The Stranger watched the view roll past beyond the window. Mountains rose in the distance and their peaks were white with snow. The sky was a calm blue, and the air felt fresh and clear as the wind blew in. The train crawled along the ledge of a high precipice and the Stranger could see the Nikulin River down below, a wide expanse of cerulean blue, and the sunlight caught a leaping fish and reflected off its silvery scales.

“I don’t like this,” the Kid complained. He kept fidgeting with a pendant that hung from a necklace round his neck. The Stranger had noticed it before. It was a silver thumb-tip, and on it, engraved, was the legend Vernaculus: it was an old word, and it meant both clown, and slave.

The Kid saw the Stranger looking at his pendant and put it back under his shirt, out of sight.

“You mean we just sit here?” he said.

“That’s how it goes,” the Stranger said. He was not in a hurry. He felt content for the time being to simply sit and look out on the ever-changing Escapement and not to think too much. It was soothing. The train was headed to Jericho, a large town deeper in the Thickening and a terminus for several of the rail routes. The Stranger hoped to find a cartographer there.

“Listen,” the Kid said. “In your travels, did you ever run into a conjurer?”

“A conjurer?”

“You know. White gloves. Black clothes. Wears a tall black hat. Makes ducats disappear. A fucking conjurer.”

There was a sort of pain behind the Kid’s eyes. The Stranger said, “I can’t think as I have.”

“This one wears pistols with silver handles on his belt,” the Kid said.

The Stranger shook his head. “I’ll keep my eyes open,” he said.

“Yeah. Well.”

“Where are you from, kid?”

The Kid shrugged. “A small town called Bozoburg, on the Fratellini plains. The sort of place where nothing ever happens.”

“A one-clown town.”

“Yeah.” The Kid reached for his pendant again, absent-mindedly. “What about you?” he said. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re from that other place.”