by Fran Wilde
“Longer on the ground. The towers all grow together into a ridge, and if they hadn’t grown so high…” I stopped, thinking of all the times I’d helped scrub at a towertop with scourweed, in hopes of raising a new tier so that my tower might rise higher, and my fortunes with it. “The weight of the towers has kept this city immobile for a long time.”
I knelt down to draw what we’d been able to see of the city from the ground, to show them the elevations, the middens, the places where the bone eaters roosted, and what they did as part of the city’s life cycle.
“Next you’ll be saying that you found an ancient city,” Beliak said, his voice half joking. His disbelief stung.
I shook my head. “We haven’t had time. We’ve been too busy trying to keep the city alive until we could find a way to signal you and to get you to safety.”
“To signal the whole city,” Ciel added.
I bit my lip. You were all I thought of. If convincing these four was taking so long, how long would it take to tell the entire city the truth? We didn’t have much time at all.
“The thing is,” I finally said, “you must be off the towers and somewhere safe very soon.”
Just then, a figure limped through the back tunnel, tracing confident fingers along a wall. “You all are disturbing the littlemouths,” Elna said. She looked healthy, if frail. Her hair had been cloud and bone colored for as long as I could remember. Her eyes—formerly a very pale blue—were now fully clouded over. Skyblind.
My mother. I ran to her and touched her shoulder. Real. She was here and all right, like Ceetcee had said. “It’s me, Nat.”
The embrace Elna pulled me into wasn’t a strong one. “You came back,” she whispered. “You’re here.”
We stood there for a long moment. I did not want to shatter it. But I had to.
“I came back, and now we have to leave, fast,” I whispered. Her eyes widened with surprise. “We have to go down through the clouds—now.”
13
MACAL, BETWEEN
A midcloud discovery, as the world quaked
Before Allsuns, I’d wanted to take wing to help warn the city. Now, flying close to the clouds, searching for reasons for the disaster, I passed the shattered base of a tower, the rough bone core still seeping and the smell of rot everywhere.
I peered through the mist, looking for any scavengers working the cloudline for the wealth that had fallen from the tiers so very recently. For anyone who might help guide me.
Which is how, when the southern towers began their Conclave, I’d glided low enough that I nearly became one of their sacrifices.
A shadow spun through the light above, and I pulled hard on my wing grips to dodge. Gravity and wind fought me for control as a Lawsbreaker’s body plummeted past.
“Below you!” I shouted as if flight students were still with me. But I flew alone in the midst of a Conclave.
I remained aloft. The body fell. An old woman, her mouth open, shocked. The trail of blood in the air indicated she did not go peaceably.
Above, shadows, spinning arms and legs, wingless. More cloudbound, being sent to placate the city.
Save someone, Macal. I followed, trying to catch each, until the bodies were lost in the clouds and mist. I circled, no longer looking up. Clouds. The mist made my vision waver. I was certain it was the mist. The mist was in my throat too, choking me with anger.
Lawsbreakers? The bodies I’d seen bore few markers.
I searched for grip hooks on the side of a nearby tower, one that had not cracked. Held on so I could breathe. I had to stay calm down here.
Sidra, if she were here, would likely frown, and say, What could they have possibly done in the wreckage of the city? The old woman wore no Lawsmarkers. The reason I’d called them Lawsbreakers in my mind was because they were cloudbound.
The one does not inherently follow the other.
What were the towers doing? The city hadn’t quaked again, nor had it shifted its canted angle further. My search for scavengers to accompany me below could wait.
I circled up to the high tower of Grigrit, where two rings of blackwings stood, one at guard and one group trying to push their way in. Three prisoners, bound and wingless, waited on the towertop.
“You are making a desperate mistake,” a woman’s voice said, high and clear in the wind. “The city does not want your offerings any longer. Stop this.”
Laughter from the inner circle. “How do you know this, Rya? Have you asked the city?”
