by Fran Wilde
“What’s that?” Ceetcee said. Her resolve wavered now that we were downtower.
“Could be gryphons.” I tried to keep my voice light. Skymouths? Bone eaters? Worse? “Let’s find shelter.” Before anything could rise to investigate our presence.
The winds were more turbulent within the clouds, as we’d learned before. But they were still rideable. The guards had oiled our wings against the damp, had provided us warm quilts, and food. Some weapons, for most of us.
Something moved beneath my foot. A tether, tied to a piton and a weathered grip. One of the shadows began to creep up the side of Bissel, moving closer to us. I unsheathed my knife. Beliak drew his too. Then I grabbed the tether and gave it a snap. “Stop where you are.”
“Nat?” Aliati’s voice, muffled by the clouds.
Beliak reached down and hauled her to the ledge. “Greetings, Risen,” he said, with a sad grin.
She stood, brushing damp threads of moss from her robes. “What happened? I’ve been searching the undercloud all day. I saw the Conclave. They didn’t fly the Singers to the city’s edge?”
Conclave? Realization dawned. “No,” I said, trying to put words to the disaster. Reeling at what she’d seen from beneath the clouds.
She frowned, confused. “If that wasn’t a Conclave, what was it?”
“That was the council. They fell.” I gripped her arm so tight she tried to pull away. “You saw an attack on the platform.” More than that, she’d seen them fall. “Did you see where they landed? Will you take me there?”
“I can, in the morning—it’ll be easier.” She looked up at her dry quarters, and readied to climb.
But we couldn’t wait. We had to find shelter below the clouds, to hide Ciel, and Ceetcee too, from the angry towers. I showed her the message chips. “We have to go below. You’ve done this, when you scavenged. Tell us how?”
She frowned, slowly turning her head to look at the cloudtop. “I’ve never spent a night in the clouds. Don’t know many who have.”
Many, not any. That meant some. “Please, we need your help. We must go now,” Ciel said, her voice edged with fear.
Aliati thought hard. Then made a decision. “There are caves where scavengers leave supplies, in case someone gets caught out, or hurt.”
“Scavengers look out for each other?” Hard to believe.
She caught my look of doubt. “We work alone, keep what we find, each to ourselves. But we leave caches for others in need, in case we need one someday.”
Scavengers had more kindness in them than some citizens in the towers.
“What we must do is not get lost,” Aliati said. “First rule of working in the clouds.”
She knelt on the ledge and pulled the small Gravity game from her robe. In the dim cloudlight, we could barely see the tower sigils on the silk. Bending close caused my shoulders and leg to throb, from landing on Varu.
Using a bone chip to mark the tower where we stood now, Aliati said, “There’s a broken tower, just there.” She pointed to a space in the clouds. “It’s what scavengers call a ghost tower. It stands between Bissel and Naza, but far lower, hidden by the clouds. That’s why those towers are so far apart in the city, when other towers are close.”
She pulled out her tools. Laid the straight edge against the game sheet. “I don’t know exact distances, but it usually takes me about two verses of The Rise to get there.” She began to coil the tether, then half-hitched it to her shoulder strap.
“Are you proposing we go now?” Beliak said.
“Unless you want to stay on this ledge all night? My echoing’s getting good, but I’d rather not risk getting separated.”
She wasn’t merely proposing we go to the ghost tower. She was proposing to come with us. “I’ll show you where the council fell tomorrow, if you want to employ me. Other scavengers have been searching, paid by the towers, but I’m the only one who knows where the council is. So far.”
Ah. She wasn’t doing this out of the goodness of her heart. “I’ll pay you,” I said. I would get Doran to give me tower marks. “And as for not getting lost, we can pick windsigns,” I said. “Keep track of each other like hunters do.” I whistled one as an example: “defend.” Two long notes, one short.
Ceetcee considered for a moment, then whistled “bridge,” a long note with a curl at the end.
Aliati chose “retrieve.” Three long, piercing whistles.
Beliak chose the call for a circle formation. One long note with two short notes following.
Ciel couldn’t decide. So we gave her the windsign for “home.” She liked that.
