“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.

“It is a battle not recorded anywhere but in the grooves it’s made in the Escapement. Shadow battles stone; the lizard scuttles from the glare of the sun. There was a battle here, I think, between Colossi and pupae. It created a knot in the land.

“Time passed; elsewhere. The warring factions moved on. Only their discarded materiel remained, burrowed deep underground. People came and they settled and they built railway tracks and they spread out across the Thickening, but they skirted this place. There was nothing here.

“Then, one day, I came.

“I was very tired then, I think. I have been traversing the Escapement for a long time. I have been other people, yes. Those names you mentioned. I was searching for something. Something that seemed important at the time.”

“A weapon,” the Stranger said.

“Yes. Perhaps,” the man said, dubiously. “But then, at last I came here, on my travels. And I felt it, then, under the ground. A huge silence, waiting. All that untapped time.”

Zebulon smiled at the Stranger.

“Um,” he said, “would you like to see them?”

Tick, tick, tick, tick, ti . . .

ck.

The wide doors opened wide, on hidden springs, in silence. . . .

Behind them, the dark.

“Come in, come in,” the Hierophant said.