining a perfect circle. It wasn’t her flashiest act, but it was a good solid piece of performance, especially when she threw in some zig-zags and jumps that the unridden horses mirrored perfectly.
Now, they would flee in earnest. She glanced over at the wall.
Laborers streamed away from it, running along the riverbank or bolting onto the bridge in hopes that the creatures wouldn’t follow them.
The policeman who’d fired the shots was down. Not so good at protecting us after all, the analytic part of Lacey’s mind noted. He wouldn’t be protecting anyone ever again. He’d been trampled into a bloody mash of shattered bone and torn flesh beneath the hooves of the hell-creatures. The only way she even knew it was him was the useless musket lying nearby and the scraps of blue fabric clinging to the misshapen muzzle of the animal nuzzling the corpse.
The deer-thing jerked its head up and tossed something into the air, then snapped it up like a crocodile. Even from a distance, Lacey saw the blood dripping between its teeth.
Not deer, no. Deer don’t attack. Deer don’t run people down. Deer don’t—. She shuddered and looked away, clapping her heels to her mare’s sides and shouting, “Hiya!” to goad the mare to a gallop.
When Lacey heard clattering hooves on the bridge behind her, she risked a glance over her shoulder, rising in the stirrups to see better.
The deer-things stampeded onto the bridge. Those laborers who had fled to the bridge in hopes of safety were diving off the side into the uncertain safety of the river below.
One elderly man was too slow to get out of the way. At first, she thought the deer would race right past where he cowered. He was not so lucky. Two of the deer broke from the pack and lowered their heads. The old man screamed. They charged. The old man’s scream turned into a wail of mortal anguish as both deer skewered him on their unnaturally long and twisted antlers.
The deer tried to back up, but their antlers were stuck, trapped by their own viciousness. One of the deer tossed his head. The motion jerked the old man up, pulling the other deer along. The old man howled and blood trickled from his mouth as something vital ruptured inside him. The deer tossed their heads and jerked and tugged, trying to free themselves. Every movement wrung another scream from the old man until he fell silent. Dead or passed out, either was a mercy.
Thanks be to God everyone else fled. Even as Lacey had the thought, the girl sharpshooter galloped back past her, unlimbering her rifle.
At first, Lacey thought Genevieve had run mad—and then she saw the small figure in the center of the bridge, huddled against the railing. It was Tracy, the little girl who had giggled at the ostrich. She was alone and frozen in place.
At a gallop, Genevieve aimed and fired. A blossom of red sprang from the chest of one of the creatures, but it didn’t even slow its pace. Again she fired, and again, to no effect.
The child was doomed.
“Not if I can help it,” Lacey said through gritted teeth. She shouted a command to keep her string of horses racing across the bridge, and then she wheeled her mare around to face the horror.
Chapter 15
~* * *~
Hail the Heroes
Lacey Miller, the Fabulous Lady Equestrienne Who Defies the Fiery Rings of Death!
New York City
Lacey clapped her heels to her mare’s flanks, urging the horse to a flat-out gallop. Her breath thundered in her ears as she galloped toward the child trapped on the bridge.
Ahead of her, the girl sharpshooter aimed and fired at the monsters. One jerked its head to the side as its jaw exploded. Lacey could have cheered. Then she saw lumpy flesh crawl over the shattered bone. Within seconds, it was as the beast had never been injured.
Genevieve dismounted and sank to one knee to steady her rifle as she aimed and fired. One of the monsters collapsed to its knees and then pushed itself up and rose again. She was aiming for the joints, Lacey realized. It wouldn’t stop them, but it might slow them down long enough.
The little girl huddled against the railing, easy prey for the monsters unless Lacey could get there first. The angles flashed through her mind. The only way to rescue the girl at a gallop would be to perform a modified Cossack drag. Lacey needed to circle in front of them and grab the child on the way back.
“I’m coming for the girl!” Lacey shouted, hoping her voice carried over the thunder of hooves. “Don’t shoot!”
