Updraft (35 page)

But another question still bothered me. “How did you know about the vents?”

Tobiat crawled back through the wall and interrupted. “Me!” he hooted.

“Elna said she went looking for Naton after he disappeared, after he was thrown down. She flew as far downtower as she could, around the city. She didn't find him.”

“Found me!” Tobiat spread his arms wide. “Shiny present for the artifex's wife.”

Nat looked at me, dirty and wounded, and rolled his eyes. Squeezed my hand quickly. I squeezed back before he let go. Almost like old times.

“How long have you been here?”

“Days,” he whispered. “Shot through that vent in the Spire, got banged around, and fell again. Landed hard. Then someone found me. Brought me here.”

“Who?” I asked. This was important. Tobiat had said,
Wind was right.

“I never saw. But then your Singer brought Tobiat to take care of me.” Nat laughed until he coughed, and his eyes closed again. He passed into a restless sleep, exhausted by our conversation.

Wik. I heard the dark Singer's voice in my memory:
I wouldn't have let them harm Elna.
Felt him catching me while Sellis flew on. So many secrets in the Spire. So many currents working round each other.

I crawled past Tobiat, back through the tunnel, and onto the empty, black balcony. I leaned against a crumbling wall and looked up at the city that had risen beyond Lith's broken tiers.

 

24

HIDDEN

A shadow passed the balcony. One shadow, but two people: Wik, carrying Elna.

When Wik set her on the ledge, Elna stood for a moment before her legs wobbled. She caught herself against a spur, then sank to the ground and began to crawl towards the tunnel. Towards the sound of Tobiat's voice. She'd been here before. But to fly like that, without wings, blind, after a near attack. She was stronger than I'd ever imagined she could be.

Wik stood on the thin balcony, furling his wings and looking to the horizon. I resisted the urge to push him off.

Elna disappeared into the tunnel, and I followed. She hadn't realized I was there yet. I watched her tend Nat, listened to her clucking at him. She touched Nat's wounds gently and reached into her satchel for a packet of herbs. Pulled back the gray silk, but kept it to reuse. “Who has been here?” she asked.

“Singer,” said Tobiat.

Elna dipped her head. “On your wings, Wik.”

Wik, who had followed us to the tunnel's mouth, said, “Not me. Kirit.”

Elna paused in her work, and her face brightened. “Where?”

The tiny grotto had grown very crowded. I stepped closer to her and put my hand on her shoulder. But I turned to Wik. “Whose side are you on?” I put timbre into my voice. As I'd been taught. How could someone know all that Wik knew and not do something to stop it?

Elna touched my hand. “We trust him, Kirit.” It was almost enough.

“Why?”

Tobiat chuckled and gestured to Elna. “Trust,” he said. “Can't remember why.”

My softhearted, gentle second mother. The woman who never picked a fight, who was always two steps ahead of us as children. Her chin hardened as she ran fingers along her only son's broken limbs, ably adjusting bandages and applying salve as if he had just tripped while running in Densira.

“I went looking for Naton after Conclave. I left Nat with your mother, who was pregnant with you. I spent days at it, all through Allsuns. Broke my eyes, it turned out. Too much sun. Slept in a hang bag down every tower around the Spire for days in the winds. But I never found Naton. I found Tobiat. Hanging by a wing from an abandoned tier on Bissel. Birds had already started pecking at one of his eyes.”

She turned her face towards him, smiling fondly. “I don't know how long he'd been there, but he was alive, and he was wearing a Singer robe.”

I held my breath. I'd been right.

“I figured if I could make him well, he might tell me of Naton's last days.”

“How did he get there?”

Elna quieted and turned to Tobiat. Waited.

Tobiat cleared phlegm from his chest and spat. He coughed for a few seconds more, then drew a long breath.

“Challenge.” He cackled.

The sun was going down. Tobiat would babble until it came up again. I tried to hurry him. “Who did you challenge?”

Nat's eyes were open; he was listening too. Tobiat spat again, hitting his first gob with the quivering mass of the second. “Young Rumul. For Naton.”

“Why did Rumul want this so badly?”

