Cloudbound

by Fran Wilde

  The city rises on Singers’ wings, remembering all, bearing all;

  Rises to sun and wind on graywing, protecting, remembering.

  Never looking down. Tower war is no more.

  The city was coming apart: each tower for itself. As the songs warned.

  “Hurry, then,” I said. But she dithered, turning this way and that. Searching. “Kirit, really. If you don’t know where to look, let’s end this. Whatever you want from Doran, there’s got to be a better way to get it. I have a vote to prepare for.” I hadn’t meant to say that last bit.

  “Vote? More Laws? Because of the riots?” She must have heard the rumors. There’d been market riots over food, over fair trades. Over Singers walking past. The most recent on Varu, two days ago. There’d been so many skymouth losses during Spirefall, and too much anger from survivors.

  “You’d know if you were on the council, instead of making expeditions like this one.” It came out sharp and fast. Maybe I’d meant it to. I wanted to fight with her about this—her responsibility—about everything.

  Even here, in the Spire’s ruins. Especially here.

  She met my gaze for a moment. Her shoulders squared. “There haven’t been any riots on Grigrit,” she said. “Doran runs a tight tower.” But then she sighed. “Let’s do what we’re here for, and argue about that later. The codex should help. And then you will tell me who’s getting new Laws this time.”

  All of them, I wanted to say. All the Singers. Including the Nightwing Wik. We’d get Rumul too, if we could find his body.

  But we’d been sworn to secrecy until the council was ready. It was our one chance to unify the city, and the timing had to be right.

  “Nat,” she said again. She reached out a hand, silvered with two Singer marks, and seared with the wilder lines—marks made by skymouth tendons acrid on her tawny skin as she’d fought Rumul to the death. The fight that had eventually cracked the Spire.

  I was caught between taking her hand and revulsion. Not at the appearance of her hand, but at the thought of all she’d done. The Spire had cracked, and the skymouths hidden inside—hidden by the Singers in order to protect the city—had escaped. Many had died. She’d fought then too, and me beside her; Spire and tower fighting together until all the monsters had been captured.

  Now she was a hero, but increasingly unwelcome. The city had found its path without her. But Doran had trusted her enough to come here, with an escort, saying, “She’s earned another chance, Nat. Her decisions lately notwithstanding, she defended the city once.”

  Her fingers hung in the air, inches from my arm. Then they trembled and she pulled away. Her brass-flecked eyes, much like Ezarit’s, but framed by silvered scars, seemed to plead with me. Then she bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Nat. I’m sorry for your anger.”

  “You have to pick a side, Kirit. You can’t be tower and Spire both. Not anymore.”

  “If I can’t be both, who can?”

  “Why would you want to? They were monsters. You knew that when you fought Rumul. Before that too.” Anger, bubbling up. Singers had killed my father in order to keep their terrible secret. They’d tried to kill me.

  Not they. She. Kirit.

  “It’s not that simple!” Kirit threw up her hands. Dust curled in the disturbed air currents. “Some worked against Rumul, from the inside. Why are you repeating rhetoric when you know the truth, Nat?” The tower creaked again. “Many fought for the towers.”

  I knew it wasn’t that simple. My father had tried the same a generation before.

  On my wrist, a faded blue silk cord held a single message chip. One of my father’s carvings, found after Spirefall. “They moved too slow. Too many died,” I said, each word sent after her like arrows. “You should be angriest of all.”

  I reached out then, to the Kirit I’d known since childhood, to Kirit Densira, not Kirit Skyshouter, but my hand grasped air. She’d already turned away to search more of the dim tier, and a large alcove nearby.

  From the tier above, a floor had collapsed into a pile of rubble in the alcove. A carved stool stuck crookedly from beneath shards of ceiling and wall. Several more cracks ran across the floor where we stood.

  “Rumul’s office was above,” she whispered, turning in place. Getting her bearings.

  My wrapped foot slid over the bone floor, testing the seams. The wreckage signified that the floors—tough outgrowths of bone at each new level—could sunder and break without warning.

  Working in secret before his death, my father, the artifex Naton, had riddled the Spire with holes. I was glad he’d drilled Rumul’s office as thoroughly as he had, but I wished I didn’t have to walk through it now.

  I looked closely at the fallen ceiling, and the small patch of sky that showed through another hole in the wall. Those weak points had helped us bring down Rumul. And the whole Spire too, releasing the monsters within. Now the same weaknesses threatened our safety.

  Kirit shivered like she was still feverish. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Kirit’s ears were sharp, even after her illness. Secret Singer training. Echoes. Eerie stuff. Flying at night was good, but the sharp hearing? Disturbing.

  I peered into the Gyre. “Just bone chips falling from where we hit the walls, probably,” I said. “Don’t go thinking everything’s a skymouth!” I made tentacle-finger gestures and a face to go with them, wide jaw, tongue wagging. It must have looked awful, but suddenly I was afraid too—of the Spire collapsing, of the clouds far below, of a skymouth lurking, uncaptured and invisible, below—and I didn’t want Kirit to see it.

  I was a city hero, just like her, at least to some. And a city councilor. A junior councilor.

  “No time to be afraid,” Kirit whispered. She picked up the pace of her search, pulling shards of bone from the rubble.

  The slop rope we’d descended swung and smacked against the wall. A sudden breeze? The soft scratching sounds could have been my imagination. Then a screech echoed up the Gyre that made my skin crawl. Kirit turned, eyes wide.

  “Only bats,” I said. Please be bats. But a dark shadow circled the lowest visible tiers, far too big for a bat. As it moved, its tail swung and flicked. A beam of sunlight hit it from above. Feathers glistened on broad wings. A long beak stitched up and down as it sniffed the air. I edged back, pulling Kirit with me.

  Clouds. Those feathers are the size of my arm.

  “There were songs,” I whispered. “Old ones. Of things living in the clouds that carried away the dead.” Let’s fly, Kirit. What’s down there is wrong; it is danger.

  Words from an ancient song echoed in my ear, in an old friend’s voice:

  They eat the stars.

  They crack the bones.

  They …

  Peering over the gallery edge, I struggled to remember the rest of the words. But all was dust and darkness.

  Ceetcee, Beliak, and I had studied with the old windbeater, Tobiat, while I was being punished for attacking the Spire. Weighed down with so many Lawsmarkers, including Treason, I could barely fly. I couldn’t hunt. The day Ceetcee—whom I knew from wingtest—landed on my lowtower tier with fruit for Elna? I’d waved her off with a wary “We don’t need that.” But she’d stayed, had even coaxed Tobiat uptower. When Beliak brought two geese he’d shot, and work for us to share—winding sinew and fiber into ropes for bridges—I began to feel part of the city again. Not a Lawsbreaker. Productive. Tobiat had singsonged at us while we worked.

  Tobiat had been sharing what history he knew, it was clear now. Singers had kept the city’s stories to themselves for generations. Verses from “The Bone Forest” and “Terror of the Clouds.” “Corwin and the Nest of Thieves.” After Spirefall, scavengers had found carvings far downtower that had matched his songs. But Tobiat had died in the market riots at Viit, and I was already forgetting what he’d taught me.

  Doran was right. Each new violence cost us stability, good people, knowledge. Even though the council was preserving Tobiat’s legacy, his
trove of songs, for the good of the city, it wasn’t the same.

  “Must be a gryphon,” Kirit said, shaking me out of my thoughts. She sounded hopeful. Gryphons were sharp-beaked and aggressive. “Or a trick of the light. Come on.”

  “That’s far bigger. Worse than a gryphon. That could be a bone eater.”

  She’d heard the songs too, of course. Right from the Singers themselves. Shook her head. “They’re cloudbound. Never seen this high.”

  “Maybe not when the Spire had skymouths hidden in the Gyre,” I said. In talking with Doran and Hiroli about the towers, and how fast they used to grow—which was Hiroli’s project—we’d compared rumors. That skymouths in the clouds had battled gryphons and bigger birds. That they’d won. “Maybe they were keeping the bone eaters in check.” My voice was little more than a whisper, quiet against the scratching sounds below. I closed my eyes against the vision of a giant mouth opening wide while invisible tentacles wrapped Kirit, pulling her away.

  “If there are bone eaters this high,” she said without looking away from the rubble pile, “the city has bigger problems than the Singers.”

