Blood Under the Big Top

• Chapter 1 The Wagon of Wonders
• Chapter 2 High Above the Sawdust
• Chapter 3 The Barber-Surgeon's Kit
• Chapter 4 Balance and Breath
• Chapter 5 Miasma in the Ring
• Chapter 6 The Acrobat's Tremor
• Chapter 7 Bloodletting by Candlelight
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Canvas
• Chapter 9 Tinctures and Poisons
• Chapter 10 Step Without a Net
• Chapter 11 The Black-Tongued Fever
• Chapter 12 Painted Masks, Pale Skins
• Chapter 13 Quarantine of the Troupes
• Chapter 14 Vertigo at Midnight
• Chapter 15 The Ringmaster's Decree
• Chapter 16 A Silent Menagerie
• Chapter 17 Leeches and Ligatures
• Chapter 18 Walking the Thin Wire
• Chapter 19 The Anatomy of Panic
• Chapter 20 Shadows Under the Big Top
• Chapter 21 The Desperate Remedy
• Chapter 22 Falling from Grace
• Chapter 23 The Burning of the Wagons
• Chapter 24 Threading the Needle
• Chapter 25 The Fever Breaks
• Chapter 26 The Last Bow

The scent of a traveling show in the year of our Lord 1648 was a pungent trinity: wet sawdust, horse sweat, and the faint, sweet copper reek of dried blood.

I sat on the folding bench at the tail-end of my wagon, polishing a steel fleam with a grease-stained cloth, watching the town of Oberwald materialize through the autumn drizzle. My name is Nikolas Veit. In the grand playbills that our advance runners nailed to church doors and tavern posts, I was listed as Master Veit, Chirurgeon of the Imperial Courts and Purveyor of Health Extraordinary. In truth, I was a barber-surgeon whose tavern-bench license had been revoked in Strasbourg after a mayor’s son lost three fingers to a mortification I could not arrest.

Here, however, under the patched linen canopy of the Caravana de Miracula, my past mattered far less than my razor. A man with a throbbing molar or a neck boiling with caruncles does not demand to see a university diploma. He wants the pain gone, and he wants it done before the beer turns cold.

"Mind the rut, Nikolas, or you’ll impale your own thigh with that blood-spit," a voice called down from above.

I looked up without stopping my rag. Suspended on the wooden perch above my wagon hood, swinging her bare, soot-stained feet over the edge, was Juliette. She was nineteen, though her eyes possessed the heavy, careful stillness of someone three times her age. In her canvas slippers she moved like smoke; on the hemp rope forty feet above the sawdust, she moved like a creature that had struck a personal truce with gravity itself.

"If I impale my thigh, Juliette, I shall bleed myself according to the lunar calendar and charge the troupe two groschen for the demonstration," I replied, squinting at the dull light reflected off the triangular steel blade. "Where is Corvo directing us?"

"The marsh meadow," she said, leaning back against a coil of thick Italian hemp. She spat expertly into the tall grass beside the road. "Where else? The burghers of Oberwald want our copper, but they do not want our wheel-tracks on their cobblestones. They think we bring the lice."

"We do bring the lice," I noted mildly, tucking the fleam into its velvet-lined horn case. "Along with three trick ponies, a black bear that has forgotten how to dance, and thirty souls who haven't bathed in clean river water since the Duchy of Baden."

The wagon shuddered as the iron-rimmed wheel dropped into a knee-deep puddle of black mud. Up ahead, the teamsters cursed in three dialects—Alsatian, Italian, and the thick, guttural Romani of the southern plains. The iron kettles clattering against the underside of my wagon rang like cracked church bells.

This was our life: a slow, creaking parade of seventeen painted wagons, moving across a war-torn Empire like a bright snake dragging itself through ashes. The Thirty Years' War had ended on paper only months prior, leaving the German lands picked bare by mercenary armies, deserted by god, and crawling with desperate people looking for a miracle—or at least two hours of forgetfulness. That was what we sold. We traded in awe, in terror, in physical impossibility, and, in my small corner of the caravan, in the swift extraction of decayed teeth.

My wagon was known to the troupe as the Wagon of Wonders, though amongst ourselves we called it the Box of Bones. On the outside, painted in fading vermilion and leaf-gold, were depictions of miraculous cures: men throwing away crutches, giant worms being drawn from ears, and a pristine anatomical figure whose intestines spilled forth like red ribbons to reveal the secret workings of the humors. Inside, it was a dark, cramped sanctuary smelling of vinegar, camphor, dried willow bark, and the sharp, vinegar-like bite of sulfur.

"Look at the sky," Juliette said suddenly. The banter had dropped from her tone. She was leaning forward now, her thin frame tense under her woolen shawl.

I glanced up from my instrument case. The clouds above the valley were not the soft, pale gray of typical autumn rain. They were heavy, bruised, and hung low over the pine-forested ridges, yellow-bellied like an infected wound.

"Bad weather for the wire," I said. "The hemp will swell and stretch."

"It isn't the wire I'm thinking of," she murmured. "Look at the birds."

Across the meadow toward the timbered walls of Oberwald, a flock of rooks rose from an oak grove. They did not fly in their usual orderly wheel. They drifted chaotically, dropping low, flapping with heavy, clumsy strikes before settling back into the wet grass as if exhausted by the simple act of remaining aloft.

"Miasma," I muttered, invoking the old word that every surgeon learned before he learned how to hold a lancet. "The low grounds are full of rotten vapors this time of year. Decayed leaves, stagnant water, bad air."

"It feels... warm," Juliette said, rubbing her bare arms beneath her sleeves. "The air is cold on my face, but when I breathe, my chest feels as though someone is blowing furnace air down my neck."

I stepped off the rear footboard of the wagon, my heavy boots sinking into the wet turf with a wet shluck. I walked alongside the rolling wheel, placing a hand on the rim to steady myself. Juliette was right. Despite the light frost clinging to the grass blades at the edge of the ditch, the air carried a strange, suffocating density. It hung in the back of the throat like unslaked lime.

Ahead of us, the procession ground to a halt at the edge of the designated meadow. Master Signor Corvo—born plain Johann Pfautz in a village near Mainz, though he wore a coat of faded crimson velvet and swore in broken Tuscan to impress the locals—was already vaulting down from the lead coach. His silver-tipped cane struck the damp earth like a quarterstaff.

"To work, you dogs!" Corvo’s voice boomed across the mist, reverberating against the wet canvas roofs. "The sun sets in two hours! I want the main tent pinned before the vesper bells ring, or by God, I’ll feed your bread rations to the bear! Nikolas! Where is the barber?"

"Here, Signor," I called out, slogging through the heavy mud toward the center of the clearing.

Corvo turned, his grand mustache twitching. Underneath the powder on his cheeks, his skin looked gray and moist, though he swept his brimmed hat off with a flourish that nearly swept the mud. "Ah, Master Veit. Set your shingle near the entrance gate. The burgomeister has granted us three days. Three days only! The peasants have just harvested their barley, which means they have coins in their breeches and rot in their jaws. I expect your leech-pots to be full by nightfall."

"My leeches died three leagues back, Corvo," I replied flatly. "The cold snap killed them in their jar."

Corvo scowled, leaning close enough for me to smell the stale brandy on his breath. "Then use your razor, surgeon. Cut them, bleed them, tell them it cleanses the humors of the autumnal rot. Just ensure they pay two pfennigs before you spill the first drop."

Before I could answer, a heavy thud echoed from the middle line of wagons.

It was old Gabriel, one of the primary teamsters who drove the heavy timber wagon carrying the main center-poles. He had tumbled from his high bench and lay half in the mud, his arm tangled in the leather reins of the draft horses. The horses were stomping nervously, their nostrils flaring red in the twilight.

"Damned drunkard," Corvo spat, stepping forward to kick the mud from his boot. "Get up, Gabriel! The poles won't raise themselves!"

I reached the fallen driver before Corvo could lay his cane across the man's shoulders. Kneeling in the wet grass, I rolled Gabriel onto his back. He was a broad-shouldered man of fifty years, accustomed to hauling oak beams through snow and mud without a whimper. Now, his eyes were rolled back into his head, showing only the yellowish whites. His breath came in fast, shallow rattles, like dry peas shaken in a bladder.

"Is he drunk?" Corvo demanded, though he stepped back a pace, his bravado wavering at the sight of the man's face.

I pressed my fingers against Gabriel’s neck, feeling for the carotid pulse. It was racing—a frantic, fluttering beat that hammered against my skin like a trapped moth. I pressed my palm to his forehead. His skin was astonishingly hot, radiating a fever that seemed impossible given the chill of the afternoon.

"He isn't drunk," I said softly. I drew back his lips. His teeth were yellow, but it was his tongue that made me pause. It was covered in a thick, dry fur, so dark it looked as though he had been chewing charcoal. "He is burning."

"A chill from the road," Corvo grumbled, though his hand shifted to touch the small brass cross he wore hidden beneath his velvet lapel. "Give him a draught of vinegar and pepper. Put him in the back of the hay cart. We have canvas to raise."

Juliette dropped down from the roof of my wagon, landing beside us with barely a sound. She looked down at Gabriel, her dark eyes wide. She did not touch him. Performers—especially those who work without a net—have a sharp, superstitious instinct for danger.

"His skin," she whispered. "Look at his hands, Nikolas."

I turned Gabriel's calloused palm upward. At the base of his thumb, stretching up toward his thick wrist, the skin was not red or inflamed with the yellow pus of a common wound. It was mottled with tiny, dark purple spots, no larger than flea bites, clustered together like spilled ink on parchment.

"Petechiae," I muttered to myself, searching my memory of the old Latin texts I had rescued from my burned shop in Strasbourg. Galen wrote of such spots; so did the Italian physicians who chronicled the summer fevers along the Po. It was a sign of the blood breaking down within its vessels, a corruption of the vital spirits.

"Is it... the pestilence?" Corvo asked. His loud voice had dropped to a thin, raspy whisper. The word hovered in the cold damp air between us like an executioner’s axe.

"No," I lied, though my own chest tightened. I had seen the Great Plague in '37. That came with swellings in the groin and armpits as large as apples—buboes that turned black and burst with foul humor. Gabriel had no such swellings. "It is a swamp fever. A malignant synochus brought on by the damp air of the lowlands and hard labor."

"Good," Corvo said instantly, seizing upon my words with desperate relief. "Good. A swamp fever. It stays with him, then. We do not speak of this to the town guards. If the burgomeister hears the word 'fever', he will lock the gates and send the night watch with pikes to drive us off."

He straightened his coat, clapped his hands, and bellowed at the gathered acrobats and riggers who had stopped their work to watch. "Back to your ropes, you idle dogs! It's only Gabriel having a fit of the vapors from too much schnapps! Master Veit will patch him up! Move!"

The men hesitated, then slowly returned to the heavy work of unloading the iron stakes and canvas rolls. But the energy had shifted. The laughter that usually accompanied the pitch was gone, replaced by a quiet, hasty efficiency.

Juliette remained kneeling on the opposite side of the unconscious teamster. She reached out and touched the edge of his woolen coat, her face pale.

"You told Corvo it was not the pestilence," she said, looking across Gabriel’s still chest into my eyes. "Was that the truth, Nikolas, or was it a surgeon’s comfort?"

I pulled a bone spatula and a bottle of spirits from my leather satchel. "It is the truth that he does not have the buboes of the plague, Juliette. But whatever this is... it burns fast." I placed my hand on Gabriel's chest again. The heat rising through his coarse woolen shirt felt almost unnatural, like water on the verge of boiling. "Help me pull him onto the straw behind my wagon. Keep him out of the rain."

"And if it spreads?" she asked softly.

I looked around the clearing. Thirty souls, huddled together in small wooden boxes on wheels, sharing the same stew-pots, the same water casks, breathing the same heavy, stagnant air under the canvas tent. Above us, the bruised yellow sky was darkening into black, and from the town of Oberwald, the sharp, iron tone of the vesper bell began to toll, warning all travelers that the gates were closing for the night.

"If it spreads," I said, unscrewing the stopper of my bitterest tincture, "God help the Caravana de Miracula. Because no razor I possess is sharp enough to cut away an invisible enemy."

From forty feet above the earth, humanity looks remarkably simple. Strip away a man’s velvet coat or his copper-buttoned doublet, and he is merely a small, dark shadow moving across a patch of damp grass. From the king post of the main tent, I could see every secret of the Caravana de Miracula laid bare like a hand of cards spread upon a tavern table.

