Cloudbound (4 page)

The floor beneath me creaked as I neared the Spire's ruined wall.

“Nat,” Kirit whispered.

“The artifexes promised this tier was still safe. Ceetcee too.” Especially Ceetcee. I put as much confidence into my voice as I could. “Promised” was a very strong word for what she'd said. “Hoped” was closer.

My ears picked up sounds that none in the city ever wanted to hear. Cracking sounds, from deep within the walls.

Kirit heard them too of course. “Nat, get back!”

Backing up, I knocked loose a pile of small tablets. Carvings excised from Spire walls. They rattled to the floor. One broke, exposing another layer of carvings. More secrets.

“Nat,” Kirit whispered again. The cracking noise grew louder.

“What?” I asked, sharply. I wanted to get the brass.

The Spire's outer wall crackled over the wind. Then the thick noise of bone ripping from bone filled my ears. The far edge of rubble where I'd stood moments ago disappeared. In its place was blue sky, a cloud of windblown dust. The new hole in the wall ran down to the tier floor. There, existing cracks darkened, then widened near my feet. I backed away fast, the tier below me already visible. More rubble fell away.

The surface beneath my feet began to move. I slipped.

“Kirit! Run!” I turned and scrambled, but the crack was too wide and I fell into it, riding a wave of dust and bone. The Spire echoed with the sound of debris falling hard to the next tier. In the dust cloud, I grabbed for anything solid as I slid, and caught my bone hook on something that hadn't moved, hadn't fallen in. The edge of Rumul's worktable, wedged at an angle in a crack.

My feet swung free above the lower tier. The bone hook, strong enough to carry a flier beneath me, held true. “Kirit?” I said, over the roar in my dust-filled ears. My face and arms were caked in bone dust. What was left of the pile we'd been searching was a jagged mess below me. I stifled a sneeze.

Our spare rope dropped down the hole beside me. Kirit, breathing hard, slid down the rope. “We're going down. It's too unstable up here.” Her voice was calmer now. Whatever else, Kirit could think straight in emergencies.

She dropped to the floor. Using one hand, I grabbed the rope, while holding fast to the bone hook with the other. When I was ready, I let the bone hook go and swung the weight of my body onto the rope, then through air that sparkled with tiny shards of bone to the tier floor. Once down, I eased to my hands and knees, not trusting my legs yet. Beneath my aching hands, bone dust and metal glittered. I clutched at the shiny bit of brass that had caught my eye above. Squared corners, etched, my fingers told me. I dropped it in my satchel. The metal had poked from a silk-wrapped packet above. Where was that packet? I crawled forward, searching. Kirit could have the codex. I could sell the brass.

Kirit caught me searching. “Scavengers are Lawsbreakers, huh?”

“We're on council business, with permission. This isn't scavenging.” I might have grinned.

“You haven't changed so much after all,” she said. She sounded happy about that.

“I've changed,” I said, readying my arguments. But they all fell away as a shadow blocked the light from the Gyre and the hole above my head. Kirit and I turned together as an enormous bird blacker than night blocked our exit.

 

2

BONE EATER

A rattling hiss from deep within the dark expanse raised the hair on my arms. The bone eater bent over me, serrated beak parting. Its purple-black tongue covered with sharp spines tasted the air. Saliva dripped on the floor, on my arm; it burned when it hit my skin. With a screech, the bone eater lifted one of its claws above me, each talon a sharp curve the size of my head. Its dark tail whipped around on the floor for balance. I froze. The creature blocked our escape, left no space to hide.

We'd been taught to fear skymouths, Singers, clouds. But the bone eater, long lost to time and myth, was what now stood before us, ready to attack. As the talon descended, I swore. The Spire's walls would
never
be the last thing I saw in this city.

I sat up fast, dodging to the left of the claw. I hit the bone eater with my bow.

Kirit screamed.

Once, she'd stopped attacking skymouths with that scream. But the bone eater's inner eyelids came down pale over its dark eyes, and its beak did not veer away. Its claw scraped the floor, gouging bone, then rose high again above us both.

