Updraft

by Fran Wilde

  This was no comfort.

  Before long, another pail descended. It contained a dirgeon wing, already broken, its marrow drying out, and, I thought, a smaller sack of water than before. The Singer at the top of this pit had set me a timer. The more time I spent here, the less I’d be fed. Soon, my food would run out and I would vanish. No more bad luck, no more Lawsbreaker.

  I drank every drop of water and savored the lone wing.

  Another bucket was sent down the next day, with less water and a piece of goose liver. I lay curled in the small pile of clean silk and netting. My fingers had recovered, but my feet, with their soft pads that never had to do much, were lacerated and painful. I could barely walk, even if there’d been room enough to do so. I leaned my forehead against a wall and listened to the city whisper and pulse. I imagined Nat was here too, listening with me to the secrets of the Spire. I whispered our Laws to him.

  Bethalial: In the Allmoons time of quiet, let no tower be disturbed.

  Delequerriat: The act of concealment, in plain sight, may only be used to turn wrong to right.

  Trade: No trader lives with jealousy or greed.

  War: We rise together or fall apart. With clouds below, our judge.

  On the bone wall near where my foot rested, someone had carved a skymouth attacking. It gaped at me.

  I took up the tool against it, scratched over it until it disappeared.

  Then I found a tiny, uncarved space in the floor. I drew the lines of Nat’s profile as I remembered it.

  The sharp edge of the carver peeled tiny curls of bone away in its passage. Nat’s face looked much younger on the floor. His face from our youth, from before Ezarit and I rose. It was a poor likeness, but when I finished, I had someone to talk to.

  I told him everything, in a rush. That I wanted to live, any way I could. I told him why the Singers wanted me. What Wik forbade me to tell anyone. I told him what I could do. How I could help the city.

  Nat did not respond. But the Spire did: it whispered secrets back to me, until I was ready to fly.

  * * *

  Covered in filth, my greasy braids matted against my head like a cap, I stripped all but the last layer of silk robes from my body and piled them below where I planned to climb.

  I left my friend on the floor below me, with my broken wing. The Spire’s whispers pushed me higher.

  I heard them as I balanced on the tips of my toes and slipped and fell. My back arched, and my head struck hard against the wall. I heard them when I woke again. Hopeful, fearful. Calling for me.

  Nat would have wondered at me, I realized. Talking to the Spire. Starving to death, more like it. Get up, Nat would have whispered. Pull yourself up.

  And so I did.

  I found the carving tool and poked at a blister on my forefinger, let the sack of skin weep. It hurt. I howled with the pain as I did it again and again, until I was ready. Then I wrapped my fingers and toes in what was left of the cleaner spidersilk.

  The wall was already warm and slick with grease from my hands. I ignored the pain in my fingers and concentrated on the lift I got from my legs. I pretended that my toes were part of the wall and that the Singer above had a rope around my waist and was hauling me up. I found I could inch my way up the wall, crack by crack. I pressed fingers and toes into the carved crevices: faces and wings and clouds and towers, the forgotten dreams of others who had been here before me. The spidersilk provided an extra stickiness that held my hands to the wall and let me stop and rest.

  My legs and arms started to shake when I realized that the carvings were thinning. At the bottom, there was only a small uncarved space. Now that I was high—at least three tiers, I realized—there were many fewer handholds. The oubliette narrowed at the top, and if I could make it a few body lengths higher, I would be able to place a foot on the opposite wall. I could edge my way up. A big if. Not many more carvings here—a flock of birds, a faint trace of a flower, broken off.

  Below me, the floor was dark. I knew now why the carvings below were so clear against the walls. They had been shaded with dried blood, where others had fallen, trying to rise.

  Up high, the carvings were brighter: eggshell on bone.

  I could see the edge of the crescent now. The buckets had stopped coming, but the window had been left open. A promise, if I could make it.

  They waited for me there, the Singers who wanted me, though for what purpose and how long, I did not know. I did not care.

