Updraft (38 page)

I walked the outer edge of the pens, humming. The skymouths quieted, though tentacles still reached for me, curled round my ankles.

A roar on my left drew me towards double netting held fast with spidersilk, thick tendons, and something else. Metal wire. Metal. The desperation of that shocked me. The reinforcements were recent and rough-hewn. The big skymouth Wik spoke of at Lith—they must have enclosed it here. And it did not want to be kept. I backed away quickly and gathered the last few dead and dying skymouths from the pens' edges. My arms filled with them. The deflated bodies and slack limbs slopped over my hands and dragged on the floor, tripping me. Their acrid stench burned my nostrils.

I returned to the center of the pens and put down my burden. I echoed and saw the culls. A dozen of them, piled at my feet. Either they couldn't survive or their keepers didn't want them to.

The pens shifted and creaked as their occupants grew restless with the smell of death so near. I hummed while I worked, hoping it would calm them enough to stay their movements.

All the culls were recent, dying now or dead within the last day or two, by my guess. Several were as large as my wings. Not big enough to be farmed for sinew, so left to feed their brethren in the pens.

I took Wik's knife from my sleeve and dragged its point across the first cull's skin, separating the hide from the muscle below. I wasn't sure what I was doing would work, but I had to try. More rank scent filled the room. I gagged and prayed it wouldn't get worse.

It took an hour to get what I needed.

Above, the night sky showed through the distant opening at the top of the Spire. When I'd begun my task, it was still dark. Now the apex was starting to lighten. The city rumbled again below. I stood on the pens, covered in the gore of dead skymouths and looked up into the Gyre. The galleries and tiers rose to the distant circle of sky.

I put on my lenses to protect my eyes from the increasing burn in the air. The skymouths' skins stuck to my fingers as I worked.

Good.

I took the skin peeled from the culls and pieced two slippery edges together on my lap. Then I took out the metal needle I'd found on Lith and clumsily tried to thread a thick vein through the needle's eye in the dim light.
Faster, Kirit. Work faster.

I pushed the needle through the skins, denting my fingers and drawing blood when I had to, pushing too hard.

My arms ached, and my knees grew numb from kneeling as I seamed one hide to the next. Soon, I held an acrid cloak of shame and death that clung to me wetly when I wrapped myself in it, making me shudder.

“Clouds,” a small voice whispered, just above my head. Moc had climbed onto the pens. He helped me adjust the cloak so that it hung low over my face, dripping and filled with an unbearable musk. I was grateful again for the lenses, which kept the worst of the gore from my eyes. I tried to breathe through my mouth, tried to avoid throwing up at the stench.

Then I left the pens, and, using the slops rope, began my slow climb up the inside of the Spire, wingless, and, I hoped, completely unexpected.

I lifted my hand. It was a shimmer in the air. I was as invisible as a skymouth.

 

27

CHALLENGE

Once I climbed from a prison within the walls of the Spire, half starved, my skin torn. Once, I begged for my life and traded my will for a pair of wings.

I would not beg this time. I was a Singer, and a citizen. They would hear me. They would free my mother. They would find another way to protect the city. They would admit what they'd done in its name.

I clung to the refuse ropes, lifting myself up arm over arm, past the windbeaters' tier. Unseen, I glimpsed my father rousing his peers, preparing them. I saw a closed vat over a new fire. Rot gas, heating. My face grim beneath my hood, I continued to climb.

Above me, the Spire's mouth opened, distant and toothed with the last of the night's stars. I had to reach it, and the council's tier below it. Each tier I passed brought me closer.

After ten tiers, I rested an arm on the railing of an observer's gallery and flexed my aching hands. The skymouth skins had thinned and turned silver where they had rubbed too hard against the fibers of the refuse ropes.

A bone hook clattered to the floor of the tier. My clumsy hand had knocked it loose from its prop against the gallery wall. A Singer must have left it there to push challengers away from the walls. I looked around the tier, a novice level. Saw only one bleary-eyed, gray-robed acolyte trudging with a bucket towards the pulleys. He didn't give the noise a second look.

