Updraft (16 page)

I could not hear a response, but he turned his full attention back to me. My hands locked on to his arms, while his hands circled my biceps. I scrambled my feet against the bone wall and pushed as he pulled. From beyond him, a breeze brushed my cheek. Fresh air. I longed to bask in it.

He dragged me, still kicking, through the hole. The thick edge scraped the last spidersilk from my chest and bruised my ribs. I hit the floor hands first, then my knees connected with the hard surface.

Sunlight struck the bone floor, turning it and the walls bright white, shocking my shadow-trained eyes. All I could see in the dazzling room were gray foot wrappings and the edge of a dark robe.

“Rest,” Wik said. He held out a water sack, and I snatched it from his hands. This Singer. I swallowed my first sip, then took another. I spat that mouthful at his feet.

He laughed and stepped back. I was too weak to rise or to try again.

As my eyes grew used to the light, the lower half of the room took shape: a broad expanse with stools and a workbench, all carved from bone, near the wall where I sat. A threshold carved with chevrons and, beyond that, a passageway. Then more light and air. The passage bordered something like sky, though the light was strangely taut, like sunbeams strung on a bow.

I took another sip of the water. Built my strength to move, to rush for the passageway, to shout at Wik. To leave here.

With the sound of swishing robes, two more pairs of gray feet came into view. I struggled to sit straighter, my back and leg muscles protesting each shift in position.

“Kirit, you have broken such Laws.” The new voice belonged to another man. It was a smooth voice, the kind Ezarit had always told me to be careful about when trading. The kind of voice that lulled listeners before it struck them down.

This Singer listed my crimes. I could almost hear the songs that accompanied each broken Law: Bethalial. Trespass. Treason. War. I startled at the last. That had not been tied to my wrist.

“Did you think breaching the walls of the Spire was not War? You could be called a traitor to the city.” His voice was even, soft.
Mellifluous.
My skin crawled. Beneath the smooth tones, I heard darker notes.

I looked up, trying to meet his eyes. His face was shadowed. The light behind him hurt. “All I wanted…,” I began. My voice rattled.

“You wanted to fly the city. To be a trader, like your mother.”

Yes. He was so very right, but I wouldn't let him win the point.

“Better than her.”

The Singer sat on a stool, his knees level with my eyes. Wik and the other gray-robed figure remained standing on either side of him.

“Ah, but you had bad luck, and then the wingtest went so poorly.”

“That was
his
doing,” I said, lifting a shaking arm to point at Wik.

Wik didn't move. The Singer continued as if I hadn't spoken. His hands, resting on his knees, were silvered with tattoos.

“All traders want to be important. They all look for an edge to make them faster, better than their competition. Your mother is no exception. She fought to gain her edge. How would you be better than her?”

I could not answer that.

He continued, his voice rising and falling. “The best traders help the city. There are songs in their honor. Your mother's run, bringing together the medicines for the southeast? That is already sung in many towers.”

Already. I'd been trapped in the Spire's walls for many days, then.

The Singer leaned forward so I could meet his eyes without tilting my head up. I could see the silver marks on his cheeks and forehead. His head was bald, and tattoos curved above his brow. Some symbols I recognized: knife, arrow, spear. Some I didn't understand at all.

“The towers know her wings on sight. You want that. She flies everywhere without fear. You want that too.” He pressed his lips together: a dark line below his sharp nose. “But you are a Lawsbreaker. Your tower's only use for you now is as an offering to the city. They will sing no songs for you.”

I shuddered. An offering. When I left Mondarath with Nat, I hadn't thought beyond making the Singers give me my wingmark. Now everything was lost. I swallowed. “Is Nat here?”

The Singer looked me in the eyes, with more sorrow than I'd thought possible on a Singer's stern face. “No.”

My heart dropped. His word turned my fear into truth. My oldest friend, fallen. His death as much my fault as his own. More so. He had not broken Fortify. I had. My mind went as empty as the sky beyond the city. It filled with a moaning that built as I remembered his screams and the skymouth attacking.

The feet to the Singer's right stepped forward, and a hand shook my shoulder roughly. A young woman's voice said, “Stop that. The sound hurts my ears.”

