Fran Wilde - Updraft

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.”

I took the package and slowly unwrapped it. Glass and metal gleamed. Civik’s lenses. Heavy in my hands.

I stared at Elna and Tobiat, then at Wik. Perhaps Tobiat was not so damaged after all, nor Elna so gentle. “Who else is part of this? Why doesn’t Ezarit know?”

“She was already too much at risk,” Elna said. “The Singers watch her.”

Because of me.

“My brother has tried to help, while on excursion,” Wik said. “Though he sometimes acts too quickly.”

Wik’s family: Spire-born, all of them. They had siblings, cousins, parents all around them, as the tower-born did. And they got to keep their families, as long as they remained Singers. His brother — Macal. “Then Magisters can help.”

“Some, yes. Some, like Dix and Florian, are Rumul’s.”

Nat pushed against the floor with his hands. “You Singers have had your chance. I will tell everyone. The towers will take the Spire. End this.”

Elna pressed firmly with her hand, stilling him. “A few more days yet.” Her eyes said more than a few days.

My hair fell across my face, and I tucked a lock behind my ear. “Wik shouldn’t reveal himself if we can help it. If I return, I can try to lodge a challenge before the council can stop me. Rumul, trying to silence a new Singer that he’s just elevated? That would raise some eyebrows among the broader Singer ranks, and the windbeaters too.”

“Sellis has likely already spoken against you to the council,” Wik said. “You’d need to sneak in, or they’ll throw you down. Wait until dark. Then come.”

Nat looked at us, darkly angry, the old wing-sibling long gone. “If you don’t succeed this time, I will find a way to stop the Singers from outside the walls.”

Elna put her hand on his. Then I put mine over hers, and Tobiat joined me. Then Wik clasped our hands together. We were five for certain, set against the might of the Spire.

“I was wrong to hope this would all go away,” Elna said.

“We will make sure Naton’s message gets out,” I promised. One way or another. I hung Civik’s lenses around my neck. “Can you get a message to Macal? Tell him he’s needed at the Spire? Would he understand?”

Wik pulled a Spire marker from his robe. Made a symbol on it with his knife. Gave it to Nat. “Send Maalik to Mondarath with this.”

Below us, the tower shook anew.

Wik and I crawled back through the tunnel, leaving Elna, Nat, and Tobiat in their hiding place.

When we reached the balcony, we could hear a bone horn in the distance. Calling the city elders to the Spire.

“Something is happening,” Wik said.

“Not another Conclave?” Not so soon.

“I will find out. Will try to slow it, if so.”

Before I could say anything in response, Wik leapt from the tower. I was left to address the biggest hurdle of returning to the Spire: wings. Sellis’s knife had ripped mine, and my fall had made it worse. Four of us, trapped on Lith, with one working wing among us.

And a Singer who had so far kept secrets from both tower and Spire.

I looked about the abandoned balcony, then crawled back through the first passage, rummaging through the discarded refuse of Lith.

I would find a way to turn one wing into two. I would figure out how to get into the Spire without being seen.

Then I would make the Spire tell its secrets to the city.

As the day warmed, I descended through Lith’s broken tiers with increasing desperation.

Tobiat brought more strong silk rope with him, and he insisted on joining me while I picked through the tower. I couldn’t stop him. Nor could I keep him quiet. I struggled to focus. He smacked his gums together and rambled.

He hummed an old tune. Sometimes sang a verse. I listened, despite myself. This was another song long fallen from the city’s memory. More than that, I noticed that when he sang, Tobiat’s speech made more sense. He could remember longer sentences.

When Tobiat said, “Lith song,” I smiled, even as I searched.

“I don’t remember much of that one,” I said. I expected he wouldn’t either.