Updraft

by Fran Wilde

  I tried to think of something that would make him act beyond his fear. “Do your rumors tell you who they’ve caught and brought to the Spire?”

  Civik shook his head. “Who?”

  I paused, thinking of Ezarit’s scars, of what she did to Civik in the Gyre. I didn’t know how he’d react to the news.

  “Who?” He tightened his grip on my hand. Then, as if he could read my mind, he said, “Ah. Yes. Ezarit.” The way he said it gave me no comfort. I should have stayed quiet.

  “I can’t let them hurt her either.”

  The old windbeater frowned. Then he tapped my lenses again. “You are right. Now is time to fight, and to speak.”

  I breathed out, relieved. I would have his support if I fought in the Gyre. I hoped he could gather enough of the others. But I needed more than that. “I need better wings, Civik. And a good blade.”

  My father let go of my hand. Rolled back and forth on his cart. “We do not have those things down here. The Singers took all the nightwings we’ve made. And there are no blades among the windbeaters. You must get them elsewhere.”

  There was a scuffling sound, and Moc tumbled into the alcove. “They’ve blocked off the council tier. I can’t get past the guards. Can’t get to Wik.”

  “They kicked me out earlier,” Ciel said, appearing behind Moc. “No flying, either.”

  New plan, then. I couldn’t use the ladders to get to the council. I couldn’t fly. And Wik was somewhere up there.

  “Moc, you need to help me sneak into the pens. Right now.”

  He started to argue. “They’ll see you.”

  But Ciel said, “I know how,” and pulled me from the alcove, towards the galleries where the windbeaters worked the Gyre. She grabbed one of the ropes that ran down the Gyre’s sides and handed me a large bucket. It still smelled of stink, but it was empty, and big enough to hold me, if I kept very still.

  But the bucket couldn’t hold my patchwork wings. I stripped them off. Felt the small skymouth wrap itself tighter around my shoulder.

  I tucked myself as best I could into the bucket. Both twins and Civik, working the ropes together, lowered me down on the cable to the knotted ropes of the pens.

  They worked fast, and when the bucket came to rest, I rolled out and ducked into the shadows beneath an overhanging gallery. They reeled up the bucket and disappeared.

  Alone in the dark, once all had grown quiet again, I crawled to the center of the nets and let myself into the core of the pens. Felt the captive skymouths bump against the ropes and poke the thin points of tentacles out as I passed. I hummed, and the tentacles receded.

  When the skymouths settled, the littlemouth still at my shoulder loosened its grip. “Oh, no you don’t,” I whispered, then tucked it into my robe, by my ribs. I tightened the fastenings to secure it. “You’d be like dinner to your cousins.”

  Too close beside me, someone coughed, and I jumped. In the darkness, I could make out a tall form with broad shoulders.

  “You made it,” Wik said.

  “I did.” My heart pounded from the scare. “How did you get away from the council tier?”

  “I told Rumul someone needed to check on the pens. He told me to get them ready to migrate again tomorrow and then return. The council will discuss Ezarit’s fate in a few hours.”

  Worse and worse.

  “How did you know I’d come here?”

  “I didn’t. I’d planned to ask Moc to help find you, but he’s made himself scarce.”

  I wanted to laugh, but it was too awful. “He was looking for you. You passed each other. One going up, the other coming down.” I grew serious. “We need to get back up there.”

  He wrapped a hand around a thick rope. “They will try to stop you from reaching the council and issuing a challenge, Kirit. Rumul says that the city is already angry. That a sacrifice needs to be made.”

  “Did you try to challenge?”

  Wik bowed his head. “I began the process. No one would support me. Not with another Conclave possible if the city keeps rumbling. They are frightened. They don’t want to lose my vote on council, if I fail. We were so close to breaking him before the city—” He stopped. Dragged his fingers through his hair. Exhausted. “Instead, I tried to blunt Sellis’s attacks on you, tried to keep them from tearing apart the towers looking for you, the traitor Singer. I told her I’d disposed of you already, but that did not satisfy her, or Rumul.”

  I couldn’t imagine it would. “They wanted to dispose of me themselves.” Cloudbound. The first sacrifice at Conclave.

