by Fran Wilde
“What is that? Another egg?” I moved forward to investigate. I should have stepped back, as Wik had.
The slick feel of a tentacle wrapping my ankle was my only warning. The rough grip yanked me off my feet and dragged me several lengths through the dust. I scrambled, clutching at the still air, the shifting ground.
Maalik squawked and flew into the air. The terrain scratched my back raw and cut at my elbows. I kicked at what I could not see. I tried to hack at what was pulling me, but that only got my arm entangled too, and lost me my bow.
Behind me, Wik stopped yelling. Has he been grabbed too?
His echoing clicks from above and to my left told me he was still free.
I planted the bone hook I’d been carrying in the ground and hung on to it. I would not make this easy. The tentacle pulled tighter at my ankle. I closed my eyes and echoed as Wik did.
There was too much dust. All I could sense was confusion. An indistinct shape rising from the hole in the ground several lengths away. Curling tentacles waving in the air.
Another tentacle wrapped my leg, this one higher on my calf. My grip on the grounded hook began to slip.
“A skymouth. Here!” I yelled hoarsely.
No response.
“Wik!”
Where has he gone? He wouldn’t flee. But would he fight for me when I hadn’t been sure I could kill, even for him? When I’d disdained his return as citykiller because I hated my own role in the same crime?
The grinding sound of rough dirt sliding beneath me. I was dragged again, closer this time, and more slowly, against the anchor I’d planted. My leg felt as if it was being pulled from my body, but my fingertips clung to the bone hook.
“Wik!” I tried to pry it loose from the dirt while kicking, but that only made the tentacle in the ground pull harder. I couldn’t feel my foot any longer. Where was Wik?
I lost my grip on the bone hook, and it sprang back upright in the dirt as I was dragged again. I flipped facedown, then scrabbled at the ground with my fingers. Dirt filled my mouth, my nose, as I fought to turn over again. I barely managed to roll just as Wik took a running leap and landed directly over the hole in the ground.
He stumbled, then grabbed at something I couldn’t see. He cut and slashed at the air with his knife.
Maalik dove too, screeching. His small body jerked from the air and tumbled, all feathers and rage, before he fought his way free. Then he circled back, uncontested.
The tentacles released my leg. Maalik flew to me, and I scrambled upright, my skin throbbing, fingers and face bloodied, my shin a bees’ nest of tingle and ache.
Wik had circled to one side of what had attacked us and crouched cautiously, ready to fight. He dug in the ground beside it. Slowly, as he shoved the sand away, a carapace emerged, coiled in on itself and the same shade as the dirt, but mottled. Hard. Silver fluid ran from it.
“Not a skymouth. Something near to it, though,” Wik muttered. He paced a length of dirt, then kicked dust into the air and let it drop. I saw the tentacles. Long ones, several more stretching almost to me. “Big. Thing’s shell is the size of a tower core.”
Together, we looked across the desert we’d crossed. Noticed just how many mounds of different sizes there were in the earth here. Just how many places the invisible predators could have been hiding.
“What are they?” My voice was a rasp.
“Call them groundmouths, until we know better,” Wik answered. He said it as if we were the first here. As if we had any right to name things here.
The broken metal in the ground said we were not the first, by far. The ground hid layers upon layers of evidence that this world had many names for things. Names we could never know.
But now we knew one new thing about the ground. An invisible groundmouth could lurk, and grasp. We could guess from the city in the distance that cities liked to eat these creatures.
No wonder our ancestors wanted to get as high as they could away from this. No wonder they had cautioned us that below the clouds was dangerous. It was safer to never, ever come back down.
My leg throbbed. When I examined it, pushing my tattered robe aside and pulling at the torn legging beneath, I saw the skin purpling where the groundmouth had grasped it, near enough to where I’d broken it previously to worry me. I could still put weight on it, so I did, leaning away from the pulse that echoed up through my leg and hip with every step.
“All right?” Wik asked. He looked ready to carry me.
“I’m fine,” I said, smiling for emphasis. Absolutely fine. And I would stay fine. I had to. Wik could walk by my side, he could wait for me if he wanted, but I would carry myself as long as I could walk.
Maalik spread his wings while clinging to my shoulder. The shade and small breeze from the motion was a cooling relief. The blood on my face began to dry. Then the whipperling furled his wings again and began to smooth his feathers.
I began to move again, going out ahead of Wik’s doubtful gaze. If he could continue on, I could also. As a distraction from the pain, I held the image of the brass plate in my mind. It had to contain a clue about the groundmouths. I thought of the other plates Nat had carried through the clouds to help prove to the towers that everyone must come down. And about those plates I’d gathered from where Dix had fallen, from the ruins of the city. How they showed weapons and flying mechanisms and life cycles. Maybe not all of our great-great-great-dependents had wanted to stay far from the dangers. Perhaps they’d been planning to artifex their way home, but had forgotten as more life-and-death needs took over.
Wik caught up with me. He brushed at his robes, looking anywhere but at me or my leg. “I won’t worry until you tell me to.”
Good choice.
Wik’s robes were wet and flecked with silver-blue ink. So was his face.
“What is that?” It didn’t look like skymouth guts, or skymouth ink at all. That would have burned.
“Before it died, it sprayed a lot of ink in the air.” Wik wiped at his ear with a dust-fouled corner of his sleeve.
“Did you breathe any of that in?” I tried to think of what Elna would do for aspiration of a skymouth’s defensive spray, but I had no idea.
“Tried not to.” Wik shrugged. “I’m sure it will be fine.” He smiled at me. “And,” he added as he brushed his face again with his robe, “now we know.”
We did know. And we would be more careful in the future.
10
MACAL, ABOVE
Above the clouds, destruction vast, the Magister flew alone
Gruff voiced and dirty with tower dust and blood, the northwest councilors—most so new as tower leaders I didn’t yet know their names—gathered warily around me in the shelter of Mondarath’s lowtower. Sidra and I had bargained and begged for enough stools and cushions to seat all who’d come. We crowded against the core wall, trying to stay quiet enough that few nearby would overhear.
When I had their attention, I didn’t waste time.
“All of us have to move lower. The towertops aren’t safe anymore.” I let that sink in. “Ginth and Amrath, your towers are showing cracks too near their cores. You must move immediately. We will assist you.”
The councilor from Amrath—the youngest among us—stared at me. She was working the ragged cuticle of her thumb with her teeth. The skin puckered and bled as she spoke.
“The blackwings took everything we had. What about supplies?” the councilor said. “We need medicine, spidersilk for bandages.”
“We need hang-sacks so that our people can sleep in the lowtower,” the councilor from Varu added. “Our core is too wide for more than a few tiers from other towers to shelter there.”
“Would you crowd all of us on fewer towers, with few supplies?” one councilor from Laria protested. “Why not separate the Lawsbreakers from each tower and use them to appease the city? It obviously needs it.”
“We will not have another Conclave,” I said. “Enough citizens have died on that account.” I paused. “Goin
g into the clouds, however—”
Another councilor jumped in, almost as young as the woman from Amrath. Fear etched his eyes. “Would you send us to explore the clouds, never to return?”
“Careful excursions. That will return. We need to find out what caused the quake. That starts in the clouds. And I’m saying if we don’t expand the area of the city that is livable, by one means or another, people will begin to attack each other.”
“They already are,” murmured the Varu councilor. “Stealing too.”
I knew this was true. Already, several on Mondarath had been caught. Fear drove discord. So did hunger.
“You say we must abandon all tiers that look unsteady, all at once. That we must crowd together and sacrifice,” the councilor from Varu said. “When people grow angry and want to live on their damaged tiers, what then?”
The tower council had always been a slow vortex of ideas, a community coming together to agree on purpose. Questions were natural. Arguments too. We had no time for either.
