Updraft (5 page)

“I'll keep my eyes open,” Nat said. For now, we were a team again, trying to work as fast as possible.

Instead of scourweed, we found an old rain catcher, too broken to be worth lifting higher, and used it as a scoop. Then we started as far from Tobiat's piles as we could, swiping at the mold and bird shit that had accumulated everywhere. I felt sick. Nat looked pretty green too.

“Tobiat,” he called, “we need to move your things.”

Tobiat had piled wing battens and bits of broken carvings around what was probably his bed. Kept them a safe distance from the small fire pit. He had nothing that looked like metal. If he'd found anything that valuable, it would have been sold or stolen before now. I caught myself looking anyway, like a glitter-smitten kavik.

Other piles had been pushed against the inner wall. One leaked dank vegetable liquid from the bottom.

I kicked at it. “All trash.”

With two fingers, I lifted a fetid pile of grayish cloth from the heap. The fabric was crusted with age-browned blood and gristle. I walked to the edge with it and had cranked back my arm to give it a good heave when Tobiat came out of nowhere, howling, “Mine, mine!” He grabbed, the fabric crackling at his touch, bits falling off. Stink rose, though whether from the cloth or Tobiat, I couldn't tell.

“Disgusting,” I said and pulled, while trying to keep myself back from the edge. Tobiat shrieked and yanked at the fabric, leaning way out. The thought of him falling, at my hand, nearly choked me. The clouds were too close here. As were the shadows that prowled the clouds.

“Nat!” I yelled. Nothing. “Nat! Help!” and Nat came running, finally. He coaxed Tobiat off the edge of the balcony and calmed him with a piece of goose. When I released the rags, the hermit bundled them into a ball and held them close.

“We are never going to finish,” I said. We'd miss the wingtest. I'd lose my best opportunity to avoid another confrontation with Singer Wik. And even if we were to finish in time, we'd have no chance to study. One look at Nat's creased brow showed he was worried too.

“What if we toss everything?” Nat raised an eyebrow. “It would be faster. He's mad, right? He won't miss any of it.”

I looked more closely at Tobiat. He wasn't mad. His skull was dented on one side, as if he'd hit something at great speed and lived to forget the fall. His skin was frost-marked where he'd left it bare in the wind. Scars rippled across his face and back, and several bones looked to have been broken and rehealed as they lay. He was more crooked than straight. It must have been very painful. Still, he was aware of us. He'd covered himself a bit better with his rags than before. He gripped the cloth tightly. He was in there, somewhere. We couldn't throw his things down like he wasn't.

“Tobiat?” I said in my softest voice. “We have to clean four tiers, fast, or we'll never be allowed to leave.”

He looked at me. “Leave?”

“Yes, we'll leave when it's clean.”

The hermit reached out a claw and hooked a finger around one of my cleaning rags. He lifted it gingerly and dipped it in the bucket we'd been using to hold rainwater. So he knew how to do it. Soon he was heaving trash over the edge of the balcony with us, yelling, “Good-bye, good-bye!”

The sun had dipped towards the clouds when the ladder clattered against the tier, finally. Tobiat disappeared. I looked around. The space was clean, but it had taken all day. Three more tiers to finish by the wingtest felt impossible.

A stone fruit pit bounced off my shoulder and rolled across the balcony. I chased it down before it could stick to the newly cleaned tier. Sidra and Dojha from uptower circled and swooped just out of my throwing range.

Once Ezarit and I moved uptower, Sidra had become coldly polite in flight class. She'd grown much warmer to Nat. Since Allsuns, he'd found himself at the center of a swirl of brightly colored wings. He looked amused to see them here.

“Does stink down here,” Sidra said. “You were right, Dojha. So far downtower, we're bound to get hit with a bucket's worth of foul if we stay too long.”

Dojha blushed. “We wanted to see if you two needed anything from flight.”

“Since you're going to miss the last classes before the wingtest,” Sidra added.

Sidra's wings shone with decorative thread. Between batten sections, panels had been dyed the color of flowers: red, blue, purple. Hard to miss. Sidra caught me sizing up her colors and grinned at me.

“My father says you got off easy.” She sounded like our Magister, strict. Scolding. “Lawsbreaking. Bringing shame on the tower just before Allmoons. The guard said you were playing with lenses on your balcony when it came. Did it run away because you sang to it?”

