The Night Glass

The city held its breath as if the tide itself were listening. Lornhaven crouched between iron cliffs and a sea that remembered every thing it had swallowed; black buildings rose like teeth and glass burned in their bones. At the far end of Ember Street the glassworks threw a pale, steady light down onto the cobbles—an honest hearth in a place where honest things were rare. Edda worked there, wrist steady, mouth set against the furnace’s heat. She timed the beat of the bell with the pulse in her throat, felt the rhythm of the world in the pads of her fingers rather than by any tidy ear. Sound arrived through her as pressure, as a map of tremors, and she read language as a potter reads clay: by feeling its give.

Her hand moved over molten sand and flame, shaping panes that would hold whispers. The kilns smelled of old sugar and iron; glass hissed as it cooled, like a living thing exhaling. Marius, who owned the shop with a stern, patient face, leaned against the tool bench and watched her work the way a sentinel watches for storm. He kept his hands scarred and gentle; every night he carried a little bundle of his own voice in a tin, a habit Edda had teased him about until he showed her the tin’s dented lid and the label—A SECOND CHIME—and she had fallen quiet out of curiosity.

—Steady, Edda, —he said. His voice had the kind of gravel that made it easy to follow with her hands. He tapped the bench; she felt it travel up bone and marrow. —The bells for the Lantern Parade are only three nights off. I want a dozen murmurs for the chapel bell and a hollow for the market’s sign. Keep the edge thin; it sings truer when it is hungry.

Edda tightened her jaw. She breathed then blew into the pipe, sending a thin limb of glass out toward the iron frame. It shivered under her thumb. Each small tremor sketched notes she could not hear but could answer. Outside, gulls insulted the dusk and the tide scoured the stone, but to her those sounds came as a slow, patient pressure against the soles of her feet. When she finished the pane she brushed the rim with cloth and held it toward the light. The surface held the city like a secret.

—You’ll learn the bell’s face tonight, —Marius said, and there was a lift to his mouth that she felt like a pulse in her collarbone. —I’ll show you which places keep the right pitch.

She nodded. The shop hummed with the small domestic music of work—metal nicking metal, the hiss of cooling, the soft careful breathing of two people who had spent years finding the same rhythm. Edda felt anchored by that music no less than someone cued by a conductor’s baton. She did not know then that the city’s breath would be stolen, and that the anchor would go taut and snap.