Updraft

by Fran Wilde

  What Nat wouldn’t have given to know this. The thought didn’t make me sad this time. Instead, I felt a rush of strength. In this, I was stronger than anyone in the towers. I knew now why Singers stood so quiet, so confident.

  Distracted, I missed a rung with my foot and grabbed hard with both hands to keep from tumbling. Below me, I heard nothing. No intake of breath, no faint grunt as arms and legs braced to catch my fall. I echoed over my shoulder, and the ladder was clear of climbers. I was on my own.

  For the rest of my blind climb, I moved carefully, staying focused. I would think of the towers later, when I had time. When I was safe.

  The novice dining alcove was four tiers up from my alcove. I counted the tiers as I passed them, hearing the sounds of footfalls and robes change tone and clarity as I climbed. Where Sellis slept, few seemed to be about. The entire tier sounded empty as I paused to rest on the ladder. An echo-sweep across the passageway caught someone in the act of climbing over the ledge of the Gyre, using the pulley ropes.

  As the person straightened, I heard wings being furled. Battens clacked together, and silk rustled and folded. My echoes bounced off broad shoulders again.

  “I can see you, Wik.” I would not fail in his presence again. “Even with the blindfold on.”

  He chuckled. “You are quite good at this. Not everyone is. Sellis couldn’t sound her way out of her alcove without help for a year.”

  “And Ciel and Moc?” I stepped onto the tier.

  “Their ears are as sharp as yours, but they’re distractible.” His voice was closer now. I could hear him breathing. “Your focus is good.”

  I didn’t need to echo to know where he was now. My fingers stretched out and tapped his lower arm. I traced the muscle down to the veins on his hand with my fingertips. He froze. I kept my hand on his arm. Tightened my grip, trapping him there.

  “Why did you have me failed at wingtest, Wik?”

  He stayed silent for a moment. His lips parted, audibly, as if he’d pressed them together before deciding to speak. “The council felt you would be more motivated to consider our offer. And Macal showed you too much with that dive.”

  The young Magister. I couldn’t remember his face very well. It seemed so long ago. But the dive. I remembered that dive. I smiled. “A Singer’s dive.”

  Wik’s robes rustled. He pulled his hand away. “Macal is talented, but unpredictable, and young. My brother doesn’t hold with all the traditions.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Yes,” Wik said. “And a good Magister. He cares about the towers very much. He is trying to convince our mother and the council that he could serve the city better as a teacher.”

  As I absorbed this, Wik touched my shoulder. I startled.

  “You need to keep going, Kirit. You’re almost there.” He stepped around me and clambered up the ladder. “See if you can smell your way to breakfast,” he whispered.

  I stood still for another moment, the floor cool beneath my feet. Then I climbed after him, sightless, but not blind.

  The noise of the dining alcove on the next tier sounded like a storm: conversations built and lulled. Pairs and clusters of novices passed me, hushing each other when they spotted my blindfold.

  Embarrassed, I lowered my outstretched hands and tried to echo as unobtrusively as possible. The moment I did that, my sense of surrounding space began to fade. I stumbled and stopped. Then, taking a deep breath, I tilted my head back and echoed the way that worked best for me. I heard shapes that must have been tables and benches. A jumble of motions around me could have been novices, seated, standing, and walking. I found a table shape near the entrance of the dining alcove where two figures were seated: one broad and larger than most novice shapes, the other slim and sitting ramrod straight.

  I sat down at this table, next to the second figure, hoping I’d got it right. I smelled pungent spices.

  Fingers tugged at the knots of my blindfold. When it dropped, the daylight in the room made me blink until my eyes watered.

  “You did it,” Sellis said. “First try.” She smiled guardedly. I thought I saw a jealous twinge, but then she brightened. “You understand now,” she said.

  “With your help,” I said. I meant it too.

  Wik pushed a bowl of potatoes and peppers towards me. “With enough practice, we’ll make you a Singer yet, Kirit Spire.”

