by Fran Wilde
That she’d asked for something wasn’t the question. That she’d done so in a language they did not understand was a surety.
“They took Dix in. Healed her,” Wik said to me. “As they’ve done for you, Kirit. She repays them by taking things. Just like she did at home.”
“Stealing.” In the towers it was a serious crime. “Dix, how could you? We need their help.”
Here, there were no towers to war against each other. Everyone followed paths within the city. Everything here seemed so orderly, so controlled. When they’d questioned us, they’d seemed merely curious. But curiosity was easily damaged. My unease grew. Would we be welcome here? Not if Dix stayed. Not if they found her here with us.
Yesterday, I’d said I didn’t know her because I didn’t want to. This city would view my decision in a far less appealing light.
I shook my head. In the best situation, they might have helped us. We were no longer in the best situation.
And that was the least of our worries. Generations ago, we might have had a shared language, but now? I thought back to our interrogation. We could gesture, draw pictures. Misunderstandings could escalate. “We have to get Dix back in the cage. Make her give back what she stole.”
Dix said, “I didn’t—” before Wik stared at her, hard.
“What did you take?” She’d stolen from the city. She’d stolen Maalik from me. Had she taken more? “My satchel?”
Fear bloomed again. The plates. My wings. The satchel had been with me on the climb. I hadn’t dropped it, and Dix obviously had no difficulty sneaking from her cage.
Shoulders and robe caught in Wik’s strong hands, Dix struggled, but managed to shrug. “You abandoned me for dead. I walked out from the city and collapsed on the sand. These people from this city found me before the groundmouths did. They have wonders here. They don’t need them all. When you pretended I was no one you knew, I figured you wouldn’t mind if no one took your medicines.” Dix started laughing so hard she coughed. “But I didn’t take your satchels. This city’s people did.”
I saw motion behind one of the alcove’s thinned bone panels. Heard shouting.
“They’ll find me here, with you.” Her lopsided grin showed several broken teeth. “They’ll know you lied.”
They would hate us then.
Wik growled, “Our first representative here was you.” His sour expression said just how bad that was. His newfound status, gone, by association.
We’d both known, upon seeing her. We’d both hoped to hide it from our hosts.
We were guilty too.
This new city wouldn’t trust us once they knew we’d lied. Citykiller or no, they’d want us to leave, at best. This was Dix we were talking about. I’d want us to leave too.
“You have to go back to where they’re keeping you. You can’t be found here.” I wanted her to get away from us fast. Better to continue to pretend she didn’t know us at all.
Dix chewed on a strand of dirty hair. Her eyes darted to the hallway. “I won’t go back into the cage! I’ll scream and shake the city with my voice. They’re so quiet here, they can’t help but hear. They’ll find me here with you. They’ll cage you too, for colluding with me. And especially for lying about it.”
Wik and I looked at each other, eyes widening. Neither of us would ever collude with Dix. But we were in the same room with her. And had no chance of explaining ourselves. Not well. Possibly not at all.
We heard the healer returning. Saw their shadow passing by the thin bone walls.
With her free hand, Dix pulled her robe out of Wik’s grasp.
“If you come with me, I’ll show you where your satchels are. And a way out,” Dix said and grabbed my hand with what was left of hers. “If you don’t, I’ll show them you are liars.”
I resisted, for a moment. But I needed the satchel, she had Maalik, and if the healer caught all three of us here, we’d all wind up in that cage.
So we left the healer’s room. Me, limping, Wik, with a firm grip on both of us, following Dix’s whispered directions.
“Up there,” she said. Ahead, a ramp was carved into the ridge wall. We followed a light map shaped like a cloud. “Not far at all.”
Wik looked from Dix to me. “Knowing where she’s going is probably better than wondering where she’s gone.”
He had a point.
Dix might break us all. We kept up with her anyway, into the hollowed ridge. Clouds. We followed to keep her out of trouble. Because we needed our satchels. We followed because it meant climbing away from any pursuers, into the secrets of a new city.
