Page 14 of The City in Glass

Finally, Passim turned their head to look at Vitrine, and in the light from the many candles, it occurred to Vitrine that there was something sweet in Passim’s wolf face, where the teeth were so long they couldn’t properly close their mouth.

“Tell me, sister. You have been so kind. Is there anything I can do for you before I leave tomorrow? I should not like to see you struggle with anything too large when you are only so gentle.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to say that Passim should knock the spar of rock off the harbor cliffs as they headed out to sea, but for some reason, she stopped herself.

“No, only remember to kiss Obla for me and to tell her that I miss her, that is all.”

Vitrine saw Passim off the next day, and then she took on the seeming of a very wealthy woman from the mansions in the west. The old woman at Arvan’s boardinghouse squinted at her suspiciously, torn between fawning and spitting on her well-made shoes, but she called Arvan down and Vitrine whisked him away to a restaurant on Camellia Street. The waiter brought them a large platter of snails and a tiny cushion studded with silver needles to dig out the meat.

“I want you to do some work for me,” Vitrine said. “I want you to capture this city, all of it.”

Arvan blinked, twisting his needle delicately so that the flesh popped out of the snail shell in a complete spiral.

“But of course,” he said cautiously. “I can do the spires and the harbors, and the great houses…”

“Well, of course you will do all of those. But I said I want all of it. I want the shops and the taverns. I want the starving children along the river and the courtesans in their beds. I want the faces of the men at the grain share markets, and the ships, every ship in the harbor, I want that.”

Arvan considered her. He would come to know what she was, or at least he would have a better guess than almost anyone else would. That was probably when he started to suspect.

“That will be very expensive,” he said, and she waved an impatient hand.

“Of course you will be paid. I shall pay you whatever you like.”

Still he hesitated.

“My work is not always beautiful.”

“Then make it true, and I will content myself with that.”

She put a golden coin on the table between them, barely clipped, and then set down another two beside it.

“What does this get me?” she asked, and he stared.

“That’s six months of my life on the table, you know.”

Vitrine pouted, warming to her role as Lady Plenty. She passed her hand over the gold, and it doubled.

“There, a full year,” she said, rising from the table in a swish of marigold skirts. “Meet me here in a year with what you have to show me. No paintings, I think, just drawings in ink. I suggest that when you come, you impress me.”

“Or what?”

She showed him her teeth, white as any aristocrat’s and sharper than a lion’s.

“Or you will disappoint me,” she said, and she left.

Single days could be very slow, but weeks passed very quickly. That year there was a new method for straightening wood that made for stronger ships, and someone discovered the bones of a magnificent dragon bedded in the cliffs down the coast. A team of clerics from Sui and faraway Tuyet arrived with delicate chisels and makeup brushes to painstakingly dig it out, and Vitrine went to join them, spending the high summer poring in fascination over the ancient past emerging from the stone. At night, she went to sit beside the dragon’s jaws, still blackened with soot from the furnace of its belly.

“Who were you?” she marveled. “Who did you love?”

Sui claimed the bones of one foreclaw and Tuyet took the other. The rest was carefully transported to Azril where Vitrine had replacements for the missing parts carved from light wood and then gilded. The dragon posed magnificently in the city’s hall of records, overseeing the deeds and contracts with its great empty eyes.

By then, Vitrine was almost late getting back to the restaurant to meet up with Arvan. He had ordered the snails again, but before they came, he passed her a leather folder filled with ink drawings.

She was silent as she flipped through them, nibbling on her lower lip as she took in her city in a new way, through the eyes and the skills of another.

Oh, it is rather dirty and shabby down by the river, isn’t it? Perhaps I shall whisper to the mayor to put more money there.

“I do not know how I like these,” she complained. “Azril is not at all flattered, and neither am I.”