I had thought about making the trek to our mother’s mansion, but Duncan had assured me he could keep her safe. {She was quite safe, for several reasons, not least of which was her location: far enough upriver that the Kalif’s men had not requisitioned the house, and far enough from Ambergris that she would come to no harm from the gray caps.}
Dusk had become night by the time Sybel arrived, breathless from running. After I let him in, I bolted the door behind him.
“It’s not good out there,” he said, gasping for breath. “The trees are too still. There’s a silence that’s…like I imagine what the Silence must have been like.”
That was a thought. I felt light-headed for an instant, a conjoined chill and thrill. What if, tonight, we were to experience what the twenty-five thousand had experienced during the Silence, the city to become another vast experiment?
“Nonsense,” I said. “It’s just another Festival. Help me with this.”
We pushed a set of cabinets up against the door.
“That should do it,” I said.
Outside, a few dozen drunken youths passed by, shouting as they stumbled their way past.
“Death to the Kalif!” I heard, and a flurry of cursing.
“They’ll be lucky if they survive the hour,” Sybel said. “And it won’t be the Kalif that kills them, either.”
“When did you become so cheerful?” I asked.
He gave me a look and went back to loading his gun. We had pistols and knives, which Sybel had managed to purchase from, of all people, a Kalif officer. There was a booming black market in weapons these days. Some wags speculated that the Kalif had invaded Ambergris to create demand for inventory.
Meanwhile, the gray caps had spores and fungal bombs, and Truff knew what else.
“Do you think we’re much safer in here?” I asked.
Sybel smiled. “No. Not much safer.”
There seemed about him that night more than a hint of self-awareness, mixed with that rarest of commodities for Sybel: contentment. {It was only rare to you because you never saw him in his natural element.}
We didn’t board up the window until much later, fearful of losing the thread of what was going on outside. The full moon drooped, misshapen and diffuse, in the darkening sky.
Through that smudged fog of glass, we watched rivulets and outcroppings of the Festival walk or run by. Clowns, magicians, stiltmen, and ordinary citizens with no special talent, who had put on bright clothes and gone out because—quite frankly—in the middle of war, how much worse could the Festival possibly make things? True, without the great influx of visitors from other cities there wasn’t nearly the number of people that we had become accustomed to seeing, but Sybel and I still agreed it was a more potent Festival than had been predicted by the so-called experts. {Including us, Janice, in our column in the Broadsheet.}
Then the merrymakers began to trail off. Soon the groups had thinned until it was only one or two people at a time, either drunk and careless, or alert and hurrying quickly to their destinations. Every once in a while, something would explode in the background as the Kalif’s men kept at it. The bright orange flame of the shuddering explosions was oddly reassuring. As long as it stayed far away from us, that is. At least we knew where it was coming from. {Yes, with all the force of His benevolent, if distant, love.}
Sybel and I sat there looking out the window like it was our last view of the world.
“Remember when we used to host parties in abandoned churches on Festival night?” Sybel said. He looked very old then, in that light, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth undeniable.
“Yes, I remember,” I said, smiling. “That was a lot of fun. It really was.”
At least, more fun than the war. I didn’t want to return to those days, either, though.
Sybel smiled back. Had we ever been close? I search my memory now, thinking of the glance we exchanged back then. No, not close, but comfortable, which is almost more intimate. In the preparations for countless parties, in seeing Sybel day after day at my gallery, a deep affection had built up between us.
“Maybe after the war, I can…” The words felt like such a lie, I couldn’t continue. “Maybe the gallery can…”
Sybel nodded and looked away in, I believe, embarrassment. “That would be good,” he said.
We continued to watch the city through our window: that fungi-tinged, ever-changing painting.
Finally, it began to happen, at least three hours after nightfall. A stillness crept into the city. The only people on the street were armed and running. Once, a dozen members of a Hoegbotton militia hurried by in tight formation, their weapons gleaming with the reflected light of the fires. Then, for a while, nothing. The moon and the one or two remaining street lamps, spluttery, revealed an avenue on which no one moved, where the lack of breeze was so acute that crumpled newspapers on the sidewalk lay dead-still.
“It’s coming,” Sybel muttered. “I don’t know what it is, but it’ll happen soon.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “It’s just a lull.”
But a chill had crept over me, as it seemed to have crept over the city. It lodged in my throat, my belly, my legs. Somehow, I too could feel it coming, like a physical presence. As if my nerves were the nerves of the city. Something had entered Ambergris. {Creeping through your nervous system, the gray caps’ spores, creating fear and doubt, right on schedule. I’d put the antidote in your food, but an antidote only works for so long against the full force of such efforts.}
The street lights went out.
Even the moon seemed to gutter and wane a little. Then the lights came back on—all of them—but they were fungus green, shining in a way that hardly illuminated anything. Instead, this false light created fog, confusion, fear.
Sybel cursed.
“Should we barricade the window?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Sybel said. “Not yet. This might be the end of it, you know. This might…” Now it was his turn to trail off. We both knew this would not be the end of it.
We began to see people again on the street below. This time, they ran for their lives. We could not help them without endangering ourselves, and so we watched, frozen, at the window, beyond even guilt. A woman with no shoes on, her long hair trailing out behind her, ran through our line of vision. Her mouth was wide, but no sound came from it. A few seconds later, some thing appeared in the gutter near the sidewalk. It tried to stand upright like a person, tottered grotesquely, then dropped all pretense and loped out of sight after the woman. The roar of the Kalif’s mortar fire followed on its heels.