This time, when the claw dropped, I ducked. Sharp talons missed me and snagged Kirit by the robe. Dragged her across the floor. I tucked and rolled beneath the beast's legs, my wings clattering on debris. When I got my feet under me, I nocked an arrow. The bird shifted to glare at me through its legs. Slowly, it began to turn, dragging Kirit. She struggled to reach her knife.

I shot once, then pushed myself to my feet and ran for the Gyre. Behind me, the bone eater clacked its beak and screeched. I'd hit it.

Kirit scrambled free.

“Clouds, Kirit, you can't shout everything down,” I yelled. “Find something to throw at it!”

The bone eater lowered its enormous head and charged me.

I unfurled my wings and leapt from the gallery. The bone eater jumped after me, miscalculating the distance. Its head scraped the tier's ceiling, it was so big. I swung a small parabola around the Gyre's void, and the bone eater overshot me.

With a screech, my whipperling, Maalik, dove in to distract the giant bird: a gray wisp against the bone eater's black expanse.
No, Maalik. Get away.

Before the bone eater could turn and attack again, I locked my wings and nocked another arrow. Took aim and let fly, striking its neck. The creature screamed, snapped at the shaft sticking from its feathers, and vanished into the darkness.

I circled the Gyre again. I'd hunted for much of my life. I knew the bird wasn't dead, but it wasn't coming back up the Gyre fast either.

Neither was I. Without the windbeaters below, there wasn't enough of an updraft for me to rise back to the tier where Kirit waited.

She'd noticed me struggling to find a gust. “Wait there.”

“Ridiculous thing to say, to someone on the wing, slowly sinking.” But the tension had drained from our voices. I heard her laugh.

“True.”

The rough rope the council had sent us with hit the gallery railing closest to me, and I grabbed hold. Dragged myself hand over hand back up to where Kirit had lashed the line to a grip. Above my head, Maalik flew in worried arcs around it, up, up, up.

“We have to warn the towers,” Kirit panted.

I nodded agreement. Finally, she was talking sense. Then something caught her eye and she darted around me, to where Rumul's worktable had fallen.
Birdcrap.

She got down on her hands and knees, then her stomach. Spreading her weight, she reached for something I couldn't see. I listened for more walls cracking, but heard nothing. Finally she stood up, holding another mildewed, silk-wrapped packet, about an arm's length across. It looked heavy, but thin. Two pages at most.

The packet clicked and shifted in her hands. Broken.

“That won't do you much good cracked.”
Come on, Kirit.

She frowned. “It has to. But it won't be enough.”

“Come on, now, before that thing comes back,” I said.

Bigger problems,
she'd said. We definitely had much bigger problems now.

But she was turning, studying the walls near the floor. “We need the rest of it.”

She didn't listen. Ever. “We're done here.”

“We're not done.” She knelt near a solid-looking part of the tier wall. “Here.” A relieved sigh. “We need as much of the codex as we can find. Rumul must have hidden the most important pages in the one place he knew no Singer would touch.” She pulled aside the trash that had piled against the wall—rags and pieces of broken dishes. A pile of dusty, gray feathers.

There, at knee-height, two codex-sized pieces of bone pressed against the wall. New bone grew around their edges, turning a strange color. Gray, not the yellowish white I remembered from when Densira rose.

Kirit yanked at the first tablet. It didn't budge. She drew her knife, but hesitated, the blade point above a small gap between wall and page.

“I'll do it,” I took the knife.

“You don't understand,” she said. “This is forbidden.”

“By whom? Kirit, we make the Laws now.” I put the knife edge between the wall and the page. Pried the bone tablet away with a crack, revealing a deep cut in the tower's wall. Deeper than any carving I'd seen in the Spire. The bone within was spongy and smelled strongly of something I couldn't place. Almost like new bone, but sour. Thick. “Clouds, what is this?”

“Heartbone,” Kirit said. “This is the lifeblood of the city.” She looked at the second plate, then grabbed hold and pulled. “Or it was. The color is fading. It's dying.” Her voice wobbled. The page tore from the wall, leaving exposed, sickly heartbone.

I handed her the page. “I'm sorry,” I said. How did you mourn a tower? Even one as malevolent as this? “Peace to the Spire.” I touched my eye and pointed up, the gesture that marked the passage of a citizen.

