Even as we stayed the same, the city changed again and again, as it always would, its grime-smeared head, its soiled towers, its debauched calls to prayer the same, and yet always it changed. I grew to love and appreciate it more than I ever had before. It was all I knew, and I knew it almost too well by now. (Yet neither of us ever found out if it loved us back.)

Then, some four or five years ago, the Shift began to affect Ambergris, disrupting the flux and flow of the city. All became unpredictable, save for one constant: as once it had become colder, now the city seethed with heat, even in the winter and spring. With this heat has come the rain, sliding down in oily sheets, or mumbling to itself in little gusts and flurries, or dissipating into a fine gray mist.

In a Broadsheet article Duncan cut out and stuck into his journal, the strangeness of the rain is remarked upon in detail:

This rain behaves oddly sometimes. It forms funnels in the sky. It falls one way on the left side of Albumuth Boulevard and at a different angle on the right side of Albumuth Boulevard. It delivers a puzzling bounty: fish and tiny squid and crabs that are not native here. They lie struggling in piles of seaweed as alien to the city as we are to them while crowds form around them, or do not; many among us try to ignore such happenings.

Over the River Moth, the rain behaves as if with a conscious will, for there it will sometimes form columns on two sides with no rain between, and the air there, as one eyewitness put it, “turns to darkness with a weight and smell unlike the rest of the sky.” (A door, Janice.)

With the rain has come, again, as in the old days, a proliferation of fungus, so that the business of mushroom culling and cleaning is once again very profitable. And yet the gray caps have become absent even during the deep night.

That no one knows what these signs mean may be more troublesome than the signs themselves.

Even House Hoegbotton, in the past three years, has looked askance at the weather, seemed oddly humbled by an enemy it can neither predict nor defeat.

With the heat and rain have come the agents of House Frankwrithe & Lewden once again, infiltrating Ambergris, although this time with no discernible gray cap support. And yet, with murder on the rise and rumors of war constant now, our nerves have once again become as frayed as they were on the eve of conflict so many years ago.

None of this has helped the tourist trade. The number of people attending my increasingly rote tours has dropped off. Incidents such as having to walk around a three-foot crimson mushroom suddenly erupting from the pavement near their feet, or ducking a torrent of tiny silver fish delivered by a thunderstorm, has positive novelty value to only a select few.