I spit on my palms, rubbed them together until the skin grew tacky, and pulled myself up the final section of hemp rigging. The air near the peak of the canvas canopy was stifling. It was a strange, oily heat that seemed to gather in the upper folds of the tent, despite the cold autumn wind whipping against the exterior canvas. The gray drizzle of Oberwald beat against the linen roof above me with a soft, persistent hiss, like lard frying in a deep skillet.

Below, the ring was taking shape. The wooden perimeter curbs had been hammered into the soft earth, their fading yellow paint splashed with fresh mud. Two dozen men were dragging heavy wicker baskets of oak sawdust across the arena, flinging the yellow grains by the armful to mask the black dirt and wet manure beneath.

In the center of it all, small and stooped, Nikolas was crouched by the tailgate of his wagon. Even from this height, I could pick out the silver gleam of his instruments arranged on the wooden bench, and the dark, crumpled form of old Gabriel lying under a horse blanket in the straw.

I hauled my wire tight, loop by loop, fitting the iron turnbuckle into the iron ring bolted to the center-pole. Wire-walking is not a matter of luck, nor is it a favor granted by God, whatever the priest in Strasbourg might have claimed before he tried to have our troupe banned from the church square. It is a matter of mathematics, muscle, and absolute, unforgiving tension. If the hemp stretched too much in the damp air, my feet would sink into a hammock of rope, throwing my center of gravity to the dogs. If it was pulled too taut, the iron anchors would rip free from the mud, and I would fall.

"Hold the stay-line, Paolo!" I shouted down into the shadows of the ring.

My rigger, a broad-chested Italian who had lost his left ear to a Swedish pike in the late war, looked up from the main anchor post. His face was slick with sweat. That struck me as wrong immediately. Paolo had hauled center-poles through the winter mud of Pomerania without breaking a sweat, yet now his forehead shone under the oil lamps as though he had been dipped in a river.

"It’s pulled tight, Signorina!" he called back. His voice lacked its usual booming gravel. It sounded thin, pinched at the edges, like air escaping from a torn bellows. "The iron is buried three feet deep!"

"Give it another half-turn on the winch!" I ordered, wrapping my bare toes around the cold hemp line to test its give. "The air is heavy today. The rope is drinking the rain and growing fat."

I stepped out onto the narrow wooden platform—a plank no wider than my shoe, bolted to the center-pole. Below me, the wire stretched sixty feet across the void to the far platform near the tent entrance. Without the balance pole, the line looked impossibly thin, an ink mark drawn across a void of sawdust and shadows.

I picked up my pole. It was sixteen feet of seasoned ash, weighted at both ends with lead caps, smoothed by my own hands with linseed oil until not a single splinter remained. The pole is not a safety device; it is an extension of the spine. When the wind catches the canvas and the whole wooden skeleton of the big top groans, the pole tells your shoulders where the earth still resides.

I took a breath. The air tasted of wet canvas, horse manure, and that same sulfurous, metallic tang I had smelled on the road. It seemed to stick to the back of my throat like grease.

I placed my left foot on the wire, heel first, then rolled my weight forward onto the ball and toes. The hemp was cold, but beneath the cold lay an unnatural, sticky humidity.

One step.

The world shrank to a line three inches wide. The noise of the camp below—the hammers striking iron pegs, the roaring of Corvo, the baying of the draft hounds—faded into a dull background hum. This was my sanctuary. High above the sawdust, no one could reach me. No tax collectors, no witch-hunters, no drunken soldiers looking for a girl behind the baggage wagons. On the wire, gravity was my only master, and gravity was an honest enemy. It never lied, and it never accepted a bribe.

Two steps. Three steps.

I slid my right foot forward, letting the sole sense the twist of the hemp rope. But something was off.

A sudden, sharp wave of heat rolled up from the floor of the tent. It wasn't the warm draft of the iron braziers the jugglers used to warm their hands. It was a suffocating wave of hot, dead air that seemed to rise directly from the damp sawdust. My eyes pricked with sudden moisture, and for a fraction of a second, the line beneath my feet seemed to double.

I froze. My arms made a micro-adjustment with the heavy ash pole, dipping the left lead cap two inches to arrest an imperceptible sway.

I closed my eyes, took three deep breaths, and opened them again. The line was single once more. But my heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I had walked the wire in high winds over the Rhine; I had walked it in a blizzard in Leipzig when the hemp was coated in a skin of clear ice. I did not get dizzy. Vertigo was an affliction for ground-dwellers, for people like Nikolas who spent their lives staring into mud and open wounds.

