by Fran Wilde
Secrets had been the Singers’ trade goods for so long in the city. That had nearly killed us all.
I hated secrets.
When I’d first come to the towers, it was to be a Magister at Mondarath, a tower that had needed one so desperately few questions were asked. The towerman was bribed, of course, but that was normal back then. I’d been outside the Spire only a few times before my excursion, and then only after dark, to test my night flying. For while I was a new Magister to everyone else, I was in truth still a Singer, sent to watch the towers, to see which way their politics flew.
The secret nature of what I’d been expected to do, passing information through whistles and glances, keeping facts from citizens who needed them, all made me writhe in discomfort.
I’d been windstruck by the sheer openness of the towers, their tiers and balconies, their shutters thrown open to the sky, children wobbling in the air on patchwork wings. The vast unguardedness of the city.
When I had set my sleeping mat down at Mondarath, I drew a first breath of that air unbounded by Spire walls and felt my loyalty to the Spire snap.
The small songs I’d made since I was a child, plucking cheap notes out on a borrowed dolin, began to change then. They became less about structure, rules, and the battles of the past, and more about daily things: meetings and kisses and partings of ways.
I longed to know the rest of the city’s songs. The ones that would fade over time, on the lips of few, and then be lost to history. When Tobiat began teaching the old songs again, I listened, but I listened more for newer songs.
Now, across the meadow deep in the clouds, I heard someone singing. High voiced, but enthusiastic. I followed the voice like a thread and found Ciel helping Djonn add the spring she’d been shaping to part of the climber’s mechanism. She looked up and smiled, but kept singing.
She sang something I’d never heard before. A song about walking and falling. And walking again. A toddler’s song, perhaps.
I smiled to hear it. Vowed to learn it someday.
“So many new songs we get to make,” Ciel said, looking at me for a moment, before she focused on the bone spring and tendons in her hands again. “If we survive.”
My heart squeezed at her words. “We will. You’ll have many new songs.”
Ciel laughed. “I will, at that.”
Her voice was still so young, and she was so determined. She gave me hope. She wasn’t relentless like Kirit, nor impulsive like Nat. She was scratched and bruised, but still finding ways to help, still making her own music. Still trying. Sidra had sung too, early on. She’d sung Remembrances one last time over the loss of her father when the council fell, and then gone silent. I missed her singing as much as I was now missing her wisdom.
In the mist and haze, looking across the cloudbound meadow to the rotting stub of what was once the Spire, I promised myself the city would sing again. Better, it would be free of the secrets that had bound it for so long.
My fingers brushed the climber and a cog turned, lifting a pointed leg a handspan into the air. I spun it back quickly. Djonn looked at me. “I’ve been working out how we can send citizens down each time a kite or a pulley mechanism is finished. If you send me more artifexes, we can work faster still.”
“Urie’s aunts know more artifexes are being held on Grigrit. We’ll find them.” I sounded more confident than I felt, but this had to work. I would make it work. Once I would have been able to find anything. Once, the city had kept its secrets in a single place.
Now it was almost as if we’d dreamed that city, but woken to a different one. “We need to help the towers understand that a change had to happen. We have to do it quickly.”
Ciel spoke again. This time slowly, choosing each word carefully. “We need to give them a song. Something to hold on to.”
Nat cracked his knuckles. “Like The Rise?” He hummed a verse.
Far down below the clouds, oh, the city did rise
“Different, I think. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, but I don’t have it all yet. Can we give them a few verses? Make the rest later? When we survive this?”
If we survived. “I think that’s a good idea,” I said. On our last night together in the undercloud, making a song felt like exactly the right thing to do.
Ciel began to repeat the song she was working on.
Ceetcee and Djonn joined in, learning as they sang. Soon the guards did as well. The simple, familiar melody, a modified Singer’s Rise, made learning easier, new words and a growing set of verses. But it was something.
Voices echoed around the meadow too. The sound made a promise; the promise made a binding. I tried to join them, but got caught up learning the words and watching everyone interact over a song. Ceetcee leaned on Nat and Beliak. Ciel and Moc stood like fledges trained in the Spire, singing counterpoint. Elna dozed by the cookfire, listening now and then.
Pulled apart, the sky’s towers weakened, unless a bridge was tied.
While monsters clashed and the groundbound watched as a city died.
All that shook, all that fell was sky and bone,
So two went far and two climbed home.…
We’re headed to the horizon …
The song went on, and our spirits lifted. I noticed sometimes the singers broke into comfortable laughter when they lost a line or a beat. The cloudbound had sung together before.
I noticed something else too. Nat and I were the only ones not singing.
* * *
The next morning, Nat and I flew loops around the nearby towers to find space for citizens from above. The mist turned to rain, and a storm threatened lightning in the distance, but Nat encouraged me to continue. Water beaded on my wings, waxed now like those of the rest of the midcloud. As we passed them, four tower trunks looked safe for temporary hang-sacks.
Nat circled the last tower, closest to the city’s edge, a final time. It rose above the clouds, but cracks ran in lightning patterns across its thickened core.
Nat bowed his head as he flew. I heard him singing Remembrances.
