by Fran Wilde
But I saw a flicker of conflict cross his face. He did see the two actions differently. One was in service to the city. To keep it safe. Our trust. One sped our downfall.
“I did. As much as anyone.” But I was finished. Too many had died.
Wik stayed where he was. Would he follow a citykiller? Or would he return to climb with Nat and Ciel? He’d wanted to, once. To find his brother.
Finally, his words came fast. “Let’s find them a good home.” He turned away, thinking I didn’t see the moisture rimming his eyes. And I didn’t let him see mine. We began trudging into the desert together, but separate.
Behind us, the noise of the city—its groans from its injuries, the rumble of its breath, the sound of chewing, diminished as we walked. The smell of it: breath and broken skin curdling the air, faded too.
“Given what we know, we can’t have blue sky and towers above the clouds without killing the city below,” I finally said, trudging again. If we found a new city.
Wik sighed and stopped walking. “We could be more aware of the risks, make Laws about raising the towers.”
“You know that wouldn’t be enough, not after a few generations.” Going higher was what we knew. People’s self-interest would win out. Our presence had changed the city’s life, altered its natural course. Now we walked away from it. I tugged Wik along.
With us gone, several bone eaters had already returned and resumed feeding our former city. We could see them swooping, small dark spots, as we walked away. They fought over the scraps again.
We weren’t needed on the ground.
Maalik left my shoulder and circled above, testing his wings. After a few moments, I whistled and he returned. His claws gently pinched my shoulder.
“If we could fly,” I began. If there was a place high enough and windy enough, I’d find wings and launch myself from it into the sky once again.
Wik snorted. “On what wind?” Flying was not possible where we were.
“Maybe there’s something across the desert? Maybe we’ll find a city—”
A city that rose up and into the clouds, where we could fly, just as before? We’d have the same problems, the same destruction for the city.
“Come on,” I said. The worry must wait. “Let’s find out.”
We knew now that the world was vast, that the clouds ended, and the wind too. We knew more, and less, than before. I knew, too—in my gut—that we couldn’t survive here.
For now, we walked, and my legs and ankles ached. My steps were no longer as sure as they’d been.
As the city receded behind us, Wik took my hand and squeezed it tight.
“No more deaths. Not by my doing,” I whispered. It was a vow I’d been turning over in my mind since before the blackwings had come to the meadow in the midcloud. Since before we fell. I couldn’t keep the promise then. Now? I would try harder. I would walk away from Kirit Citykiller too.
“That’s an impossible vow to keep. You’re not a Singer any longer. You’re a hero of the city.” Wik frowned. “What if you need to defend the community?”
“I would defend it.” I knew that much. All of the community. Not just some of it.
Wik chewed his lip. The sun rose higher. It was nearing time to stop and find shade. “What if you had to choose between my life and your promise?”
Sounds of our feet scuffing the dirt, sounds of the weak breeze, the dirt husking our breaths, a hollow space that I could not fill with an answer. Finally, “I don’t know yet,” tumbled from my lips, a confession of sorts.
I waited for him to storm at me—to tell me I was neither a good Nightwing nor a good companion on a journey. I waited for him to fear all that he risked in my company.
His shoulders did dip a little. His eyes, when he looked at me, were hooded at first. He was Singer-trained, a hunter, a fighter. Together, we’d fought and killed for the city. How could I betray him like this? I tried to speak again, to explain. To let my words tumble from me so that we could trip on them as we walked. But only silence came. And Wik’s silence matched mine.
I waited for him to turn and walk away.
But he kept pace with me. His strides were longer than mine, but taken slower.
Then, quietly, “It’s all right,” he said. “You don’t need to know until you know.”
He squeezed my hand again, and something deep inside my lungs shifted. I could breathe easier. I pressed his fingers between mine. That seemed to be enough for him to know I heard him, because the air eased around us, and we passed through it faster.
“I won’t leave,” he said even more quietly.
“That’s a hard vow to keep,” I answered. We trudged ahead anyway.
The ground hurt our feet; our shins and knees ached and creaked and refused to grow stronger. We walked across a dirt-filled plain rough with an unfamiliarity of rocks and small scrub plants.
Once I felt something brush my foot and slide away, but when I looked, I saw nothing.
As our pace across the warming desert slowed, two bone eaters came to investigate. “We’re not dead yet,” I scolded. The bigger bone eater screeched at me, then flew back to the city. The smaller one dove slow and sure, talons out, but still too high.
Wik knelt for a rock, but I just stared the enormous bird down. I curled my hands into fists. It veered away at the last minute and headed home.
“You didn’t blink,” Wik said. “You weren’t afraid.”
No. Not for myself, I wasn’t. “I was less afraid than it was. That’s all that counts.”
* * *
In a morning’s walk, we found a patch of broad, spike-leaved ground plants with purple flowers. They turned out to be filled with a sweet liquid that smelled somewhat like muzz. I put a dab on my arm. When it did not burn or give me a rash, we tasted some on our tongues. After a half day in the shade of the plants, when we didn’t feel ill, we each took a sip and kept walking.
“We were already cloudbound and worse, already committed to the ground,” Wik said.
“But not dead after all,” I reminded both of us. That was hopeful.
Over a small ridge, we glimpsed a new city in the distance. Smaller than Corat and Nimru. Smaller by far than our own city. Slowly, it crossed the hot reddish plain. Between us and that city lay more ground plants and a bumpy terrain.
“What will we do when we get close to it?” I asked, scuffing the ground with my foot while we sipped again at the broadleaf plant. The city wasn’t one we’d seen and named. It wasn’t the city Dix had been trying to drag Ciel towards all those moons ago either. That one had several broken spires. This one looked young; its towers spiraled upwards, but didn’t reach the clouds. Bone eaters circled, a black cloud seen from a distance.
“We’ll climb it. See if it’s safe enough to stay.” Wik sounded so confident.
“We have to get there first,” I said. “Then climb it.”
“Our ancestors managed.”
“There aren’t any songs about climbing onto a city,” I said.
Wik’s face stuck halfway between doubt and negation.
“There are songs about that?”
He nodded. “We learned the really old songs as fledges. About how to abandon a tower. What bad heartbone smelled like. I don’t remember them all, but there have to be songs about climbing cities.”
Singers. They’d kept so much knowledge to themselves. “What does bad heartbone smell like?”
“Like smoke.” He looked up, and the light hit his cheekbones and jawline. “How long, do you think?”
“Until Nat and Ciel make it above the clouds? Or until they bring the citizens down to us? Those are two very different questions.”
Wik turned to walk backwards, looking behind us at the distant, hazy shape that was our fallen city and its nemesis, Nimru. “Both. How long?”
“If they’re lucky, I think they can reach the midcloud in a few days. If we’re lucky, the city has at least a couple of moons left.”
“A couple moons,
more or less. At worst, ten days.”
We couldn’t keep moving. The sun was too hot on the sand. We pulled our tattered, sweat-drenched robes over us. The heat beat at us, and we leaned against each other to wait. The heat made it to hard to speak, to think.
“Kirit,” Wik whispered after a long time staring at the sand where we’d dug. “I’d understand. If you wouldn’t kill a bone eater, or even anything else.”
What if you had to chose between my life and your promise? I hadn’t answered his question. But I knew now that I’d break my promise. His was one death I could not accept.
I took his hand again. Squeezed hard.
Our steps took on a familiar, jarring rhythm. Our bones echoed with the ground’s opinion of us. We did not belong here. The ground let us know that with every step. No plants offered themselves this far out as food. We survived by hunting the small rats that skittered from the smallest of shadows into narrow tunnels. Maalik took to the sky more than once to chase the black bugs that raced across the sand, but the whipperling quickly returned to my shoulder each time.
Life on the ground was a surprise. How small it was. How it darted and flashed before us, then disappeared.
We were nearing a small hill when something dark lifted from the ground and then sank out of sight. Wik and I both froze. Maalik stuck his head into my robe and hid.
“What is it?” I asked.
We drew closer and found a span of silk, a piece of a dark footsling, half buried in the dirt.
“Blackwing,” Wik muttered under his breath. “This far out.” He looked around, but we could find nothing more of it.
We kept walking, crossing the desert, but more tense and alert now.
If a blackwing had survived this far out here, we could be closing in on an enemy, as well as the closest city and its ring of circling bone eaters.
Even with the footsling suggesting others had fared poorly in the desert, we let it lull us into its slow beats.
We knew the cities were deadly, and the clouds were dangerous. We didn’t know anything about this dry expanse or that the ground itself was the least safe of all.
A full day and a half from our former, dying city, we discovered the first of the big hills, the size of a small city, that mounded the ground.
As we neared them, my calves worked harder to crest a rise in the ground. Muscles pulled at the backs of my knees, drew a slow ache from my shins. I was used to aches from my arms after long flights. In my legs, this feeling was especially strange.
The earthen rise we climbed wasn’t big at first. Then suddenly we felt a little cooler. The heat from the ground no longer pushed so hard at our newly callused feet.
“What an odd place,” Wik said. “This is a nearly perfect curve.” We hadn’t seen anything close to geometry since leaving the city above.
Now, after days of walking the desert, this oddity, plus the sound of Wik’s curiosity, shook me from my catalogue of aches.
We skirted the edge of the mound, tapping at it with our bone hooks. Dirt slid away from the surface, revealing a dark, mottled hide, thick like that of our city.
Wik dug into the dirt below the skin with his bone hook, still gory from the run-in with Nimru. He cleared a hole below big enough for a child. Then he hit something soft. “Huh.”
The hole was filled with an immense egg, dormant. It didn’t look like a silkspider hatch, or a whipperling clutch.
“Did you bring the brass plates?” Wik said. He reached a hand back and pulled me forward, up the hill.
I’d brought several and given Ciel the rest to help convince the towers. “Which one do you want?”
“The one with the moons and stars on it.”
I dug in my satchel until I felt the piece of brass. When I passed it over to Wik, he held up the plate to the strangely marked skin of the thing beneath the mound.
The etching wasn’t a match, but it was similar.
“Maybe these things were smaller once. And this place…” He looked closely at the reversed drawing and then flipped it upside down.
The moons and stars became pits and gaps in the desert floor.
The plate became a map, not of the sky, as we’d thought, but of the ground, with several city hatchlings marked.
“All this time, we didn’t know what we knew.” How many of our assumptions have been upside down? “How much has been lost?”
Other symbols on the brass surface, even flipped—even when I tried to imagine them reversed, as if they’d been pressed into silk—still did not make sense. But the markings for what lived under the cities, which we’d thought were moons in the sky, now meant so much more.
“They lay eggs,” Wik said in wonder. “And the eggs get drawn down into the earth somehow, and kept the right temperature. This one looks like it got too hot.”
My feet pressed the leathery shell. It crackled like dried leaves. He was right. Dead. We stood on the grave of a city that never was.
“Could people have lived on the ground before the cities—arrived? Appeared?” I wasn’t sure if those were the right words. I rubbed the square marks on the plates. “Could people still be here?” I looked around. Saw nothing but more hills. That made me shiver.
Wik pointed to a small etching on the side of the plate—a nascent city pulling itself from the ground, and another, a city lying in a hole it had dug for an egg. The drawing was rough, which was why we’d mistaken it for moonrise.
There were measurements, markings along the side. “How many moons is that?”
“Many,” I said. I swallowed dryly. Generations or more.
“The cities look like they erupted from the ground,” Wik said. “Look at the crushed pieces of mechanicals,” he pointed at the dirt he’d cleared out of the hole. “Look at all the metal.” This last he breathed out. What we’d considered riches in the clouds was nothing to what seemed buried deep in the ground here. Still, Wik couldn’t keep himself from picking up and pocketing a small piece of the unfamiliar gray metal.
“Perhaps there’s more beneath the dirt,” I said. “I wish we had a guide.” The land around us was so strange, more so than even the midcloud. There, we’d had Aliati and her scavenger knowledge to fall back on. Now we were on our own. “If the blackwing got this far, I don’t know how they’d miss this.”
“Would that the scavengers had ever come this low,” Wik said, shaking his head. “We’d have had so much more to work with.”
“At some point, some might have, but not for generations. Maybe when the cities were small.” And if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to get back above the clouds any better than us. Wik’s excitement at discovery was distracting him. I cleared my throat.
Wik executed a slow turn. “I don’t think we’re going to come across any small cities, not right now.”
“Unless one hatches.” That made me look at the hills and mounds around us with new eyes. A newborn, hungry city was likely as dangerous as a bone eater hatchling. All sharp teeth and ravenous stomach. We had new fears to reckon with. New reasons to hurry.
Around us the desert mounds, interspersed with smaller rises, revealed more eggs, each overheated and leathery. The ridge on the horizon rose higher, and we climbed that, away from the ruined hatchery.
Here, it smelled like stagnant water and something else: sharp and green. Vegetation grew nearby, and I was hungry enough to sniff it out. Wik’s nose wrinkled too.
“I’ll forage,” Wik said. “If we find a city, we’ll need strength.” He limped towards the green smells.
A thin breeze brushed my cheek, and I wanted to believe—for there were breezes, they were just tiny things—that we would fly again. That we’d rise up in the air, the wind full against the silk spans of our wings, a city thriving beneath us. That we could do it without killing another city. Without harming another being, now that we knew what the cost was.
Wik, even when our council had draped him in Lawsmarkers for being a Singer, didn’t quit easily. I wanted to believe we
would find what we sought, together. That this one person who shared so much of my history, so much of what I knew, would be the one who finished this journey with me, no matter my answer to his question, no matter how the ground tested us.
Instead, we walked, separately again. My eyes and mouth caked with grit that even the liquid from the broadleaf plant couldn’t clear. My feet ached. When we rested, Wik relented, and we sheltered beneath the same cloak.
* * *
Finally after many days with the young city in sight, we were no longer walking away from our home: we could not see its body any longer, and could only see the glimpses of towers on its back, raking through the cloud, in shadow and haze.
We had only the new city to walk towards.
Wik returned, long stalks of a spiky silver plant in his hand. Different than the broadleaf we’d been sucking dry of moisture.
“What if a city won’t have us?” I asked as I looked at the stalks. Only one way to find out if it was dangerous. I broke a section off and rubbed it on my arm.
“What kind of question is that? Cities don’t get a choice.”
“They should,” I said.
“You figure out how to talk to a city, then. It doesn’t look like our ancestors ever figured it out.”
“If we can’t figure it out,” I echoed his words, “we might keep walking until we are out of range of the cities and find a place on high ground.”
When the stalks didn’t raise any reaction on my skin, I took a tiny bite and waited.
I looked once more to the distant ridges, the smoke on the horizon. Between the ridge and the hills where we walked, the city we were trying to reach had turned suddenly and moved towards a dip in the ground. It bent its head low and tore at something in the dirt, then shook wildly. I could see nothing. Then a spray of silver-blue. Then only loud sounds of the city chewing as we drew closer.
“What is that city eating?” Its jaws gaped as if something large and gristly hung there, but we saw nothing. As it chewed, I thought I saw silver glints in the red dust. The color of my tattoos, and Wik’s.
“Don’t.” Wik put out a steadying hand just as I picked up the pace. “Look.” Another divot just before us had shifted. Red sand poured into a newly formed hole. The sand ran in rivulets, some packed hard against the ground, some moving in the other direction.