Shriek: An Afterword (33 page)

Now, in the most orchestrated event of the entire evening, House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe & Lewden gave their reply. It was animal, guttural, and in almost perfect unison. With a great shout of both outrage and fear, out came guns previously hidden. Out came the knives, the swords. While the neutrals—I saw Martin and Merrimount running for an exit—tried to extricate themselves from their now utterly indefensible position, Hoegbotton and Lewden, Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe, came together in a unity of purpose. You could see it in their eyes, that, for a time, all differences would be laid aside to defeat a common enemy. They poured up toward the stage, firing, stabbing, while the Kalif’s soldiers, under the calm command of their leader, laid down a murderous fire. Bodies fell in the aisles, cut to pieces. The smell of blood and gunpowder rose from the stage. Billowing smoke, caught and distorted in the green light. The utter panic and dissolution of those who had never thought their night might end like this, some in their distress running back and forth as if caged, unable to find their way out.

Those of us on the balcony seemed to have a better chance than most, unless the front entrance lay blocked. We began to make our way to the stairs and down. We were much calmer than those on the ground floor. Just as the stage had, during the performance, been remote from our rarefied location, so too the violence. We had the sense of it spreading slowly, the stain of the Kalif’s soldiers like some natural force, one that had its own rhythm of invasion, one that would allow us to casually take our leave.

Lacond had pulled his pistols from their ankle holsters. Sybel wielded a particularly deadly-looking knife so long I wondered how he’d managed to conceal it. My brother had, in his protectiveness for Mary, let his fungal disease overtake him further, so that one eye lay clear and blue while the other had become overgrown with a green curling substance that magnified its intent and size. His right arm he had allowed to become a kind of fungus club, black and shiny. The look on his face told me he was ready to die for Mary, right there, right then. {And perhaps endure a minor maiming for you and Sybel.}

We took cover behind the battering ram of Lacond, who cleared a path for us by shoving people out of the way. My last glimpse of the stage showed that the Kalif’s soldiers had advanced farther into the audience, the Ambergrisian resistance becoming more of a rearguard attempt to let the majority escape, rather than anything resembling an offensive.

Then down the cramped stairs, stinking of sweat, and out the front door into the night, running, all too aware now of the new sound of what would turn out to be the Kalif’s mortars, set up to ring the city. Shells hurtled through the air, poorly aimed and indiscriminate. {We knew them as the Kalif’s because the unique sound had no parallel to H&S weapons. And unlike F&L bombs, they did not become a writhing explosion of fungi and spores. They just smashed into things and sent shards of those things crackling across the space between, then lay inert. Why we feared those mortars more than the weapons of the Houses, I do not know. Perhaps the sheer unfamiliarity of them. We had grown accustomed to our other assailants.}

And that was our night at the opera, which I remember more clearly than all the rest.

It had been a strange, strange war long before the opera—two years of watching Ambergris, like some sun-drenched, meat-gorged reptile, make one of its random attempts to molt, to shed its skin, to become something new. All across the city, from the narrow alleys of the ruined Bureaucratic Quarter to the wide bustle of Albumuth Boulevard, we could sense it coming. Odd alliances formed under stark orange skies. The vertical invasion of telephone poles, for example, once a random dotting, had become a concerted march from the docks into the city’s scaly white underbelly. Guns poured in with the telephones, both originating from the Kalif’s empire {although often by way of F&L’s agents, already gathering in the city, fly-thick and as black-swarming}. The guns came in every size and description, most of them oddly bulky and gleaming with the kaleidoscopic reflection of unknown metals. They smelled both new and old at the same time, smelled of far-off places, as if the metal had soaked up the essence of the foundries and factories that had produced them. The guns frightened me. They seemed like an emanation from some future Ambergris, some place that did not yet exist, but soon would.

Outdoor café life became charged with danger and interruptions. Shootings and stabbings became all too frequent. {The novelty of guns was too much temptation for the average Ambergrisian.} Motored vehicles began to reemerge—dark, dank metallic beetles long dormant—as new Hoegbotton resources brought barrels of sticky black fuel into the city.

The very air smelled different—it had a charged quality, as if we were all breathing tiny particles of gunpowder; our lungs burned even without the impetus of pollen in the spring, and, in the fall, even on days when the air wasn’t cold and dry. {This was not your imagination—the spore content of the city began to change, to be transformed. The gray caps had begun the process of slow but inexorable translation/transformation that would culminate in the Shift.}

At the time, none of us thought much about these changes. Ambergris, for all its history, its secrets, its allure, had always been dirty, sickly, on the verge of crumbling back into itself—battered, babbling, incoherent in its design and intent. We all thought that, ultimately, the molt wouldn’t take, and the reptile that was the city would sink back into the mud a little, its skin ever more mottled from the experience.

Into this strangeness, this bubble of trapped amber, in which everything and nothing was happening all at once, the war intruded. Suddenly, what had seemed random had form and structure: it was Us against Them: a Hoegbotton many of us could not tolerate against Frankwrithe & Lewden, an Other that was far worse: an invader, usurper, the likes of which we had not known since the Kalif’s temporary Occupation generations before.

It was in this atmosphere that we became reporters for
The Ambergris Daily Broadsheet
under the guidance of the
Broadsheet
’s editor and publisher, James Lacond.

