Horizon

by Fran Wilde

  2

  KIRIT, BELOW

  While far beneath, four struggled to rise again, proud.

  The night we fell out of the clouds, and all those that followed, I fought against my dreams.

  In the dark, I dodged sleep by singing of wind and wings with Ciel, Nat, and Wik. The city groaned and wheezed beside us. When we ran out of songs, Ciel quieted, then slept, her head pillowed on my leg, her hair caked with grime.

  I sharpened blades. Nat paced. Wik leaned back against the city’s foot, and I leaned against him. The cloud above us blocked the stars. A spare breeze barely ruffled my robe until a drizzling rain began. We sheltered beneath what remained of our wings.

  When exhaustion won me too, I dreamed only of the ground.

  Here, we could not escape the dust and the dead. Not even in sleep.

  Some nights, my mother, Ezarit, walked with me, silent, her face obscured by clouds, her wings broken. Some nights, the blackwing Dix attacked us again and again from above.

  Their ghosts were always gone by morning.

  Tonight, they fought each other, circling, then clashing overhead. They trailed behind me, singing The Rise.

  Dreams trapped me the way thirst, pain, and loss caught us all. Ezarit and Dix wrapped their arms around me, and I fought them, thrashing.

  Wik whispered, “Kirit, shhhh.” He lowered his voice to keep from disturbing Ciel.

  Too late, his niece kicked and cried out for her brother. “Moc! Fly!”

  “Shhhh,” Wik whispered to her too. He sat guard against our nightmares until we settled back to uneasy sleep.

  Too soon, the sun broke the horizon. Light spilled across mud and grime, illuminating the body of the dying city. Time to wake again.

  That morning, like many before, bone eaters watched from high perches as we fed the city rotting animals and garbage. The city’s thick gullet took it all in. It spat out the cracked bones.

  The giant black birds carried the marrow away.

  The thick odors of the city curled around us. As the sun rose higher and the day heated, the smell grew worse. Rot and waste, bird and bone. No matter how hard we scrubbed our skin with the ground’s unfamiliar dust, we stank. Our moods followed suit. Wik grumbled and muttered.

  Ciel swore at me as we passed each other, her arms empty, mine burdened. “Clouds, Kirit, we can’t keep this up forever.”

  Dreams and waking wound through each other now. But in daytime, the heat and stench of our surroundings felt true, in the way dreams are rarely true. The long days beneath the clouds and nights of hard-fought sleep turned everything slow and nightmarish. Our only comfort was each other.

  The worries that lurked below Ciel’s words felt like the old songs. Her curses became cadence, then verse. We break the bones, we miss the stars, clouds, Kirit when can we go home.

  “This is our punishment, since being cloudbound didn’t kill us,” Wik said in passing. “Our way to appease the city.”

  My breath caught. Such worry in Wik’s eyes.

  “Do you really hold with that tradition? We broke no Laws.” I said it loud enough for Ciel to hear too.

  “Kirit,” Wik said, reaching out, then stopping. “We broke all of them.”

  That was truth, and I knew it in my heart. We’d broken War, Trespass, Treason. We’d thrown ourselves down from the city to the midcloud. We’d been driven down farther by the blackwings, and—worst of all—I’d hastened the city’s death, instead of saving it.

  My shouts had cracked the Spire, had killed the towers and sickened the city below.

  Now we had to keep it alive for as long as we could. To help the bone eaters keep the city fed, though food was growing scarce.

  Now we appeased the city on the ground, without cease.

  * * *

  Those first sleepless days after we fell, we watched our city sicken further. We worried as it settled deeper into a pained crouch. I’d tried to help the bone eaters keep the city fed and alive. “We’ll do as they do,” I said, following the giant black birds to a midden heap.

  The bone eaters noticed us following. Saw us lift the carcass of a gryphon and drag it back to the city’s mouth. One dove at Wik while he dragged the large bird.

  After three trips to the midden, the bone eaters began to swoop lazily, calling at us as we hauled rats, gryphons, and larger creatures to the city’s mouth. Their shadows grew smaller as they roosted higher on the towers, out of range of our arrows. Some left for other cities on the horizon. A spare dozen cackled at us from the towers above. But the city still lived.