The wind knocked things over, shook things loose. Now I was the wind, come to knock at the Spire's walls.

Once the novice had finished disposing of his stink, I returned to the refuse rope and continued climbing. I had to move faster now. The ropes would soon be put to hard use.

A breeze wound its way up the Gyre. Were my wings with me, it might have lifted me slowly up the last few tiers. I didn't have time to look down to see if the breeze was natural or created by the first of the windbeaters working the vents. I had to climb.

Hand over hand, feet twisting in the ropes for extra purchase, I climbed alone, save for the kaviks that passed me and tried to coat me with their waste. One hit its target, my shoulder, and the white goo splattered. The guano slid off the skymouth hide and continued its fall into the Gyre. I remained unmarked, hidden. “Incredible,” I whispered, thinking of the littlemouth in my pocket. My voice sounded strained and worn.

The dark night and the dimness of the tower helped me climb past many tiers without incident. But I had been lucky for too long. The refuse rope jerked against my hands, and I clung to it, yanked upwards at a fast clip as someone hauled on the rope from above. I saw a face peering over the edge confused. Lurai, looking for tangles in the rope and finding none.

My heart rode high in my throat, threatening to choke me. I was so close. Then the pulling stopped. I swung on the rope as it halted its rise. Above me, Lurai circled his tier, headed for another pulley. One that worked.

Relief slowed my heart a bit, but I knew this was a short-lived reprieve. I had to climb faster.

Lights began to appear in alcoves. Oil lamp sprites moved up and down ladders. I heard whispering, but could not make out the words through my cloak.

I heard a familiar melody. What sounded like Ezarit's voice, muffled, singing The Rise. The city's version. At least it sounded like Ezarit's voice, from very far away. With a clatter, followed by shouts, the song broke off. But not for long. Another voice, from a much closer tier, boomed across the Gyre. Wik. Singing The Rise in response to Ezarit. He sang the Spire's version to her, telling her the truth. It was a subtle rebellion. One that cheered me on. Five tiers to go. Four. I sweated and choked inside the cloak. My skin stung from the still-acrid veins that I, in my hurry, hadn't scraped away.

Below me, windbeaters began practicing their dancelike movements. The edge of my cloak flapped, slapping at my feet. The rope twisted, and I scrambled for balance. The novices just waking and the windbeaters not aligned with Civik would spot me soon.
Hurry, Kirit.

A pair of carvers dropped over the gallery edge nearest the Spire's opening and hung suspended above me. They spoke quietly as they continued work on the fierce decorations scraped into the newest Gyre wall.

I was nearly to the council's tier, but I could not move without them seeing the rope shake.

As I wavered about what to do next, my foot slipped. In my scramble to recover, the sewn-together hides began to slide from my head and shoulders. I could not hold them in place and still keep climbing.

With one hand, I managed to grab the trailing edge of the cloak I'd made from dead skymouth culls before it fell away completely. I hung, revealed, at the edge of the council tier. Air struck my skin where the hide had touched it, painful and raw.

With arms on fire from the climb, I slung the cloak over the tier edge and grabbed the nearest gallery railing. Pulled myself up and over it. I rested for a moment, a pile of oil-damp, foul-smelling girl, my cheek pressed against the young bone of the tier. My scalp burned. Some hair had torn away when the cloak slipped. The palms of my hands bled. The skin on my arms and face was red from contact with the hides. I pulled my lenses away from my face and down to my neck. I shooed off the pain as one of the carvers approached.

“All right, Singer?” she said, curious at my appearance. My lack of wings.

“Very,” I said with all the breath I had. “Special training for night flying,” I added.

She shrugged and went back to her work. Rumul may have had Singers searching for me, but he'd failed to inform the novices. My familiarity to the carvers, from many days of punishment as I had learned the Spire's ways, was now another kind of invisibility. I approached the council unchallenged, dragging the cloak behind me.

The council huddled in Rumul's alcove, crowding the space and spilling into the passageway.

Below, more voices began to sing. The morning ritual of The Rise had begun. Sound surrounded me: the story of the city and how the Singers saved it from ruin. In her enclosure beneath Rumul's alcove, my mother might have been able to hear the singing as I had, once.

