The shot from my cannon was enough to drop a charging elk, loud as a thunder snap and bright enough to light up the room—dragon’s breath ammo, home made. And so the little Wahira went flying, eyes rounded, legs splayed out, braids tossing like a little girl jumping rope, the breath wheezing out of her. A plume of dust kicked up as she fell flat. Her body went motionless on the ground, dress rumpled, smoke fuming from her chest.
GahaAHAHAhahaHAha! The troll and his minions hollered.
My mouth wrenched but I turned and steeled myself.
“I gotta give it to you...” Grivonne wiped some tears, gulping for air between lingering laughs. This is better than any magician act I've ever seen. If you take care of this job in the city, you're welcome to come on the road. I'm sure I'll have a job for you here and there, and in between you can pull funny cagg like this. Hell, you might actually have an act. For now, here.” The troll extended his massive arm, handed me the money bag.
“Finally.” I relished the fabric’s tugging weight in my grip. “Someone appreciates my talent. You have a good eye.”
“That’s right. And my word is good. ” He grinned a toadie friendliness, nodding down to the bag with generous pride. “Your reward.”
“Great.” I inhaled deep: gold, the rosie smell of success. “Now, here's yours.”
My elbow swiveled, was lost in a metallic blur, the gun barrel striking midnight under his chin.
BLAM!
The shot flashed up through his jaw, bursting an eyeball out, coming up right up through his conya, blowing his fuzzy top hat off in a mix of blood and bone and brains. As he was flailing, stumbling back, baton in his hand, I fired off a volley. It was so rapid fire that three explosive dragon breath rounds hit him on the arm just inches from one another, severing it at the elbow, bone tendons rupturing like sliced rope. The last shot went clear through his gut, leaving a visible hole and intestines spilling. His body thudded the ground like a giant sack of concrete, leaving him dead a foot or two from the cage where goblins were hopping in chittering shock.
The room became a hen house of barks and cries and shouts and frenzied limbs.
Security man was gunning for me.
I sprinted as the first shotgun bark came, would have fired back but Racoon was running on all fours in a feral lope to intercept me. My hand holding steady in mid run, I fired off a round. It only grazed him but even so it shattered his collarbone and ripped his shoulder open and turned his barks into high pitched wines. I dove behind a huge castiron pot as a shotgun blast came at me.
Even through my jacket, I felt the pot’s cold iron on my back as I braced against it, while my one hand tilted the cannon’s cylinder open so that empty shells clinked out and my other hand pulled a moon clip from my belt and slid it into the cylinder, my wrist flicking it shut with a metallic shlthunk, the whole act of emptying and reloading less than a second. No more explosive rounds, but these would drop bodies just as good. I peered out the side, had to get a good aim—
The shotgun sparked. Stacked wood tables next to me were torn apart, splinters and pellet shot nicking my ear bloody, tensing my neck with panicked pain. A hip pivot took me back behind the iron pot. More shotgun blasts—3, 4, I couldn't tell—a constant roar that filled the tent.
A lull in his shooting. My ears perked.
Listening to him sliding shells into steel tubes as he ran, I popped up from the cauldron like a flogging mole on cocaine. My arms in a triangle shape tracked the sights on him as he raced across my field of vision, two trigger snaps and smoky bangs and blood plumed out his ribs, sending him into a face planting fall on the packed dirt, shotgun sliding, dead.
I glanced over to the Wahira prone on the ground. She seemed to be stirring, my shield vest’s stiff edge faintly outlined under her dress fabric as she rubbed her chest, wincing. Knifer had scurried toward her, sniffing in growing realization that she lived. He raised his dagger. But K’matli posted her hands above her like a pair of red flowers. Little sparks of lightning shot out through her fingers, buzzing Knifer into a crackling confusion. A brighter Mana spark snaked through him and he was launched onto his back, left in fuming convulsions.
Footsteps on the platform above. The silhouettes of a couple of security guards, rifles rising out from them, bouncing closer along the tent walls.
The Wahira yelled, “Let’s get the goblins and go!” Then her hands lit up with Mana as she took aim at the platform.
I ran toward the safe, where Jackal had dug his back into the wall, a key set hooked on his belt, his lightning stick trembling in his hands.
My cannon trained on him point blank. “Your caggy job worth dying for?!”
“Don't—” His face wrenched like he was about to bawl and he tossed his lightning stick. It clattered and rolled a few feet away.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
I yanked him by his collar. “You're opening that cage.”
“Rgeegh! I don't have the key!”
“The hell you don't.” I pistol whipped him, opening a gash above his brow.
He recoiled down onto his haunch, moaned, covered his bloody face. “I really don't! Nragh! Grivonne has it!”
He pointed to the huge troll corpse on the ground next to the cage, some keys hooked on his belt, their metal tips touching the ground. That masked gobbo from earlier was holding the bars, trembling, the other gobbos in a startled frenzy, green yawping chickens.
My boot crunched dirt floor as I pivoted for the dead troll.
A silver glint above me. My heels dug just in time—the throwing dagger slit my cheek open rather than stab me through the eye.
On the platform above: two trapeze artists decked in bright red and white leotards with diamond patterns all over, faces painted white with haunting black around the lips and eyes. One mal, one fem, like they were twins, acrobat bodies filled with uncanny poise.