  “What’s next?” Breakfast’s spices prickled my tongue, and I blew out to cool my mouth. All around me, the sounds of the meal and the room added to what I could see. I wanted to learn more, to know everything now.

  “Rest,” Wik said. “With no moon tonight, we must rest today.” I couldn’t imagine why. Not when there was so much to hear.

  By the time I returned to my tier, closing my eyes now and then to see if echoing still worked, I was ready to curl up without unfolding my mat. Exhaustion and giddy success netted me and pulled me into sleep.

  15

  LIFT

  Sellis woke me in the dark.

  Many Singers were already awake, readying themselves to fly.

  In the towers, night was for sleeping. For storing up energy for the next day.

  But Singers flew the night. Now that I was learning how they did it, I sensed the power of the skill, the advantages. Nightwings. Like the children’s song, but better. They might see the invisible and travel through the city unobserved.

  Sellis took me to the top of the Spire, where Wik waited for us. I breathed the fresh air. I wanted to throw myself to it; it felt so different from the trapped stuff that cycled through the Spire.

  No moon. The stars were dim. I could not guess how long until sunrise. But I could see the nearest towers. The few lights within. The city slept, though we did not.

  “Can you hear?” Wik growled in my ear. He pressed the metal prong to my temple again. “Echo. You will hear.”

  Suddenly, I could hear too much. I could hear Wik’s breath and Sellis’s teeth chattering. I tried echoing faster. Sellis and Wik joined me. Faintly, I could hear something beyond them, in the distance, resonating.

  I pictured the city before me, the outlines of the towers I knew from my studies. I imagined what could be out there that I could hear but not see.

  The forms sounded faint, but very large. They surrounded the Spire.

  Oh.

  The sounds that my ears strained to hear were the true shapes of the city.

  I drew a breath and whispered, “I can hear.”

  “You will get better at it,” Wik said, almost too loud. I realized he wasn’t shouting.

  My heart leapt. If I could hear the city, I could fly it. Even if I could not see it.

  More citizens could learn this, too. If we could hear what we could not see, the towers could help seek out skymouth nests and free the city from their terror.

  Sellis must have interpreted the excited look in my eyes. She shook her head.

  “The city entrusts us with this knowledge, Kirit. This is not for the towers.”

  “Why not?”

  “Tradition. Since the Rise.”

  “Singers say ‘tradition’ when they don’t want to explain.”

  “It’s more than that.” Wik shook his head, struggling for patience. “It’s about our history. About how people work. Traditions hold the city together, like the bridges do the towers. Once, we had no traditions. Only fear and loss.”

  There had been no traditions in the clouds. Where skymouths and worse roamed free. Where towers had gone to war, attacking each other in fear and desperation. I’d studied. I had sung The real Rise. The Singers’ traditions had lifted the city from that darkness.

  Now I shivered, chilled.

  Sellis, impatient with old history, pulled the conversation back to the night’s lesson. “Echoing is a matter of learning to listen even more,” she said. “You can hear in directions, see in sounds.”

  “But it takes practice,” said Wik. “Do not assume that you can hear everything straightaway.”

&
nbsp; But I was surely much better at this than they thought. Perhaps it was like my voice, the shouts I could make that no one else on this blessed Spire could. At least sometimes. When I was lucky. But maybe I could hear differently too.

  Then Wik took the prong away, Sellis fell silent, and the city went dark. I could no longer hear the towers spread around me like a flower. No. I was silenced and grounded again. Wik had cut off a newly grown limb. I wanted it back.

  I reached for the prong.

  Wik tucked it away in his upper robe. “You must learn to make your own echoes out here, as you did inside.”

  Sellis took my hand and pulled me to the edge of the tower. She nudged me to sit, with my feet hanging over. I balked. I was unwinged, having left my training pair in my alcove.

  “We will fly tonight,” she said. Her voice sounded more hesitant than I’d ever heard it.

  “How many Singers are night fliers?” I asked.

  “Most. Everyone has to train to do it, but some don’t like it. Many think this one step closer to falling.”

  “But this lets you see! And hunt skymouths! It’s an honor to keep the city safe.”

