Gradually, he got a sense of the tragedy of Duncan’s life. How close Shriek had been to success. To being a kind of prophet. An injustice, his fate working at Finch’s sense of fairness. A staggering sense of an opportunity lost. A path not taken. An Ambergris where Duncan Shriek was lauded and the Rising had never happened. Or been defeated. A horror at the idea of nothing really changing in a century. The Houses had gone from war to war. The city was more fractured than ever. Would still be fractured even if the gray caps disappeared tomorrow.
All depressingly similar, and yet he remembered the brief years of peace more vividly than the war. No matter how hard he tried to forget. A better life. A better way.
Kept searching Duncan’s asides for anything that might point to why the man would wind up dead a hundred years later in an apartment he’d once lived in. Found a reference to switching apartments to evade the gray caps. Another reference to working as a tour guide while living in an apartment in Trillian Square. The place had been destroyed long before the Rising. Finch wondered if the few children growing up now even knew who Trillian was anymore.
Then there was Shriek’s obsession with Manzikert. With the Silence. And with Samuel Tonsure, the monk who accompanied Manzikert underground and who never returned, although his journal—half evidence of an ill-fated expedition, half the ravings of a madman—reappeared sixty years later.
I became convinced that the journal formed a puzzle, written in a kind of code, the code weakened, diluted, only hinted at, by the uniform color of the ink in the copies, the dull sterility of set type.
A quote from a book Duncan had found helpful called A Refraction of Light in a Prison had an uneasy resonance with the desert fortifications from Shriek’s memory bulb:
Where the eastern approaches of the Kalif’s empire fade into the mountains no man can conquer, the ruined fortress of Zamilon keeps watch over time and the stars. Within the fortress … Truffidian monks guard the last true page of Tonsure’s famous journal.
Could Zamilon be the place he had seen in the memory bulb vision?
He read, too, about Duncan’s own explorations underground, following in Tonsure’s footsteps:
I could disguise myself from the gray caps, but not from their servants—the spores, the parasites, the tiny mushroom caps, fungi, and lichen. They found me and infiltrated me—I could feel their tendrils, their fleshy-dry-cold-warm pseudopods and cilia and strands slowly sliding up my skin, like a hundred tiny hands. They tried to remake me in their image.
Like Wyte. A few pages later, a section Janice had taken from Duncan’s journal. About doors. About a door. A kind of recognition from deep within that stirred him to read carefully.
A machine. A glass. A mirror … But it hasn’t worked right since they built it. A part, a mechanism, a balance—something they don’t quite understand … Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes … Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen, or heard mention of their existence. Ever … After several days, your vision strays and unfocuses and you blink slowly, attention drawn to a door … The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so minute you could reach out and touch it.
Skipped a few pages. Found a section where Janice related a conversation with her brother.
Duncan: The door in the Machine never fully opens.
Janice: What would happen if it did?
Duncan: They would be free.
Janice: Who?
Duncan: The gray caps.
Janice: Free of what?
Duncan: They are trying to get somewhere else—but they can’t. It doesn’t work. With all they can do, with all they are, they still cannot make their mirror, their glass, work properly.
And, then, on the Silence:
You learned it wrong. That’s not what happened. It didn’t happen like that … They disappeared without a drop of blood left behind. Not a fragment of bone. No. They weren’t killed. At least not directly. Try to imagine a different answer: a sudden miscalculation, a botched experiment. A flaw in the Machine. All of those people. All twenty-five thousand of them. The men, the women, the children—they didn’t die. They were moved. The door opened in a way the gray caps didn’t expect, couldn’t expect, and all those people—they were moved by mistake. The Machine took them to someplace else. And, yes, maybe they died, and maybe they died horribly—but my point is, it was all an accident. A mistake. A terrible, pointless blunder.
Also, mentions of the symbol from the back of the scrap of paper: “Manzikert had triggered the Silence, I felt certain, with his actions in founding Ambergris. Samuel Tonsure had somehow cataloged and explained the gray caps during his captivity underground.”
Throughout, Finch caught a refrain by Janice. Didn’t know if it was Duncan’s refrain echoed by Janice: No one makes it out. And near the end, with Duncan apparently lost underground again, this sentence: “There may be a way.” What the woman had said to him when he’d blurted out bellum omnium contra omnes.
No one makes it out. Yet There may be a way. Janice had thought Duncan meant metaphorically. Spiritually. Maybe it was literal.
Couldn’t help thinking of the words on the scrap of paper in Shriek’s hand: Never lost. Like a call and response. There is a way. Never lost. Was that what he should have said to the woman?
Absently, he petted Feral, who’d leapt onto his lap, nudging his head up against Finch’s chest. Tossed back another shot of whiskey. The alcohol had begun to numb his shoulder. It also helped push worry for Wyte into the back of his mind.
Returned relentlessly to the facts.
A man last seen alive a hundred years before turns up dead in an apartment he once lived in. There’s a dead gray cap with him. The gray cap has been cut in half as neatly as if he’d been killed in a slaughterhouse.
The dead man is Duncan Shriek, former discredited historian and explorer of the underground. The Stockton spymaster Stark believes the apartment holds a rebel weapon, but the only thing left in the apartment is the body of Shriek.
Stark kills all of Bliss’s men, but leaves Bliss alive. Bliss travels through the city using doors that aren’t doors—doors that when you come out the other side, it is the future.
And Shriek, the center of it all, believed the gray caps had built a door to another place, and the Silence was a result of that door malfunctioning.
Finch took out the photo of Shriek the Partial had given him. Stared at the photo on the dust jacket of Cinsorium & Other Historical Fables. Hadn’t looked at either that closely before. Not like he was looking now. Shadows of light and dark in both. Framing a man with eyes shut, eyes open.
Who is he? Who was he?
Eyes Shut had a beard made of fungus. A hard face. A well-preserved quality to it. Weathered in the way of someone who has lowered his head into the wind too many times. Eyes Open had a close-cropped normal beard. A kind of naive quality to the face. The smile perhaps too self-satisfied. The look of a martyr-in-waiting.