She watched me and said, quietly, “Thank you.” Tears pooled in her eyes but didn't fall. She let me grip her shoulder, and put her hand over mine. For a moment, we were simply friends once again. A friendship scarred and wounded, perhaps, but still friends. And it was enough.

The sun passed beyond the Spire's apex, and we were in shade once again. She looked down at the pages she held. “Birdcrap.” Rooted through the shards in the silk packet.

“What's wrong now?” I was eager to leave this place.

She pointed at the top of one tablet. “The broken one says Challenge.” A long line of date marks that I recognized and symbols that I didn't ran down the page. She shifted to show me the other page. Hesitated, then pointed. “Conclave.”

“There's nothing about tower growth here. Doran wanted that.”

I couldn't turn my eyes from the Conclave page. The lines spoke for themselves. Lawsbreakers. Grouped in tens, then hundreds. My eyes itched and my vision blurred. Finally, Kirit tucked the pages into her satchel, though they were almost too big for it. She couldn't secure the cover properly. Three whole pages, broken pieces of more.

“Kirit, it has to be enough. The bone eater is going to come back, or its friends are.”

She nodded, sadly. “It will have to be enough.”

How did the song with bone eaters in it go? Terror of the Clouds? I tried to recall Tobiat's exact words again.
They carry the dead away.
But what did they do to the living? I didn't want to find out.

We ascended the last tier together and stood side by side on the Spire's lip. “Here,” Kirit said. “Conclave happened here.”

The way she said it, I knew she meant my father's Conclave. His mark, scratched somewhere on that terrible page. We'd been infants when it happened. “It wasn't your fault.”

I took her hand again and stood next to my oldest friend in the city as the sun slid towards the cloudtop and the horizon. The wind had cooled even further, and below us, the doomed Spire settled and creaked. All around it, the towers of my home stood like beacons against the dark, their tiers open to the setting sun, filled with green gardens and colorful banners. I took a deep breath, feeling like I'd escaped from a prison.

Kirit wiped her eyes, then checked my wings. “No holes,” she said, finally. “You were lucky.”

“You were, too.” I readied myself to fly. But she stayed me, her hand on my arm.

“Tell me about the vote.” She'd remembered after all.

Doran had advised me not to tell her. Said it was for her own good. But now? How could I not? “Tomorrow,” I said. “Or the next day. There have been too many roars. And now a bone eater this high in the towers? It's bad luck. The city needs appeasement. The remaining Singers will be tried for their crimes against the city. Those with the most Lawsmarkers will be taken,” I pressed my lips together as she stared at me. “And there will be a Conclave.” The first since Spirefall.

Her jaw dropped. “Thrown down. My mother agreed to this? You agreed to this?”

“There are enough votes to overrule your mother,” I said slowly. It was what Doran had said when I'd helped count the projected votes. “But she does not yet know.” Doran's instructions again. Ezarit was too personally invested in this. Worse, no matter how much I admired her, Ezarit was a whipperling leader, ready to listen, interested in compromise. We needed a hawk. A gryphon.

Kirit paled. “We have to tell her,” she said. “We have to stop this.”

“You cannot, Kirit. You're not even council. You're not supposed to know.”

Kirit could never control her emotions. Her jaw tightened and her expressions passed through rage and dismay to sadness and resolve. “But you knew. You agreed to it.”

I dipped my head in acknowledgment. Convincing councilors to vote now wasn't something I was ashamed of. The towers wanted action. Expected this of their leaders.

“You have no idea what you do. How horrible it is. These are people, Nat.”

“They are Singers. They threaten the towers' integrity.” I was sure of that. Each month that passed towards Allmoons, there were more riots and more tower attacks. The remaining Singers had been sequestered after the first riot. But the city's anger had grown. “There must be a Conclave. For the city's sake.”

Atop the Spire, with the sky turning pink and orange around us, Kirit stared at me.

“You'll understand, when there's been more time,” I said. “When the city is stable again. Maybe someday you'll be ready to sit on the council with us.” I sounded like Doran, talking to other councilors, convincing them.

A flight of bats poured from the cracked Spire wall, startling us. They spun in the air, snapping at bugs. I heard Kirit draw a ragged breath.