Fran Wilde - Updraft

I realized that I cared about her more than I did the city. I would protect her against any challenge. Use myself as a weapon if I had to.

With a scream, Sellis attacked my wing, a slicing arc aimed to break battens. She caught a wingtip, and I spiraled away, losing altitude and control as the silk tore. The rip stopped at the first batten. The rest of the wing held, but I could not control my fall. I spun away from the Singers and their monsters, and fell towards the empty tiers of Densira and the waiting clouds.

The wind screamed in my ears. I grew dizzy with spin and fear. Sick welled in my mouth, hard terror against the dryness. I tried to work my legs from the footsling in order to use my feet to keep the rest of me from being dashed against a tower.

The clouds rose quickly to meet me.

I tangled in my wings.

Fell, blinded by the rush of wind.

* * *

With a powerful jerk, my wings were nearly ripped from my back.

Someone had hooked me. I dangled, then I rose.

I was dizzy, but alive.

Who had me? In the night, with my captor above and my wings in the way, I could not see.

I tried to speak, but my voice was a croak, muffled by my wings. My throat felt like I had swallowed scourweed.

From a slit in the mess of torn silk and broken battens, I saw a double shadow pass across the uninhabited tiers of Densira. One flier, one flown. We flew so far downtower, the bone core had nearly grown out to the balcony’s edge.

We cleared Densira’s curve, and my bearer found a strong vent. We began to move fast into the open sky, headed beyond the city.

Not a rescue, then. Cloudbound. I imagined what it would be like to fall without the towers around me.

But the air shifted, and a cold breeze flapped the torn wing silk near my face. We turned again, back towards the city. A dark shape rose from the clouds, rough edges blocking the white towers on the horizon.

Lith. Only the most recent to fall, I heard Rumul say again. The most recent tower to send citizens tumbling into the clouds.

We approached the broken tower top from the city’s outer edge. It was still dark. No one on the other towers could see us this far down. No one looked this way, if they could help it.

I struggled, hoping to slow my captor.

A hard shake stilled me. “You always have the worst timing, Kirit.”

Wik’s voice. The voice I’d grown to trust. The voice of the man who had led a pack of skymouths to attack Densira.

I kicked and flailed. Tried to loosen my arms from my wingstraps. I would have rather fallen.

“Stop! I wouldn’t have let them harm Elna.”

I didn’t believe him. I did not want to hear him.

He picked up speed, despite my struggling, and turned just before he flew right into the dead tower. As he turned, he tossed me hard at Lith. I tumbled through the air towards the filthy tiers. I heard my wings make another loud rip as he let them go.

I landed hard and rolled to a stop against a bone spur. Dust billowed around me and made me cough. The tower groaned.

Wik did not follow me in. When I looked behind me, I saw nothing but sky. He’d flown away. Stranded me here.

Left to die?

My hand rested on a dusty pile of feathers. Bones snapped beneath my palm. Lith smelled of rot and decay.

The sun broke the cloudline. I caught my breath and checked for broken bones, moving feet and arms carefully.

Around me, Lith glistened darkly in the dawn.

My throat was dry from my screams and my robes were torn from the fall. I would not last long here.

A wail echoed against the dark bone: my voice, burred and painful.

At least no one was around to hear me.

I was little comforted by that thought, until a shadow peeled from a wall and limped towards me, jittering and waving one starvation-thin arm.

“Look who fell!” Tobiat peered down at me, his robe flapping in the shadows of the dead tower.

He sidled closer, bringing a familiar Tobiat-stench with him. I lifted myself up to sitting and looked at him.

“Where did you come from?” I said. But he didn’t answer.

The wind coursed through the tower. The pitted bone whispered like a cracked flute.

Had he been left to die here too? Tobiat danced his feet back and forth. His old breaks creaked and stuck out at odd angles; he looked like a broken kite. But when the day brightened enough that he saw the color of my robes, he whistled and backed away.

“Singer.” He warded the air with his hands. Began to disappear into the shadows.

“I won’t hurt you.” I didn’t want to be alone, not now, not on Lith. “You remember me, right?”

“Tobiat, it’s me, Kirit,” I tried again. “Nat’s…” My voice failed. Nat’s what? Friend? Murderer? I couldn’t say it. “Remember the cleaning? At Densira?”

I rose and shrugged off the remains of my wings. Tobiat continued to back away.

“How long have you been here?” I asked gently, hoping to keep him near. “Who brought you here?”

Instead of answering, Tobiat ducked into a hole in the blackened wall.

I crawled after him, deep into the broken core of Lith. The tunnel we passed through was neither smoothed by age nor worn away by rot, though Lith smelled like rotting bone. This tunnel had been gouged with sharp tools, recently, to make passages.

The tower’s core was hard and cold. Where layers of bone had been peeled back to the marrow, the scent of rot lingered. I brushed a spot with my fingertip. It crackled and compressed at my touch. Nothing like the warmth I’d felt when Viridi let us touch the city.

Wind blew the gray dust of the tower from my finger. We emerged from one tunnel and crossed an open balcony. The floor’s odd angle made me wish for my wings. We stood on a dead tier, within a dead tower.

Cracks latticed Lith’s core, deep black lines on blackened bone. Nothing grew here except the resilient scourweed and lichen. No families made their homes here. No ladders hung from balconies, no banners. Lith was nothing like the towers of my childhood, and nothing like the Spire.

Tobiat didn’t seem to care. He’d threaded a line of silk through the tunnels. As he walked, retracing his steps, he gathered it up into loops. He didn’t look back.

“You talked to Nat before he challenged the Spire,” I said. This time, at “Nat,” Tobiat froze in place. “Why did you let him do it?”

“Wind was right,” Tobiat answered gruffly.

“You were a Singer once, weren’t you?” I asked, but he was silent.

We entered another tunnel. The gouges looked fresh here, as if someone had dug deep to make new passages between hollows. This passage ended in a narrow cell, walled on all sides and crowded by the central bone core. Two oil lamps glowed weakly in the darkness.

I saw a nest of rags. Smelled the stench of long residency and rotting meat.

Tobiat skittered away from the bedding and placed a small sack of water precariously atop a tripod. He cackled softly as I licked my lips.

A basket of wilted greens waited near the fire, spices and herbs nearby. Bird meat was drying on a rack. Tobiat hadn’t lived this well at Densira. Someone was taking care of him. Keeping him alive.

The old man crouched by the fire in his cell. Smoke wound its way out through holes drilled low in the wall. The tower’s walls sighed and moaned with the wind; ghost sounds made by a dead tower teetering dangerously on the border of bone and sky.

He peered at me from under heavy eyebrows. “Singers. Skymouths.”

“How did you know? Why did you tell Nat?”

“Nat,” he said again, echoing my words.

My throat constricted. I heard Nat falling again, sucked out the vent. I should have tried harder to save him.

“Kirit,” came a whisper from the cell’s far corner. Not Tobiat’s voice.