Sidra had the prettiest voice in flight. When she sang Laws, everyone remembered the words. I was not so lucky.

I pulled back into the shadow of the tier and held my mouth shut tight.

Dojha turned her head sideways as an updraft brushed her wingtips. “Let's go, Sidra. Dinner.”

“Right,” Sidra said. “See you at wingtest, I hope.” She waved to Nat, and I bristled. Then they were gone.

Nat gathered our buckets and rags. The back of his neck was bright red.

I reached for the ladder, but Tobiat rushed up, nearly bumping me off the ledge. “Payment,” he said, and held out his hand.

“We can't pay you. We don't have anything,” Nat said, frustrated.

But Tobiat's hand wasn't empty.

“Look, Nat.”

Tobiat held a pile of bone chips, as filthy as his hands. Nat lifted one, and the rest came with it. They were strung together like a necklace.

“More Laws,” Nat said. His eyes went flat, and his voice with them. “Thanks for nothing, Tobiat.” But he stuffed the stinking thing in his robe so that Tobiat would let his arm go. Once he did, Tobiat bobbed his head and muttered to himself. He receded back into the gloom.

As we prepared to climb the ladder back to Elna's, I heard Tobiat shout, “Leave!”

*   *   *

That night, I huddled in the sitting area. Elna had borrowed screens to make a guest space, but it was still breezy. The fire had gone out. Elna's own sleeping screens, hand-me-downs from my mother, muffled her soft snores. Day after tomorrow was the wingtest. If there was the slightest chance we'd be allowed to take it, I would be ready. No time to sleep.

When two fliers are on the same plane and at risk of collision, the flier with more maneuverability must give way. Traditionally, this is the flier with the wind coming over their right wing.

Tradition. There was a rule for that too.
Traditions meant everyone knew what to do, and did it. Laws were tradition, strengthened to avoid angering the city.

After a while, I'd recited everything I could remember from Magister Florian's instruction, jealous that our flight group had two extra days to practice with him. That they knew they'd be able to wingtest. I'd never felt so angry at my tower in my whole life. Nor at myself.

“Kirit,” Nat whispered.

It took me a while to answer. “What?”

He scooted into my space, his hair sleep-tossed. He didn't say anything for a moment, just looked at his hands. He toyed with old message chips, rubbing them together so they squealed.

“That's a horrible sound,” I said. Then I pressed my lips together. We used to talk about everything. Then I rose and he pulled away, and now? I wanted to tell him everything, and now I couldn't. The Singer's fiat forbade me. I held my fears in my mouth. I swallowed what I would have once told him about how it felt to scream down a skymouth or argue with a Singer. I waited for him to speak.

“Tell me what it looked like, at least?”

“The skymouth?”

He nodded, eager to hear.

I could give him that. But where would it lead? To have the whole story pulled from me like a silk ribbon off a package, until I was emptied and Nat was tied up in it.
No.

He cleared his throat and tried again. “All right. What if I go first?”

Hope rose, tickling the corners of my mouth, as I realized he wanted to fix things, a little.

“You have to see these,” he said. He wasn't playing with any old message chips from a kavik. He'd been fingering the strand of chips Tobiat gave him. He'd cleaned them up, so that we could see the rope binding them was frayed blue silk. Much finer than the chips we tied to message birds. Or any Laws chips. The pieces of bone were thicker too. This strand was never intended to be sent by wing.

I looked at the scratches on the chips. The carving included tiny holes, careful etchings. Carvings within carvings. “What is this?”

“I'm not sure,” Nat said. “Look.” He wiped away a spot of mold on the back of a chip. The scratches took on shape and substance. “It's like a tower map. Each chip is a tier. And there are symbols on the other side. I can't make them out.”

“What do you mean? You can read chips as well as I can.”

“Look,” he said again. And he was right. The symbols weren't made up of forms I knew. These were arabesque curls and sharp cuts. Odd angles. Tobiat had given us something very strange indeed.

I whispered without thinking, “Some of it looks like the marks on that Singer's face.” Suddenly, I wanted to go back to worrying about the wingtest.

Nat watched me carefully. “Tell me about them?”

“I want to study.” I said it as casually as I could. If I'd had feathers like his whipperling, they'd have been raked around my collar.