“We’ll find Moc,” I promised her.
“I believe you,” she whispered back.
One more thing. “Keep an eye out for survivors.” For Ezarit. For Kirit. For others.
“If we find too many survivors, they will slow us down,” Aliati said.
“If we find any,” I said firmly, “we’ll help them. We are not cowards. We won’t turn away someone in need.”
* * *
Aliati searched for the strongest vent she could find, asking Ciel to echo with her in order to help her see the wind’s shape. I scanned the darkening clouds for invisible menaces. The sun began to set as we flew for the ghost tower, tinting the clouds around us orange and gold, then rose and blood.
She took us lower than I’d flown near the Spire. Lower than the net where I’d lost Kirit. Everything above disappeared. Then what were once layers of mist shot through with beams of light, now turned opaque. The tower shadows we’d been using to orient ourselves faded. We could still hear just fine, but we couldn’t see very far at all until our eyes once again grew used to the dim light. I focused on Aliati’s wings, the sound of her whistle: the three long notes. Retrieve.
“Stay together,” I whispered. My jaw ached. I’d been grinding my teeth. My fingers wrapped my wing grips tighter. Then Beliak whistled, and I whistled back. One long and two short notes for him, two long with one short flourish for me. Defend. Ciel whistled next, one long note. Home. A pause. Then Aliati again. We whistled in rotation, spilling air if anyone sounded too far behind. We must have gone twenty rounds or more, we flew so long.
We flew straight until Aliati said, “Should be here.”
Below us and to the left and right of our wingtips, we saw shadows, but we couldn’t see the ghost tower. I circled lower and lower until my feet grazed sturdy bone. I whistled and the others landed in the midst of a heavy cloud that had blocked much of the moonlight and faded to gray. We gathered close together, barely able to see each other’s faces.
“We’ll need to wait here until the moon rises high enough to cast more light into the clouds,” Aliati said. She held her voice calm, which made me more nervous. “If we move in the thick clouds, we could get lost.” We sat, knees and elbows touching. Fingers intertwined, hands holding on to what was left of everything we knew.
I expected Ciel to cry. Everything she’d known, gone twice over. She surprised me by humming a song instead. Not The Rise. Something I’d heard last when Tobiat was alive. I felt warmer, as Ciel began to put words to “Corwin and the Nest of Thieves,” an old Singer ballad.
Corwin dove down and down again,
Through the clouds, fought the deep and the dark.
He returned to the city, once more risen.
Beliak and Ceetcee laughed to hear it, remembering our sessions with Tobiat. Corwin was a rogue—like Tobiat had been—and the song had a rowdy turn. But he’d won in the end.
Aliati didn’t say a word when the first verse was done. The thieves, I remembered too late, were scavengers. “She doesn’t mean any hurt,” I whispered, hoping to broker a peace. “She’s been through a lot. Her brother’s missing.”
“I know,” Aliati said. “Doesn’t mean she can hurt someone else to ease her own pain.”
She had a point.
“Ciel, we’re not Corwin,” I said, finally. She’d been nearing the song’s end.
“I know,”
she said. “Maybe we’re the thieves. I’m changing things.” She sang on.
But what Corwin missed was a tear in his robe
As the thief struck from behind, quiet and bold,
And what Corwin thought was the treasure cold
Against his skin, was the wind on his backside, and the light leaking in.
The new verse had even Aliati laughing and clapping along quietly.
Not bad, for a Singer fledge. I dug into my satchel and handed Ciel an extra-large piece of fruit, then passed the rest around. We ate in companionable quiet, occasionally singing more.
The city had songs for Remembrance, and adventure. But there were no songs for the living cloudbound, the missing. Once the city sang Remembrances at Allmoons, it let the lost and the dead go.
We would make our own songs.
The moon finally shot pale shafts of light through the cloudtop, marking some paths, obscuring others. “Do you want to try now or wait for morning?” Aliati asked.
The thought of spending a whole night on the towertop was not a pleasant one. I stood up. “I’ll go. We’ll come get you soon.” The others gathered closer, preparing to wait.
