“You have come from afar,” the hermit said.

“Yes.”

“From that other place.”

“Yes,” the Stranger said, surprised. It was seldom that such matters were discussed so openly on the Escapement.

“You carry a great burden.”

“You seem very perceptive, hermit.”

The hermit shrugged. “You travel alone to the edges of the world, stranger. Make the inference.”

The Stranger was forced to smile. “That seems fair. I am travelling to the Mountains of Darkness, to seek the Ur-shanabi.”

“The Plant of Heartbeat. Yes. I have heard that it flowers in the dark. But stranger, no traveller who crosses the twelve double hours of the night ever returns.”

“You know much of what lies beyond?”

“It is said that, beyond the Great Salt Lakes, the land is populated by herds of lions, and wild scorpion men. But whether that is true or not, I could not tell you. You must pay the ferryman to cross the waters. Beyond lies the tunnel.”

“I have a map,” the Stranger said. Perhaps he felt a little defensive. “From Jefferson & Norvell, Medici, of Jericho.”

“I heard Jericho has fallen.”

“You hear much, here in the wilderness?”

“I hear the loons cry, and the earth tremble when the wild Harlequinade passes,” the hermit said, complacently. “And they tell me that the old general who ruled over Hole is vanquished once again into the Doinklands, there to take on a new shape and form.”

“You seem remarkably well informed, hermit.”

Outside, the storm intensified. The hermit nodded, as though listening to something only he could hear. He pulled back his hood, and the Stranger took a step back when he saw the living shapes that moved over the hermit’s skin. The hermit disrobed, with quick, assured gestures, and stood there naked in the light of the flames.

The hermit’s entire body was covered in tattooed shapes, in bright inks of balloon-yellow and clown nose–red, mime-white and reptile-green. And as the Stranger watched, they moved, and he saw the intricate detailed mechanism of it, like tiny cogwheels moving in the exposed escapement of a clock. The mountains of the Grand and Petit Philippe were there, and the Big Rock Candy Mountains. He could see the River Nikulin as it flowed into the lake, and the ruins of Jericho, where stone statues as tall as cliffs now stood in awful silence. As he watched, a fist rose from the dirt of the Doldrums, and something awful and rancid resembling a clown shambled back into being with a cleaver in its hand. On the plains of the Thickening he could see men and women in wagons heading north and east and south and west, fleeing the Titanomachy, but many of them were not people at all but merely people-shaped, and shadows animated them. He knew then that the war was eternal, that it was within himself just as it was external to it. Shadow battles stone; the lizard scuttles from the glare of the sun. So it is said on the Escapement, though what it means, he never really understood till then. He saw the Conjurer ride far and small, a black dot with white gloves in a wide expanse of desert, with a merciless sun beating down. The bones of great creatures lay in the sand, and the Conjurer’s horse traversed the ribcage of some fallen giant. Ahead of him was a circus’s Big Top, several days’ ride still away. And he knew then that the Conjurer, for reasons of his own, was at last returning home.