He aimed at a singer and s/he fell—Sophia again, poor Sophia, so fated to fall. The leak of blood, miniature mimic of the soldiers’ progress, that spread across the front of Sophia’s white dress, had the effect of renewing our love for the opera. Such melodrama! Such an authentic battle scene!
From the rising screams and shouts onstage, we naturally expected one clear soprano or alto would rise above, drawing together the threads of chaos. The Kalif’s men would drop their guns and swords. They would become part of a great chorus of voices, or a powerful counterpoint. The lovers would reunite. The houses would reconcile. The curtain would fall, then rise again, that our applause might become more specific, rewarding our favorites.
But none of these things happened. Not a one of them.
Instead, the music began to lose its harmony, become discordant, and momentarily returned as strong as ever as a section of foolish woodwinds held their ground. It then dissolved into individual horns and violins before falling away into silence, leaving only the sounds of struggle.
Silence from the audience, for a moment. (Some of us were just glad the musicians had stopped playing.) Finally, we began to understand. We did not know it to be true all at once, and each of us reached our conclusions separately. But understanding did come to us, some with gasps, some with shouts or screams, others in a silence born of dread or amazement. Under the green light, anything was possible, even an invasion.
When the white-turbaned commander drew his sword and cut Sophia’s head from his neck and held it, dripping and white, by one gloved hand, we knew any performance had ended minutes before. As we had sat there, watching the opera, the Kalif’s troops had invaded Ambergris. (For me, it was a few seconds later, when Sarah Gallendrace appeared onstage, her belly cut wide open, her impossibly pale hands trying to stanch the flow. That’s when I unfroze.)
The flag of the Kalif was unfurled on the stage. The moat created by the orchestra pit became so cluttered with the most unmusical of things—dead, hacked-apart people and the remnants of the set, cleared with methodical precision—that it was no great leap for some of the soldiers to bridge it and start firing into the audience.
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 in 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.