Despite these failings, Aquelus managed partial redemption by having four children with Irene, although surely the irony of the Cappaness being the instrument of his salvation was not lost on him. These children—Mandrel, Tiphony, Cyril, and Samantha—became Aquelus’s delight and main reason for living. While Irene ruled, he doted on them, and the people doted on them too. In Aquelus’s love for his children, Ambergrisians saw the shadow of their former love for him, and many forgave him his involvement with the mushroom dwellers—a charge almost certainly false anyway.

Thus, although in many ways tragic, the partnership of Cappaness and Cappan would define and redefine Ambergris—both internally and in the world beyond—for another 30 years. They would be haunted years, however, for the legacy of the Silence would permeate Ambergris for generations—in the sudden muting of the voices of children, of women, of those men who had stayed behind. For those inhabitants who had lost their families, their friends, the city was nothing more than a giant morgue, and no matter how they might console one another, no matter how they might set to their tasks with almost superhuman intensity, the better to block out the memories, they could never really escape the Silence, for the “City of Remembrance and Memorial,” as one poet called it, was all around them. It was common in those early, horrible years—still scarred by famine, despite the reduction in the population—for men and women to break down on the street in a sudden flux of tears.

The Truffidian priest Michael Nysman came to the city as part of a humanitarian mission the year after the Silence and was shocked by what he found there. In a letter to his diocese back in Nicea, he wrote: