Page 25 of The City in Glass

There was no thought in her head of laying what had been an angel to rest. No, she was a black squirrel scraping out a shallow cache for later. She didn’t know who might want dust that had once been an angel, strange and volatile stuff that could sing praises and find delight in the world, but she had the idea that sooner or later, someone would. Then she could whisper in their ear, take their sleeve and draw them to this place that had once been a graveyard and now was next to nothing. She would watch as they dug up their prize, and then who knew what in the world they would make of it, what gift and what disaster?

She thought of Chanda, nurturing her poison, and of Isra, who clung so hard to the bulbs because even if she believed that she could not begin again, she had believed that they would. Vitrine shook her head.

She was no guardian and no gardener, no matter what she might once have thought. Instead she was a demon, the demon of Azril, and she planted a jar of singing dust that had been an angel deep in the earth. When she was done, she hesitated and laid her hand over it.

Still the dust sang, and she pulled her hand away.

Well, she thought. We shall see what will grow from that, won’t we?

FOURTEEN

Honey and the bees that made it came to Azril from Doufun province in Kailin and from the foothills of the Palas, the round-shouldered mountains to the west. The immigrants kept their hives jealously, guarding the secrets of their apiculture with locked lips and turned heads, refusing to let their charges mingle, and so there were two distinct populations, the great dozy bees from Doufun and the quicker bees from the Palas.

Their keepers were long gone, and the remnants of their hives had blended together in very little time, the queens mating with drones from both populations before flying, laden with potential, to the hollow places in the ruins, the empty logs, even the lowest anchoress cells.

The honey they produced was dark and thin with a bitter edge to it. It pleased Vitrine to call it mourning honey when she went to steal pieces of honeycomb from their hives, but it was sweet overall, strange and special.

This new honey would never have existed if Azril had not fallen, and Vitrine thought that properly she should hate it. She should curse the bastard descendants of the Doufun queens and the Palan drones, turn their vivid yellow stripes white, render them blind and deaf so that they would fall to the ground and signal endlessly for each other.

Her grief tired her out, however, and instead she walked up to their hives and broke off pieces of the comb to drink the honey and to chew on the wax and grubs within it. It tasted of something besides her memories, and sometimes, she was all right with it.

She had prised a handful of brood comb from the colony developing in the cell of Mona Delarova, who had been a poor anchoress but an excellent spy. She had dreamed of uniting the north and south of the Angives, and with her prodigious memory and her gift for languages, she might have done it if a sly narrow man had not come to her cell in the night to smother her. Now bees built vast and ponderous labyrinths of honeycomb where she had once rested her brilliant head, and Vitrine found a bracelet of red ceramic beads she had once worn at the join of the wall and the floor.

The beads clacked on Vitrine’s dark wrist, and she carried the brood comb to the beach to eat it. The sun was just rising over the horizon, and Vitrine sat on the dunes, staring out at the sun that had, against all decency, continued to rise despite everything.

The sun had barely escaped from the sea when there were sails on the horizon, and Vitrine rose to her feet with a frown. They gained the bay as she watched, and she saw that these were no towering merchant vessels, no fast pirate coursers. Instead there was a homely humiliated quality to these ships, their sails ragged, a list to their wake that made her think that their rudders must be damaged. There were not many, no more than twenty or so, and the wind that blew them to her smelled of fire and of misery, a hundred nights of bad sleep and more than a year of tears.

So what, Vitrine thought peevishly. I have had more.

She stood on the beach with her arms crossed over her chest, her chin tilted up, but to her surprise, they did not land. Instead, the ships turned away, their sails flapping as they drew into the bay but no closer.

A figure launched itself from the first ship, gray wings pearly in the spreading light, and her lip curled as the angel crossed the water and landed where the waves lapped up on the sand.

“Has it been fifty years already?” she asked.

“Fifty years and four days. I was kept back on the veld of Abyssos.”

“What kept you on the veld of Abyssos, and why did it not keep you longer?”

He shrugged, his broad hands spread open and his pale palms flashing in the light. He was tired, wavering a little on his feet. His wings weighed him down rather than carrying him up. He was missing some number of feathers on the right, the spaces between them ragged and accusing.

“What always happens when kings want more. It has to come from someone, and when it cannot come from their own people, it must come from other kings. They went to war. They burned down the cities, and the gardens of Igomto are salt fields where nothing will grow again.”

“I liked Igomto,” Vitrine said without thinking, and then she scowled because it had given the angel some kind of hope.

“I have people here,” he said, pointing towards the ships. With their prows turned away from Azril, they had the appearance of children, too nervous to ask for what they needed, tattered and shy in their own want.

“I see that,” she said cuttingly. “Is this the best of the lot? Did you winnow them for goodness’ sake and this was all that remained?”

“This is all that remained, good, bad, and indifferent,” the angel said. “Their families died and they were the ones who got to the harbor fast enough, who got lucky, who happened to be in a place where they could watch the invaders fall upon their families with farming scythes rather than falling under their scythes themselves.”

He paused, his throat working. If she tuned her ear to listen to him, she could still hear his praises, but she wondered if they were fainter than they had been before.

“They need a home, and every city needs people,” he said at last.

“Ask me.”

He bridled at that, because even among angels who were not used to asking, it seemed that this was a particularly unaccustomed act to him. He demanded, he ordered, he bargained, but asking was a new thing, and she stood immobile as he fought with himself.