by Fran Wilde
I got up and ran for my life, coating myself with webs and spiders as I passed through and dove, wings still furled, for the nearest balcony and the clouds.
22
WAR
Once I was in the air, I tried to snap my wings open. I pushed my hands into the grips and tried to extend my arms, fast. But where the wingset should have unfurled, silk and battens held my arms to my sides. I fought back panic and tried again. A look over my shoulder with the wind whistling through my ears told me why: spiderwebs snarled the wings at key points, binding them. Another jerk of my arms, stronger this time, stretched the webs, but the cams and gears still jammed.
I had little time, I knew it. But pulling too hard risked breaking the wings. I would drop like garbage. I opened and closed the mechanisms gently, extending a little farther with each effort. I tried to breathe in time with my motions. Meanwhile, my fall accelerated, the white cloudtop grew closer.
Tower children learned falling was the worst thing that could happen to a person. The clouds were full of danger, darkness, and storms. Up high was the safest place to be. To the towers, “fallen” meant grief. And “cloudbound” meant dead.
What I knew now was different. The wind beat at me as I spun, but below the cloudtop were more chances to right myself, if I could stay calm. I continued to stretch my arms, to move my bound wings in ways that would loosen the webs. It was working. Slowly.
I broke the clouds still half furled, spinning. The warmer, damp air came as a shock after the cold dryness above. Below me, the hidden towers’ ridges and shadows were barely visible, but I fell ever closer.
I had a slim hope that Aliati would return at the same time. Had she seen me dive? Could she catch me? I even, for a moment, wished my pursuers would net me and haul me from the clouds. Though I no longer feared falling as much as I had, I dreaded impact against a hidden wall. I grew dizzy as I spun into the clouds.
Come on, Nat. Keep working.
The damp air weakened a strand of webs, and these gave way. My left wing spread wide. Before I could spin too far on the single foil, I flexed the right wing harder. The wind screamed in my ears now. Shadows grew deeper. Something loomed far below.
The last of the silkthread stretched far enough to part. Falling headlong towards the ghost tower’s dark shadow, my wings finally snapped open most of the way.
My heart caught in my throat as the wind filled my wings. I’d fallen but I had not died. I flew below the clouds, alive, though I wobbled and fought for control. My footsling brushed against an outcropping near the ghost tower.
As I recovered enough to fight my way higher, my breath rasped in the moist air. I shook with relief, then struggled to keep my wings balanced in the breeze.
* * *
Finally, I righted myself and caught a good gust towards the ghost tower.
“Nat!” Aliati cried, waiting atop the tower. “I waited for you until I couldn’t. What did you see?”
“Did you tether the lighter-than-air?”
“Better than.” She grinned and pointed to the ghost tower, where a spidersilk line anchored to a grip hook. The line rose up, swaying in the wind. Aliati had done much more than tether the air sacks. “There was such a mess in the market, I was able to pull the lighter-than-air they were storing in skymouth husks down with me. No one saw.”
I wanted to shake her. “You don’t think someone will notice it’s missing? Like the artifex?” Unauthorized scavenging risked undermining our plan.
But her smile broadened. “I left enough in the storage area to make it seem like it’s all there. Now we don’t have to wait.”
There was nothing to be done now. Hoping she was right, I told Aliati about the kaviks, about Dix. About the near-worship of Rumul—or at least what was left of him. “I’ll go update Kirit and Doran,” she said. “This changes our plans.”
Inside the cave, Djonn had set his and Doran’s two brass plates out on the bone floor. Beside them, he’d placed what looked like tiny, twisted wings next to small bags of lighter-than-air. He’d decoded an engraving of wings from one of the plates. In Ciel’s lap lay bands of stretchy birdgut and small wing-mockups.
Ciel’s fingers, now covered with scratches from working with Djonn’s tools, wove together the rounded wings. “Small fingers,” Djonn said, “make excellent work.”
I frowned, thinking about where I’d heard that before, but Ciel laughed and kept working. Her design looked like the windbeaters’ foils Dix had used to create the hole in the wind, in miniature. She set those down beside Djonn until he was ready for them.
