Still there were others living in that distant and inhospitable land. As a child, the boy who would become the Conjurer was fascinated by the ancient ruins that could be found in the lonely places of the Escapement. He had made a friend in Professor Federico, the Magnificent, whose dazzling displays of alchemical marvels were in truth nothing much more than fizzy potions made with water, vinegar and baking soda.

The Professor was a short, stocky man with thinning black hair and a thick moustache, and when he spoke he spoke with an accent that came from that other place. He let the boy accompany him on his excursions, and it was thus that the boy first saw the great broken pillars of the dead Colossi.

The first dead Colossus he saw lay in a valley crusted with salt seams in the walls. The Colossus had fallen on its side, and its body broke into many parts, and trees and desert shrubs grew on its scalp and in its ears and sprouted out of its nose. Its pelvis was shattered, and its fingers had broken into many smaller pieces, and the Professor said, “A great violence had been perpetrated here.”

The boy stood on the heights and looked down on the Colossus. From above, one could see its overall shape, and there was something sad, even noble, about the stone. When they descended, it was impossible to discern that image: the Colossus broke into fragments of vision, so all that one saw were curiously-shaped rocks.

“Who did this?” he had asked. The Professor puffed on a pipe which merely produced soap bubbles, and the boy watched the bubbles rise high into the sky. They broke the sunlight into rainbows.

“Us, I think,” he said.

“Us?”

“People. We carry our violence within ourselves.”

The boy did not understand the answer; not then. The Professor showed him how history was often erased and rewritten in the flesh of the Escapement. How where once the maps said was a river was now a part of the plains, or how hills became mountains, how paths disappeared. He showed him the old ghost roads, which came and went on the Escapement, but it was when one appeared, more often than not, that an old place would be revealed nearby, and it was in this way, too, that the boy saw the first of las máquinas. You saw it long before you reached it, if you ever did. It rose out of the hard, dry ground and seemed to travel up for miles, an ovoid shape of metal and glass that reflected the sun out of cubic mirrors that could have been windows and could have been eyes.

It could have been a luxury liner, or the egg of some giant, flaming bird.