Updraft

by Fran Wilde

  And I learned to listen to the Spire in other ways, and through the Spire, the city.

  I heard the city’s voice in the bone floors, through my feet as I walked, my knees as I scrubbed. I heard its rumbles and creaks, its sighs. I learned to speak to it in secret.

  As I slowly learned, I was punished for nearly everything. For getting words wrong. For annoying Sellis. For being in the wrong place when a Singer wanted me somewhere else. I could not say how many infractions, but the punishment was always the same: not bone chips to weigh me down, but more cleaning and carving. My nose was filled with bone dust, and I grew tired beyond measure of being handed the carving tools. My hands thickened with calluses and scars from tracing patterns charcoaled on the walls for me by Sellis, the Magisters, Wik, and seemingly anyone else passing by.

  And yet, I learned. Despite everything. Moc and Ciel knelt by me and sang with me while I gouged at the walls or scrubbed the floor. I watched Singers come and go on powerful wings and listened to the songs they sang to each other, citing challenges won long ago in order to support arguments today.

  I pricked my ears for any mention of the windbeaters.

  When the full moon showed through the top of the tower, the entire Spire stopped to sing The Rise. Sound swept me up in the history. The bravery. The real Rise. I mouthed the words I knew now, still hesitant to sing with them.

  I memorized facts about the towers: how high they were, how many had troubled their neighbors. I listened as Magisters discussed balance in the city and how to keep towers from cracking, like Lith. An artifex came to show our class how bridges helped strengthen the towers. With the young ones, I counted the toll of the skymouth attacks.

  We had our own songs in the Spire: legends, epics, and heroes the towers could never know about. “Corwitt Takes the Nest of Thieves,” “The Plunge of the Singer,” “The First Appeasement.” Through them, I began to understand more of the bone towers on which we lived.

  I had not seen Rumul since my release from the oubliette.

  The Spire remained quiet, save for the songs and the city’s everyday sounds.

  And then the day came when I stood before the classes and sang The Rise again, and they sang it back. The Magisters questioned me about the populations of Grigrit, Varu, and others, and I knew the answers without thinking. I knew them all. The sun passed beyond the tower, and the oil lamps came out. My examination continued. Did I know the load-bearing weight of new bone? What was the angle at which a Singer must glide when carrying a child? An adult?

  I had memorized the songs, understood the reasons for the answers. I knew so much more now.

  The Magister presented me with a gray robe bearing two blue stripes. A robe that fit me.

  Sellis brought me a pair of wings. Worn ones, certainly, and not the glorious Singer wings I’d admired, but something to practice in.

  My voice, too, had strengthened. Wik seemed pleased.

  When I returned to Sellis’s tier one night, a small, perfect apple rested atop the folded bedding outside the alcove. I munched the whole thing, sour core and all.

  The next morning, Sellis woke me early, saying, “Now I will show you how to fly.”

  “I know how to fly,” I protested.

  “You still don’t know everything,” she said. But she smiled behind her stern words.

  She cleared her own bucket that morning. We tightened each other’s wingstraps; ate bowls of boiled buckwheat sweetened with honey together in the dining alcove. Then she showed me how little I knew.

  As we exited the alcove and walked the passage outside, still chewing our last mouthfuls, she grabbed fistfuls of my new robe and pushed me over the balcony, headfirst.

  In my panic, my kicking legs flipped me right side up. My hands reached out, grasped air, then silk.

  In the confines of the Gyre, I took command of my wings and let them unfurl, praying that I would have time to jam my fingers in the grips. A gust caught and spun me. I tried to hold down my breakfast. My fingers locked around the grips, and I struggled to turn before I hit the opposite wall and dashed myself to pieces.

  But I did not turn. And I did not hit the wall.

  A drumbeat from deep down in the Spire began as my wings filled with a strong gust from below. My plunge ceased abruptly. An updraft carried me, though a moment before, the Gyre had held only the most meager of breezes.

  “What is this?” I whispered.

  Sellis appeared beside me, smiling. “It is the Gyre, Kirit. Learn to fly here, and you will own the city.”