  Anything to get out of this prison. I braced myself on a narrow foothold and dug into the wall with the carver. Dried bone curled away. Thin lines became deeper. I was not going for beauty or style. I would not leave a mark beyond a handhold. This was not my last message to my city, to the Spire. This was a way out, nothing more.

  My fingers oozed blood when the carver finally splintered and shattered so badly I could not find a sturdy edge. I screamed with pain and frustration. My whole body was rigid.

  Would what I’d done be enough? The Spire remained silent. I could not wait for it to speak again. I had to try on my own, a few more steps. I lifted a shaking arm and gripped the carving with my fingers, pulled. Lifted my foot and put it in the last bird on the wall. Placed my other foot on top of it. Grabbed for the new handhold I’d carved and pressed up. I nearly slipped. I scrambled for balance. The carver fell, and it took a long time before I heard it hit the floor.

  With shaking legs, I moved my foot and stretched it to reach the other wall. My hipbone popped at the exertion. I had no idea how long I’d been climbing, but my body noted the time in aches.

  I missed the voice of my city. The daily sounds from distant towers. The bustle and press of neighbors, the call of friends on the wing. I missed the voice of the Spire, the whispers.

  I braced close to the ceiling and lifted my fingers from one handhold. Reached towards the crescent. I was short by fingerlengths.

  I roared, pushed off my feet in frustration, and found myself lifting farther than I’d thought I could. My toes pointed hard, my pelvis rocked, my spine and shoulders and everything leaned towards that hole. My fingers seemed to grow, clawing for the crescent. Sinking my hands around the thick edge of bone that was the way out. I touched it with a fingertip on a wild swipe. That touch drove me forward again and up. I grabbed the edge with one hand, then the other. My feet slipped, and I hung for a moment, above the oil lamp, above the oubliette. My fingers slid. I had no strength left to hold on.

  11

  FOUND

  A rush of air. A moment where I touched nothing, not the wall, not the ledge of the window. I flailed, hands cupping emptiness. Then one hand caught a muscled arm, reaching from the gap in the wall. Held tight.

  “Easy. I’ve got you,” a familiar voice said. The brightness of the room threw his face into shadow, but I knew his profile. The way he clipped his words.

  Wik leaned out of the opening above me. His fingers gripped my wrists tighter as he pulled me up. He turned his head away from me and spoke over his shoulder, almost grunting with the effort. “Tell Rumul she finally made it.”

  I could not hear a response, but he turned his full attention back to me. My hands locked on to his arms, while his hands circled my biceps. I scrambled my feet against the bone wall and pushed as he pulled. From beyond him, a breeze brushed my cheek. Fresh air. I longed to bask in it.

  He dragged me, still kicking, through the hole. The thick edge scraped the last spidersilk from my chest and bruised my ribs. I hit the floor hands first, then my knees connected with the hard surface.

  Sunlight struck the bone floor, turning it and the walls bright white, shocking my shadow-trained eyes. All I could see in the dazzling room were gray foot wrappings and the edge of a dark robe.

  “Rest,” Wik said. He held out a water sack, and I snatched it from his hands. This Singer. I swallowed my first sip, then took another. I spat that mouthful at his feet.

  He laughed and stepped back. I was too weak to rise or to try again.

  As
my eyes grew used to the light, the lower half of the room took shape: a broad expanse with stools and a workbench, all carved from bone, near the wall where I sat. A threshold carved with chevrons and, beyond that, a passageway. Then more light and air. The passage bordered something like sky, though the light was strangely taut, like sunbeams strung on a bow.

  I took another sip of the water. Built my strength to move, to rush for the passageway, to shout at Wik. To leave here.

  With the sound of swishing robes, two more pairs of gray feet came into view. I struggled to sit straighter, my back and leg muscles protesting each shift in position.

  “Kirit, you have broken such Laws.” The new voice belonged to another man. It was a smooth voice, the kind Ezarit had always told me to be careful about when trading. The kind of voice that lulled listeners before it struck them down.

  This Singer listed my crimes. I could almost hear the songs that accompanied each broken Law: Bethalial. Trespass. Treason. War. I startled at the last. That had not been tied to my wrist.

