Horizon

by Fran Wilde

  “No bone eaters around. What do we have?” I asked.

  “Sore feet. The people in the kites don’t have anything but bad luck,” Dix muttered.

  That wasn’t true.

  “They have me. They have us.”

  Painfully, I began moving over the ridge again. The breeze tossed my hair in its braid and kicked my robes before I realized that it wasn’t just a breeze. It was real wind. Stronger than any I’d felt on the ground so far.

  Maybe I could fly there.

  Instead of going towards the kite, I coaxed Liope to climb higher on the ridge. I hoped there would be more wind. My wings were broken, but I wasn’t the only one with wings here.

  “Where are your wings?” I held my hands out to Dix.

  Dix turned from me. “No.”

  I waited. “You can start walking away, then. I won’t slow down for you again.”

  “You’re just like your mother,” Dix muttered. But finally she pulled the parts of her wings from her pack and gave them to me.

  They’d been pieced apart in two places by an expert, silk panels and battens separated for inspection. Otherwise, they were in good condition. To put them back together, I would have to sew.

  I hated sewing. And I had no kit.

  But Dix had the wire around her neck. And I could unravel thread from any silk. “Give me your necklace,” I said.

  She shook her head and backed away, nearly stumbling down the ridge. “You take everything.”

  I had no problem doing so. I didn’t need to say it. My outstretched hand and my stubborn stance did the work for me.

  Dix gave in and unwound the wire from her neck. “I want it back.”

  The wind had shifted, and the kite slowed, still high, still out of reach, but if I was quick, maybe I’d have time to catch it.

  I snapped a small section from the wire and handed the rest back to Dix. Looped it in half and wound one end of the wire around the other, until it formed a sufficiently straight needle that could carry a thread through cloth. Then I got to work patching Dix’s wings.

  I stabbed myself in the finger and cursed. A spot of blood welled. The healer reached out and took the needle and the wings from me. Their stitches were quick and sure. They handed Dix’s wings to me, and I could barely see the patch.

  Still it had taken too long.

  The kites had drifted, one back inland towards the desert, the other, farther over the ridge. I could barely see the top of it. Dix had curled up on the ridge, pillowing her head on her pack.

  “Get up. We’re going.” I prodded her with a blistered foot.

  She slowly rose, groaning. “Why do you need me?”

  I flexed the wings, their dark silk stained and faded in places. Put my hands in the grips, which I’d restrung. The wings felt sturdy and responsive, but I’d never flown this way before. If Wik had been there, he would have been the one I asked to watch out for me. Instead, I had Dix.

  “I need you and Liope to come get me if I crash.”

  Dix snorted, a bit like her old self. “All right.”

  The wind on the ridge was stronger than I’d felt anywhere since we crashed. Was it strong enough? The kite drifted farther from me with each passing moment.

  One way to find out.

  I leapt from the ridge, and the wind filled my silk wings. For a moment, I hung in the air. Moved forward. Flew.

  But when the wind gave out, I tumbled down the side of the ridge.

  Though I wasn’t that high, I hit the rocks hard enough to jar me. I scraped knees and elbows. In the distance, Dix cackled like a bird. Liope stared at me with eyes round as eggs.

  Dusty and bloodied, I was still able to stand on my own. Dix’s wings were unscathed. Tough, like their owner.

  “Birdcrap!” I yelled at the ground.

  Dix stopped laughing. “Kirit!”

  The healer was climbing towards me and pointing at the kite. The wide silk spans slowly moved away as a strong gust pushed it up the ridge. Towards the water. “Serrahun?” they said.

  The kite was not a monster, but it was like home. Could I take the risk of misunderstanding?

  “Yes,” I said. “Serrahun.”

  The shouts from above grew louder. There’s another way. There’s got to be. I started walking in the direction the kite was headed. Too far. I wouldn’t make it.

  Why was no one else from the towers chasing them down? Didn’t they know that they’ve lost this one? I wasn’t certain they did.

  It didn’t matter. We’d lost too much, and too many people. I could make this right.