“Perhaps I have. Tell your blackwings to release their Lawsbreakers to me.” Once close enough, I could see several Lawsbreakers shivering in the wind, their thin robes not enough for the cold. The woman speaking stood nose to nose with a tall blackwing. He’d called her Rya.
Rya. I’d found her again. And she was trying to stop the Conclave.
Wishing Urie—or someone already known here—had accompanied me, I approached the tower. The assembled group stepped back without a word. Their furled dark wings rustled as they made room for me—a councilman and Singer—before the two leaders.
They did not bow when I furled my own wings and dropped to the towertop.
For a moment, our robes flapping in the wind were the only sound on the tower. The leaders gave no words of welcome. Then Rya approached me.
When our eyes met, I saw recognition. She knew me from the clouds beyond Mondarath, but she didn’t speak of it. Nor did I.
She wore dark feathers now across her shoulders and on her wings. “You’ve come to offer your loyalty? What tower?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’ve come to find out what you do here.”
“What they do”—she gestured behind her—“is wrong. I am trying to right it. Your loyalty would help.”
I would give no one my loyalty that easily, no matter how much I wanted to unite the city. Especially not when three more citizens stood at the edges of a tower awaiting their fate. But I knew, from what I’d seen, that Rya’s blackwing alliances balanced on a knife’s edge.
Rya turned back to the other blackwing leader, bracing for confrontation. More feathers decorated the back of her robes. They rustled with her movement. Hunger and determination had sharpened her face to edges and points. She’d painted the hollows near her eyes with a dye used for wingsets, creating colorful angles and small hash marks. She was the most beautiful blackwing I had ever seen.
And she was challenging the others, in defense of the cloudbound.
I could not offer loyalty, but I could still strengthen her case.
“I wait to hear from you, Risen,” I addressed her as leader, and bowed, ignoring the other blackwing. “As an emissary from the northwest. What happens here?”
The challenged blackwing’s lips parted slightly. Rya’s attendants and the assembled wingless prisoners watched her, and him.
The other blackwing leader spoke first and quickly. “We keep the city alive here, Risen. That is what we do. These are Lawsbreakers. Join us, or join them.” His voice grew thick with disdain. “You too, Rya.”
I looked at the blackwings, then at the assembled Lawsbreakers. Recognized one: the wingfighter Aliati. The others were children. All were bound.
Pressing my hand to my robe, as if preparing to make a speech, I palmed my knife and nodded. “I understand your need to appease the city.” I saw Rya watching. “This is leadership in hard times. I understand that too. But what have these children done? What laws have they broken?” None of the prisoners wore Lawsmarkers. They just looked thin and hungry.
“Tower laws,” the blackwing growled. “Insurrection,” he added, looking hard at Rya and then at me. “Both of you.”
His companions moved forward, while Rya stayed completely still.
I was faster.
Singer training had prepared me, though I rarely used it. Wingfighting, on the other hand, had been my joy. I ducked under their reach and came up behind one of the guards, then spun to the left, near the tower’s edge.
Leapin
g in the air, I grabbed the three “Lawsbreakers,” though I didn’t know how I would carry them all. Aliati felt very light, even with the two children who clung to her.
The two guards still on the tower shouted for help and began to pursue us, but as we dove through the clouds, I heard Rya shout, “Let him go! He’ll do your work for you twice over.”
The guards did not follow us past the clouds. Rya had bought me time.
Aliati shifted in my grasp and tried to reach for my knife. “Careful!” I shouted in the whistling air as we plunged. “You’ll end us all.” The children clung and whimpered.
Aliati growled, her dark hair blowing in the wind.
“I’m as good as dead anyway. I came back up here for supplies and help. Now I have nothing. Not even wings.”
“That’s not true. You’ll find shelter, more supplies.” Supplies for what? I wondered. “You’ll get new wings.” For now, at least.
“The last tower that offered me shelter tricked me and traded me to Grigrit for appeasement. What would you trade me for?”
The wind whistled around us as I absorbed the news. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Everyone always says they won’t, until they do,” Aliati whispered. But she stopped trying to grab my knife.
* * *
We flew until Aliati spotted a pale shadow in the clouds, a ledge far below Grigrit and its guards.
“Set me down here,” the young woman instructed me. “It’s safe.”
“What is it?” I called. I couldn’t see the tower clearly.
Aliati laughed. “It’s the ghost tower.” She was so matter-of-fact about it, I guessed she’d been here before.
“What tower sold you to Grigrit? What Laws did you break?” I finally asked as we set down on the rough top of the truncated tower.
Aliati looked at me a long time, then took the children from her back and brushed their hair with her fingers, soothing them. “Scavenging. You know, how most towers get their metal? When they don’t want to pay for what we find for them, they call us Lawsbreakers.” She hadn’t told me what tower, I noticed.
It wasn’t just that, I knew. “The southwestern towers are strict about that.”
She snorted. “The northern towers aren’t any better. You think you’re so enlightened up there, but you dislike scavengers just as much, even though you use them.” Aliati’s face was bruised, and she looked unsteady on her feet. “We’ve traded before. Raq found you things others couldn’t. It was useful. For the market.”
Raq. I should have guessed. But I’d never asked.
Aliati looked at me, and at the fledges. “You should be on your way. You’ve tumbled into a blackwing power struggle, and none of them will be happy with you. Except maybe Rya. Take these two with you when you go. Fly them out of here. Back to the northwest.”
I had to think fast. Aliati was, like Raq, a scavenger. The metal beads in her hair, her talent with wingfighting, her resourcefulness at Mondarath. How had I not seen it before? The answer was my own assumptions. Because it wasn’t obvious up above the clouds. The beads didn’t sparkle like glass ones did. But down here, Aliati seemed relaxed and very much at home.
“I need a scavenger now, and I’ll pay proper respect,” I said.
Aliati laughed again. “The city’s finally shaken so hard you’re willing to come below the clouds and ask politely for help? What took you so long?”
“You know the undercloud. Help us find out what’s wrong with the city. We need to know so we can prepare the citizens.”
She waved me towards the edge of the tower. “I’ve been down twice since the shake, and I have to tell you, there’s nothing here. A few breaks, some torn bridgework. Nothing that would cause a quake.”
“How low have you gone?” I asked.
Aliati shrugged, but her eyes were guarded. “Low enough. Go too low, you can get sick.”
I boggled at this, and then, peering through the mist, I shivered. There was too much. “We can’t find anything in this fog, but I need to keep looking,” I said. “I can pay,” I added when Aliati looked disinterested, staring into the depths as if she wanted to leap. “I have marks and trade goods. Back uptower.”
Aliati snorted. “I can find everything I need down here.”
“Except wings.” She had none. Nor did the fledges.
The scavenger acknowledged this with a nod. “Except wings.” She frowned, but it quickly turned into one of her slanted grins. “But going down? I don’t need wings. And I can always climb back up.”
No wings. Outside of the towers. The idea shocked me. No, it horrified me. Then it intrigued me. “How do you do this?”
Aliati pulled out bone claw grips tipped with metal from deep within her satchel. She put them on her hands and grasped the tower with them. The two children hopped on Aliati’s back, and she began to climb. The grips dug into the bone and left small marks as she passed.
Aliati skittered up the wall, fast as a silkspider, even carrying two fledges.
But Aliati had disappeared into the clouds and left me alone.
The mist closed in on me again, the quiet. How could she be at home down here?
I tried to leave the ghost tower, tried to fly in a direction that made sense, but without a guide, in the strange gray shadows of the undercloud, I was reluctant to go far. The dim light faded too soon and then it was too late for me to move. I would have to spend the night on the tower, alone.
I curled up in my robe and tried to keep warm as best I could, but the damp and the darkness leached everything: warmth, hope. I shivered in my cloak. “Tomorrow morning, I’ll try one more time to find out what happened, then I’ll go back up,” I promised myself, and Sidra.
