Clown’s Gulch, Stark’s Holborn, Grieblingsburg, Skelton’s Landing, Blackstone, Geller’s Bend, Balducci’s Levitation, Downtown Wagon, Freak Alley, Mud Show, Pitchman’s Stand . . . the small hamlets and towns fled by as the slow cargo train went past them, past checkerboard fields and tidy orchards, bubbling streams and sleeping beehives. The sights evoked in Mathieu a nameless longing, for all that could have been and wasn’t, for a homestead, for a home. For children playing in the yard, their laughter. There was nothing more pure and more holy in all the worlds, he thought, than the sound of children laughing.

Bells pealed as they went past chantries and chancels and clown missions. Whitewashed walls and good black earth and flowers growing in profusion. The smoke of foundries and trains, and herds of cows in the distance. The fish like an intimation of things to come. Something external, something that had a purpose all its own.

In this manner they traversed the Thickening, until at last they saw the famed walls of Jericho rise ahead of them in the distance. He felt like a sailor in a crow’s nest, sighting land.

The city came upon them and they passed through, and it swallowed them, it swallowed them whole, and they passed from sight of the world.

The Fall of Jericho

EIGHT:

THE FALL OF JERICHO

“The peace has held for a thousand thousand years,” the petit Pierrot said. He—if it was a he—tugged nervously at his bells. They made no sound, or rather, they made an absence of sound, a peal of silence that spread outwards from the diminutive Pierrot. “No, not years. Time didn’t mean the same then as it does now. And no, not peace. What is the word I am searching for? Ah, yes. Stalemate. The stalemate held for a long period of untime. Until people came to the Escapement.”

The Conjurer hid a yawn. He sat at the table of the dimly lit Bull Tub, drinking moonshine. He was a great believer in moonshine, and hogswallop, and bunkum. If you could drink it, the Conjurer believed in it. He was most devout, in that regard.

He wore his beautiful white gloves, and his beautiful black top hat. He was very tall and very thin. The top button was open on his pristine white shirt. There were thumb-tips and Svengali and Bicycle cards in his jacket; invisible thread and elastic eggs and cut-and-restore ropes and linking rings; silk handkerchiefs and cups-and-balls and all manner of cut and restored papers which, frankly, he’d forgotten about and could no longer remember what they had been for. On his hips he bore twin six-shooter handguns with silver-plated handles.