“We are back to Singer laws, for the moment. They try it, they go against Laws.”
No one spoke for a moment.
“Singer laws, from a Singer.” The new towerman from Viit spat every word. She’d been the oldest person on what remained of that tower.
“Hush,” Varu silenced her. “We are working together for now.” But the man’s look said that “now” would last only until my first big mistake.
I could make no mistakes. There were too many lives in the balance. We had to get everyone housed, and safely, either on tiers or elsewhere. I had to lead, so that the surviving city could benefit from what each tower had. It turned out that several of the towers closest to the Spire had their own small stashes of lighter-than-air. Varu, for instance, had squirreled away several large sacks of the stuff. While the gas would eventually run out, for now it kept a small group of brave souls housed on a tarp just outside of the tower proper.
Abandon. The Law wove through my mind, through everything I did. It tinged every possible mistake. What didn’t I yet understand?
Not for the first time, I wished Kirit and Nat were here to tell me what they knew about the city, about the undercloud. Instead, all I had to rely on in front of the new group of councilors was Laws, and Singer knowledge. The tower abandonment song.
“The law says gather in safety and remove,” I sang, remembering. “To highest of towers, away from cloud and fear. But we cannot move high. It’s not safe. We have to go low.”
“Into the clouds?” The young woman’s voice cracked.
“If we must.” I was again thinking of Wik, Kirit, and Nat, of the glowing lights from long ago. Perhaps we could hide in the clouds too. At least temporarily.
“If we could discover why the city shook, we could call on all quadrants to work together again to fix it,” I proposed. “We won’t have to leave people behind.”
As I spoke, I thought about the city and its bridges that had broken. “The bridges,” I realized. “The towers that fell all had bridges. When the city shook, they couldn’t compensate. Their neighbors dragged them down.”
My fellow tower leaders looked as shaken as the city. Truth be told, I was too.
“You say we should work together,” Varu said. “But if bridges and connections brought down the towers, why should we follow you?”
“If risking connections keeps us from remaining isolated until the city dies around us, tower by tower? I’ll do it,” Sidra argued. She’d lost her father in council fall, her mother to the bone dust fevers the year following the Spire’s destruction. She had no one else but me, and the fear in her voice was vivid. The anger too. It caught like a market fire. I watched it spread from face to face.
“She’s right,” I said. To let Varu take the lead was tempting. But I knew I couldn’t cede yet. “We cannot forge strong ties unless we risk collapse too.”
Around us, Mondarath’s residents squabbled for room, trying to get as close to what they thought of as the most stable parts of the lowtower as possible: the cores, where the council was trying to meet. Despite our best efforts, many listened carefully.
Sidra spoke again. “We’ll work to keep the community together as much as we can. We’ll find more room. And we’ll figure out what has happened to our city.”
A few councilors nodded. Then one harried guard carried a half-full sack of what looked like dirgeons past, towards what Sidra had designated a general commissary. The tip of his half-furled green silk wings bumped the young Amrath councilor in the shoulder. Dust shook from the councilor’s hair when she jumped.
“Watch yourself!”
For a moment, tensions flared anew. Some looked at the sack of dirgeons hungrily.
“I will try to help you,” I said after letting them go on for a moment. “But we have to pool our resources so that everyone can manage.”
The councilor from Amrath shook her head. “We need food, no matter where we rest. We need stability. Going near the clouds means disaster.”
I waved Urie and Raq over. “It means survival too,” I said as calmly as I could.
Urie carried a blank bone slate and a sharp stylus. “Tell Raq what you have, and we’ll help distribute.”
No one volunteered to go first. They shifted on their stools and looked at each other, waiting. “We’re not telling your pet blackwing and scavenger anything.”
“Urie is with us. And Raq’s a guard, not a scavenger.” I kept myself from sighing, which would only anger them more. “Mondarath has herbs, rope, and muzz.” Urie wrote it all down. Then I turned to the young councilor from Amrath. It wasn’t fair to pick on her, as she was the youngest, but it was expedient.
