Cloudbound

by Fran Wilde

  Doran finally nodded. He clasped Ceetcee’s hand.

  Beliak knelt with Djonn and Aliati on the ghost towertop. They sketched several ways to capture Dix and reveal what she hid from the city, then discarded them. Plotted rescue attempts using decoys, long climbs up the towers. Most plans, worked through to their logical end, led us from the clouds, to Laria, and capture.

  No one was happy, least of all with me.

  They stared at the silk square with the tower map on it. “What if—” I broke the tense silence. “We tell the people on Laria and nearby towers how they’re being manipulated. We tell them about the fledges, the kaviks. Show them how they could be next. Some will rise against her. Then we visit Dix at Laria before the Conclave, before she gains more power—”

  “Why not fight now, and get it over with?” Kirit interrupted.

  Ceetcee answered, “I think most towers just want to survive, so many will turn away from fights unless they’re sure they can win, because they want to be safe. There’s been too much loss already. If we can avoid more violence, we stand a better chance of swaying the city away from Dix.”

  “That means fewer people to fight, if it comes to that,” Beliak countered.

  “I’ll alert the guards I have left at Varu, and the strongest fighters from Densira and Mondarath,” Doran said.

  “I wish we had lighter-than-air, and more weapons, in case it does come to a fight,” I said.

  “That,” said Aliati, “Djonn and I can help you with.”

  21

  TREASON

  Aliati and I dressed in hunter blue cloaks from the scavengers’ ghost tower cache. Mold flecked the hoods, but not too obviously. I secured my knife on my arm, my bow across my chest. Aliati mimicked my preparations, and I showed her how to slide her quiver of arrows beneath her wingset, out of the way, but ready.

  We’d look like hunters heading to market. I didn’t want to think about why scavengers would need hunters’ cloaks.

  “Are you sure you want to choose sides?” I asked her. “Even if it risks your safety, and Djonn’s?” Even if it means the city knows you to be a scavenger and a thief?

  Aliati tilted her head at Kirit, sitting at the cave mouth, sharpening her bone knife over and over again. “She’s chosen a side, and it’s neither Tower nor Spire. She’s chosen the city,” Aliati whispered. “I choose the same.” She looked long and hard at me. “You didn’t give me a choice before.”

  “There aren’t any easy choices left.” No one was right; no one was a hero. Not anymore.

  “Hearing you say that eases my mind,” she said. “Maybe I’ll choose your side too.”

  Somewhat comforting, that, even from Aliati.

  We left the others in the ghost tower cave, with Ciel watching over Maalik’s recovery. Ceetcee and Beliak carved message chips to alert the towers about Dix. Djonn began making something he said would help us deliver the messages.

  A mist-filled wind buoyed our wings, and we slowly spiraled up the morning gusts until we rose close to the cloudtop. By flying to the south from the ghost tower, we reached the core wall of Ginth and drove in our grips. The tower to the left was Harut. The tower to the right, Laria.

  “We’re going to need a reason for being there,” Aliati said. “And a distraction. I’ll do that part. You find where the lighter-than-air is.” She handed me a series of long tethers, tied together, then looped into a coil so it could be carried over a shoulder.

  I stared at the tether. “Wait. I’m the thief?”

  She grinned and nodded. “You can’t get caught if something happens in the market. Dix would throw you down. I’m invisible. If it works, I’ll come help you.” We thought the tethers, together, might reach all the way to an old handgrip on Laria, hidden just below the clouds. We hoped to tie up the sacks filled with lighter-than-air, wait for dark outside the tower, then pull the sacks through the webs and down to us. As long as the tethers held and no one spotted us sneaking into the storage area. Or caught us pulling them out. “We’ll just be faster,” Aliati said when I questioned that part of the plan.

  “What kind of distraction are you thinking?” I’d always gone at problems head-on. Aliati had different tactics, ones I wasn’t at all comfortable with, even now. Especially now.

  She shrugged. “Let’s wait until we know what the market’s like. Then we’ll know better how to work our way into the silkspinners’ storage.”