  “Did you think breaching the walls of the Spire was not War? You could be called a traitor to the city.” His voice was even, soft. Mellifluous. My skin crawled. Beneath the smooth tones, I heard darker notes.

  I looked up, trying to meet his eyes. His face was shadowed. The light behind him hurt. “All I wanted…,” I began. My voice rattled.

  “You wanted to fly the city. To be a trader, like your mother.”

  Yes. He was so very right, but I wouldn’t let him win the point.

  “Better than her.”

  The Singer sat on a stool, his knees level with my eyes. Wik and the other gray-robed figure remained standing on either side of him.

  “Ah, but you had bad luck, and then the wingtest went so poorly.”

  “That was his doing,” I said, lifting a shaking arm to point at Wik.

  Wik didn’t move. The Singer continued as if I hadn’t spoken. His hands, resting on his knees, were silvered with tattoos.

  “All traders want to be important. They all look for an edge to make them faster, better than their competition. Your mother is no exception. She fought to gain her edge. How would you be better than her?”

  I could not answer that.

  He continued, his voice rising and falling. “The best traders help the city. There are songs in their honor. Your mother’s run, bringing together the medicines for the southeast? That is already sung in many towers.”

  Already. I’d been trapped in the Spire’s walls for many days, then.

  The Singer leaned forward so I could meet his eyes without tilting my head up. I could see the silver marks on his cheeks and forehead. His head was bald, and tattoos curved above his brow. Some symbols I recognized: knife, arrow, spear. Some I didn’t understand at all.

  “The towers know her wings on sight. You want that. She flies everywhere without fear. You want that too.” He pressed his lips together: a dark line below his sharp nose. “But you are a Lawsbreaker. Your tower’s only use for you now is as an offering to the city. They will sing no songs for you.”

  I shuddered. An offering. When I left Mondarath with Nat, I hadn’t thought beyond making the Singers give me my wingmark. Now everything was lost. I swallowed. “Is Nat here?”

  The Singer looked me in the eyes, with more sorrow than I’d thought possible on a Singer’s stern face. “No.”

  My heart dropped. His word turned my fear into truth. My oldest friend, fallen. His death as much my fault as his own. More so. He had not broken Fortify. I had. My mind went as empty as the sky beyond the city. It filled with a moaning that built as I remembered his screams and the skymouth attacking.

  The feet to the Singer’s right stepped forward, and a hand shook my shoulder roughly. A young woman’s voice said, “Stop that. The sound hurts my ears.”

  The Singer raised his hand. “Sellis, let her mourn her friend.” I was grateful to him, until his next words stifled my sobs to a hiccup.

  “Wik is of the belief,” he said, “that you have suffered enough losses, Kirit.”

  I looked up. Rumul smiled, slowly. Beside him, Wik shifted on his feet. “You love the city?”

  The city’s towers. Its blue skies, the lights of Allmoons. The touch of the wind when I woke in the morning. The towers and the people in them. The songs of our past. I did love it.

  “Yes.” The barest whisper.

  “It needs you, Kirit. If you can grow beyond your anger and your losses, the city needs you.”

  The girl, Sellis, pressed my shoulder again. “Listen to Rumul.”

  The honey-voiced man’s name. Rumul. He stood up. Walked behind the workbench and took a seat there. Wik and Sellis remained near me.

  “Why do you fight us in this?”

  I shook my head. I could barely sit, much less fight.

  Rumul lifted a thick skein of bone markers from the worktable and rubbed a chip between his fingers. For a moment I thought he held Naton’s chips, but these were new, uncarved. Their cord was red, not blue. “You were offered an opportunity to come to the Spire, which you resisted.”

  I eyed Wik’s spit-marked foot. He had not said much since he’d pulled me from the oubliette.

  “And yet you flew straight here on your own. Why?” He fingered another chip. The markers were thick. They were Lawsmarks like the ones on my wrist. “Because you knew we had something you wanted. And you thought you had something we wanted too.”

