The genocide of Cinsorium’s inhabitants, the Grey Caps, who even now skulk and screech in the sewers and side-streets of Ambergris and in its present inhabitants’ minds, is a crime that pervades the atmosphere of the city, along with the spores and mycelia of fungi—green, and gold, and blue, and red like blood—which infest the city as they infest the body and mind of its foremost chronicler, Jeff VanderMeer, a brilliant scholar but unreliable, believing as he does that Ambergris is a figment of his imagination, and that any evidence to the contrary is part of an elaborate delusion on his part….