  Sellis winced. “This is a charge, not an honor. And you will notice your hearing gets more sensitive for all things. There is a tradeoff. You will be marred.”

  I looked at my hand and its silver mark. “How?”

  “You will hear too much. All the time. Singing will be painful, but you must continue to do it. You will overhear what you shouldn’t. You will find crowds abhorrent. It sets you apart.”

  I already was set apart.

  Being separate from the rest of the city was not unusual for Singers. I realized Sellis’s cautions held a note of pride. Her concerns were Spire concerns: traditions, skills, Rumul. How much power she had and could gain. How high on the tower you lived didn’t matter here. Influence within the Spire and marks did.

  Wik had many marks. Rumul had many more. Sellis and I each had just the one, on our hands. Plus the pathways the echoes had begun carving in our brains—those were marks too.

  “When do we begin?” I whispered.

  “Now,” Wik said. He pulled me to my feet and covered my eyes with a silk scarf. Blind. I stood atop the Spire, blind.

  “Wait!” I couldn’t see where the edge of the tower was, though I felt the solid bone beneath my soft footwraps. The air whistled around me, but I froze in place, afraid to step the wrong way. Nets or no, I did not want to fall.

  Wik took my hand and guided me a few steps backwards. Then he let go and spun me around.

  Sellis whispered, “Not so fast!” Her voice was loud in my ears. I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, fast, like I’d done in the Spire. My eyes rolled beneath the scarf, searching for sound.

  Wik said, “Listen.”

  And I could, faintly. I heard the wind against the towers and how it wrapped them with soft sweeps of breeze. I could hear gusts too.

  We had so many ways to describe different types of wind. Lifts. Crosses. Constants. Gaps. I might one day hear them all.

  Something low and large echoed ahead of me. The closest tower? Varu. The wind swept over the shape, slowly, then ripped around the higher towers beside it, whistling. Far beyond, Lith lurked, broken and forlorn. I knew it was there, though I couldn’t hear it, because nothing else sounded so empty in the entire city.

  I knew then that we stood at the apex of the Spire, on the western side, with Varu on my left. That was my compass. The other towers close in sounded whole and twisting. The wind moved among the tiers, and I heard soft laughter and muffled sounds of families gathered together for warmth and comfort. All very faint.

  Echoes bounced off the crystals Sellis wore in her hair like shards of sound in a soft cushion. Sound marked where her body was next to mine and, in front of me, defined a broader, taller form. Wik. I reached out my hand. My palm brushed his silk robes.

  “Well done, Kirit,” he said, removing my blindfold. He lifted two sets of wings from the roof, gesturing to Sellis and me.

  The wing frames were covered with deep gray silk. In the dark, they were practically black. Nightwings. Invisible against the sky.

  Nat, I thought, the stories were true.

  I took one set of wings and slipped the straps over my shoulders.

  “Already?” Sellis said, hesitating and pale. She looked at me and caught herself. “Kirit’s barely ready.” But I realized as she spoke that she’d never flown the dark either. I wasn’t so far behind her any longer.

  My cheeks flushed, but I felt no fear. I knew I could die out there, but it would be among the towers, outside. In the wind. Not forgotten behind walls of bone.

  “Frightened?” Sellis said to me.

  “No,” I said, hoping this would continue to be true.

  “You should be,” Wik said. “Many things live in the dark. Not just towers and skymouths.”

  Skymouths. That did scare me. I looked over the edge of the Spire and saw the vast towers widening below us. The dark all around them, swirling to the clouds. Woozy, I had to catch myself before I fell. Sellis and Wik were too busy adjusting their wings. They did not notice.

  My hand stung from Rumul’s mark as I flexed it to check the buckles on my nightwings. The straps were worn in, but the wings were beautifully made. Nothing like this kind of wing in the whole city. I could almost hear them sing. The wind cut around them with a chuckle, and it tickled my ears.

  “Hurry,” said Wik. “Sunrise in a few hours.”

  “Why can’t we test sounds at dawn?” Sellis asked.