Down in the ring, a commotion broke out near the entrance flap.

I turned carefully on the wire—a simple pivot on the balls of both feet—and looked down.

Three men on horseback had ridden directly through the heavy canvas entrance, ignoring the warnings of the gate-keepers. They wore heavy leather coats stained dark by the rain, and broad-brimmed hats pinned with the white feather of the Oberwald city watch. The lead rider held a long, iron-tipped pike across his saddlebow, using it to push aside a pile of velvet costumes that Gianna, our seamstress, had hung on a drying rail.

"Where is the master of this carnival?" the lead guard shouted. His horse snorted, dropping a fresh pile of steaming dung onto our newly spread sawdust.

Corvo materialized from the dark shadows behind the bandstand, sweeping his brimmed hat so low it brushed his muddy boot. "Master Officer! Master Officer, welcome to the Caravana de Miracula! You honor us with your presence. I was just about to send a messenger to the town hall with the customary courtesy fee for the honorable Burgomeister..."

"Save your grand words, vagabond," the guard sneered, resting both hands on the pommel of his saddle. He did not dismount. His eyes darted nervously around the interior of the tent, taking in the high platforms, the wooden cages, and the riggers working in the rafters. "The Burgomeister has sent us with a warning. You have three days to show your tricks and leave the parish meadow. No performer is to enter the town walls after the evening church bell. No townspeople are to be invited into your living wagons."

"Of course, of course!" Corvo beamed, though his mustache twitched in anger. "We are clean, God-fearing artists, sir! We bring only joy, wonder, and the marvels of the Orient to your good citizens."

"You bring filth," the guard spat, turning his horse in a tight circle. "There is a pestilence two leagues south in the valley. Whole villages are burning their bedding. The river is full of dead sheep."

A quiet fell over the canvas tent. The hammering of the riggers stopped. The jugglers held their wooden clubs motionless.

"A south wind is blowing," the guard continued, fixing Corvo with a cold, suspicious glare. "If a single member of your company shows a fever, a cough, or the black spit, we will chain your wagon gates shut and set fire to the wood. Do you understand me, Italian?"

"Perfectly, noble sir," Corvo said, his voice dropping its grand theatrical ring, becoming flat and dangerously quiet. "We carry no rot. My people are as healthy as the Prince-Elector’s own guard."

"See that they remain so," the guard said. He glanced up into the dark roof of the tent, his eyes briefly catching mine where I stood perched on the high platform. For a second, his face showed a flicker of pale, peasant dread—the deep-seated fear of anything that existed between heaven and earth without touching either. Then he spat onto the sawdust, pulled his horse's head around, and trotted back out into the gray rain, followed by his two men.

As soon as the canvas flap fell shut behind them, Corvo exploded into a volley of Tuscan curses, stamping his boot so hard he kicked up a cloud of yellow dust.

"Swine! German swine!" he yelled at the empty air. "They take our ten silver thalers for the meadow tax, and then they threaten to burn us like dry leaves! Paolo! Where is the main curtain? Why is the banner not raised?"

Paolo did not answer.

I looked down from my platform. The rigger was still standing by the main winch, but his hands had slipped from the wooden iron-bound handles. He was leaning his forehead against the heavy oak upright of the center-pole, his arms hanging limp at his sides. His shoulders were trembling violently.

"Paolo!" Corvo barked, striding across the ring toward him with his cane raised. "Are you deaf, you dog? I asked you—"

Corvo stopped three paces short.

Paolo turned his head slowly toward his master. In the dim lantern light of the ring, his face looked slick and gray, like wet slate. His tongue protruded slightly between his teeth, dry and dark as ash. He made a strange, wet clicking sound in the back of his throat, reached out one trembling hand as if to grasp Corvo’s velvet lapel, and then his knees gave way.

He hit the sawdust with a dull, heavy thud, rolling onto his side. The canvas bag of bone dice he carried at his belt spilled across the yellow floor.

No one moved. The entire tent seemed to hold its breath.

Then, from the dark shadow of his wagon near the rear exit, Nikolas appeared. He was carrying his black horn case and a bucket of steamed vinegar water. He moved with a quiet, methodical swiftness that was more alarming than Corvo’s screaming.