  I swallowed and prepared to bargain. I did have something they wanted: me. My voice. I could help them with the skymouths. For my wings. For my life. I lifted my chin, took a determined breath.

  Rumul raised his eyebrows. “You still think so?” I nodded, opening my mouth. Sellis jerked my arm and hushed me before I could argue.

  “There is dissent in the Spire over letting you live. Wik has argued on your behalf. Has said you stopped a skymouth. Though you didn’t stop the one near the Spire.”

  Wik stepped forward. “She had no time to do so.”

  Sellis jumped in, saying, “She is headstrong, and she is a Lawsbreaker.” She raised my hand and shook my wrist so the marks clacked heavy.

  A look from Rumul quieted her.

  The room settled into silence, punctuated only by the clicking of the bone markers Rumul held.

  “You are no longer a citizen, by Laws,” he finally said. “But I would like to make you a bargain.”

  Sellis stifled a protest. I struggled to rise to my feet, succeeding only when Wik steadied me. A bargain.

  “When a citizen challenges the Spire and fails,” Rumul said, his voice taking on a new depth, “they are thrown down. However, when a Singer, or a Singer-born, does so, they are allowed to live, if their injuries are not too great. Did you know this?”

  I shook my head.

  “What has Ezarit told you of your father, Kirit?”

  A puzzling question. When I was slow to respond, Sellis elbowed me. I glared at her. “She’s told me nothing. He disappeared during a migration.”

  Sellis snorted. “Your mother is a liar.”

  I bristled. Though I could not argue the words, Sellis had no right to say them.

  Rumul watched me glare at Sellis for a moment. “She is correct. Your father is in the Spire.”

  “A prisoner?” I pictured the walls of the oubliette I’d just climbed from and felt panic tighten my stomach.

  “Not at all,” Wik said. His voice was low and clear. He kept his eyes on Rumul’s desk, so his bird-of-prey profile was all I saw. “He is injured, but he lives among the Singers.”

  Rumul produced a roll of silk from his pocket, wrapped around something heavy and something that clattered. He passed it to Wik, who handed it to me. I unwrapped the silk and gasped. My mother’s lenses—I’d thought them lost.

  A skein of message chips was tangled in the straps.

  “The lenses were his once. Your father’s,” Rumul said. “We are pleased to have them back.”

  The lenses heavy in my hand,
I stumbled with Wik’s assistance to the workbench and spread the chips out across the flat top. My hands shook, though the message was not addressed to me. Nor to anyone.

  But I knew the hand that had marked the chips as well as I knew my own.

  * * *

  You will live, they tell me, Ezarit had written.

  For a moment, I thought she’d sent this message to me. Then I saw how faded the skein was. How dust-filled the marks. This was a message as old as Naton’s had been.

  I brushed a shaking finger across the chips. Felt the marks she’d made. Kept reading.

  I traded you and your lies for my life. Your secret will remain with me, and the Spire will make me a fine bargain for my silence. Good-bye, love.

  The bone grew slick, and the dust trapped in the marks dimpled from the tears I realized ran down my own cheeks. I did not brush them away.

  This was not meant for me. She did not mean me.

  I tried to hold on to that thought.

  Sellis cleared her throat. She shifted under Rumul’s fierce gaze, but made no further sound.

  So many secrets. So many things Ezarit had kept from me. I knew she’d challenged the Spire, but to learn our tier was a bribe for her silence? That my father—

  Rumul’s words suddenly hit home. “My father is here? He is a Singer?”

  Rumul nodded. “He was Singer-born. He ventured out of the Spire before he took his wings and was marked a Singer.”

  “And when he disappeared? When he left my mother alone?”

  The room went still.

  Wik bowed his head, his hand warm on my arm. “He was Spire-born. It is tradition to return. In the end, he paid a heavy price.”

  I sputtered. He left us. No price was great enough. “Does he know of me?”

  Quiet built in the room. Outside, in the passageway, a voice called out a muted greeting, and another voice responded. A bird flapped its wings and passed into the taut light.