Cloudbound

by Fran Wilde

  “You haven’t changed so much after all,” she said. She sounded happy about that.

  “I’ve changed,” I said, readying my arguments. But they all fell away as a shadow blocked the light from the Gyre and the hole above my head. Kirit and I turned together as an enormous bird blacker than night blocked our exit.

  2

  BONE EATER

  A rattling hiss from deep within the dark expanse raised the hair on my arms. The bone eater bent over me, serrated beak parting. Its purple-black tongue covered with sharp spines tasted the air. Saliva dripped on the floor, on my arm; it burned when it hit my skin. With a screech, the bone eater lifted one of its claws above me, each talon a sharp curve the size of my head. Its dark tail whipped around on the floor for balance. I froze. The creature blocked our escape, left no space to hide.

  We’d been taught to fear skymouths, Singers, clouds. But the bone eater, long lost to time and myth, was what now stood before us, ready to attack. As the talon descended, I swore. The Spire’s walls would never be the last thing I saw in this city.

  I sat up fast, dodging to the left of the claw. I hit the bone eater with my bow.

  Kirit screamed.

  Once, she’d stopped attacking skymouths with that scream. But the bone eater’s inner eyelids came down pale over its dark eyes, and its beak did not veer away. Its claw scraped the floor, gouging bone, then rose high again above us both.

  This time, when the claw dropped, I ducked. Sharp talons missed me and snagged Kirit by the robe. Dragged her across the floor. I tucked and rolled beneath the beast’s legs, my wings clattering on debris. When I got my feet under me, I nocked an arrow. The bird shifted to glare at me through its legs. Slowly, it began to turn, dragging Kirit. She struggled to reach her knife.

  I shot once, then pushed myself to my feet and ran for the Gyre. Behind me, the bone eater clacked its beak and screeched. I’d hit it.

  Kirit scrambled free.

  “Clouds, Kirit, you can’t shout everything down,” I yelled. “Find something to throw at it!”

  The bone eater lowered its enormous head and charged me.

  I unfurled my wings and leapt from the gallery. The bone eater jumped after me, miscalculating the distance. Its head scraped the tier’s ceiling, it was so big. I swung a small parabola around the Gyre’s void, and the bone eater overshot me.

  With a screech, my whipperling, Maalik, dove in to distract the giant bird: a gray wisp against the bone eater’s black expanse. No, Maalik. Get away.

  Before the bone eater could turn and attack again, I locked my wings and nocked another arrow. Took aim and let fly, striking its neck. The creature screamed, snapped at the shaft sticking from its feathers, and vanished into the darkness.

  I circled the Gyre again. I’d hunted for much of my life. I knew the bird wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t coming back up the Gyre fast either.

  Neither was I. Without the windbeaters below, there wasn’t enough of an updraft for me to rise back to the tier where Kirit waited.

  She’d noticed me struggling to find a gust. “Wait there.”

  “Ridiculous thing to say, to someone on the wing, slowly sinking.” But the tension had drained from our voices. I heard her laugh.

  “True.”

  The rough rope the council had sent us with hit the gallery railing closest to me, and I grabbed hold. Dragged myself hand over hand back up to where Kirit had lashed the line to a grip. Above my head, Maalik flew in worried arcs around it, up, up, up.

  “We have to warn the towers,” Kirit panted.

  I nodded agreement. Finally, she was talking sense. Then something caught her eye and she darted around me, to where Rumul’s worktable had fallen. Birdcrap.

  She got down on her hands and knees, then her stomach. Spreading her weight, she reached for something I couldn’t see. I listened for more walls cracking, but heard nothing. Finally she stood up, holding another mildewed, silk-wrapped packet, about an arm’s length across. It looked heavy, but thin. Two pages at most.

  The packet clicked and shifted in her hands. Broken.

  “That won’t do you much good cracked.” Come on, Kirit.

  She frowned. “It has to. But it won’t be enough.”

  “Come on, now, before that thing comes back,” I said.

  Bigger problems, she’d said. We definitely had much bigger problems now.

  But she was turning, studying the walls near the floor. “We need the rest of it.”

  She didn’t listen. Ever. “We’re done here.”