  “Yes.”

  “Why should I believe you? You led the attack on Densira.”

  “I was trying to foil it, Kirit.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. But I saved you. And brought Elna to you.”

  That was true. “They have Ezarit now, up there.”

  He met my gaze. “She’s being held in Rumul’s enclosure.”

  I thought of Ezarit, encased in the walls of the Spire as I once was. “I can’t get to her there.”

  “If you win your challenge, you can free her.”

  “And if I lose?”

  Wik was silent. The nets creaked. “Then I will challenge without support. Like Terrin. And more people will die tomorrow.”

  I thought of Nat, and my mother. Of the enclosure’s carved walls. Of the skymouths. I had to try.

  Wik reached into the sleeve of his robe and removed his knife and its sheath. He handed these to me. They were heavy in my hands, and the glass blade was dark as the night. I bound the sheath to my arm.

  He said, “I’ve been down here too long. They are watching everyone. Every tier. How will you get to the council?”

  “It’s better if you don’t know.”

  He stared at me. “You are a Singer, Kirit. Truly. The kind we need.” He leaned close, his eyes fierce. “Don’t let them tell you you’re not.” He climbed quickly from the pens and onto the next tier. Then he was gone, leaving me alone, surrounded by skymouths.

  When I echoed, the Singers’ skymouths sounded like soft objects, bobbing in the pens. Their tentacles trailed across each other. In the far corner of the pens was a different shape, less buoyant. Not moving.

  Any breeding program had successes and losses. I thought of Nat’s whipperlings, his search for the fastest ones. Of my own silk spiders. We didn’t feed the ones that didn’t make enough silk. There were always culls.

  I hoped I was right, that it was the same here. Skymouth culls didn’t need their skins any longer.

  The rigging and cages designed by Nat’s father for these pens almost seventeen years ago filled the center of the Spire. I stood on the side, echoing, until I found more still shapes. Beyond them, I could hear the harder objects, the pulleys and cams that raised the pens when the Spire rose.

  I imagined how far the cages had risen in the intervening years, and what horrors they’d hosted.

  Then I took a deep breath and, humming softly, entered the pens. The littlemouth squirmed against my chest. Gripped tighter. I kept moving, gathering the piles of skymouth skins I’d spotted a moment ago.

  I walked the outer edge of the pens, humming. The skymouths quieted, though tentacles still reached for me, curled round my ankles.

  A roar on my left drew me towards double netting held fast with spidersilk, thick tendons, and something else. Metal wire. Metal. The desperation of that shocked me. The reinforcements were recent and rough-hewn. The big skymouth Wik spoke of at Lith—they must have enclosed it here. And it did not want to be kept. I backed away quickly and gathered the last few dead and dying skymouths from the pens’ edges. My arms filled with them. The deflated bodies and slack limbs slopped over my hands and dragged on the floor, tripping me. Their acrid stench burned my nostrils.

  I returned to the center of the pens and put down my burden. I echoed and saw the culls. A dozen of them, piled at my feet. Either they couldn’t survive or their keepers didn’t want them to.

 
The pens shifted and creaked as their occupants grew restless with the smell of death so near. I hummed while I worked, hoping it would calm them enough to stay their movements.

  All the culls were recent, dying now or dead within the last day or two, by my guess. Several were as large as my wings. Not big enough to be farmed for sinew, so left to feed their brethren in the pens.

  I took Wik’s knife from my sleeve and dragged its point across the first cull’s skin, separating the hide from the muscle below. I wasn’t sure what I was doing would work, but I had to try. More rank scent filled the room. I gagged and prayed it wouldn’t get worse.

  It took an hour to get what I needed.

  Above, the night sky showed through the distant opening at the top of the Spire. When I’d begun my task, it was still dark. Now the apex was starting to lighten. The city rumbled again below. I stood on the pens, covered in the gore of dead skymouths and looked up into the Gyre. The galleries and tiers rose to the distant circle of sky.

  I put on my lenses to protect my eyes from the increasing burn in the air. The skymouths’ skins stuck to my fingers as I worked.

  Good.

