by Lavie Tidhar
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.
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.
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.”
He discovered he quite liked the sound of that. The truth of the Conjurer was not that he was entirely an amoral character, but rather that he had his own, somewhat idiosyncratic notion of morality, and one that did not perhaps chime exactly with the ideas other—or even most—people had. The wild strongmen and their bearded ladies had robbed him of something—something precious, something ill-defined—and though you cannot miss what you do not have, nevertheless, from time to time he’d feel a pang in the place where his heart should have been, an itch of the sort that you get from a ghost organ. And it was not compassion that made him get up, and make his way, stealthily, out of the bar and into the dark streets, but curiosity, a curiosity as dark as the streets of Jericho and as empty as the salt plains beyond which lie, or so it was said, the Mountains of Darkness.
The Conjurer was what one may term a purist. He killed cleanly and efficiently and only for money, and he applied the same methodology to his magic routine. Underlying both occupations was the most important thing one could do to achieve first proficiency and then excellence, and which is, of course, practice. There was no one whose patter was better perfected, no other whose linking rings routine seemed so flawless and natural, and no one better to dispose of a corpse than the Conjurer. He was not prideful. He always sought to become better than he was.
But this purity—of practice, of purpose—was the same aspect of him which made him loathe the city of Jericho as much as he did. For he was born on the edges of the world, and for all that he now dwelt in the Thickening, it felt to him an unnatural intrusion upon the body of the Escapement, like a malignant tumour that needs must be removed. Worst of all was its very heart, this fortified town, with its great train terminus and its garlanded avenues, its towers of solid stone and its cheery and practical and hardworking façade, which hid the truth of itself behind walls and deep in the ground. The Conjurer was an expert in misdirection, but even he was fooled, at first, by this city, which had been built, he had come to realise, as an exact and rather sinister act of manipulation of interest, so that one’s eyes were always drawn elsewhere, and it was only with effort that one could tear away from the illusion to see the ancient truth
.
But he knew it now—some of it, at least. Enough to steal out of the Bull Tub that night, just behind the petit Pierrot; and he watched how the little creature straightened himself and stepped with quiet purpose much at odds with the persona he had put on in the bar; how he faded into the brickwork and the shadows, so that he all but vanished. But this was child’s play for the Conjurer, who turned his gloves inside out so that the bright white was replaced with pure black velvet, and he utilised what magicians call the “black art,” the act of vanishing when a black object is placed against a black background, which conjurers use in their stagecraft; and he moved softly, like a big cat.
He followed the petit Pierrot down the alleyway.
The city of Jericho stood at the heart of the Thickening, that tear-shaped stain of human settlement on the Escapement, and it had grown, as they say, in the telling. It was a rough prospectors’ town in the old days, and sat on the confluence of substance mines that even when the first people came had already been extensively mined by other, vanished peoples. Whoever they had been, they had left some of their curious remnants behind them, these machines which trouble the dreams of those who pass too close, and as the city grew and prospered it worked hard at the subterfuge of hiding its foundations. Vast ship-like structures jutting out of the ground had been built over with wood and stone, in graceful spirals of stairs and homes that floated in the sky, bridges that linked rooftop to rooftop and on which the denizens of the pleasure quarter gaily strolled at nightfall among hanging gardens. Down below, the wide avenues that intersected each other in a series of bright circuses nevertheless gave birth to a host of narrow, twisting alleyways that had come into being through the unregulated construction of dwellings of all sorts, many of the buildings rising several stories high, many leaning alarmingly and some even merging into each other as individuals found themselves sharing homes that had, through the actions of gravity and time, slowly fallen into each other. Those alleyways, in contrast to the main thoroughfares, were dark and narrow and hid many things that respectable citizens of the Thickening would not openly tolerate, and indeed would shake their head in amazement to find dwelling, still, in their midst.
Beyond the avenues and the towers lay the enormous train terminus of Jericho, into which all tracks led. It was a place of wrought iron and paved platforms and high windows of coloured glass which broke the clear pure light into rainbows, and it was filled with bustle and steam and the sharp whistles of trains, the hurly-burly of passengers and conductors, the transport of people and goods.
The city was gaily decorated with many balloons.
Unbeknown to the Conjurer, he was being followed.
The Kid and the Stranger had split up upon arrival, each intent on his own private goal. The Stranger went one way and the Kid another. The Kid could sense that his quarry was there. He fidgeted with the silver thumb-tip that hung round his neck. He had not seen a town as large as Jericho before, and for a time he was seduced by the bright shopfronts, where they sold every manner of fabulous things, from bales of multicoloured twine and miniature train sets remarkable in their detail and vivid in colour, and pedal-operated machines for the washing of clothes, and in the streets the horse-drawn carts intermingled with penny-farthings swishing to and fro, and pedestrians in clothes smarter and brighter than he had ever seen doffed their hats at each other as they passed. The Kid strutted down the street confidently enough. He fancied himself a sort of alley cat, ready for anything and everything, and he grinned cockily at the young ladies who passed him, who could not resist but glance back at this dashing young man, with his spurs that jangled on the cobblestones, and the guns on his hips jutting from their holsters.