  “We’re not done.” She knelt near a solid-looking part of the tier wall. “Here.” A relieved sigh. “We need as much of the codex as we can find. Rumul must have hidden the most important pages in the one place he knew no Singer would touch.” She pulled aside the trash that had piled against the wall—rags and pieces of broken dishes. A pile of dusty, gray feathers.

  There, at knee-height, two codex-sized pieces of bone pressed against the wall. New bone grew around their edges, turning a strange color. Gray, not the yellowish white I remembered from when Densira rose.

  Kirit yanked at the first tablet. It didn’t budge. She drew her knife, but hesitated, the blade point above a small gap between wall and page.

  “I’ll do it,” I took the knife.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “This is forbidden.”

  “By whom? Kirit, we make the Laws now.” I put the knife edge between the wall and the page. Pried the bone tablet away with a crack, revealing a deep cut in the tower’s wall. Deeper than any carving I’d seen in the Spire. The bone within was spongy and smelled strongly of something I couldn’t place. Almost like new bone, but sour. Thick. “Clouds, what is this?”

  “Heartbone,” Kirit said. “This is the lifeblood of the city.” She looked at the second plate, then grabbed hold and pulled. “Or it was. The color is fading. It’s dying.” Her voice wobbled. The page tore from the wall, leaving exposed, sickly heartbone.

  I handed her the page. “I’m sorry,” I said. How did you mourn a tower? Even one as malevolent as this? “Peace to the Spire.” I touched my eye and pointed up, the gesture that marked the passage of a citizen.

  She watched me and said, quietly, “Thank you.” Tears pooled in her eyes but didn’t fall. She let me grip her shoulder, and put her hand over mine. For a moment, we were simply friends once again. A friendship scarred and wounded, perhaps, but still friends. And it was enough.

  The sun passed beyond the Spire’s apex, and we were in shade once again. She looked down at the pages she held. “Birdcrap.” Rooted through the shards in the silk packet.

  “What’s wrong now?” I was eager to leave this place.

  She pointed at the top of one tablet. “The broken one says Challenge.” A long line of date marks that I recognized and symbols that I didn’t ran down the page. She shifted to show me the other page. Hesitated, then pointed. “Conclave.”

  “There’s nothing about tower growth here. Doran wanted that.”

  I couldn’t turn my eyes from the Conclave page. The lines spoke for themselves. Lawsbreakers. Grouped in tens, then hundreds. My eyes itched and my vision blurred. Finally, Kirit tucked the pages into her satchel, though they were almost too big for it. She couldn’t secure the cover properly. Three whole pages, broken pieces of more.

  “Kirit, it has to be enough. The bone eater is going to come back, or its friends are.”

  She nodded, sadly. “It will have to be enough.”

  How did the song with bone eaters in it go? Terror of the Clouds? I tried to recall Tobiat’s exact words again. They carry the dead away. But what did they do to the living? I didn’t want to find out.

  We ascended the last tier together and stood side by side on the Spire’s lip. “Here,” Kirit said. “Conclave happened here.”

  The way she said it, I knew she meant my father’s Conclave. His mark, scratched somewhere on that terrible page. We’d been infants when it happened. “It wasn’t your fault.”<
br />
  I took her hand again and stood next to my oldest friend in the city as the sun slid towards the cloudtop and the horizon. The wind had cooled even further, and below us, the doomed Spire settled and creaked. All around it, the towers of my home stood like beacons against the dark, their tiers open to the setting sun, filled with green gardens and colorful banners. I took a deep breath, feeling like I’d escaped from a prison.

  Kirit wiped her eyes, then checked my wings. “No holes,” she said, finally. “You were lucky.”

  “You were, too.” I readied myself to fly. But she stayed me, her hand on my arm.

  “Tell me about the vote.” She’d remembered after all.

  Doran had advised me not to tell her. Said it was for her own good. But now? How could I not? “Tomorrow,” I said. “Or the next day. There have been too many roars. And now a bone eater this high in the towers? It’s bad luck. The city needs appeasement. The remaining Singers will be tried for their crimes against the city. Those with the most Lawsmarkers will be taken,” I pressed my lips together as she stared at me. “And there will be a Conclave.” The first since Spirefall.

