Cloudbound (24 page)

She meant both of us.

“Kirit.”

“Get away!” She rose to one knee, tried to stand. Collapsed again, her blade on the ground beside her, her face buried in her mother's robe, sobbing.

I wheeled on Aliati. But the scavenger, the wingfighter, the woman who had led us into the clouds had reached for Ezarit's robes again.

“Look,” she said.

A knife hilt stuck from Ezarit's back. Blood caked the tea-colored robe around the wound.

“She didn't fall. Someone killed her.” Aliati grabbed for the blade, but Kirit slapped her hand away.

“We will find out who did this,” Kirit whispered. “I promise.”

The skies had darkened over the valley, and I couldn't see Beliak and Ceetcee anymore. We'd been down here too long. We'd found proof the attackers hadn't been Singers; we'd found a survivor, and a murdered councilor, but it wasn't enough. Now we needed to find our way out of the valley.

Kirit began keening. A horrible sound, her rough voice tore the air with her pain.

“Shhhh,” I tried to calm her.

“Let her,” Aliati said. “Let her say good-bye.”

Loss echoed through the valley. I closed my eyes against it, but it seeped through my ears, my skin. I echoed Kirit's promise in my mind.
We'll find who did this.

I meant the knife. I meant the council platform. I meant the broken city.

“Nat,” Aliati whispered, “open your eyes. Hurry.”

I opened them a crack. Wiping tears away on my sleeve, I spotted a soft glow over my robe cuff. Another, at the edge of my vision. At my feet, Kirit raised her face from her mother's robe. Her mourning quieted, but did not stop.

A soft light pulsed the cloudscape. On the nearest ridge, two orbs glowed a diffuse blue. Kirit's voice stilled in her throat, surprised. The lights faded.

“Don't stop,” Aliati said. Kirit looked up at her, angry. But Aliati gasped. “Your face. Your skin is on fire. Blue fire.”

It wasn't fire. Kirit's tattoos and scars shimmered, like the skymouth had against the clouds. Not a lot, but enough to scare Aliati.

She raised her hands. The mark traced in skymouth ink on her hand, and those more organic scars left by the veins and seams of the skymouth skin she'd draped over herself had a bluish glow to them.

“Sing, if you can, Kirit?” Aliati said.

Kirit looked at Aliati with dead eyes. “How can I sing now? Ever?”

The blue glow faded around us. Her tattoos faded too. I remembered the few blue pulses I'd seen in the clouds, thinking I'd imagined them. I'd never seen their like in the city above. This was something the clouds kept for themselves.

Footsteps quietly approached, and the sound of footslings dragging on the moss. Ciel and Ceetcee, with Beliak behind them. Ciel put her hand on Kirit's shoulder. After a moment, Kirit touched Ciel's fingers with her own.

Ciel began to sing Remembrance. Kirit, after a moment, joined her.

They sang through the verses once, then again. A third time. Kirit's tattoos pulsed, and the valley filled with soft blue lights along the ridge walls and in the moss.

One was close enough for me to reach out and touch. My hand brushed slick skin, a curved tentacle that grabbed for my finger.

Littlemouths. The glow was coming from cloud-born littlemouths.

Across the valley nearest where Kirit sang, they clustered, numerous. A few pulsed farther from her. Kirit and Ciel finished the song. Aliati drew Ezarit's robe over her head, while removing the knife from her back. All bathed in a blue glow.

In the silence that followed, the lights slowly faded, and the ridgeline shadows grew longer, as darkness took the valley for its own.

 

19

THE ARTIFEX

We left the valley's shadows and climbed the ridgeline to get high enough to fly.

Kirit walked in silence, leaning hard on Ciel. She'd agreed to let Ceetcee remove her gray wings and fouled robes down to the undersilks. She hadn't protested when Ceetcee wrapped her in a spare overlayer—my hunter's cloak—and slid a pair of green silk wings that Aliati had found over her shoulders.

Now we walked from the valley at her side, thinking our own thoughts, occasionally whispering, but Kirit's silence felt like a void where no sound could enter or leave. We wove our presence around her like a net.

The resolve I'd carried with me from Doran's to find the traitors only strengthened as we climbed the ridgeline above the valley where the council had come to rest. We would honor Ezarit's life, her sacrifice. We would honor them all.

