I want to turn my house into a great city of canals. At eventide the gondolieri will transport my family and guests to and from the masquerade balls held every night in one of the eight great glass pyramids that mark the compass-points of the fair dominion, and the police will show up at the door and they will say, "Sir, we've had reports you've turned your home into a great city of canals. You realize this is illegal in a residential zone." And I will laugh--chortle, really--as I invite them to sit with me on my balcony overlooking the vast diamond-shaped Plaza Piscina, which depending on the temperament of the sky above, sparkles different shades of blue, ranging from inky indigo in the prelude of a storm to the purest sheen of a robin's egg on the most peaceful of spring days. On that day, I think, it will be in the precise median, the grayish yet morbidly beautiful hue of an iris that has wilted just to the threshold of putrescence. "Friends," I will say, "do not think it rude of me, please, but might I question the logic of rendering illegal the turning of one's home into a great city of canals in, of all places, a residential zone? Where else might you place such a great city--whose ports, I could add, teem with bustling trade from the furthest corners of the known world, and which even in the leanest plagueyears boasts a population of nearly ten thousand souls--but do tell me, constables, what might be a better place other than here, a residential zone, to host all that, not to mention our grand temple, the Great Ptomanon of the Corpse-God, which houses many hundreds of monks and pilgrims, and is where the Deep Angler Oblun Baga himself is said to stalk with his bulbous lantern through the otherwise lightless and forgotten reliquaries of its aqueous catacombs? Might you think these matters of faith, too, are inappropriate for a private residence?" This I will ask the visitors as my servants, their faces hidden behind masks of luxurious silk fashioned in the wild manner of varicolored vines and leaves, step forward to draw back adamantine chairs arranged around a black-and-white marble longtable set for a great but hitherto quite lonely dinner. And while my revelers call and sing below us, their voices only just masking the whispering, babbling streets on which they ride, their shadows cast in great distorted chimeras upon the agate walls of our city, the officers will take the proffered seats and kindly accept the light delicacies of caramelized adder-tongue and crisply breaded toad, oblivious to the fact that these are deadly necromantic agents to which I, of course, am quite immune, having built up a great tolerance to and even a certain... reliance upon them in the pursuit of my studies, as I sought and succeeded to turn my house into a great city of canals.