Duncan, in the absence of Mary—still, in those early days of the war, imprisoned by the two-semester ban—decided to take it upon himself to visit Lacond and make the arrangements with him. I can’t say I minded Duncan going instead of me. I had made some inquiries about Lacond and discovered a man of many vices—he smoked at a ridiculous rate, he drank, often while on the job, he swore constantly, and he sometimes participated in the dangerous fungal drug trade. {All vices you once possessed, Janice!}

At first, Duncan found Lacond to be cantankerous and irritating. He seemed unable to understand the value of adding us to his stable of broken-down journalistic nags. However, he had met Duncan before, read his work, and even reviewed one of his books in the past, and that made him warm to us. {Warm to me. I don’t know if he ever really warmed to you. It certainly wasn’t your fault—he was, without much doubt, a blustery old fart. The day I went to see him, James had already begun a downward spiral. I think this is why he wound up liking me when we got to know each other better. He saw in me a fellow lost soul, an underachiever, a candidate for an early reputational grave. As I was to find out, I had crossed his path as his expectations were decaying—journalism was as much a low point for him as for us. When I came upon him—bloated, red-nosed, squat, a cigar in his mouth—setting type for the printing presses that clacked and rattled and sobbed behind him, I sensed a stubbornness, a refusal as yet to acknowledge his fate. He was talking fast, his stubby fingers working the type in and out of position with an unexpected grace. The man liked plain shirts, over which would hang striped suspenders, holding up pants that he tucked into short boots. He often muttered to himself—always muttering to himself as long as I knew him, whether about the price of ink or the vagaries of typefaces.

{“What do you want?” he asked, never looking up from his work. He didn’t need to look up. I could guess our connection from the faint black stippling around his chin, his ears. He had been underground. And when he finally did look up, he recognized the same in me. After that, any reluctance on his part was mere economics.}

For Lacond, by fate or fortune, or both, was the founder of the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society, a historical organization known for its outlandish theories and high fatality rates. As Duncan wrote in his
Early History of Ambergris
several years later:

This newsletter would later become Duncan’s eccentric flagship as he led a fearless crew of “fringe historians” into the uncharted and unclaimed waters of Oblivion. These hardy men and women subsisted at the far reaches of popular acclaim and derived what little sustenance they could from peripheral mentions in the lesser-known broadsheets and journals—lingering in the brackish backwaters of footnotes in papers by their more famous colleagues. {Mary’s footnotes would eventually take on this preservative quality, often the only extant mention of any number of historians, myself included. Although some felt gratitude, for most living in the margins proved a grim and unfulfilling existence.}

Our dad loved historians, of course, but he had always hated journalists. He considered them the juvenile, larval stage of the historian, and as with certain reptilian or insect species that eat their own young, he believed they should be done away with for society’s greater good. I remember he used to call journalists “Historians without the wisdom of perspective.”

As Duncan used to say, though, after the war, “Father was wrong. Journalists are just frightened people with notepads who are trying very hard not to get killed.” It was, paradoxically, a boring time, what with all the running around. All we did was skulk and hide, then run somewhere. Record what we saw—the aftermath of an explosion, an outbreak of illness, a battle—run somewhere else. Hide. Report. Run. Hide. Report. Run.

“Bring me the story!” Lacond used to bellow from his chosen spot behind the typesetting machine. “There’s a story out there—find it now!”

Even as, some weeks, he was reduced to paying us for those stories with bread, vegetables, and milk.

Bring me the story!
This command became our lives. Rather than a slow, bleary-eyed stagger down to the gallery, my day would begin—in the deepest part of the night—with the telephone ringing. I would fumble for the phone, offer a mumbled “Hello?” A voice, usually Lacond’s, sometimes his assistant, would whisper “123 So-and-so Street—there’s been a bombing.” If the phones weren’t working, it would be a knock on the door from a runner, usually Sybel, who’d taken the job because there was nothing else for him in the city. Where once Sybel had dressed outrageously, now he wore clothes that allowed him to blend right into the wall. “To each time and place its own apparel,” he told me. “Not that I don’t miss the bad old days.” {Miss them? He was still
living
them. Acting as a runner for a broadsheet gave him a certain amount of neutrality in sections of the city critical for him to reach if he wanted to continue providing “substances to those who desire them,” as he was fond of saying. It certainly made it more convenient for Sybel to slip me my “peace of mind,” as he called the tincture I required. As for Sybel’s wartime clothes, they hardly taxed his skill at camouflage. You should have seen what he wore while in his natural element, the trees. Except…you
couldn’t
see him there.}

I would then rush into a shirt and trousers—the only practical clothes for a woman in such circumstances—shove big black boots over cold feet—and careen out the door, pen and notebook clutched in one hand. In my pants pocket, the dried mushrooms Duncan had given me. If a spore bomb exploded near me, I was to swallow them as an antidote. Of course, this only helped against F&L’s unconventional weapons. I would still be vulnerable to the shrapnel bombs of H&S.

I cannot think—through all of our transformations of position, location, and function—of a change more bone-crunching than that which made us reporters. I had never counted physical endurance among my attributes, but now I had to call on hidden reserves almost every day. I kept spraining my ankles, too, whether running toward a story {or away from one that had proven too hostile}, walking across an uneven island of pavement disfigured by fungi, or fighting to avoid being trampled by a mob of fleeing citizens. Eventually, I wrapped both ankles in bandages before I went out, hoping that the extra support would help.