We had a single day until Allmoons now. When we'd climbed high enough on the ridgeline to fly, I could send Doran a message about what we'd found. I hoped he would listen, and that he could get the city to listen.

Over my shoulder, I asked Ciel to pass back a request: “Beliak, ready Maalik to fly.”

The ridgeline turned, obscuring our sight of the valley. We angled up, away from one tower's expanse, towards another. The mists parted in front of us, layers of fine curtains. Occasionally, we saw littlemouths in the distance, pulsing once, twice, then disappearing.

Walking next to Aliati, I searched the ridgeline for signs we were clear of the valley's wind shadow. In the mist behind us, Ciel held tight to Kirit's hand. Kirit had pulled my cloak's hood over her head, closing herself off from us. Ceetcee and Beliak brought up the tail end of our group. He raised a hand in acknowledgment and broke a graincake into pieces for Maalik. The bird bobbed and snapped at the food from Beliak's shoulder.

Kirit walked slower with each step, as if an invisible tether kept her tied to the valley. Ciel towed her along, and Beliak whispered encouragements from behind.
Keep moving.

Overhead, a shadow passed, still high enough in the clouds to have indistinct shape. Another. Birdcrap, we couldn't let Maalik go up if he was going to be snapped from the sky by a predator.

But the way Aliati watched the shadows made me wonder. “Scavengers?”

She tilted her head. Looked again. “No. Scavengers work the towers mostly. They don't stray too far from a way back up, rarely come this low. Those are gryphons, maybe. Or blackwings. They've been searching the clouds around the Spire since you, Moc, and Kirit fell from the sky. But most can't echo so it's taking them a long time.”

“Think they're still looking for Kirit?”

“Maybe. Maybe something else.” She bit down on the last word, as if she regretted saying it.

I considered what Doran had said the day before. “Or they're looking for the artifex who went missing.”

“I didn't say that.” Aliati turned on me, sharply.

I knew only what Doran had told me, that Dix had sent a message about the missing artifex. When I'd mentioned it the day before, Aliati hadn't reacted like this. Now, I was concerned. “What do you know, Aliati? Scavengers seem to have connections everywhere. If you know something that could help us, you should say so.”

She shook her head, no. Trudged on. I followed her closely. Changed the subject. “Where's the knife you took off Ezarit's body?”

She'd seen me watch her do it. She wouldn't keep that knife as a scavenged trophy. Not while I was leading this group.

She reached into her satchel and pulled it out, wrapped in a strip of Ezarit's robe. “I want to show it to someone.”

I took the wrapped knife from her. “Sell it, you mean. No.” Turned the bone handle over in my palm. This looked like the knife of a wingfighter. Not many glass-tooth knives left these days. No skymouths being caught, no glass teeth for knives. But I'd seen one with a similar handle at Grigrit, when Doran showed us the game, Justice. “There was a similar knife at Grigrit; Kirit and I both saw it.” Aliati and I turned to look back at the young woman trudging up the ridge.

On hearing her name, Kirit slowed. Looked up at us. She didn't speak, but she listened. Ciel wrapped her hand more tightly around Kirit's fingers. Kirit leaned on the girl's shoulder.

“I've seen the knife before too. Over a game of Gravity.” Aliati had said at Bissel that she didn't play. Now she did. What was the truth? The latter, probably. She had her own game board. “No, I would not sell this knife.” Her voice said,
Don't be skytouched.
Her eyes spoke more sharply.

The more I learned about Aliati, the more I wondered what we'd gotten ourselves into, trusting her. She'd accompanied us below the clouds on little more than a whim and the offer of payment.

“Who do you want to show the knife to?” The fewer people who knew about our task, the better. Especially when it came to people who played strategy games with Dix's confederates. Anyone who warned Dix or the knife's owner would put us in jeopardy.

“A friend.” We'd crested the ridgeline. Above us, the bone-encrusted bridge ran from one tower to the next. Above that, shadows and clouds. A bird-shadow circled over us. Aliati chewed her lip. “You need to talk to him too.”

“Who?” I'd twisted my finger in the silk cord that once held my father's message chip. Secrets. I hated them, what they did to my friends. “Aliati, tell me.”

