Then down the cramped stairs, stinking of sweat, and out the front door into the night, running, all too aware now of the new sound of what would turn out to be the Kalif’s mortars, set up to ring the city. Shells hurtled through the air, poorly aimed and indiscriminate. (We knew them as the Kalif’s because the unique sound had no parallel to H&S weapons. And unlike F&L bombs, they did not become a writhing explosion of fungi and spores. They just smashed into things and sent shards of those things crackling across the space between, then lay inert. Why we feared those mortars more than the weapons of the Houses, I do not know. Perhaps the sheer unfamiliarity of them. We had grown accustomed to our other assailants.)

And that was our night at the opera, which I remember more clearly than all the rest.

It had been a strange, strange war long before the opera—two years of watching Ambergris, like some sun-drenched, meat-gorged reptile, make one of its random attempts to molt, to shed its skin, to become something new. All across the city, from the narrow alleys of the ruined Bureaucratic Quarter to the wide bustle of Albumuth Boulevard, we could sense it coming. Odd alliances formed under stark orange skies. The vertical invasion of telephone poles, for example, once a random dotting, had become a concerted march from the docks into the city’s scaly white underbelly. Guns poured in with the telephones, both originating from the Kalif’s empire (although often by way of F&L’s agents, already gathering in the city, fly-thick and as black-swarming). The guns came in every size and description, most of them oddly bulky and gleaming with the kaleidoscopic reflection of unknown metals. They smelled both new and old at the same time, smelled of far-off places, as if the metal had soaked up the essence of the foundries and factories that had produced them. The guns frightened me. They seemed like an emanation from some future Ambergris, some place that did not yet exist, but soon would.

Outdoor café life became charged with danger and interruptions. Shootings and stabbings became all too frequent. (The novelty of guns was too much temptation for the average Ambergrisian.) Motored vehicles began to reemerge—dark, dank metallic beetles long dormant—as new Hoegbotton resources brought barrels of sticky black fuel into the city.

The very air smelled different—it had a charged quality, as if we were all breathing tiny particles of gunpowder; our lungs burned even without the impetus of pollen in the spring, and, in the fall, even on days when the air wasn’t cold and dry. (This was not your imagination—the spore content of the city began to change, to be transformed. The gray caps had begun the process of slow but inexorable translation/transformation that would culminate in the Shift.)