  Sellis pointed. I ducked my head to look and saw the windbeaters at work far below. At first I thought they were using sheets of silk, similar to those sometimes used in wingfights, that caught and bent the wind. But their tools were complicated by frames, sleeves, and battens. I gasped. The windbeaters wore giant wings over their arms. They worked in rhythm to the drums, channeling the wind through the tunnel so that it lifted and planed.

  “Singers who can no longer fly,” Sellis explained as we flew tip to tip, “are still a part of the Spire.”

  The wind coming up through the center of the Spire smelled of must and bone and something thick and caustic. Wik had said my father was a windbeater. Perhaps he worked the Gyre below me now. Did he know I flew above? I had my wings now. Perhaps now I would be allowed to go below and speak to him.

  More windbeaters gathered, using their misshapen wings to channel the air. A grinding sound floated up to us.

  “They are opening the gates,” Sellis said. “To build a stronger vortex—to welcome you.”

  The gates. Like the one I had opened in the walls so many days ago.

  I cringed, even as the breeze quickened. The gates’ opening made me worry about skymouths. I tucked my legs in my footsling and wished for my lenses.

  “Relax,” Sellis said, not understanding my fear. “Singers have been doing this forever.”

  “It’s true,” Ciel said, leaning out from a gallery. She grinned, her tiny face framed by a circle of sky and sun, far above. Faces peered over the balconies, amused. She laughed at my surprise. “This is nothing. Wait until your first fight. If it’s not exciting enough, the windbeaters have rot gas and fire to speed things up.”

  “Ciel!” Sellis said. “Let her learn for herself.”

  I glided the Gyre in a circle and watched the windbeaters. Their oversized wings swept and dipped. The winds rose, and I could feel the pressure change in my ears.

  Sellis modeled a turn, then a slow dive. I followed her, wobbling. The new wings and my time away from the wind had cost me skill and confidence.

  Gyre winds mimicked the best gusts of the open sky, made more complex by the shape of the tower and its galleries. I discovered I could tack quicker, and that the breezes became muddled near the walkways.

  Sellis called sharp instructions to tighten the curve of my wings, to stretch the footsling with my ankles, to look up, not down.

  “You’ll need to learn to fly with locked wings,” she said. “For the challenges. Can’t hold a knife and grips both.”

  “Have there never been skymouths in the Gyre?” I finally asked, as I felt more comfortable in my glides.

  My companion did not answer. The drumbeats slowed and we sank to our tier and furled our wings. Ciel ran to a ladder, late for class downtower. I sighed and looked out into the Gyre. “That was amazing.”

  Sellis tucked her wings away. “Flying the Gyre is for training. We shouldn’t enjoy it.”

  I composed myself, but Sellis’s face broke into a glowing smile. The first I’d seen from her. “But I love it anyway.” She reached to help me furl the complex angles of my training wings. “Singer wings have more detail. You need to care for them, or they’ll wear wrong. Become dangerous.”

  “I will.”

  “When I first became an acolyte, learning to fight in the Gyre was my reward for being quick. I had excellent sparring partners—” she began, then stopped. Smiled shyly, her head tilted, listening. I heard noth
ing. “I am summoned away.”

  I had so many questions, but exhaustion took me before she returned.

  In the morning I woke to find Sellis still not back, and Singers rushing past our alcove. A bone horn sounded. First Moc, then Ciel ran past. “Quickly!” they said, pulling me upright.

  I was barely on my feet when the city roared loud enough to knock me back down.

  13

  SACRIFICE

  The Spire shook with sound. What had begun as a low moan far off built quickly, like a fast-moving squall, into a blistering roar, and did not lessen. Soon, the storm of sound battered my skin with its force, emanating from the Spire’s very walls.

  The birds roosting on the ledges beyond our alcove all rose and scattered into the Gyre and out through the apex with a clapping of wings that shook dust loose everywhere. The Spire’s enclosure amplified the city’s roar. Everyone within, at least who I could see, was affected by the sound. Students rushed by with their hands over their ears. A Singer fell to his knees.

  As suddenly as it began, the sound moved up and out past the top of the Spire and faded away.