* * *
After many twists and turns, Dix led us to a room filled with mechanisms and treasures.
They have wonders here.
She hadn’t been lying.
In our city, we’d had codexes, carvings. Nothing that couldn’t be carried up. Here, they could store things indefinitely.
“Are you sure this is the way out?” I asked. We seemed very high up. “Where are our satchels?” A curving ramp delivered us out of the healer’s cells down below. Each level higher, the bone walls grew thinner and more lightly decorated. We could see, as if through silk, others moving in spaces beyond the ramp. But not many others. This city was not as populous as ours had been. If we brought our citizens here, Varat would grow crowded.
Dix nodded. “I explored while they slept.”
I bet she had. The citizens of this city had never met Dix’s equal when it came to survival and treachery. She could damage this city. She could get us all killed.
How are you not dead? I was still in shock. Even though I wouldn’t wish her death now, I certainly wondered how she’d escaped it. That she had barely escaped was little comfort.
That she escaped it and greeted us here is exactly why you’d need to kill someone, Kirit. If Aliati were here, she’d be shaking her head.
Dix chuckled and held out her hands. “You know they hunt cities? I’ve watched them do it.”
The pieces of a puzzle started to click together. The dried husks of city eggs. The exultation over Wik when he’d shown how Nimru died, taking out our own city in the process.
“We didn’t see anyone walking the desert to other cities.” The groundmouths were too dangerous.
Dix smiled. She leaned close and whispered, “Maybe they fly too.” She said it as if she already knew the answer. As if she wanted me to ask. I heard Maalik chirp desperately from within her robes.
I fought my own curiosity. Dix wouldn’t lead me into owing her anything. Still, I followed her. “Where are the satchels?”
What Dix revealed worried me. We needed a new home, but she’d poisoned them against us. They’d celebrated Wik, had let him explore. They’d made me well again. I flexed my leg. It still ached; it would likely always ache. But the infection seemed gone.
Yet the people of Varat hunted other cities. And they had a wealth of artifacts that seemed to be collected from many places.
We’d be hard-pressed to fit in, even if we could learn their language. Even if we could get everyone downtower. And there were too many of us.
But the truth still shook me. We were never alone.
And neither were they.
Where we hid was a gallery of sorts. They’d shaped walls from the bone ridge, much like in our own cloudbound towers. Metal poles marked boundaries between alcoves, as with the paths below. The honeycombed cells of the upper alcoves were brighter than any below. They’d polished walls until tiny portions were fingernail thin and delicate. Natural light streamed through bone in complicated patterns, many cryptic, but a few familiar: a spiral within spirals. Bird chevrons. What looked like a cascade of littlemouths down a wall.
“Look at the dark panels,” Dix said. Each wall in the gallery was divided into two strips of pitch-filled carvings and then subdivided by seasons and moons. “They don’t get Allsuns or Allmoons here, only two dark seasons, because of the clouds.”
She’d been here long enough to know.
>
I stared. They marked their days with sculptures of bone and light.
And there was light to spare. Above us, bone tiers began to split and rise freely, without further carving or sculpting. The result was a slimming of the towers and a separation that added to the airflow.
The contrast between Varat’s light-art and the bone carvings of the Spire also struck me. So much beauty here. The walls were calendars, like the floors were maps.
“They’re artists and teachers,” I whispered as we walked. “They heal, they make things, they keep records.”
“They punish. And they don’t make everything.” Dix raised her injured hand, then let it drop. “They take things too.”
I didn’t want to believe her. “They’re curious. Explorers.”
I tried to imagine what would happen if our city descended on this place, this library, and winced.
“On expeditions, they take what’s not theirs,” Dix said. “Your satchels, for instance.”
We needed those back.