  Liope had turned and was berating Dix in their unfathomable language. They pointed at Dix’s robe. At her hands.

  Dix shouted, “Might be it’s time to just cut losses. Isn’t that what you did when you walked away from the city in the first place?”

  I shivered even though it wasn’t cold. “We didn’t walk away. We were looking for a new city.” The words sounded hollow. I could have gone up. I could have helped Nat get the community down to the ground. “We are not walking away now.”

  Nat had every right to be angry with us as he climbed up the towers. I could hear his voice now. He’d be even angrier when he learned we’d failed. And now I’d gone off again, chasing a kite.

  “I won’t accept any more losses,” I shouted, pointing to the erratically drifting kite. I wasn’t getting any closer. In fact, I was farther from both kites and the city now.

  I considered Dix, still very far away. Liope had a tight grip on the blackwing’s robe now. They pointed at Dix and then at the sky.

  Dix finally held up her hands. Shouted, “You want to get up in the air?” She pulled a wrapped packet from her pack and waved it. The healer stepped back, relenting.

  I walked back down to meet them. In the packet were the metal windups Dix had stolen from the archive. The ones that reminded me of Djonn’s propellers.

  For once, she looked unsure. “I think these will work.”

  “This isn’t a good time for guesswork,” I said. “We need to catch that kite.”

  The kite was slowly getting lower, and precariously closer to the ridge. My chances were better on the ridge, but only if we hurried.

  Dix wound the stolen brass cone and pulled a bone pin from the top of the mechanism. The propeller inside began to spin and didn’t stop. I felt wind stir around me. She handed the propeller to me. “Hold on tight.” The cone generated enough push that I stepped back hard. When it wound down, I was breathless.

  “Turn them around, attached to your wingframe, and you go up. If they don’t pull your wings off first.”

  “That’s some artifexing.” We’d never seen this kind of mechanism in the city.

  “Wind them again,” Dix said. She showed me how to twist the parts against each other just so. We sat and wound two cones until my arms ached. We began to attach them to my wings, but Liope waved their hands and moved the propellers to my shoulders. We secured them near the strongest wing hinges with silk and wire and bone. Then I locked my wings.

  “This is more skytouched than jumping off the cliff,” I said.

  “Careful when you pull the pins on them—they could take your fingers right off,” Dix added just as I was about to set out. “And you’d better hope you can land when they stop spinning.”

  “They’ll get me there?”

  She nodded. “They should. As far as I understand them.”

  This was not reassuring. Still, I climbed up higher on the ridge in an attempt to catch the kite. The healer stayed with Dix. Both watched me carefully.

  “Such space,” I breathed.

  I would fly it, with help.

  Beyond, the ridge wall that I’d seen on the Varat—or Serra, as the healer called it—map was a sharp dip and more ridge. Columns of smoke rose in the distance. And water. So much water. It spread to the horizon, glittering in the afternoon light.

  32

  NAT, BELOW

  A city’s secret discovered one night at la
st

  We passed by more shelters, all upwind of the city, most made of discarded wings. Citizens’ faces showed as much bewilderment as I’d felt the first time. A small girl with Mondarath markers around her neck asked me, then others, “Are we dead?”

  “We’re not dead,” Rya’s guard said.

  “But we’re below the clouds? We fell through?”

  “We did. And we lived,” I said.

  Others looked at the ground beneath their feet, tested it by stepping hard until it crumbled. They rubbed it between their fingers.

  The air began to clear. The giant city on its side, the smaller city crushed beneath it, and the horizon beyond all became more visible.

  I hadn’t thought much about what would happen once we were on the ground. I hadn’t thought at all about what would happen when people saw the city, the horizon beyond.

  As the dust settled, some stood and stared. The gray expanse of the dead city registered in their eyes.

  “I heard stories it was alive, that it ate people,” a woman whispered. She pulled her children back inside their shelter.

  Others climbed higher, to see the horizon. A knot of panic and excitement built among five blackwings who’d pulled themselves up on the city’s leg. “There are more!”