  Many in the city kept a small hatch of family silk spiders for household needs from patches and netting to bandages, or for silkweb and thread sale at market. They preferred not knowing too much about silk production for wings, robes, screens, and banners. The silkspinner towers weren’t pleasant places to visit.

  I’d been no different. We’d bought our silk from traders like Ezarit.

  A larger hatch, the kind needed to make silk production viable, required a tower working together to ensure the spiders were well fed, gently harvested, and continued to breed. And the mess. Even a few silk spiders could speckle the floor beneath their webs with the acid they used to digest their dinners.

  Dix had chosen to stage her revolution from Laria. I shuddered. I hated the very idea of wandering the silkspinner towers. Aliati looked as uncomfortable as I felt. I wondered if she’d made me thief and risked the greater danger of getting caught in order to stay out of the webs.

  She pointed at the dirgeon nest perched precariously on one of Ginth’s lowtower tiers. “See if there are any eggs.” She pointed, and I climbed up to the balcony. The nest contained eggshells and hatchlings.

  Aliati stuffed the wriggling baby dirgeons into her satchel. “Excellent. We’ll be hunters with something to trade.”

  A flier passed between the towers, moving quickly towards Laria. We followed them, staying back enough to avoid being spotted, we hoped. Gliding several tiers above the clouds, moving from one set of tower shadows to another, the flier wore dark wings and robes patterned with dark dyes on lighter silks. They doubled back twice, causing Aliati and me to dip into the clouds when we saw her wings curving for a turn. Once, they shifted gusts so abruptly, I wondered if they’d spotted us.

  They made their second circuit of Harut, then spun on a draft, searching the sky for someone, and continued more directly on their way.

  Aliati and I followed, still below and behind them, tracing shadows across the cloudtop. The flier disappeared into the same tower we were heading for: Laria. On the market tier.

  “Wait a few moments,” I said. “So we won’t be challenged for following them.”

  Aliati shook her head. “Even if we are, few will recognize us as being from a different quadrant, especially as dirty and weather-worn as we are.” The moldy cloaks were useful for that. “Don’t talk too much. If someone asks, remember we have hatchlings to trade.”

  But when we landed at Laria, we were relieved to find the black-winged flier was nowhere to be seen. The market area of the tier was clear of webs. The stalls looked sparsely supplied, but there was still food to buy. A family passed us, the children carrying a basket of stone fruit and tiny apples. A small bird carcass hung upside-down from their mother’s fist.

  Though the stalls were sparse, several nearby tables were filled with Justice players, and more crowded around, watching. Another noisy group surrounded a small birdfighting ring. Several blackwings stood near a line of hanging webs, blocking access to the more-interior spaces. Aliati nudged me. “The storage space is behind those.”

  “How do we get back there?” I asked. We needed something that would give me enough time to slip past the guards and get to the storage space.

  “The easiest thing would be to shout ‘fire,’” Aliati said. “Silkspinner towers hate fire.”

  I thought of the stampede that might ensue. “What about flipping a stall?” I eyed one selling raw-silk dolls.

  She frowned. “Not enough of a stir.”

  “We don’t want a riot,” I said. I’d only seen a wisp of one, before the Grigrit guard
s stopped it, but it had been enough. I’d lost friends on Viit.

  “Then we’ll trade first,” Aliati countered, and she led me into the crowd.

  * * *

  Aliati showed the dirgeon hatchlings to a silk spider stall closest to the back of the market. “We’re hoping to trade. These are pretty fat.” The birds were crawling with lice and had shat all over the inside of her satchel.

  “We’ve no tower marks yet,” the young girl behind the tower said. “Let me fetch one of my uncles.” She put a boy of five or six Allmoons in charge of the stall. Then she ran, her brown knees showing through tears in her robes and leggings, past the guards and through a hole in the webs.

  Aliati and I waited, hearts pounding. We could see her move through the silkwebs into the back of the tier. I noted how carefully she parted them with a child’s bone knife. She passed into a living space of sorts, where shadowy bone supports braced tunnels and covered nests for sleeping kept out the worst of the yellow webs. Creeping out into the market, the ceiling rippled with hand-span-sized spiders, their striped legs and weavers’ claws making soft taps and drags as they skittered across each other, drawing out new trails of silkthread as they passed.