Wik stepped in. “A Singer historian found a set of bone plates hidden far downtower. They showed Singers using skymouths to hunt in the clouds, and Rumul saw the potential. There was not enough dissent to stop him. Not then. The council brought in an artifex. Called it tradition. Before the Rise, they said, Singers had trained skymouths to defend the Spire. They stopped long ago. Rumul thought it necessary again.”

My jaw hung open. Those? To defend the city? No. That wasn't what Wik had said. He'd said the Spire.

“How long have people been trying to change this?”

I'd asked Wik, but Tobiat answered. “Too long. Too slow.”

Wik nodded. “Rumul had the votes in council and strength in the Gyre. He had many of the windbeaters too. With some towers rebelling against tithing and Conclave especially, Rumul has fought hard to keep order. Singers were afraid to have another Lith. He gained more supporters. Inside and outside the Spire.”

The southern towers, I thought. Where the Spire got its apples. Its muzz.

“We have only recently been able to shift the balances,” Wik continued.

All those people. The towers.

I turned to Nat. “What were you willing to die for to have spoken aloud?”

And he looked at me full on, for the first time since I'd found him here. His eyes looked harder, and sadder, than I'd ever seen them. “You mean, what did I risk killing a friend for?” he said.

I winced, but stood firm. Waited for him to answer.

“I wanted the city to hear what Naton knew, and what Tobiat knew, but couldn't say.” He paused. His voice was deep and firm. Determined. “I wanted them to have to sing it from the towers. That the Singers kept skymouths. Used them against the city.”

No one would have listened to someone like Tobiat.

Except someone had. Nat had. Elna had.

Nat said, “After you disappeared and Singers told everyone I'd attacked the Spire, they weighed me down with Laws. I had to hide during Conclave, or they would have taken me.” He paused and drank the tea that Elna held to his lips. “I went so far down. Into the clouds, Kirit.”

Into the clouds. The nerve that had taken. The desperation.

Nat kept talking. “What I found down there, the city needs to know that too.”

I looked at Wik, who shrugged, confused.

“In the clouds, I had to hide often, letting gryphons and skymouths that were the size of whole tiers pass by.” Nat swallowed. “It was dark down there. I stumbled around a lot. Nearly fell off the edge of a tier more than once. Then I tripped over a nest of them. Hiding. Tiny ones, little bigger than my hand.”

“Them?”

“Littlemouths. They live in the towers. But they're not like the ones that migrate. They're small. No sharp teeth. They climb. Can't fly. They eat waste and weeds. Not people.”

“Then they're not skymouths.” I thought of the baby skymouths in the cages. Those had been big. They'd had teeth.

Nat reached into a basket by his side and pulled out his hands. His palms formed a seemingly empty cup. “Look at it. Feel it.”

I turned to Wik, questioning. He began to echo at Nat's hands so that we could better see what he held. I joined him. There was something soft in Nat's hands, for all that they looked empty. I reached out a fingertip and touched an eye ridge, the crease of a mouth.

The creature was something like a skymouth, a baby skymouth, but much smaller. Large, wide-set eyes, a ridge of glass teeth, but not the sharp edges that gouged and tore. Grinders.

The creature nestled in Nat's hands.

Wik was doubtful. “Another kind of skymouth?” He crossed his arms and frowned.

Nat shook his head.

Tobiat made a sound that was part yelp and part laughter. “Same kind.” He stared for a long time at Wik.

I turned too. “What does he mean?” I watched Wik's expression shift from confusion to understanding. To horror.

He spoke in a rush. “The Spire's skymouths are bred there.” He reached to touch the tiny creature. Hesitated and pulled his hand back. “It's not night and day. The city needs the sinew. Needs the bridges. Singers have kept a few skymouths for that purpose since the Rise. Rumul argued in council to breed more, bigger mouths. They got more than they bargained for.”

Elna bent her head.

“Why was he allowed to do this?” I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Was the council truly that weak? The Singers that easily led? Why had no one challenged?

“Not everyone knows. The skymouths aren't exactly easy to see down there, and so their true number goes unobserved. The shouters and the council know. There's been gossip, but there have been accidents too. And the council has to be careful. Rumul's beaten every challenge so far.”

