Updraft (19 page)

“Moc.” The Magister crooked her finger. From behind a taller boy, Moc peered out with an apologetic look at me. “Lead your flightmates, please.”

Moc's voice was a tremulous quaver, but his friends joined in, and the sound of young voices filled the room. Theirs was a boisterous retelling of The Rise—but not a version I'd ever heard before. This Rise told of danger, of dying, and of tower fighting tower. This Rise was not beautiful. It put music and memory to fear bred of long privations. It was a warning, wrapped in familiar notes.

In the Spire, even the songs were different.

Nat would have loved to know about this. As for me, I realized Sellis was right: I was worse than a fledge. If I was to get my wings back, I would need to learn fast.

By the time we broke for the evening meal, I had committed several verses to memory. My stomach growled as we walked to the common dining hall. Moc and Ciel took long strides on each side of me.

“We'll help you remember,” Ciel said. “We'll practice with you.”

“Don't you sleep?”

Moc shook his head and grinned. “We learn a lot when everyone's sleeping.”

And they did help me—on that day, and on many days after.

In the dining alcove, the twins seemed to know everyone. They filled their bowls with the day's meal—peas, or potatoes, or spiced bird—and began chattering with other novices before they'd set their meals down on the long bone tables. I was swept up in their conversations and barely needed to speak myself. Often, I found that we sat near Sellis, who was surly but not outwardly rude.

The children of the Spire swirled around us, eating, talking with both hands and mouths full. They were much like children of any tower. And yet they knew things the rest of the city did not. I wished for the first time that I could have grown up here, that I'd been taught what had really happened, instead of a merely a pretty song filled with lies about the city I loved. There was power in the knowing.

*   *   *

The moon waned and filled, then waned again. I mended Sellis's robes, badly at first, then better. Cleaned buckets and her cell.

My throat went raw from singing with the children.

Many evenings, Wik came to test my shouts and to instruct me further.

“There aren't many of us,” he said.

I caught his meaning. “You are a skymouth shouter, too.”

“Yes, but not naturally. I had to train, and I'm still never certain—” He swallowed before continuing. “Whether it is enough to stop the next one. It has been, so far. I am lucky.”

He taught me to aim my voice, by standing across the Gyre until I could shout at him in any wind. He made me do breathing exercises to strengthen my diaphragm and lengthen my shouts. “So you don't black out again,” he said.

He frustrated me with his criticisms. “You are not trying hard enough. Your voice doesn't have the right timbre, as it did at Densira. You must try harder.”

The harder I tried, the more I was unable to recall what shouting at the skymouth had sounded like, or felt like, and the more I was convinced that I was unable to manage it on demand. What good was I to the Singers if I could not control my voice?

“It's no good, Wik.” My voice rasped from the exercises.

“We will find another way,” he said. “I must ask the council for permission.” He refused to elaborate.

Meantime, we walked the Spire and practiced. Wik and Sellis and I. For Sellis lurked these lessons, and sometimes tried to accomplish the same types of shouts that Wik and I were practicing. Her frustration built when Wik shook his head at her attempts, but she kept trying.

“Most Singers can't, Sellis,” he said. “It's all right to not be perfect at something.”

“There are many things I haven't perfected—yet,” she said, frowning.

The lower tiers we walked through were as richly carved with city and Singer history as the oubliette had been carved with fears and monsters. As we walked, I noticed that at least one place—sometimes less than two hands wide—on each Spire tier had been left bare. We passed Singers paused by those walls, hands laid gently against those uncarved stretches of bone. Their eyes closed as if listening. I wished to understand what they heard, but when I reached out to a wall, Sellis swatted at my hand. “You may not. Not yet.”

On the other side of the passage, beyond the steep drop, Singers and older novices flew the Gyre's swirling winds.

I wanted to regain my wings so that I might fly with them.

Sellis saw me watching. “Not yet.” She found me more carvings to study. “Soon,” Sellis encouraged me as she rousted me from the floor to clean her bucket and her bowl. “Soon,” the Magister said as I scrubbed the carvings on the upper tiers clean of grime. “Soon,” Wik promised, before asking me to shout for three minutes; my voice turned to gravel.

