Foreward
Welcome to The Circus of Brass and Bone. This story is free, but donations are what keeps it going. All proceeds go to help cover my mother's treatment for advanced ovarian cancer.

Now settle back and enjoy the circus. It's the end of civilization, but the show...must go on.

Episode 8

The Peculiar Case of the Fortune Teller's Veil, Part I

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New York City, Fort Hamilton Stockade

It was autumn in Shenandoah Valley, and the air was thick with the reek of smoke. Second Lieutenant Richard Walters of the Grey Steel Regiment, Fifth Company, stared out over the scorched wasteland. Shenandoah Valley was a rich and fertile jewel before North fought South up and down the length of it. Wherever the Yankees passed, they burned crops and slaughtered farm animals. Without the ability to supplement their food stock, the Confederates' wagon train supplies were nearly exhausted. Walters' whole company was on half-rations and ravenous with it. There was something very bad about that, though he couldn't quite remember what.

He tried to remember what was so bad as his batman* dropped the war harness over his shoulders. His batman tightened the buckles, loaded the tank of bone aether onto his back, strapped the brass contacts into place, opened the valves to precisely the degree recommended, and pressed the activation button. Walters gritted his teeth when he heard the familiar clink of the needle covers sliding back. A dozen wide-gauge steel needles jabbed into him at the contact points, tearing through the scar tissue that formed unnaturally quickly between battles. He breathed. As bone aether began trickling into his system, the pain subsided and strength poured into him.

Stop, Walters tried to say. Wait. Remove the harness. That's an order. His mouth said, "Thank you. Check with the platoon leaders to make sure our boys are ready to go."

A feeling of boundless energy and power surged through him. His sense of foreboding deepened. Something very bad was going to happen, and he had to stop it. He tried to flip the activation switch off. Instead his hands moved to his camp table, picking up maps with battle lines and possible strategies drawn on them.

He stared at his knobbly hands. Ridges of scar tissue marched across his flesh. Lumps and bumps tented his skin where bone spurs pushed upward. Fingernails thickened and lengthened into claws. He stared at the scars and bone-bumps and had the odd feeling that he wasn't looking at his own hands. They shouldn't look like that anymore.

In the early days of the War, when they all believed it would be over quickly, those manifestations would have invalided him out. Those had been the glory days, when the Confederacy's brave boys in the Grey Steel Regiment were the toast of every ball and the desire of every belle. Victory had seemed certain. The North was struggling to build their war machine. The South didn't have nearly the materiel manufacturing capability, but that wouldn't matter because the War would soon be over. How could it be otherwise, when a single soldier in the Grey Steel Regiment could leap over skirmish lines, sprint faster than a Northern soldier could aim his rifle, and take out an entire company by himself? No fortifications could stand against them.

That was before the Yankees' fire-spitting tanks. Before the "steel killers." Before the Confederacy lost the ports. Before the food and munitions shortages. Before the burning of Atlanta. Before the North began to win. Before the South's beautiful boys returned home as monsters.

Walters didn't look so bad as some of his regiment, though he chose to avoid the mirror and let his batman shave him.

Some soldiers had harnesses that delivered higher doses of bone aether. Natural variations in the valve manufacture, the generals said. We must all make sacrifices. Some soldiers deliberately self-administered higher doses, from misguided valor or because the rush of power that came with it was addictive. Some simply lived long enough that they began to manifest signs of the excitation of bone aether: growths of scar tissue or bone, deformities of the flesh, flashes of temper, ravenous hunger, and an irrationality that sometimes bordered on madness.

His batman pushed aside the canvas tent flap and stuck his head inside. "The boys are ready, sir."

No, Walters wanted to say. No, they're not. They have no idea.

"Thank you," he said. "I'll be out in a minute. For the glory of the Confederacy, eh?" His traitor hands gathered the battle plans and stuffed them inside his uniform jacket.

He had to stop his platoon from making a skirmish line and going into battle, but his feet lifted and fell, his lips pulled back in a smile, and his hands beckoned his squad sergeants to him. His sergeants showed the same minimal manifestations that he did. He insisted on self-discipline in his subordinates--and they'd been lucky.

Stop them, he thought urgently, but he heard himself outlining the battle plans.

No, no, no no no. . . .

Time sped.

His platoon assembled. All his boys were there and harnessed-up, even the ones who would have been invalided out a year ago. Even the ones who had been invalided out but hadn't been transported away to a Confederate hospital yet. Men their own mothers wouldn't have recognized. Men with tumors distorting their skin and horns erupting from their bones. Men who jerked and twitched. Men who spoke too loud or didn't speak at all. Men who laughed and cried for no reason. Brave men all, who for the sake of their homes and their families had sacrificed everything. Some would say they'd even sacrificed their humanity.

