He was concerned that the boy had managed to sneak up on him so, but clowns had that ability, sometimes: to move in deathly silence, to go unseen, to pass upon the flesh of the world without leaving a scar. The Stranger rode fast and furious now, not in impatience but with an urgency he did not feel before.

This was clown country.

He heard the outlaws even before he saw the smoke of their campsite, for they seemed to feel themselves secure, and they did not bother to hide their fire or lower their voices, and, moreover, seemed to him drunk. The Stranger tied his horse to a tree and proceeded alone, his rifle in his hands.

The outlaws’ voices echoed weirdly in between the hills, and the Stranger navigated carefully, listening to the voices as they seemed to vanish and reappear elsewhere without warning; and he realised then why they must have felt so safe.

For this part of the Escapement must have been a maze or, rather, a broken part of one. He navigated slowly, treading from one hill to the slopes of another, across a brook and past a conifer which he marked carefully with a knife.

And yet when he proceeded he found himself traversing the same patch of ground, or encountering a tree identical or near as made no difference; and the distance to the assassins’ hideaway never varied. Their voices echoed queerly from one end of the maze to the other, but within the transference of voices he thought he began to discern a pattern.

The Stranger knew that all mazes are ultimately solvable. There was the random mouse approach, and there was wall following, there was the Pledge and the Trémaux.

But mazes on the Escapement were not always static, and the unwary traveller using one such method could find that the maze itself would shift unexpectedly around them.

The Stranger, instead, listened for the absences of sound, and it was into their gaps that he directed his steps, ignoring the geography, until the voices coalesced into clearer coherence around him, and their wild seesawing slowed and became recognisable speech, and he was through at last into the heart of the maze.

A small mill house of weathered white stone stood on the bank of a gently rolling stream. There were cracks in the stone and moss grew in between the cracks. The wheel of the mill had long since broken into several pieces, which lay sunk in green grass and mud.

The Stranger took shelter behind a rock as he watched the hideout.

A small fire burned by the side of the old mill house, and five men were seated around it, their horses grazing in the nearby grass.

The men were laughing. They passed a bottle around between them.