Fran Wilde: Updraft

“Wik, find Ceetcee and Beliak. Help them. Tell the Singers you see to team up with tower fighters.”

As we flew away from Ginth towards the west, we crossed another group flying in dove formation.

“We’ve bagged three,” their leader shouted. Aliati. She smiled ear to ear, buoyed by their success. The Singer at her side whooped as they turned and headed east.

Across the city, more emerged to fight than hide as the word spread through the towers. The traders, including Ezarit, made sure word spread faster than the skymouths.

I rearranged flights as I saw them so that each group had Singers who could echo.

We continued to hunt the air around the farthest towers for escaped skymouths large and small. Netted as many as we could. This was not the skymouths’ fault. This was what they were bred to do. We would capture them now, then figure out, as a city, together, what could be done.

When we left the Spire, the sun was high. Now we flew through the long day into dusk, seeking out the invisible.

In each tower, children and the old had been sequestered behind shutters and huddled close to the tower cores. Rooftops bristled with guards and volunteers. Bone horns sounded alarms.

“This is what the Rise must have been like,” said a Singer novice, flying by my wing for the moment.

No, this is nothing like the Rise. “This time, we all work together.”

I called for the flight to shift formation.

My flight assembled around me, wings to my left and right, bristling. The glass edges of the guards’ wings glittered.

“On your wings, Singer,” a hunter called. I looked around. She meant me.

I was the eye of my flight group. I shook myself awake and resumed echoing. Around us was open sky, then a curve of a tower. Below, fresh horror. A medium-sized skymouth, twice as large as my wings, crept towards the tower, its path confused. It zigged and zagged, not attacking, not yet.

“Net!” I said, signaling to those nearest. A big net of drugged spidersilk rustled as the novices unfurled it behind me. I did not take my focus off the skymouth. It moved below us, drunk with freedom, towards the tower.

We circled until the skymouth was directly beneath us and dropped the net. The monster fought, but the novices finally cinched the ties shut and secured it to the tower. I doubled back to make sure there were no more following this one.

From above, Beliak whistled, then dove to fly at my wingtip. Wik was behind him. “Finding fewer of them now, Kirit. Still some out there, but they’re hiding. Now what?”

I looked out across the city, hearing its towers as much as I saw them. “We have to stay vigilant, but we should start to rest in shifts. Fixing this will take time. Find places for the Singers to bunk on the towers for now.” My voice sounded tired.

“What about the skymouths?” Wik asked.

I closed my eyes for a second. “We’re not taking them back to the Spire.”

He agreed. “And we can’t free them. They’re too dangerous.”

The thought of more killing, even skymouths, made me lose my way for a moment. I tried to think. What would Ezarit do? What would Naton do? Ezarit might find a way to use the skymouths, to keep them for their sinew. Naton might build something to help hold them, away from the occupied towers. They’d trade bad for good.

But many of these skymouths were bred for killing. Even drugged in nets, they were still dangerous. One of my fighters had lost a toe, bitten off after he flew too close to a net.

My fliers grew tired. My own arms and legs ached, my mouth was dry with thirst. Fearing we would make mistakes if we grew too tired, I looked for a tower that did not yet have a flight or two of fighters already resting on its roof.

“I’ll scout for a tower that can host us,” Wik said. He found a breeze that took him southwest and slowly faded into the distance.

* * *

As I watched him go, I realized the rash on my hands from the skymouth’s hide had faded, along with the skymouth’s scent. The caustic oil had finally dried and peeled away. As I flew an updraft, my exposed skin pulsed in scrawls and etchings along the lines where I’d seamed the hides.

In the distance, Nat’s dark wings and those of the Singer flying with him led a line of hunters returning, seeking a place to land. I sighed with relief.

Then the sky opened below us. An enormous mouth, readying to swallow us whole.

The monster of the pens. The one that had devoured Sellis. It had tracked us through the night, hiding and waiting. Now it was upon us.

“Scream, Kirit!” yelled Beliak. “Shout it down!”

I tried. A sour sound, almost a bark, came from my throat. My voice was ruined. I had screamed too long in the Spire just this morning.

So I gripped my knife and dove instead. Angled to meet the thing sideways, its teeth as big as my hands; its eye, oiled and deep like the sky.

No chance this monster would stop, once it got through us. Not until the whole city was stripped bare and ruined.

I dove, my glass-tooth blade aimed straight at its giant eye.

I flew close enough that I could smell it: that acrid scent combined with smoke and blood. I tried to hum, to calm it, but the monster rolled its eye, flipped over backwards and fled, jettisoning behind it an acrid cloud that made breathing near impossible.

I choked on the cloud, wobbling on my wings.

“Kirit, where are you?” Beliak called as Nat’s flight crossed the skymouth’s path. I shouted a warning and tried to right myself.

Nat heard me. He whistled a turn. The Singer in his group signaled wildly and tried to order him back into line.

No! I was upright again, and climbing for them before I knew it. This time, I felt the scream in the back of my mouth, and I hoped that I was strong enough. Loud enough. Horrible enough.

The maw opened. I put myself between it and Nat.

The skymouth grunted and lashed tentacles in all directions. It scrawled motion in a sea of wings, tearing down one flier after another. In the midst of a pass, I jerked to a stop. The skymouth gripped me around the waist with a tentacle and pulled me in towards the rows of teeth. My rough scream had no impact on its intent. My voice faded in my mouth. The monster began to squeeze.

Behind me, Nat held his shot and yelled my name.

The skymouth now loomed as wide as a tower, as angry as the clouds. It shrieked and grabbed even as it drew me in. The fliers dove to stay clear of it, while still trying to make it release me. Arrows studded the invisible giant, but they served only to make it angrier.

The bone battens of my wings began to crack in its grip.

And then I heard a squeal, too high-pitched to be Singer or skymouth. The sleeve of my robe squirmed, then deflated. The littlemouth. I echoed, trying to see it, though I didn’t know if I could in all the noise and confusion.

Yes, barely.

The tiny mouth pulled itself along the tentacle of the monster, a soft moving shape against the harder arm. It cheeped and squeaked, sharp-pitched and noisy, like nothing I’d ever heard. When it reached the maw, moments before I did, it was sucked past the glass teeth. The tiny skymouth spread its limbs, reaching for purchase, stretching. It grasped a flap of the mouth and didn’t let go. It reached for another, and another. It began to choke the monster from inside.

The giant skymouth thrashed. Tentacles loosened as it clawed at its own mouth.

I fell away from its grip, and when a gust from the skymouth’s struggle hit my wings, I rose with the wind until I leveled off on a steadier gust. My wings still bore me up.

As soon as I was steady enough, I turned and flew at the skymouth one more time. On the monster’s other side, I saw Nat dive towards it, arrow nocked to bowstring.