He may be wrong in this assumption, however. Instead, his actions appear to have united enemies whose only previous commonality was an ampersand.
Along Albumuth Boulevard yesterday, this reporter saw elements of House Lewden’s Twelfth Militia and House Hoegbotton’s Fifth Irregular Infantry {or the “Filthies,” as they’re commonly known} moving in concert toward the docks, intent on rooting out any of the Kalif’s men unlucky enough to still be in the area.
Besides this circumstantial evidence, respected sources tell this reporter that Hoegbotton & Sons and Frankwrithe & Lewden may orchestrate a general ceasefire, the main goal of which will be to ensure the Kalif’s defeat prior to the resumption of hostilities.
The broadsheets accompanying the Kalif’s mortar fire haven’t helped the Kalif win much support, either. These odd, half-shredded love letters to our great city indicate that the Kalif has come to “liberate the citizens of Ambergris from chaos and tyranny.”
“Frankly,” says the typical man on the street {at least typical among those who are still alive and not crawling with fungal bullets}, “I thought we were already doing a good enough job of that ourselves. This is our squabble. Between us and those bastards from F&L. The Kalif should stay out of it.”
The broadsheets also indicate that “To preserve the rare antiquities and collective wisdom of the Religious Quarter, the Kalif has decided to stepped in and bring an end to the conflict.”
“Stepped in,” indeed.
Many of us wondered why Stockton, Nicea, and other Southern cities had not intervened in the conflict—after all, their trade was profoundly affected by this split between merchant houses. Now we knew—they had been calling on a higher power, and although it had taken almost two years for that august entity, the Kalif, to take notice, take notice he had. He would have needed little real pretext; after all, in each Kalif’s heart must burn the desire for revenge upon our city for earlier defeats.
The scream of the Kalif’s mortar fire—often indiscriminate or ill-timed—was a welcome contrast to the whine of fungal bullets, the garrulous chatter of Hoegbotton guns. {As the city was at war, so, by then, was my body. The rumblings of my belly, where fungus fought fungus—much remarked upon by Mary in her less charitable moments—matched the Kalif’s invasion. The sharp pains that sometimes annihilated my chest hurt no more or less than the spiraling flight of bullets through the Ambergrisian air.}
Perhaps more insanely, no one paid the Kalif’s troops much attention once we knew H&S and F&L had united against them. Even the day they came marching down Albumuth Boulevard on a daylight raid in a long, proud column of red, we ignored them. We had suffered through too much war. Either we could not digest this new threat, or we felt no need to.
This, then, is how things stood that year on the threshold of the Festival.
2
There came a night so terrible that no one ever dared to name it. There came a night so terrible that I could not. There came a night so terrible that no one could explain it. There came the most terrible of nights. No, that’s not right, either. There came the most terrible of nights that could not be forgotten, or forgiven, or even named. That’s closer, but sometimes I choose not to revise. Let it be raw and awkward splayed across the page, as it was in life.
Words would later be offered up like “atrocity,” “massacre,” and “madness,” but I reject those words. They did not, could not, cannot, contain what they need to contain.
Could we have known? Could we have wrenched our attention from our more immediate concerns long enough to understand the warning signs? Now, of course, it all seems clear enough. Duncan had said the war could not continue in the same way for long, and he was right.
As soon as Duncan and I saw Voss Bender’s blind, blindingly white head floating down the River Moth two days before the Festival, we should have had a clue.
“There’s a sight you don’t see very often,” Duncan said, as we sat on an abandoned pier and watched the head and the barge that carried it slowly pull away into the middle of the river. A kind of lukewarm sun shone that day, diluted by swirls of fog.
“It’s a sight I’ve never seen before, Duncan,” I replied.
F&L had cut apart a huge marble statue of Voss Bender that had stood in the Religious Quarter for almost twenty years and loaded it, piece by piece, onto the barge, displaying a remarkably dexterous use of pulleys and levers. There lay the pieces of Bender, strewn to all sides of his enormous, imperious, crushingly heavy head. About to disappear up the River Moth. As vulnerable-looking in that weak sunlight as anything I had ever seen.
“I wonder what the people who live along the banks of the river will think about it,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Duncan asked.
“Will they see it as the demolition, the destruction, of a god, or will they be strangely unmoved?”
Duncan laughed. “I’m strangely unmoved.”
In part, we had come to the pier to relax. We were both still a little rattled from a close call the day before, when we had arrived at what was supposedly the scene of a bomb attack only to find the bombs exploding as we got there. My hair was dirty and streaked with black from the explosion. My face had suffered half a dozen abrasions. Duncan had had a thumbnail-sized chunk of his ear blown off. Already, it had begun to regenerate, which I found fascinating and creepy at the same time. {Do you want a glimpse of something even more fascinating? The real problem was: it wasn’t my ear. That had been blown off a long time before.}
“I think it’s sad,” I said. “They’re carting off all of our valuables, like common thieves.”
Until then, F&L had contented themselves with bombing us silly day and night. The steady northward stream of goods, art, and statuary had only started in the past week. It should have been a clear sign that the war was about to change again. After all, F&L, with their fungal mines, bombs, and bullets, seemed to have a direct line to a certain disenfranchised underground group.
“Actually, Janice,” Duncan said, as he dipped his ugly toes in the Moth, “I hesitate to try to convince you otherwise, but I think the sight of Voss Bender’s head floating vaingloriously down the Moth is very funny. So much effort by old F&L, and for what? What can they possibly think they will do with these ‘remains’ when they reach Morrow? Rework the marble into columns for some public building? Reassemble the statue? And if so, where in Truff ’s name would they put it? We hardly knew where to put it ourselves.”