Chapter Ten

TEN

It distressed Vitrine how much of the city had to come down. A good lot of it already had in the years she had been burying and restoring, but Azril, thanks to its love of fire and the scouring waves from the sea, had always preferred to build with stone rather than with wood.

Much of the stone they used, cut from quarries that filled with acidic water when it rained, was proof against common flame and salt, but in the scourge of the angels, it grew porous and soft, crumbling and chalky, powdering the pads of Vitrine’s fingers when she pushed too hard. The older stone, granite that had come from some older city that came before, that would stay, proof against everything that had come before, but the newer stone was fragile and untrustworthy.

“Not fit to build with,” she said to herself. The angel stood at her shoulder and a little behind, for all the world like a diligent foreman taking his orders. She spoke to him because otherwise she had no one to speak to but the cranes and the deer that sometimes wandered down from the hills, and sometimes, she thought that he might even have been listening.

“When they come back, they’ll need places to live, and so much of this, it’s a ruined tomb, isn’t it? They can’t squat in here like grave ghouls. They can’t live under buildings that might just drop on their heads if they sneeze…”

She walked the city back and forth, shaking her head as one building after another proved unsound. There were some buildings that stood almost as proud and beautiful as they had before, missing only a roof or a wing. Seen from an angle and close enough to block out the rest of the neighborhood, she could pretend it was only a quiet day, and any minute, people would come out or rush in on important business. However, even they were pitted and fragile, as apt to fall as to shelter, and she knew that one way or another, they had to be taken care of.

The angel watched as she unearthed a forge and a casket of iron ingots, his head tilted slightly.

“You need fire,” he observed.

“I can’t bring down the rotten stone with a wood spade, so I’ll make one from iron,” she said. “Yes, I need fire.”

The words were no sooner out of her mouth than she found herself in the angel’s arms, held as snugly and securely as if she were a cat he was rescuing from danger. The ingots dropped out of her hands, clattering against the anvil, and then they were high above the city, looking down at it.

Vitrine yelped with surprise, and then she saw all the city below her as she had not the last time he lifted her. She saw the grid of streets and the towers, all broken but some still tall.

If I don’t look at it straight on, if I do not look too closely, it’s still there, she thought in wonder, and then the angel spoke.

A tremor shook the earth, so powerful that it struck them in the air as well, and then something deep below the city groaned as if it was hungry, and rose up, as if it had briefly been freed.

A dark cloud rose up from Azril— the ghosts, Vitrine thought for one wild moment, the ghosts are leaving— and then she saw that it was only the birds, all of them that could fly abandoning the young ones who couldn’t, and the ground heaved up and something screamed across her mind, and then the buildings fell. The ruins turned to rubble, the stones cast like white bones onto the shore.

Out at sea, the waves churned up and pulled back from the shore, leaving the wrecks naked for a split second before rushing back and pounding flat what was left of the low town by the water, and Vitrine screamed so loudly that the earth went still and the angel dropped her.

She closed her eyes as she fell, her skirts fluttering up to make a sound like helpless, useless wings.

She looked up where she saw the angel hovering over her and over Azril with a silence that looked as much like judgment as it was surprise, and then she closed her eyes tightly. What was there to see after all? Nothing she could bear, nothing that would heal her or that was worth writing in her tattered book.

Vitrine hit the ground like a star, sending up a wave of dust and grime, sinking into what had been Murrine Square before the angels came. It was where the glassblowers had set up their outdoor stands, puffing out globes of red and green and yellow for perfume bottles, witch’s balls, and amphitres of poison. Sunk a good few feet below the surface of the street, Vitrine could smell decades of copper for blue and garnet-gold for ruby, almost the same as it was before.

With her eyes closed, Vitrine could sense more clearly what the angel truly was as he came down to land beside her. Her eyes told her he was a man, and without them to fool the rest of her, she could feel the way the heat of him wanted to singe her skin, how he smelled of something cold that lived between the stars, and how, barely audible, something of the song of creation hung over him.

“Are you hurt?” he asked anxiously.

“Of course. What a stupid question.”

“Here, let me—”

She opened her eyes to see him reaching for her, and she bared her teeth, sharp enough to tear a strip of flesh off a crocodile.

“No!”

For a wonder, for a miracle, for a mercy, he stopped, doubt on his face and disapproval in his eyes.

“You cannot simply lie there—”

“I will if I wish to,” she snapped. “You put me here.”

“I didn’t—I did what you wanted!”

“Then leave,” she said, surprising them both.

They examined the two words she had thrown between them.

“And where shall I go?” he asked, his tone formal.

“Anywhere. I don’t care.”

“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.