  When they could stand again, the Singers whispered to one another in worried tones.

  A bone horn sounded atop the Spire, and I heard distant klaxons sound in the city.

  “Moc,” I whispered, “what just happened?”

  Already on his way to the ladders, Moc spun on his soft foot wraps. “We’ve got to get up top to watch!”

  I must have looked confused, because he grabbed my arm and began to pull. “This is a big one. The Singers will tell the Magisters and the city leaders what the city wants at Conclave. It’s going to be crowded up there.”

  All the air went from my lungs. Conclave. Elna had said that when the Singers took Naton, it was for a Conclave. It had been a long time since the last roar of this magnitude. Usually there were only rumbles and rumors of rumbles.

  I could still feel lingering vibrations in my bones. Neither rumble nor rumor: the city had made a sound as if the world was ending.

  From down the passage, someone yelled Moc’s name, and my slight companion skittered off again.

  I was left alone in a swirl of activity. Everyone knew where they needed to be. Except for Kirit Spire. Conclave hadn’t been covered in the novitiates’ class. Sellis and Wik hadn’t instructed me on where to go, what to do. Once again, I did not belong. I was the sole still body in a whirl of motion.

  Tower children were schooled in a version of what happened when the city roared. That information was all I had to guide me now. Singers had recorded the codex of sounds the city had made over generations, ever since we rose through the clouds. When the city roared, the Singers weighed a new chip, from a piece of tower knocked loose by the sound. The bigger the roar, the bigger the piece. If none had been disturbed, they cut one from the lowest tier themselves, sized carefully to chronicle the sound for the future. They bound these in the codex.

  Then they balanced the roar through Conclave.

  Once, Florian, our Magister at Densira, had told us how the city had roared twice in his own childhood. He’d turned sallow as he described the second Conclave, the desperation of the adults around him.

  “Weren’t you grateful for the Lawsbreakers, Florian?” Sidra had asked. Sidra’s father had lectured us about Lawsbreakers a few days before. We’d learned that even those who defied the tower had their purpose in the city.

  Florian had coughed. “We were grateful. Their duty meant that the city was appeased and didn’t roar again for many years.” But his face was still sallow, still drawn. He’d lost someone; he was still afraid.

  I remembered now that he’d toyed with a thin bone marker at his wrist: a Lawsbreak of his own, though a small one.

  When he’d gathered himself, Florian explained what came after a roar, doing his job as our Magister. He spoke of how those who lived at the margins, those who broke Laws, would be called into service to the city. That the Singers would come, weigh their crimes by the bone chips they carried, and take the ones they needed away.

  As I remembered, I felt as shaken as Florian had been. I’d broken Laws. I broke Bethalial and Trespass. Worse. I still wore those markers on my wrist. I was sure no one had forgotten.

  If the need was great, would they come for me too?

  No, I thought, they needed me in other ways. They’d said so. Still, I couldn’t help the fear rising in my gut. Elna said Naton hadn’t been given Lawsmarkers at first. She’d said that until the Singer handed them to her once Naton was gone, she’d had no knowledge of his crimes.

  If the need was great enough. That had been an enormous roar. I looked around, desperate for ways to make myself useful. No one said a word to me. They moved around me as if I was in the way.

  That was the last thing I wanted to be. I did not want one of the Singers who disagreed with my training to find a reason to add to the appeasement.

  The novitiates’ tier emptied. The birds scattered by the noise had not returned.

  A tug at my sleeve. Ciel stood close.

  “I’ll show you where to watch.”

  I could have said no. I could have hunkered down in the shadows and waited for Conclave to end. But I choose to follow Ciel to the Spire’s apex and watch, like a Singer.

  * * *

  Atop the Spire, the city’s councilors gathered. The craft and trade representatives arrived as Ciel dragged me up the last rope ladder, for there were no risers carved into the top of the Spire. You had to fly up, or scramble.

  Ciel tucked herself behind a spur of bone near the ledge, her wings unfurled for safety. I tried not to cling to her hand: I had not been wearing my wings when the roar began. The wind whipped the robes of the assembled, and those on the ledges below, looking up through the Spire, watching.