He didn't look at Corvo. He didn't look at the gathered acrobats. He dropped to his knees beside Paolo, ripped open the rigger's coarse linen shirt, and pressed his palm flat against the man's chest.

I slid down the stay-rope. I didn't use the ladder. I grabbed the friction leather, wrapped my wool-wrapped calves around the hemp, and let myself drop thirty feet in a single, whispering rush of air, stopping my descent six feet from the sawdust before dropping lightly to my feet.

"Nikolas," I said, stepping past Corvo, who had backed away three paces, his face pale under his theater paint.

Nikolas did not look up. His fingers were pressed into the soft hollow above Paolo’s collarbone. "He's burning," he said flatly. "Just like Gabriel. The pulse is wild—over a hundred beats a minute."

"Is it... the spots?" I whispered, leaning down.

Nikolas pulled back the neck of Paolo's shirt further. There, spreading across his pale chest like a constellation of dark stars, were the same purple flecks—the petechiae. But on Paolo, they were worse. Around his collarbone, the small purple spots were already coalescing into dark, plum-colored bruises, as if invisible hands had choked him.

"This is not a swamp fever," I murmured, looking up at Nikolas. "A swamp fever takes days to brew. Paolo was hauling canvas two hours ago. He ate salt pork with me at noon."

Nikolas reached into his bag, drew out a small silver mirror, and held it over Paolo’s dark, open lips. A faint, wet mist clouded the glass, but it was mixed with tiny, red specks of blood that had been coughed up from deep within his chest.

"Miasma," Nikolas muttered, his eyes dark with a terrifying mixture of professional curiosity and creeping dread. "It isn't in the water. It isn't in the swamp. It's in the very breath."

"Nonsense!" Corvo shrieked, his voice cracking like a dry twig. He was backed up against the painted ring-curb now, clutching his brass cross with both hands. "It’s a fit! A heat-stroke from hauling the timber! The man is fat and drinks too much potato spirits! Nikolas, give him a salt-drench and stand him up! The townspeople will be at the gate in two hours!"

Nikolas slowly stood up. He wiped his fingers on a rag dipped in vinegar, his face carved into hard, tired lines. He looked at Corvo with a cold disgust that made the smaller man flinch.

"If I stand him up, Corvo, he will die in your arms before the first trumpet sounds," Nikolas said. "His blood is rotting inside his veins. The vital heat has turned upon itself. If you force the doors open tonight, if you let three hundred townspeople sit on those wooden benches and breathe the air of this tent..."

"We have no choice!" Corvo shouted, pointing a trembling, ring-bedecked finger toward the town gates visible through the tent flap. "Did you not hear the watchman? If we do not play, we do not eat. If we do not pay the meadow fee, they will drive us into the forest with pikes! We have three silver thalers left in the chest, Nikolas! Three! Do you want to eat horse-bark by Martinmas?"

"I want to live until Martinmas," I said, stepping between Corvo and the fallen rigger. "If the watch sees Paolo like this, they won't just drive us off. They will lock the canvas flaps and burn us inside, just as they threatened."

Corvo looked from me to Nikolas, his chest heaving under his embroidered waistcoat. The theatrical grandiosity had completely vanished, leaving behind only a terrified, aging showman who knew that his bright, painted world was surrounded by dark forests and angry men with pitchforks.

"Put him in the back of the apothecary wagon," Corvo whispered, his eyes darting frantically toward the entrance flap as if he expected the city watch to ride back in at any moment. "Cover him with the spare canvas. Nikolas... bleed him. Do whatever your university books say to do. Clean his blood."

"I was thrown out of the university, Corvo," Nikolas said softly. "And Galen had no cure for a fever that turns a man's tongue black in four hours."

"Then find one!" Corvo spat, turning his back on us and marching toward the center-ring, his voice rising into an anxious, cracked roar. "Listen to me, all of you! Gianna! Marco! The show goes on at vespers! Bright faces! Bright paint! Anyone who speaks of fever to the locals will be whipped until the bone shows! Back to your posts!"

The performers slowly dispersed, moving like ghosts through the yellow dust. But no one sang as they worked. The jester did not practice his tumbles; the juggler dropped his painted brass ball twice onto the turf.

I helped Nikolas lift Paolo’s heavy, limp frame onto a wooden hand-barrow. The rigger’s skin was so hot it felt as though he had been sitting beside an iron furnace, yet he was shivering violently, his teeth chattering with a rhythmic, bone-dry click.

