by Lavie Tidhar
And also, quite recognisable among them, was the Kid.
They came slowly and unhurried across the plain and they brought their cargo with them.
“Please,” Zebulon said. “Wait.”
“Wait,” the other two said, in unison. “Wait. Wait. Wait.”
The Stranger withdrew his guns. The Hierophant opened and closed his graceful gunman’s fingers.
“What are you going to do,” he said. It was not exactly a question.
The Stranger turned again as the group of workers came nearer. He tried to cover both sides with his guns, arms spread, but he knew it was futile. The Kid was in amongst the workers. The Kid had the same dull look in his eyes as the others. The look of a person trapped forever in a passenger lounge, waiting for a train that would never come.
The Stranger shouted, “Kid!”
The Kid turned his head and looked at him. He carried a big grey cloth sack like the others. More of the eggs must have been inside.
The Hierophant said, gently, “There is so much coiled time inside of you, stranger. You alone are not yet affected. I can give you what it is you need. I can give you time.”
He moved his fingers in a complicated gesture. The Stranger felt the tingle of substance in his nostrils. The town faded, and for a moment he was standing in a clinically white room, where a large machine burped and hummed, two tiny legs sticking out from its cylinder. The boy was very brave to endure the procedure. What must he be thinking, trapped inside the scanner, seeing nothing but white walls?
Then it was gone. The Stranger shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, it’s not enough.”
“You seek a cure,” the Hierophant said. ”But time is running out. I can give you that much. I can offer you the time to wait.”
But the Stranger could not abide waiting. He could not abide the smell of hospitals and the shuffle of slow feet, the awful sense of time dripping away. He could not stand being helpless. He turned his gun and he fired, but not at the Hierophant.
He shot the Kid.
The shot merely grazed the Kid’s arm. It ripped through the sleeve and left an angry red welt on the skin, drawing blood. The Kid yelled and dropped the sack he carried. Animation returned to his eyes with the pain. At his feet, the sack opened. The clocks within shuddered and undulated as they tried to crawl away across the ground. The Kid looked wildly this way and that. The other workers turned as one and faced him. They took one step forward, and then another.
“Run, Kid!” the Stranger said. But the Kid didn’t need advice.
They chased him. They moved like automatons but they gathered speed. They seemed to the Stranger like a flock of dirty-grey seagulls. The Kid ran and the passengers followed. Bowler hats blew in the wind. The Hierophant, Zebulon, merely watched. The Kid ran until he was at the base of the clock tower, and when he saw they were almost upon him, he began to climb.
The Hierophant looked at the Stranger and made that little gesture with his fingers again. “I built this place,” he said. “To find that which was buried. I waited, and they came, those who were lost, those who had nothing left but the waiting. And you would take this from them?”
The Stranger did not reply. The Kid was climbing faster now. The clock tower seemed to elongate into the sky, as though its dimensions were not quite right, and it reached higher and higher into the grey heavens. A wind howled from nowhere, snatching at the Kid, bellowing at his hair and clothes. Down below, the passengers attempted a climb but continued to fall down as others took their place.
The Hierophant advanced on the Stranger.
“I will shoot,” the Stranger said. He took a step back.
The Hierophant smiled.
“If you have to shoot, shoot,” he said. “Don’t talk.”
He took another step forward. The Stranger took another step back. Overhead the Kid climbed ever more desperately. When he reached the next level his fingers grasped for purchase and for a moment it seemed he would fall. He flailed helplessly for balance.
The Stranger pulled the trigger of his gun.
The gun clicked with a dry sound like an apologetic cough. No bullet emerged. The Hierophant made that gesture with his fingers. He took another step, and then another.
“. . . waiting.”
No one was chasing the Kid now. He was almost at the top when he looked down. He must have realised there was nowhere to run. His foot slipped and pebbles of broken stone fell down to the ground. He shouted, and just when it seemed he would fall he took one last, desperate jump, and caught hold of the minute hand of the clock.
He hung there, suspended from the big clock above the town.
Tick, tick, tick, tick,
ti—
They were on the Stranger now, the passengers holding him helpless as the Hierophant bore down on him, and the man’s fingers pressed against the Stranger’s throat as the Stranger’s useless gun pressed into the Hierophant’s belly. . . .
That useless bullet, trapped inside.
The long, graceful fingers moving on the Stranger’s throat, pressing painfully on his windpipe, choking the air out of him.
The Kid, hanging from the minute hand of the clock, the wind lashing savagely at his face.
He cried, “Help me!”
The Hierophant’s grimace of savage satisfaction. It would be the last thing the Stranger would ever see, that and the Kid’s feet, dangling, high in the air.
A gust of wind blew in from the plains. It snatched a bowler hat off one of the passengers and tossed it skyward. It stirred the grey-brown dust and it tousled Mrs. Lazarus’s hair. Overhead, the second hand battled against the stuck minute hand. Tick, tick, tick, tick, ti—
ck.
