The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm Two

by Sean Williams

  Banner was smiling. “You make a convincing argument, Sal,” she said, “when you put it like that.”

  He tilted his head to look at her sideways. “I'm not trying to convince anyone. You just asked, and I told you.”

  Banner sat back into her seat. “That's the best sort of argument.”

  “No,” he said. “The best is when you don't have to ask at all.”

  They hit the open road and accelerated north for Laure.

  “Flight is not for the fainthearted. Or the heavy.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, FRAGMENT 379

  Skender gaped in wonder at a sight he had never imagined. He felt as though a blindfold had been removed from his eyes. All the wealth of the visible world lay before him. Bulbous plumes of hot air rose from the sun-warmed buildings, expanding and overlapping as they hit cooler layers high above the city. Complicated eddies swirled around towers, forming knots and tangles. Directly off the edge of the platform, a strong plane of wind swept up and to his right. He could see, now, how miners coming in to land angled their wings to take advantage of that steady stream. Beyond them, vast edifices of air rose and fell in waves over the disrupted geography of the Divide. The earth itself seemed to be breathing.

  “You see it?” said Chu into his ear.

  “Goddess, yes. I see it.”

  “Good.” She pulled away for a moment, then turned her back to him. “Let me strap myself in. You're going to be my eyes. We're going to fly together.”

  He tore his mind away from the magnificent vistas before him to concentrate on her words. The harness jingled as she slid into it and pressed tightly against him. The arrangement felt cramped and clumsy on the ground, and he wasn't so sure it would be any better in the air. They would be awkward compared to the other miners, who sliced through and skipped across the wind like stones on water.

  But they didn't need to be graceful. All they needed was to remain airborne. For the first time he began to see how that might be possible.

  “We give the winds names here,” she said. “There's the Smoker from the north in summer, and the Twister that comes down the Divide late autumn. The Cocoa Express is brown with dust, while the Braid is cool and sweet. The one running by this tower at sunset is called the Red Lifter.” She fastened the last strap across her chest. “Right. I'm ready. Which way is the Red Lifter heading?”

  Skender pointed.

  “We need to find a thermal that'll take us up above the city. It'll look like a big mushroom. Once we get up there, we can work out what to do next.”

  “I understand.” And he did. He could see the necessity for elevation as clearly as he understood the need for paths and roads on the ground. Thinking in terms of up and down as well as forward and back, left and right, now felt as natural as breathing. The licence had made him a creature of the sky more surely than had merely strapping a wing to his back.

  The Change-rich fabric that would support them in the air flexed organically as they shuffled to the edge of the platform. He spared no thought for the ground below, or for the other miners watching, hooting their derision. His attention was firmly focused on the wind. The sky was no longer a void. It was full of potential. He was a fish yearning to swim in the ocean. He was going home.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Hold me.”

  His arms slipped around her waist. Every muscle in his body tensed, ready, and she was no less poised. He felt her balance shift slightly, leaning outwards in a way that would have panicked him just a few moments earlier. Her knees bent.

  They jumped, and the Red Lifter caught them.

  With a cracking sound, the wing snapped taut, filled with air. The harness wrenched at him, digging deeply into his heavy, earth-yearning flesh. Downward the ground pulled them; he could feel its power clearly, even though the streets below were hidden in shadow. For one dizzying moment, the world became a spinning kaleidoscope of buildings and rooftops; Observatory Tower pierced the sky like a dagger. The platform blotted out the stars and threatened to swat them from the air.

  Chu wrenched her horizontal body to the right, shifting their combined centre of gravity. He felt the wing instantly respond, shifting to a new tack. He and Chu didn't plummet to their deaths. They were, for the moment, holding their own.

  The wind broke around them, trailing streamers and short-lived vortexes behind his legs. He ignored the details and concentrated on the flow.

  “Up there!” He let go of her long enough to point to her right, then grabbed back on. Just below the leading edge of the wing was a strong up-welling of air. He could see its edges roiling powerfully against the clear night sky. The crimson sunset was fading fast, but he didn't need light to see the wind. His awareness of it came through entirely new senses.

  With his eyes he saw red glowstones on every building roof and tower, visible only from above: navigation lights to ward off those in the air.

  He didn't stop to sightsee any further than that. The scenery was relevant only if it came too close. Chu shifted, swinging them in a new direction. He kept the bulk of his attention on the noise and feel of the wing.

  “Are you all right?” Chu asked him, her words barely audible over the wind rattling around them.

  “I'm fine.”

  “Are you sure? You're hanging on very tight. Here.” She took his arm and folded it diagonally across her chest, so his right hand was in her left armpit. “Hold me like this and let go with the other hand, so you can point. Does that feel better?”

  He was, for a brief moment, completely distracted by the sensation of her body against his. Her breasts were soft under his arm and her hair whipped into his face. Her head angled back into him. Their eyes just met.

  Then the world dropped out from under them, and they were tumbling downward.

  “Which way?” she cried, twisting the wing's control surfaces wildly in an attempt to check their descent.

  “There!” He pointed at the nearest thermal. “No—that way.” A bigger one lurked just around the corner of a clock tower. “Can we make it?”

