I think it’s morning outside, but I haven’t bothered to check. I had thought it was lunchtime earlier, but it turned out that my stomach had it all wrong. If it is morning, the sky is probably gray and undistinguished, flecked with rain. It’s that time of year when sudden showers appear and make of the city stark outlines, robbing it of color and texture. A welter of umbrellas appears on the streets and people walk quickly to their destinations, with no appreciation for anything around them.

4

Afterwords. Afterwards. Afterwar.

The war had been jarring, numbing, senseless. In its aftermath, the balance of power remained much as it had before all the bloodshed. The Hoegbottons controlled Ambergris and F&L controlled Morrow and Sophia’s Island but lacked the military and political will to enforce their ridiculous tariffs. The Kalif’s mauled troops retreated across the River Moth even as their merchants advanced to secure deals with the Hoegbottons to rebuild the city and import new products. (Oddly enough, the Kalif’s troops could be said to have ultimately achieved their goal, if not in the preferred way. For, after all, hadn’t they liberated the citizens of Ambergris from chaos and tyranny through their sacrifice?)

After the war, Ambergris forgot the real enemy—Hoegbotton & Sons still railed against Frankwrithe & Lewden or the Kalif, but provided no warning against the gray caps. People gratefully went along with this mass denial. Wasn’t it easier to blame F&L than an amorphous, faceless enemy that hid underground and attacked seemingly at random? (To be fair, the still unknown way in which F&L had acquired fungal weapons confused the issue—F&L did look like the sole instigator. After all, didn’t the gray caps periodically erupt from their hidey-holes during the Festival anyway?)

The terrible, cold beauty of the truth appealed to no one. Every few weeks, for several years, one or two, or three or four, people were killed by a leftover fungal bomb or a new one planted by someone—the gray caps or F&L, I assume, but who could tell the difference? H&S did nothing to prevent this, and tried hard to stop Lacond from reporting it. We were a city and a people unable to face our coming annihilation, incensed over an enemy that posed not a quarter of the threat. In a way, we lived in a fairy tale, convinced that someone else’s actions or inactions might save us. As day after day passed without Ambergris being invaded, we flinched less and less, let down our guard. No one was going to destroy the city—only rumors could do that, the thinking went, only idle talk. If we pretended otherwise, the enemy could not creep out at night and make us all disappear. Permanence had become a thing from the past.