“Hang-sacks, about twenty. Cushions, silk, five council plinths in various states of repair…” She kept speaking until she reached the food stores. She paled. “The blackwings took most of our food.”
“We’ll get you some, Risen,” the councilor from Varu said. “We could trade for the hang-sacks.” He was an older councilman who’d lived through the blackwing attack and had refused to fight at Laria. Now he drew a deep breath as if the thought was costing him dearly and named a ridiculously low weight of dried fruit for the trade.
“We will gather all of your resources.” I stared at Councilor Varu especially hard. “Here. And distribute them fairly.”
“After the disaster of your market, I’m not sure I like this,” the councilor said.
I held up a hand. “Enough. No more tower by tower. You will have hang-sacks.” I nodded at the elder councilman. “And she will have food.”
“Here,” Sidra added, “we need catchments, as several of ours fell during the quake.” We were running out of water rapidly. If we could get catchments set before sunset, we had hope of starting the condensation and collection process again.
“Ours are gone,” said Naza. Two other tower councilors nodded. All but one of the unstable towers.
“We’ll find more. And we’ll use the remaining lighter-than-air to help float hang-sacks from the towers,” I said, though I despaired ever having enough lighter-than-air to float more than a few tiers’ worth.
“If we can find an artifex with experience making the gas, we can try to tap the damaged towers for more,” Councilor Amrath suggested.
Away from cloud and fear—
She was right. I thought of who, in this new landscape, we could get to help us. If only we had Urie’s aunts. I turned to the boy. “We need the artifexes. I don’t care how we get them.”
He nodded. Made another note about Grigrit.
Gather in safety and remove—
The point of the Law wasn’t going up, it was getting out. The point was doing whatever it took to survive. We needed those artifexes.
The councilor from Varu jumped up. He motioned to the four tower guards who’d come with him. “Maybe we don’t give Grigrit a choice. Gather hunters from the other standing towers and go get the artifexes, and as much lighter-than-air as you can.”
&nb
sp; “Wait!” Sidra stared at us. She spoke low and carefully. “That is advocating War. How can you consider that?” Her gaze pried at mine as if she were trying to prize loose a knot.
“It isn’t War,” Varu said. “We’re offering citizens a different tower to live on. And they attacked our markets. How am I breaking Laws?”
“Blackwings attacked us. We are unsure about which ones,” Sidra countered. “There are factions. Urie’s confirmed it.”
And I’d seen evidence of it. Still, I came down in the middle. “Urie said messages went through Grigrit. We have a right to defend ourselves. But not to attack.”
Sidra nodded, acknowledging the point. “But this isn’t defense. You, Macal, lead by example. I’ve seen you. People follow you because of it. Will your example be Singer strategies now? Will you side with Varu to take us to War?”
Her voice, cast low as it was, caught the attention of other tower representatives, of citizens trying to sleep in the tier. Many people turned towards me, eyes filled with questions.
Singer.
Their mistrust always came back to the tower I was born to. Was I what they thought? Singer-born, always sworn? Was Sidra starting to believe that?
“We won’t lead from fear,” I whispered. “We’re better than that.”
Beyond the tier where the council met, beside broken tiers and the few standing towers, broad spans of sky hurt like lost limbs. Markets and bridges were for peacetime. I had to face the truth: I’d turned away from the Singers young, I’d promised to lead by example, but in times of great stress, I’d fallen back on Singer strategies.
I’d miscalculated and let Varu push the council in the wrong direction. Sidra was correct, and once again I was grateful for her advice. But even if we couldn’t float the city, the citizens also needed to know what could befall them. “The towers are unstable. I would rather turn us into a community that can live beyond the towers than turn to War,” I said quietly. The gasps spread around the tier. “To do that, we need artifexes. Even if we don’t go into the southwest, which I concede is a bad idea. The southwest has no interest in helping us.”