(A mental shudder. A sudden moment of self-awareness—was I like that? Yes, I probably was. But I don’t know if Mary ever understood the great strain I was under, how what I sought was of the utmost importance. That it meant nothing more or less than safeguarding the fate of everyone who lives in this city, perhaps in the world. And still. And yet. I knew she had taken something from me, that I had been valuable to her. I had given nearly as much as I had taken. I’d been her mentor and she’d been my student, no matter what grief I had caused her. I took some small comfort from that.)

And that was the end of it. Or so I thought. For although Mary was free of Duncan, Duncan would never really be free of her, or her flesh necklace.

As Duncan’s romantic fortunes waned, his fortunes as a historian waxed again: a flowering in miniature, given the heights he had ascended to in his youth. Although those who did speak a kind of truth about the gray caps and Ambergris’s past were condemned to the fringes, they did have their own organization: the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society. Most of Duncan’s postwar hopes of self-expression reached fruition through AFTOIS.

AFTOIS had once again become Lacond’s passion—and in its limited way, it flourished for a time after the war—so that the Broadsheet, which paid the rent, often suffered from his neglect. (Indeed. It never quite failed when he was in charge, but some years after I took over production of the Broadsheet, I would have to put it out of its financial misery, much to the delight of our many enemies.)

“The important thing,” Lacond said to me once, “is that we get the truth out in some form, that we document what is happening. So that at the very least, there will be a record that someone knew about it.”

This struck me as an absurd statement. “Why?” I replied. “So that when the abyss opens up you can stand on the edge and shout down, ‘I told you so!’?”

Lacond looked at me as if I hadn’t understood anything he’d said.

When I told Bonmot about this exchange, he said, “Yes, but without Lacond, how much more mischief would Duncan get into?”

A good point, I had to admit. Because Lacond spent much of his time in those years after the war making Duncan his second-in-command. Without Lacond, the loss of Mary might have hit Duncan harder than it did. (How much harder could it have hit me? I hardly left my apartment for months. Lacond had to drag me out of my bed to get me to work for him. For years afterward, I would feel this hollow space in my stomach, in my lungs. Sometimes, I would think of her and I couldn’t breathe.)