I joined him. We sang to the tower’s memory as we flew through the mist.
“Should we warn them about the cracks?” Nat said when we landed.
“If they balk, we absolutely tell them. Anything to get people to begin to move,” I said.
Nat peered at me, curious. Asked, “Would you tell other towers the same thing, knowing they’d be hard-pressed to prove you wrong?”
I considered it. Would I lie to other towers? “No,” I told him. No more secrets.
Above us the towers rose into the mist, and the evening darkened to night. Work on the kites and mechanicals continued by oil lamp and, when Ciel could coax them to it, littlemouth glow.
When Aliati returned after her latest run above the clouds, she pulled us aside. “I spoke with a blackwing near Varu. There are two major factions still. The group from Laria has been absorbed by Rya’s Aivans after a bit of interference at a Conclave.” She smiled at me. “But they’re fighting others due to Laria’s loss of their lighter-than-air.” She paused for a long look at Urie.
The former blackwing had the wisdom to duck his head and return quickly to work beside his aunts on more lighter-than-air.
Aliati continued, “The other faction, from Bissel, Varu, and Lith, plus their allies, is currently preparing to attack the northwest again, starting with Mondarath.”
“Mondarath can weather an attack. Our guards are well trained.” I didn’t feel as certain as I sounded. I wanted to go there first, more than ever. Or send Sidra a message.
Aliati hadn’t been able to get close enough for the past several flights.
“Another worry,” Aliati said. “We saw no skymouths anywhere around the towers. Not even in the clouds. And not one gryphon.”
Ciel drew a long, tremulous breath. “We saw three when we came up a few days ago. If the skymouths are gone, then we need to speed up. Tell everyone to move faster.” Her whole body shook as she said it.
/> Aliati put an arm around her shoulder. “Maybe. We’re nearly ready. We’ve got the pulleys set up, and we’ll lower the first group tomorrow.”
The sun was out now, but barely visible as light in the mist. Another precious day had fallen. Nat balled his fists. “We should start now. Get them moving.”
“We could, but we can’t risk launching the first kite in the dark,” Aliati said. “Everyone will be safer this way.” She was a mote of calm in the midst of Nat’s urgency. “Plus we still need a crew.”
“Our pulley operators need to practice and to rest. We’ll eventually need more hands to help work the pulleys, but for now, these are our experts,” Djonn said. “We’ll send the group down tomorrow, as planned.”
Ciel nodded. “I want to lead that group, with Ceetcee steering the kite.” She was still young, but her experience went beyond everyone’s except Nat’s. “I know the ground.”
Djonn bowed to her. “And you should, Risen. But the risk—”
My niece practically glowed with the honor. “I know the risks. I want to take Elna and the baby down myself. And Beliak to help prepare for the rest to come. For Nat’s sake. And the community’s sake.”
I felt a surging pride on my niece’s behalf. I wished Wik could have seen her. Sidra too.
Moc ducked his head. “I could do that.” But he looked proud of his sister too.
Aliati gestured Ciel towards the kites in the meadow.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep now,” Ciel whispered. Her voice carried in the dark.
“You’ll need to rest if you’re going to go back down with a kite full of people,” Aliati answered. “Want to sing something more? ‘Nest of Thieves’?”
Ciel shook her head at the song suggestion. “Maybe. It’s hard singing when so much is about to happen.”
Something had been bothering me, since I flew around the towers and saw the cracks. I found Djonn and Ceetcee. “This may be the time,” I said, “to find a home that isn’t another city. Especially if we don’t hear from Kirit and Wik. We need to learn to live on the ground, no matter how dangerous. Or build our own city somehow. Something that cannot die.”
“What kind of city?” Djonn asked.
“I’m not sure. What would you build?”
Djonn smiled and looked up into the mist. “Something that can fly, or at least float.”
“I think that’s a good place to start,” I said.
Djonn’s excitement took wing, though I was glad to note an undercurrent of caution in his gaze. He grabbed a bone tablet and began to draw. “Thanks, Macal. It’s always important to dream.”
As for me, I liked the idea of a flying city, but I was curious about the ground. The crushed lichen underfoot and the mist in the midcloud still felt strange on my skin. The smells here were too rich after a life spent in the mostly dry cold of the clouds. What would the real ground be like?
I’d accepted the city as it was all my life—there was nothing we were taught that told me otherwise. No songs, no Laws. Cities grew from below the clouds as plants grew from dirt. That’s what the songs said, the ones that sang of bone forests. And we’d always looked up in the other direction, towards the sky. We’d always moved up, towards safety.
Children asked about the sky, its purpose, its form. As a community, we’d stopped questioning the city in the same way long ago. The towers were there; they grew. We lived on them. So the Singers had taught us. In doing so, they’d buried the fraught history of the midcloud.
Now we’d see more. We could become more. Starting on the ground and, if Djonn’s ideas worked, perhaps from the sky.
After a few moments’ silence, while Djonn made notes on a bone tablet, Ciel coughed, then began to sing again.
“While monsters clashed and the groundbound watched as a city died…” she started. A chill ran across my shoulders. Died. But I didn’t say it.
Ciel nodded as we sang, then cleared her throat. Gestured to Nat: You try.
