As we approached Lacond’s offices in the late afternoon, the wind picked up. It rattled the gravel on side streets. It brought with it a strange premature twilight, and a smell that none could identify. Was it a smell come up off the river? It seemed bitter and pleasant, sharp and vague, all at once.

The light, as Martin Lake might have said, had become different in Ambergris.

We left Lacond’s offices tired and ready for rest, Duncan to his and Mary’s apartment, me to my own place much farther down Albumuth Boulevard in the opposite direction. (Not even Lacond could demand we cover the Festival, not that year. The Kalif’s troops were an unknown factor—they made us nervous, as had the uneventful Festival the year before.) Sybel had decided to take me up on my invitation and stay with me that night, just in case. Either we’d celebrate the Festival together or defend ourselves against it. (I left ample protections; I’m sorry they were not enough.) We had all been through many Festivals. We were old pros at it. We knew how to handle it.

I had thought about making the trek to our mother’s mansion, but Duncan had assured me he could keep her safe. (She was quite safe, for several reasons, not least of which was her location: far enough upriver that the Kalif’s men had not requisitioned the house, and far enough from Ambergris that she would come to no harm from the gray caps.)

Dusk had become night by the time Sybel arrived, breathless from running. After I let him in, I bolted the door behind him.

“It’s not good out there,” he said, gasping for breath. “The trees are too still. There’s a silence that’s … like I imagine what the Silence must have been like.”

That was a thought. I felt light-headed for an instant, a conjoined chill and thrill. What if, tonight, we were to experience what the twenty-five thousand had experienced during the Silence, the city to become another vast experiment?

“Nonsense,” I said. “It’s just another Festival. Help me with this.”

We pushed a set of cabinets up against the door.

“That should do it,” I said.

Outside, a few dozen drunken youths passed by, shouting as they stumbled their way past.

“Death to the Kalif!” I heard, and a flurry of cursing.

“They’ll be lucky if they survive the hour,” Sybel said. “And it won’t be the Kalif that kills them, either.”

“When did you become so cheerful?” I asked.

He gave me a look and went back to loading his gun. We had pistols and knives, which Sybel had managed to purchase from, of all people, a Kalif officer. There was a booming black market in weapons these days. Some wags speculated that the Kalif had invaded Ambergris to create demand for inventory.

Meanwhile, the gray caps had spores and fungal bombs, and Truff knew what else.

“Do you think we’re much safer in here?” I asked.