Genevieve aimed, fired. Reloaded, aimed, fired. Her horse bolted back across the bridge. Genevieve could have fled then, but she didn’t. She stayed by the little girl and kept firing as Lacey galloped past them.
“Don’t shoot!” Lacey shouted, as she raced between them and the deer-things.
The monsters were so close. Too close. She saw every detail of the creatures as she wheeled in front of them: the bloodshot eyes, the foam at nostrils and mouth, the bone spurs erupting from their flesh, and the blood smeared across their muzzles. It was a relief to swing herself over the mare’s side and hang down from the saddle.
Lacey focused on the small girl huddled beside the bridge railing. She had only one chance. The girl shrank back as the horse bore down on her. Lacey had expected that. She seized the child’s wrist with one hand and wrapped her other arm around the girl’s waist, sweeping her up as they galloped past.
Lacey’s arms burned like fire. She couldn’t haul herself and the girl back into the saddle, but all she had to do was hold on to the child.
Upside down and half under the horse’s belly, Lacey saw what happened next.
Genevieve should have run, but she didn’t. She kept firing, aiming for the deer-things’ legs. Giving Lacey time to widen her lead and escape.
The monsters were a scant yard away when Genevieve tossed her rifle aside.
For a second, Lacey thought she’d make it. Genevieve climbed onto the railing and was about to dive into the river below. Then a deer-monster stretched its neck out, sank its teeth into her shoulder, and wrenched her back onto the bridge. It jerked its head, sending her tumbling through the air like a rag doll. She landed headfirst on the hard stone of the bridge and did not move again. It was a mercy. Lacey looked away from what happened next.
The sound of Lacey’s horse’s hooves changed timbre, but it took her a minute to realize what that meant. They were off the bridge, in New York City. She caught glimpses of buildings, lamp poles, sidewalks, wagons. Wagons? She’d caught up to the rest of the circus.
“Whoa,” she croaked. “Whoa!”
Her mare slowed to a canter and then to a trot. They passed the roustabouts, the doctor’s wagon, and the animal cages.
“Whoa!”
The mare came to a stop beside two massive columns of bone and brass: the aether elephant’s legs. The mahout had stopped, even as the rest of the circus continued to flee farther into the city. Lacey released the little girl. She’d been gripping the child so hard that straightening her fingers sent throbbing pain through them. The girl fell to the ground and began to cry.
Lacey summoned her last reserves of strength and hauled herself up to the saddle. The world righted itself. She cast a quick look around.
The mahout hunched over the neck of his elephant, feverishly pushing buttons and pulling levers. The elephant’s giant, hammered brass ears rotated straight up. Its ribcage heaved and parted, ribs rippling open. Brass tubes inside slotted into new locations. And yet it did not move. What a terrible time for a malfunction, Lacey thought.
As the doctor’s wagon approached, Lacey shouted, “Doctor! Take the child!”
He nodded in response, pulling on the reins to slow his wagon. Seeing the promise of safety, the little girl bolted to him. He leaned over, lifted her up onto the seat beside him, and slapped his reins to get his wagon moving again.
Lacey wondered if the best chance for survival might be to abandon the wagons and seek shelter inside the buildings nearby. Deer couldn’t handle doors an
d stairs. Neither could her horses, though. Without her horses, she would be nothing.
Beside her, the bone and brass elephant lurched into movement—toward the attacking deer-creatures. Lacey gasped. Her eyes were drawn to the mahout sitting atop the elephant. She expected to see terror in his face. After all, he was trapped aboard a malfunctioning aether elephant, and it was carrying him to certain death.
He was grinning.
As the elephant strode onto the bridge, the mahout reached into the long brass canister by his seat—the canister that held a ceremonial flag—and pulled out a large bore gun. Lacey gasped as he mounted it onto a “flag holder” that fit it perfectly.
A veil lifted from her eyes. The elephant had never malfunctioned. Those upright brass ears acted as shields on either side of the mahout’s seat. The pointed ends of the splayed ribs would be as effective as a field of bayonets. And how had she not noticed that the protective brass caps on the elephant’s tusks had vanished, baring its wickedly sharp war ivory?
