“Up to the mansion,” the carnie said. “Let the General decide what to do with you.”

“Can’t we just shoot them, Charlie?” a younger carnie, face scarred with acne, said.

The head carnie shot him an angry look. “We don’t shoot shit without the General’s say-so,” he said. “You know what he’s like. And you lot, move it. Ain’t got all day.”

The Stranger and the Conjurer exchanged a glance, and the Conjurer gave him a wary grin. The Conjurer didn’t have an ace up his sleeve . . . but he did have the dynamite. The Stranger gave him a tiny shake of the head. Not yet. Instead, they let the carnies lead them on.

They walked, through the haze of substance. It burned in furnaces scattered all about the place, ghost faces forming out of the smokeless emanations of the cold fires, mouths open in silent screams. They walked, past shackled clowns on the chain gang, past carnies holding rifles and a boss clown being whipped against a spinning wheel of death, but never uttering a sound. They walked, along white-smudged dusty trails that resembled the paths slugs make as they pass. They walked, past cranes that dipped and rose, dipped and rose, lifting up rocks and chunks of crystal substance from the mine. They walked past tents where the carnies lived, past older, abandoned excavations, past the severed giant foot of a Colossus, past a broken dream machine half-buried in the ground. And the Stranger began to realise just how old this place was, how long this part of the Escapement had been worked. The flesh of the Escapement was at its most tender here, it had been prodded and poked and dug out since long before humanity’s arrival. A Cadillac drove towards them, its lights burning. It passed harmlessly through the carnies’ bodies and disappeared into thin air. Something else, at the edge of vision, was less easy to quantify. For a moment he had a dizzying sense of wrongness, as though he were beyond the atmosphere, in outer space, and something vast and balloon-like and semi-dead floated like a mote of dust in a giant eye. . . .

They walked, and they walked some more, until they reached at last a hill that must have formed in millennia past from the debris of earlier, more primitive digs, and on top of that hill there stood Hole Manor, and it was to its doors that they wended their way.