Horizon

by Fran Wilde

  Beliak laughed. “A fair wind, strong wings were the old blessings. What about a new horizon?”

  It wasn’t a traditional tower wish, but it was a wish we made together.

  Sitting with them and talking, planning for a naming, gave me new strength for what I needed to do. There was so much beyond the clouds, so much danger. But those dangers were less than what the towers faced now.

  We would see our way through it, together, and stronger for the risk.

  As long as we all made it safely to the ground.

  19

  KIRIT, BELOW

  The Skyshouter fled from a city of light

  Down the ramps, speeding over patterns of light and dark, the curators dragged us. We passed the alcove where I’d recovered. From within, the healer shouted, then emerged.

  The healer gestured, “No,” emphatically. Pulled at our escort’s sleeves. The guards resisted, roughly.

  I stumbled as the three of us were shoved and prodded down the ramps to another alcove in the bone ridge. Varat’s guards stuffed us into the woven bone cage that had once contained only Dix.

  With some effort, they reinforced the lock with wire.

  The place reeked of old robes and sweat. A bucket, pushed into a corner and covered tight, also smelled. Pressed next to Dix, I realized she stank to the highest of clouds too. Worse than the bone eater.

  Wik, on her other side, seethed. Dix grew somber as our captors departed.

  “Kirit.” Dix’s broken front teeth turned the two syllables of my name to one. She added a pleading note at the end that held me still and wary. Worse, she stood too close, her chest brushing my shoulder, my arm pinned against her belly. Crammed into a cage together, because of Dix’s escape from the same cage in the first place.

  Guilt by association. Bird stealing. Lies.

  Wik slipped his right hand to his left sleeve. His fingers brushed the short knife he’d hidden there before we left our dying city. “What now, Dix?” He tilted his head as if considering whether she could make the situation any worse. He’d had to duck to fit in the cage, so this made him look like a giant, looming over her shoulder.

  I put my fingertips on his and shook my head. No harm comes to her, not here. We’ll never be let out if they see us as liars and killers. “Maalik.”

  Wik’s grimace deepened. “That bird isn’t worth your sacrifice.”

  “I disagree. We need to keep him safe.” Maalik was our only connection to our former home.

  Dix ignored Wik, despite the close quarters. Focused on me. “Kirit,” she said again. Hearing my name emerge from her lips gave me chills.

  In the shadows of our bone cage, her presence was still enough to make me squirm. There were too many betrayals between us. Now she raised her hand—to beg for more favors or to touch me, I didn’t know which—and I flinched. “What now?”

  “We have to try again,” she answered. “You have to get me off this city.”

  I flinched away from her. “Why should we help you ever again?”

  Wik frowned at her. “We can’t leave easily when the city’s moving fast. As it will be soon. Meanwhile we’re stuck in this cage with you.” Wik’s voice was cold as Allmoons winds.

  All the murders and horrors Dix had committed in order to hold power in the city above. Her crimes in this new city. The fact she still held Maalik hostage in her robe, one hand clamped over his body as a warning. The things she’d done. I grabbed her, my fingers at her neck.

  “Kirit, I’ll help you,” Dix whispered. “Let me go.”

  Maalik cheeped, then squawked. Dix’s good hand squeezed his brown feathers tight, even as she pleaded for her life.

  I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t kill her. Wouldn’t, Wik would say. I stopped squeezing, but held on. “Give me the bird.”

  Dix’s face transformed at the refusal, painfully highlighting the crease and dent in her skull where her eye socket had healed badly. That eye drifted. “Please.” She crumpled the sleeve of my robe with her mangled hand. “Please. Help me. I’ll help you.”

  The city rolled slightly from side to side. The motion was disconcerting. “They’re moving.” We’d lost our chance to leave easily.

  Beyond the cage, we heard people passing between the thin bone walls, talking in their unfamiliar tongue. We saw their shadows. “Dix, quiet.” We were in enough trouble. The bone cage held us apart from this city, its technology, its history. The bars and lock said this city’s peace should never be ours. Because of Dix.