More citizens passed, in groups of twos and threes. They did not shout, or whistle. They whispered and murmured, soft like a breeze. Their voices sounded like wings cutting through wind, echoing through the passages. Beauty, yes. Still, the quiet unsettled me.
Dix pulled me closer to the wall, out of sight of a tall figure who’d entered a larger room across from us. “Watch. Then I’ll help get your things, and mine.”
The citizen dressed much like the healers below, with a woven facemask and shorn hair. They pressed an undecorated wall with their fingertips. The bone panel swung outward, revealing storage: shelves of small objects made of metal and glass. When the individual held one object up, a cone, it made a whirring sound, and I could feel the breeze it generated from across the honeycomb. Like Djonn’s whirlwind, but much smaller.
The breeze pulled a strange scent from another section of the tier to our nostrils. Something I hadn’t smelled in days. “What’s that?” I wrinkled my nose at the bitter odor.
Dix answered. “There’s a large rookery just beyond these rooms. Bone eaters. Tame ones.”
Maybe they fly too. She’d known they did.
“I’m taking you there,” Dix said. “But we need to wait for the curators to leave.”
I was tiring, but if I followed her, I’d get my satchel back. The plates.
So much metal and artifexing in the gallery already, and yet they wanted to keep ours too. As I turned to Wik to wonder at the differences between our cities, I realized, finally, what Dix was up to. I grabbed her hand. “She’s going to steal something here. Something important to them. And then she’s going to escape, and we’ll take the blame.”
“If she hasn’t yet,” Wik said, “she won’t be able to now. We won’t let her.”
Maalik screeched.
My fist clenched tighter on Dix’s hand. I wanted to shout at her, but I had no words. She’d been here while the rest of us had been trying to keep the city alive. But she’d poisoned this world against us.
Now everything was closed to us, to our city. And she had Nat’s whipperling.
The curator spoke then, and a voice answered from the rookery. Their incomprehensible language fell around me like the dappled light, unfamiliar and complex. Sound patterns were starting to repeat, but not enough, not yet.
Wik shook his head. “I can’t make sense of it.” He kept staring at the objects the curator sorted. His fingers twitched.
I expected as much from Dix, but Wik? “You’re thinking about taking some things for yourself too?”
He shook his head. “If I knew they would help the city, our city, I might. I am curious too. And I want to survive, just as she does.” He tilted his head at Dix.
“You’d risk the same punishment as her?” Captured. Lost fingers. Losing the ability to climb. The ability to fly. “They caged her. And could cage us.” Unless we got out of here.
A clamor of squawks broke out in the rookery. I peered through one of the thinner panels in the wall. Wik hadn’t been mistaken. Enormous bone eaters stretched their wings and hissed at their keeper on the bone ledge just outside.
“Those don’t look trained at all.” They looked like they might bite the handler’s fingers off.
Wik shook his head. “I’m not certain. They might ride them? They could use them to feed the city.”
Dix knew they rode them. Now I had no doubt she planned on riding one herself.
Dix looked guardedly at the curator. Then back at me. Defiant. A third curator entered, carrying Dix’s wings. Or what was left of them. And the broken set we’d had in our packs.
We had to hold her back. “Those are mine,” she whispered.
The pulleys and battens had been partly disassembled, the straps peeled back from the wingframe.
“They’re curious,” I said. That kind of curiosity wasn’t good for us. We wouldn’t fly home from here now.
The first curator put the wingframes on a shelf. Stored our satchels on the same level. Now I was the one thinking about stealing.
But the second curator pulled four brass objects from another shelf. Sheer and solid, with a bit that turned, holding fast to a point no matter how I looked at it. “What are those?”
Dix stared like a bird admiring something shiny. But no one replied. We were stumped.
We hung back in the shadows, watching. Outside, dark shadows swooped. The rookery trainer and the curator opened a bone box and pulled out a handful of something. Reached through a grating and scattered it. The grain smelled thick and rich. Dark shadows outside went crazy, cawing and scraping, then settled down.