Meantime, Djonn put one tiny wingset on a base carved from the same piece of bone Beliak and Ceetcee were using for message chips. He wrapped the birdgut around it and twisted until the gut was tightly wrapped in a spiral around the bone. Then he let the contraption go.
The small craft whirred across the cave.
“You spent all that time making a toy?” The two of them. We were risking everything, and they were fiddling.
“Not a toy.” Djonn held one up. “A delivery system for messages. Or for fire, if we need weapons. They fly on their own until the band uncoils. I call them firebugs.”
I sat down beside Djonn, taking a moment to look closer rather than rushing through. A good leader would know the talents of his crew, and it seemed Djonn had talents. He could make anything: from firebugs to lighter-than-air. Naton would have loved watching him work. Elna too.
Djonn picked up a firebug and wound it. His knotted hands worked fast. Another of the bugs sat beside the first, ready for its own twist of birdgut.
Ciel knelt beside us. “Can I help more?”
Djonn smiled. “Yes. With this, and with the bigger things. You remember how the blades worked on the tower-tapping plinth?” Djonn asked her without a note of condescension, so different from the way Dix talked to children, to Moc.
Ciel wrinkled her nose. “Yes.”
“We can use broken wings for something smaller, but similar. It could be useful in an emergency. Would you like to help?” Ciel nodded. “Do we have any nets in the cave?”
There was a medium net holding the cache of food off the cave floor. I dumped the food out and brought the net over. Knelt next to Djonn. “You helped repurpose the windbeaters’ wings from the Spire into the blades that pulled the wind from the sky, didn’t you?” I pointed at the tiny wings on the firebugs. “When you worked above the kidnapped fledges.”
Djonn frowned. “I knew there were fledges down there. Dix told me they were working for tower marks.”
“She drugged them, like you were drugged. She’s doing it still.” His face turned ashen at my words.
Djonn finished the last firebug. “She’ll pay for that, someday.” He was clear of the heartbone drug now, and sounded angry to have been so used. I hoped Moc would be the same.
Allmoons was tomorrow. The year’s shortest day, when the city gathered to light banners of Remembrance. So many banners clustered around the towers this year. The city looked very unlucky.
To restore the city’s luck, Dix wanted to throw our friends into the clouds without wings.
“She’ll pay for it tonight. We have the message chips, the delivery system, the lighter-than-air. We can go now.” Only we had no way to signal our allies in the towers.
* * *
Ceetcee found me pacing, trying to work that one out. She hugged me tight.
“Where’s Kirit?” I asked.
“She, Doran, and Beliak went to try something with the undercloud littlemouths after they heard about the birds. They think Doran’s guards might see their lights from the towers, especially if they can get littlemouths to signal to one another up the towers.”
“We’re guessing that the littlemouths use light—and maybe echoes too—to communicate in the clouds,” Djonn said. “They have to communicate somehow or else they’d lose each other. Just like us.”
Ceetcee chuckled, nervous. “If it works, Kirit thinks she can send messages th
at way. Doran’s people have spread through the city, talking to people about Dix. They need a way to know when we’re going up.” She looked at her hands before I had a chance to say anything. “We came up with most of the plan while you were at Laria. Your news about the birds confirms what Doran suspected.”
“It’s a good plan.” It didn’t matter to me who came up with which elements. We were pieces of an artifex’s mechanism, working together to stop Dix. We were nearly ready.
I hoped Doran was telling the truth about how much support he still had in the city.
“Surprise is our best weapon,” Djonn said, putting his firebugs into a sack and giving them to Ciel. He was right. But surprise belonged to our enemies, too.
* * *
We carefully rigged the air sacks Aliati had stolen with the extra wingstraps we’d taken from the council field. Each flier who would be tied below them—myself, Ciel, Ceetcee, Beliak, Aliati, Doran, and Kirit—held enough ballast that we would rise slowly, until we were ready to enter Laria.
“We won’t attack if we don’t have to,” I reminded them. “We want to talk and to remove Dix from the tower alive. Rumul too. Meantime, Beliak and Ceetcee will get Moc, Wik, and Hiroli.”
“And the man whose knife this is?” Kirit lifted the blade that had killed Ezarit.
