(If so, then the entire city was trying to kill itself. One of the strangest things about the war for me was the calm in the midst of violence that sometimes came over people—a state of grace, or denial, perhaps. I can remember watching from one end of a street as a fungal bomb blew up a few blocks away. It was one of those hideous creations that, dissolving into a fine purple mist, travels forward from the impetus of the blast and enters the lungs of anyone in its path, making of them brittle statues that disintegrate at the slightest touch or breath of wind. I ducked into a side alley, even though I was already immune—the purple mist would encounter and be neutralized in my lungs by the green mist already residing there—and watched as people ran by, screaming. There was no help for them, no help I could give. Across the street, though, I saw a man in a long overcoat standing calmly by a lamppost. He had on thick glasses and he had covered his nose and mouth with a mask of cloth. As the mist washed over him, bringing with it the usual, if incongruous, smell of limes and lemons, he did not panic. He just stood there. As others were brought up short in midflight, rendered motionless, their eyes rolling into their sockets, a light purple fuzz hardening on their lips and eyebrows, crawling up their legs, this man stood there for a moment, and then went on about his business. Over time, as more and more precautions were taken, you would see people going about their daily lives with a calm, with a sense of peace, that astounded me. Only in Ambergris! For, incredibly enough, very few people fled the city during the war. Stockton and Morrow combined received no more than a few thousand refugees.)

Poor Duncan, meanwhile, had different afflictions. His seasonal fungal diseases intensified under the stress, until he jokingly said to Lacond that at times he could lean against a fungus-covered wall and no one would see him. His trench coat grew oddly empty or full depending on the virulence of the attack, a hat hiding most of the tendrils that insisted on colonizing his scalp. Thick coatings of cologne helped disguise the reek of decaying mushroom matter—at least until the second year of the war, when so many people had contracted their own fungal diseases that disguise was no longer necessary. (Often, Janice, I was flexing my newfound control of my affliction. My changes in shape, in density, were but responses to the spores in my immediate surroundings. They were how I defended myself—and, not coincidentally, you. Although sometimes I was hiding an awfully big gun under my coat; some threats are best met with bullets.)