Around and around, the three of them circled. Ryan marveled at the man’s grip strength and stamina. They were all that kept the Wazls from feasting on the audience.
Gradually, the birds’ frantic, sweeping spirals grew narrower and dropped in altitude. Their cries became desperate and despairing. As the man was borne around, his boot heels cut furrows in the dirt. When the Wazls were finally exhausted, they just dropped from the air, crash landing in the center ring. The man took a hard landing, too, bouncing forward on his face and chest. He didn’t loosen his grip, though.
Before the Wazls could recover from the impact, a dozen roustabouts set upon them with long poles and ropes, trussing their beaks and legs together, then carrying them on the poles back to their cage.
Their rider removed his steel mask and took a low bow.
The crowd jumped to its feet, cheering.
Amid the tumult, something on the far side of the center ring caught Ryan’s eye. Something flashed behind the mirror wall of the facing trailer. And for a fraction of a second, the silver, reflective glass became vaguely, hazily transparent, as if through a pall of oily brown smoke.
Then it was over.
In that frozen moment Ryan glimpsed a ghostly figure, whose afterimage was burned deep into his brain. Spindly limbed. Slouching. Menacing. Even if he hadn’t seen the glare of the light on the steel, he would have known who it was.
Chapter Fourteen
When the Magnificent Creeca opened the door to the Magus’s private viewing booth, a crack of light from the tunnel speared the gloom, flaring off the wall of glass. Before the carny master could get the door shut behind him, the half-metal monster who was his lord and master snapped around in his recliner, steel eyes glaring.
“Sorry,” Creeca said. His words hung in the air, the half whispered apology unaccepted. He kicked himself for saying anything at all. Over the years he had learned that silence was always the best response. Contrite silence.
With the viewing booth’s door closed and darkness surrounding them, the one-way mirror again became transparent from their direction.
“I see you brought your goggles, as I requested,” the Magus said. “Go on, put them on.”
Creeca hefted the massively overbuilt ComBloc infrared sensors by their wide head straps. They were powered by a radium battery, and came installed with a small warning plate in Russian that the carny master couldn’t read. Translated, the warning said: Extreme Radiation Hazard. He placed the heavy instrument on top of his head, with the stubby goggle lenses pointing up at the ceiling like antler buds.
On the other side of the glass, roustabouts were pushing the Wazls’ cage out of the tent. A moment after they disappeared through the lone exit, another trailer entered, this one tightly tarped over and dragged forward by men in black masks that covered their heads from crown to throat.
The masks protected them from the effects of a chemical gas, the death producing agent known as Zyclon B.
How the Magus had discovered the stockpile of lethal gas was unknown. Creeca presumed that he had found the canisters during his wanderings back and forth through the timescape. Somehow he had arranged to steal it, and had left it in a place where it could be recovered more than a century later. There was no way to prove this, of course. However the Magus had come by the information, he had led the carny right to the burial spot.
The carny master watched the one-eyed man stare at the cage and at the masked men pushing it. His blood ran suddenly cold.
“He knows!” Creeca exclaimed. “Cawdor knows!”
“Of course he knows,” the Magus said, chuckling.
The noise grated on Crecca’s nerves, like stripped gears grinding.
“That doesn’t worry you?”
“No,” the Magus said, “it doesn’t. What it does is make what is about to happen all that much sweeter. The one-eyed man knows, and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. Nothing he can do to save the good and innocent people of Bullard ville. Nothing he can do to save his traveling companions, his own son or even himself. Ryan Cawdor has a date with death today that he isn’t going to miss.” After a pause, the Magus said, “I hope you impressed on our looting teams the need for speed and selectivity.”