“Terrin.”

Wik frowned. “Others too. Civik, long ago. Rumul is too good in the Gyre and has many windbeaters on his side. He bribes them well. When Rumul kept winning, we decided to try to work for change in different ways.”

“Sabotage.”

“And changing minds. It's slow and dangerous. There are more dissenters among the younger Singers. A few of us try to blunt the effect of Rumul's policies.”

“Why can't you tell the towers? Or kill the skymouths?” My outrage brought the pitch of my voice close to a scream.

Wik smiled weakly. “The needs are too great. Rumul has consolidated too much power and removed most of the strong-willed among the council. Only Viridi opposes him openly, and then very cautiously. She—we—have been trying to secure windbeaters we could trust, biding our time. Too much so. Rumul's trade with the wealthiest towers has enhanced the Spire's food; the towers themselves enjoy more bridges, nets too, though they fear the skymouths as everyone does. The wealth keeps Rumul popular. The fear keeps the towers under his thumb.”

Tobiat moaned. “Secrets, secrets.”

I ignored him and pushed forward. “You are trying to stop it? And Viridi too?”

When Wik nodded, I continued, “Yet she let Terrin be destroyed? She—” I stopped. I turned and looked past Nat. To Elna. “You knew. Naton worked on the pens. He told you.”

She blinked and frowned. “I knew something was wrong. I knew he thought he was doing something important for the city, but then he had questions. He gave me the chips before they took him, but before he could tell me what all the marks meant, he was gone.”

“Does Ezarit know?”

Elna shook her head. “No one outside the Spire but me. Naton smuggled the carvings on a necklace to me, for safekeeping. If I'd said anything, I would have been cloudbound. And Nat—” She put her hand to her head and turned towards her son's sickbed. “Now you know everything.”

Nat threw a bandage in the fire pit, nearly knocking over the tripod, enraged but unable to rise. “I would have told the city! We could have gathered the towers together. We could have done something. Not waited to build support over generations. And now we're stuck here.”

“You would have died trying, like Naton,” Wik said. In the dim light, his eyes reflected the oil lamps. His face, etched with the marks of his battles in the Gyre, looked grim.

“Just like we'll die here. Once they come for us,” I said. “We are two Singers missing, with Sellis gone to report me to the council. They will come looking. They'll search the towers for me. And they will then find you.”

“Then we have to rouse the towers, tell them!” Nat said. “They will fight!”

Wik said, “The towers no longer know how to fight. They know how to break things, like Laws, and make minor rebellions. They know how to issue a challenge to the Spire, because that is what they've been trained to do.”

“Trained to guard, and to hunt. But only within their own quadrants. Trained to Fortify. To hide. Only a few fly the whole city.” Nat's voice was bitter and mocking as he sang, “
Tower by tower, secure yourselves.
We watch while others suffer. Call it unlucky. Turn away.”

“And Singers decide which towers gain connections,” I said. “Which can rise. Which fall in the path of migrations.”

“But”—Wik gestured to the blackened walls around him—“we do not wish another war. Wars break towers. People die. Fighting throws the city into mayhem, and worse. We cannot sink to that. That is what we were before the clouds. We were not a city.”

“Are we a city now?” I asked the question. “The towers humbled and begging for Singer attention. For freedom to speak? Who can fight this?”

Tobiat pointed his crooked finger at Wik and me. “Singers fight.”

Wik agreed. “One of us must gain audience with the council. Try again to stop Rumul. His last wingfight injury has not healed well, though not many know it. I will go back. If I fail to get them to hear me, I will challenge, and then Kirit will get to the windbeaters. Convince them to support us.”

“You want me to go down beneath the Gyre again?” I was suspicious. “You just said Rumul has too many windbeaters on his side.”

“Civik sent Moc with a message after you and Sellis departed. The message in Naton's bone chips swayed more windbeaters. He said he'd found places where Naton drilled the extra Spire holes. He thinks Naton meant to use them to undermine Rumul. He also says that some see a way to use the holes, where before they only knew defeat. We could gain more support.” Wik pulled a small wrapped package from his robes and held it out to me. “He sent these as his promise.”