Page 2 of The City in Glass

It had taken a hundred years before she was willing to slow down, another hundred after that before she went back and tore out some of her early efforts and refined others. It would never be lost Saqarra, which was empty even of revengers and scavengers by now, and Vitrine had come to realize that it never could be.

I don’t need it to be, she thought with some satisfaction and pride. It is Azril. It may never be finished, and yet it is still enough.

Vitrine wove through the riot like a light-footed cat, and as she passed, people grew rosy with desire, drunk with love, wild with need for something that surely danced just beyond their fingertips. They did not know it, but they loved her, and she brushed her fingertips over their cheeks and their lips and their brows, promising them that she loved them too.

Before it was anything else, before it had a name or an observatory or the beginning of a library or a mayor or a demon, Azril had been a port town, and the tradition of the ghost ship was sacred. At midnight, Vitrine made her way to the floating docks with a torrent of people in veils, dancing and laughing and shouting with joy for they were no longer the dour fishermen and raiders they had been.

The ship given up for sacrifice that year was an old trading craft, the triangular sail rent into rags from top to bottom and a hole big enough for a large man to crawl through right above the waterline. The boys and girls of the town had spent the last two days decking the caravel out with paper flowers, and Azril’s own master pyrotechnician had seeded the ballast with gunpowder and sprinkled the deck with the same. The small dishes of wine laid out across the deck would perhaps help feed the flames as well, but Vitrine knew that long ago, they had been for her, and she was still flattered.

Invisible, Vitrine stood by the pyrotechnician’s shoulder as she checked the laden bags one more time, her burn-slicked fingers probing for any dampness, any obstruction that would prevent the blaze. Twelve years ago, the ship had failed to light at all, and Vitrine nodded, pleased at her diligence.

“That was an unlucky thing,” she told the pyrotechnician. “Your predecessor hanged herself from shame, and I do not know if anyone who was there will forget the wailing.”

Satisfied that the bags were dry, the pyrotechnician made her way back to the docks in a small coracle, and when she arrived, she nodded at the Lord Mayor’s son, who was bloodied and a little shaken, but alive. He stood on the foremost pier, the arrow nocked in his hands wrapped about with an oily rag. As Vitrine stood next to him, smiling as proudly as the ghost of his mother on the other side, he held the arrow to a torch.

The flaming arrow arced through the sky like a comet. Vitrine watched it unblinking in wonder, and when it struck the bale of dry straw on the deck, there was only a count of nine before the fire started. Like children, the flames danced along the deck, crawling up the rigging and curling over the rails. There was a moment of almost peaceful stillness as the black water shone like a broken mirror with firelight, and then the flames found the charges of gunpowder in the ballast.

The boom struck Vitrine square in the chest, and as a dark billow of smoke rose up to the clear sky, she clasped her hands in front of her in joy.

It was only when Vitrine turned to the open sea that she saw the moon, setting now and reflecting silvery shards on the choppy water. Many things could come on a broken road like that, and then she saw the angels.

They were as tall as the topmost masts of the ships in the harbor, and their wings stirred with the winds of hurricanes. As a courtesy to the world they deformed with their presence, they went on two legs and reached out with two hands, but their faces were as blank as shields while crowns of flames spun about their heads.

The cry went up immediately, and in the chaos of people running for the safety of Azril’s walls, many were pushed into the water or trampled outright. Vitrine felt their screams like the beating of wings against the glass case in her chest, and if she opened to them, she would crack. Instead she stared at the angels come to Azril, frozen at the head of the pier, and in a moment, entirely alone.

Arrogant, was Vitrine’s first thought, that they would walk so mighty through the world. Demons learned humility with their first mouthful of dirt, their first mouthful of blood, and angels had never learned it at all.

No, Vitrine thought, as the first in the line of four stopped by the flaming ship. It hurt to look at, too much, too strange, and too livid with grace. The fire of the ritual, birthed with love and duty from the hands of the master pyrotechnician, faltered with shame before the angel, shrank away from its greater light and its greater indifference.

Vitrine watched as the angel gently killed the fire, suffocating it under its hand as it passed by, walking the moon road to the floating dock where Vitrine stood alone. By the time they reached her, they had shrunk their visible part down to the size and shape of men, and they looked like men, mostly, though she could see under their mendicant robes that one bore the feet of a great bird, and another went cloven-hoofed. They were dark like she was dark but prouder by far, with shoulders never bowed by defeat.

“Will you give way?” the first angel asked formally, and Vitrine’s lips peeled back from her teeth.

“Go fuck yourself,” she advised the angel.

The angel’s face, handsome, bearded, eyes sunk deep in his well-shaped skull, did not move.

“Will you prostrate yourself for grief?” he asked.

“Fuck your brothers,” she answered, glancing at the ones behind him. They were even stiller than he was, as if he had at least something of the trick of seeming human and they had it not at all.

“Will you beg?” the angel asked.

“Fuck the road you walked on, the sky you fell out of, the clouds that shielded you from rain, and anyone who gave you a moment of peace or comfort. Fuck everything that brought you here to stand in front of me without knowing what shame is, and when I dance on the wind, I will turn the names that were given to you to mud—”

“Enough.”

Something flickered through the angel’s black eyes, something enough like irritation that Vitrine paused when otherwise she would have kept on.

“We are sent to bring the city to the ground,” the angel said. “We come with fire and with might, and so will the city of Azril be torn from the tapestry of the world.”

Vitrine didn’t believe him. There was nothing in her that could believe his words no matter what she knew of angels and their opaque purpose in her world.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You will not.”

The angel made to move past her, and without thought, she put herself in front of him, her arms spread like wings. He stopped in surprise, and she had to crane her neck to look up at him.

“Stop,” she said.