Fran Wilde: Updraft

“You must stop!” Rumul dove from the council tier as he shouted to be heard. “You are breaking the Spire. The city.”

He hurtled like an arrow towards me.

“The Spire isn’t all of the city, it is just one part!” I shouted back. The Gyre echoed with sound.

Rumul’s wings were tucked tight. He aimed to knock me into a pen or a vent. He did not intend to fight. He plummeted, willing to sacrifice himself for Singer secrets, for the Spire. The force of him hitting me knocked my breath out. I was silenced.

But Wik and Civik continued shouting.

Rumul and I fell past the occupied tiers. We fell past the windbeaters.

Fell until Sellis, blind from noise and fear, struck us both. She hit me again with her last knife, slicing my arm. As she struggled to right herself, she knocked Rumul loose with a bone hook gripped in her other hand.

Rumul hit the nets above the pens first, and I fell hard beside him. He struggled as something held him there, pulled at him. A tentacle grazed my leg.

The sounds of the Gyre merged with a new noise from the pens. The skymouths. They were screaming back at me. I was so close to them, my head rocked with pain, and I pulled my arms from my wing grips so that I could cover my ears. I found my breath and resumed shouting. The sinew nets pressed hard against my knees and elbows. Beside me, invisible limbs pulled Rumul’s arms and legs in different directions. He screamed with the pain.

Some of the smaller skymouths gathered beneath me. I could feel their snouts bumping the netting. One grazed its teeth over my hand, a soft gesture. They pushed on the net and then moved backwards as a group, then they pushed forward again. I could not understand what they were doing, but I rose and fell with their motion. I rolled. They pushed me towards the edge of the pens.

The smell was all around me. The musk. My skin burned with it still.

I smelled like them. And they were screaming like me.

We shook the tower with the horrible pitch of our voices. Then the Spire trembled worse than ever before and a terrifying sound wove between my voice and the skymouths’. A sound like a giant wing breaking. Louder. The bone walls of the Spire began to crack.

The Spire shook again, and the city roared, sharp and piercing. I heard a sound no city dweller lives to describe: the sound of bone splitting.

The cracks began to run through the tower, but while another tower would have cracked across its center core, across a tier, the Spire cracked vertically. From one carefully drilled hole to the next, the breaks ran along carvings, forming arches and circles. In many cases, the breaks started where Naton’s carving had gone deepest.

The Spire itself moaned and shrieked as the bone walls of the tower split and cracked. I squinted as entire panels fell from the walls and daylight poured for the first time into the Spire. Novices blocked their eyes. They ran from the winds and the suddenly open tiers. Teachers tried to put wings on their students, to get them aloft.

The tower rumbled, and more walls shattered.

Holes opened around the pens. Naton’s tools had cut deep there too. Wind whistled over skymouths escaping the pens and squeezing themselves out of the Spire, suddenly free. The screaming faded as they scattered.

The pressure of invisible bodies gathering beneath me lessened, then disappeared. The netting sagged, and I sank into the depths.

A rough howl shook the tower. Sinew broke and metal snapped as the last giant skymouth’s pen twisted apart with a rush of air. The monsters were free.

“What have you done?” Rumul moaned. The line of his collarbone ran jagged beneath his skin and his legs were splayed, broken. Now freed from grasping tentacles. He could not move.

For the first time, the Spire was open to the elements, to the eyes of the city. For the first time, its tiers were unguarded. Singer-bred monsters flew in and out of the gaps in the walls, mouths open and searching for prey.

Sellis circled above us on a gust let in by new air. “What has happened?” Her voice pitched high and panicked. “What has—”

A whistling roar cut off her words. The biggest maw I’d ever seen opened howling and red behind her. Her robes puckered as invisible limbs grabbed her waist, crushed her wings. Drawn backwards, like she was being sucked out of the Spire, Sellis flailed, her arms and legs towards us, her head thrown back, before the mouth swallowed her whole.

The monster turned, the wind from its passage pushing me into the sagging net. A torn wing hung from its invisible mouth, rising to the top of the Spire and out, into the sky, into the city.

I turned to Rumul. His face was sallow and waxy, his eyes closed.

“Sellis! It took her!” I yelled, but he did not respond.

Wik appeared on my left and reached his hand out. “Grab my hand, Kirit. Hurry.” He helped me stand.

I followed him up a ladder to the windbeaters’ tier, then looked down. Two Singers, one with a large cut on the back of his head, the other with a torn robe covered in dust, braced Rumul’s legs on his folded wings, preparing to move him, unconscious, to safety.

The Spire stopped rumbling.

Civik lay crumpled beside the gallery, his wings beside him. With his mouth open, he looked as if he was still shouting, silently now.

“It took his last breath,” Wik said. “Shouting with you.”

When I took Civik’s cold hand in mine, I found Naton’s bone chips wrapped around his fingers. I left them there with my father as Wik pulled me towards the next tier. Naton’s holes had not weakened the ladders here.

“Moc? He was down here with the windbeaters. And the novices?”

“Being evacuated to the towers. They’re safe.” Wik climbed faster.

After three tiers, my arms were shaking. I could not lift them to the next rung. All around us, Singers gathered pieces of the Spire and tended the injured. The Gyre seemed clear, though with the walls blown open, it whistled with a complex wind. “You have to fly, Wik. You have to get to the top of the Spire. I am too slow.”

In answer, he unfurled his wings and locked them. Held out his arms to me.

Lifting me up, Wik made a running leap from the tier, and we plummeted into the Gyre. He found a gust glittering with sunlit bone grit, and we lifted, circling slowly higher.

I expected a mouth to open above us, or behind us, at any moment. I echoed, but heard and saw nothing. The mirror in my lenses showed me only Wik’s robe and his wingstraps. Below us, the nets and the scattered windbeaters receded.

As we rose, Wik called to different tiers, asking after the injured, shouting instructions. Singers waited by the galleries, making ready to fly up after us, but waiting so as not to foul our wind. More flew from the holes in the walls, searching for cracks and signs the Spire was about to collapse. The first of these, a woman Wik’s age, with a bruise ripening on her cheekbone, reported back as we reached the top of the Spire.

“It’s lacework out there, all open to the city,” she said. “But the breaks are evenly spaced. The tower seems to be holding, at least for now.”

“Find weapons,” Wik instructed her as he set me down. She descended a ladder and ran down the passageway below, following his orders.

“This is what Terrin feared would happen. That the skymouths would escape,” Viridi said. Her silver-streaked hair was dusted with bone shards. Her voice cracked. She held Ciel’s hand tightly. “We were wrong to pen them, to breed them.”

Another Singer interjected, “We’ll need weapons if the towers attack.”

I flexed my arms and bounced on the balls of my feet, trying to work some feeling back into my legs. “The towers attacking? That’s what you’re worried about right now?” My voice was rough as scourweed.