The massacre must have taken place only a few hours earlier. There were eleven bodies, and some had been shot in the back and some from the front but either way they were all dead. Some had tried to flee their attackers and were gunned down, and some had stood stoically and awaited their death. The Stranger smelled greasepaint, candyfloss, gunmetal oil. The tattered remains of a yellow balloon lay on the ground.

The Stranger examined the scene of the massacre. He had been witness to such scenes before, in other places, far away from there, but he never grew indifferent to such a sight.

Eleven clowns lay on the ground.

Unusually, while five were Augustes, four were Whitefaces and two were Hobo braves. The two Hobos had stood up to their attackers, and the Stranger noted the remnants of the custard pies they had thrown.

He took everything in methodically, though he was furious inside. The Stranger could not abide an unkindness to clowns.

Each of the clowns had been scalped, and the Whitefaces’ red ears had been sliced off, as were some of the Augustes’ red noses. The Stranger knew it was the habit of bounty hunters to do this, to create a brace of the ears and noses for easy transport and to display; and that they would be aiming to collect a bounty for this, the massacre. Clowns were—as much as anyone could tell—indigenous to the Escapement, while people were not. And there was just something about clowns that people inherently hated. Now they killed them for their sport.

The Stranger also noted that not all ears and noses had been taken. Perhaps they had been interrupted, or were spooked, as they were collecting their trophies. He glanced around him a little more uneasily. The symbol storm was still distant but it could herald the coming of other forces, though sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t.

None of this was, strictly speaking, his business, but he determined nevertheless to make it his. He, perhaps alone in all the strange travellers upon the face of the Escapement, felt that clowns brought joy. And somewhere, elsewhere, in that other place, there lay a boy who had loved clowns.

Perhaps that was enough.

The Stranger went back up the slope and retrieved his horse. He spurred it down, but around the copse of trees, and he noted the hoofprints of the horses and the direction they went.

The riders went in a hurry. Something had spooked them, he decided. The hooves had scattered pebbles and dust as they ran at full gallop from the scene of the massacre. The Stranger noted five sets of hoof prints on the ground. He spurred his own horse to a light trot. He did not bury the clowns. Golden spirals and tetractys flashed briefly overhead on the horizon. The Stranger rode away into the distance, following the scalp hunters.