For the first time since I'd known her, Aliati sounded frightened. “The artifex. The missing one. You need to talk to him.” But she didn't slow her pace, she pressed on towards the bridge.

I stopped so suddenly, Kirit walked right into my back.

I grabbed Aliati's arm, stopping her, making her look me in the eye. “How do you know where the artifex is?”

Yes, she was afraid, though I couldn't tell if it was for herself, or for someone else.

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Pressed her lips tight enough to turn white. Then, finally, spoke. “Because I took him. I took the artifex from the Spire and put him someplace safe.”

*   *   *

With a single sentence, Aliati became immediately more useful in the undercloud, and far less reliable.

“You took the artifex?”

Doran and Dix each sought the artifex. We needed him. And Aliati had both stolen him and forgotten to mention it at Bissel.

“You took him where? And when were you going to tell us?” Beliak joined us at the front of the walk. He'd tied a yellow silk tether to Maalik's claw.

Aliati scratched her ear. “I didn't want him in danger. He's a friend I've known a long time.” Simple words, and so devastating.

Kirit spoke, her voice hoarse. “We aren't friends, then.”

“You're wrong, Kirit.” Aliati turned. “I wouldn't be down here if we weren't. I don't let my friends go into danger. But if they're there, I try to help. Djonn—the artifex—was in danger, and neither of us had realized how much. When I couldn't find you, I saved Djonn.”

Kirit stared at her. Aliati pulled on the hoop in her ear and looked away first. I stepped between them, eyes on Aliati. The scavenger wouldn't meet my gaze either.

A friend. Her friend, whose work required kidnapped fledges. But also, an artifex who knew more about Dix's operation than anyone.

If Dix was involved with the council attack, Aliati's friend might tell us. But why hadn't Aliati told us? Scavengers lived by their own codes, certainly, but she'd known what we were looking for. And had wanted to protect the artifex from the blackwings, from the city. From us too, probably.

Unbidden, the tune for “Corwin and the Nest of Thieves” echoed in my mind. Ciel had sung it when we first came below the clouds. Corwin had retrieved something for the Singers. Something metal. We'd come here to retrieve answers. Aliati had descended into the clouds to look for Kirit, but had stolen the artifex instead, the man who had figured out enough of the cryptic marks on the metal plates to make lighter-than-air.

Corwin found a gleam of hope

He lifted himself by wing and rope

And returned the city to treasures old …

The Singers had maintained Corwin's song through generations. When Tobiat taught it to Beliak, Ceetcee, and me, it had seemed like a bawdy, archaic myth. But not one of the songs the Singers kept as part of their legacy was purely for fun. They'd sung to remind themselves and others what happened to rebels and thieves. The towers had no such legends. When we made it back above the clouds, we could change that.

I made a fast decision. Moving away from Aliati, I knelt on the ridgeline and cut a message chip:
Meet between the Spire and Naza, at dawn. We'll find you.
Then I took Maalik from Beliak's shoulder and tied the chip to the yellow silk cord. “Varu. Doran.” Maalik had flown to Varu many times and recognized Doran. If he made it out of the clouds, he'd deliver our message.

We would bring proof to Doran: no tattoos among the fallen attackers, a very particular knife, and the artifex and his thief.

I tossed the whipperling into the sky and watched him circle up until he disappeared into the clouds.

Aliati watched me, pale. “I'm not the enemy, Nat.”

We needed her help, to show us where the artifex hid, to talk to Doran. I was wary of her, certainly, but could not make her a captive, couldn't drive her away. When Doran needed to keep ties to a dubious ally, he spoke of need and trust. He sometimes shared a secret with them. With me, up in the tower, he'd shared the secret of the brass plates. Ezarit had done things differently. She'd listened to both sides, tried to understand.

We had no time for either. The woman who'd flown at our side during Spirefall, who'd guarded Wik but refused black wings, who'd hidden a friend away to keep him safe—and who had endangered us all.

“Take us to the artifex. Now.”

She gestured to the ridgeline's peak, where another bone pile, this one much older and overgrown, stood before a small cave entrance. “We're already here.”

*   *   *

“We can't all go in,” Aliati said. “Nat and me, maybe Kirit if she wants to. Djonn needed someplace safe where he could recover. Dix was drugging him too, for much longer than the fledges.” Emotions played across her face: anger, concern.