  Two Singers rode a gust of wind up and out of the Spire, carrying something between them. Metal gleamed in the sunlight. Those watching whispered; a brief sound, louder than the wind.

  “The scales.” Ciel pointed at the gleam. I leaned to get a better look. The Singers flew a small circuit of the Spire’s ledge and landed carefully. They anchored the base of what they carried to the ledge: a brass plate, very old, wrapped with spidersilk, tied to nearby bone cleats. Magister Florian hadn’t said the scales were so big. Or made of metal.

  A spike of bone stuck up from the plate, bound there by a metal hasp. From where I crouched, it was hard to see the mechanism. A metal basket wobbled on each side of the spike. The baskets teetered and swung until the councilors, crafters, traders, and Singers gathered around to shield the scales from the wind.

  A Singer drew a bone chip from a carry sack the size of a baby. Bigger. He raised it high, so that everyone might see, then placed it in the basket closest to the edge of the tower. The scale dipped. City representatives muttered among themselves. They turned to the horizons of the city.

  I looked too. At first, all I saw was sky. The wide-open blue made my heart leap. The sky was a drink of cold water. The warm sun, a balm. I had missed both so.

  Then I saw them.

  All around the Spire, gray-winged Singers approached, bearing nets.

  The two Singers who’d carried the scale stood. One was Rumul. The other was the woman with hair as brass-colored as Ciel’s.

  The arriving Singers dropped their nets on the ledge but did not untie them. Inside, I saw hands and feet, a curled back. No wings. I could hear someone weeping. The bodies were robed in white. Many lay still.

  The net closest to us wriggled as its occupant turned, dark curls falling away from a face. I sucked in my breath. Those looked like Nat’s curls. Nat, alive?

  Not Nat. Please no, I whispered to the city.

  Brown eyes peered from the net, sun-spotted olive skin below the dark curls. Not Nat. Someone older. My relief was short-lived. That was someone’s Nat, I knew.

  Beyond the Spire, a man circled wildly, shouting as he flew near two Singers carrying a net with an older woman in it. I couldn
’t hear what he said from where I stood, but amazingly, Ciel heard. “He wants to challenge for his wife,” the girl whispered, wide-eyed.

  I looked across the gap, past the couple, and saw the edges of the nearby towers rippling with what looked like motes of dust from here: belongings being thrown from nearby towers. Citizens were jettisoning anything that might skirt the limits of Singer patience if another appeasement was required.

  My fear for Nat transformed. Rumul’s threat against my mother seized my throat. Surely she wouldn’t be one of the citizens caught up so? Not after I had signed myself over?

  Ezarit’s voice whispered in my mind. You gave them what they wanted. What do you hold in trade now? I shook my head to clear the sound. Rumul wouldn’t. They needed me. Wik had said so. I held myself in trade still.

  And if I was not good enough to be a Singer? What then?

  If I was still at risk, so was Ezarit.

  The Singers approached, carrying fistfuls of bone chips towards the scales. They surrounded the brass baskets, one Singer for each of the towers. The ledge filled precariously with people.

  “What are they doing?” I turned to Ciel, but she’d disappeared. I watched alone as more Singers appeared from every direction, their flying nets filled with men and women. All were dressed in white, most clinging to the nets disinterestedly.

  Drugged, of course.

  “Where have you been?” Sellis whispered to me as she hurried past, Wik close on her heels. “We searched for you. Come with us!” She grabbed my robe and pulled me from my hiding place. “Rumul’s orders.”

  She didn’t let go of my robes when I began to scramble after her. I picked up my pace, lest she drag me right over the edge.

  The Spire’s silence grew heavier as more Singers landed, none making a sound. We reached the gathering around the scales in time to watch them place the first of the chips in the empty bin.

  “Wirra,” said the Singer as he placed a chip. Bone hit metal. A high sound, a sour sound. The only sound.

  The scale barely moved. Another Singer came forward, and another, adding chips from each tower to the basket until it began to drop against the weight of the bone chunk on the other side. More Singers stood by, their hands cradling the chips of the Lawsbreakers. Waiting to see whether those crimes against the city would be added to the weight.