  I took the skin peeled from the culls and pieced two slippery edges together on my lap. Then I took out the metal needle I’d found on Lith and clumsily tried to thread a thick vein through the needle’s eye in the dim light. Faster, Kirit. Work faster.

  I pushed the needle through the skins, denting my fingers and drawing blood when I had to, pushing too hard.

  My arms ached, and my knees grew numb from kneeling as I seamed one hide to the next. Soon, I held an acrid cloak of shame and death that clung to me wetly when I wrapped myself in it, making me shudder.

  “Clouds,” a small voice whispered, just above my head. Moc had climbed onto the pens. He helped me adjust the cloak so that it hung low over my face, dripping and filled with an unbearable musk. I was grateful again for the lenses, which kept the worst of the gore from my eyes. I tried to breathe through my mouth, tried to avoid throwing up at the stench.

  Then I left the pens, and, using the slops rope, began my slow climb up the inside of the Spire, wingless, and, I hoped, completely unexpected.

  I lifted my hand. It was a shimmer in the air. I was as invisible as a skymouth.

  27

  CHALLENGE

  Once I climbed from a prison within the walls of the Spire, half starved, my skin torn. Once, I begged for my life and traded my will for a pair of wings.

  I would not beg this time. I was a Singer, and a citizen. They would hear me. They would free my mother. They would find another way to protect the city. They would admit what they’d done in its name.

  I clung to the refuse ropes, lifting myself up arm over arm, past the windbeaters’ tier. Unseen, I glimpsed my father rousing his peers, preparing them. I saw a closed vat over a new fire. Rot gas, heating. My face grim beneath my hood, I continued to climb.

  Above me, the Spire’s mouth opened, distant and toothed with the last of the night’s stars. I had to reach it, and the council’s tier below it. Each tier I passed brought me closer.

  After ten tiers, I rested an arm on the railing of an observer’s gallery and flexed my aching hands. The skymouth skins had thinned and turned silver where they had rubbed too hard against the fibers of the refuse ropes.

  A bone hook clattered to the floor of the tier. My clumsy hand had knocked it loose from its prop against the gallery wall. A Singer must have left it there to push challengers away from the walls. I looked around the tier, a novice level. Saw only one bleary-eyed, gray-robed acolyte trudging with a bucket towards the pulleys. He didn’t give the noise a second look.

  The wind knocked things over, shook things loose. Now I was the wind, come to knock at the Spire’s walls.

  Once the novice had finished disposing of his stink, I returned to the refuse rope and continued climbing. I had to move faster now. The ropes would soon be put to hard use.

  A breeze wound its way up the Gyre. Were my wings with me, it might have lifted me slowly up the last few tiers. I didn’t have time to look down to see if the breeze was natural or created by the first of the windbeaters working the vents. I had to climb.

  Hand over hand, feet twisting in the ropes for extra purchase, I climbed alone, save for the kaviks that passed me and tried to coat me with their waste. One hit its target, my shoulder, and the white goo splattered. The guano slid off the skymouth hide and continued its fall into the Gyre. I remained unmarked, hidden. “Incredible,” I whispered, thinking of the littlemouth in my pocket. My voice sounded strained and worn.

  The dark night and the dimness of the tower helped me climb past many tiers without incident. But I had been lucky for too long. The refuse rope jerked against my hands, and I clung to it, yanked upwards at a fast clip as someone hauled on the rope from above. I saw a face peering over the edge confused. Lurai, looking for tangles in the rope and finding none.

  My heart rode high in my throat, threatening to choke me. I was so close. Then the pulling stopped. I swung on the rope as it halted its rise. Above me, Lurai circled his tier, headed for another pulley. One that worked.

  Relief slowed my heart a bit, but I knew this was a short-lived reprieve. I had to climb faster.

  Lights began to appear in alcoves. Oil lamp sprites moved up and down ladders. I heard whispering, but could not make out the words through my cloak.

  I heard a familiar melody. What sounded like Ezarit’s voice, muffled, singing The Rise. The city’s version. At least it sounded like Ezarit’s voice, from very far away. With a clatter, followed by shouts, the song broke off. But not for long. Another voice, from a much closer tier, boomed across the Gyre. Wik. Singing The Rise in response to Ezarit. He sang the Spire’s version to her, telling her the truth. It was a subtle rebellion. One that cheered me on. Five tiers to go. Four. I sweated and choked inside the cloak. My skin stung from the still-acrid veins that I, in my hurry, hadn’t scraped away.

