Beyond Jericho, forces were awakening that had been dormant for centuries, and they assembled now with something like anticipation, and something like glee. They came from the east, the north, the south and west, for all that directions meant nothing to them. And a child peering out of a moving train saw something impossible, a Colossus rising in the dark, and behind it another, and another, faces in the stone unmoving, austere, cruel. But when she looked again, the figures were no longer there.

The Conjurer saw the little Pierrot slip into a deliveries yard for what must have been a row of shops, and he followed him in, and threw open a door that had been left just so slightly ajar.

Behind him, softly, came the Kid, and he snuck behind the Conjurer and lifted up his gun, but he never took the shot.

“Kid?” the Stranger said, on the other side of the room.

“What are you doing here?” the Kid said.

The Conjurer looked at them both, first at one, and then at the other, but he made no comment. Then he looked back at the centre of the room, and at the thing that lay there.

He stared.

“A fucking fish?” the Conjurer said.

The three men stood in the room facing each other with guns drawn over the giant flopping mechanical fish. The Stranger had not seen the fish since that single glimpse within the tinkerers’ cart. The thing seemed more alive, somehow. Its glassy eyes stared up and seemed to glow from within, with some yellow, inner light. Its powerful tail thrust against the floor, over and over, and its scales shone wetly, as though it had just risen from a swim.

“What is that thing?” the Conjurer said. “And who the fuck are you?”

The Stranger shrugged. “I’m a stranger here myself,” he said.

“And you, kid?”

The Kid stared at the Conjurer with something like loathing, and something else, ill-defined, something like desperation, or longing.

“Hello, Dad,” he said.

It was quiet in the room. In the silence the only sounds were the men’s breathing and a sound that materialised slowly, on the edge of hearing, but became more and more pronounced as one tuned in to it, until it seemed to dominate the world: the slow, relentless ticking of a mechanical clock. It seemed to come from within the body of the fish.

The two men stared at each other across the room. The Conjurer, for once, looked taken unawares. He stared aghast at the Kid.

“. . . What?” he said.

The kid removed his necklace and showed the silver thumb-tip to the Conjurer.

“Do you recognise this?” he said.

“Vernaculus . . . ,” the Conjurer said.