He passed a baker shop with a beggar in rags sitting under the awnings. All he could see were bright brittle eyes under a hood, the face swaddled in shadow.

A woman accosted him. She wore fingerless black gloves. Her breath smelled of sweet liquor, coconut and rum. She gripped him by the shoulders. She only had one eye. She leaned close to him and whispered in his ear, urgently, telling him not all was lost, telling him about a place beyond the Mountains of Darkness, and of a flower that grew only there. She let him go and he walked on, deep into the night, until he heard footsteps, running, and someone shouting his name. His keys dangled in his hand. He let them help him through the door and he sat on the couch and waited for them to leave, politely, but frozen, until he heard the door shut close. Then he lay down on the sofa, with his head on the boy’s stuffed toy clown, and it was only then, finally, that he started to cry.

A painter’s brush smeared strokes of yellow paint over the horizon, and the sky gradually turned a light blue. The clouds in the sky resembled clowns’ balloons, and the Stranger, on his horse, looked up over the Escapement. The landscape stretched away from him in all directions, with not a town or a hamlet in sight. They were two days’ ride away from the broken maze and clown country, and at least another day, he calculated, from a small outpost town called Kellysburg. Clumps of scorpion weed and five-needle prickly leaf lit up the parched earth with vivid blue and yellow colours.

“What is it that you are looking for, Stranger?” Temperanza said.

She drew on her cigarillo, and blew out two perfect rings. The rings floated in the air until they linked with each other, and slowly dissolved in the breeze.

“A flower,” the Stranger said.

Temperanza gestured at the land around them. “There are plenty of flowers here,” she said.

“It is called the Ur-shanabi, and it lies beyond the Mountains of Darkness.”

At this Temperanza’s face grew troubled and she smoked for a few moments without comment. Thick drops of ash blew away on the breeze. Then she said, “I am not familiar with that flower, nor with that particular geographic region.”

“But you have heard of it?”

She shrugged. “Stories. Stories are all we have, really, in this world or the other.”

“What sort of stories?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t ask me.”

“I must,” he said. “I need to know. I have been searching for an awfully long time.”

“Time means nothing, here.”

“Please,” the Stranger said. He knew that she was not quite what she seemed. Temperanza’s frown deepened. She blew out three smoke rings in quick succession. The rings interlocked above the brook and seemed suspended there.