The battle that day was long, and bloody, and several times in the melee the boy heard, or imagined he had, high-pitched, inhuman laughter, and this was punctuated by terrible silences, as though the battle was merely the microcosm of another, bigger battle which took place on a different plane of perception entirely. When it was over, all he remembered from that time was the taste of dirty cloth in his mouth as he bit on a sleeve, someone’s sleeve, an arm flopping from above him in the pile of corpses. He lay there like a mouse in a cave, biting on cloth to stop himself from screaming. He could hear the strongmen moving through the rubble of the camp, and the laughter of their bearded ladies as they looted the circus’s belongings. All through that day and into the night the boy lay, delirious, under the pile of dead. It was before dawn, when the night is darkest, that he crawled out, as quiet as a mouse, and made his getaway. The strongmen and their bearded ladies lolled here and there, drunk on moonshine and innocents’ blood. The boy who would become the Conjurer made his way to his parents’ wagon, but it lay on its side, its roof burned to cinders, and lying in the dust he saw his mother’s corpse.

One more thing must be mentioned, though the Conjurer never liked to do so himself. On his way out of the encampment he came to what is called the Backyard, the space behind the Big Top where the performers prepared. There he came across a strongman slumped before a cage in which two of the big cats still prowled. How he did what he did, the Conjurer never explained, though the story went ahead of him and grew in the telling. The first hint of the boy’s presence and subsequent escape from the camp came to the strongmen at dawn, when they found the mutilated body of their companion lying inside the big cats’ cage, with the cats nowhere in sight, and with the door locked from the inside.

It was the Conjurer’s first act of conjuring, and its bloody spectacle would come to define his work in the years to come, as he traversed the Escapement, performing sleight-of-hand and making coins and handkerchiefs appear and disappear for delighted children in one-clown-towns; all while earning his living, more quietly yet lucratively, by shuffling off the mortal coil of various targets for various clients: it was said that he always carried a job through to the end.