  Below me, windbeaters began practicing their dancelike movements. The edge of my cloak flapped, slapping at my feet. The rope twisted, and I scrambled for balance. The novices just waking and the windbeaters not aligned with Civik would spot me soon. Hurry, Kirit.

  A pair of carvers dropped over the gallery edge nearest the Spire’s opening and hung suspended above me. They spoke quietly as they continued work on the fierce decorations scraped into the newest Gyre wall.

  I was nearly to the council’s tier, but I could not move without them seeing the rope shake.

  As I wavered about what to do next, my foot slipped. In my scramble to recover, the sewn-together hides began to slide from my head and shoulders. I could not hold them in place and still keep climbing.

  With one hand, I managed to grab the trailing edge of the cloak I’d made from dead skymouth culls before it fell away completely. I hung, revealed, at the edge of the council tier. Air struck my skin where the hide had touched it, painful and raw.

  With arms on fire from the climb, I slung the cloak over the tier edge and grabbed the nearest gallery railing. Pulled myself up and over it. I rested for a moment, a pile of oil-damp, foul-smelling girl, my cheek pressed against the young bone of the tier. My scalp burned. Some hair had torn away when the cloak slipped. The palms of my hands bled. The skin on my arms and face was red from contact with the hides. I pulled my lenses away from my face and down to my neck. I shooed off the pain as one of the carvers approached.

  “All right, Singer?” she said, curious at my appearance. My lack of wings.

  “Very,” I said with all the breath I had. “Special training for night flying,” I added.

  She shrugged and went back to her work. Rumul may have had Singers searching for me, but he’d failed to inform the novices. My familiarity to the carvers, from many days of punishment as I had learned the Spire’s ways, was now another kind of invisibility. I approached the council unchallenged, dragging the cloak behind me.

  The council huddled in Rumul’s alcov
e, crowding the space and spilling into the passageway.

  Below, more voices began to sing. The morning ritual of The Rise had begun. Sound surrounded me: the story of the city and how the Singers saved it from ruin. In her enclosure beneath Rumul’s alcove, my mother might have been able to hear the singing as I had, once.

  A shout from the rooftop broke the song’s rhythm. I crouched behind a spine as an older Singer climbed down from outside and rushed to Rumul’s chambers.

  “Fliers approaching! A Magister and four others,” he said.

  “Who summoned them?” Rumul’s voice rang clear over the song coming up from the tiers below.

  The council broke its huddle. I hauled the stinking cloak back over my head. Obscured myself. Delequerriat, Rumul.

  Several Singers began speaking at once. Over the tumult, I heard Wik say, “Let them land. Perhaps they have found Kirit.”

  The other Singers murmured agreement.

  This was my cue. I could rush into the alcove and challenge Rumul while the council waited for news.

  But I could not move from my crouch. My muscles had seized after the long climb, my toes were asleep. I watched the visitors land on the roof above and be escorted down to the tier. Only when Rumul emerged from his alcove, the council behind him, was I able to feel my feet once more.

  Macal had returned to the Spire. He’d brought Beliak with him. And several traders. He must have told the trade council that Ezarit had been taken to the Spire.

  Macal stepped forward, but Wik held up his hand and stopped his brother from speaking. One tan-robed trader, his hair beaded with glass like my mother’s once was, cleared his throat.

  Rumul spoke before the trader could. “We did not summon you to the Spire.”

  “We thought we heard horns,” the trader said. “Macal said we were summoned.” He was layering the truth. I could tell from the set of his jaw. Macal nodded in support. Met Rumul’s glare with raised eyebrows.

  The trader looked over Rumul’s shoulder, eyes searching, perhaps for Ezarit.

  Several thick-shouldered Singers climbed up the ladders from downtower. Rumul had called for reinforcements. Once they closed ranks around him, I would not be able to get close enough to challenge him. I would be captured. I racked my tired brain for ways to get around them. Then Ciel burst past me and ran to the assembled Singers.