Dr. Alan Self, a physician employed by a House Hoegbotton militia, confirms this information. “I don’t know how it started, but because of the food shortage in parts of the city, starving people have begun to eat the remains of House Lewden’s infernal fungal bombs,” he said.
The core of these bombs does not explode, but serves as the delivery system for the bomb—ballast, of a sort. The ballast is high in protein and appears to have no harmful side effects, as of yet.
Some kinds of fungal bullets appear to share these properties.
“They have a short half-life,” according to Sarah Mindle, one of many Hoegbotton employees recruited to fight in the increasingly confused civil war. “After about five hours, most of them become inert, harmless.”
High in nutritional content, these bullets are also being harvested by the poor and those cut off from food by the barricades and militias of the various warring factions. Of course, finding the bullets can be hazardous. Knowing when they have become harmless requires yet another set of skills.
“I wait until [the bullets] lose their purple tinge,” Charles Jarkens said. Jarkens is a homeless man whose wife died in a bombardment at the beginning of the war. “I wait for that, and I wait until they get a little orange around the base of the bullet. That’s when I know they’re good to eat.”
In an unverified and extreme case, a family whose son was killed by a barrage of such bullets resorted to removing them from the body and eating them.
What no one can as yet explain is exactly how House Lewden procured such weapons, nor why Hoegbotton & Sons have not yet deployed captured weapons against F&L. Some speculate that the blockade of Ambergris by F&L ships has led to such a reduction in food stores for Hoegbotton’s various militias that the Lewden weapons are, in fact, being deliberately detonated for use as food.
As might be expected, such incendiary stories led to Lacond’s offices being bombed so many times that he eventually moved his printing presses, under cover of night, to a secret location in the forests outside of Ambergris.
“Let them stop me now!” he would say, face flushed with defiance. “Those pompous, homicidal swine can blow me up as much as they like—the presses will keep churning out the pages!” (The war, I must say, revitalized Lacond for a time.)
While the fuel lasted, motored vehicles brought the broadsheet in every morning, and fast runners—usually boys and girls from ten to fifteen years of age, the only group with the stamina for the job who had not already been conscripted by the Hoegbotton militias—would distribute it to a few safe or neutral locations, where it instantly sold out. Distribution was dangerous, and sometimes our runners did not come back. Sybel kept at it for a time, but it wore on his nerves.
“I can’t take it,” he said one morning. Dark circles had formed around his eyes and he had developed a habit of blinking rapidly, his left hand subject to uncontrollable quivering no matter what his mood. “I can’t take it. I can’t take it.” (What he couldn’t take was working so many jobs at once. Although he did have several disturbing episodes involving either militia members who robbed him at gunpoint, or bombs.)
Lacond had come to love our work by this time, so he let us use Sybel for our personal missions, which didn’t mean he was in any less danger—just a different kind.
“You must be doing a good job,” Lacond said once, while all three of us sat on the floor of his office, sweaty and exhausted. “Both sides want your heads on a platter.”
Thus, it became wiser for us to publish our reports under pseudonyms like Michael Smith and Sarah Pickle. I even began to sleep in different locations, seldom returning to my apartment for fear of a fungal bullet to the back of the head.
And yet, on certain days, in certain parts of the city, you could walk down a dozen streets and not even realize a war was going on—if you could rationalize the mortar fire as thunder. Markets were open, people walked to work, the telephones operated (even if few wanted to use them), restaurants served what food they had. The Religious Quarter, for political reasons, remained largely safe, with both H&S and F&L doing a respectable trade in foodstuffs and clothing—sometimes while fighting raged only a few blocks away. (War was also an opportunity for the native tribes, the Dogghe in particular, to make a killing supplying food and collaborating with the enemy—either enemy.) A few times, I was even able to meet with artists and gallery owners, regaining a little respect from them because of my new profession.
This sometimes sense of safety was in part caused by a retrenchment by both sides following the first seven or eight months of the war. House Lewden’s original probes centered on feints to the southeast and southwest, with the aim of control of H&S headquarters and the docks. But after several intense battles, F&L had been restricted to the northern third of Ambergris. They controlled part of the docks and a portion of Albumuth Boulevard, but they could not smash through to H&S headquarters. Recovering from the initial shock, H&S had found the morale and discipline to hold their ground. Thus, the “front” became relatively stable, except for some porousness due to spies, sneak attacks and, eventually, the Kalif’s mortar fire. The regularity of it became a kind of comfort. (I was never comforted. The whole conflict had troubled me from the beginning. Just trying to guess the reasons for gray cap involvement bothered me. Never before had they backed one faction over another, or even seemed to recognize the difference between factions—or, if they did understand the difference, to care. Why now should they change tactics? Also, their weapons were everywhere, but they were nowhere to be seen.)
Still, it could not go on forever. The city was in real danger of becoming less than a city, of becoming rubble and black smoke and piles of bodies—of becoming twenty different cities that only loosely formed a country called “Ambergris.”
Duncan sensed this, but could not really articulate it. (I anticipated it as a feeling deep in my ever-changing body, but could do nothing about it.)
“We’re near the end,” he said one evening eighteen months into the war, as we sat in the smoldering remains of the Café of the Ruby-Throated Calf. It was more or less neutral ground now that most of it had been destroyed by mortars. At least we could count on no one trying to kill us as we sat there, protected by overturned tables and a few strategically placed shrubs. The service was terrible, but, then, all the waiters were dead.
Duncan was pale but whole, face dark with dirt, a flurry of cuts rubbed red. We were drinking a couple of bottles of Smashing Todd’s Wartime Stout, which we had found—miraculously whole under a fallen, splintered door—in an abandoned store.
“Near the end?” I prompted.
“Yes,” he said, and took a long pull on his beer. “We’re near the end. Something has to give. Someone has to blink. To change. It can’t go on this way. It can’t.”
“It’s done a fine job of going on this way for a while now, Duncan,” I reminded him. I took a sip of ale. It was warm, almost hot, but the bite of it still tasted good.
“Maybe I mean I can’t go on this way,” he said.
“You mean, being paid in eggs, cauliflower, and milk?” I said.
He laughed, but I knew he was thinking about Mary, always Mary.