Discomfort woke me much later, a poke at my side with a sharp point. Aliati sat before me, head cocked, waiting for me to wake.
“I have what you want,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “How much are you willing to pay?” Her claw fingers glittered in the darkness.
“Anything,” I said recklessly. “Anything to save the city.”
PART TWO
THE GATHERING
14
MACAL, MIDCLOUD
Within the cloud, the rescue started
All my weapons and my dreams—this was the price Aliati collected.
Dreams for the city above, dreams for the future. They all dissipated as we flew into the midcloud.
My weapons, Aliati said she took as a precaution.
In the mist, Aliati’s wings disappeared often, and I struggled to follow. The buffeting wind, the damp—these became familiar quickly. So too, the fear of being lost in the cloud. I tried to fly more daring angles, as she would not slow for me.
But the unease I felt below the clouds? That I couldn’t get used to.
“Keep up, Macal,” she shouted behind her, into the dimming cloudlight.
* * *
As we flew, we passed the towers growing together. The cracked and broken trunks. I realized somewhere far below, each tower depended on the others to rise above the clouds. None was unaffected by the quake.
We could not bind the towers together. We could not save them with bridges.
There was no market barter, no song that could save them.
Aliati stopped to rest on a ledge and brush the moisture from her wings. I landed beside her.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked, breathless. Above, the remaining towers rose into the brighter cloud.
She sat on the towertop and pulled her knees to her chest for warmth. “Home. But we have to stop for a while. You need to adjust to the air here.” She would say no more than that. She closed her eyes and hummed an old song. “Corwin and The Nest of Thieves.” She passed me a water sack and made me drink. I curled up and slept on the towertop, beneath my wings.
When we were rested, we descended again, but this time Aliati flew by my side, our pinions wobbling on the wind, just far enough to avoid an accident, but close enough not to lose sight of one another. When she dov
e deeper into the midcloud, passing a bone-encrusted bridge, I followed. Wind battering the edges of our wings, the only sound in my ears.
I couldn’t imagine anyone living at these depths. Yet Aliati had called it home.
She whistled a complex windsign. I looked around, saw only more towers, a broad gap of cloud. Then a whistle returned on the wind, out of nowhere.
Below us, a cloud seemed to part, and with a shout, Aliati dove for it. I adjusted my wing grips and dove to follow, stunned by the widening expanse of green below.
We flew beneath a netting of skymouth skins, and I gasped. “Hidden in plain sight!”
“Not so plain.” Aliati laughed. “We’re pretty far down.”
She was right about that. When we landed beside the closest of the three towers, I knelt by a large fern, dizzy from the rich air.
Aliati, her wings half furled, had run to thrown her arms around a young, wingless man. He walked crookedly, and she nearly knocked him over. She released him and led him my way. Others followed. In the mist, I could see large structures—mechanicals—and several blackwings working on them.
I tensed. More blackwings. What had Aliati led me into? She approached, and I reached for my knife. Found the sheath empty. Taken as a precaution. “Blackwings? How could you lead me here?”
The young man dipped his head to me. “You are welcome, Risen. And you have nothing to fear from us. Nor do the blackwings who chose to stay when Dix was chased from this meadow by Kirit and Nat and your brother, Wik.”
My brother. This man had seen him alive. Knew what had happened. Aliati’s face cracked a faint smile. “You are welcome here, Risen.”
That word, Risen. I frowned. “There are no Risen anymore. No hightower. A quake has taken out so many towers, and all are racing to see how low they can live.”
The young man groaned. “My apologies. We didn’t know the destruction’s extent. We felt only a few shakes here.” He pointed to the shards of bone in the meadow. “How much damage above?”
“Many edge towers and tiers are gone or damaged,” I replied. My heart pounded out the details of the quake, the number dead, but I held my tongue. “Wirra and Densira included. Viit took damage.”