But the Kid had other things besides women on his mind, and underneath the cheery and untroubled façade there coiled the same dark, jagged anger, like a hanging rope coated in broken glass. Which was what he kind of had in mind to use when he finally found the Conjurer.
The Kid diverted from Bim Bom Boulevard down a narrow road that ran perpendicular to a long, old wall. Something about this wall, the way it seemed to swallow the light, so that the road seemed gloomier than perhaps it should, disturbed him. He paused and ran the tips of his fingers lightly across the brickwork, and was surprised to see dust smudge along the path, exposing underneath not brick but a faded metal, warm to the touch. He cleared more dirt from the spot and saw that it was the kind of metal one found in the giant edifices that littered the Escapement like downed ships. It could be a fin, he thought. Which would mean the rest of the edifice was buried deep down below. . . .
He tried the bars and hostelries of the city in his search, and each became shabbier and more decrepit as he wended his way deeper into the clown quarter. In each bar he asked for the Conjurer, and in each bar he was met with dark looks and muttered excuses and shakes of the head, but still he persisted. The daylight grew dim and then disappeared entirely, and a thin, wan moon rose like a broken sickle blade over the towering minarets.
Street lamps came into life then, burning a yellow flame that cast the alleyways in shivering chiaroscuro. The Kid felt suddenly how very alien the place became at night; how none of the shadows quite corresponded to the objects casting them; how in the passageway between two decrepit buildings he could swear he saw a tiny figure, not quite human, in a three-point jester hat with bells on, whose wide yellow eyes stared at the Kid with malevolence. He saw the night riders come out then, scruffy, scrawny youths who skulked into the alleyway and hastily pasted posters on the mock-brick wall. The austere face of a patrician man stared at him from the poster, but the eyes had been daubed with black paint, with the corneas, irises and pupils erased, and the scrawled letters below said, mayor wilder is lying to you and doom comes to jericho.
As he watched them, from the shadows, one hand on the butt of his gun ready to draw, he saw the ushers stream into the alley, official men in uniform, carrying billy clubs, their clogs rat-tat-tatting on the cobblestones. The fight that ensued was swift and brutal and at the end of it the night riders ran off but for one unlucky soul who was captured by the ushers and kicked on the ground, viciously and without sound, all this while without a sound from anyone at all.
The Kid holstered the gun he had almost unconsciously drawn, and then he faded into the space between buildings where the Pierrot had been. This city’s problems were not his own. He followed the narrow gap over to the next alley and then the next, getting lost in a maze of impossibly twisting streets. He passed a wide gate, to what might have been a garden or a pavilion, on which was etched the symbol of a serpent entwined around a staff, but he paid no attention, and he passed it by, and did not notice the Stranger as he entered that strange place, for which the legend above the gate read, simply, asclepius gardens.
Everything will be all right, the man said. He stroked the boy’s hair. The boy lay in the bed under the clean white hospital sheets. His hair stuck to his forehead yet his skin felt cold. He breathed evenly but his eyes were closed. The machine by the bedside beeped. There were always machines these days and they always beeped. Do you remember this book, the man said, taking a worn copy out of his bag, we used to read it all the time when you were smaller.
The boy didn’t answer. By his head, the man had placed the boy’s favourite stuffed toys, an elephant, a cowboy and a clown. Outside the window the lights of cars passed endlessly, like a river. The man opened the book and he tried to focus on the first page but he couldn’t see the letters clearly. The book had black-and-white ink illustrations. He leafed through the pages wordlessly.
Tiny forms in huge empty spaces.
A man disappearing through an arch into a shadow of ink.
The Stranger did notice the Kid’s passing, but he had other things on his mind just then. He’d noticed many things since their arrival, for like the Conjurer he, too, was uneasily attuned to the changing vagaries of the Escapement, if only as a mechanism of survival.
The Stranger passed into the night. On Moe Lane he found a shop selling materiel. For a moment he stood and watched the objects behind the glass, avidly, almost with hunger. Behind a window he saw the mummified corpse of a bee eater, its beak transformed into a set of golden scissors; a clock with seven hands, each human; a pair of dice formed of the skulls of rodents; a plant with human hair; a coal iron filled with blinking human eyes—the usual assortment of materiel discarded in the wake of battle. No use. No use to the Stranger, no use to the man behind the Stranger—
A nurse said, Could I get you a coffee?—kindly, startling him awake. He shook his head. No, no, he said. But thank you. In his hands, the book he used to read the boy. The one about the flower. But when he’d asked in shops about it no seller ever recognised the name or the description, he’d never seen another copy but his own. No, thank you. He was so tired. He had such important things to do. He let the book slip from his fingers to the floor, and settled in the chair. The beep, beep, beep of the machines. The boy unmoving. He had to find the flower—