The mahout sighted his gun on a deer and fired. Half its head disappeared, and it tumbled to the stones and lay there, thrashing. He fired again, gouging a chunk out of another monster’s chest. Then he was among them.
Lacey felt sick, thinking of how casually they had treated the mahout and his war machine. If he was capable of this, what else could he do? What else did he know? The hoof pick in her waistband, a present from the mahout, seemed to grow heavier.
The monstrous bone elephant was as unstoppable as an avalanche in monsoon season. It speared the deer-things on its tusks and tossed them in the air. It crushed them beneath its hooves. It swung its side against them, stabbing them in a dozen places with bayonet-sharp ribs. The mahout aimed and fired from his protected seat on the elephant’s back. Flesh spattered against the stone.
Yet it wasn’t enough. The monsters kept getting back up again. The elephant inflicted horrendous wounds—and the deer healed them. Even that first head shot hadn’t been fatal. The deer staggered to its feet. Half its head was lumpy and misshapen, like a bag of rocks. Its eye had regrown halfway back on its skull, where it stared blankly at the sky. The beast should have been dead, but it shambled forward.
The mahout must have reached the same conclusion. Instead of continuing his attack, he stopped and did something complicated with the elephant’s control apparatus. The elephant’s ornamental collar unlatched and rotated counterclockwise. He seized the end, fed it through the elephant’s skull, and hooked it to the opening of the elephant’s trunk.
The elephant wheeled around and stampeded through the deer pack, mashing them to the ground. It kicked left and right, shattering their ribs and pulverizing their legs.
As soon as the deer were down, the elephant charged to the end of the bridge. The deer began to struggle to their feet. The bone and brass elephant raised its trunk as if to trumpet defiance. Instead, it expelled a shining golden sphere that flew from the elephant’s trunk and shattered among the deer.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then flames roared to life, wrapping around the monsters’ flesh. The deer screamed as pain finally penetrated their maddened minds. They reared and fell and reared again. Some managed to run, though fire wreathed them.
Lacey stared in shock. He had fire aether bombs? Those shining golden balls decorating the elephant’s collar were more armament than ornament.
The mahout steered his elephant back into the fray. It waded through fire and crushed the deer until they moved no more. Lacey expected it to catch fire, but it didn’t. When the last deer lay still, the elephant emerged unburnt, though soot streaked the bones of its legs.
She heard a roaring in her ears. Then she realized the sound was cheering. She looked back at new New York. The townies hung out of building windows, shaking their fists and shouting approval.
Only one thing to do.
Though her muscles screamed in protest, Lacey leapt to stand on her saddle. “You’ve seen Rajesh, the Hindoo mystic, and his fearsome aether-powered bone-and-brass elephant!” she shouted. “We are the Loyale Traveling Menagerie, Hippodrome, Circus, and Museum of Educational Novelties! See us perform tonight on the dock at Port Rumsey! Tell your neighbors, tell your friends—heck, tell your enemies! Come, see our performance tonight at Port Rumsey!”
She signaled her horse. The mare reared, the momentum catapulting Lacey up in the air. She executed a neat flip before landing on her feet and bowing. People clapped, so she assumed they couldn’t tell how close she came to falling over.
The circus doctor hurried over, trailed by the little girl Lacey had rescued. “I saw that. You nearly toppled over there at the end. How are you?”
“I’ll be fine,” she assured him. “I strained my muscles a bit, that’s all. You needn’t worry. I’m sure you have your own business to attend to.”
He nodded. “I need to go and see if what I suspect about those creatures is true.” He frowned at the carnage on the bridge. “Assuming that mad Indian left me enough to examine! But first, Miss Tracy LaChance wants to tell you something.” He nudged the little girl forward.
Tracy stared at Lacey with big eyes and sucked bashfully on her thumb for a minute. Then, mustering her courage, she removed that appendage and said, “Thank you, lady. I was scared.” Having covered the matter to her satisfaction, she popped her thumb back in her mouth.