  And because of our actions too. We’d become like her.

  I let her go.

  Dix pulled her way past me and leaned against the far corner of the cage. She kicked at a bar and wiggled it: loose. She pushed a piece of bone until it turned sideways. The bar had been cut carefully with a wire like the one Dix wore around her neck. She’d stolen it from the cloudbound cave, I realized, and kept it with her since. No wonder she’d escaped more than once.

  “You too!” She gestured with her ruined hand.

  The gap was wide enough for Dix to squeeze through. She tried to pull me after her, but my right shoulder jammed against the cage wall. The rough bone joins snagged at me. I gasped, but I was too big. The cage held fast.

  Dix stood on the other side of the cage, wavering. She wanted to flee, but couldn’t escape without us.

  Footsteps. Just outside our alcove.

  Dix froze. Wik’s face turned stormy. “We’re cloudfood.”

  But the healer stepped into the alcove. Silently, they began to unwind the wire that held our cage closed. They looked up once, their brown eyes catching mine. So like my aunt’s eyes in color, like Elna’s in kindness. But the healer’s brow furrowed. They covered their mask with a hand and stared at us intently, willing us to understand. Pointed at us. Then repeated the gesture.

  Quiet.

  Then they reached through the opening and tugged at my robe.

  Wik grabbed me from behind and held on while the healer tried to pull me from the cage. A piece of rough bone tore my robe as the healer tugged. Their grip was hard; they pulled urgently.

  “Let go,” I whispered. I didn’t want to go wherever they were taking me.

  Dix shrank against the wall, trying to hide. Her eyes were wild. Maalik wriggled in her robe.

  When the healer finally yanked me from the cage, I wobbled, thrown off balance by the city moving beneath me. Wik followed, and the healer let him. Both held firm to my robe.

  Dix stared at the healer, shocked. Then turned to me. “Now you’re a thief and an escapee just like me,” she whispered. I felt nauseous, whether from the rolling motion of the city or Dix’s words, I couldn’t tell.

  But the healer hustled us away from the paths with spiral designs on the floor. They put their hand to their lips again, pointed at all three of us, and gestured “no.”

  “You’re helping us.” I stared at them.

  The healer glanced back at me, the corners of their eyes crinkling, and made a gesture that seemed very obvious: “Get moving.”

  We turned left and right as the healer drew us farther down the city’s tunnels. Dix followed, trying to keep up. The healer picked up speed.

  “Where are we going?” Dix whispered.

  The healer turned, a fierce look in their eyes. They covered their mask with a hand one more time, then kept moving. Even Dix hushed.

  Pulled along the corridors by the healer, we tried to stay as unremarkable as possible. Those few who walked the passages down here saw the healer’s white shift and mask, their shaved head, and did not question. Once, the healer pulled us into an alcove and gestured again for silence until another Varat citizen, one with a blue mark behind their ear, had passed.

  As we descended, the bone walls began to turn green and lush with moss, marked with thin patterns in purposeful places that let light in.

  After working our way through the bone ridge of Varat, when we emerged onto the city’s back, the sunlight nearly blinded me. The healer kept pushing
us forward, towards the edge of the city’s body and the moving landscape far below.

  Varat’s thick hide was even and almost smooth, unlike our old city. And the rolling motion of its walk was much more pronounced the closer we were to its legs.

  I nearly lost my balance as Varat stepped lower, into a ditch, and then lurched forward. The healer caught my arm and steadied me. The bone eaters flew farther out in front of the hungry city, and the beast straightened its path.

  We stumbled through the daylight, four now, not three. The healer was still with us. For the first time, I noticed their robe was torn at the shoulder.

  They smiled, eyes crinkling above their mask. Gestured at me to move, fast.

  “That healer’s a gentle heart. Was for me too, once.” Dix laughed until coughs racked her chest and she had to slow down and breathe for a moment. The healer turned and gave Dix the same gesture, but didn’t smile.

  Dix ignored them. “Kirit, what will you do now that you have another pet to protect?”