  A man wearing hunter blue robes, still dusty and shocked, looked to the blackwings. “What will we do?”

  Rya struggled to gain their attention. Climbed up on the city’s leg too. She put up both hands for calm. “We are safe here, for now. Don’t worry.”

  It didn’t work. More people climbed the ropes to the city’s leg. Milled around Rya, tightening their panic to a sharp point. I pulled against the guards. “Let me help.”

  But they wouldn’t.

  When Ciel wove through the crowd, tugging Sidra with her, few noticed. Until they began singing.

  The song was familiar now. It had been a call to action. Now it was a mote of calm in the panic.

  All that shook, all that fell was sky and bone,

  So two went far and two climbed home

  On birdback, through cloudburst, so close to home

  Across desert, through illness in search of home

  The community drew close around them, listening. Sidra began to speak. “Macal, when he gets here, will tell you that this is the beginning of something new,” she said. “Until he arrives, I ask you for patience, for calm. We are building our community again. You must give us time to do that.”

  She stepped back, and Rya stepped forward, taking Ciel’s hand. “We will make a new place here, safe for us.”

  It was a start. Some left humming Ciel’s song. Others moved to help the wounded.

  “Thank you,” Rya said to Ciel and Sidra. “We’ll find Macal.”

  Sidra nodded. Still hopeful. “With a little structure, everyone’s calmer.”

  Ciel looked at me for the first time in a long time without glaring. She passed me a bone chip, an old challenge marker from the Spire. “Sometimes secrets are kept with the best of intentions.”

  I was, for the first time in a long time, left speechless. I squeezed her hand.

  “We’ll take that into consideration, fledge,” Rya said. “Someday, you’ll make an excellent Aivan.”

  Ciel smiled and turned away to follow Sidra back towards the fallen towers, to search for Macal. I recognized that look on her face from our climb, ten days ago. That look said, I’ll do what I want. It buoyed my heart to see that in all the destruction.

  Rya led me away from the crowd. Her eyes on the horizon, she asked, “Where do we go, Nat? Which city is ours?”

  I shook my head. “Kirit and Wik are searching.”

  Rya’s eyebrows shot up. “The Spirebreaker and a Singer? That’s who you left in charge of preserving our community?”

  I didn’t answer. I’d wanted us all to go up. To return together. I’d left hoping to see them again, and fearing I wouldn’t.

  Kirit and Wik must have seen the city collapse. If they didn’t return soon, they were lost. My hard-won conviction dwindled. “They deserve our trust.”

  Rya looked at me for a long moment. “I don’t owe them anything.”

  “It’s the truth, all of it.” Standing before the fallen city again, with my family on the ground now, I understood their impulse. Now I wanted to go out and search for a new home too.

  “I don’t believe you.” She tapped my Lawsmarker. “You are a liar.”

  “I saved the city with my omission. We got almost everyone down.” I kept my words simple, but I was fuming inside. “You cannot think I meant to harm anyone.”

  “True. But the city may never forgive you. And if I suggest it, I will be seen as weak.” She inclined her head, but minimally. “We’ll keep you with the Aivans for your safety. We’ll care for your mother as a hero.”

  It was too much. “I’d rather be with my family.”

  “You would endanger them too, then. What happens when there is no new home?”

  Rya’s second in command shifted uncomfortably. “There will be a new home. Won’t there?”

  She turned his way, smiling. “Of course. But it may be different from what we know now.”

  We kept walking, past shelters made of wingsets.

  A ridge of bone stretched for several days’ walk beside our dead home, the tiers and towers piled one atop another. Moss and pieces of calcified bridges stuck up through the tier in the vast expanse of dust and ruins.

  “Rya?” Two blackwings carried the young councilor from Amrath on a stretcher of silk and bone battens. She pointed with a finger at the city. “What is that?”

  “That’s the city, councilor,” Rya answered.

  The dark body of the city had already begun to collapse in on itself. The smell was only going to get worse. No one cared, not yet. They were just staring, with the same shock I’d felt when I first saw the city, a lifetime ago.

