Fran Wilde - Updraft

I sat down at this table, next to the second figure, hoping I’d got it right. I smelled pungent spices.

Fingers tugged at the knots of my blindfold. When it dropped, the daylight in the room made me blink until my eyes watered.

“You did it,” Sellis said. “First try.” She smiled guardedly. I thought I saw a jealous twinge, but then she brightened. “You understand now,” she said.

“With your help,” I said. I meant it too.

Wik pushed a bowl of potatoes and peppers towards me. “With enough practice, we’ll make you a Singer yet, Kirit Spire.”

“What’s next?” Breakfast’s spices prickled my tongue, and I blew out to cool my mouth. All around me, the sounds of the meal and the room added to what I could see. I wanted to learn more, to know everything now.

“Rest,” Wik said. “With no moon tonight, we must rest today.” I couldn’t imagine why. Not when there was so much to hear.

By the time I returned to my tier, closing my eyes now and then to see if echoing still worked, I was ready to curl up without unfolding my mat. Exhaustion and giddy success netted me and pulled me into sleep.

Sellis woke me in the dark.

Many Singers were already awake, readying themselves to fly.

In the towers, night was for sleeping. For storing up energy for the next day.

But Singers flew the night. Now that I was learning how they did it, I sensed the power of the skill, the advantages. Nightwings. Like the children’s song, but better. They might see the invisible and travel through the city unobserved.

Sellis took me to the top of the Spire, where Wik waited for us. I breathed the fresh air. I wanted to throw myself to it; it felt so different from the trapped stuff that cycled through the Spire.

No moon. The stars were dim. I could not guess how long until sunrise. But I could see the nearest towers. The few lights within. The city slept, though we did not.

“Can you hear?” Wik growled in my ear. He pressed the metal prong to my temple again. “Echo. You will hear.”

Suddenly, I could hear too much. I could hear Wik’s breath and Sellis’s teeth chattering. I tried echoing faster. Sellis and Wik joined me. Faintly, I could hear something beyond them, in the distance, resonating.

I pictured the city before me, the outlines of the towers I knew from my studies. I imagined what could be out there that I could hear but not see.

The forms sounded faint, but very large. They surrounded the Spire.

Oh.

The sounds that my ears strained to hear were the true shapes of the city.

I drew a breath and whispered, “I can hear.”

“You will get better at it,” Wik said, almost too loud. I realized he wasn’t shouting.

My heart leapt. If I could hear the city, I could fly it. Even if I could not see it.

More citizens could learn this, too. If we could hear what we could not see, the towers could help seek out skymouth nests and free the city from their terror.

Sellis must have interpreted the excited look in my eyes. She shook her head.

“The city entrusts us with this knowledge, Kirit. This is not for the towers.”

“Why not?”

“Tradition. Since the Rise.”

“Singers say ‘tradition’ when they don’t want to explain.”

“It’s more than that.” Wik shook his head, struggling for patience. “It’s about our history. About how people work. Traditions hold the city together, like the bridges do the towers. Once, we had no traditions. Only fear and loss.”

There had been no traditions in the clouds. Where skymouths and worse roamed free. Where towers had gone to war, attacking each other in fear and desperation. I’d studied. I had sung The real Rise. The Singers’ traditions had lifted the city from that darkness.

Now I shivered, chilled.

Sellis, impatient with old history, pulled the conversation back to the night’s lesson. “Echoing is a matter of learning to listen even more,” she said. “You can hear in directions, see in sounds.”

“But it takes practice,” said Wik. “Do not assume that you can hear everything straightaway.”

But I was surely much better at this than they thought. Perhaps it was like my voice, the shouts I could make that no one else on this blessed Spire could. At least sometimes. When I was lucky. But maybe I could hear differently too.

Then Wik took the prong away, Sellis fell silent, and the city went dark. I could no longer hear the towers spread around me like a flower. No. I was silenced and grounded again. Wik had cut off a newly grown limb. I wanted it back.

I reached for the prong.

Wik tucked it away in his upper robe. “You must learn to make your own echoes out here, as you did inside.”

Sellis took my hand and pulled me to the edge of the tower. She nudged me to sit, with my feet hanging over. I balked. I was unwinged, having left my training pair in my alcove.

“We will fly tonight,” she said. Her voice sounded more hesitant than I’d ever heard it.

“How many Singers are night fliers?” I asked.

“Most. Everyone has to train to do it, but some don’t like it. Many think this one step closer to falling.”

“But this lets you see! And hunt skymouths! It’s an honor to keep the city safe.”

Sellis winced. “This is a charge, not an honor. And you will notice your hearing gets more sensitive for all things. There is a tradeoff. You will be marred.”

I looked at my hand and its silver mark. “How?”

“You will hear too much. All the time. Singing will be painful, but you must continue to do it. You will overhear what you shouldn’t. You will find crowds abhorrent. It sets you apart.”

I already was set apart.

Being separate from the rest of the city was not unusual for Singers. I realized Sellis’s cautions held a note of pride. Her concerns were Spire concerns: traditions, skills, Rumul. How much power she had and could gain. How high on the tower you lived didn’t matter here. Influence within the Spire and marks did.

Wik had many marks. Rumul had many more. Sellis and I each had just the one, on our hands. Plus the pathways the echoes had begun carving in our brains — those were marks too.

“When do we begin?” I whispered.

“Now,” Wik said. He pulled me to my feet and covered my eyes with a silk scarf. Blind. I stood atop the Spire, blind.

“Wait!” I couldn’t see where the edge of the tower was, though I felt the solid bone beneath my soft footwraps. The air whistled around me, but I froze in place, afraid to step the wrong way. Nets or no, I did not want to fall.

Wik took my hand and guided me a few steps backwards. Then he let go and spun me around.

Sellis whispered, “Not so fast!” Her voice was loud in my ears. I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, fast, like I’d done in the Spire. My eyes rolled beneath the scarf, searching for sound.

Wik said, “Listen.”

And I could, faintly. I heard the wind against the towers and how it wrapped them with soft sweeps of breeze. I could hear gusts too.

We had so many ways to describe different types of wind. Lifts. Crosses. Constants. Gaps. I might one day hear them all.

Something low and large echoed ahead of me. The closest tower? Varu. The wind swept over the shape, slowly, then ripped around the higher towers beside it, whistling. Far beyond, Lith lurked, broken and forlorn. I knew it was there, though I couldn’t hear it, because nothing else sounded so empty in the entire city.

I knew then that we stood at the apex of the Spire, on the western side, with Varu on my left. That was my compass. The other towers close in sounded whole and twisting. The wind moved among the tiers, and I heard soft laughter and muffled sounds of families gathered together for warmth and comfort. All very faint.