“Aghh!” I reeled back, stumbling as two more knives impaled themselves on the ground, barely missing. One of the trapeze artists was swinging down toward me on one of the pulley ropes above, a tether holding a wicked knife. “Cagg!” I flung myself back, back flat on the ground. The jester swooped by me, dagger arcing through the air. Rolling on the uneven ground, I took prone aim. The blast ruptured his back, sent him flying off his rope, smacking face first into the platform’s edge, then tumbling down, toppling a stack of tables below.
Just as I was getting up a growl prickled my neck. Raccoon, shoulder bloodied and ripped open, was pouncing on me. I back pedaled like an inept ice skater, firing, but in the panic under snapping jaws and raking claws several shots went wildly astray, leaving only the acrid smell of gunpowder and the burning crispness of hot metal on my fingertips. One of his swipes opened a gash on my hip. Gngh! I grunted and then taking aim I finally had him between the eyes.
Click.
An empty cylinder. “No—”
He came roaring at me and another swipe tore through shirt and skin, made me lose my balance and I tripped. His slobbering jaws rushed to me. My hand groped for ammo, for anything. His yellow teeth plunged down but just as they would have torn my throat I stabbed Jackal’s fallen lightning stick into his mouth, his cheek like stabbing a rubber band. With a squeeze of my thumb the lightning rod sparked alive. It lit up Raccoon’s conya like he was at a healer’s office getting X-rayed, and he twitched an eee eee eee of his last laugh.
His body slumped fuming next to me.
Gunfire above me.
Glancing up I saw that at least two more security guards with their hairy arms sticking out of canvas sleeves and armed with the wood and steel of rifles were on the platform now. K’matli was standing with her hands glowing but trembling, strained, the femna trapeze jester splayed at her feet. She saw the security guards taking aim again. Her hands swept up, tracing a mana circlet. Her sandals rushed off the ground as a crystalyne sphere took shape around her. She was floating in some kind of mana bubble. She began shooting off her thin Mana sparks, trading fire with the guards. Several of their rifle shots connected, making the bubble spark a white substance like ice had exploded on it, leaving a crack in its crystalline substance.
“Hurry!” she crowed.
We had to get the flog out of here.
“The goblins.” Limping skips took me toward their cage, the gash across my gut from Raccoon’s swipe a raw, burning pain, my hand digging under my coat for ammo. Just as my fingers felt the coolness of a fresh moon clip, something squeezed my ankle with inhuman strength.
“Nnnghhhh!” I looked down, wild eyed: it was the troll’s severed forearm, torn sleeve and all.
A sudden yank swept me off my feet, my back slamming to the floor—the flogging thing started dragging me like I was tied to a chariot. The rushing ground tried to peel my jacket off, exposing my lower back to a blistering skin sanding. In the shifting madness, I managed to see that the troll’s severed arm was dragging me along its slick trail of blood which was thickening into a substance strong as cable and springy like a rubber band, and the arm went slithering in twitches like an injured snake, dragging me back toward its body.
The troll body which was regenerating.
New bone took shape in the troll’s shattered skull like water congealing into ice. Sinews snapped alive. Brain blubber writhed. Waxy skin stretched to cover it. A new eyeball puffed in its bloody socket like a muffin rising in an oven.
“Hob...” Grivonne slurred as his mouth was still regaining its shape. “No soup... eat you alive...”
I frantically pushed through the pain, finally managed to align the clip and my cannon’s cylinder, shoved the rounds in with a metallic clack. His arm rejoined his rising body, yanking me up—I was a chicken in the grip of some deranged farmer. I flailed, kicked. My arm whipped, shot off once, missed wildly, whipped up to aim again, aim anywhere on his massive body, but he'd seen it coming. He hoisted me like he was about to pitch a ball, my cannon shots veering as the world twisted in my eyes, but one just managing to knick the troll’s shoulder, coat and tendons tearing so that he released me earlier than intended and instead of my spine shattering on the ground I went flying.
The tickle of hurtling through the air.
I smacked against a set of chairs so hard I was pretty sure I broke a bone or two. My cannon went flying in the clatter, and for a split moment the world became a strobe light of stabbing, wincing pains.
“I’ll bite your ribs out one by one while you watch...” the troll boomed as he stomped toward me, shoulder reknitting itself, his wand swinging in one fist. “Whatever remains of you... I'll throw it to my dogs.”
“Yaegh!” K’matli shot sparking Mana at him from the platform above where a security guard laid unconscious, but the troll raised his bulky baton arm like a shield. The baton glowed like a lightning rod as it took much of the roiling mana. Even so, rich fabric, thick hide, fat and arm muscle sizzled under the sparks, tissues torn apart. But the manablast died down—Wahira only had so much juice. Though the troll’s arm and sleeve were broiled in patches, his flesh quickly began reknitting itself. Now that we weren't catching him off guard, it seemed like he could simply absorb whatever we threw at him.
His baton’s head glowed and then it became much brighter, and as he aimed it, out came a torrent of streaking prismatic jets. This torrent erupted into rumbling fireworks on the Wahira’s translucent orb, cracked it, sent it reeling, a marble shot from an angry kid's hand.
She squealed, bouncing in her bubble, her body smacking on its surface as the sphere ricocheted off the balustrade into the air. Striking a wooden pillar, it shattered with a thousand ethereal clinks. K’matli’s small limbs thrashed in the impact. In her free fall she bounced off the platform then went smacking into the ground, a nut falling from a tree. She lay unconscious.
The troll now turned to me as I lay there bloodied and bruised and pinned by toppled chairs, no handcannon in sight...