Aliati and I set grip hooks in the tower, dislodging chunks of gray bone that rattled down the towerside until they disappeared. She tugged at the grips to be sure they were secure. Then we each tied tethers to them, using looping knots Aliati taught me. We tucked the other tethers’ ends through our footslings. If we needed to, we could reel ourselves back to the top of the ghost tower.
“As long as you don’t get hung up on something.” I tried to make it sound like a joke.
“If I do get tangled, I’ll cut the rope and shout until you find me.” Aliati wasn’t joking. We weren’t playing at thieves, and this wasn’t a song. She was as serious as I’d been while trying to drag the fledges away from the Spire a few days before. Neither one of us was willing to pull down those we cared for.
I appreciated that about her. That and her abilities beneath the clouds. “I’ll do the same.”
We needed to find the scavengers’ emergency shelter. I hoped it was safe and dry and out of sight.
Aliati and I let ourselves down the tethers simultaneously. I spared a look up. Silhouetted in the moonlight, Beliak, Ceetcee, and Ciel knelt on the ghost towertop watching us search, their faces hidden in the shadows, but each of them for a moment outlined in silver moonlight. Then the clouds closed again.
When we were out of earshot, I asked, “Any sign of Kirit?”
“I didn’t find her,” she said. “Many good reasons for that. Some not so good.”
A heavy weight settled over me, and I held the rope tightly. “But?” Her words had an empty space at the end, as if she wanted me to ask.
“I found signs of her. A bit of blood spilled on a Spire grotto, as if someone wounded had bedded down there.”
“Show me. Tomorrow. After we find the council.”
Aliati leaned against the tier, her toes jutting out over the ledge. “What if Kirit’s alive and doesn’t want to be found?”
I couldn’t think about that. “The city doesn’t need another ghost, Aliati. She’s alive until we know otherwise.” All of the fallen were.
In the city, anything fallen into the clouds was forfeit. That was tradition. But I’d fallen in and lived. We were here, now. Inside the clouds, there was hope until there wasn’t.
“I don’t think she’d hide on purpose without saying something. Without making sure at least the fledges were safe,” Aliati said.
“The artifex who was working for Dix is missing too,” I said. Aliati might have passed his cave in her travels.
Aliati looked up at the clouds and brushed hair back from her eyes. “Strange.” She sighed. “We should be looking for the cave, not talking so much.”
“What about that there?” I pointed at a shadow on the tower. A section of core wall not altogether grown out? The shadow was small, though. And then it moved.
Aliati chuckled. “Not the cave. Probably a wild bird. Or a bat.”
Probably.
Unsettled, we went lower. “It’s close,” she said. She pointed to a mark carved in the ghost tower. “Scavenger marks.” But the only things nearby were a ledge and a divot in the tower, not anything deep.
In the distance, the moonlight outlined another thick cloud. “We should head back,” I said. “There’s nothing here.”
“Listen, Nat,” Aliati said. “In the clouds you have to be patient and look closely. You can’t decide you don’t like something because it’s below the clouds and you don’t want to be below the clouds.”
She was right. We used pitons and grips to work ourselves closer to the divot. As we approached, we saw the cave was bigger than it had appeared through the clouds. But a cairn sat outside the cave entrance: a pile of jagged, hollowed bones, emptied of marrow.
A bone eater’s cairn? I wanted to leap from the tower and rise, to warn my friends. Aliati put a hand on my arm, stopping me. “Wait. They’re dry. Not new.”
But my eyes scanned the tower, searching for danger. “Don’t move,” I said, pointing. “Look.”
Not too far above us, near where Naza might be hidden in the clouds, shadows tangled and flew apart. When they separated, wings blurred the air, scattering whorls of mist. The moonlight edged a sharp beak. An enormous bone eater, bigger than the one Kirit and I’d seen in the Spire, flew there.
And the second shadow that chased the first? That outline was the unmistakable form I’d fought to never see again.
“Birdcrap,” Aliati said. She pressed herself into the shadows.