His face smiled. He should have been proud, but all he felt was dread and a bone-gnawing hunger.

His mouth moved, rallying the troops. They needed rallying. Morale was shit. As was common in the Grey Steel Regiment, Walters' company had been detached to duty with the Thirteenth Regiment. That didn't mean the Thirteenth Regiment liked it. The days of the Grey Steel Regiment being seen as heroes were long gone. They were monsters, and they were treated no better than the lowest foot soldier. Food supplies were short, terribly short--you tried not to look at what you were eating, because the salt pork was blue-green, the cornmeal full of weevils, and fresh vegetables nothing but a fading memory.*

Walters' stomach churned with nausea.

Time skipped, and they were in the thick of the battle against the Yanks. He led the skirmish line forward, bounding across the battlefield. One leap, and he was over a defensive cluster of soldiers surrounding their captain. The blue-belly captain raised his rifle, but he was slow, so slow. Walters stretched his arm out and grabbed the captain's throat. His elongated fingernails scored deep gouges in the captain's flesh.

When Walters pulled his arm back, a chunk of the captain's throat came with it. Walters bounded away, leaving the captain convulsing on the ground and gasping for air.

That was how it started, Walters thought. No. I don't want to see what comes next. But he couldn't close his eyes and he couldn't stop the surge of triumphant power that raised goosebumps across his skin.

His appetite whetted, Walters leapfrogged across the field of engagement, empty hands outstretched to grasp the enemy. He destroyed emplacements. He broke reinforced positions. He killed officers. He twisted heavy cannon into scrap. He panicked cavalry horses. And his boys leapt with him, sowing chaos in the battle.

The bluecoats fought back. It wasn't like the first engagement at Shiloh when they'd fallen back in confusion before the Grey Steel Regiment. The Union knew what they were up against, and they'd developed devilish war-weapons in the factories of the North. Fire-spewing tanks stalked across the valley on their giant mechanical chicken legs. Weapons loaded with "steel-killer" ammunition were aimed and fired at Walters' boys. Thanks to the accelerated healing excess bone aether allowed, the Grey Steel Regiment could shrug off ordinary injuries, even ones that would kill a regular soldier. But if one steel-killer crossbow bolt or bullet punctured their bone aether tank, they died. Walters hoped if he died on the battlefield, it would be by an air aether bullet. Those deaths were quick and, he hoped, relatively painless.

But I didn't die then, he thought.

Despite the Union's weaponry, the Confederates were winning.

Walters was so hungry it was hard to think, even though he was chewing on something. Must have still had a scrap of salt pork in his pocket. He found himself moving from place to place with no memory of the in-between. And then--it all went wrong. The skirmish line fell apart.

Screams rang across the battlefield behind him. There was always screaming on the front lines--and shouting and swearing and the sobs of wounded men--but this sounded different. He spun around.

Bill Buckford, of the Virginia Buckfords, stood spraddle-legged over a corpse as grey- and blue-coated soldiers alike scattered. He brandished something above his head. A ripped-off leg.

Whorls of activity circled both sides of the skirmish line, where the boys of the Grey Steel Regiment hunted. There was so much screaming. Something was terribly wrong, but it was hard for Walters to think above his rising hunger. And I don't want to remember.

Bill Buckford hunched possessively over the corpse of the officer he'd killed. His shoulders moved as he did--something. Walters leapt closer. A couple of other Grey Steel Regiment soldiers followed him. Bill glanced over his shoulder, revealing the mask of blood smeared over the lower half of his face. He smiled, and his teeth gleamed red. Somebody's stomach growled.

A rain of flaming naphtha-soaked arrows plummeted out of the sky. One pierced the tank on Bill's back. Unseen inside the arrow's shaft, a fragile vial of fire aether shattered on impact. The fire aether saturated the shaft and mixed with the bone aether in the tank. The mix of bone and fire aether was sucked up the pipeline and injected into Bill's muscle and bone.

With it went the fire.

Bill arched his back and screamed as his flesh cooked from the inside out. His skin turned bright red. Steam wafted from his body. It smelled a lot like barbecue.

Bill died then, and thank God for that. Many of my boys died on that battlefield. But I didn't.

Ex-Second Lieutenant Walters shuddered up out of the nightmare. His eyes flew open and he stared up into the darkness of the stockade cell. The taste of human blood lingered in his mouth.

#

A few miles from New York City

Turban, or no turban? The bloody thing made Martin Smythe's head itch, but it was part of the disguise. He'd worn it for three weeks straight when he first joined the circus, until the circus members all accepted him as Rajesh, the Indian mahout. Anyone who'd ever read a penny-dreadful recognized the Indian mystic type. Give them a turban, a few cryptic statements, and a yoga pose or two, and they'd fill in the rest.

