Updraft (39 page)

I met his eyes. “I still do.”

He did not respond.

Sellis shoved a council member aside and pushed into the circle. She looked long at Rumul before she turned on me. “I take the challenge up in Rumul's name. There will be no concession.”

“Singer's right,” the same group of council members spoke again, joined by more who had stayed silent when I issued the challenge.

Wik groaned. Sellis was young and whole. She was an excellent fighter. I was tired from my climb, hungry from my days away from the Spire. Wik began to step forward, to take up my challenge for me. I would not allow it. I held up my hand and met Sellis's eyes.

“I accept.”

Far below, enormous white wings edged the windbeaters' tier. They began to move, creating eddies and whorls in the Gyre. The wind picked up.

Singers stepped back from us, gathering weapons for us to select. A rustle of silk and clatter of wing battens nearby nagged at the edges of my attention, but I refused to turn from Sellis's glare. The challenge began now. Here. I would win, or she would. One of us would die.

Only when Rumul pulled her aside did I drop my gaze and look around me.

Wings surrounded me. Viridi, Beliak, and Macal held theirs out, straps ready for me to slip over my shoulders. Wik held a different pair. They were tea-stained, with a kestrel stamped on the silk. As familiar as home. My mother's wings.

I reached out to touch them. Drew the straps over my shoulders and tightened the buckles.

“I would see her.”

Rumul started to argue my request, but Sellis whispered to him and his face changed. “Open the enclosure.”

They took me to the moon-window above the pit and I looked down on her, curled far below.

She peered up, unable to see who watched her.

“I cannot make the same choice you did,” I said. She sat up, listening. “But I understand why you made yours.”

“I wanted to know you would be safe,” she whispered. Her voice carried up the walls of the pit, and my ears helped it the rest of the way.

“There is no safety here,” I said. I turned so the council could hear my words as well as Ezarit. “The city must know what I know. Why should I die silent?”

She reached her hand up, towards me. I reached through the window, towards her. We were separated by the deep pit, but I could feel her there with me. A breeze cooled the stinging rash that had risen on my hands. I closed my eyes and imagined she wrapped her arms around me and held me until I stepped away. I walked from the alcove across the passageway to the council tier.

Without waiting on tradition, I leapt into the Gyre.

*   *   *

As I hurtled from the ledge, the windbeaters whipped the challenge winds higher. The churning gusts confused me. Some vents buoyed me up; others seemed to disappear from beneath me.

Heavier gusts began to rattle from far down the tower. The carvers grabbed their tools and pulled themselves from the walls. Singers and novices ran to the galleries to watch.

I locked my wings in fighting position. Reached into my sleeve and undid the sheath. Wrapped my fingers around the hilt of Wik's glasstooth knife. I felt a small tentacle wrap my arm, then release it.

My throat closed. I had forgotten my small passenger. I had doomed the little skymouth too.

The windbeaters were my hope. If Civik had convinced enough of them that I was worth the risk, they would support me. If not, or if he was still convincing them, then I could fly right into a void and drop like a stone.

I could not know how well Sellis would fly these gusts, nor what she was armed with. That was the right of the challenged. My own knife—Wik's knife—smelled acrid. Like skymouth skin.

Taking a tactic from Nat's fight, I circled the Gyre and grabbed a carved post below the council balcony—the traditional launch point. If she chose that, I could get behind her.

The spectators roared and looked above me. My guess had been right. Sellis soared over my head, carrying a long bone spear in one hand and a glass knife in the other.

She locked her wings in fighting position and dropped quickly, searching for me.

I pushed out from the wall, twisting into my glide, and circled on her heels.

She made a sharp turn and came at me from the side, intending to crush me against the Gyre wall. Her eyes searched for the best angle to take me out quickly.

I'd seen Sellis fight in the Gyre, and I'd trained with her. I knew the tricks she used. I slammed into her before she could build up speed. Knocked her into a spin that sent her against the far gallery wall. Her pinions clattered against the carvings.

As she fought to recover, I began to shout.

“You know the truth, Sellis. So should the others.”

We were high enough that we could be heard by many of the tiers. At my words, the galleries rumbled. Not everyone here knew what was done in the Singers' name. Not even Terrin had gone so far as to speak the truth before he won the right to do so.

Tradition.

Sellis would never break the Silence. She would never allow me to do so.

Whose permission did I need to speak? No one's.

Tradition had created a place where Rumul could breed secrets. I was finished with tradition.

My voice rang rough and barbed across the Gyre.

I shouted the truth for Ezarit, who could not hear me. For Naton and Elna, who were not here. I shouted to the traders from Naza and Bissel, and to the shadows I saw gathered at the Spire's roof.

“Below you, in the pens, we have bred monsters. This has been done in the city's name. You were lied to on purpose. The city was deceived.”

“Silence!” Rumul roared from the balcony.

The Singers were so caught up in the fight, and in my words, they did not notice the growing audience on the rooftop. As Sellis and I circled higher on the maelstrom, I thought I could see Ceetcee, Sidra, Dojha, Dikarit, Aliati, and citizens from nearby towers, gathered to witness. Macal had summoned them. I squinted at their robes and colorful wings, dazzled by the bright light of Allsuns.

Sellis threw one of her knives. It flew past my ear and clattered down the carved wall.

She shrieked in frustration. “Shut up, Kirit! You cannot speak! Not until you have won!”

But I kept shouting and more. I sang. I sang of the tiny skymouth in my sleeve. I sang of the attack on Elna the night we blessed the bridge. I sang how Sellis had hung back. How she would have let a blind citizen die.

She paled at this.

I sang to the Spire the horror that the Singers had made, so that no one could deny knowing, so that none could stand by, robed in ignorance and tradition any longer.

As Sellis and I wheeled in the Gyre, first high, then low, I could see the galleries and watch some of the other Singers' eyes widening. Novices turned to each other, whispering. The council shattered as several members ran for the ladders, hoping to reach the windbeaters and force them to drop me from the sky. Too late.

My voice cracked as I sang of Naton, Tobiat, and Civik, one gone, one broken beyond repair. One lost, then found again.

A rumbling dissent sounded from the very walls of the Spire, even as I continued singing and shouting the Singers' crimes.

A gust lifted me higher again. The windbeaters supported me.

But I did not stop. I shouted the Spire's triumphs too. I sang how the Singers saved the city, how they kept its people from warring against one another. How they collected our stories and kindled our culture. I sang Tobiat's story of Lith.

Finally, I sang the skymouths. My voice grew hoarse, but I sang their past and their present. I sang the pens and the truth about the migrations.

I was still singing when a horrified Sellis threw herself at me. “You lie!” she said. “You will be silenced!” She stabbed at my side with a long bone blade.

And then I screamed, with all the sound that I had left. I had run out of words. I screamed and screamed and screamed.

 

28

RELEASE

Sellis did not land a second blow. She instead circled with her third knife still aimed, listening. Not to my screams. To the city. From deep in the Spire, the rumbling rose. It built to a roar. The watching Singers clutched their ears.

My scream poured from me anew. My voice, echoing down the Gyre, mixed with the city's anger until the Spire shook. Sellis wobbled in her glide, too stunned to make the turn, and crashed into a wall. Where sharp bone tools had carved deep gouges long ago, the Spire's walls now oozed yellow ichor.

Sellis's hands came away from the wall, and she fell backwards. Her hands were stained yellow with the city's blood.

My shout continued, though my voice had begun to falter and fade. Then another voice joined mine: Wik's, strong and deep. Then a third, elderly and tremulous, but shouting from the windbeaters' tier. Civik. My father. I found my breath again, my voice, and continued to scream.

“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.