Then he tossed it on the pile and the sensation fled: of being awake, of being alive. He returned to digging, there on the grey and featureless plain, digging in time to the beats of the big clock.

The Stranger meanwhile had the sense that he couldn’t shoot his way out of this one. He needed another story and he went to find it. He stood under the clock tower, where time was held captive, the second hand fluttering forever in its place, trapped against the minutes. He saw no one around. At last the doors to the factory opened, as he suspected they would, and a man stepped out. He was tall and wiry and a little stooped, with a thick head of greying hair, a grey-white moustache and twinkling eyes, and he moved like a man used to long days of riding.

He said, “Welcome, stranger.”

The Stranger hesitated before replying, and the man did not press him. Indeed, it felt as though the man had time—all the time in the world. An air of amused contentedness emanated from him. An air of cheerful goodwill.

At last, the Stranger said, “May I ask your name?”

“My name?” The man’s long fingers moved as though playing the piano or itching for a gun. “It has been so long, stranger, since anyone inquired . . . To tell you the truth, I am not sure I would even know it now myself.’

“Was it Zavatta, or Zapata?” the Stranger asked.

“It might have been, it might have been,” the man allowed. He frowned. “It seems to me that I had many names, stranger, in my years on the Escapement. But you know as well as most, don’t you, that names are not to be taken lightly. Not here.”

“That is true,” the Stranger allowed, and the man smiled a thin-lipped smile.

“You can call me Zebulon,” he said. He offered the name tentatively.

The Stranger said, “I know who you are.”

“I . . . see.”

“One does not often meet one of the Major Arcana,” the Stranger said. “Though I seem to, of late.”

The man dipped his head in acknowledgement, but refrained from speaking.

“Tell me,” the Stranger said. “What happened in this place?”

The man shrugged. “It was so long ago . . . ,” he said.

“But you remember?”

“If I try hard enough. Perhaps. Yes. There was a battle, I think. Yes, that sounds right. A battle of some sort.” The man spun in place. He seemed suddenly agitated. “You would not tell so, now. It happened long before the Thickening, long before woman or man set foot upon this place. We were not here, then, or perhaps we were, in a sense, but only in potentia. The land, too, did not look quite as you see it now, for ‘land’ and ‘see’ were not fully formed concepts then. There was only the war.