The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

Author:Nghi Vo
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

THIRTEEN

Vitrine worked for decades without raising her head. Some of the work she did with cart and hastily broken feral horses, perhaps the children and grandchildren of the bay she had sent up the river. The work strained her muscles and left her skin as dry as ash and peeling like diseased bark, and sometimes she went to stand in the mud of the river so that she could remember that she was indeed a living thing that could bend without crackling.

After the buildings came down, the foundations of Azril had been bared, and there were a few surprises waiting for her when she uncovered them.

One day not long after the equinox, when the days were clipped shorter and shorter, she found the sigil of one of her brothers etched in the stone underneath the city. The pavers and packed dirt and then the real soil had pulled back like lips from teeth, and in the pale and gleaming bedrock underneath, she saw a series of familiar curves that made her eyes water and her mouth go dry.

A human seeing that name would have gone mad, but for Vitrine, it was only her brother’s name, Gallimane, the harvester at the end of the row. At first Vitrine didn’t believe it, and she had to clear out all the soil and sediment to reveal his name in its entirety. She stood at the center of a sigil that would sprawl a good city block, and wondered.

Gallimane was older than she was, old enough he might have been her father. He had been missing for some time now, and whether he was trapped, lost, or only sleeping, there were none who could say. He was a favorite of warlords and poets alike, so handsome that people grew sick of the sun for love of him, and so tall he liked to put his hand on the top of Vitrine’s skull to show her how very small she was.

She missed her brother a great deal, and she traced her foot along a curve of his sigil, bent down to see if she could taste any of the ash from when it had been burnt. He had been missing for a century or more now, and he might stay gone for twice that, or he might pop up again, full of stories and with gifts for each one of them, good things to eat or to hide or to rip.

“So you were here too,” she murmured. “You did not love this place as I did, but you loved it at least a little, didn’t you, to leave your mark here?”

He was silent, still missing, and she demolished his sigil, thinking absently that that was why this district always seemed to breed riots. In general, avarice and cruelty would do that well enough on their own, and it was hardly as if Azril was short on those things, but there was always something about Swallow Street and the Hesters that was inclined to crack and

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