Too tired to sleep. Poured himself another whiskey. Sat down with Shriek: An Afterword and Cinsorium & Other Historical Fables. He was facing the apartment door, with his Lewden Special wedged in beside his left leg. So he could reach across his body to draw it. Sitting upright eased the pain in his shoulder.

Cinsorium looked like a kind of abridgment of Duncan Shriek’s theories. He started to read it, then put it down. Needed something first that gave him more of a sense of Duncan’s character.

He picked up Shriek, began to skim it. Saw at once the conceit: Duncan’s voice in parentheses, commenting on Janice’s history of a broken family and the first war between the Houses. Skipped to the end, read the editor’s afterword. Duncan’s disappearance. His sister’s disappearance and possible death. The manuscript found in a pub Finch figured must’ve gone under or been destroyed years ago. With notes scrawled on the pages by Duncan. Which meant he’d still been alive when Janice went missing.

Finch turned back to the beginning. Charted Duncan’s rise and fall as a historian, a believer in fringe theories about the gray caps. Almost all of them now proven true. Obsessed with a student at the academy where he’d taught history. A long, unhappy love affair. Duncan turned into a stalker. Discredited. Become unbelievable. Skipped Janice’s own rise in the art world. Beside the point to Finch. He found Janice an exasperating narrator. She hid things, lied, delayed the truth. To undermine and slant. Like a particularly crafty interrogation subject.

Gradually, he got a sense of the tragedy of Duncan’s life. How close Shriek had been to success. To being a kind of prophet. An injustice, his fate working at Finch’s sense of fairness. A staggering sense of an opportunity lost. A path not taken. An Ambergris where Duncan Shriek was lauded and the Rising had never happened. Or been defeated. A horror at the idea of nothing really changing in a century. The Houses had gone from war to war. The city was more fractured than ever. Would still be fractured even if the gray caps disappeared tomorrow.

All depressingly similar, and yet he remembered the brief years of peace more vividly than the war. No matter how hard he tried to forget. A better life. A better way.

Kept searching Duncan’s asides for anything that might point to why the man would wind up dead a hundred years later in an apartment he’d once lived in. Found a reference to switching apartments to evade the gray caps. Another reference to working as a tour guide while living in an apartment in Trillian Square. The place had been destroyed long before the Rising. Finch wondered if the few children growing up now even knew who Trillian was anymore.

Then there was Shriek’s obsession with Manzikert. With the Silence. And with Samuel Tonsure, the monk who accompanied Manzikert underground and who never returned, although his journal—half evidence of an ill-fated expedition, half the ravings of a madman—reappeared sixty years later.