  Nat reappeared from behind the city’s shoulder, carrying his own burden. He ignored our feathered audience. Pressed his ear against the city’s thick, enormous hide near where I scavenged. “Barely breathing.”

  Weeks ago, we hadn’t been able to escape the bellows sound of its breath.

  “Barely is still alive. It chews, it breathes and digests,” Wik said, frowning at Nat.

  “And craps. Don’t forget,” Ciel said, her voice a blend of disgust and sorrow at our fate.

  It was true. Sick green rivers of the stuff heating beneath the sun mixed with sharp ozone and rotten-egg scents. My stomach, too empty to do more, flipped in protest.

  “We keep the city alive until we can get a message above the clouds.” I put force behind each of my next words. “They need to know it’s sick.”

  “Not just sick.” Ciel tucked her chin and climbed the city’s claw, all the way up to a ridge on its massive shoulder, using a tether we’d tied there for that purpose. “People need to evacuate. But who would want to live down here?” She avoided a sore spot and disappeared around a fold in the city’s stinking flesh.

  “They won’t have a choice,” Nat said. He patted the city’s foreleg.

  The city could not feed itself. Hadn’t been able to for a long time. The towers on its back had crushed its massive bulk into the ground. The crouch was the city’s survival pose, and its trap. If it hadn’t sunk to its haunches long ago, it would have toppled.

  Because it had settled this way instead, it could no longer move.

  Motion caught my eye: Wik, giving the city’s maw a wide berth. I could see his figure through its open jaw, framed by teeth and sunlight. His Singer-gray robes were shredded, his skin dulled and highlighted with dust. Grime crusted the silvered skymouth-ink tattoos on his cheekbones.

  Wik didn’t meet my gaze. He heaved a gryphon in, muttering, “I’m agreed this can’t last.”

  The city’s tongue wrapped the morsel, and its jaws crunched closed.

  For as long as I’d known Wik, he’d been the stoic one. Solid, like a tower against the wind. Now he muttered when he thought no one could hear him with the city making such noise.

  “We agreed to stay and care for the city, all of us,” I said. He nodded and kept working.

  Despite his muttering, Wik worked harder than anyone. His face was gaunt with the effort, but his determination rarely wavered.

  That was part of his inheritance as a Singer—his ancestors had maintained the city’s culture for generations without flinching from the task. They’d taught each tower, and each citizen, what was necessary to keep the city safe. But they hadn’t known what was below the clouds any more than the rest of us. They’d maintained traditions established long ago: the dead flown to the city’s edge and dropped. Living Lawsbreakers too, during Conclaves. Those who disobeyed were weighted and flown, wingless, through the clear blue sky and into the never-ending clouds. They were called cloudbound, and they appeased the city. We’d learned to praise their passage and their service.

  Now we knew what had happened to the cloudbound, knew they’d fallen far beyond the cloud and were brought to the city by bone eaters. But not yet by us.

  I writhed. No time to think about that.

  While we each walked our own circuit to find food to feed the city, Nat sometimes disappeared for long stretches of day and night. He left us like the bone eaters had, with more work. We’d grumble
d at first, then searched for him. Found him trying to carve stairs in the bone ridge.

  Now we let him vanish without complaint.

  At the rate he was going, even with our help, it would take generations to work his way back up the steep bone ridge and into the cloud.

  “You’re worse than your bird,” Wik chided Nat, not unkindly, when he returned. A point of contention between them.

  Nat could still not convince Maalik to fly high enough to take a message to the rest of the city. The bird had fallen from the clouds just as we had, when the wind faded. Since then, Maalik was unable, or unwilling, to fly far from us at all.

  Now Nat’s frown deepened. “I know we need a messenger. But until Maalik can fly again, or we can, stairs are a start.”

  I would have launched myself at the clouds at that moment. Would have made myself a messenger for them. I did not care about falling or crashing. But there was the problem of wind and wings. We had neither.

