The land rose by degrees but the forces of vastation and revel acted upon the Escapement and on the eighth or ninth day after they left the edifice they woke up in the morning with the sun rising from the north and it set that night beyond the mountains. The air was colder and the fish as heavy as before and there were no towns or any sign of human habitation, and Mathieu thought that they must have shifted farther into the Thinning. It was then also that he began to discern the hidden marks of the denizens of this wild land. A squiggle of chalk on the bark of a tree; boot marks in the ground, of long, flat feet; a dollop of rancid custard.

They were deep into the cedar forests at the foothills of the mountain range when the clowns attacked.

They came like pale ghosts out of the trees. Hobos, Augustes. They carried baleros and diabolos and cream custard pies. Long red boots and pale wide faces and red round noses and eyes that reflected your own inhumanity straight back at you.

Leading them all was a boss clown. It was a giant Hobo clown, with hobnailed boots that thudded into the ground with each step it took. The clowns surrounded the clochards, though they avoided the shadows that congealed around Davide and Esther. The clochards were not armed, and it was Mathieu who faced up to the clowns. The giant gestured. Davide replied with gestures of his own.

“You must not trespass,” he translated. “This is no place for that which was lost.”

“What does that mean?” Bill complained. Davide and Esther communicated silently, or so it seemed to Mathieu.

“It’s the fish,” he said. “I think.”

“All we want is to find our way back to the Thickening and sell the damn thing,” someone else said. But the clowns would not move, the road ahead blocked to the trespassers, and the clochards turned and left the forest the way they’d come, and the clowns shadowed them silently until they were far away from that place.

They came upon a river that snaked between the mountains and followed it instead. There were no maps and they were running low on substance and Sticks, and that other place was no longer there for them to imagine. There was only the Escapement, and the snow-capped mountains which resembled stone giants, and the loons that cried by the riverbanks in low lingering moans, and the flurries of snow and the harsh shadows shed by the sun. Rise and fall, rise and fall, and they carried their burden onwards until they came at last upon an old bridge that spun the river, the first sign that they had seen of human intervention in the landscape.