Most of the disguise he liked. He enjoyed practicing yoga again--it hadn't been quite the thing at Cambridge, though he would have appreciated a good revitalizing stretch after some of those cricket matches. And though his thick Indian accent might be a bit over the top, it made a change from having to disguise all hint of his mother tongue. That dratted turban was another matter.

He sighed. When the Maharana of Udaipur* gave you a mission, you did a pukka* job of it. You tried not to doubt whether there was still a Maharana, or an Udaipur, or a British India. You tried not to wonder if your widowed mother still lived, if she still brought her sari up to cover her mouth when she laughed, if she still made chapatis* for the neighborhood kids.

Martin reined his thoughts in with an effort.

At least the bloody turban was so conspicuous that nobody seeing it would ever suspect he had anything sneaky in mind. He squared the turban on his head, slid his Gurkha knife inside his embroidered waistcoat, and slipped out of his wagon.

Against the rich blue of the sky before dawn, trees stretched their skeletal limbs up to the heavens. The circus wagons were dark, quiet lumps. The morning air carried the shifting of the horses, the yawns and grumbles of the menagerie animals, and the first chirpings of the dawn chorus.* In the distance, the skyline of New York City loomed like a distant, dark mountain range.

Martin felt a cold foreboding in the pit of his stomach as he stared at the darkened city. What awaited them there? What awaited him there?

He shrugged it off and wound his way through the maze of circus wagons. Pre-mission jitters, that was all it was. Collywobbles. He should have taken care of this earlier, as soon as he saw those coded pages from the ringmaster's trunk, but it would seem more natural now. Besides, he admitted to himself, I was shaken by the catastrophe. Thrown off my game. Who wouldn't be? It was like the lord of death himself had come to earth.

Martin passed under the shadow of his mechanical elephant and knocked on the door of the wagon beside it. Last night, he'd been careful to position the beast beside this particular wagon.

No sound came from inside. He knocked again. He heard muffled grumbling and the creak of the floorboards. A match hissed, and light seeped from under the crack in the door. The door swung open, and the skeleton man squinted out. "What do you want, Rajesh?" he asked, shining the lantern into Martin's eyes. "It's hardly the time for a social call."

Martin waggled his head in that yes-no Indian gesture he knew foreigners found so annoying. "I am having these sausages," he said, "but my religion is forbidding me from the eating of cows, and I am wondering--"

"Come in, come in!" the skeleton man said, all smiles at the mention of sausages, even though Martin's hands were empty.

He'd taken the lure. It even happened to be true. After years of eating beef in England, Martin felt a sudden rush of freedom at being able to say so. Trying to persuade himself that only Indian cows were sacred hadn't helped much. He'd made such sacrifices for his country--and he didn't mean England.

As Martin stepped up into the wagon, he thought he heard a rustle nearby. But when he scanned his surroundings, he saw only the dark blotches of wagons.

The inside of the skeleton man's wagon appeared to be half the size of the outside because of the jumble it held. Stacks of books and newspaper broadsheets and candy tins rose to the ceiling. Bric-a-brac nestled in the nooks and crannies. Silk flowers and ribbons dangled from the ceiling and spilled across the floor. Martin took a step further inside, closed the door, and had to duck as the movement sent a ham dangling from the ceiling to swinging in a hazardous arc.

"Sausages?" the skeleton man asked, holding out his hands. Those long, thin fingers trembled slightly.

"Not yet," Martin said. "I am wanting a trade, yes? You are finding papers in the ringmaster's cabin?" His accent slipped a little, but it hardly mattered.

"Yeeesss," the skeleton man said warily, backing away. "I gave them to the fortune teller and the equestrienne when we reached Boston."

"I am trading the sausages for the other papers."

The skeleton man shook his head quickly. "There were no other papers. And where are these sausages anyways?"

Martin ignored the question. "You are lying." He let the last traces of his thick Indian accent slip away as he backed the skeleton man into the corner. He slid his Gurkha knife out of his waistcoat, angling it so the lantern light ran along its blade.

The skeleton man kept shaking his head, his eyes riveted on that on that sharp gleam of light. From the direction of the wagon window, Martin heard a faint scratching sound, as if a short person were trying to pull themself up to peer in the window. He spun and dashed to the door.

When he threw open the door and leapt out, knife in hand and ready for an ambush, he found--nothing. The person, if person there had been, was gone.

The scuffle of footsteps inside the wagon behind him gave him enough warning to dive forward and seize the door before the skeleton man could slam it shut and throw the bar. The door still slammed, but on Martin's hand instead. Red pain seared through him, but he bit back both the pain and the urge to scream or swear aloud.