The guard playing Justice with Dix at Gigrit. “Him too, if he’s there. Taken alive. We need to show the city who they are and what they’ve been doing. The city needs answers.”
Aliati nodded, grimly. “We’ll try.”
Atop the ghost tower, Djonn waited beside the net he’d set up, and the whirlwind he’d rigged beside it. The spare wings raked the air in a circle when he twisted the improvised haft he’d made from tools in the smugglers’ cache. “It’s modified to spin twice as fast.”
He handed Ciel and me pieces of flint from his toolbox. “If the first person to fall through the clouds could be Kirit, or Ciel, that would be useful,” he said. “They could help me.”
Kirit laughed a little. “No promises,” she said.
I thought about it. Kirit and Ciel could sing the littlemouths into signaling, once Djonn’s net was ready for us. “Do you want Ciel to stay?”
Ciel, already strapped into an air sack rig, made an affronted noise. “I’m going! My brother’s up there. And Kirit’s going.”
Djonn agreed. “You need her to float highest above Laria. She’s the only one light enough.”
No one asked if Kirit wanted to stay below.
Ciel promised she would come down as soon as her part of the job was done, and we ascended to the cloudtop and prepared to let the first air sack rise as dusk darkened the city.
The air, colder than I remembered, and very dry, smelled of home: oil lamps and cook fires. The towers rising high above us blocked out the stars.
Attached to a skymouth husk that was also attached to Laria, Ciel drifted almost invisible in the sky.
After the sun set, during the darkest moment of the city’s year, Kirit began to keen. I held my breath, hoping it would work.
She flew in a circle around Laria, mourning Ezarit, the lost councilors, the Singers. As she passed, the littlemouths clinging to the tower began to luminesce.
This was the signal to Doran’s guards to begin making a distraction on nearby towers, to summon Dix’s blackwings away from Laria.
The lights faded as Kirit completed her circuit. In the closest tower, Ginth, we heard yelling from far uptower, a fight breaking out. Had the guard seen the signal? I hoped so.
Kirit returned to the ledge in time for us to strap her into the lighter-than-air sacks. We slowly let ourselves rise unseen up the spider tower’s side, the updrafts buffeting us, but not knocking us off course.
In the dark, we were invisible. Above, Dix’s guards bristled at the top of Laria, peering at the ruckus on Ginth. Meanwhile, towertops in the distance began to light up with Remembrance fires.
Far above us and to the west, a riot horn sounded from Bissel. Another from Naza. A group of blackwings leapt from the top of Laria and raced towards the towers, flying to protect the city, as Dix had promised she would.
You cannot lead through fear. Ezarit’s words. I would honor their truth. I wished I could hear them again, from her own mouth, but that would never be. Instead, I vowed not to let fear keep me from acting, either.
My thoughts churned as we rose silent in the crisp air. Ceetcee and Beliak released a sack of ballast, bones from the bone eater cairn. I did the same.
We heard horns in the east, and southeast too, as Doran’s people started fights on more towertops during the city’s most solemn ceremony.
Doran had kept his promise to accompany us. He looked as ready to fight as we were.
Kirit dropped the most ballast and slipped past me. She and Aliati raced to Laria’s market tier. Then Ciel’s signal came. A single firebug, lit like a shooting star, moved across the sky before it burned out.
More of Laria’s guards took off from the towertop like bats, chasing the flare. Ciel pulled closer to the skymouth husk, camouflaging herself in the dark night air. The blackwings shot past her and chased where they thought the firebug would be.
We found the updrafts then. Unfurled our wings, which we’d rubbed as dark as we could with blacking from Djonn’s supplies. All of us, night-colored, like blackwings, and the Singer nightwings before them. Kirit had tied a tea-colored ribbon from Ezarit’s robe at her shoulder. I had done the same. Aliati, too. Not exactly like the blackwings. Nothing like, if we could help it.
When we cut ourselves loose from the skymouth husks, letting them float away, the wind caught our wings, and we shot into the market tier, past the guards. We furled our wings fast and rolled into the silken maze. Aliati whistled, loud and fierce, a tower alarm.
