Cloudbound (10 page)

I bumbled into an updraft that bore me higher into the gray, damp clouds. Around me, dark forms, thick trunks of towers. Bissel? Grigrit? I had no idea where I flew.

Was that the shadow of a ledge? Perhaps. I aimed for it, slowing my glide so that I wouldn't smash myself towerside if I was wrong. I needed to rest. To get my bearings. Then I'd figure out how to get above the clouds.

The ledge was barely that: a slim spur almost overrun by the tower's bone core. Still, I could stand on it and lean against the core wall. Let my legs stop shaking from the exertion. Breathe. Air filled my lungs, a breeze played with my hair.

Around me, the clouds were not a constant thickness. This was a surprise. From above, they'd appeared almost solid, a wall of white. Below, when a sunbeam broke through, I could almost see the next tower over. And then I could see it clearly.

The Spire's massive carved wall appeared in the clouds, then disappeared again, back into shadow and mist.

A low whistle nearly escaped my lips. It looked so close. No giving away my position, if anyone was nearby to hear. If I hadn't imagined the voices.

Then the clouds closed. No matter what I had imagined, I was on my own, below the city.

I peered again into the clouds, waiting for another break. My eyes ached with staring at the white. Mirages appeared: spots of distant glowing blue pulsed where I looked too hard. The damp began to get to me, and perhaps the shock of falling also. My legs shook and my teeth chattered. I could not stay there. Not without arrows. Not this close to the Spire, where bone eaters and who knew what else lurked.

*   *   *

My time became measured in breaths. Too many to count. In staring at the white air, at the shadows within it, while thinking of my family far above. Elna, Ceetcee, Beliak. My growling belly. The damp.

I would go mad with it. I would have to fly soon, or try to climb.
No one returns from the clouds.
Wrong. I'd return. I'd prove everyone wrong. And I'd bring Moc and Kirit with me—if I could find them.

Patience rewarded, finally: a sunbeam wormed its way through the cloud wall, illuminating mist and edges so beautifully I gasped. The air was still chilled, but the Spire loomed before me, piercing thick heaps of clouds in its rise.

The breeze buffeting the ledge carried a thick smell, sweet like rotting apples, but heavier. I recoiled from its sudden slap on my senses, bumping my head against the tower core. Then the smell disappeared as quickly as it had come.

Within the clouds that surrounded the lower Spire, a large shape, darkly solid and slow-moving, was outlined crisply against the brighter clouds. My skin prickled, increasingly cold. I reached for my quiver again, before remembering it was empty. I couldn't make out tentacles or teeth, and the shape was wrong for either skymouth or bone eater.

I thought I heard the rhythm of voices again, far distant, blown on the wind coming from around the Spire.

What was the shadow? Why was it circling the Spire? Whose voices were those? Where had Kirit and Moc gone?

So many questions. I struggled to get my bearings.
Plan, Nat. Don't just react.

Go up, as fast as I could? Or try to figure out what was happening, here below?

We'd fallen, impossibly, between Grigrit and Bissel, while taking the Spire on our right wingtip. Had we fallen straight down? It had seemed so. And when I'd flown up, it had been at a relatively sharp angle. Perhaps I stood on Bissel? I was obviously not far from the Spire, although I'd never been so many tiers down. Whatever made the slow circumnavigation of the Spire's walls must be close to the cloudtop.

Closer than I was.

Was it still morning? I couldn't tell by the sunbeam's angle, rapidly dimming as the clouds closed. I had to make my decision soon, or I'd find myself trying to fly cloudblind, or scaling Bissel with only the pitons Beliak had given me.

Logic said,
Return. Go to the council. Let them send a search party for Kirit Skyshouter and the Singer fledge.

Curiosity said,
Investigate
. And rekindled friendship said,
Find them now.
I shook my wings open and launched into an upswirl of mist. Soon I caught a powerful windflow around the Spire and rode it.

The wind led me away from the shadow-shape. But if I was right, the gust would carry me back around the Spire. If I was lucky, I'd find a handgrip or wall carvings to cling to.

If I was unlucky, I'd end up deeper in the clouds.