He reached around with his other hand and muscled the door open despite the skeleton man's attempt to hold it shut. It wasn't difficult. The skeleton man, well, he was thin and stringy and mostly made of brittle bones.

Once inside, Martin shut the door quietly and slid the bar across it. The skeleton man's eyes widened. "Where are the papers?" Martin asked.

The skeleton man shook his head, backing away. Martin felt a bit sorry for him, but he didn't let it show in his face as he closed the distance, knife in hand. "Where are they?" he asked again.

The skeleton man's eyes flickered to the corner his bed was wedged into. A chocolate tin lay beside the bed. Martin crab-walked sideways, scooped the tin up, and shook it. They both heard the hissing sound of sliding paper. Careful to keep an eye on the skeleton man, Martin braced the tin against his hip and pried the lid off. He smiled when he saw the papers scribbled with code. "Did you take anything else?" he asked.

The skeleton man shook his head.

"Think, man! Was there anything else with these?"

"Just a King James bible."

Martin felt a rush of excitement go through him. "Thank you. Sorry for the scare I must have given you. Here, sit down." He gestured to the bed.

The skeleton man perched on the edge and smiled back at him tentatively. Martin picked up the blanket from the bed and wrapped it around the skeleton man's shoulders. Then he took one quick step closer and rammed his knife between his ribs. The skeleton man's face whitened. He pressed a hand to his chest. "You. . . ."

"Sorry, old chap." If 'twere done, 'twere best done quickly, and all that rot. Martin jerked the knife out and brought it up in a smooth stroke across the skeleton man's throat.He pulled the blanket up as he did so. The thick wool soaked up all the blood. A gurgle, a gasp, and then Martin was the only living person in the wagon.

Into a burlap sack went--as best he could judge--the skeleton man's most prized possessions, the ones that would be obvious in their absence or conspicuous in their presence. In these uncertain times, surely it was reasonable to think that a performer or two might run away to join the city? He avoided looking at the tintype photographs as he swept them into the sack.

Finished, he blew out the lantern and opened the wagon door a crack. He listened. Nothing. He peered out. Nobody.

He slipped out the door and went to the bone elephant. A sequence of taps with his mahout's stick along the brass keys arrayed between the elephant's ribs, and the elephant reached up with its snakelike leather trunk and pulled off the extra rug he'd thrown across its back last night. He wrapped the skeleton man's body up in the rug, tied the ends up with rope, and hustled the parcel outside. Then he climbed up to sit on the elephant's back, had the elephant lift the body, and breathed a deep sigh of relief. The riskiest part was past.

He'd always practiced the elephant's act with a toss-tool of a rug wrapped around a log, to prepare for just this eventuality. The first time people saw something body-shaped wrapped in a rug, they'd look close at it. The dozenth time, they wouldn't even spare it a glance. Martin had hoped never to need the ruse, but he supposed that after the ringmaster grew suspicious, it was only a matter of time.

He tapped his stick, and the elephant twirled the body, tossed it high in the air, and caught it. Another signal, and the elephant lurched forward, its ponderous dinner plate-sized feet crunching over the thin crust of snow. The rug-wrapped body twirled, swooped up into the air, and fell again, caught at the last moment by the elephant's trunk. After the first mile, Martin stopped the show. Two miles farther away, he stopped in a copse of trees and dumped the skeleton man's body and the bag of his precious possessions in a hollow. He covered the body with stones and fallen branches and then covered it with frozen leaves. He made a thorough job of it, despite his injured hand slowing him down. When he was done, nobody would have suspected a body lay there. The area still looked disturbed, but the next snow would cover that. He squinted at the grey-streaked sky. Perhaps even today.

After he'd finished disposing of the body, he returned to the skeleton man's wagon. He knelt and studied the ground next to the wagon window. He thought he saw something, but it was hard to be sure in the cool blue light of early dawn. He took a chance and lit the lantern.

"Bloody hell," he swore.

There were boot prints under the window, small, neat ones with square heels. He studied them for a moment, imprinting the image into his mind, and then he blew out the lamp.

(To be continued in Episode 9: The Peculiar Case of the Fortune Teller's Veil, Part II)

If you enjoyed this episode of The Circus of Brass and Bone, consider making a donation to keep it going (and get a character named after you, and a copy of the final book). All proceeds go to help cover the costs of my mother's treatment for advanced ovarian cancer. If you can't afford a donation, tell a friend, or blog about it!

Acknowledgments

This episode is brought to you by the generous donations of Christopher Janzen and Jessica Miller.

The Circus of Brass and Bone is written and recorded by Abra Staffin-Wiebe (that's me). My main website is at www.aswiebe.com, and I blog at cloudscudding.livejournal.com.

Music is courtesy of Vermillion Lies. Go to their website at vermillionlies.com to hear more.

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