But I flew the Gyre in my dreams, before the galleries, up to the council balcony, and out through the apex into the blue sky.

And I learned to listen to the Spire in other ways, and through the Spire, the city.

I heard the city's voice in the bone floors, through my feet as I walked, my knees as I scrubbed. I heard its rumbles and creaks, its sighs. I learned to speak to it in secret.

As I slowly learned, I was punished for nearly everything. For getting words wrong. For annoying Sellis. For being in the wrong place when a Singer wanted me somewhere else. I could not say how many infractions, but the punishment was always the same: not bone chips to weigh me down, but more cleaning and carving. My nose was filled with bone dust, and I grew tired beyond measure of being handed the carving tools. My hands thickened with calluses and scars from tracing patterns charcoaled on the walls for me by Sellis, the Magisters, Wik, and seemingly anyone else passing by.

And yet, I learned. Despite everything. Moc and Ciel knelt by me and sang with me while I gouged at the walls or scrubbed the floor. I watched Singers come and go on powerful wings and listened to the songs they sang to each other, citing challenges won long ago in order to support arguments today.

I pricked my ears for any mention of the windbeaters.

When the full moon showed through the top of the tower, the entire Spire stopped to sing The Rise. Sound swept me up in the history. The bravery. The real Rise. I mouthed the words I knew now, still hesitant to sing with them.

I memorized facts about the towers: how high they were, how many had troubled their neighbors. I listened as Magisters discussed balance in the city and how to keep towers from cracking, like Lith. An artifex came to show our class how bridges helped strengthen the towers. With the young ones, I counted the toll of the skymouth attacks.

We had our own songs in the Spire: legends, epics, and heroes the towers could never know about.
“Corwitt Takes the Nest of Thieves,” “The Plunge of the Singer,” “The First Appeasement.”
Through them, I began to understand more of the bone towers on which we lived.

I had not seen Rumul since my release from the oubliette.

The Spire remained quiet, save for the songs and the city's everyday sounds.

And then the day came when I stood before the classes and sang The Rise again, and they sang it back. The Magisters questioned me about the populations of Grigrit, Varu, and others, and I knew the answers without thinking. I knew them all. The sun passed beyond the tower, and the oil lamps came out. My examination continued. Did I know the load-bearing weight of new bone? What was the angle at which a Singer must glide when carrying a child? An adult?

I had memorized the songs, understood the reasons for the answers. I knew so much more now.

The Magister presented me with a gray robe bearing two blue stripes. A robe that fit me.

Sellis brought me a pair of wings. Worn ones, certainly, and not the glorious Singer wings I'd admired, but something to practice in.

My voice, too, had strengthened. Wik seemed pleased.

When I returned to Sellis's tier one night, a small, perfect apple rested atop the folded bedding outside the alcove. I munched the whole thing, sour core and all.

The next morning, Sellis woke me early, saying, “Now I will show you how to fly.”

“I know how to fly,” I protested.

“You still don't know everything,” she said. But she smiled behind her stern words.

She cleared her own bucket that morning. We tightened each other's wingstraps; ate bowls of boiled buckwheat sweetened with honey together in the dining alcove. Then she showed me how little I knew.

As we exited the alcove and walked the passage outside, still chewing our last mouthfuls, she grabbed fistfuls of my new robe and pushed me over the balcony, headfirst.

In my panic, my kicking legs flipped me right side up. My hands reached out, grasped air, then silk.

In the confines of the Gyre, I took command of my wings and let them unfurl, praying that I would have time to jam my fingers in the grips. A gust caught and spun me. I tried to hold down my breakfast. My fingers locked around the grips, and I struggled to turn before I hit the opposite wall and dashed myself to pieces.

But I did not turn. And I did not hit the wall.

A drumbeat from deep down in the Spire began as my wings filled with a strong gust from below. My plunge ceased abruptly. An updraft carried me, though a moment before, the Gyre had held only the most meager of breezes.

“What is this?” I whispered.

