“He spoke of many things. It was hard to understand him, and harder enough to care. We grew resentful of his constant babbling. We wished him to die but still he held on. He was a camp follower of sorts. He followed the Titanomachy where it went. And yes. He spoke of one place, with huge figures standing motionless in the sand, and dark mountains, so dark it was as though they sucked the light and made it vanish. But they were far in the distance, I think. These mountains. He was not very clear. Colossi, and some sort of guards at the mouth of a tunnel at the end of the world. I don’t know of any flower.” She jerked her cigarillo into the brook. It hissed when it touched the water.

“No. I lie. He said he wished to smell one, and he used a name. The one, I think, you used. It seemed important to him, as though, if only he could smell it, all would be well. Then he died.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t a meaningful or noble death, you understand. He passed from here. Whether he lives still in that other place or not I do not know. We didn’t bury him. The next morning, as soon as the snow had stopped, we continued on our way. Now I avoid the cold, and when a storm comes, I take shelter.”

She was silent then. The Stranger mulled over her words.

“Thank you,” he said at last.

They rode on, in companionable silence, accompanied only by the horses’ farts and occasional whinnies, with the horses chomping at the wildflowers or bits of grass whenever they could find them, and the Stranger gnawing, from time to time, on a chunk of dried beef. The Escapement here was flat for miles, the sky serene, and there was no sign of the war.

As the miles passed by, the Stranger rocked in his saddle, lulled by the unchanging landscape.

He was brought sharply awake, however, at the sound of a pistol shot.

The sound was somewhat muffled, and yet it carried across the open air of this part of the Escapement. When the Stranger scanned the horizon he saw, snaking across the plains, what seemed to him the remnants of a white road and, coming in from the west, a plume of slowly rolling dust, which might have been a wagon.

The Stranger made to head that way.

“No,” Temperanza said.

“No?”

She shook her head, simply. “No.”

“But I want to see—”

“Do you know the old saying?” Temperanza said. “Shadow battles stone. The lizard scuttles—”

“From the glare of the sun, yes,” the Stranger said. “What of it?”

Temperanza shaded her eyes and looked out, to that distant plume of dust that was slowly approaching along the white road.

“Beware of shadows, Stranger,” she said. “I’ll see you in Kellysburg, I guess.”