Though their skin gave them near perfect camouflage in the city above, in the clouds, skymouths blocked the dim light, and this one’s outline shimmered darkly. The shadow-monster’s tentacles curved out from its bulbous frame. Even without being close to its mouth, we could see that it, too, was enormous. Skymouths in the wild, deep clouds. Amazing. Seeing it, I hoped the skymouths’ smaller cousins, the littlemouths that clung to the towers, lived this far downtower as well.
Many tiers over our heads, the skymouth grappled a bone eater. Aliati and I hid in the mouth of the scavenger’s cave as glossy, black feathers fell against the towers around us, making a sound like rain.
“The others,” I said. “We have to get back there.”
She gripped my arm, tighter this time. “If they’re smart, they’ll lie down on the towertop and won’t move. Like we’re not going to move, got it?”
I got it.
We hunkered below the overhang of the cave, keeping our eyes on the clouds above us. The bone eater screamed, though the clouds muted the sound, and dug its shadow-beak into the skymouth’s shadow-side.
“That big thing lives here in this tiny cave?” I couldn’t imagine a bone eater squeezing inside the opening.
“No. Too big,” Aliati said. “Scavengers put cairns like that out to keep bone eaters like that away. Let’s take a look?”
She sounded more certain than I felt, but we needed shelter—a safe one—so we ducked inside the cave mouth. Despite Aliati’s assurances, I drew my knife and held it ready while Aliati echoed all the way to the back of the cave. “You’re good at that.”
The echoes stopped. “Been studying. Useful trick those Singers had.” She picked up echoing again.
It was dark, and all I heard were the clicks she made and the sounds of my own footsteps bouncing back to me from bone walls. If I closed my eyes, the clicks seemed to make a pattern, but I couldn’t quite understand what it meant. I banged into a wall, reached a hand out to brace myself and touched a cool surface. Nearly cut myself on a sharp edge that was cool like metal. Something Scavengers had put here? Whatever it was, it had become embedded in the cave wall long ago. In old towers, like Lith, I’d seen metal spikes used to split growing bone into sections, so that tunnels appeared, or could be cut more easily later, after the core wall grew past. Tower residents didn’t do it often, because it weakened the tower, but a sca
venger could, using a larger piece of metal than we could afford up above. A metal piece could have caused the gap in the bone that eventually formed this cave.
Besides the spike, the cave was nearly empty. Aliati found two small caches. She clicked her tongue to her teeth, a thoughtful sound, this time. “Food, we don’t need. Oil lamp, we do.” She lit one and hung it from a hook in the cave ceiling. The space was tiny, but crowding five of us inside would be better than hanging nets from a tower in the mist below a skymouth fight, which had begun to look like our other option.
While I worked my way around the cave once more, making sure no bone eaters hid in its walls, Aliati went back to the cave mouth. Moonlight outlined her profile, looking up. I joined her. The two creatures had descended close enough that we could see the bone eater clearly now, and the skymouth hardly at all, except for silver glints of refracted cloudlight. The bone eater’s body bent at an odd angle, its beak opened and shut without making a sound. Its feathers were pressed close to its body, and as we watched, they began to bend and stick out at odd angles. We heard the cracking sound of ribs breaking and the enormous bird gave a strangled squawk. The skymouth had wrapped invisible tentacles around the bone eater and was squeezing the life from it. Dark silver skymouth gore dripped across the bone eater’s face. We heard the hiss of it on feathers. The bird’s still scrambling claws must have punctured the skymouth’s ink sacs.
A small win, too late. The feathered body, nearly half the size of Kirit’s tier on Grigrit, sagged. Its head flopped, its long gray tongue dangled in the air, as its body slowly began to rise.
A skymouth in the blue sky over the city was terrifying enough. A red tear would open from nowhere and the last thing anyone saw was the gaping mouth and rows of glass teeth. But we were in a new habitat now. The dark red maw opened in the gray clouds, and we could see the impact of its enormous flowing tentacles, the size of its body. Giant bones snapped as the skymouth began to tear its prey apart.
The wild skymouths weren’t all gone. Once I overcame my shock, the awe I felt at the sight of them surprised me. In the clouds, the monstrous was magnificent.