"Look at his hands, Nikolas," I murmured as we wheeled him into the shadow of the Wagon of Wonders.

Paolo’s fingernails—usually thick, yellow, and caked with rope-grease—had turned a deep, bruised blue. It looked as though he had dipped his fingertips into indigo dye.

"The peripheral vessels are closing," Nikolas said, his tone dry and clinical, though I could see a fine bead of sweat running down his temple. "The blood is retreating to the core, fleeing from the pestilence within. It is what the Arab doctors called asphyxia asphyxiata—the suffocation of the blood."

"Can you save him?"

Nikolas set the barrow down by his wagon steps and looked down at his Horn-case of tools. The steel fleams, the bone saws, the silver syringes, the dark glass bottles filled with dried vipers, antimony, and mercury ointment—they all looked small and absurd against the massive, silent grey rain that was falling over the valley.

"I can open a vein," Nikolas said, staring at his thumb where a drop of Paolo's hot sweat had fallen. "I can let out six ounces of corrupted humor. I can give him white hellebore to make him vomit, and willow-bark to cool his skull. And then I can watch him die, Juliette. Because that is what barbers do. We watch people die, and we send a bill to their widows."

"Don't speak like that," I said sharply, catching his wrist. His skin was cool, but his pulse was fast. "You cured the baker's girl in Rastatt."

"She had a simple quinsy," Nikolas said, shaking his head. "This... this is an executioner."

He turned and climbed the wooden steps into his wagon, his heavy boots sounding like iron weights on the timber.

I stayed outside in the drizzle, looking up at the great high-top tent. The red and gold flags at the top of the center-poles were hanging limp, soaked through by the rain, clinging to the wood like dead skin.

Tonight, I would have to walk the wire forty feet above the sawdust. I would have to smile down at three hundred burghers and their children, wearing my silk tunic covered in glass spangles, balancing on a three-inch rope while two men lay dying in the straw fifty feet away.

I looked down at my own hands. My fingers were steady, hardened by years of rope and ash. But as I pressed my thumbs together, I realized that the air around me no longer smelled like rain. It smelled of sulfur, dried rose leaves, and the faint, unmistakable odor of an ungreased axle burning itself to iron dust.

The fever had entered our ring. And high above the sawdust, there was nowhere to hide from the wind.

By late afternoon, the rain had settled into a steady, gray mist that blurred the line between the muddy earth and the low clouds. The news of our arrival had drawn a crowd despite the damp, cold chill. Peasants in rough homespun coats, small-town merchants with pewter buckles on their shoes, and wide-eyed apprentices had gathered at the edge of the parish meadow, drawn by the yellow glow of our pitch-torches and the dull, rhythmic thumping of our brass bass-drum.

Corvo stood upon a wooden mounting block at the tent entrance, his crimson coat gleaming under the oil lamps. He had dusted his face with extra white powder to cover his sallowness, and his voice boomed across the meadow like a cathedral organ.

"Come forward, citizens of Oberwald!" he roared, waving a silver-tipped baton toward the sky. "Witness the miracle of the human spirit! See the flying acrobats of Milan! See the great wild bear of the Hartz Mountains who can count coins with his claws! See the maiden who walks upon a single strand of Italian hemp as if it were a paved street in Rome!"

Behind him, hidden behind the velvet curtain of the entry flap, I stood waiting for my cue. My spangled silk tunic felt freezing cold against my skin. I had rubbed my bare arms with goose fat to keep off the chill, but it did me little good. Inside the tent, the air was growing thick and warm, packed with the breath of two hundred spectators who had crowded onto the damp wooden bleachers.

Nikolas was standing near the orchestra pit, a brass oil lamp held high in his left hand. His face was dark. He had spent the last two hours in his wagon, trying to cool Gabriel and Paolo with cold vinegar compresses, but neither man had regained consciousness. Gabriel’s breath was now a wet, dark gurgle that could be heard three yards away, even over the sound of the rain.

"Is the wire dry?" I asked Marco, the juggler, who was standing beside me checking his painted clubs.

Marco didn't answer. He was staring straight ahead at the red curtain, his bottom lip trembling. He had a smudge of yellow paint across his nose, but under it, his skin possessed that same wet, slate-gray pallor I had seen on Paolo three hours before.