  “If they’re coming with us, they’re not a pet.” I recalled the loud conversations outside the alcove where I lay ill. The look of disdain the five officials gave the healer as they passed. There’d been disagreement about our care.

  Dix coughed again, earning her another hush gesture from the healer.

  Above the clouds, wounds like Dix’s—or any of ours—could have been a death sentence. I thought about the blackwings, and about our injuries. Was the sky more dangerous than the ground? I thought about the healer, who, for reasons of their own, was helping us escape.

  Anything could kill us down here, just as in the sky, even things we could not see. But the cities themselves were more dangerous here. I shivered. No wonder our ancestors had climbed on the cities’ backs. It was safer up higher.

  Soon we might have to make that choice again.

  Dix caught her breath. “I’m ready. Whatever comes next.” Maalik stuck his beak out of her pocket and cheeped at me, but she pushed him back into the folds of fabric.

  The healer pointed to ropes that hung down the side of the city. Began to descend, while the monster’s motions were still slow.

  “The healer’s helping us,” Wik reminded Dix, “as, so far, we are helping you.”

  “I have something you want,” she snapped. But she looked worried. She glanced at her ruined hand, and at the ropes. The healer’s shorn head could barely be seen, they were descending so fast. We had to move fast too.

  Dix couldn’t go anywhere fast.

  It was tempting to let Varat take care of her, or the drop to the ground. But Dix was our problem.

  “If we bring you with us, how do we keep you from turning wing on us and coming back around to attack?” I asked.

  Wik growled, answered for Dix. “Nothing at all. Except tying her up.”

  “She’s all bones. Not hard to carry if we share.”

  “So we take her,” Wik said. “She causes any problems, it’s on your wings.”

  I looked at her and almost felt sorry for her. “We get you off this city, Dix, you’ll give me Maalik. That’s all. We’re done after that.” I couldn’t see the healer any longer.

  Wik looked at his former captor, but spoke to me. “I’d like to drop her from something high.”

  “You might get your chance if she doesn’t behave,” I said. Dix flinched beside me.

  We walked across Varat’s back to where the healer had begun the descent.

  “Stop here,” Dix murmured. We’d been following the beginning of Varat’s bone ridge. Dix pointed at an outgrowth that spread low against the city’s walls. I set her down and she knelt beside it, sawed for a moment with the wire, then pulled. A piece of bone lifted away like the cover of a heartbone gap in the Spire, with a peeling, sucking sound.

  The bone on Varat was healthy and alive. It grew fast. My nose filled with the smell of heartbone. Such a familiar scent, I was thrown back to the first moment I’d been shown the city’s core. As a newly marked Singer, in the Spire. Here, now, things were much different.

  From within the hollow, Dix pulled three wrapped objects. They glittered as she slipped them into her robe. I heard Maalik squawk.

  “What did you do?” I whispered. Three objects. Had she lost her fingers as punishment? “You stole those from Varat too.” I reached out to grab her arm again, and she shifted so I nearly tumbled from the city’s side.

  “Their artifexes are better than ours. Or the people they took these from were,” she said. “We need new knowledge to survive.”

  Birdcrap. I knew she was right.

  But the last thing in the world that I wanted was to be like Dix.

  20

  MACAL, MIDCLOUD

  And the Magister hoped for a new kind of bridge

  In the towers above, Sidra and the council tried to hold the city together. Below, I worked on breaking it apart.

  More than once, I caught myself staring into the mist, wishing I could talk with my partner, wishing I had her skill with people, her ability to shift a situation from disastrous to possible.

  Even as Nat and I helped Djonn equip grips and weapons for our return above the clouds, we sized each other up. Would Nat be a help or a weight? My concerns had eased after his confession, but they were still there. Just as I had held concerns about Urie, above. Was he telling the whole truth?

  “We’ll tell them that the city is dying first,” I proposed. What would Nat say in reply? Did he still believe that we shouldn’t tell the others?

  He dipped his head. “A good idea. We need citizens to listen, to follow directions.”

