Page 21 of The City in Glass

“And what shall I do?”

“I told you to go fuck yourself once—”

“Several times.”

“—and that still stands. I don’t care.”

He stood with his head bowed and his hands clasped in front of him. It wasn’t penance—she didn’t think that he was actually capable of such a thing—but it might have been humility.

“When may I return?” he asked softly.

There was something gnawing her, something as cruel as he could be, that gleefully wanted to tell him never. He could never come back. He could live with the contagion she had put inside him forever, let it eat him until it and his suffering and longing for home turned him into one of the leviathan, great and terrible bodies hidden under the mountains and the sea because they could not bear the earth and they were grown too heavy to seek the sky.

Something kept her from it, and she ignored whatever it was in favor of enjoying the thin thread of fear in his voice.

“Fifty years,” she said. “Come back in fifty years.”

The angel’s shoulders slumped, he nodded, and a moment later he was gone. He could cross the world with a thought, find a single grain of gold in the desert sands. He could be anywhere and doing anything, and the only place he would not go was Azril.

When Vitrine could feel no hint of him in the air or the soil or the stone, she rose from her crater, and looked around.

The earthquake had shaken the lesser buildings to the ground. Everywhere there was dust, and where the stone had snapped instead of burst, it left a raw break, shiny and slick like the stone had been when it was fresh cut. There was something painfully new about the sight of it, but af ter the first flinch, Vitrine grew used to it. There would be newly cut stone again someday, and the buildings still standing, made of granite, made of basalt, stayed. They had been there before she arrived, and someday they would house new generations.

But only if I get to work, she thought.

ELEVEN

About twelve years after the angel departed, Vitrine came down from adjusting the flow of the river to find people on the beach. She was so startled to hear human voices again that she shied back into the darkness and shrouded herself in shadows, her blood racing and her eyes wide.

They had built a great bonfire on the sand to hold back the night, but she crept closer and closer yet, unblinking and fascinated. Had the first people of her Azril been like this? Had they built fires from the wood that washed up high on the shore, and had they roasted seabirds in the embers of their fire? Had they gestured with broad hands at what had been theirs and pointed to the mountains at what might be theirs again?

With the pleasure of an eavesdropper who knows she will not be caught, Vitrine came to sit at the fire, one more face the men were sure they knew, though if they counted, they would find themselves one more than they had been.

“It was an earthquake that brought down great Azril,” one of the sailors said. “It opened the ground like a woman’s legs, and what came out must surely fall back in.”

“Pah,” snorted another man. “We see what you know of women. No, it was fire, fire started from the toppled candle of a woman in the pleasure quarters. I know this because I knew a man who sailed with one who survived it. He said that it was a courtesan’s candle, and from there raced the doom of the city.”

“That’s a story about disease, didn’t you know? No, Azril fell because the Lord Mayor ordered it. He was in the pay of the Ithars, the horse people. When they gave him the weight of a princess in gold and threw in the princess besides, he opened the gates to let them in, and they leveled it. Time and fate did the rest.”

“Azril fell because angels came from the east and set it afire,” Vitrine said quietly, and suddenly every eye was on her.

She stared at the fire, which sent plumes of writhing smoke into the sky, and she was aware of the men around her surreptitiously reaching for the knives they had concealed in their clothing and the amulets they wore to ward off demons and bad dreams. She was both, and she was not offended.

“You are not welcome to our fire,” the oldest man among them said finally. “You will not poison our food or taint our water. You will strike no man with blindness or ride his back home to turn his children into rats.”

“Children into rats, I remember that one. You must be from the Iray River valley, where they sang of Bavion and Horu for so many years.”

“Indeed we are. You are not welcome at our fire, you will not—”

“I am not, and I will not,” she said. “Only get your story straight. Azril was struck down by angels.”

The men sat quietly, respectfully, and Vitrine was al most ready to rise and fade into the darkness again, nothing more than a story that they would tell others when they returned safely home, when one of the other men spoke up.

“What had Azril done to deserve that fate?”

In an instant, the fire was doused and the beach plunged into darkness. They were men of the Iray River valley, and so they knew the old stories. They did not run, and they did not cry out, but instead they sat still, as still as baby rabbits when the hawk’s shadow appeared.

“Azril was set afire because angels opened their obedient mouths and spoke,” she said, her lips inches from each man’s ear. She was sorry when they did not flinch back from her, when they did not unthinkingly reach back and try to strike her. Then she would have been within her rights to rend them open through the middle, to reach through them and throw what made them living men instead of dead men into the still-steaming coals.