Page 3 of The City in Glass

“You know we will not,” he said, his tone measured.

Vitrine swallowed, looking down at her bare feet.

“Would it have stopped you? If I had begged?”

“No.”

Vitrine’s hands twitched and when they came up, they were clawed, her nails tipped with iron and glowing hot. With one swipe she cut him open from groin to throat, leaping as she did so to knock him back among his brothers like a game of tenpins.

There was a moment of complete and savage satisfaction when she saw something move on their awful silica faces, that looked as if they had been hewn from an indifferent cliff face some thousands of years ago and never changed since. Now they were shocked and outraged, offended in their dignity even as their brother fell among them, and she came right over him like a hunting cat ready to cut and maul. She wanted to tear at their faces to see if it would bloody them, to reduce them at least to humiliated birdlike squawks.

Of course it couldn’t last, and as the angel in the lead staggered up to his feet, the rearmost one who had not stumbled at all touched a fingertip to her shoulder, a look that might be scorn if he were not so holy on his face.

“Fuck you,” she spat again, and then with a fingertip alone, he flung her into the harbor, almost past the smoldering ship. Vitrine hit the water with a force that made it feel as if she had hit stone instead, and inside her, the bones that she kept to better walk as a human among humans broke, smashing against each other like the sides of a ship struck with a battering ram.

She sank through the cold water, numb and unable to move anything save her fingers. In the beginning, before there were words to speak, she and her family had spoken with their hands, gesturing food and hate and anger and new to each other with increasing urgency. Now her hands fluttered with the sign for no over and over again, and it was only when she touched the silty bottom of the harbor, littered with broken clay pipes, bone buttons, and bones, that she was finally able to surge towards the surface.

Vitrine fought against her broken body, moving her arms and legs like oars, and when she broke through the surface, she was looking up at the sky above Azril. From where she floated in the harbor, the wreck of the caravel on her right and the ashen cliffs on her left, she could see the highest peak of the observatory, the slanted roof of the Lord Mayor’s house, the elegant spire of the house of the courtesan-general. The city was still lit up like a bonfire, and from that bonfire four sparks flew up into the sky.

Like comets who found the earth too cruel, Vitrine thought helplessly, and as she watched, the angels, somewhere between their man-shapes and the giants of light who had come walking over the water, wove a circle over the city. They flew so fast that their flaming tails grew longer and longer still as they braided their paths together, forming a ring of terrible heat. It pulsed orange, it glowed red, and finally it went white and soft around the edges in a way that hollowed Vitrine with dread, that light that fell on Azril, crowning the city in inferno.

The heat sent a boom of hammer-like force through the air, smashing the water and setting it to a boil. Vitrine in the water screamed as her skin bagged on her flesh, as her flesh cooked inside her skin. If she was a human, it would have killed her immediately, but she was not, and for a short and terrible space, not longer than four breaths, she was aware enough to feel her lungs burst and her liver split, to hear the terrible ringing of the explosion itself before her eardrums ruptured and she could hear no more.

Before she was blinded, she saw the observatory tower crack straight down the middle, and she thought, before she could no longer think at all, of the quartet of bodies she had seen entombed in those stone walls to keep them strong and sound.

The water, hot and salt like tears, took her again as she crumpled into darkness.

TWO

Because it was written at the beginning of their world that they could not die, every demon knew the trick of bringing themselves back from death. They might sight the far flags of death’s pavilions, but they knew they were not welcome, and for the second time in her life, Vitrine turned around and began her return.

Some of her siblings made the journey often enough that there was a strangely ductile quality to them, like metal which was amenable to being shaped without growing brittle. She had one sister who could shape herself a legion of bodies from a handful of grains of rice and another who could draw a real smile from sorrow. Vitrine’s siblings were brilliant and talented, but she did not have their facility for remaking herself.