Nat cracked his knuckles again. Hesitated.
“All that shook, all that fell was sky and bone,” he finally sang. Ciel nodded.
“So two went far and two climbed home.”
That first line was the quake. One city knocking another to pieces. Ciel and Nat were singing now. Both of them working together to learn a song. I had tears in my eyes. This time I tried to learn the words, so I could sing it tomorrow and the next day, so the song could be shared and learned and acted upon.
I still worried that Nat would stick to his decision to tell the truth about how unpleasant the ground was. But I was relieved he’d changed his mind.
The singing went on late. A last moment together.
We offered new rhymes and ideas. Ciel discarded some, took others. I didn’t mind. I loved watching her build a song. She would have made an excellent Singer, once. But no longer, for there were no more Singers.
We listened as, in Ciel’s new song, the city changed from one that rose to one that moved. Where safety replaced luck.
I imagined the entire city on the move, climbing down the bone towers. Flying into the much-feared clouds. Ciel’s song would help get them there. It would help, I hoped, keep us together.
We’re climbing to the horizon.
The evacuation was a massive undertaking, even in my imagination. So many places we could lose people, or where our community, already so frayed at the edges, could come shearing apart.
“When the city dies,” Nat added, “the towers will all fall. There will be no safety then.”
Ciel added Nat’s words to the tablet. “I’ll figure out how to write that later. After the city dies. It would be bad luck before.”
The roar and rumble of collapsing towers from the previous quake, the towers left in the north and south, all falling sideways and crashing into rubble, were too much to think about. I could remember the tumult but not see the actual fall. I could hear the noise, but not see the people. I could feel Sidra’s hand on my arm, clinging tight, forming a net that kept our citizens from falling into the sky.
“We’re looking out to the horizon,” I repeated as Ciel wrote more down on the bone tablet.
Nat, beside me, echoed those words, the refrain for the middle of the song.
As work slowed around us, and the littlemouths faded into darkness, our voices carried over the meadow. We heard the other workers begin to pick up the tune again.
21
KIRIT, BELOW
The Skyshouter walked between a city abandoned and a far-flung ridge
If tending our dying city had been a waking nightmare, escaping a living city with Dix clinging to my back was my punishment for past wrongs.
“What does it mean that you’re always on the run from one council or another, Skyshouter?” She clung tight, fingers digging in where my wingstraps once rested. “Once a citykiller, always a citykiller.” She laughed.
Dix was a weight, a flesh-and-bone Lawsmarker.
I refused to let Wik carry her.
“I won’t kill another city, Dix,” I said as we descended the side of the giant beast. “No matter how much I want a home. We need to find a way to live like they do on Varat, without crushing or breaking one.”
She laughed again. “Why not just take Varat?”
I didn’t answer. Focused on putting my feet and hands in the right spots. Going down was even harder than going up. The speed with which the city was moving, led by its trained bone eaters, didn’t make for easy climbing at all. My leg burned. So did my ears.
Worse, I kept looking, but couldn’t see the healer below. They’d moved quickly on the same ropes we were carefully navigating. Where had they gone?
“You are changed, Kirit,” Dix said. “You’ve taken an awful lot of blame on yourself, haven’t you?”
“You might try it,” I whispered.
She hung close and murmured my fears back to me instead.
I focused again on placing my grips. The city’s hide had good places to set them, long
dry cracks and wide spans of wrinkles. When I misplaced a foothold or handhold, faltering only encouraged Dix to berate me more. She hissed at me.
Finally, I snapped. “I broke the Spire. I shouted it down. When we found the city, it had infections running from that spot. What blame do you take? What responsibility?”
“The city would have died soon,” Dix said. “It was too big. The towers were too high. Even the Singers knew the towers’ growth was slowing.”
True, the most powerful Singers had known something was wrong. I remembered conversations in the Spire. Her words enraged me anyway. They hadn’t done anything to help except try to maintain control. Focus, Kirit.
She continued, “The city’s end terrified the Singers. It scared the blackwings more.”
My hands burned, my leg throbbed, but afraid or not, I was not going to stop. We’d get off this city, then find another city to explore, quickly. And if we could leave Dix in the desert while we were at it, I wouldn’t have any regrets. She’d used the blackwings’ terror to gain power.
“Why would you want to make our ascendants repeat that?” Wik asked. He gestured to me, offering once again to carry the blackwing. The ground moved below, still slow enough to see details: silver-green spiked plants, a groundmouth hill.
I shook my head. Dix was my responsibility. My weight to carry.
Dix laughed until she hiccuped. “I’m asking the questions, Singer. You’re not a good defender of the city any longer either. What happened to you?”
“You happened to us.” Wik, descending next to me, did not mince words. “You destroyed the council, broke the city’s trust. You enslaved the fledges. Your hands are covered in the city’s blood. You stole from the new city. We don’t want you to happen to anyone else.”
She frowned. “Surely people can change?” Her voice sounded different in the warm, open air than it had above. The rhythmic pulse of the city’s feet hit the ground far below, matching my heartbeat. Sweat ran into my eyes.
“What happened to ‘once a citykiller, always a citykiller’?” Wik said.