“I heard you the first time,” the Conjurer said. The Pierrot made another beseeching motion at the bottle. He seemed unfazed by the gun to his face.

“Tell me first.”

“Doom! Doom! Doom cometh to Jericho, and Jericho must—”

“Fall?”

“Fall!”

“Piss off, you little twerp,” the Conjurer said. He kicked the stool from under the Pierrot and the little creature fell, but nimbly enough.

“No drink?”

“No drink.”

The Pierrot shrugged. He wended his way to the next table, where a couple of grizzled ex-miners sat half-slumped over Sticks.

“The peace has held for a thousand thousand y—” he began.

The Conjurer sighed.

He sat there for a long time, sipping his drink. It had been years since he’d last visited Jericho, that oldest and grandest of all human settlements on the Escapement. It was a strange old stone town, filled with narrow cobblestoned alleyways that took twisting turns, and tall, narrow houses that obscured sunlight, and it was surrounded by sturdy stone walls, which had withstood numerous attacks over the centuries. It was a solid place. One very seldom caught even a glimpse of that other place, and even drinking Sticks, one found it hard to penetrate the veil of shadows and into that other, more mundane existence. Though the Conjurer had no use for that other place. He was firm in who and what he was.

He was, first and foremost, a conjurer.

The Conjurer had been born into the great Boreal Circus on the outskirts of the Désert de Soleil, a thousand years before. He could have been as young as twenty or as old as a hundred, and he distinctly remembered at certain times being much older, and at others very young. He had grown up by the great salt marshes that lie on the very outskirts of the inhabited world, and beyond which lie the Pillars of Nisir, which are inhabited by fearful serpents, and are, or so it is said, the gateway to the Mountains of Darkness.

The Boreal travelled slowly along the Thinning and the Thickening of the Escapement, performing less for an audience than for the sake of performing, and it laid down train tracks ahead of itself and removed them again after the great lumbering cars passed, and in this fashion it traversed the edges of the desert.

The sun shone very brightly there. He remembered it, still, a huge ball of fire in a cloudless sky, and the heat, and the haze over the Great Salt Lakes, and that smell of bromine. And the tracks being laid and pulled out again, and the Big Top erected over inhospitable land, and the elephants shitting in great steaming piles, and the hunters coming back cursing and grumbling, for there was no meat to be had.