by Fran Wilde
I shook myself to stay awake, then shook Ciel. She’d dozed off with her finger still in her mouth. “No time to sleep, not yet. We still have the light for at least one more tier.”
We might never make it through the cloud in time if our stops grew longer. Maybe Ciel was right. I could keep going.
“What if you went back down?” I said, worried. “It’s not that far, and it’s safer than continuing to go up. You could still catch up to Kirit and Wik.”
She glared at me. “My brother is up there.” She shouldered her pack—a bag we’d filled with a few items from the collapse: grips, some food. No wings, though.
If Ciel would listen, she’d be able to get back down from where she was, and I wouldn’t have to worry about her when the harder vertical climb began. “I’ll bring Moc back down to you,” I said. “I promise.”
I’d saved her twin’s life once already. But I’d also nearly lost him in the clouds.
I wanted Ciel to listen to me. I’d saved her life too.
But she shook her head, a slow no. I stifled a groan, and my stomach rumbled. Hunger.
“What if you fall?” We’d had this argument before. She made a face at me as she lifted the safety line between us.
“If we climb together, you’ll catch me. If I climb alone, I’ll tether to the tower.” She wouldn’t stop climbing.
Her determination made me grin, even as the reality frustrated me. “All right.” I came to sit beside her on the bone spur. Ciel was lankier than when I’d first met her and her brother. Her legs swung over the edge of the tower, all knobby knees and ankles. Her silk footwraps had long worn away, but she was skilled at climbing barefoot now. Calluses and sore spots marked her still-small feet. I pulled out my water sack, and she smiled. Her cracked lips began to bleed a little.
“Drink some water,” I said.
“It isn’t time for that yet.”
“Do it anyway. I can’t carry you if you pass out.”
As she sipped, we watched a large black beetle with crimson markings on its back crawl up the incline and wave its pincers at us.
Since the collapse, we’d seen all sorts of bugs, but none this big. Was it edible? I worried about having enough to eat. “What if one of us got sick? Fell. What would the other do?”
Ciel frowned. “Keep going. That’s most important. Stop worrying.”
I worried at her because I couldn’t worry about anyone else. Not about Kirit and Wik, still below us on the ground. I was too angry to worry about them. Not about Maalik, who I hoped would protect them, or at least might recover from his own fall. Not for my family far above me in the clouds. When I thought about what might have happened to them in the meantime, I couldn’t breathe. I needed to breathe. So I worried at Ciel instead.
She waved me away. After a long wait, she finally nodded. “Ready.” We began to climb again.
When we drew close to the top of the collapsed tower, the jagged breaks began. We were within reach of the main upright tiers of living bone that would, I hoped, take us to our friends and family and then above the clouds. If any of their tiers were still standing after the collapse.
Ciel panted, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead.
“Slow down,” I said. “We’re closer to the midgrowth than I thought.” Ciel drank a few sips—her allotment and mine too.
The sun sank farther below the cloudline, highlighting telltale dents and ridges in the bone towers where each central core had grown over its tiers. The growth had connected and formed a solid wall below, but now there were more places to grip. How had we climbed so far and not reached the clouds?
I threw the bone chip in the air again. A breeze tumbled it, but it still fell straight down. I caught it, thinking harder.
What if we were closer to the midgrowth because so many of the outer towers had collapsed all around the city? Some of the breaks did look jagged, the bone beneath, white and yellow, rather than brown and gray. If not for the tilted bone spires we’d scrambled up, the route would have been impossible.
Ciel, struggling to stay on her feet, nearly warbled with hope. “We might make it to the cloud before true night tomorrow,” she said. “I’d been wishing we could fly, but now we’ll be all right.”
Even if our wings had been intact, we couldn’t have flown up to this level. Far below, the wind wasn’t strong enough. Here, the towers weren’t high enough to generate their own updrafts. But I knew how she felt. I longed to fly again too. After I found my family and didn’t let them go.
Tomorrow night. Ciel could make it from here. If I kept climbing on my own, I might reach the cloud earlier. By tomorrow morning, even. I could feel their arms around me, hear their voices. Ceetcee’s laugh, Beliak scolding.
Instead, the heavy, looming cloud above us pressed down, making my skull ache, even as the cloud itself remained stubbornly out of reach.
I wavered on the problem. I could move faster without Ciel, but if I did, she would have to pace herself on her own, remember to drink water. And so I could not—would not—abandon her either. Slowly we crossed the span where the smaller city’s broken towers jammed into the thicker, older bone tiers of our own city. The first time I touched one of our towers, my skin prickled. I was finally going home.
But Ciel’s arms drooped. “I need to rest again,” she finally admitted.
“There’s a safe spot here.” A small depression in the bone wall was Ciel-sized and sheltered by an outgrowth of core. A ledge beside it would let me sit and keep watch.
In the towers above, the central core pushed out as the tiers rose, moving occupants up, always up. Here, the core looked like so much kept goose fat drippings, solidified and mashed together. The result was a variegated tint, depending on the age and width of the towers, and the lichen that grew on its southern edges.
I withdrew a tether and drove two bone pitons into the thick wall to secure Ciel to the side of the tower, and her eyelids drooped further as she fought sleep. “Rest,” I said.
Ciel tossed restlessly in the nook, then slid into a dream. The moon passed between the horizon below and the cloud above. I settled my main water sack and the food satchel beside me and leaned back on the tower wall. We would climb this together.
When she woke, I would still be here.
Yes, a moment to rest would be good. Then we would climb.
When I closed my eyes, I saw Nimru attack again. I saw that often now, dreaming or awake.
* * *
I woke struggling.
In the distance, Ciel screamed. Below me, I saw only air, and the bone tower receding.
A bone eater’s giant black feathers whispered in the passing air. Its purple-black claw edged in more feathers, tightened around me. Above, the bird’s barb-encrusted tongue rasped against its beak.
My pack, made of torn robes and braided vines, fell away. It bounced down the tower’s outgrowth. Imagining my body bouncing similarly, I stopped struggling. Ciel crawled to grab the pack before it slid farther. She hung on to it while I was lifted higher.
The black grip wrapped me so tightly I couldn’t scream. The bone eater took me farther away from the cities and the ground. The bird banked and began to turn towards the east, to a rocky rise.
I knew why: to drop me, then wait to suck the marrow from my bones.
I lay still and tried to breathe in the bone eater’s grip. Looked up at the black expanse of feathers above me until my heart began to beat a fast pattern of panic again. Against my better judgment, I looked down.
Below, two tiny cities lay close together. Two more walked slowly in the distance. Dust whorls might have been Kirit and Wik making their passage across the red desert. From this height, I made out lines and patterns in the ridges. Places cities had fought and died? Perhaps something else. Beyond the stone ridge where I was headed, more ridges appeared, sharp cones of stone and dirt, with clouds or smoke ringing several.
Beyond that, something sparkled. Water? It was so far, and very bright.
No.
I couldn’t die. Not with Ciel stuck on the bone spurs. Not with my family stranded in the midcloud.
I hadn’t died in the Spire.
I hadn’t died by falling through the clouds.
I was not going to die now because a bone eater thought I was a meal.
The claw gripping my waist and shoulders ever tighter said otherwise. It stank, too.
A seeping crack in the claw’s cuticle nearest my chest, in particular.
An idea grappled with my fear and panic. Breathe, Nat. Think. You’re a hunter. You’ve flown the Gyre. You can use this.
I’d stuffed a skein of tethers in my robe pocket from the wreckage. I could stretch my fingers enough to reach it. Tying it to the bird’s claw was hard, but with my teeth and both hands, I managed. I wrapped it as tight as I could near the dewclaw and slipped one wrist through the gap, then I dug at the cracked claw with my other hand.
