Page 4 of The City in Glass

Vitrine nearly fell on her face as she bent to scoop up a piece of slag, but when she threw it, she struck true. The stone hit the angel’s forehead like a bolt delivered from a sling, and his head rocked back sharply. If he were a human, it would have killed him, but instead he only looked at her through a veil of blood that rolled down to cover his face.

Vitrine would have shouted curses at him again, but their eyes locked, and suddenly she no longer needed the words. A piece of herself, some dark and deadly and spiteful piece, flew from her and into his eyes, making her a part of him, and for the second time in as many seconds, he flinched in shock. His face was bloody, and her curse would live inside for as long as he would last, which was to say, she would live inside him forever.

Vitrine fell to the sand again, exhausted, the furthest thing from satisfied, but she knew that it was all she could do. She would never be anything like happy again with the city pulled down in front of her, but it would serve.

She curled on the still-warm beach as the angels passed from Azril. She swirled her fingers through the sands, marking esoteric patterns that hurt her eyes. Behind her, the seas still pounded the cliffs, and foreign gulls had already come in from the nearby islands, looking for territory that had too long been held by the city birds.

Vitrine inspected the grief left behind. It was an enormous thing, and when she closed her eyes, it took the shape of a ghost-ward, a tall and straight post hung with the artifacts of those who had gone on. After the wars, they used to spring up like wildflowers in the places of the great battles, where the mourning came to honor their dead. They were easy prey for looters, however, and eventually they fell out of fashion, though it was still possible to come across one unawares in the odd corners of Imanea, where the forests were very deep and strange.

The ghost-ward for Azril would be taller than the tallest mast, and it would be hung with wealth from a dozen foreign cities. There would be lanterns dangling from its yew shaft and so many bones inlaid into the wood that it would have a dusky white glow all its own. Azril’s ghost-ward would be the finest ever made, strung with jewels and carved with noble names going back to the city’s founding.

It was too large, Vitrine realized with dismay, to fit in the glass cabinet of her heart, too large by far even if she removed her book, which she had no intention of doing. It towered too tall for her to begin to lift, and even if she tried, it would crush her indifferently under its weight.

If it were a real thing, and not a shape that lived inside her, it would be taller than the mayor’s house, thicker than the girth of the shy and secretive mastodons that still roamed in the north. It would sink deep into the sand and rise up into the bright blue sky.

The sky is still blue, Vitrine thought, looking up. I am not sure that the sky should still be allowed to be blue.

One of her sisters could conceal the moon by sliding her lucky gold coin across its face. Another sister could, with one long breath drawn from the very core of her, blow out the sun for a few minutes.

Vitrine knew she was not as powerful as either of them. She could not change the clear blue of the sky to something more suitable, and she could not build a ghost-ward so great it would hold the depths of her mourning. Instead, she turned back to the city.

“Well, every moment I waste shall be counted against me in the days to come,” she said. It sounded wise, like something her sisters Ashabath and Lili might say. It occurred to her for a fleeting moment that they would never be here in her situation, dressed in mud and ship’s bones, crying with frustration at what was behind her and what was to come.

They never would have loved Azril as I did, either, came the defiant thought, and that gave Vitrine some strength as she made her way towards the broken towers.

THREE

Long before the city became known as Azril, a refugee woman stepped onto its floating pier carrying a glass jar filled with flower bulbs, and clinging to her green and tendril dreams was the demon Vitrine.

All of them—woman, bulbs, dreams, and demon—were freshly come from the fall of a great city in the south, whose gates were guarded by stone-winged bulls until the moment they weren’t. In fifty years, the conquerors would leave it, and a few decades after that, so would the revengers. In a century, the scavengers would be gone, and in another, so too would be the ghouls. The city in the south would go the way of limestone, crumbling into the desert until nothing was left but an archaeological layer of dark gray ash and sorrow.

When Isra bin Khouri arrived, however, the city in the south was still a smoking ruin, and this city on the edge of the sea was nothing special. The people who had lived there first were killed by the people who landed there next, and they were in turn killed by the wave that came after. It was a pirate’s nest with pretensions of finer, with stolen banners flying from the ropes hung between tall poles, the men and women adorned with polished jade pebbles and rough garnets. The children wore antlers of coral strung around their necks to keep them safe when they paddled their coracles in the bay, and the ships in the harbor unfurled sails of vermilion, goldenrod, and lilac, making Vitrine think of Isra’s old greenhouse before the glass was shattered and Isra’s family fell among the shards.

The woman Isra took a tighter grip on her glass jar, snugging it close to her ribs like a baby, and she disappeared into the city. From there, where she went and what happened to her was a mystery, but Vitrine managed to give her a gentle invisible kiss on the back of her neck just before she was gone, a blessing, a hope, a thanks for the ride out. Then Vitrine was alone on the pier, alone as she never was in the city to the south.

The sailors and fisherfolk dodged around her, knowing instinctively without seeing that there stood one who had been formed out of rebellion and rage, shaped by her own hand rather than one greater. She was a thing that had been pared down by pain until there was only a sliver of her left, and everything she had regained, from the top of her dark head to her gleaming black eyes, to her sharp white teeth to her brown skin hectic with a madder blush, she had made herself.

Vitrine’s first steps into the city that would be Azril were heedless, and her next were doubtful. It was colder than she was used to, and the wind that whistled through the narrow streets was no kin of hers. It came down from the glaciers of the north, and in it Vitrine could taste the pine and the snow. If she drank too much of that cold, she thought it might freeze her from the inside out, and she shook her head.

The people were paler as well, with skin that was rendered white and red from the winds. There were fewer people who looked like her and the ones she had loved previously. Vitrine peered into their faces as they parted for her, all unknowing. She was looking for something familiar, some scrap of someone she had known before. She had known so many people, and she watched for their faces to return, washing up on the beach before the water took them back.

Once or twice, she felt a shiver of recognition, some eye or cheek or smile that she had known before, but when she hurried after it, she was always wrong, and being wrong stung.

Finally, Vitrine ended up at Gallowscross. It had once been nothing more than one road kissing another, but the rest of the city webbed out from it. The square gained its name from the scaffold built from old ship timbers along the westward side. The gallows could still remember being a ship, and in the wind, it rocked slightly, searching for the spray and the northernmost star that could no longer guide it.

Vitrine stood below the platform, stroking the upright timbers soothingly, and she took a closer look up at the three figures hanging from the beam as they looked down at her.

“Well, look at you,” said the first, a man with laps of scarring across his right cheek. “What manner of thing are you?”

“Fine and mighty, whoever she is,” said the girl with the pearl face and her hair cut short. “Hey, are you here to fetch us?”

Before Vitrine could say that had never been any of her business, the third spoke, a narrow figure in a long kilt and a hooded garment that covered most of their face. The noose—woven from tough grass and wool fiber—sat over the scarlet of their hood.

“Not her,” they said quietly. “She’s here for bigger than us. Aren’t you?”

“Maybe I am,” she said, irritated with being caught out, but before she could say more, a low drumbeat sounded, the sound quick as a frightened heartbeat. It echoed through Gallowscross, but before Vitrine could ask what it was, it was answered by the high breathy shrill of a pipe, something made from metal with a tin shriek to its voice.

Vitrine had heard plenty of good music in her time. One of her sisters was made of it, nothing more than a tune that leaped from head to head, sometimes given glorious form through a viol or a flute, and other times only carried as softly as a hopeless wish. Vitrine’s sister danced through a thousand years, but something about this song made Vitrine pause for the fast staccato beats, the phrases that were clearly meant to be sung and danced.