  “Because your eyes tell you what to see then. You need to train your ears.”

  With that, Wik beckoned me to go first. I leapt from the Spire into the darkness.

  As I leaned into my glide away from the Spire, waiting for Wik and Sellis to catch up, one of the worn buckles on my night-dark wings slipped.

  The strap screeched. As the bone loop of the buckle continued to give, I could hear the fabric tearing. Before my training, I wouldn’t have heard a thing.

  My wings pulled taut in the wind. All around me was pitch-black. If the strap broke, I would fall and no one would see me go. I scrambled to set my right wing’s elbow hook and reached as far as I could to hold the left strap together with my hand. The movement threw me off balance.

  I began to spiral dizzyingly.

  “What are you doing?” Wik shouted. When he realized what I held, he ordered, “Turn back now.”

  I was already trying to turn back. Didn’t need to be told twice. I had dipped too low to regain the top of the Spire. I couldn’t maneuver, only glide and hope.

  I heard the wind curve around something below me before I saw its shadowy outline, barely tinted against the darker forms of depth and clouds. A bridge.

  Don’t overshoot it. You have one chance.

  I could barely see it to time my landing.

  I tried hearing the bridge, forcing my tongue against the dry—too dry—roof of my mouth repeatedly, until I made a loud, stuttering sound.

  For a moment, my ears shaped the sweep of the sinew bridge. It stretched from Varu to Hirinat tower.

  The bridge echo disappeared. I was not yet skilled enough.

  I tried to hold the shape I’d heard in my mind. If I could drop low enough to catch the span with something—my hook, a knife, anything, I might stop my glide without falling.

  Above, I heard the others glide past me. Wik dove below what must be the bridge. Catching me on this spiral would be risky, even for an accomplished Singer. But he was there to make the last-ditch attempt if I missed.

  The strap slipped farther. The bone clasp cracked. And I heard Sellis beside me. She pushed me slightly off course with her backdraft.

  “Shift, Sellis!” I shouted. How could she not hear me?

  I could sense every change in the wind caused by the bridge and the looming wall of the Spire. If I didn’t course-correct soon, one would smash me flat, the other would cut me down.


  “Sellis, break windward,” Wik yelled.

  She finally heard and turned to clear the air. Her turn pulled me back onto a good landing angle for where I thought the bridge was. I kicked my feet out of their strap in time to hook the space where I pictured the railing should be.

  I hoped I was right. I needed to be right.

  One foot caught, then the other. I landed, sort of, hanging upside down by my ankles. The underbridge breeze swung me back and forth precariously.

  The bridge wobbled as Wik landed and hauled me onto the span.

  I brushed off his attempts to help inspect my wingstraps.

  By feel, I could tell that both straps had been stressed with something sharp. Someone wanted me to fall far enough that I never came back.

  Sellis’s eyes were wide in the sere predawn light. “I couldn’t turn,” she gasped, shaking. When Wik held out his hand, she shucked out of her own wings and they checked those wingstraps. They were stressed too, though not as badly. The grips had been weakened as well.

  “Where did our new training wings come from?” she asked.

  Wik was ashen; his tattoos, almost phosphorescent. The clip he gave to his words chilled me further. “The windbeaters sent new pairs up for the night fliers.”

  “Windbeaters?” Sellis looked shocked. “But why would they ever—Rumul will—How dare…” She fell silent, shivering and looking, in the dim light, much younger and more afraid than I’d ever seen her. She caught me watching, but did not glare or flinch.

  Finally, Wik spoke again. “Windbeaters. The Spire is in conflict.”

  Sellis looked at Wik, then at me. “Please. We must return quickly. Tell the council. Before more Singers fall.”

  16

  GYRE

  Wik had produced a sewing kit from a hidden pocket in his sleeve. He dampened a translucent cord with spit, then threaded it through the eye of a thick bone needle. He patched the break with sinew. When he finished, I tested the strap. It felt solid enough for a short flight.

  Sellis paced, eager to fly once her wings were patched. Her need to make sure Rumul knew what had happened, and why, was palpable in the darkness.