Dad used to joke that he had married Mom as part of his research into the history of the city.

“Your mother, children,” he said once, “figures prominently in my current research. She’s fodder for my essays. Certain experiments, certain experiments cannot be conducted without her—or, if conducted, do not”—and he stared pointedly at Mom and then back at us—“yield the same results.”

Sometimes when he said this, he would hold her close from behind, nuzzle her neck. Mom would give a sly, quick smile then, before pretending to be offended as she pulled away from him, and I remember that smile, because it gave me the first clue that there might be an adult world existing above or on top of the one in which we dwelt as children.

Mom had a problem laughing at herself; she never knew if people were laughing with her or at her, so she never fully gave herself up to it with other people—Dad was the only one who could make her laugh in a way that seemed effortless rather than forced.

As for whether first-generation Ambergrisian blood flows through our veins, I don’t know, but I think our dad believed it did. (And if it didn’t before, Janice, the city probably flows through my veins now, in altered form, whether I want it to or not. An entire world flows through my veins these days.)

While upstairs Sirin worked on making Mary the flavor of the decade and downstairs I labored at scraping out a living, Duncan fleshed out his theories and his articles, which would one day culminate, or dissolve, in his Early History of Ambergris tour guide book. (Or at least culminate in the unexpurgated version that has still never seen print.)

In those days, sentences crawled out of Duncan’s skin, paragraphs exhaled with each breath. On a winter’s morning, you could almost see them forming in the white smoke of his speech. (For all the good it did me—most of the sentences and paragraphs didn’t coalesce into longer works, or if they did, I sacrificed them to the AFTOIS newsletter.)

Sometimes I thought the Spore of the Gray Cap made him prolific—that in a space neither above nor belowground, he felt in the most perfect balance—and thus balanced, ballasted, he could write without self-consciousness. Certainly, the owner loved his presence—“fringe” or not, they’d never had a historian use their tavern as a work space. Of course, Duncan brought more business with him than I ever did, in the form of his fellow crackpots. Lacond even indulged for a time, before his illness made that impossible.

The following note in Duncan’s journal exemplifies his approach: