The Stranger nodded. He climbed on his horse and the Kid followed suit on his.

“I think we’ll just avoid the railways for a while,” the Stranger said.

“Seems sensible to me,” the Kid said.

They rode out of town, following the setting sun. And if he listened very hard, the Stranger thought he could just hear something, faint, on the edge of sound . . .

The things still buried deep underground, burrowing, murmuring . . .

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick—

Tock.

Big Top

SIX:

BIG TOP

The town of Big Top lies some one hundred miles from the main estuary of the Grimaldi River, and over seven hundred, as the jackdaw flies, from the city of Jericho in the heart of the Thickening. It was to Big Top that the Kid headed after he’d left Bozoburg, and it was there that he first tried to kill the Conjurer.

The Kid really was just a kid back then. The guns hung heavy on his waist. He was a skinny thing, a backwater country boy fashioned into a weapon by circumstances, and with only one thought on his mind, which was to kill the Conjurer. The circumstances surrounding this instinct lay back both miles and years, in Bozoburg. Around his neck, the Kid wore the old silver thumb tip that bore the legend vernaculus. He had rescued it from the burning homestead, on the night the Rasmussen Gang hit the bank.

Big Top, burning. They mined substance nearby and as it burned it cast shadows into that other place and back again. Bright coloured flames . . . the smoke rose up, a permanent fog over the town. It was a liminal sort of place, a lonely, lawless outpost beyond the Thickening, half-way into the Doinklands themselves. There were clowns in the streets, and things that only looked like clowns. There was no law but there was a sort of . . . decorum. There were things much older than people on the streets of Big Top. Shadows that talked. It was said that if you took the wrong turning you might run into Harlequin, pissing in the street, and if it turned and looked at you with its grin it would be the last thing you ever saw. They said members of the Major Arcana could still be found in human form, passing through the dusty streets of the town.

Open fires burning in drums . . .

Figures dancing, drinking, swearing, fighting, sweating, hugging, the shadows of cars passing through the streets of that other place, ghostly illusions imposed upon this world. The fading siren call of an ambulance in the distance. The Kid cared for none of that. He stepped into the town with his spurs jangling and his guns hanging low and his hat over his eyes. His mother was dead. The town bank was in ruins, the safe blasted open, ducats falling down like silver rain . . .

Out there without a friend or money, he searched for the Conjurer in a city full of conmen and magicians.