Veterans, of which the city hosted many, already transformed by previous skirmishes in the war between pupae and Colossi, took up assorted arms, pistols, rifles, hoes and hammers. They smashed and stabbed and shot the invading materiel. Walls disappeared, opening onto sudden chasms. Ivy with tiny snakes’ heads choked homes and palaces. The Fat Lady rose above them, rose above it all, drifting on the strong cold winds. The Stranger watched the city transform, eldritch lights bursting forth, shadow battling stone. The Colossi moved across the city methodically, treading on people, buildings, carts and horses, flattening trees and anything that stood in their way. The shadows of the pupae umbrarum grew over their own side of the city, snuffing out lives and lights like useless candlewicks. The Stranger watched the city’s destruction. For too long it had stood there, an open sore, an irritant on the flesh of the Escapement: fat, arrogant, elegant, doomed. Now the war had come at last to Jericho, and those who had thought themselves secure, impregnable, discovered too late the awful truth. All human life is solitary, brutish, nasty and short.

Another pink flamingo rose awkwardly into the sky, and then another.

“I guess the doom really had come to Jericho,” the Conjurer said. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He spat over the side of the gondola, meditatively.

The hot air balloon drifted away from the city.

The last the Stranger saw of it, the city resembled the crushed skull of a lizard, crudely drawn in shadow and stone. Then it was gone from sight.

The Preacher

NINE:

THE PREACHER

At night, hospitals feel like shadowy, deserted wastelands inhabited mostly by machines. The man stood alone in the elevator and he pressed the button to go down, over and over, until the machine announced Doors closing! with a sort of unwarranted cheer, and the doors slid shut and the elevator began its descent, like a mine cage going down a shaft. When the doors opened again they did so onto a wide corridor where, in the daytime, numerous visitors, doctors, nurses and patients came and went, not to mention deliverymen and postmen and administrators and attendants and cleaners and cooks, the lifeblood of a hospital, its people. Now there was no one in sight and the lights were dimmed to conserve power, and in this twilight empty world the man walked, his feet treading the parquet floor. They made a little squeaking sound with each step he took, like a clown’s.