  Wik caught me looking up, flexing my fingers in missing wing grips. He put a steadying hand on my shoulder. “We’ll sort it out.” But he stopped grumbling only when Nat opened his satchel. A baby gryphon carcass was stuffed inside.

  “Keep the city fed, Kirit?” Nat deadpanned. “The first Law of the undercloud.” Even when he tried to joke, I could hear the pain in his voice.

  “Not a Law,” I answered before Wik could. “A necessity, for now.”

  It was such a small deed, and so large. And we ourselves were the size of silk spiders, compared to the city. Smaller.

  Our prior lives above the clouds faded to dusty memories, as did the old Laws, the old songs.

  My feet, scuffing the ground’s uneven expanse, made a beat for the song in my head, childish and repetitive: It can’t die, it won’t die. The bone eater up on high cawed at me, mocking. Maybe sizing me up for a meal. Might be I’d die before the city.

  We’d found live birds and scraggly weeds to eat. Even Maalik had sampled some of the weeds, but spat them out. And the stagnant water hadn’t killed us off yet, though it was difficult to get used to the taste. When it rained, we filled our water sacks to the brim, then emptied them just as quickly. But my stomach had long ago stopped growling. We were starving.

  We knew we couldn’t last. Still, we focused all our efforts on keeping our city alive.

  That was the way of nightmares.

  * * *

  When Wik reappeared once more around the city’s flank, his face looked ashen beneath the sweat and dust. “There’s been a small Conclave, far to the south.”

  A Conclave. That meant more cloudbound to appease the city.

  Ciel sounded crestfallen. “A Conclave? Why? The city hasn’t roared in so long. Who would claim to appease it?”

  Nat rushed to us. “Who fell?”

  Wik shook his head. “I couldn’t see.” The cloudbound were unrecognizable on the ground, they fell so far. Still, Wik’s face was as expressionless as bone. “We must use that.”

  “You’d debase them further?” Ciel protested.

  Wik rounded on her and Nat. “Do you want to live? Do you want to give the others the chance to live? What do you think has happened to Conclaves before now? The bone eaters will help, but we can speed the process up.”

  Despite myself, I shivered. We’d both nearly been Conclave sacrifices. Many we’d loved had died that way. Wik caught and held my gaze. “Be strong for the city.”

  His words were spare, but the burning sensation in my stomach was not. Wik had been working near the city’s mouth earlier. He’d had a silk-wrapped burden then. I realized he’d already begun to feed the city its awful meal. One the city had been eating for centuries, with the help of the bone eaters.

  Be strong. I would. I had to.

  * * *

  That evening, as the sun’s last rays slipped below the distant ridge, Wik and I found Ciel standing on the city’s brow, spinning a turn, as one would for flight practice. Arms out, empty. No silk wings, no battens, no grips.

  She stepped into a slow curve of mimicked flight, fingers moving invisible wing controls, hooking and lifting the air.

  When she caught me watching, she dropped her arms.

  My heart sank. We’d lost so much. All of us.

  “I don’t want to forget how,” she said, her eyes welling.

  “We’ll find our way back into the clouds,” I promised, knowing we might not.

  Ciel, no longer a child, wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  We went to sleep hungry that night. In the morning, after awful dreams, we caught a change on the horizon. Variations in the slow-paced movements of the creatures crossing the long stretch of desert.

  I spotted the motion at the same time as Wik, but he was the one who yelled, “Look!” He was the one who caused the giant black bone eaters to lift, startled, and crap everywhere again. I ran out of the way, climbed up the rope to the city’s shoulder, and saw clearly what Wik had noticed.

  In the distance, large, gray shadows moved slowly across the dust, highlighted by moonlight.

  More cities. Smaller than our own. We watched the first city bite the second with a fierce lunge. That motion had caught Wik’s attention.

  We’d watched these cities since we’d hit the ground moons ago. We’d seen them walk to the distant ripple on the horizon that had to be a body of water.

  We’d seen them run at each other and fight, their massive bodies and the short bone ridges on their backs looking impressively graceful for all their bulk.

