The curtain rose. The green light was very much like the green light in this place, as I type this afterword. Here, I am on the stage. There, I was part of the audience.

Not that there’s much difference.

The opera began.

Despite Gallendrace’s valiant efforts, it soon became clear that the opera would be a rather muddied affair. What more could one expect under the circumstances, hampered by lack of funds, lack of time, donated costumes and sets, and the shortage of many other supplies? But a certain unnecessary complexity also wreaked havoc with the production—too many parts and not enough actors. Further, men played most of the female parts and women played most of the male parts, which created a dissonant musical effect, tenors and sopranos popping up in the most unexpected places. It became increasingly difficult to keep track of all but the most major characters.

Still, the main story line had the kind of familiarity that is difficult to lose in translation, especially when you’re in the middle of the conflict in question. As in real life, the opera carefully related the particulars of a deadly war between merchant families.

To put it plainly, what hawkish Sirin had anticipated so accurately was an economic invasion of Ambergris by Frankwrithe & Lewden, the type of invasion that only coincidentally results in bloodshed. For years, the constant pressure exerted by Hoegbotton & Sons on F&L in their home markets around Morrow had hindered Frankwrithe’s attempts to expand into Ambergris—although a tenuous toehold had been gained through influence on Antechamber book bannings and through bookstores large enough to ignore Hoegbotton intimidation. However, mere months before my enlightening trip to Morrow, F&L had managed to take over its governance from a failed monarchy, in the process issuing a decree banning all Hoegbotton agents and imports from the city. Hoegbotton found itself unable to mount an effective counteroffensive. (In part, F&L took advantage of H&S’s temporary shift of attention to trains and railways, a fixation that emanated from Henry Hoegbotton, the hoary but clever patriarch of the Hoegbotton clan. Henry Hoegbotton—of whom not enough has been written; if not for my present circumstances, I would attempt the biography myself—had hoped for an era of economic domination over all of the South, to the very tip of the last atoll of the Southern Isles, and all of the North, including the frozen Skamoo in their spackly ice huts. Many experts speculated that Hoegbotton might then wage “a holy war of commerce” against the closed markets of the Kalif’s empire. However, such a vision required Hoegbotton to overextend itself so much that it became unable to effectively respond to a threat like being banned from Morrow.)