Cold and damp chilled my skin as I flew around the Spire's wall. My cheeks, long accustomed to dry air, felt slick. My ears, long used to the city's noise, searched for sound.

It had been a long time since I'd been so alone. Since Allsuns, over a year ago, and then only for a short while.

The quiet of flying solo in the clouds, the mist my only companion, made me edgy.

Even when I was Lawsbound. Elna and Ceetcee, Beliak and Tobiat had filled my quarters with friendship, family. Before that, I'd had Kirit, always nearby, and our wing group, practicing our flight skills around our crowded tower. Shouting to each other from open balconies. The entire city was a family. We didn't sequester ourselves away from one another. That was something Singers did.

“Put myself into a bit of a tight spot,” I whispered to my absent friends, my companions, my family. “I'll make it back.”

As I came back around the Spire, I spotted a shadow below me and far forward. The sun's angle in the clouds chased the dark spot with ripples of light.

I trailed the shadow from three tiers above until it disappeared around the Spire. The mist and my hunters' colors cloaked me well enough, I hoped. Far below, at a break in the mist, a net swung in the wind, lopsided, and a hole cut in its webbing.

This was where we'd fallen.

I hadn't imagined it. What had happened to us?

Above me, another shadow loomed beneath the clouds, closer now. Unmoving. I passed beneath it: a bone spur and wire construction attached to the Spire with bone screws and pegs. It lined up with the shadow's path below.

My wingtip grazed the Spire wall with a skitter.
Pay attention, Nat, or fall forever!

I tightened my fingers in my wing grips and shifted my body weight, slowly easing my glide away from the tower. Before I'd gotten too far, I spotted the carvings that marked an upcoming handgrip—a safety precaution tower fledges were taught to fly for in emergencies.

I risked flying closer to the wall again. Unwrapping my fingers from the grips, I locked my wings, wrapped my elbows around the winghooks and readied myself to reach into the air. Wobbled and almost slammed into the Spire wall. Then I saw the handgrip: crusted and overgrown, but still usable. I grabbed, jerking my already tired shoulders so hard I nearly cried out. A small rodent—gray, with a hairless pink tail—scooted out of its hiding place in the grip, making me jump but not let go. The rodent began to climb away. I swung there, catching my breath, until I found a place to rest my toes as well.

Soon, the shadow circled below me. I could hear regular noises coming from it. Conversations, perhaps. Whistles. No birds, no animals that I knew, made noise like that, save one. There were people in the clouds, working the Spire's side. No one was going to believe me, should I ever return above the clouds to tell them.

Another break in the mist gave me a glimpse of the space between the Spire and Bissel. Distances narrowed far below, until the towers seemed to grow together. In the muted distance, other towertops stopped midcloud.

Those towers hadn't risen when the city did. Some had broken. We knew this from Tobiat's songs. Others stopped growing. The city grew past them. Forgot them.

Not everyone had forgotten.

The noises grew louder as, below me, the shadow's edges sharpened. Plinth-shaped, like the city council's meeting space, but smaller by half. And unlike the council's platform, this one was not suspended between the towers. This platform floated.

I stared, blinked and stared again. This was no cloudtouched dream. Below me, bulbous shapes rose silver above the plinth, visible only because the sunlight hit them cloudwise.

Skymouths. Hanging right below me.

My feet scrambled against the Spire's side, trying to climb away fast. In the cloudlight, the creatures' limbs dangled limp, trailing silver in the wind, and very visible within the cloud cover's shadows. I cursed at my fear, trying to drive it away.

These weren't skymouths, not anymore.

They were four filled air sacks made of skymouth carcasses. They supported the platform below.

These air sacks floated on their own, without wings. Tethered to the plinth, they wobbled in the wind, but without a skymouth's natural motions. The monsters' corpses hung in the cloud-ridden air, buoying the plinth's corners, while the platform's center sagged against several bone supports.

The skymouth air sacks had been filled to near bursting with gas. Rot gas? That was the only gas I knew that rose, but it was unstable at this volume.

On that plinth, figures worked. Gray robed, some of them. Others, wearing brighter colors at the plinth's far edge flickered and disappeared. On both sides, shadow figures moved wing-shaped oars the size of windbeaters' wings to steer the plinth around the Spire's trunk.