  The memory of Spirefall, and of almost losing everyone I cared about, was still too fresh. Ceetcee had fought that day. Beliak too. I took a calming breath and let it spool out from between my lips. “Now we really have to hurry,” I said, pulling her with me towards the slop rope. “Up and out.”

  But she pulled back, then slipped my grip. Headed towards the rubble.

  “If it’s not a gryphon, it’s something else,” she said. “A bone eater won’t want living bone. Otherwise the towers would have been food long ago. We’ll be fine.”

  “Unless it’s dining on Singer skeletons from Spirefall.” Typical tower talk, these days. But she froze. She didn’t turn, didn’t yell at me. I wished she would yell. Ceetcee and Beliak certainly would have. Ezarit too. Sometimes I was an idiot.

  But I could try to fix my mistakes. “That wasn’t your fault, Kirit,” I said quickly. Maybe I only made things worse. “Tell me more about what we’re looking for.”

  No Singers we’d questioned would describe the codex well enough to anyone from the towers. Bone tablets, they’d said. Big ones. There were a lot of those.

  Kirit held her scarred hands up, an arm span apart. “Most pages are this big. Marks carved on both sides. We need…” She stopped to think. “The pages charting the city’s roars”—she meant the destructive, roaring quakes—“the Gyre challenges, and”—she paused, swallowing hard—“the appeasements.”

  “You mean Conclave.” When Singers had fed Lawsbreakers to the clouds after a roar, it was not called an appeasement. It was called a Conclave. “Use the word if you’re going to think it.”

  “Yes. That. They’re marked with numbers of Lawsbreakers and kinds of Laws too.” So many Laws. So many ways to break them. Again I felt the ghost weight of Lawsmarkers around my wrist. The Lawsmarkers I’d gathered uptower bumped against my side.

  “Forget the challenges.” The fewer pages we had to find, the faster we could be out of here.

  “No. The city needs to know how many times Singers had challenged Rumul and the leaders before him. To know that not everyone agreed. To see differences among the Singers. Between Rumul’s allies and Wik, for instance.”

  “It won’t do any good, given the city’s current mood. They’re guilty of not doing enough, at the very least.”

  “Even Wik? You fought by his side. And he yours. And me?” She stared at me.

  I felt another twinge of regret. “You were taken to the Spire against your will.” But in the end, she’d sung Singer vows. The only reason she didn’t need to heed Escort, the new Law, was because she was the Skyshouter. “You ended the Singers’ reign.”

  She was right about one thing. The city had bigger problems now. And the city was about to call on her to renounce the Singers. To denounce them all, even Wik. I was forbidden from telling her; we needed her help first.

  She bit her lip and stepped through the ruins of Rumul’s office in silent disagreement, ignoring sounds from the Gyre that were now loud enough that I could hear them too.

  Her silence rankled. “You know I’m right. The people have every right to be angry over what happened in their midst.” You have to know I am angry too. “I fought by your side. And Ceetcee, and Beliak. All of us, together.”

  At home, Beliak had given me extra pitons, a sack of spiced apples. Meantime, Ceetcee had worried about the Spire’s stability, and Kirit’s. About her behavior lately. “She’s been through so much. Give her a chance,” Elna had added.

  I was trying. Despite how frustrating Kirit was. And how stubborn.

  “We care about you, Kirit,” I said as gently as I could. “All of us worry. Let’s hurry.”

  “If you care, quit distracting me. Keep an eye on the Gyre and whatever’s down there,” she said. Gruff rejection. I took another deep breath and complied.

  Trying to watch both the Gyre’s depths and Kirit as she navigated the rubble was a tough task. After a while with no movement from below, I decided she must have been right about the gryphon. I joined her in the alcove.

  “I’m trying to think like Rumul,” she said. That gave me chills, but she added, “He might have put the codex and other valuables somewhere out of the way.” She hadn’t told me to get back to my post, so I drew closer. “They brought it to the Spire’s roof during the last…” She paused, but I waited her out. The gap in her sentence spread.

  Conclave.

  It was only a word, I knew. But her not saying it, while she wanted me to forgive the Singers? Not all right. Making her say it would give me some satisfaction at least.

