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.

He saw Temperanza and the Kid ride out in the Doinklands. They hunted a vigilante group of chasseurs de clown who were a day ahead of them, but they seemed to be closing the gap. Temperanza was laughing, her single eye twinkling in the sunlight. The Kid looked carefree and comfortable, riding beside her, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The Stranger realised, with some surprise, that they seemed happy.