“Why? This is so much better—secret Singer messages, diagrams. Besides, if we do finish cleaning and you get to wingtest, you'll be great at Laws. You know them all.”

If my voice didn't trip me up. If we could wingtest. Too many ifs.

I didn't want to talk about ifs. I couldn't talk about the skymouth. “You think the tower on those chips is Densira or Mondarath?” I asked, trying to think of anything that would swing Nat's attention.

“It might be a tower far away.” Nat looked out into the dark. “Why?”

“Because if you get your wingmark,” I said, “you can fly the city until you find it. Without a Magister at your side.”

He paled. “If I don't, I'll be stuck here until next Allsuns. No wingmark, no flying past this quadrant. No apprenticeship or wingfights or anything.”

Nat loved his mysteries and his conspiracies, but he loved flying more. I'd caught him. Worse, if he didn't pass with full marks, he wouldn't get a good apprenticeship because of Naton's Lawsbreaks. Nat and Elna would sink farther on the tower. And they didn't have far to go.

He tried to play it off. “You worry too much,” he mumbled.

“We have three tiers to clean tomorrow,” I said. “That's worry enough. I'm afraid we're not going to finish in time, even if Tobiat's was the worst by far.” A few days ago, my biggest worry about the wingtest had been to do well enough that my mother would beg to have me as her apprentice. Now I needed my wingmark to stay clear of the Singer's clutches. And I'd started to fear the lengths the Singer was willing to go to in order to set me up to fail.

The last few days of flight training had focused on sweeps, rolls, and defensive gliding, and I needed work in that area. Magister Florian's recitations and songs were filled with important angles and calculations. We'd missed plenty of last-minute secrets while we were downtower with our buckets.

I hoped Nat shared my worries. “We could study together?” But he'd already retreated to his mat.

So I curled back up on my own mat and tried to recite more right-of-way rules. I practiced the singsong Laws. Easy to sing, easy to remember. Less carving required to pass them on. The rhythms were memorable; the repetition made me drowsy.

My eyes snapped open at movement by my side. Elna was bent over me, furious.

“Where did you get this?”

I scrambled off my sleeping mat and stood, blearily, as she shook the blue silk cord with the strange bone chips at me. Nat was nowhere to be seen.

“Tobiat gave it to Nat!”

I'd never seen Elna this angry. “He did, did he? You're an innocent bystander again?”

A chill ran up my back. Yesterday, Elna had thought I was a skytouched blessing. Now she sounded like she agreed with the councilman.

“You can't leave well enough alone, can you, Kirit? Always have to make a mess.”

I reeled on my feet. Was I dreaming? Elna loved me. The bone chips dangled and rattled in her hand. That's what had changed.

“I don't even know what they mean,” I protested.

Elna ran her fingers along the age-smoothed bone chips. Her chin quivered. She threw the braided skein of chips on the floor and turned from me. “Leave those things be.” She pointed at Tobiat's chips. Her voice broke like a wild whipperling's tethered for the first time to a training line. She began singing Laws. Pointedly. The ones about trespass and betrayal.

I struggled to pull myself from my sleep fog and find the words that would loosen her anger. “Elna, no,” was all that came out. A child's whisper. “Please.” I picked up the chips. “Tell me what they are?”

The chips turned to ice in my hand.

And I jerked awake screaming, sprawled on the warm bone floor beside my mat.

The real Elna was at my side moments later. Elna who loved me, who had always been there, her hand gentle on my back. She hushed me softly and began to hum a baby's song about Allmoons and Nightwings, like I was a child again.

“Sing The Rise,” I murmured, my eyes drooping.

She shifted to the song of salvation. The story of how the city nearly died in the clouds and how the people saved it. In my mother's quarters, Elna's voice had been tight and formal. Here, she sang from the belly.

The Rise began as a children's song, with verses added as we learned to read carvings and to listen to the city sing at Allsuns and Allmoons. She began it low and soft: “
Far down below the clouds, oh, the city did rise.…
” She grew surer of herself, even as she kept her voice quiet. She let the notes wash over her. The towers of the city grew in my imagination, in time with the music. Elna glowed when she sang. She repeated the chorus again: “
The clouds fell away, and the people were saved. Oh, the city did rise,
” and I could see her as she might have been, before Nat's father died. Before she gave up teaching. Before Ezarit paid her to watch me and to be my mother too.