  “You can’t pretend you’re above all the Spire’s horrors by not saying that word.” Ceetcee would swat me if she ever found out I was talking to Kirit like this. “Speaking a truth brings it out into the open. You know that as well as I do. Say it.”

  “Conclave” was an important word. But Kirit remained silent.

  “It’s part of our history, and part of the city’s survival. Everyone knows what happens when the city roars unappeased,” I said. Towers cracked and broke. People died. Monsters escaped.

  “After that—after Conclave—Rumul must have hidden the codex.” The hook she used to test the rubble knocked loose a tumble of bone. I heard a quiet sob. “You haven’t seen a Conclave, Nat. They were horrible.”

  She was right. I’d never seen one. I couldn’t imagine what they were like, but I’d lost my father to one. I was about to reply when a sharp sound echoed off the walls. A clatter and a raucous screech.

  “What’s the bone eater doing?” Kirit smoothed her robe.

  “I thought you said it wasn’t a bone eater.”

  She didn’t reply.

  I stepped on the pile and levered myself up, hoping my legs wouldn’t wobble. The pieces of floor and ceiling, the wreckage of Rumul’s worktable, shifted and settled. I moved again, holding my breath. At the pile’s edge, closest to the wall, I spotted a faint glint of brass peeking from a knotted and torn package of gray silk. Metal. I reached for it. Metal was worth many tower marks.

  The floor beneath me creaked as I neared the Spire’s ruined wall.

  “Nat,” Kirit whispered.

  “The artifexes promised this tier was still safe. Ceetcee too.” Especially Ceetcee. I put as much confidence into my voice as I could. “Promised” was a very strong word for what she’d said. “Hoped” was closer.

  My ears picked up sounds that none in the city ever wanted to hear. Cracking sounds, from deep within the walls.

  Kirit heard them too of course. “Nat, get back!”

  Backing up, I knocked loose a pile of small tablets. Carvings excised from Spire walls. They rattled to the floor. One broke, exposing another layer of carvings. More secrets.

  “Nat,” Kirit whispered again. The cracking noise grew louder.

  “What?” I asked, sharply. I wanted to get the brass.

  The Spire�
�s outer wall crackled over the wind. Then the thick noise of bone ripping from bone filled my ears. The far edge of rubble where I’d stood moments ago disappeared. In its place was blue sky, a cloud of windblown dust. The new hole in the wall ran down to the tier floor. There, existing cracks darkened, then widened near my feet. I backed away fast, the tier below me already visible. More rubble fell away.

  The surface beneath my feet began to move. I slipped.

  “Kirit! Run!” I turned and scrambled, but the crack was too wide and I fell into it, riding a wave of dust and bone. The Spire echoed with the sound of debris falling hard to the next tier. In the dust cloud, I grabbed for anything solid as I slid, and caught my bone hook on something that hadn’t moved, hadn’t fallen in. The edge of Rumul’s worktable, wedged at an angle in a crack.

  My feet swung free above the lower tier. The bone hook, strong enough to carry a flier beneath me, held true. “Kirit?” I said, over the roar in my dust-filled ears. My face and arms were caked in bone dust. What was left of the pile we’d been searching was a jagged mess below me. I stifled a sneeze.

  Our spare rope dropped down the hole beside me. Kirit, breathing hard, slid down the rope. “We’re going down. It’s too unstable up here.” Her voice was calmer now. Whatever else, Kirit could think straight in emergencies.

  She dropped to the floor. Using one hand, I grabbed the rope, while holding fast to the bone hook with the other. When I was ready, I let the bone hook go and swung the weight of my body onto the rope, then through air that sparkled with tiny shards of bone to the tier floor. Once down, I eased to my hands and knees, not trusting my legs yet. Beneath my aching hands, bone dust and metal glittered. I clutched at the shiny bit of brass that had caught my eye above. Squared corners, etched, my fingers told me. I dropped it in my satchel. The metal had poked from a silk-wrapped packet above. Where was that packet? I crawled forward, searching. Kirit could have the codex. I could sell the brass.

  Kirit caught me searching. “Scavengers are Lawsbreakers, huh?”

  “We’re on council business, with permission. This isn’t scavenging.” I might have grinned.