The City in Glass

Chapter Five

FIVE

The night after she decided that the city that would come to be known as Azril was hers, Vitrine ascended to the highest point in the city she could find. It turned out to be the roof of the mayor’s house, which contained under it three stories, a venal man, a clever woman, a set of variable children, and assorted servants that were mostly up to no good.

She flipped to the first clean page of her book, and with a quill she borrowed from an irritated goose in one of the courtyard hutches and ink she had taken from a dead scholar in an alley, she started to write.

Year one, Vitrine wrote with a flourish. I want my city grown taller, and I want more ships in the harbor. I want proper piers. I want the songs to be sweeter, and I want the gallows to be less lonely. I want the mayor’s house to be far grander, and the house of the foremost courtesan to be grander than that. I want a tower to watch for enemies from the sea and I want another, even taller, to watch the stars as they dance.

The breeze chilled the light sweat on her brow, and she tugged up the hood of her robe. Someone looking from the ground would have seen a nightmare shadow, something visible from one angle but not another, something that shifted to let the moonlight pass through her.

Vitrine let her legs dangle over the edge of the roof, her book open in her lap to allow the ink to dry. Absently, she added, Find out if the people here can read. Literacy, then a university, fine as the one in—

Vitrine frowned, blotting the last three words out with a careful pass of her thumb. She abruptly decided it was unlucky to name the city in the south. Instead she wrote the world has ever seen, and nodded with satisfaction.

The ink was the cheap kind, made from the galls of the oak tree and blessed iron nails. It looked black on the paper in the moonlight, but she knew that in the daytime, it would show itself to be brown. The iron would eat through the page, leaving pinprick holes and then carving out the spaces between letters the longer it lasted.

Definitely scribes, Vitrine thought. And then I can have inks from Sui, the kind that blooms from black to rose over seventy years, and some from Padri, which can only write the truth.

The ink from Padri was a holy thing, rare beyond measure and bound with the gum from a tree that had once been a god. It was only meant to be used for writing the sacred teachings of that god, but the monks were a trusting lot, and Vitrine was willing to wager that over forty years, they had still not changed the lock on the holy ink.

Yes, definitely the ink from Padri, she thought. But not only the ink from Padri, for I shall want the poets and scholars to write me lies as well as truths, great lies big enough to clothe the city in myth and glamour.

When Vitrine touched the words she had written, they were dry. She closed the book and brought it to her lips to kiss before she stowed it again in her heart. The ink and quill, poor as they were, she stashed in the bag she had taken off the dead scholar. They would do until she got better, and after all, they had been free. You could not get a fairer price than that, and she shouldered the bag, going to stand at the edge of the mayor’s roof. Underneath her feet, the mayor dreamed of gold, his wife’s dreams turned to a lover she had sent away many years ago, and their children’s dreams needed no push at all to turn to red and bloody things.

“All right,” Vitrine said out loud. “Year one.”

The house where the Lord Mayor’s household had dreamed so brightly was long gone, of course. Time destroyed things as well as angels did, and it had been centuries since Vitrine had sat on the roof and decided what she wanted the city to be.

In the intervening time, the house had burned down, been raised up, burned down, this time on purpose, and been built up and added to and redecorated and enlarged countless times. Throughout the years, it had stood between two stodgier buildings, houses of dignity and respectable origins built out of native gray stone, and to Vitrine’s surprise, that saved it, or rather, saved a portion of it.

She was crossing the plaza, on her way to inspect the city’s drainage systems and old cisterns, when she unexpectedly found more of the Lord Mayor’s house standing than she thought she would, which was to say that there was something left standing at all.

The two stone buildings on either side had borne the brunt of the blast, crumbled down to rubble mixed with glass, and the newer gables of the Lord Mayor’s house had been clipped off like wings torn from a bird, but the very oldest part of the house remained, a low room with four walls and raftered with short thick beams. From the outside, the walls still bore traces of the pale peach wallpaper, peeling now in long and shockingly fleshlike strips, and Vitrine hesitated against a strong and more than slightly mad urge to knock on the startlingly intact door. She knew it was ridiculous, but she stood with her hand on the stone doorpost, pressed so hard against it that the snarling lion carved into its face left dents on her palm.

Who will I find waiting for me? Vitrine wondered. Would it be Hector Barca, who ruled so well for so long, or his daughter Mariet, who returned to take charge when he fell from that horse? Will it be the Tran sisters, who had no right to this place but made it theirs and drank wine out of stolen goblets and toasted to the robber god? Who would wait for me?

She was almost ready to see them, in spectral shrouds or in the flesh, because some of them had been buried in the house’s foundations and some kept publicly in reliquaries just like her own glass cabinet. When she opened the cracking door, she was ready to be greeted with pleasure and joy, she was ready to have things flung at her head for her part in their deaths. She found she was unready for the silence.

It was the Green Room that had survived, she thought numbly, looking around. It was a particular favorite of the most recent Lord Mayor’s grandmother, Viola Aquila. She’d only died a few short months ago, certain of her legacy and the place of her beloved family, which she’d ruled with an iron glove.

The Green Room had been her particular retreat, the furniture upholstered in green velvet, the rugs dyed deep green with moss and fixed with iron mordant. She’d resisted the wallpaper that had been so fashionable recently, instead choosing her favorite artist from Padri to paint the walls with leaves and grass, so realistic that you could almost hear the rustling of the beasts in the grove.

Vitrine took her seat in the visitor’s chair, because no one could sit in Viola’s own seat, taller than the rest and practically a throne. She conjured Viola up as a hale woman in her early sixties, her own tenure as Lord Mayor behind her, but sharp-eyed and apt to rule if she did not rein herself in.

Well? Vitrine imagined her saying. And how goes it in my city?

“Poorly,” Vitrine might have replied. “It is all torn to the ground, it is all broken. The river runs again, but what’s left of the dead is piled at the doors, and there’s no one left to mourn.”

Viola snorted.

“Who has time to mourn?” she demanded. “Who ever has time to mourn? Cry while you work, and grieve when you’re dead. You’re not dead yet, are you?”

“No, not yet,” Vitrine admitted. “But so many are.”

“Well, they won’t help you, then,” Viola said practically. “Who will?”

“No one. No one will help me. I’m alone.”

Viola rapped her dragon-headed cane on the ground briskly.

“This is Azril, my girl, the greatest city of the age. You are never alone here, and the lights will never go out.”

In this room, in this one room left standing by chance and architectural luck, it was true, and Vitrine nodded. There was a moment where she doubted she could leave. She would only stay in the Green Room, sipping the memory of Viola’s smoky tea and listening to her talk about the warring merchant families and ghost ships coming into port. She could have.

Instead she climbed to her feet and went to kiss Viola gently on the cheek before she left, closing the door behind her with a final click.

After a moment’s thought, she touched the peeling walls and the room crumbled, a patch of green amid the paler stone. She didn’t need the reminder, and she didn’t need the temptation.

Viola and all her family were written in her book, and Vitrine went to rebuild the city for them as well as herself.