In the beginning, Vitrine was a glass cabinet, six-sided and joined at the edges with dull gray lead flashing. This was the hollow inside her that all demons had, and inside that cabinet was her book. The glass cabinet was more her than her dark eyes and her mouth had been, and the book was what she had chosen to put there.

Her brother, with dark curling horns and a bull’s arch to his elegant neck, filled the hollow place inside him with a river, and whenever she embraced him, she could hear it rushing over smooth stones, hear the lowing of the oxen that drew the barges along its continent-crossing length, feel a fine spray that covered her skin with the taste of silt and moss. Another brother kept a family there, and every few years, he added some son or daughter to the throng inside. When Vitrine fought with him, she could hear their fists pounding on his ribs, their voices raised in desperate pleas for freedom.

At the bottom of the harbor, she rebuilt herself from the ships that sank in the conflagration. She found for her bones the splintered and shattered pieces of the broken masts and sterns, and on that frame, she slathered layers and layers of harbor mud. For her hair, she stole the burned ropes from the ships’ rigging, long round braids that swung past her shoulders, and by then she had hands and fingers that could sculpt for her a face, plump cheeks, wide flat nose, and a round and wise forehead.

Vitrine had no eyes until she came to shallower water, and her questing fingers found two marbles of black glass, frosted from their time in the waves. She put them in her head, and she was as complete as anything less than an angel could be. Wading out of the harbor, she caught up a shred of sail to wrap around her hips, and then she stood on the beach, staring at what was left.

The sun was just below the horizon, and the light over the city was a soft gray dream, a time of unreality where you might believe anything. For one terrible moment, Vitrine allowed herself to believe that it was not as bad as she knew it was. There might still be survivors among the crumbled towers, there might still be something living, something that remained.

Then the sun rose a little higher, streaking the sky with gold and giving the lie to her brief moment of hope. The air was heavy with the smell of char, and everyone in Azril was dead.

Vitrine’s new legs collapsed underneath her, and she fell to the beach, still looking at the broken city and trying to quell the voice in her mind that refused to believe that it was gone, all gone, almost three hundred years of work and care lost in one terrible moment …

She was listening so hard for some sign that it was not over that she heard the crunch of footsteps on the friable rock path above her immediately. The promenade on the high edge of the beach had been a place for people to stroll and preen and to watch their ships come in. It was clad in stern stone, and there had been dozens of names chipped into the high sides where they sank into the sand. Now the blasted rock crumbled like ancient limestone, and the angels that walked along the path left cracked footprints in their wake.

Numbly, Vitrine watched as they walked along the promenade, virtuous and self-contained as the anchoresses who lived in the chambers honeycombing the northern cliff of the city. Baskets hung from pulleys next to the anchoresses’ open cells, and daily, food and water would be sent up and their wisdom, scratched on little bark slips, would be sent back down.

Where they had once lived, Vitrine reminded herself, staring at the progression of angels. Her anchoresses had once lived in the northern cliff. Some of them had been women weary of the world, some of them had only been weary of trying to scrape a living from it, and some of them, some very rare number of them, had been actual mystics, writing words of power and comfort and command with thin oak-gall ink. Vitrine had never quite taken the time to sort each from each, so they were all special to her, all beloved, all perfect, and the angels made her think of their names written in her book.

The angels walked the promenade as if they hadn’t seen her. They were already growing and changing, their limbs lengthening and their heads filling with light. Their radiance was a weight on her unworthy shoulders, and defiantly, Vitrine struggled to her feet, tottering forward so that she could at least be upright as they went by. She tried to find the strength to curse them, but her tongue and her lips were still too new for it.

All Vitrine could do as they left her city was stare after them with her eyes burning, with her nails digging into her lineless palms and her legs trying to collapse out from underneath her like a sickly foal’s.

As the first vanished from view to some other place, the angel at the end of the line inexplicably turned. He was more light than human then, but she could still make out the smudge of a beard, the finely shaped skull, and the deep eyes. He was the one who had spoken to her, who had wanted to know if she would beg for nothing, and a cry tore heedless past her throat.