The mourners clapped, politely. A murmur of appreciation rose and fell among them like the chatter of crickets. The Stranger stared at the scene: four men lay dead on the ground, and a fifth must have died under the Fat Lady when she’d landed.

The Stranger climbed down. “Get their weapons,” he told the Kid.

A woman ran up to him then, sobbing. He saw she wore an eyepatch. She threw her arms around the Stranger’s neck. “We thank you very sweetly for doing it so neatly,” she murmured into the Stranger’s ear. Her breath was hot on his skin. She lingered there a moment longer, as though unsure of protocol. Then she released him abruptly and retreated to be with the rest of her congregation—for that was what they must be, the Stranger saw. He had seen such chapels before.

The Kid and the Conjurer moved among the corpses, collecting the dead men’s guns. The Stranger went to the fallen man on the unicycle and helped him up to his feet. He was a large, imposing man, the Stranger saw, with broad shoulders threaded with muscle. His grey hair was cropped short, in almost a military fashion, and his deep unsettling eyes were the colour of Tyrian purple.

“Thank you, stranger,” he said. His voice had the gritty coarseness of broken coral. “I am Jedediah Baily, preacher to this poor congregation.”

The Stranger looked up at the small chapel. It was a clown ministry, of the sort that dotted the Escapement on the edges of the Thickening and into the Doinklands.

A stylised Harlequin, garrotted with a diabolo, hung over the steeple. The Harlequin’s eyes, disconcertingly alive, bulged comically out of their sockets as the wire cut into its throat, and a single drop of blood was visible. Gravel neatly covered the ground before the door. The whole place had a neat and well-kept, if worn, appearance.

“You seem to have incurred someone’s displeasure, Preacher,” the Stranger said.

“That would be the General’s man, down under your gondola, General Barnum’s man that is,” the preacher said. “And I thank you kindly, you and providence, for despatching him when you did. I could not have pedalled that wheel for much longer.”

“But why is it that you were about to be executed?” the Stranger said.

“Yeah,” the Kid said, swaggering over to join them. “And where’s your congregation, Preacher? I don’t see any clowns.”

“Yet plenty of tombstones,” the Conjurer observed, more quietly, coming to join them. “Your ministry appears to be nothing more than a graveyard, Preacher.”

“My story is a long and sad one,” the preacher said. “But come inside, strangers. We have little enough, yet what we have we’ll share gladly.”

“I’d like a drink,” the Kid said.

“A big fucking drink,” the Conjurer agreed.