The Stranger was choking. The Escapement came and went around him, fading in waves. He saw that other place and that other man who was there. A machine hummed in a white room. The patient table slid out, slowly, the boy emerging feet first. A doctor said, We’ll have to run more tests—
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Ti—
Something had to give. Ancient gears solidified by disuse with rust and dirt, jammed against each other, struggled under this new-found strain, the drop of weight exerting pressure on the mechanism. Something had to give. The clockwork creaked—
Down below, the Hierophant’s hands slackened on the Stranger’s throat.
The trapped bullet travelled an inch down the barrel of the gun, and stopped.
The Kid’s fingers, raw and bloodied, held on but he felt them slipping, slipping . . .
He felt the second hand flutter against the jammed mechanism like a bird trying to escape.
Tick.
Tick.
T . . . i . . . c . . . k—
“No,” the Hierophant said. “No, this cannot be allowed—”
Inside the warehouse, the molten clocks whispered and wriggled, shuddering against each other.
And with a hideous screech of gears the big clock broke. The minute hand gave against the Kid’s pull and it plunged downwards and up again, and the Kid was tossed and turned in the high wind.
The Hierophant’s hands lost their grip on the Stranger’s neck.
The bullet, suspended with all that deferred time, was suddenly free. Kinetic motion propelled it onwards. It slid down the tube and emerged directly into the Hierophant’s belly. The Hierophant said, “Oof!” and staggered back. His hands held in his belly.
“No,” he said. “N—”
Inside the warehouse, the clocks shook and shuddered, their time finally come.
Tock.
He pushed the Hierophant off of him. The shell of the man was dying, and the grey clouds parted and sunlight burst through. The body—of the man who had called himself Zapata, or Zavatta, those and all the other names—fell to the ground. The Stranger pushed himself upright. Overhead the hands of
the clock spun and spun, free from the rule of their escapement. The Kid dropped through the air. The passengers stood there, blinking stupidly, as though they had just woken up from a long and pleasant dream.
“Oof!” the Stranger said, in unconscious imitation of the Hierophant, as he caught the Kid in his descent and broke his fall. They ended up in an undignified pile on the ground, and it was from that position, lying on his back, staring upwards, that the Stranger saw the clocks at last take flight.
The clocks broke out of the roof of the old warehouse, flapping against the currents of the wind, and their dials moved and were transformed into talons, their escapements opened and became dark wings. Their mainsprings turned to beaks. In silence they streamed into the sky, a dark cloud of clocks turned into birds—ravens, or crows, or perhaps they were storm petrels. The Stranger didn’t know. They rose into the sky in a swarm, forming a shape that could have been an hourglass before it broke, re-formed and changed.
The birds, newly hatched, flew against the sky and fled away from the waiting place.
“That hurt,” the Kid complained.
“You’re telling me,” the Stranger said, rubbing his side. “You’re heavier than you look, kid.”
They left the townsfolk where they were. Some, the Stranger saw, had simply gone back inside the waiting room. Others stood, uncertain, under the open skies. They might be there still tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day after that. The Stranger didn’t know.
They found their horses ambling near the broken-down train. The horses whinnied greeting. They seemed unconcerned with all that had transpired.
“I hate waiting,” the Kid said.
The Stranger nodded. He climbed on his horse and the Kid followed suit on his.
“I think we’ll just avoid the railways for a while,” the Stranger said.
“Seems sensible to me,” the Kid said.
They rode out of town, following the setting sun. And if he listened very hard, the Stranger thought he could just hear something, faint, on the edge of sound . . .
The things still buried deep underground, burrowing, murmuring . . .
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick—
Tock.
SIX:
BIG TOP
The town of Big Top lies some one hundred miles from the main estuary of the Grimaldi River, and over seven hundred, as the jackdaw flies, from the city of Jericho in the heart of the Thickening. It was to Big Top that the Kid headed after he’d left Bozoburg, and it was there that he first tried to kill the Conjurer.
The Kid really was just a kid back then. The guns hung heavy on his waist. He was a skinny thing, a backwater country boy fashioned into a weapon by circumstances, and with only one thought on his mind, which was to kill the Conjurer. The circumstances surrounding this instinct lay back both miles and years, in Bozoburg. Around his neck, the Kid wore the old silver thumb tip that bore the legend vernaculus. He had rescued it from the burning homestead, on the night the Rasmussen Gang hit the bank.
Big Top, burning. They mined substance nearby and as it burned it cast shadows into that other place and back again. Bright coloured flames . . . the smoke rose up, a permanent fog over the town. It was a liminal sort of place, a lonely, lawless outpost beyond the Thickening, half-way into the Doinklands themselves. There were clowns in the streets, and things that only looked like clowns. There was no law but there was a sort of . . . decorum. There were things much older than people on the streets of Big Top. Shadows that talked. It was said that if you took the wrong turning you might run into Harlequin, pissing in the street, and if it turned and looked at you with its grin it would be the last thing you ever saw. They said members of the Major Arcana could still be found in human form, passing through the dusty streets of the town.
Open fires burning in drums . . .