  “We can try.” She dipped their nose and used gravity to accelerate them into the hot up-welling. His body seemed to hang heavier in the harness as the wing lifted them upward, curling in tight circles in order to maximise their lift.

  Their joint effort began to pay off. Slowly and not always surely, they crept higher over the city. The navigational glowstones grew fainter. The lights of taverns and homes took on a hazy, distant feel.

  Another miner circled them, watching their progress with some concern.

  “We're okay!” Chu yelled, waving. “Don't worry about us!”

  The other miner dipped her wing in acknowledgment and descended gracefully to the landing platforms.

  Circling within the thermal became a familiar chore. He found that he had time to look around. Stars appeared in the eastern sky over a land still hot from the day. Buoyant air formed a substantial cladding over the earth, and he knew that he could have flown indefinitely in any direction he chose. The wing thrilled through the air, its charms humming and crackling. When they reached the top of the thermal and circled lazily at the summit of the sky, he felt confident enough to let go of Chu and spread his arms.

  Air rushed between his fingers, stealing their heat. But the cold didn't concern him. The wind rattled in the wing and rushed up the inside of his robe. They were rocketing to the edge of the world. He gave himself completely to the experience, and whooped for the joy of it.

  He was flying!

  “So,” said Chu over her shoulder, “was it worth the effort?”

  “Yes!”

  “You know, I hope, that you're getting off lightly. At the moment, I'm doing all the work. If we're going to keep this up, you'll have to help out.”

  He sobered. “Of course. Show me how.”

  “Try shifting your weight from side to side. See what happens. Don't worry about making a mistake. We're relatively safe up here. U
nless we come out the side of the thermal, there's not much you can do wrong.”

  He nodded and took a grip on the straps leading to the wing's control surfaces. Shifting his body from the way it wanted naturally to hang, flat in the harness, was surprisingly difficult. Giving up on subtlety, he wrenched himself violently to the left. The wing instantly banked to the right. He swung awkwardly, trying to regain control. Momentum and gravity warred over him, and he lost.

  Chu tipped them onto a level heading with a gentle nudge.

  “It's not as easy as it looks,” she said. “Is it?”

  He agreed wholeheartedly. It was as hard as rock climbing for a beginner. “You make it look easy.”

  “Thanks to a lot of practice. Try moving just part of you, rather than all of you at once—a leg, your upper body, your arms. Get the feel of the wing and work with it rather than against it. It's a partnership, like you and me. If we're working against each other, we won't get anywhere. You can't make the wing do what you tell it to. You have to make it want to do it.”

  He could appreciate what she was saying, but putting it into practice was difficult. The wing wobbled from side to side as he experimented with moving his weight around. He found it very difficult to maintain an even keel; the slightest nudge sent them angling left or right, up or down, and the odds of overcorrecting were high. It was better, he soon discovered, to give in to the nonlinear nature of flight and allow the wing to travel in graceful curves. Straight lines were strictly for the ground.

  Before long, his muscles begged for a respite from the strain of tugging backwards and forwards, over and over again. Not a single limb was spared, and he could see why missing a leg might hamper the quartermaster's ability to fly, and why strength was an advantage.

  Finally he managed a complete circuit of the top of the thermal without losing control. That was a long way from attaining mastery over the wing—and the thought of landing already worried him—but it was progress.

  “Tired yet?” Chu asked him.

  “Yes, but I don't want to stop.”

  “Good. Let me take over for a bit and you can rest. All you'll have to do is tell me where the wind is going.”

  He sagged gratefully into her, breathing heavily. “Where are we going?”

  “Over the Divide.”

  A chill deeper than the wind swept through him. “I thought we weren't going to do that until later.”

  “I said we wouldn't do any real searching until tomorrow. It won't hurt us to make a quick pass, just so you know what it takes.”

  He nodded, hiding his nervousness. A fall would be fatal no matter where they came down, in the city or in the Divide. The thought wasn't terribly comforting, but it did put things in perspective.

  He studied the flows of the wind. “There's a current over there,” he said, pointing with his free hand. “Catch it and it'll take us halfway.”

  “Excellent.” Her spine flexed under him, and the wing responded smoothly, tilting steadily nose-upward. “Hold on tight. You're about to see some real flying.”

  She flexed again and the nose came down. The wing surged forward as though released from a cage. Skender clung to Chu with both hands and hoped for the best.

  They dropped out of the thermal with a lurch. Chu banked hard and fast, skidding through the air with consummate skill even though she couldn't “see” it. Moments of free fall alternated with sudden jolts upward. Skender swung back and forth like a rag doll in a dog's mouth. He concentrated on the city far below, studying the layout of its streets and the angular shapes of its roofs and towers, not thinking at all about the solid stone, bricks, and mortar waiting for them should they make a mistake.

