Mimes spread through the city then, cradling weapons only they could see. Beyond the walls, there arose a terrible laughter, and the sound of giant stone feet treading. They came down on the walls and tore them to the ground. From high above the city, the Stranger could see it all. The rows of Colossi ranged against it, and the awful shadows that fled into the city from the north and west, a sea of dark. Each opponent reached within and animated people like puppets in its war. A water fountain burst and shot up multicoloured streamers. A man’s nose melted down his face and he wiped it clear off with a hand that was turning by degrees into a trumpet. The cats, who knew when things were going bad, slunk into the holes between the city and that other place and vanished. A woman’s head turned into a flower. The flower grew, extending roots deep inside her. It bloomed beautifully, rising as tall as a building. Men turned to ants and lay helplessly on their backs.

Civilian resistance was bloodied and ineffective.

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