The shapes and colors resolved themselves as even more clouds shifted: gold hair, and black. Four figures who looked very small at this distance rode the platform as it circuited the tower.

My fingers wrapped the Spire handgrip, and my foot struggled to stay on its resting notch. Still, I felt as if the air had disappeared beneath me once again.

What I saw made no sense.

Spotting more grips below me, I descended another tier, intent on seeing more.

*   *   *

On the Spire's mossy side, my blue and brown wings were barely dark enough to blend into the shadows. The light had faded again as moonlight replaced sunlight. I couldn't judge distances well in the dim, but I was much closer at least.

As I snuck up on the plinth, a brighter moonbeam sliced the clouds. Pieces of the whole structure appeared. A long boom swung from the plinth's center, holding a net aloft. Another net was undergoing repairs by two figures who were still small, even up close. Children.

Small fingers do fine work.
Doran's words echoed through the last of the muzz.

Clouds chewed at the moonbeam and a scrim of mist obscured the plinth. The nearest skymouth skins seemed to shimmer blue-silver with reflected light. I could see them easier now.

Two fledges worked at the plinth's edge closest to the bone tower. Now and then, one of them knelt or lay down. A larger figure stood watch.

I strained my eyes, counting. Waiting. Four children worked the plinth.

Their guard focused attention on the Spire wall, and the work the fledges were doing there. The smell came again, close enough to be sickening. Foul air surrounded the plinth, the skymouth hides. I could see the sharp objects that the children had pushed into the bone tower's overgrown core as the plinth circled. Dark, moonlit liquid dripped from the resulting holes into goose bladders and bone buckets.

Flattened against the Spire, I remained unseen. I rested in a shallow divot, a sealed-over Spire gate from long ago.

The child workers attached spigots and buckets to the holes they'd made. They pulled other buckets and taps from holes that no longer dripped. The plinth continued to circle, slowly, as a guard struggled with the large wings to guide its turn.

Looking up, I saw a glow above the fledges still working the taps that quickly faded and went out. The clouds parted and a moonbeam caught on two metal assemblages connecting tower and plinth. I could barely make out the tendons that had been stretched between them. They looked like work my father might have done once—a mechanism that kept the plinth circling close to the tower.

Ceetcee and the other artifexes used similar but simpler tools to help them build bridges between the towers. But someone had modified this construction. Someone who understood tools. Another artifex.

The plinth made a turn, two large silk wingfoils swinging out with the same speed as windbeaters' giant wings had worked to churn up the Gyre.

Five more windbeaters' wings hung from the Spire, above the plinth, at the end of the bone and metal outcropping. The expanse of it stretched down the Spire's side, and bolts had been driven far enough through the bone wall that dark liquid seeped down the bone, pooling in old carvings.

Five foils, arrayed in a circle. Enough to spin a Gyre of its own, or the reverse of one. If someone could get it moving fast enough, they might make a hole in the wind. A hole big enough for a flier to fall through. I clutched the message chip on the blue silk cord at my wrist. Felt its solidity, its realness.
This happened. This was happening.

I hadn't imagined the shadows. Nor the missing wind. I hadn't imagined the nets. I was neither dead nor skytouched.

Using handholds and the tier's narrow ledge, I followed the slowly orbiting platform as far as I could, until I came to another gate. This one half open.

A shadow passed between me and the moonlight, a flier descending fast, and before I could worry about rodents or what else might be behind the gate, I pressed myself into the crack.

The plinth below me dipped, then rose.

A familiar voice broke the night below me, not bothering with whispers. “You are working too slow. The city needs you to work faster.”

I knew that voice. I'd heard it that very morning
Councilor Densira … Hello Kirit.
Dix. Talking to the small figures on the plinth as if they were garbage.

Another black-winged guard approached the plinth and whistled. Pulled a spindle from a satchel and attached it to skymouth-hide tethers.

“It's time,” Dix said. The fledges hoisted more silk foils onto the spindle's sides. The guard extended it up with the turn of a crank and connected with the array on the arm attached to the Spire. The fledges, with Dix shouting at them, pulled hard at the spindle and set it spinning like a top. Fast. Then faster. The giant array whirled above their heads.