Page 10 of The City in Glass

“Will you be welcome to my fire, angel?” she asked, holding out the crossed bones of the crane girl’s forearm invitingly.

“You did not have to do this,” the angel said, and the smile fell from her face.

“Of course I did. Do you see? You can offer me nothing I want. You can give me nothing so precious that I will hesitate to destroy it. You will not be suffered in this city. You will not be welcomed, you will not be tolerated. The buildings will not shelter you and the fountains will run dry when you reach for the water.”

“Another curse?” asked the angel wearily, and she shook her head.

“Only a declaration. You already bear the worst of what I can give.”

He nodded, his eyes closing briefly from the pain of the truth, but he did not fade back into the darkness. Instead he sat with her at the fire; vigil, she supposed, for his poor misbegotten girl. Vitrine ate her slowly, watching the angel as she did so. She was grudgingly impressed when he did not flinch, not even when she took the girl’s long black plait and laid it neatly atop her remains.

“She deserves a burial.”

Vitrine shrugged.

“Then bury her if you like, or leave her for the harriers. You’ve made such a mess of her that one is as appropriate as another.”

A spasm of distaste crossed the angel’s face. Perhaps his kind did not have a great deal of experience with this end of things. They were the heralds of the dawn, when things awakened and were made new, and they came at the end. It occurred to Vitrine that they did not have experience with what came after the end, when everything was over and ruined.

“Don’t you know that sometimes you can walk away from the end?” she asked almost gently, and the look he gave her was dark.

Her belly full, Vitrine doused the fire and stood. There was nothing left to say to the angel, so she went off in the dark, but for some reason she did not entirely understand, she did not go far. Instead she slipped into the wind, hitching a ride with a firefly. The night lit up with strange colors, and she flew along behind the angel, who shone with cool blues and soft silvers. To the firefly, the angel had two enormous clusters of eyes on either side of his head, so numerous and small they looked almost velvety, and the colors he flashed, over and over again like a signal waiting for the one person who needed to see it, spoke holy and holy and holy.

She flew behind him as he made his way through the disintegrating mansions, and then greatly daring, she settled on the seam of his tunic, grabbing on to the linen. This close, with her borrowed eyes, she could see the sheen of sweat on his throat, and the crinkling hairs of his beard. He breathed uneasily as one unused to it, and there was a faint glow in the swirls of air leaving his lips.

He came to the small graveyard that had once been the sole provenance of the Mercer family. The wall that kept in their dead was gone, and with it the great compass that had been engraved upon it. The Mercers were wild, merchant princesses and razor-tongued diplomats bred from pirate stock, and the only reason that they were no longer buried in silk shrouds at sea was because generations ago, the first Malabec Mercer had fallen in love with Azril and committed her entire family to its gates.

Now the Mercers were gone, and though the family was far-flung with members on the sea as well as in the courts of Brokkslevan and Yfs, they were not her Mercers, and they did not matter. The mausoleums were shattered and the old dry bones, unmixed with flesh or fat, burned a pure layer of black charcoal into the ground. Settled on the spar of a broken pine sapling, Vitrine watched as the angel knelt in the dirt and hollowed out a hole with his broad hands. First he had to get through the broken bits of crypt, and then came the layer of bone. Underneath that was the clay soil, harsh and fit only for the planting of bodies and sorrow.

As he dug, Vitrine watched with interest as the angel’s shoulders shook. She wondered if his kind, so set on how perfect they were allowed to make the world, could cry, and if so, what emotion might move him to it. She wondered if he considered his crane-girl a murder or merely some failed experiment.

Finally, the angel lowered the bundle of ruin and hair into the hole and covered it up again. Against the odds, he found an intact slab of stone as large as a shield, part of the fourth Malabec’s own tomb. He laid it over the little grave he had made, tamping it down with gentle taps to embed it firmly in the clay, and then he climbed to his feet again, standing with his hands clasped before him.

He stood there long enough that Vitrine grew bored, winging her way through the night to haunt the ruined streets and broken squares.

Maybe he’ll stay there forever as her memorial, she thought spitefully. He can stand there for all of them if he’s really sorry.

SEVEN

Vitrine knew in a practical way that Azril was not special. Perhaps a thousand years ago, it would have been, the triumph of some horselord or seaqueen, some wonder of resources and accord and luck that managed to get that many people living in one place without tearing each other to pieces. A city took all those things and then time, and it wasn’t as if there was any shortage of that.

Azril was not special, but it was unique just like all the rest, and so Vitrine cleared the streets, taking up a spade and beginning by the shore. The buildings had fallen like so many careless drunk girls, casting glass that glittered like jewels into the broad avenues, obscuring the white pavers that divided the boulevards down the center.

Azril’s first streets were narrow and haphazard, like a handful of straw thrown onto the ground. There had been a revolt some decades ago, a surprise, but not, Vitrine thought in retrospect, a terrible thing, for all it had briefly turned Gallowscross into a killing floor. The blood there ran three fingers deep, and the severed heads slowly mummified in the salt air.

Those that came after learned their lessons well regarding rule of law and how far a people could be pushed, and also about how easily a single household could be turned inside out to barricade a street. They rebuilt after the fires with an eye for wide roads, the main ones broad enough at least to allow two coaches to pass side by side, the small ones large enough for a vegetable cart.

It was an architect from Gao who had designed the city as it was now, the streets as straight as virtue, the squares built on some astrological design rather than on where someone’s mule had died or where they hung their thieves. He had come to Azril after doing the work of a king too well, and he loved the city, old and new, almost as much as Vitrine did. When he died, Vitrine honored his last wish and stole his body from where it lay in the small Gaoese cemetery to bury it under Palavar Square, where he could rejoice forever in the tight fit of the paver stones and the feet walking his streets.

Vitrine didn’t need to sleep or to eat, and before the fall came again, she had cleared the way from the shore up to the doors of the Lord Mayor’s house. Sitting on the steps with her back to the ruin, she could see the way she had come, and if she half-closed her eyes, she could imagine the people in the streets still, the setting sun giving them shadows as long as mourning veils. She did not imagine them decked out for Summersend, but instead as they were through the centuries since she had come to Azril, passing through on their way somewhere else or, like her, finding the place where they would stay.

The longer she sat, the clearer their faces became, and she smiled to see her old friends, the rogues, the strange ones, the geniuses, and the criminals. Some of them had done very well for themselves by the end, others not so much. Some of them smiled and waved at her, while others spat on the ground between them, making the sign against the evil eye with their thumb thrust up between their fingers. Most of them blinked at her as if they recognized her from some dream or vision, something that faded as soon as they awakened.

The parade of ghosts continued, as long as the history of Azril was long and as short, and at the very end of it was a tall and gaunt young man, his beard and mustache cut perfectly, and his eyes piercing like arrows into a saint’s body. He glared at her, and Vitrine rose up in shock from the sight of him, for he had loved the city almost as much as she had, and he had been sent away from it, never to return.

Oh, he came back, she thought in shock, running after the procession. He came back and he found it as dead as he was.

She ran after them as they went before her, their languid movements somehow entirely outpacing her legendary quickness. Sometimes, the man at the end would turn to look at her, and she could see there a fury identical to her own.