Lacey reached out and swept Tracy into a hug, feeling a pang in her heart. There had been a moment, when she hung off the side of the horse and reached for the child, that she had been sure she would miss, that the child would die. A wave of gratitude for her well-trained horses washed over Lacey. Without them, she would be nothing but another useless female—and Tracy would be dead.
“Tracy!” Lacey released her grasp on the little girl as the girl’s brother ran up to them. He was soaking wet from his head to his toes. “You shouldn’t have pulled away, Tracy! You scared me! Next time you jump with me, you hear!” He blinked, looking past them to the charred corpses on the bridge. “What happened?”
“Something to be scared of,” Lacey said dryly. “See that you take better care of her in future.”
“Yes’m!” he said earnestly.
Relenting, she added, “And come see the circus. We’ll be performing at Rumsey Port tonight. I’ll leave word with the ticket-taker that you and your sister are to be allowed in for free.”
“The circus? Yes, ma’am!” And there it was, the grin that she’d been hoping for back when she first tied the trick-riding straps to her saddle.
The doctor was examining the corpses of the dead deer-monsters on the bridge. Lacey rode up to him. The smell of charred meat made her stomach grumble.
“Can we eat them?” she asked.
The doctor frowned. “Bone aether is usually administered by injection into the flesh, but taking your nourishment from this thing, having it spread throughout your body … no, I wouldn’t eat it.”
“What does bone aether have to do with it?”
The doctor scowled and didn’t answer the question. “Shouldn’t we be moving along?”
“Excellent point,” she allowed. “You should return to your wagon and hang up your posters, Dr. Panjandrum. Best we be off soon, but we can put on our finery and give this city a proper grand procession.”
“I need the bodies—”
She held up her hand to stop him. “Quickly. Get the strong man to help you. And leave plenty for the police to inspect. One thing we learned while scouting the city is that we do not want to interfere with what they consider proper legal procedure. Tell the others to gussy up while I consult with our Indian warrior.”
“Our …? Oh.” He nodded.
Lacey approached the mahout. She planned to say something carefully roundabout. Polite, but firm. Demanding answers, but respectful. Instead, she heard herself say, “The elephant is a weapon.”
He looked levelly at her. “Anything can be a weapon. We are all having hidden depths. But as you yourself we
re saying, we must stick together.”
She found her mouth opening and closing without a word coming out, so she spun on her heel and stalked back to the caravan to prepare for the grand processional.
It took less time than she would have expected. Everyone was eager to get away from the bridge. Meanwhile, however, word of what had happened had spread. People came out on the street to watch the circus parade. At first, they pretended to be on some errand that just happened to bring them near the circus. Now and then a scowling policeman would stalk toward the gaudy circus procession, but one of his brethren would intercept him and whisper in his ear and he’d fade back without pestering them. Seeing that tacit approval, the spectators became brave. First, they stopped and stared openly. Then they smiled. Then they waved and cheered. Even the corpses dangling from the lampposts seemed to take on a festive, ornamental air.
At Rumsey Port dock, an unruly crowd of sailors awaited them. They welcomed the circus with shouts that included several crude suggestions Lacey pretended not to hear. No wonder the commissioner had trouble with this bunch! The hastily pulled aside barricades did not escape her notice either. She smiled and waved, glad that the animal trainer and ringmaster-in-training had made some friends while they were here.
One member of the crowd separated itself from the others and came forward with arms outstretched. “Welcome!”
Hearing a woman’s voice emanating from the mannishly dressed figure shocked Lacey. It must be that female captain that Christopher had mentioned meeting.
Michael and Christopher hastened forward. After they greeted her and introduced her to the rest of the circus, Captain Angie showed them where they could circle their wagons and set up their circus tents for the performance tonight. Then she invited them all to the tavern to tell her all about how, as she put it, “demons from hell chased you onto High Bridge, where you battled them with a dozen trained war-elephants.”