I heard a soft chirp. Too low to be Maalik.
Through the grating, a pile of bedraggled feathers stared back at us. “Baby bone eaters?” I whispered to Wik.
The baby stuck its beak through the grating and chirped again. One curator looked left and right to make certain they were unobserved, then slipped the bird a strip of something the color of bone. With a cheep and a loud crack, the beak withdrew.
The corners of the curator’s eyes crinkled from smiling.
Meanwhile, the second curator, the one who’d taken apart Dix’s wings, knelt on the floor and spread something I did recognize—another map—across the bone tier. The map was made of woven layers of the same material as their masks. Odd markings and complex hatch-work crossed its surface. Our fallen city was rendered expansively. Their city, which we’d called Varat, had the same detail, its migration circuits marked clearly.
Was I looking at a game, like Dix’s Gravity had been? I saw no way to win this.
On the map, a long stone ridge bordered the part of the plain that had no cities on it. The wingbreaker-curator waved their arms and said something incomprehensible.
The other curator, who had a spiral symbol beside their left ear, withdrew a white stick from their sleeve. I recognized it. We’d made eggshell chalk in the towers as children too.
Pressing the chalk to the brownish fiber, the curator carefully marked a circle around our city and another on the map. They looked about to mark something else, but from far below, a bone horn sounded. All three curators sped from the room and down a ramp opposite the one we’d climbed. The rookery trainer followed.
They’d left the map on the floor near the alcove where we hid.
I couldn’t resist. Despite Dix’s hissing and Wik’s muttered “Kirit!” I snuck out and knelt by the map. A ring of glass and metal lay nearby, and I placed it over the illustration of the desert around Varat, thinking it a magnifier.
As the glass covered the thick fiber sheet, an astounding thing happened: detail sprang up in the lens, far more than I’d ever seen a magnifying lens do. Layers became visible deep below the surface. I saw the ground, and what was beneath the ground, seemingly as great as the distance we’d fallen from the sky.
Wik crept from the alcove and leaned closer. Then he shifted the lens out of the way. The depths disappeared, and we had only a simple map to look at again.
/> “What artifexing is this?”
Wik said “artifex” like some in our city would say “luck,” with the same adoration. He placed the lens back over the sheet, removed it, then picked up the sheet and looked behind it. We could see small lines and flecks of metal in the many layers that made up the map’s pulp, but nothing that would indicate some elaborate engineering. And the map was so very small. So many Allmoons of carving would be required to render this much detail in bone, so many tiers in the Spire. I moved the lens back to one of the new chalk circles. “Look. There’s our city.” Ours was the only one without a migration route.
Several other cities had marks by them, in pale, almost luminescent ink. How many generations does this map span? Many hands had worked on it.
Wik looked at the map as if he wanted to peel it apart. I stayed his hand. “It’s not ours. None of this is ours. It cannot help our city.”
Dix’s groan from the alcove made my head pound. “It could. It might.”
The map captivated me. I wanted to know all of it, wanted for it to be mine more than I’d ever desired wings, wingmarkers, anything. Anything except a new home.
I stared so long I didn’t see Dix emerge from the alcove until I heard metal clink in her robe. Maalik gave a warning cheep. “Dix!”
The pocket of her robe weighed heavily, and she held the pieces of her silk wings in her uninjured hand. Her ruined face looked triumphant.
Another horn blew, and we heard voices approaching. Quick footsteps, echoed on the ramp.
“In here.” Dix pulled me into a dark cell covered with hangings, then led me farther along the carved passages that grew narrower closer to the exterior of the bone ridge. There were no thinned or sculpted panels in this part of the city. Wik caught up with us, carrying both of our satchels.
“Good grab,” I whispered.
Following Dix, I began to hum, nervously. A breeze slapped the hangings closed over this alcove. In the darkness, I caught another slight glow behind his ear. “Wik!”