Page 35 of The City in Glass

Please. We are here. Do not forget us. Do not leave us. We are here.

The living and the dead were matched in this regard, and as the plague stretched out like thread spun from a bale of good wool roving, that was the refrain that was murmured and sung and shouted and cried throughout the city.

We are here. Do not forget us. Do not leave us.

I never will, Vitrine thought with a soft and sorrowful tenderness. Whether you were here short or long, I never will.

The angel found Vitrine sitting on the edge of one of the city wells, dressed in a winding shroud. One end was pulled over her head like a scarf, and she was wrapped down to her ankles, only the tops of her bare feet visible.

“What will you do about this?” he asked. “Or are you a different kind of demon than I supposed?”

“I am no plague lord,” she snapped, “and if you knew anything about cities save the destroying of them, you would know that.”

The angel pointed west to the district they now called Albemarle.

“Four more died in the night,” he said. “Two of them were a couple, and they left behind a baby and one scarce older. None will take them in a time like this, and they will die as surely as if the plague lords had kissed them.”

The angel pointed north, where a number of people from Kailin had come to settle. They raised green and blue lanterns over their beds to turn their faces pale, hoping that Lord Mhai, who ruled over the sea at the end of the river, would think he had already taken them.

“They sing the healing songs there during the day. They sing them so much and so often that the holy meaning has gone out of the words, and they are just noise. That is what the children who survive this will remember, noise and death.”

The angel pointed east, to the docks.

“They will shoot our ships out of the water, those that still have enough crew to sail. There is already talk from Canna and from Seillon that they will barricade us in if we will not do the proper thing and die before we become their death as well.”

“I have heard the talk in Canna and in Seillon,” Vitrine said, gathering her shroud around her more tightly. “They are calling it a judgment. It seems that I have heard that story before, angel.”

“This is your city,” he said. “It’s yours, take care of it.”

“What do you expect a demon to do?” she said, and she let him hear the worn threads in her voice, the places where time and sorrow and wrath had made her what she was.

“Aren’t your kind meant to be more clever than this?” He glared at her, and she thought momentarily of what he would look like trying to breathe out of a whistling hole in his throat.

“At least my kind are more than a mindless scourge!”

“Cruel,” he said, looking up at the houses where the shutters had been daubed with bright blue paint to ward off the illness, and after a moment she realized he wasn’t speaking of her. One of the plague lords, skull-headed, fingers long and many-jointed, prodded at the blue paint speculatively, wondering whether it should be denied. A cooing from inside the house, a brace of racing pigeons bought in better times, made the thing nod its hoary head, and it slipped between the gaps in the shutter like so much smoke.

“If you could fix this, you would have, wouldn’t you?” she asked, and he was silent. “If you could fix this, I would let you go. If you could … speak to someone. One of your brothers, perhaps. Even my siblings who don’t care much for me would—”

“We are not like you,” he said a little angrily. “We no longer speak.”

“Ah.”

“Once they might have, but.”

He shook his head and she wondered at what might have come after, but he turned to the well, gesturing to the winch.

“Will you hold that for me?”

Curiously, she nodded, and as she held the winch steady, he put one foot in the wooden bucket and one hand on the rope.

“All right, now lower me and slowly if you please, without jokes.”

“I do not make jokes, angel,” she said with dignity, but perhaps she found a wry and wicked smile at the idea of consigning an angel to the pit via a series of slow half turns of the winch. Inside her, his wings beat anxiously, and she hummed as the rope jerked back and forth before he called to be lifted up again.

He was muddied when he rose up, soaked up to the knee, but he stepped off the edge of the well, dumping out the pail full to the brim with small drowned animals. No one had been fishing them out, and people would drink bad water before they would go without.

“Is that all you can do?” she asked, shaking her head, and he shrugged angrily, wringing out the hem of his robe.