Figures dancing, drinking, swearing, fighting, sweating, hugging, the shadows of cars passing through the streets of that other place, ghostly illusions imposed upon this world. The fading siren call of an ambulance in the distance. The Kid cared for none of that. He stepped into the town with his spurs jangling and his guns hanging low and his hat over his eyes. His mother was dead. The town bank was in ruins, the safe blasted open, ducats falling down like silver rain . . .
Out there without a friend or money, he searched for the Conjurer in a city full of conmen and magicians.
He saw a one-armed bandit performing the three-card monte, and a bearded lady pouring water out of a giant ear held high in the air. He saw giraffes walk high on wires strung between the rooftops. He saw clouds coalesce at head height and rain down pennies. He trudged on. This meant nothing to him. He was a child of the Escapement, he had an instinctive mistrust of the land and its illusions.
Now, this is the thing about conjurers: they’re inherently honest about their intent to deceive you.
The Conjurer must have known the Kid was coming, even if he didn’t exactly know why. People sometimes tried to kill him. He was not the world’s nicest guy. The Kid hunted him through streets covered in muddy straw, dodging between burly prospectors, bounty hunters, clown posses, snake charmers, street vendors, vagabonds, and clochards. He traced him methodically, without passion.
It was the doves that gave the Conjurer’s location away.
He had always had a flair for theatrics. His doves were almost a part of him, hidden as so much of him was hidden, nesting warm and comfortable in his clothes. He would raise his arms dramatically and release them, a flock of white doves bursting out of him and into the air.
He performed in a town square with the broken toe of a Colossus towering at its centre . . .
His audience were drunk on Sticks or moonshine. But he was used to that . . .
He was tall and thin and wore black evening clothes, white gloves, a tall black hat, and pistols black and worn with silver handles. He smiled, and his teeth were white and even . . .
The Kid came strutting into the square with his guns on his hips and a dove flew overhead and shat on his shoulder. He barely noticed.
“Listen,” he said. He felt there was a need to fill the air with voice. “I’ve come to kill you—”
With that same smile on his face the Conjurer shot him. It wasn’t a killing shot, exactly. It hit the Kid in the shoulder and spun him round and tossed him like garbage on the ground, where his blood dirtied the straw. The Conjurer came and stood over him for a moment and just looked at him and then after a moment he shook his head, as though he were disappointed. “Words are slower than a bullet,” he said. Then he was gone, in a puff of smoke, from a canister that was hidden in his sleeve: he always did have a flair for the dramatic.
The Kid survived. Someone relieved him of his possessions. Someone else cleaned and bound his wound. His pride took a knock and he had a neat little scar after that, but he survived and he learned his lesson.
By the time he’d recovered, the Conjurer was long gone.
“What happened in Bozoburg?” the Stranger asked. They rode slowly through the Thickening, to Jericho. Geographical positions were more fixed, in the Thickening. Directions often stayed the same. Elsewhere on the Escapement compasses were generally useless, and the sun did not always set where it should. This area of human settlement was the first to be mined for substance, and old mineshafts and broken country stood side by side with fields and orchards. More than once they came across train tracks, which crisscrossed this part of the Escapement, and more and more often now they came upon small, prosperous towns, with rose gardens in the front of houses and white picket fences all neat and orderly, orderly and neat. The Stranger had been travelling for a long while, and he was destined to travel for a long while more, and the flower he sought remained forever out of his grasp.
“The Rasmussen Gang came riding into town,” the Kid said, “and there was no one to stop them. They were mean and hungry, more wolves then men
, with faces painted white and noses painted red as though they had tried to go native out there in the Doinklands. They shot whoever got in their way and set fire to the town . . .” His voice faded away and he looked elsewhere, into a place that was no longer there. “They blew up the bank and, well, I was only a kid.”
“You tried to fight them?”
“I knew how to shoot, stranger.” For a moment, a rueful smile illuminated his face. “I nicked one of the brothers’ arms with a lucky bullet. That was as far as I got before they caught me. I don’t think they liked me much. Maybe it was being just a kid, maybe it was telling them that I would kill them if it was the last thing I ever did. They put the money into saddlebags, and then they threw a rope over the beam of the old courthouse, and then they strung me up. I was choking when I saw the fire on the edge of town as they rode away. I thought I was dead . . . then the beam broke. It was an old building.”
He still looked elsewhere. The sun was setting, and the blue sky deepened into purple, the flames of the setting sun streaking it in vivid red bursts. The air felt fresh and clear. In the distance they saw a farmhouse, but as they rode closer they saw that it was abandoned, the roof caved in. Beside the main building was a smaller one, the roof intact but the windows broken, and the Stranger saw that it must have once been a balloonery.
They dismounted. The sun set, and the Stranger built a small fire by the side of the balloonery building. The Stranger watched the Kid’s hands. They moved in a practiced, absent-minded pattern: the old disappearing handkerchief routine. As much as he looked he couldn’t see the silver thumb-tip as it was being used in service of the act.
“When I recovered I ran to the fire. The house burned. I ran inside . . .” The flames illuminated the Kid’s face.