“Now these,” the Professor said. “These truly are intriguing. Las máquinas. Organic or machine? Are they even real? Are they natural structures of the Escapement, or are they of an alien origin to it? Some say, you know, that the Escapement had been colonised at different times by a different peoples—a different species, perhaps? That each successive immigration reawakens the dormancy of the Escapement, and in the interaction changes it, shapes it to that race’s perception. What do you think, boy?”

“Me?” the boy said, surprised. “I don’t know, Professor. I was born here, to me this is as real as . . .” Words failed him.

“As that other place is to some of us, you mean?” Professor Federico, the Magnificent, said.

“I suppose . . .” the boy said, mumbling a little, for he did not understand what that other place was, and why some people went there.

“Which begs the question,” the Professor said. “Are you real, boy?”

“Am I?” the boy said. It was then, perhaps, that he first began to consider the nature of reality itself, and how our perceptions, and that which is perceived, may not match. Which is to say, it was when he first got on the long road to becoming a conjurer. A conjurer fools perception, after all. That is his job, and his joy. And in such a manner, perhaps, he therefore acts as a minor agent of the Escapement, in which all manner of Fools, and of fooling, proliferate.

Life at the circus was hard and work-heavy but the boy never complained. He was happy as a boy can be happy, out there on the edge of the world, far from the battles of the Titanomachy and the machinations of pupae and Colossi. In such a manner, and with the gandy dancers leading ahead, pounding the spikes for the rail tracks into the ground, over and over, the great circus traversed the shorelines of the great salt lakes that lay there, and skirted the edges of the desert, there where even the clowns hesitate to go, for the Mountains of Darkness lie beyond.

Yet this part of the Escapement was not without denizens; nor without danger. And it was on one day, all but identical to all the other days, with the sun a fiery ball of fire in the sky, and bromide in the air, and the elephants calling and the pots filled with stew slow-cooking on open fires, and the Big Top erected, that the wild strongmen attacked.

The boy saw the dust they raised before he actually saw the attackers. There were tribes of strongmen and their bearded ladies who roamed the Escapement in those days, though most went extinct in the great inter-circus war between the House of Boreal and the House of Mercator a couple of centuries later.