The giant bird screeched so loud my eardrums ached. Then I was tumbling nearly free, save for my wrist, caught painfully in the tether. I pulled myself up arm over arm as the bird wheeled to look for me.
Before it realized I was not falling through the air, I’d reached the top of the claws and scrambled upright, braced against its leg.
When I drew my knife and stuck it through feathers into the bony cartilage there, the leg pulled in close to the bird’s body. Pressed me into suffocating, dandruff-filled down. Feathers’ greased edges and sharp points scratched my skin. I sneezed again and again as I scrambled higher on the bird’s flank, then to its back.
The world spun beneath me. My fingers dug deep into the bird’s skin, and it screeched. Bucked. Tried to rid itself of me.
Wingless, with one last chance. I was not going to fall, not going to disappear from this world.
One tether left. Spidersilk, strong and elastic. A legacy from home. I looped it as we flew, the line blowing against my arm in the wind, and tied a knot in one end. Then I tossed it in front of the bird and hoped the ruse would work.
The motion caught the bone eater’s eye. The bird dove for the knot, catching the line in its beak. I pulled hard, hoping it wouldn’t break. With a guttural choking noise, the giant bird twisted, tried to shake me off, then shifted to ease the pressure on its beak. The cities came back into view, very far away. The cloud edge was closer.
I could fly up from here. I could push the bone eater higher and reach the towers. I adjusted my crouch on the bird’s back, trying to hang on as it flew closer to home than I’d been in moons. Fear was as sharp in my mouth as the wind beating at my face. This was not exhilarating flight; this was pure, unleashed terror that I held by the beak.
We flew for a long time, until suddenly, the giant bird wasn’t turning any longer. It had ducked its head low. I drew back on my improvised harness to keep the line taut.
A wall of solid bone lay directly ahead of us. The bone eater had ducked in order to run headfirst into the tower. At full speed. The carrion bird might have hoped to fly between a series of holes broken in the towers and decapitate me, but its aim was terrible. Especially with me yanking on its beak.
The beast’s tongue clacked hard and dark against its beak. A high-pitched keen echoed from its throat as it rippled past the bone lattice and through it. Fast enough to scrape at me, but not slow enough for me to safely jump away from the bird.
So I jumped off anyway.
I careened right into the core wall, curling myself into a ball as I rolled across the tier, letting the precious tether go and crashing hard enough to knock all breath from my lungs. I coughed desperately, waiting for a claw to descend. But the bone eater’s broad back retreated, and for a moment I saw blue sky and the trailing edge of a cloud.
Then the thing turned and came back, beak first, tongue extended, reaching for me. There was nowhere else for me to hide.
What if one of us couldn’t continue?
I’d been worrying about Ciel then. Now her answer was my only hope for my family.
The other would go on for both of us. But I had to keep fighting too.
I shut my eyes and thought hard about living. Then I charged. I scrambled, dizzy, right at the beak, the head behind it, and the dark eyeballs set in that head, which were glaring at me.
The bird squawked in rage, blasting me with a shower of acrid spit and foul air that made me retch. I stood once more, wobbling on my feet. Kirit’s strategy came to mind: Just run right at it. So I charged, shouting, nearly falling into it.
The bone eater gave another squawk, louder this time, and tried to pull itself out of the tier. It smacked its head on the bone floor, then thrashed and gave a horrible rattle in its throat.
A river of bile poured from its mouth, followed by red-purple blood, and as I watched, amazed, the bone eater died on the floor in front of me.
I carefully picked my way past its neck and upper body to find the other half of it hanging over the edge, skewered by a spear through its belly. Beside the gushing wound, and completely covered in filth, was Ciel, up to her arms in gore, triumphant.
“You won’t believe this.” She pulled two bone tablets, a brass plaque, and a grimy flint from its belly. She wobbled on her feet and her arms shook, but she held up a hand when I tried to help her. “I helped the windbeaters skin birds when I was a fledge. We can use a lot of it when we climb. Here—” Ciel handed me a bone knife. “Get its feathers.”
