“What did you say again this was?” he said.

“I didn’t,” the Stranger said. “But I’ve seen it, once before.”

“The Dumuzi Device . . . ,” the Kid whispered. “Right?” He turned to the Stranger. “Those aerialists on the train, this is what they were looking for?”

“I think so, yes,” the Stranger said.

“Well, what is it?” the Conjurer said.

“I think,” the Stranger said. “I think it’s a chthonic bomb.”

They stared at the fish. Its movements became more rapid, and clinking and hissing sounds began to emerge from it over the ticking of the hidden clock.

“I think,” the Stranger said, meditatively. “I think it might go off.”

“A chthonic bomb?” the Conjurer said. “Great Harlequin, not again!”

“You’ve seen one before?”

“Long ago, and far away, and only the aftermath,” the Conjurer said, grimly. “And that was enough, once was enough. We have to get out of here.”

“Can’t it be disabled?” the Kid said.

“Disabled? It’s a fish.”

“We could, I don’t know, shoot it.”

“You couldn’t even shoot me, kid. And it’s not like you weren’t trying.”

The Kid kicked the fish.

“Ouch!”

A tongue of light had darted out of the fish’s body and wrapped itself around the Kid’s ankle.

“Hey, let go!”

The Stranger looked at the fish, which seemed to grow larger, or to twist the dimensions around itself so that the walls and ceiling of the room seemed to bend down and around it, and he saw that a miniature symbol storm had begun to form in the air overhead, and obelisks and pilcrows and crucifixes burst in tiny flashes of light.

“Step away from the fish, kid,” he said.

“I’m trying to!”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” the Conjurer said. He grabbed the Kid in one arm and the Stranger grabbed the other and they pulled. The Kid howled in pain and protested with some profanity, and the tentacle of light tightened around his ankle but then, at last, released him abruptly, and the three men staggered and fell through the open door, and outside.

Inside the room, the ticking of the mechanical clock grew faster and louder in intensity and then, just as abruptly, stopped.

The three men stared at each other in the silence.

“It’s definitely about to go off, isn’t it,” the Conjurer said.

“What do we do?”

“Run?”

“Run where?”

“I know a way,” the Conjurer said. “Come on.” He hesitated, glanced at the Kid. “Son?”

“Don’t call me son!” the Kid said.

But he followed all the same.

The three men moved fast and with deadly purpose, guns drawn, and the burghers and good citizens of Jericho moved swiftly out of their way. The streets were thronged with revellers drunk on moonshine; a fat man on a piano struck “Entrance of the Gladiators,” and a mime troupe locked in an invisible glass cage writhed and floundered as though they were choking on invisible gas. A cat chased a mouse down the street. The Stranger wasn’t sure, but for a moment it seemed to him the mouse wore a bow tie.