A shout from the rooftop broke the song's rhythm. I crouched behind a spine as an older Singer climbed down from outside and rushed to Rumul's chambers.

“Fliers approaching! A Magister and four others,” he said.

“Who summoned them?” Rumul's voice rang clear over the song coming up from the tiers below.

The council broke its huddle. I hauled the stinking cloak back over my head. Obscured myself.
Delequerriat
, Rumul.

Several Singers began speaking at once. Over the tumult, I heard Wik say, “Let them land. Perhaps they have found Kirit.”

The other Singers murmured agreement.

This was my cue. I could rush into the alcove and challenge Rumul while the council waited for news.

But I could not move from my crouch. My muscles had seized after the long climb, my toes were asleep. I watched the visitors land on the roof above and be escorted down to the tier. Only when Rumul emerged from his alcove, the council behind him, was I able to feel my feet once more.

Macal had returned to the Spire. He'd brought Beliak with him. And several traders. He must have told the trade council that Ezarit had been taken to the Spire.

Macal stepped forward, but Wik held up his hand and stopped his brother from speaking. One tan-robed trader, his hair beaded with glass like my mother's once was, cleared his throat.

Rumul spoke before the trader could. “We did not summon you to the Spire.”

“We thought we heard horns,” the trader said. “Macal said we were summoned.” He was layering the truth. I could tell from the set of his jaw. Macal nodded in support. Met Rumul's glare with raised eyebrows.

The trader looked over Rumul's shoulder, eyes searching, perhaps for Ezarit.

Several thick-shouldered Singers climbed up the ladders from downtower. Rumul had called for reinforcements. Once they closed ranks around him, I would not be able to get close enough to challenge him. I would be captured. I racked my tired brain for ways to get around them. Then Ciel burst past me and ran to the assembled Singers.

“I saw her, Kirit, she's in the novice's tier! The traitor!”

The guards reacted by unfurling their wings and diving into the Gyre. The fastest way down.

Sellis's voice came from the alcove. “I told you she wasn't dead yet.”

My path cleared, I pushed past the traders, past Macal and Beliak.

“Hey! Hands off!”

“You pushed me.”

“I didn't.”

I barely registered their confusion. Then I remembered. My cloak shielded me still.

Invisible, I made it all the way to the council members who had gathered in a gray crowd around Rumul.

Wik stood close to Rumul, arguing with him. Rumul watched him as a gryphon regarded its prey. The council was slowly backing away from Wik.

I pushed my way into the circle. “I challenge the Spire,” I said as loudly as I could.

Rumul and the council members turned left and right, searching for the speaker.

I pitched my voice so that the traders and Sellis and the carvers in the Gyre could hear me. “I demand to be allowed to fight as a Singer for the good of the city. I challenge you, Rumul.”

I reached up and grabbed the skymouth cloak with my bare hand. My fingertips burned as I pulled it away, more hair going with it. I let it drop to the ground and stood at the center of the council, just inches from Rumul.

Council Singers gasped and whispered. The traders looked shocked. Macal and Beliak folded their arms, blocking the alcove's exit.

Rumul stared at me, then pointed to Wik. “Drop her into the enclosure as well.”

“No,” Wik said. “Once a challenge has been put forward by another Singer, it must play out.”

“Singer's right,” several council members said. So there was dissent, even here.

Viridi, who days ago had held my hand to the city's mystery, its very heart, stepped forward. “It is tradition,” she said. Several more council members shifted uncomfortably. They knew she spoke truth.

Another tradition was for Rumul to win in the Gyre. His face held the map of his wins. But the knife wound from his fight with Terrin had not healed easily. I had a chance.

“I challenge you, Rumul, and bid my life for my mother's,” I shouted again. Loud enough to be heard in the tiers below. “I offer it for the good of the city.”

The morning song stopped. Singers and novitiates turned their eyes to the council tier. I heard the low grinding sound of a vent opening and felt the Gyre wind deepen and quicken.

Rumul's jaw clenched. His tattoos curled and folded as his frown deepened. “You had such promise.”