  A hatch of young silk spiders was walled off near the market, the silkthread there grayer and less strong. The family was smart to keep hatchlings separate. Silk spiders ate their own young.

  The girl burst back through the webs near the residence and handed us two Laria markers each. “Uncle says if you know where more dirgeon nests are, you should come backtier for tea to discuss returning.” She pointed at the way she’d come before resuming her place at the stall.

  Aliati inclined her head in thanks. “I have business elsewhere, but my friend would be grateful.” Then she turned her attention to the marketplace.

  I walked towards where the girl had indicated, every muscle tense. Aliati walked farther into the market.

  As I came to the webline, I heard Aliati shout, “Spirebreaker! I saw her!” Oh no.

  People rushed to where she pointed, including the children from the stall. I turned to look, like everyone else, but Aliati was already gone, ducking away through the stalls. Two blackwings hurried towards the gathering group.

  With a clatter, a stall fell over near the market entrance. More people moved, some jostling each other. Someone yelled, “Spirebreaker!” again, farther away.

  Doran was right; the city was so tense anything could light it up. The families in the market scrambled to the shadows, herding their children to safety. A fight broke out by the gaming tables. When the shouting reached a peak, the tower’s guards—all blackwings—rumbled past us, towards the expanding melee.

  I kept moving, and soon Aliati joined me. I frowned at her and she shrugged. “It worked, didn’t it?”

  Beyond the market, Laria’s silkweb draped everywhere. Already this morning, lowtower women and children stood just inside their balconies, harvesting great hand spans of silkthread that had collected around them in the night by looping the silk from palm to elbow. They seemed undisturbed by the noise from the market.

  Down the thickened tunnels of this tier, close to the central core, I heard voices. One familiar one. Aliati echoed softly. “There’s a larger room that way.” Away from the voices. “That’s where the air sacks are.”

  “You go,” I said, handing her the tethers. She could be the thief now. I’d be a spy. “I heard something. I want to see who’s in there.” If my ears hadn’t misled me, Dix was here. For the rest of our plan to work, we needed to know where she was, and how many guards she had. We heard loud conversation break out near the tower core.

  I turned, drawn by the voices and walked right into a web.

  The sticky net shook and split raggedly. Nearby silk spiders dropped on their threads and began to vibrate. Their movement woke others until at least a hundred hatches quivered on threads all around me. Even to my non-Singer-trained ears, it sounded like tiny fingernails dragged across bone. Aliati winced and we held our breath, not daring to move until they’d stopped. Then I slid away as quickly as I could, farther into the shadows. Aliati went the other direction.

  Barely in time. Two hooded guards with furled black wings rounded a curve in the webbing. One carried an oil lantern, throwing the walls into high relief. They pushed through the overgrown web tunnels. “Can’t see what got them going, but I can feel it in the threads,” the first said.

  “Supposed to be good alerts, spiders,” the other grumbled. “But what they are is busybodies, jumpy at every odd thing. Like as not, it was the wind that set them off again. Or a tasty bird.”

  The guards turned back the way they came. After a few breathless moments, I followed.

  * * *

  The two blackwings disappeared around another curve in the web tunnels. I kept my hood up and my hands tucked into my sleeves. Tried breathing through my mouth. The smell increased the farther into the tier I walked.

  Elsewhere in the tier, as the riot grew louder, Aliati tethered the sacks together and lowered the line that bound them into the clouds. If everything proceeded as planned, she’d slip away and we’d pull the air sacks from the tower while Laria slept.

  Ahead, lanterns illuminated the silk, showing golden depths amid hatchworks of dark and light: threads crisscrossed hundreds of layers thick. This tier didn’t look like it had been harvested, except to hold open this single space up against the tower’s central core. A tower like Laria traded silk to feed its citizens because it gave most of its tiers over to silk growing. That they’d left a tier untouched was astounding. I crouched low, trying to get as close as possible without casting a dark shadow among the reflective webs.

  While seeing was hard, I heard voices without difficulty through the webs. Dix’s strong consonants bounced off the silkwebs.

