“Look,” he said, pointing toward the ceiling. Only Lacond did not make a sound when he saw it. Even Sybel swore, under his breath.

It seems odd now that we had not seen it before all else, as if we wanted at first to deny its existence.

Looking up, as we walked forward to the edge of the balcony seats, we slowly came to recognize the source of the clear, clean, but undeniably green light that served as our illumination. (The rational mind can absorb only so much of the strange without damage.)

“What is it?” Mary whispered.

“The remains of a fungal bomb,” Lacond replied.

“Half exploded,” Duncan said. “Fused to the ceiling.”

The wound we had seen from the outside of the opera house had provided scant evidence of the damage suffered by the building. The center of its mosaic dome—a stylized scene of Morrow cavalry riding to Ambergris’s defense during the Silence—had disappeared, the shards of its dissolution having simply vanished, assimilated, replaced by an intense green that shed its light in waves upon the stage. The green had eyes, or so it seemed, for it manifested itself as a series of circles or nascent fruiting bodies.

My breath caught in my throat. My neck grew sore from staring up at it. You could see through the green to the stars in the sky beyond, as if the green were no more substantial than gauze, than fog, and yet it sparkled and spun, each particle of it, as it shed the light that allowed us to see as we found our seats.

Lacond noticed that I could not look away from it, even as I sat down.

“Nothing you haven’t seen from the outside in,” he said as kindly as he could. His bulbous eyelids twitched, the cigar working up and down between his teeth, caught in his grouper-like lips. The sweet spicy smell of the cigar calmed me. “A fungal bomb that misfired, like we said. It hit the glass and stone of the dome and formed a substance … well, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. An interesting effect. And stable. It’ll stay there for a long time, or at least for the next four hours.” He laughed.

“Almost a piece of New Art all by itself,” Sybel said, grinning.

“Beautiful,” Duncan said, staring up at it. “Absolutely beautiful.”

“Horrible and shocking, I would have thought,” Mary said—a distant murmur, a whisper lost in a current of air.

“Quite a climb up there that would be,” Sybel said. “I think I could do it, though.”

“You’d climb a rainbow if you could,” I said, earning a half-hearted scowl.