  “They won’t make good homes if they fight,” Wik worried. But we still watched, looking for one with towers high enough to fly from and short enough to scale.

  We’d named them, trying to tell the differences between them. None had spires as tall as our city. Most were relatively small. The one we called Nimru was pale, like its tower namesake. Another, Corat, had spires that twisted a little crooked, like Corit tower. These two cities had been feinting at each other for days, loudly.

  Our own city had no name. Ciel refused to name a dying thing, worried that doing so was bad luck. That it would speed the city’s passage.

  Now with one bite, Corat’s wobbles and tremors increased, its spires swaying slowly back and forth. A beginning of new nightmares. Corat collapsed to its knees.

  Nimru moved carefully away from the long shadows that the kneeling city’s towers cast across the dirt.

  The sight stilled my voice in my throat and turned all my hopes to ash. What were we doing here, working towards that kind of end? Our city would one day wobble, then fall like this.

  But we couldn’t warn anyone above. We’d tried to climb the bone wall, but overhangs and bone spurs blocked our upward passage. We tried to help Maalik fly again, and failed. Without the bird, we had no way to communicate with our friends and family in the clouds.

  The best we could do was keep feeding the city, keep it alive until Maalik was better, or we found a place to climb that worked.

  We could watch Corat die in the meantime.

  Over the dark half-night, when the sun was above the cloud, we heard an enormous crash.

  When the sun came down once more over our own city’s bulk, it lit the plain. Nat stared, his profile in shadow, shoulders hunched.

  Corat lay on one side, flesh already sloughing in the sun, spines collapsed and scattered across the ground. Enormous clouds of dust hovered around the city. As we watched, Nimru peeled Corat’s flesh and dragged it away. Then the flocks of bone eaters began to descend.

  “That must be how our city grew so big, being the strongest and fastest,” Ciel said. “Eating everything it could.”

  “Our city had help growing this large,” Wik said. “Our ancestors must have been feeding it for generations. Even before they started to raise the towers.”

  No one mentioned that raising the towers was what had crushed the city to the ground.

  “Do you think they’ve always been here?” Ciel asked. No one answered her. We didn’t know.

  I was
too captivated by the sight of spires crushed into ground to add anything to the discussion. The real enemy was not other cities, it was gravity.

  When our city died, it would fall just like Corat. Collapsing on its side. I held my thumb and forefinger up at right angles and looked at its towers now. There was a slight list. No real change from when we fell from the clouds, as far as I could tell. Judging from our days watching cities in the distance, there’d come a time when our city listed from side to side. A warning period. We had to get above the clouds before then. To get to Elna. To reach our friends, and their friends.

  But how? And if we managed to convince them to come down, what would we do then? We’d been living in the shadow of the city for moons now, with no real way forward.

  In the dust on our city’s hide, Nat began to sketch out the landscape. The precipitous height our people had raised the towers to. The city’s size. “What will happen to the towers high above the clouds when our city falls?”

  I imagined how hard they would hit when they struck the ground. I felt that impact deep in my gut.

  “When that happens, everyone who is still on the towers will die,” Wik said, sparing no one the news. Not even Ciel.

  Days ago, Nat took Maalik up as high on the bone ridge as he could climb, then up the stairs he’d cut. He’d held the bird in the air and gently tossed him.

  We’d watched Maalik press himself into the air, up-up-up, then falter. Then the whipperling fell back into Nat’s outreached hands.

  Nat stroked the bird’s head after the attempt. “It’s okay. We’ll try again. We’ll make it.”

  Without Maalik, we couldn’t warn Djonn and the others in the midcloud. Unless we had a way up. Even carving steps in the bone ridge on the city’s back, which we’d begun to do at night while it slept, was too slow.

  Now Wik wrung out the silk rag I’d tied across his forehead, letting the dampness run onto his lips. I swallowed, realizing my own thirst, noting the cracked lips of my companions. We were growing tougher, but still, our sweat was more salt than water. As I tied the rag again, my ragged fingernails caught on the worn-through fabric. The bones in my wrists stuck out, highlighted by the sun as I twisted the knot.