The Singer raised his hand. “Sellis, let her mourn her friend.” I was grateful to him, until his next words stifled my sobs to a hiccup.

“Wik is of the belief,” he said, “that you have suffered enough losses, Kirit.”

I looked up. Rumul smiled, slowly. Beside him, Wik shifted on his feet. “You love the city?”

The city's towers. Its blue skies, the lights of Allmoons. The touch of the wind when I woke in the morning. The towers and the people in them. The songs of our past. I did love it.

“Yes.” The barest whisper.

“It needs you, Kirit. If you can grow beyond your anger and your losses, the city needs you.”

The girl, Sellis, pressed my shoulder again. “Listen to Rumul.”

The honey-voiced man's name. Rumul. He stood up. Walked behind the workbench and took a seat there. Wik and Sellis remained near me.

“Why do you fight us in this?”

I shook my head. I could barely sit, much less fight.

Rumul lifted a thick skein of bone markers from the worktable and rubbed a chip between his fingers. For a moment I thought he held Naton's chips, but these were new, uncarved. Their cord was red, not blue. “You were offered an opportunity to come to the Spire, which you resisted.”

I eyed Wik's spit-marked foot. He had not said much since he'd pulled me from the oubliette.

“And yet you flew straight here on your own. Why?” He fingered another chip. The markers were thick. They were Lawsmarks like the ones on my wrist. “Because you knew we had something you wanted. And you thought you had something we wanted too.”

I swallowed and prepared to bargain. I
did
have something they wanted: me. My voice. I could help them with the skymouths. For my wings. For my life. I lifted my chin, took a determined breath.

Rumul raised his eyebrows. “You still think so?” I nodded, opening my mouth. Sellis jerked my arm and hushed me before I could argue.

“There is dissent in the Spire over letting you live. Wik has argued on your behalf. Has said you stopped a skymouth. Though you didn't stop the one near the Spire.”

Wik stepped forward. “She had no time to do so.”

Sellis jumped in, saying, “She is headstrong, and she is a Lawsbreaker.” She raised my hand and shook my wrist so the marks clacked heavy.

A look from Rumul quieted her.

The room settled into silence, punctuated only by the clicking of the bone markers Rumul held.

“You are no longer a citizen, by Laws,” he finally said. “But I would like to make you a bargain.”

Sellis stifled a protest. I struggled to rise to my feet, succeeding only when Wik steadied me. A bargain.

“When a citizen challenges the Spire and fails,” Rumul said, his voice taking on a new depth, “they are thrown down. However, when a Singer, or a Singer-born, does so, they are allowed to live, if their injuries are not too great. Did you know this?”

I shook my head.

“What has Ezarit told you of your father, Kirit?”

A puzzling question. When I was slow to respond, Sellis elbowed me. I glared at her. “She's told me nothing. He disappeared during a migration.”

Sellis snorted. “Your mother is a liar.”

I bristled. Though I could not argue the words, Sellis had no right to say them.

Rumul watched me glare at Sellis for a moment. “She is correct. Your father is in the Spire.”

“A prisoner?” I pictured the walls of the oubliette I'd just climbed from and felt panic tighten my stomach.

“Not at all,” Wik said. His voice was low and clear. He kept his eyes on Rumul's desk, so his bird-of-prey profile was all I saw. “He is injured, but he lives among the Singers.”

Rumul produced a roll of silk from his pocket, wrapped around something heavy and something that clattered. He passed it to Wik, who handed it to me. I unwrapped the silk and gasped. My mother's lenses—I'd thought them lost.

A skein of message chips was tangled in the straps.

“The lenses were his once. Your father's,” Rumul said. “We are pleased to have them back.”

The lenses heavy in my hand, I stumbled with Wik's assistance to the workbench and spread the chips out across the flat top. My hands shook, though the message was not addressed to me. Nor to anyone.

But I knew the hand that had marked the chips as well as I knew my own.

*   *   *

You will live, they tell me,
Ezarit had written.

For a moment, I thought she'd sent this message to me. Then I saw how faded the skein was. How dust-filled the marks. This was a message as old as Naton's had been.

