That night, or predawn day, he had slit the strongman’s throat as the man lay snoring, then had pushed him into the cage and watched the cats feed. Only when they were sated had he gone inside, and petted them, and taken substance. It was easy to come by, in the circus, for many of the performers were addicts and bought it at every stop where prospectors and miners could be found, and sometimes they discovered veins of the stuff in the desert, and worked it for a while by hand. So the kid who was soon to become the Conjurer had taken a pinch of the dry white powder, and then another, and even though he was not of that other place—he did not have an equivalent, or a him-shaped absence of one, or however that worked—even though he could sense it at first and then glimpse it, and he’d seen that where he stood was not really a desert at all but a sort of highway, an eight-lane vast road that rose over a second, intersecting road down below, and that lights moved all along those highways in every direction, and he’d known then that there was no cage, and there were no bars. And so he had locked the cage from the inside and pocketed the key, and he had walked through the walls and away from the encampment and the wild strongmen and their bearded ladies, and into the dawn.

It was miles from there, in a ravine where he’d thought he could hear it calling, all through that journey in a twilight between the one place and the other, that he had found the machine. A sound like the peal of crystal bells . . .

And there, sitting around a small fire, he’d found Professor Federico, the Magnificent.

But all this had been a long time ago, and far from Jericho. The Professor was long gone, dead or vanished into that other place. He had often told the Conjurer that he believed in his own existence on the Escapement less and less. With the passing miles and years and doses of substance, he felt he was fading ever more. Until one day, when the boy who had become the Conjurer went to gather wood for their fire. When he came back, the Professor was gone. For the Professor, that other place had become the only real one, and he’d escaped back into it with a sense of quiet relief. To him, the Escapement would become nothing more than a pleasant daydream, a fantasy of escape.

Or so, at least, the Conjurer imagined. When he thought about it at all.

Right now, sitting in the Bull Tub in Jericho, what the Conjurer thought about was that little speech the petit Pierrot had given him.

“Doom,” the Conjurer said softly, trying out the sound on his lips. “Doom cometh to Jericho.”