Chapter Eight

“Come try, come try, come try your luck!”

“Ladies, ladies, tell yer fellers to win you a bouquet!”

“Spin in the Whirligig! It’ll spin your mind!”

“Your likeness affected in only four minutes! No faster portraiture in the world!”

“Experience the hypnagogic mesmerism of Sillion the Extraordinary!”

“Three rounds, three guineas! Stand for three rounds against ‘Iron Man’ Magus and take home three Gs! No cactus-people.”

The night air was thick with noise. The challenges, the shouts, the invitations and temptations and dares sounded around the laughing party like bursting balloons. Gasjets, mixed with select chymicals, burnt red, green, blue and canary yellow. The grass and paths of Sobek Croix were sticky with spilt sugar and sauce. Vermin scampered from the skirts of stalls into the dark bushes of the park clutching choice morsels. Gonophs and cutpurses slipped predatory through the crowds like fish through weeds. Indignant roars and violent cries sounded in their wake.

The crowd was a moving stew of human and vodyanoi, cactus, khepri, and other, rarer breeds: hotchi and strider and stiltspear and races the names of which Isaac did not know.

A few yards out from the fair, the darkness of the grass and trees was absolute. The bushes and boughs were fringed with bunting of ragged paper, discarded and ensnared and slowly shredded by the wind. Paths criss-crossed the park, leading to lakes and flower beds and acres of untended growth, and the old monastic ruins at the centre of the huge common.

Lin and Cornfed, Isaac and Derkhan and all the others strolled past enormous contraptions of bolted steel, garishly painted iron and hissing lights. Delighted squeals sounded from little cars swinging on flimsy-looking chains above them. A hundred different manically cheerful tunes sounded from a hundred engines and organs, an unsettling cacophony that ebbed and flowed around them.

Alex munched honeyed nuts; Bellagin salted meat; Thighs Growing a watery mulch delicious to cactus-people. They threw food at each other, caught it in their mouths.

The park was thronging with punters, throwing hoops over poles, firing children’s bows at targets, guessing under which cup the coin was hidden. Children screamed with pleasure and misery. Prostitutes of all races, sexes and descriptions sashayed exaggeratedly between the stalls or stood by the beerhalls, winking at passers-by.

The party disintegrated slowly as they passed into the heart of the fair. They hovered a minute while Cornfed showed off his archery. He ostentatiously offered his prizes, two dolls, to Alex and a young, beautiful whore who cheered his triumph. The three disappeared arm in arm through the crowd. Tarrick proved adept at a fishing game, pulling three live crabs from a big swirling tub. Bellagin and Spint had their futures read in the cards, squealing in terror when the bored witch turned over The Snake and The Old Crone in succession. They demanded a second opinion from a wide-eyed scarabomancer. She gazed theatrically at the images skittering across the carapaces of her pattern beetles as they bumbled through their sawdust.

Isaac and the others left Bellagin and Spint behind. The remnants of the party turned a corner beside the Wheel of Destiny and a roughly fenced-off section of the park came into view. Inside a line of small tents curved away from view. Above the gateway was a crudely painted legend: the circus of weird.

“Now,” said Isaac ponderously. “Reckon I might have a little look at this…”

“Plumbing the depths of human squalor, ‘Zaac?” asked a young artist’s model whose name Isaac could not remember. Besides Lin, Isaac and Derkhan, only a few others of the original group were left. They looked mildly surprised at Isaac’s choice.

“Research,” Isaac said grandly. “Research. Fancy joining me, Derkhan? Lin?”

The others took the hint with reactions ranging from careless waves to petulant flounces. Before they all disappeared, Lin signed rapidly to Isaac.

Not interested in this. Teratology more your thing. Meet you at the entrance in two hours?

Isaac nodded briefly and squeezed her hand. She signed goodbye to Derkhan and trotted off to catch up with a sound-artist whose name Isaac had never known.

Derkhan and Isaac stared at each other.

“…and then there were two,” sung Derkhan, a snatch of a children’s counting song about a basket of kittens that died, one by one, grotesquely.

There was an additional charge to enter the Circus of Weird, which Isaac paid. Though hardly empty, the freakshow was less crowded than the main body of the fair. The more monied the punters inside looked, the more furtive their air.

The freakshow brought out the voyeur in the populace and the hypocrisy in the gentry.

There seemed to be some kind of tour starting, which promised to view each exhibit in the Circus in turn. The bawls of the showman bade the assembled stick close together and prepare themselves for sights such as mortal eyes were not meant to see.

Isaac and Derkhan hung back a little and followed the troupe. Isaac saw that Derkhan had a notebook out and a pen poised.

The bowler-hatted Master of Ceremonies approached the first tent.

“Ladies and gents,” he whispered loudly and huskily, “in this tent lurks the most remarkable and terrifying creature ever seen by mortal man. Or vodyanoi, or cactus, or whatever,” he added in a normal voice, nodding graciously to the few xenians in the crowd. He returned to his bombastic tones. “Originally described fifteen centuries ago in the travelogues of Libintos the Sage, of what was then just plain ol’ Crobuzon. On his trips south to the burning wastes, Libintos saw many marvellous and monstrous things. But none more terrifying than the awesome…mafadet!”

Isaac had been sporting a sardonic smile. But even he joined the mass gasp.

Have they really got a mafadet? he thought as the MC drew back the curtain from the front of the little tent. He pushed forward to see.

There was another, louder gasp, and people at the front fought to move back. Others shoved to take their place.

Behind thick black bars, tethered by heavy chains, was an extraordinary beast. It lay on the ground, its huge dun body like a massive lion’s. Between its shoulders was a fringe of denser fur from which sprouted an enormous serpentine neck, thicker than a man’s thigh. Its scales glistened an oily, ruddy tan. An intricate pattern wound up the top of that curling neck, expanding to a diamond shape where it curved and became an enormous snake’s head.

The mafadet’s head lolled on the ground. Its huge forked tongue nicked in and out. Its eyes glistened like jet.

Isaac grabbed Derkhan.

“It’s a fucking mafadet,” he hissed in amazement. Derkhan nodded, wide-eyed.

The crowd had drawn back from the front of the cage. The showman grabbed a barbed stick and poked it through the bars, goading the enormous desert creature. It gave forth a deep, rumbling hiss and batted pathetically at its tormentor with a massive forepaw. Its neck coiled and twisted in desultory misery.

There were small screams from the crowd. People surged at the little barrier before the cage.

“Back, ladies and gents, back, I beg of you!” The showman’s voice was pompous and histrionic. “You are all in mortal danger! Don’t anger the beast!”

The mafadet hissed again under his continued torments. It wriggled backwards along the floor, crawling out of range of the vicious spike.

Isaac’s awe was waning fast.

The exhausted animal squirmed in undignified agony as it sought the rear of the cage. Its threadbare tail lashed the stinking goat carcass presumably provided for its nourishment. Dung and dust stained the mafadet’s pelt, along with blood that oozed thickly from numerous sores and nicks. Its sprawled body twitched a little as that cold, blunt head rose on the powerful muscles of the snake-neck.