Out on the street the rain had stopped, although the moist rain smell lingered, and the noontime calls to prayer from the Religious Quarter echoed through the narrow streets. He could almost taste the wonderful savoriness of the hot sausage sold by the sidewalk vendors. After lunch, he would take in some entertainment. The Manzikert Opera theater had decided to do a Voss Bender revival this season, and with any luck he could still catch the matinee and be home to the wife before dinner. With this thought uppermost in his mind, he stepped out onto the street and was soon lost to view among the lunchtime crowds.

Shriek: An Afterword

AN AFTERWORD TO THE EARLY HISTORY OF AMBERGRIS

BY JANICE SHRIEK

(And Duncan Shriek)

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

The following is my account of the life of noted historian Duncan Shriek. This text was originally begun as a belated afterword to Duncan Shriek’s The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, but circumstances have changed since I began the book.

Having begun this account as an afterword, ended it as a dirge, and made of it a fevered family chronicle in the middle, all I can say now, as the time to write comes to an end, is that I did the best I could, and am gone. Nothing in this city we call Ambergris lasts for long.

As for Mary Sabon, I leave this account for her as much as for anyone. Perhaps even now, as late as it has become, reading my words will change you.

Goodbye.

—Janice Shriek

(When I found this manuscript, I contemplated destroying the entire thing, but, in the end, I didn’t have the will or the heart to do so. It is flawed and partisan and often crude, but it is, ultimately, honest. I hope Janice will forgive or forget my own efforts to correct the record.—Duncan)

PART I

[Upon the altar, the Cappan Aquelus’s men found an] old weathered journal and two human eyeballs preserved by some unknown process in a solid square made of an unknown clear metal. Between journal and squared eyeballs blood had been used to draw a symbol …

More ominous still, the legendary entrance, once blocked up, boarded over, lay wide open, the same stairs that had enticed Manzikert I beckoning now to Aquelus.

The journal was, of course, the one that had disappeared with Samuel Tonsure 60 years before. The eyes, a fierce blue, could belong to no one but Manzikert I. Who the blood had come from, no one cared to guess.

—From Duncan Shriek’s depiction of the Silence in
The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris

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