The silkwebs picked up the sound and reverberated. Kirit, followed by Aliati, disappeared into the webs. I heard the sound of running feet pounding the tier above us.
Bone horns sounded from Laria’s towertop. That was Ciel’s signal. She began dropping the bone chips we’d carved: Rumul hides within your tower, a Singer. The blackwings are helping him. The chips urged the tower residents to attack the tower’s market tier.
From the lowtower, people began to emerge. A few carried sharp blades, lanterns. Some climbed the ladders. Some took to the wind. Others peered out from their balconies, still reading the messages.
At first, the guards must have thought the citizens had roused to help them find the flare’s source. They let them come. But when the first blackwing fell from Laria into the clouds, they began to fight.
And Laria rose up against Dix.
23
RUMUL
We ran the tower’s webbed passages, spreading out across the tier. The light of Allmoons streamed silver across the floor, turning the walls opaque until we split them apart.
Doran, Ceetcee, Beliak, and I sliced the silk walls with our knives and stepped through the openings. When we reached the innermost wall, we stopped, still hidden, and peered through the webbing.
Inside, Dix and her inner circle gathered around plans for Conclave. Blackwings and tower councilors stood beside her. On a low sling chair, Rumul huddled beneath quilts piled high, his bald head dented and shrunken, silver tattoos pulled into strange patterns by several scars.
Behind us: shouts, then fighting, as Dix’s guards alit on the lowtower and Laria’s people confronted them, asking questions. We had the tower nearly surrounded already, without a single arrow loosed.
I couldn’t count my successes yet. Too many uncertainties still remained: if Ceetcee and Beliak could find Moc, Wik, and Hiroli quickly; if we could capture both Dix and Rumul; if Dix’s guards would give way to the tower’s people; if we could escape without harm.
All we could do now was wait until we had enough of Laria at our back, then confront Dix.
From the corner of my eye, movement. Kirit began cutting her way through the last of the webs early. Draped in stray spidersilk
threads, her tattoos stark against her skin, she looked like a ghost. Her eyes were narrowed to slits, and she moved silently, trying to get within a knife’s throw of Dix.
Aliati and I moved to grab her, too late. Before we could catch her, Kirit charged through the webs at Dix, knife drawn. Three of Dix’s guards and one councilor overpowered and tackled her.
Once, before the fever, she might have fought her way free. But Kirit was still weak. She struggled as they bound her arms and dragged her before Dix.
Clouds take her, this is not what we planned.
“Kirit,” Dix said. “You saved us the trouble of hunting you down.” Beside Dix, Rumul’s waxy face remained impassive, his eyes stared at some invisible middle ground.
As the guards stepped into the corridors to investigate, I slipped between the webs’ shadows and saw Aliati and Doran doing the same. Beliak and Ceetcee had already gone in search of the captives. There was no way to warn them.
With our surprise blown, we would have to fight.
Everything went still, save for the scuff of footwraps over bone floors. I could hear the rasp of Rumul’s breathing. My heart beat a tattoo: his name, then Kirit’s.
“What do you bring us, Spirebreaker?” Dix said.
Kirit’s voice shook the webs. “I bring truth. When the city discovers who you shelter here, they will not forgive you. Nor will I. The city needs this truth.”
Dix laughed. “The city needs to be told what to see in order to discover anything, Kirit. Without strong leaders, it has only bad luck left to it. You offer neither leadership nor luck. But when I searched the Spire after you cracked it, I uncovered both. Rumul was the Spire’s heart; he sacrificed to lead. And now he’s skyblessed. He shares his insights with me. That is what the city needs: the past’s wisdom and strength to do what’s right for the future.” Dix put a gentle hand on Rumul’s unmoving head.
As we listened, growing increasingly alarmed, Doran gestured that he would try to distract Dix. That I should get Kirit and drag her off the tier. Then he stepped out from among the webs. Said to all who would listen, “You don’t know what leadership means, Dix. You never understood.” A few Laria citizens crowded behind him, straining to hear over the sounds of fighting on other tiers. “You wanted power, and you use that husk of a man as a signifier. That isn’t leadership.” He held a hand out and walked closer. “You can stop this now.”