  Her jaw dropped. “Thrown down. My mother agreed to this? You agreed to this?”

  “There are enough votes to overrule your mother,” I said slowly. It was what Doran had said when I’d helped count the projected votes. “But she does not yet know.” Doran’s instructions again. Ezarit was too personally invested in this. Worse, no matter how much I admired her, Ezarit was a whipperling leader, ready to listen, interested in compromise. We needed a hawk. A gryphon.

  Kirit paled. “We have to tell her,” she said. “We have to stop this.”

  “You cannot, Kirit. You’re not even council. You’re not supposed to know.”

  Kirit could never control her emotions. Her jaw tightened and her expressions passed through rage and dismay to sadness and resolve. “But you knew. You agreed to it.”

  I dipped my head in acknowledgment. Convincing councilors to vote now wasn’t something I was ashamed of. The towers wanted action. Expected this of their leaders.

  “You have no idea what you do. How horrible it is. These are people, Nat.”

  “They are Singers. They threaten the towers’ integrity.” I was sure of that. Each month that passed towards Allmoons, there were more riots and more tower attacks. The remaining Singers had been sequestered after the first riot. But the city’s anger had grown. “There must be a Conclave. For the city’s sake.”

  Atop the Spire, with the sky turning pink and orange around us, Kirit stared at me.

  “You’ll understand, when there’s been more time,” I said. “When the city is stable again. Maybe someday you’ll be ready to sit on the council with us.” I sounded like Doran, talking to other councilors, convincing them.

  A flight of bats poured from the cracked Spire wall, startling us. They spun in the air, snapping at bugs. I heard Kirit draw a ragged breath.

  “Then you’ll send me down with them,” she said, stripping her wings off and handing them to me.

  3

  HEART OF THE CITY

  Kirit stared at me. She pressed her wings to my chest.

  I grabbed at them, fearing she’d drop them over the Spire’s side next. Grabbed her hand too.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go, not any of it. I stood there on the Spire, clutching at Kirit, but hearing Doran’s words after I’d been elected to the council.

  He’d come to find me at Densira. Brought a bolt of silk for Ceetcee, teas for Elna. We’d stood on the balcony, and I hoped he’d ask to mentor me on the council, as Ezarit had already asked Hiroli Naza. Doran’s robes were richly quilted; his many tower marks were woven in his hair. And his laugh boomed reassuringly.

  “Son,” Doran said, “you were handed a bad game and a second chance. More than one. The Singers killed your father, impoverished your family. They did it to scare people. They used you to do it.”

  Yes, they had used me, and my family. Doran felt that, when Ezarit had known me all her life and hadn’t paid it any mind.

  “You screwed up, too, didn’t you? My own kids screwed up once or twice.”

  I swallowed my pride. Some Laws had certainly been broken. They might have needed to be.

  “You broke Laws. Not without good reason, but Laws nonetheless. Now you have another chance. Now you’re a hero who saved the city from skymouths, from Singers. You could be a good leader, maybe even great, to unite the towers. To help us rise again, on our own this time.” He looked at me quietly for a moment. I waited him out. He was a trader; he was pitching me hard. He cleared his throat. “To do that, we need invention, curiosity, and decisive action. We need to uncover the city’s secrets, set them out for all to see. We can’t flinch at the hard parts. Sound like you?”

  Oh, it did. I said as much. He’d clapped me on the shoulder. “Tell your family you’re apprenticing with a lead councilor, then. And tomorrow we start on the hard part.”

  “Like what?” I wanted to start right then.

  Doran smiled, pleased. “That’s the metal in you. But it’s delicate too, like a good wing. You can’t talk about this until enough of the council agrees with us. I’ll show you how to get people to agree with you. This one will go over easy, but it gets harder after that.”

  “What will go over easy? If it’s a question of safety, we do what we must.”

  “We need to cut ourselves off clean from the Singers. Kirit does too. She’s had enough time to recover. She needs to help the city’s leaders, if she won’t become one herself. She’s offering to help a little bit, but she’s stubborn.”

  “That sounds like Kirit.”