  “How can you not know in which tower they are hiding?” she asked. Then, “You are lying. Where are the pages that Kirit took from the Spire? Where is the Spirebreaker? Where are her friends?”

  At the thud of a bone hook striking bare skin, followed by a pained gasp, I tensed. Every muscle in my body readied for a run through the webs into the room.

  I couldn’t tell who Dix’s victim was, but I wanted to make her stop hurting them. I forced my muscles to relax. Going in now would destroy the rest of the plan, and the others were counting on me. We acted as a group or not at all. I stayed crouched on the sticky floor.

  “They’ve stolen our work, our artifex. They’re destroying the city.” Another thud. “Tomorrow, you will help us begin to repair the city.”

  A cough shook the webs. Someone inhaled deeply. Dix paused, said, “Yes. I understand.”

  One of the guards spoke. “What did he say?”

  “He told me we need to double our efforts to heal the city before more bad luck can come to it.” She sounded so certain. “When we do, we’ll return to a time of peace and growth, with the heart of the city’s wisdom, supporting tower, not Spire. He said he trusts me to do this.”

  A crackling step on the floor stopped me from moving away from the tier. “What is it, Moc?” said Dix. She sounded fond of the fledge.

  “I can help,” Moc said. His voice was oddly soft. Like he’d been drugged again. “I can send a bird. Get my friends to come.” He laughed at this.

  He was drugged, I could hear the same tone in his voice as on the floating platform.

  Dix chuckled. “You certainly can, young one. You and Hiroli.” I could imagine the greasy tail of her words wrapping Moc’s arms, Hiroli’s neck, pulling them in. The sound of Moc, relaxed and even laughing along with his captors, made the hair rise on my arms.

  “We’ll let you have a bird for that, certainly. Tomorrow,” Dix said. “They’re very good birds, much better than your old kaviks. You’ll like them. And your new pair of wings too,” Dix said. “I’ve ordered them from Viit already. The kind that an heir of Rumul deserves. Here, have a seat and something to eat.”

  Two captives. I wanted to cut t
hrough the webs and grab the fledge. Where was Hiroli? I listened, waited. I heard Moc say, meekly, “Thank you.”

  “Tell us again what the codex pieces that Kirit and Nat found looked like.” Dix paced a circuit around the interior space, her voice coming closer to where I was standing, then moving farther away.

  Moc stayed in one place while he described the pages, better than even I could have. He’d been sneaking around my satchel before we flew from Grigrit so long ago. I’d known then he was troublesome. “There were thick pieces, broken. They looked hollowed out too. And two whole brass plates with markings on them that I couldn’t read,” he continued, describing each page, including the Conclave page and the plates I’d later given to Doran. Dix listened intently.

  The fledge was trouble, sure, and nosy too. Still, I’d trade our brass plates to the blackwings to get him back. For Ciel, and for me too. I couldn’t give him, or anyone, up for lost again. Not Moc, nor Wik, nor Hiroli.

  Dix had told the city that two would be thrown down at tomorrow’s Conclave. Meantime, she was drugging at least one captive into compliance, and beating another. While pretending to talk to a nearly dead Singer. She was skytouched, for certain. She had to be. The alternative was much worse: that she believed she was doing what was best for the city and was using everyone she could towards that end.

  We had to rescue our friends before they were no longer useful to Dix.

  I crouched among shadows and spiderwebs, weighing needs. If I moved now, Aliati’s efforts to free the lighter-than-air would be for nothing. And if Dix escaped, or I failed, no one could warn the city about the new kaviks Dix was spreading. We had to tell Doran as well. He’d need another way to signal Doran’s still-loyal guards. I would return quickly, with friends.

  I started to crawl away, slowly. Damp silk pressed my bare cheek, and I pulled back, wiping the creeping feeling away. A thick web blocked my path. I shuddered again. Surely this was the way I’d come?

  Silk spiders had made quick work of the gap. I sliced impatiently with my knife, and a small section opened with a soft ripping sound. The nearby threads began to quiver. Soon more were shaking as the spiders vibrated an alarm.