Fran Wilde - Updraft

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.

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.

As suddenly as it began, the sound moved up and out past the top of the Spire and faded away.

When they could stand again, the Singers whispered to one another in worried tones.

A bone horn sounded atop the Spire, and I heard distant klaxons sound in the city.

“Moc,” I whispered, “what just happened?”

Already on his way to the ladders, Moc spun on his soft foot wraps. “We’ve got to get up top to watch!”

I must have looked confused, because he grabbed my arm and began to pull. “This is a big one. The Singers will tell the Magisters and the city leaders what the city wants at Conclave. It’s going to be crowded up there.”

All the air went from my lungs. Conclave. Elna had said that when the Singers took Naton, it was for a Conclave. It had been a long time since the last roar of this magnitude. Usually there were only rumbles and rumors of rumbles.

I could still feel lingering vibrations in my bones. Neither rumble nor rumor: the city had made a sound as if the world was ending.

From down the passage, someone yelled Moc’s name, and my slight companion skittered off again.

I was left alone in a swirl of activity. Everyone knew where they needed to be. Except for Kirit Spire. Conclave hadn’t been covered in the novitiates’ class. Sellis and Wik hadn’t instructed me on where to go, what to do. Once again, I did not belong. I was the sole still body in a whirl of motion.

Tower children were schooled in a version of what happened when the city roared. That information was all I had to guide me now. Singers had recorded the codex of sounds the city had made over generations, ever since we rose through the clouds. When the city roared, the Singers weighed a new chip, from a piece of tower knocked loose by the sound. The bigger the roar, the bigger the piece. If none had been disturbed, they cut one from the lowest tier themselves, sized carefully to chronicle the sound for the future. They bound these in the codex.