"Marco?" I reached out and touched his shoulder.

He jumped as if I had struck him with a whip. "It... it's fine," he stammered, his eyes glassy and unfocused. "The rope is fine, Juliette. Everything is fine."

He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a long smear of yellow paint across his damp skin. He was sweating heavily, despite the cold draft blowing beneath the canvas curtain.

"Marco, you shouldn't go out there," I whispered, grabbing his sleeve. "Look at your hands."

His fingers were trembling so violently he could barely hold his three wooden clubs. The knuckles were white, but the tips of his fingers were already taking on that faint, bruised dark indigo tint.

"I have to go out," Marco whispered, his voice thin and desperate. "Corvo said... he said if we don't finish the show, he won't open the bread box tonight. I have three little sisters in Venice, Juliette. I have to send silver."

Before I could answer, the brass drum rolled—a sharp, rattling thunder that signaled the start of the aerial acts.

"And now!" Corvo's voice screeched from the arena floor. "The queen of the sky! The girl who defied the pope in Rome and the Emperor in Vienna! Mademoiselle Juliette!"

The crowd roared—a dull, guttural sound of peasant enthusiasm mixed with the cheap beer they had bought at the tavern wagon.

Marco pulled his arm free from my grip, grabbed his wooden clubs, and stumbled through the curtain into the bright yellow flare of the torchlight. I saw him take three clumsy steps into the sawdust, his face twisted into a grotesque, painted grin, before he threw his first club into the air.

I took a deep breath, adjusted the heavy ash pole resting against my hip, and climbed the long rope ladder to my high platform.

The heat near the peak of the tent was worse now. It felt as though a great iron pot of water was boiling directly beneath the peak, trapping the foul breath of two hundred untooled peasants in the upper canvas. The air was thick with the smell of wet wool, cheap sausage, unwashed bodies, and that sharp, sulfurous tang that seemed to follow this terrible day like a shadow.

I stepped onto my small wooden plank forty feet above the crowd.

Below me, Marco was juggling three clubs in a wide, sweeping arc. But his rhythm was broken. His throws were jagged, uneven. One club spun too far to the left; he lunged for it, nearly falling into the front row of bleachers, his painted smile looking more like a skull's grimace with every second.

The audience laughed, thinking it was part of the clowning act. They clapped their thick, red hands, cheering his deliberate clumsiness.

I raised my ash pole, resting my bare feet on the wire.

Step one. Step two.

The rope felt different under my soles now. It wasn't cold anymore. It was warm—almost hot—and sticky, as if the dampness in the canvas had mixed with some foul sap in the hemp.

I reached the middle of the wire, thirty feet from the ladder, directly over the center of the ring.

Down below, Marco threw his four clubs high into the roof lanterns. The painted wood spun through the dark air, gleaming red and gold in the firelight.

He reached up to catch them.

He didn't catch the first club. It struck him square on the bridge of his nose with a loud crack.

The second club hit his shoulder. The third fell into the sawdust at his feet.

The crowd began to hoot and jeer, thinking the juggler had lost his senses to schnapps. "Send out the bear!" a voice yelled from the back bleachers. "The fool is drunk!"

I looked down from my wire.

Marco was not drunk. He was standing in the middle of the ring with his head thrown back, staring up into the dark canvas rafters where I stood. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and filled with a blank, terrible terror.

Slowly, like a felled oak tree, he went down. He didn't crumble or try to catch himself. He fell straight forward, his face burying itself deep into the yellow sawdust at Corvo’s feet.

A dark, crimson pool began to bloom immediately in the sawdust beneath his face—not from his broken nose, but from his mouth, a sudden, heavy fountain of thick, black blood that gushed out across the yellow floor like spilled wine.

The jeering from the bleachers stopped instantly.

A woman in the front row screamed—a high, piercing shriek that cut through the sound of the rain and the brass drum.

I stood on the wire forty feet above them, my balance pole held level, watching the black stain spread through the sawdust like ink through water. And in that awful, silent moment, I felt a sudden, burning heat erupt in the back of my own throat—a dry, sulfurous scratch that made my chest tighten with a terrible, suffocating terror.

I looked down at Nikolas near the entry curtain. He was already running toward the fallen juggler, his silver lancets gleaming uselessly in his hand under the yellow light of the big top.