“How did you get up here so fast?” I asked her. Why didn’t you keep climbing?
She chuckled. “You left your grips down below. I put your pair on my feet, and mine on my hands.” She wiggled her bare toes, then pointed to a pair of grips discarded nearby.
Slowly, to the sound of ripping and tearing, we took the bone eater apart. The guts went in one pile, the belly contents in another. Feathers and the strangely dark bones, we set aside.
Ciel cleaned the skull and offered it to me. I pushed it back to her. “That’s yours—you earned it.”
“I can’t carry it up, it’s too big.” She looked at the heavy thing sadly, then pushed it to the edge of the tier along with the rest of the bird’s entrails. Shoved hard. “Let it feed the city,” she said. Then she looked at her arms and her robe. “This is never going to scrub off.” Her brass-colored hair was matted thickly with gore.
If we’d had scourweed, she might have had a chance. As it was, she stank, and I did too. “When we get to the midcloud,” I promised, “there will be water to wash with.” I dried the flint and used it to start a small fire out of brush in the tier. “Hard to believe anything would eat flint.”
I hooked a chunk of bone eater’s thigh meat over the fire. It sizzled and popped, rich with fat. The result was gamey, but delicious.
Concealed between bone spurs, we rested for a few hours on full stomachs. When morning came, we stepped from the tier and looked up. We were far above where we’d been, right at the cloud’s edge. Moisture prickled my skin, wind tugged at me. Soon, maybe, I could see stars again.
“Best start now,” Ciel said. Her voice was calm; she sounded surer of herself.
“You did well back there,” I whispered.
She beamed. “I know.”
Using our handmade grips and pitons, plus the tether lines we’d brought from below, we set off. We began our spiderlike crawl up the bone towers.
9
KIRIT, BELOW
Across desert, through illness, in search of home
Walking away from the city was like flying into a storm: fast, my heart pounding the risk, the distance, the losses. But we weren’t flying. There was no storm. Just our footsteps in the dust.
We walked away from everything we knew. Our friends, our pasts. We walked away from the broken Spire; away from Laws.
My feet—callused beyond any tower dweller’s, save my companions’—scuffed the ground and raised small clouds of red
dust. Cruel imitations of wind, at ankle level. These hung behind me and then pulled back to the ground as I walked away.
With the desert open before us, for a moment, it felt like a new start, a new chance to right everything wrong.
* * *
“Tower and Spire no more,” I whispered, thinking of The Rise, but also of our names. No more Densira, no more Skyshouter. “But still Spirebreaker.”
“And Citykiller,” Wik whispered beside me.
I stopped, dust coating my feet. Stared at him. My worst name for myself on his lips. The very air weighed me down. “Why would you walk with me, then?”
He turned back towards the two intertwined cities and said, very quietly, “I meant me.” He pointed at Nimru. “I did that.”
At that moment, I wanted to wrap my arms around him for comfort, for both of us. But he held up a hand, determined to continue. “It gives them—and us—time. Time enough to reach my brother, time to convince the city to move. If anyone can guide them down, it’s Macal.”
My arms hung by my sides, useless as wings. I couldn’t speak. He was proud.
Wik stared at the cities, piled side by side in the distance. Swallowed and bit his lip. “That doesn’t make up for what Nimru did to the city, I know. But we gave the towers more time.”
I clenched my fists. “This is Singer logic? The ends justify the means? Do you feel the same about what I did to the city?”
He bent his head. The silver tattoos on his cheeks caught the light. He’d thought about it, as had I. “The Spire would have cracked without your shouts. With enough time. The city was already crushed by its own weight. You just…”
“Sped up the process.” That’s what he was trying to say. “A process our ancestors began by climbing the towers, by forcing them to grow higher. By thinking we were all there was. Now we know differently.” So many were trapped above, on the city I’d killed.
Wik’s charge at Nimru had bought them more time.
Wik’s face was fierce, his skymouth-ink tattoos stark against his skin. “You didn’t—”