  The councilor from Amrath looked from me to the city. “It was alive. You told the truth.”

  * * *

  “Nat.”

  I woke in the dark. Aivans snored around me, wrapped in feather-decked cloaks.

  At first, I thought the voice was a shred of a nightmare. One had wrapped me tight with visions of falling, a baby’s cry. My first inclination was to reach for my family. Then for Maalik. But my family sheltered elsewhere. Kirit had my favorite whipperling.

  I was alone, among strangers.

  Rya’s captive.

  Then the voice came again.

  “Nat!” Close by my ear. A young voice, trying to whisper, but her range was too high, her intent too urgent. Ciel.

  I hadn’t seen her since that morning, when she gave me the challenge marker. I rose quietly and stepped from the tent as if I needed to relieve myself. No one moved.

  “You have to come,” she said. “Moc and Beliak found something.”

  Found what? I retied my footwraps and straightened my robe. “Is Elna all right? The baby? Ceetcee? Beliak?”

  “They’re fine. Elna’s improving. The baby is eating.”

  Relief. Did they name her yet? In the confusion of yesterday, I hadn’t asked. I couldn’t ask Ciel as she led me away from the shelters, to the city’s moldering side. I still yearned to know.

  In the cool night, the smell wasn’t any worse than it had been during the worst of our first days here. Ciel still wrinkled her nose, but she didn’t say anything more, except, “There.”

  The moon was just about to set, and it cast a silver-gray light across the city’s corpse, and that of the smaller city crushed beneath. Beliak crouched so close to the edge of the hole where the city’s belly had rested that I worried he would slip.

  Moc stood below the shadow of the city, knee deep in mud. His hand rested on a smooth curve, mostly buried in the muck. In the low-slung moonlight, the shape looked almost blue, with an oil sheen. “What is it?” I was still rubbing the dreams from my eyes.

  “It’s warm. Still alive.” Moc’s voice was filled with wonder
. “I think it’s a city. A new one.”

  In the muddy expanse, I saw what had been exposed when the city toppled and the mud settled. The egg ran the length of the cavity and was sunk deep in the mud. “Moc, get out of there!”

  The boy grinned at me in the dark, his teeth flashing. “I can’t.”

  He must have been in there since evening at least.

  “They were scavenging,” Beliak explained, pointing to Moc and Ciel. “I tripped and nearly fell in. Then Moc did fall in. When he spotted the egg, Ciel came and got me. Look at the size of that thing!” He bent his head, then looked at Moc from under heavy brows. “Besides, we need your help to get Moc out of there.”

  The pit’s sides were slick with footprints and slide marks. It was obvious he’d tried to get out by himself. “I’ll get a rope.”

  “I’ll stand guard,” Ciel said.

  Beliak held out a hand, and I gripped it tight. “You’re all right?”

  He nodded. “Everyone’s fine. Ceetcee will worry I’ve been gone so long, but I’ll tell her I was with you. She’ll be relieved.”

  In the darkness, I stole a rope from the growing cache of supplies behind Rya’s tent when the guard went to relieve himself. Once on the ground, with several artifexes still missing, including Djonn and Aliati, Rya had centralized the rest, and stored all their tools in one place. This made pilfering a long tether rope from one of the fallen kites a fairly quick proposition.

  We lowered the rope, and Moc tied it around his waist, using a Singer knot that wouldn’t slip. Beliak and I pulled him from the pit. His feet squelched loud enough in the muck that I worried we’d wake the nearest shelters.

  When we freed him, Moc was covered in mud. Even behind his ears. Still, he was unfazed.

  “We have to tell Rya,” Beliak said.

  I agreed. “Tomorrow.” The egg wouldn’t hatch tonight.

  “How many towers do you think this city will have?” Moc asked.

  As he spoke, a tall figure approached the city. Someone who could get past Ciel without her sending up an alarm. I let out a low whistle.

  “No towers,” Wik said. “Not at first.”

  Moc nearly fell back into the pit in surprise. Then he threw himself at his uncle. “You’re back. You found a new city, then!”