  “Does it? I worry she might be affected by her injuries, her fever.” He was concerned about her, about me. “She doesn’t understand the tension in the city right now, that’s for certain. We need to help her understand.”

  I’d said yes. I would help my mentor. I’d help my city. And my friend. Yes.

  Now, atop the Spire, I wrapped Kirit’s fingers around her wings. Made a warding sign with my hands. “Put these back on. It was decided. You’re not guilty of anything.”

  My satchel shifted when I reached out to take her arm to let her know I wasn’t judging her. The Lawsmarkers inside clacked and rattled. She pulled her arm away.

  “I’m not guilty? Of letting skymouths terrorize the city? Of taking Singer vows?” Her voice rippled across the air in angry waves. “Who decided who isn’t guilty? Who has done all this deciding in the city’s name?”

  Kirit, my wing-sister, wingless atop the Spire. Shouting. Irrational. Unlucky. She would fall, and I would be responsible. I said what I could to calm her.

  “It hasn’t been technically decided yet. There hasn’t been a vote,” I said. “But there will be, and the vote will carry.”

  The look in her eyes when I said that made me regret every word. But she put her arms through her wingstraps again, and angrily began buckling them. “What about the fledges? They can’t help where they were born. Will you throw them down too?”

  “I hadn’t—wait. No! Kirit, wait.” No one was talking about fledges.

  “What do Ceetcee and Beliak think of this?” She stared at me, the wild strands of her hair flying in the wind, her scars stark on her anger-darkened cheeks. “What about Elna?”

  They didn’t know. None of them. It was Doran’s idea, and he’d sworn me to silence. “I couldn’t—” I ground my teeth hard. It had all happened fast, and I’d sworn, we’d all sworn. All the junior councilors, and some senior delegates. Vant had been all for it. “Kirit, I shouldn’t have told you, even. I’ll be punished.”

  “By whom?” she yelled.

  “The fledges are safe. Those who listen and are acclimating, at least.” I kept trying to make this better, and all I was doing was making it worse. But she had her wings back on and both hands free. Something I’d said had been the right thing. So I spoke again in a rush. Her safety was important too. “You’ll have
to renounce the Singers, of course. To keep your citizenship. Take a tower name again.”

  Wide-eyed, she gripped the front of my robes. Maalik launched off my shoulder with a noisy squawk. Her silver-marked face came close to mine, and I felt her breath hot on my cheek in the cold air. “Renounce? How can I possibly do that, when it’s clear I—” As she shook me, a curl of her hair brushed a mark on her cheek. A dagger. “Doesn’t the city have bigger problems than prosecuting Singers?”

  “The Singers are dividing the city. The city is angry and needs to be appeased. Haven’t you heard? It needs leadership. You don’t understand.” Doran’s words. My heart pounded, this high above the clouds, my wings still half furled. Even with wings, if I had to dive after her, we’d plummet fast.

  She shook me again. “Tell me everything. Help me understand what’s happening, Nat. We get no news at Grigrit.” She gestured to her carry-sack, to the codex pages. “I was trying to bargain with Doran for information and food for the fledges. But no one will tell me anything since I declined the council. It was not the most politic of decisions.” She’d stopped shaking me. Looked up at me, her eyes wide. “Tell me what’s going on. Once, not that long ago, I did that for you.”

  She was right. In the Gyre below us now, she’d told me Singer secrets.

  All the fears I had about telling her the truth? She’d felt those. And more. I knew fully what she’d done back in the Gyre. Broken Singer Laws to save me. I’d been so angry with her that I’d forgotten.

  I started to speak, but she spoke first, fierce and determined, misinterpreting my stunned silence.

  “Tell me or I’ll tell everyone about the trial, starting with Elna.”

  Elna. We’d tried to protect her from the developments in the city as much as possible. Anger flared. “She’s ill, Kirit. You haven’t seen her since Spirefall, and you’d tell her this?”

  “If I had to. I am sorry to hear that she’s sick. I had no birds, no messages. I’ll come to see her. Is it a cough?”

  I shook my head. How could she have missed the birds we’d sent? Had someone at Grigrit intercepted them?