  “We’ve been trained to do that all our lives. With songs, with Laws. The blackwings are going to help us. Well, the faction of blackwings that Rya is leading will, hopefully.”

  Rya’s stand against the Conclave on Grigrit was a good sign. She’d be the better leader to work with.

  “They’ll still need to be convinced. When will you tell them about the city?”

  A long silence. Nat didn’t comment. He was still holding something back, I was sure of it.

  “Nat. A new community built on lies may be weakened from the start.” The Singers had traded truth and lies. Our community would need to be more open to survive. I didn’t want Nat to turn away from that.

  The cave brightened with mist-light and the baby wailed, hungry. Djonn grumbled, rolled from his blankets, and slowly levered himself upright by first rolling to his knees. He sat back on his heels and, gritting his teeth, pulled himself up the wall. He wouldn’t take any help. He stalked away from the noise.

  Nat drew a deep breath. “Let’s get ready, then. I’ll say what I must to convince the blackwings we’re telling the truth.”

  * * *

  On one side of the meadow, bone scaffolding propped up an irregular bone and silk mechanism. Ladders and platforms distributed the structure’s weight across the plinth and secured it to the nearest tower. Ceetcee stood atop the scaffolding, working on the mechanism inside. A few of the former blackwings who’d chosen to stay in the meadow after Dix lost worked beside her.

  I left the cave and caught up with Nat. Behind us, Djonn slowly descended the ladder and began to cross the meadow. He waved us on.

  Ceetcee had bound her baby to her back by a swath of gray silk. A metal awl gripped between her teeth, another in hand, she pushed the butt end of a bone shaft into place on an overgrown wing cam. The holes for pulley lines and the tension clamps were missing, but I could feel how that one piece might move in my fingertips. Just like tightening a wing. Nat and I slowed to look at broken pieces of another creation trapped beneath a fallen bone shard. Djonn caught up with us.

  “We’d been building two of the climbers. Only one survived the quake.” His voice resounded with loss.

  The surviving mechanism was part wing and part tentacle. Its articulated legs were joined and levered to be controlled from an interior platform. “It moves a bit like a silkspider,” Djonn said, pointing out the new tension spr
ings he’d added to the legs.

  On the ground behind the climber, two strangers—their cloaks hunter blue—wove a fiber and silk basket large enough to carry four comfortably.

  Djonn asked for the workers to stand back. He cranked the springs tight and pulled a lever. Three of the climber’s sharp feet dug into the side of the bone tower like a blade into grease. Like the grip I’d been carving, only much bigger.

  In another part of the meadow, three giant box-wing kite frames, the size of a quarter tier, rested.

  Moc worked on one of the box kites. He threaded skymouth tendon through two pulleys to a platform below.

  “We’re running out of supplies,” Djonn added. “We can’t work on the crawlers much longer, or test anything. We need more of everything. When you come back down, bring silk, bone, more heartbone. All of it.”

  Heartbone. “You know how to make lighter-than-air.” I stared at him, hope rising.

  Djonn nodded slowly. We were far enough from the scaffolding now for privacy.

  “I think we can help each other. Once the towers and the blackwing factions come together. Few towers have supplies now, and the blackwings control so much distribution above,” I said. “We have to be careful.”

  The spider fascinated me. This could, if it succeeded, get more citizens down the tower. I noted one change from Djonn’s sketches.

  “The basket,” I whispered.

  Djonn coughed. “What?”

  “You reworked it from your sketches in the cave.”

  Djonn put his hands on his back, stretching. “It’s much more useful as a support crawler going down. Hard to ride in. We’re going to have to lean on the kites a lot more than we thought. I’ll need more supplies. Fast?”

  He looked away from me at the last minute. As if he was keeping secrets too.

  * * *

  Long ago, I’d separated from the Singers, from my family, in order to become Tower. I’d made that choice.

  Kirit Skyshouter had tried to keep both groups. It hadn’t worked out well for either of us. But both decisions had helped strengthen the community. I hoped.

  Now Kirit was gone, disappeared below the clouds, and what the city had left was me and Nat. And whatever Nat was still hiding.