  The navigation lights looked like stars reflected in a still, red-tinged lake. Their distribution was uneven, forming odd constellations, matching none in the sky. Skender thought he saw the road they had followed the previous night to the Magister's chambers, but everything looked different from above. The usual landmarks—windows, doors, street signs, graffiti—were invisible. He couldn't decide if the city looked bigger or smaller. Certainly he had never been able to see it from end to end while inside it, so his appreciation of it had been confined to those few areas he had visited. Above, he could see every tower and building, from the smallest to the very large. There was no avoiding the vast mass of industry and humanity it contained. Only one section was dark, a bulging triangle far away from the bustle of the New City; he recognised it as the boneyard, the chimneylike structure in which the bodies of Laurean dead went for disposal. Birds fed on the flesh before it desiccated completely, leaving anonymous, sun-bleached skeletons behind. He was heartily glad the sun had set.

  Gradually he became aware of a severe chord cutting into the city: they were flying over the Wall protecting the inhabitants of Laure from the Divide. The Wall curved gently inward, like a dam. Beyond it was nothing but darkness. That, in a way, was worse than the many lethal details of the city. There was no way to tell what lay beneath them. All manner of creature could be slithering across the distant ground, waving sharp-tipped limbs at them.

  He pointed Chu towards another steady stream. The wind seemed colder over the Divide, and moved more quickly, as if in a hurry to distance itself from the wounded earth. Turbulence became commonplace. Skender hugged Chu more tightly, for comfort as well as warmth, and she didn't object.

  “It's eerie out here, isn't it?” Her voice was just loud enough to hear over the snatching wind. The city was a blur behind them, the only source of light for many kilometres. He wondered what it would be like to fly without any sort of navigation at all. On a moonless night, he wondered, it might be possible to fly right into the ground without realising.

  His only reassurance was the wind, which he could still sense through the licence's charms. Its restless flow warned of sudden disturbances. He was reasonably certain they wouldn't crash into the far side of the Divide without fair warning.

  “Have you ever done this before?” he asked. “Flown out here on your own at night?”

  She shook her head, sending a gentle vibration through the wing. “Too scared.”

  That simple admission made him feel a little better. “And there's not much point, I guess. It's not as if you can see anything.”

  “There are ghostlights out here sometimes,” she said. “Occasionally, if they come too close to the Wall, someone's sent out to check. Usually older, more experienced flyers, or one of the heavy lifters with a Survey crew aboard. One mission brought back a man'kin in the shape of a giant gargoyle; chained, of course. It had lost a wing and couldn't speak. They tried to fix it, but it fell apart, and the bits were laid down in Slaughter Square. Some say that if you go there at night you can hear the pieces whispering to each other.”

  “What's Slaughter Square?” he asked, ignoring for the moment the image of a man'kin with wings.

  “You haven't been there? I'll have to take you. It's a charming place. Centuries ago, a disease killed hundreds of people. The only way to stop it was to kill the sick and their families and the rodents who spread the disease. Once a year there's a festival celebrating the Year of the Plague. Rats and mice are killed and left on every street corner; their blood is poured in Slaughter Square. It's very charming. We get lots of tourists.”

  “You're joking, right?”

  “Only about the tourists. If you stick around long enough, you'll be the first.”

  Skender had no intention of staying in Laure any longer than he had to. Once he found his mother, he could go home and return to his ordinary life. But when he tried to remind Chu of that, the words caught in his throat.

  You haven't been there? I'll have to take you.

  Had she just asked him out on a date?

  Before he could respond, she pointed into the deep darkness away from the city.

  “Look. There's something.”

  He craned past her, sending the wing wobbling from side to side. “Where?”

  “There.” She pointed again
. “See it?”

  Their flight levelled out. He peered into the darkness, squinting but unable at first to make out any detail.

  Then, at the very limit of his vision, he saw a light.

  “Yes, got it now,” he said. “Any idea what it's coming from?”

  “None at all. Want to check it out?”

  “Uh—” The night was impenetrable in that direction, the Divide gaped wide, and the cold had seeped into his bones. Only the front of him, where Chu's body gave him protection, retained any heat at all.

  He thought of his mother and what it must be like to be in the Divide at night, alone.

  “Okay,” he said, “but we're not stopping unless we absolutely have to.”

  “Goddess, no. I may be reckless, but I'm not an idiot.”

  He searched the sky for an appropriate stream. “Bring us up a bit, then across that way.” He indicated a heading slightly to the right of the light. “There's a nice strong current running through there.”

  She glided them along the correct trajectory. He felt the stream grab them and pull them forward. Skender had never been swimming, but he had read about it in books. When writers talked about being swept up in powerful currents, he imagined it would feel something like this, with the pit of his stomach suddenly hollowing and all control wrested from him.

  Chu sniffed. “I know this wind. It's called the Dark Bellows; it flows along the Divide from the mountains. Can you smell the trees?”

  He took a lungful but could smell nothing but her. “It's good,” he said.

  She sniffed again, tilting her head back until it bumped his. “There's something else on the wind. A new stink. Man'kin, I think,” she mused. “They're out late.”

  “I can't smell them. Could they be behind the light?”

  “No. Look at our heading. The light isn't in the Divide, it's on the far side.”

  He peered over his shoulder to get a fix on the city glow—now a less-than-brilliant haze far behind them. Looking forward again, he could see that she was absolutely right. The Divide floor was obviously a very long way beneath them. The light she had spotted was only just below their height.