Sellis appeared beside me, smiling. “It is the Gyre, Kirit. Learn to fly here, and you will own the city.”

Sellis pointed. I ducked my head to look and saw the windbeaters at work far below. At first I thought they were using sheets of silk, similar to those sometimes used in wingfights, that caught and bent the wind. But their tools were complicated by frames, sleeves, and battens. I gasped. The windbeaters wore giant wings over their arms. They worked in rhythm to the drums, channeling the wind through the tunnel so that it lifted and planed.

“Singers who can no longer fly,” Sellis explained as we flew tip to tip, “are still a part of the Spire.”

The wind coming up through the center of the Spire smelled of must and bone and something thick and caustic. Wik had said my father was a windbeater. Perhaps he worked the Gyre below me now. Did he know I flew above? I had my wings now. Perhaps now I would be allowed to go below and speak to him.

More windbeaters gathered, using their misshapen wings to channel the air. A grinding sound floated up to us.

“They are opening the gates,” Sellis said. “To build a stronger vortex—to welcome you.”

The gates. Like the one I had opened in the walls so many days ago.

I cringed, even as the breeze quickened. The gates' opening made me worry about skymouths. I tucked my legs in my footsling and wished for my lenses.

“Relax,” Sellis said, not understanding my fear. “Singers have been doing this forever.”

“It's true,” Ciel said, leaning out from a gallery. She grinned, her tiny face framed by a circle of sky and sun, far above. Faces peered over the balconies, amused. She laughed at my surprise. “This is nothing. Wait until your first fight. If it's not exciting enough, the windbeaters have rot gas and fire to speed things up.”

“Ciel!” Sellis said. “Let her learn for herself.”

I glided the Gyre in a circle and watched the windbeaters. Their oversized wings swept and dipped. The winds rose, and I could feel the pressure change in my ears.

Sellis modeled a turn, then a slow dive. I followed her, wobbling. The new wings and my time away from the wind had cost me skill and confidence.

Gyre winds mimicked the best gusts of the open sky, made more complex by the shape of the tower and its galleries. I discovered I could tack quicker, and that the breezes became muddled near the walkways.

Sellis called sharp instructions to tighten the curve of my wings, to stretch the footsling with my ankles, to look up, not down.

“You'll need to learn to fly with locked wings,” she said. “For the challenges. Can't hold a knife and grips both.”

“Have there never been skymouths in the Gyre?” I finally asked, as I felt more comfortable in my glides.

My companion did not answer. The drumbeats slowed and we sank to our tier and furled our wings. Ciel ran to a ladder, late for class downtower. I sighed and looked out into the Gyre. “That was amazing.”

Sellis tucked her wings away. “Flying the Gyre is for training. We shouldn't enjoy it.”

I composed myself, but Sellis's face broke into a glowing smile. The first I'd seen from her. “But I love it anyway.” She reached to help me furl the complex angles of my training wings. “Singer wings have more detail. You need to care for them, or they'll wear wrong. Become dangerous.”

“I will.”

“When I first became an acolyte, learning to fight in the Gyre was my reward for being quick. I had excellent sparring partners—” she began, then stopped. Smiled shyly, her head tilted, listening. I heard nothing. “I am summoned away.”

I had so many questions, but exhaustion took me before she returned.

In the morning I woke to find Sellis still not back, and Singers rushing past our alcove. A bone horn sounded. First Moc, then Ciel ran past. “Quickly!” they said, pulling me upright.

I was barely on my feet when the city roared loud enough to knock me back down.

 

13

SACRIFICE

The Spire shook with sound. What had begun as a low moan far off built quickly, like a fast-moving squall, into a blistering roar, and did not lessen. Soon, the storm of sound battered my skin with its force, emanating from the Spire's very walls.

The birds roosting on the ledges beyond our alcove all rose and scattered into the Gyre and out through the apex with a clapping of wings that shook dust loose everywhere. The Spire's enclosure amplified the city's roar. Everyone within, at least who I could see, was affected by the sound. Students rushed by with their hands over their ears. A Singer fell to his knees.