Nitro Hex was seven when he heard the tune through a wall he had no business standing near. Six notes. They crack the Bell of Unminding, which speeds along whatever end is already walking toward a person. Only one other soul knew that melody, and that soul is gone. So Nitro Hex, green-skinned and tattooed, a bone through his nose, went looking for an instrument wicked enough to carry the rest of the song. He wants the Insane Clown Spectres called up out of the dark to stand guard over his Acid Jester tribe. For that he needs something to play the summons on, and he has searched four seasons without finding it. He started at the burning tree. Flame-furred orangutans hung off its metal branches and golden leaves, hooting down at him. He raised his axe-hand — the one he took off the man who took his hand, bolted to his wrist because an axe never shakes — and they hooted louder. One of them stamped a branch and screeched a name at him. Boosie. Tree brewer. Out past the treeline. First he drank. His tribe gathered at the rune-marked barrel that never runs dry, and he filled a stein and told them he would be back with guardians. They laughed. One asked about the tiny hat on his head. Nitro Hex put the axe through the table and nobody asked again. An hour and a half of walking brought him to a willow with a brewery grown inside it. Boosie hung upside down from a knot in the trunk, head and fur glued solid with maple sap, drinking something that smoked. "Ssseen you comin'," Boosie slurred. "Sssmell like a fight and cheap grog." Nitro Hex told him what he wanted. An instrument dark enough to bait spectres. Boosie cackled until sap dripped off his chin, and Nitro Hex cackled with him, and for a moment the willow shook with two ugly laughs. Then Boosie wiped his mouth. "I don't got it. But I owe a gardener." The gardener turned out to be a spriggan, all bark and green leaves, kneeling in the dirt of the bud farm with a trowel. It did not stop working while Nitro Hex talked. It said it traded its harvest to a pizza man and that the pizza man collected strange things. The pizza man was a gremlin chef in red sunglasses and headphones, shoving pies into a glowing oven with a paddle. He listened, then pulled one headphone off his ear. "Oh, that's a flavor I know," the chef said. "There's a horn in the old theater. Bone-white. Nobody plays it twice. I catered there once and the whole crew walked out sick." He pointed his paddle. "Ask for the ringmaster." Nitro Hex reached the theater at dusk. Skulls sat carved above its windows, and orange light moved behind the glass without anyone inside to move it. He climbed the steps and went in. The horn was real, and it was hanging in the lobby, and it was already spoken for. A red-robed figure with gray, dead eyes stood under it, counting out coins.