I brushed a shaking finger across the chips. Felt the marks she'd made. Kept reading.

I traded you and your lies for my life. Your secret will remain with me, and the Spire will make me a fine bargain for my silence. Good-bye, love.

The bone grew slick, and the dust trapped in the marks dimpled from the tears I realized ran down my own cheeks. I did not brush them away.

This was not meant for me. She did not mean me.

I tried to hold on to that thought.

Sellis cleared her throat. She shifted under Rumul's fierce gaze, but made no further sound.

So many secrets. So many things Ezarit had kept from me. I knew she'd challenged the Spire, but to learn our tier was a bribe for her silence? That my father—

Rumul's words suddenly hit home. “My father is here? He is a Singer?”

Rumul nodded. “He was Singer-born. He ventured out of the Spire before he took his wings and was marked a Singer.”

“And when he disappeared? When he left my mother alone?”

The room went still.

Wik bowed his head, his hand warm on my arm. “He was Spire-born. It is tradition to return. In the end, he paid a heavy price.”

I sputtered. He left us. No price was great enough. “Does he know of me?”

Quiet built in the room. Outside, in the passageway, a voice called out a muted greeting, and another voice responded. A bird flapped its wings and passed into the taut light.

“He knows now,” Rumul said. “Ezarit hid you from us. You were seen so much with another woman, Elna, and her son.”

Nat. Oh, Nat.

Rumul continued, “Singers cannot possibly know everything. When Ezarit moved you uptower with her, we realized our error.” His voice was soft, sorrowful. As if he himself had sustained a loss. “Some Singers feel that if you had been taught properly, you would not be in the situation you are now.”

I turned to Wik. “You weren't at Densira to escort my mother through the migration.”

He shook his head and began to answer. Rumul held up a hand, leaving the bone chips on the table. “You were a surprise to the Spire. We were curious about you.”

“But what would you have done? I am grown.”

“True.” He frowned. “If Ezarit's plan was to keep you from us, she did a nearly perfect job. But she had something of greater value than she knew.”

Me. Breaker of Laws. Skymouth shouter. “My voice.” That was my bargaining tool.

“Untrained, your voice is merely awful,” Wik said. “But trained, you could truly help the city.”

I blinked. My mind, once empty as the sky, was a mess of wind-tossed thoughts and feelings. My father, alive, a sharp, sudden sunbeam. My mother's betrayals, dark clouds. A small thought, that she'd been trying to keep me from the Singers, fluttered back and forth between the two, like a whipperling on a message run.

“I want to see my father,” I said, my fingers tight around the lenses.

Rumul shook his head. “He is unable to come uptower, and only Singers may descend below the novices' levels.”

“You cannot be serious,” Sellis cut in. “You are truly considering this?”

Rumul stood behind his workbench. His stool fell over and clattered to the floor as he turned to face her. “You are a member of council now?” Sellis ducked her head. “You are not yet a Singer, Sellis. You are here as my ears. Have a care.”

I tried to understand the layers of this room. What Rumul decided was paramount. Wik seemed to be on my side, in a strange Singer way. And this Sellis? My ribs throbbed from her sharp elbow. What did I need to say to tip the balance? I thought hard, tried to remember all my mother's lessons about bargaining. The arguments I had practiced within the walls of the Spire had been based on one desire: I wanted to live.

Rumul was trying to show me how I could live and still be a part of the city. Thanks to a father I'd never known. A Singer.

How did I feel about that?
No time to hesitate, Kirit. No time to be afraid.

I tried to consider what Rumul stood to gain from taking me in. How far he'd go.

“What are you offering?” I rasped.

He smiled. “A chance to change your life.” The words hung in the air, sweet and tempting. He continued. “You can train as a Singer. You can learn to control your voice, and, with it, help the city. If you prove to us that your behavior is due to your lack of education, then we will reconsider your sentence. Do well enough, and you will join us.”

Rumul's tattooed face gave me chills. His voice—I knew better than to trust it. My mind reached for clouds and sky, found only carved walls. Any chance was better than the prison I'd emerged from. Even this chance. I could never go back to the towers, to the way things were. But now I had another chance to stay alive.