Cloudbound (28 page)

The fledge was trouble, sure, and nosy too. Still, I'd trade our brass plates to the blackwings to get him back. For Ciel, and for me too. I couldn't give him, or anyone, up for lost again. Not Moc, nor Wik, nor Hiroli.

Dix had told the city that two would be thrown down at tomorrow's Conclave. Meantime, she was drugging at least one captive into compliance, and beating another. While pretending to talk to a nearly dead Singer. She was skytouched, for certain. She had to be. The alternative was much worse: that she believed she was doing what was best for the city and was using everyone she could towards that end.

We had to rescue our friends before they were no longer useful to Dix.

I crouched among shadows and spiderwebs, weighing needs. If I moved now, Aliati's efforts to free the lighter-than-air would be for nothing. And if Dix escaped, or I failed, no one could warn the city about the new kaviks Dix was spreading. We had to tell Doran as well. He'd need another way to signal Doran's still-loyal guards. I would return quickly, with friends.

I started to crawl away, slowly. Damp silk pressed my bare cheek, and I pulled back, wiping the creeping feeling away. A thick web blocked my path. I shuddered again. Surely this was the way I'd come?

Silk spiders had made quick work of the gap. I sliced impatiently with my knife, and a small section opened with a soft ripping sound. The nearby threads began to quiver. Soon more were shaking as the spiders vibrated an alarm.

I got up and ran for my life, coating myself with webs and spiders as I passed through and dove, wings still furled, for the nearest balcony and the clouds.

 

22

WAR

Once I was in the air, I tried to snap my wings open. I pushed my hands into the grips and tried to extend my arms, fast. But where the wingset should have unfurled, silk and battens held my arms to my sides. I fought back panic and tried again. A look over my shoulder with the wind whistling through my ears told me why: spiderwebs snarled the wings at key points, binding them. Another jerk of my arms, stronger this time, stretched the webs, but the cams and gears still jammed.

I had little time, I knew it. But pulling too hard risked breaking the wings. I would drop like garbage. I opened and closed the mechanisms gently, extending a little farther with each effort. I tried to breathe in time with my motions. Meanwhile, my fall accelerated, the white cloudtop grew closer.

Tower children learned falling was the worst thing that could happen to a person. The clouds were full of danger, darkness, and storms. Up high was the safest place to be. To the towers, “fallen” meant grief. And “cloudbound” meant dead.

What I knew now was different. The wind beat at me as I spun, but below the cloudtop were more chances to right myself, if I could stay calm. I continued to stretch my arms, to move my bound wings in ways that would loosen the webs. It was working. Slowly.

I broke the clouds still half furled, spinning. The warmer, damp air came as a shock after the cold dryness above. Below me, the hidden towers' ridges and shadows were barely visible, but I fell ever closer.

I had a slim hope that Aliati would return at the same time. Had she seen me dive? Could she catch me? I even, for a moment, wished my pursuers would net me and haul me from the clouds. Though I no longer feared falling as much as I had, I dreaded impact against a hidden wall. I grew dizzy as I spun into the clouds.

Come on, Nat. Keep working.

The damp air weakened a strand of webs, and these gave way. My left wing spread wide. Before I could spin too far on the single foil, I flexed the right wing harder. The wind screamed in my ears now. Shadows grew deeper. Something loomed far below.

The last of the silkthread stretched far enough to part. Falling headlong towards the ghost tower's dark shadow, my wings finally snapped open most of the way.

My heart caught in my throat as the wind filled my wings. I'd fallen but I had not died. I flew below the clouds, alive, though I wobbled and fought for control. My footsling brushed against an outcropping near the ghost tower.

As I recovered enough to fight my way higher, my breath rasped in the moist air. I shook with relief, then struggled to keep my wings balanced in the breeze.

*   *   *

Finally, I righted myself and caught a good gust towards the ghost tower.

“Nat!” Aliati cried, waiting atop the tower. “I waited for you until I couldn't. What did you see?”

“Did you tether the lighter-than-air?”

“Better than.” She grinned and pointed to the ghost tower, where a spidersilk line anchored to a grip hook. The line rose
up,
swaying in the wind. Aliati had done much more than tether the air sacks. “There was such a mess in the market, I was able to pull the lighter-than-air they were storing in skymouth husks down with me. No one saw.”

I wanted to shake her. “You don't think someone will notice it's missing? Like the artifex?” Unauthorized scavenging risked undermining our plan.

But her smile broadened. “I left enough in the storage area to make it seem like it's all there. Now we don't have to wait.”

There was nothing to be done now. Hoping she was right, I told Aliati about the kaviks, about Dix. About the near-worship of Rumul—or at least what was left of him. “I'll go update Kirit and Doran,” she said. “This changes our plans.”

Inside the cave, Djonn had set his and Doran's two brass plates out on the bone floor. Beside them, he'd placed what looked like tiny, twisted wings next to small bags of lighter-than-air. He'd decoded an engraving of wings from one of the plates. In Ciel's lap lay bands of stretchy birdgut and small wing-mockups.

Ciel's fingers, now covered with scratches from working with Djonn's tools, wove together the rounded wings. “Small fingers,” Djonn said, “make excellent work.”

I frowned, thinking about where I'd heard that before, but Ciel laughed and kept working. Her design looked like the windbeaters' foils Dix had used to create the hole in the wind, in miniature. She set those down beside Djonn until he was ready for them.

Meantime, Djonn put one tiny wingset on a base carved from the same piece of bone Beliak and Ceetcee were using for message chips. He wrapped the birdgut around it and twisted until the gut was tightly wrapped in a spiral around the bone. Then he let the contraption go.

The small craft whirred across the cave.

“You spent all that time making a toy?” The two of them. We were risking everything, and they were fiddling.

“Not a toy.” Djonn held one up. “A delivery system for messages. Or for fire, if we need weapons. They fly on their own until the band uncoils. I call them firebugs.”

I sat down beside Djonn, taking a moment to look closer rather than rushing through. A good leader would know the talents of his crew, and it seemed Djonn had talents. He could make anything: from firebugs to lighter-than-air. Naton would have loved watching him work. Elna too.

Djonn picked up a firebug and wound it. His knotted hands worked fast. Another of the bugs sat beside the first, ready for its own twist of birdgut.

Ciel knelt beside us. “Can I help more?”

Djonn smiled. “Yes. With this, and with the bigger things. You remember how the blades worked on the tower-tapping plinth?” Djonn asked her without a note of condescension, so different from the way Dix talked to children, to Moc.

Ciel wrinkled her nose. “Yes.”

“We can use broken wings for something smaller, but similar. It could be useful in an emergency. Would you like to help?” Ciel nodded. “Do we have any nets in the cave?”

There was a medium net holding the cache of food off the cave floor. I dumped the food out and brought the net over. Knelt next to Djonn. “You helped repurpose the windbeaters' wings from the Spire into the blades that pulled the wind from the sky, didn't you?” I pointed at the tiny wings on the firebugs. “When you worked above the kidnapped fledges.”

Djonn frowned. “I knew there were fledges down there. Dix told me they were working for tower marks.”

“She drugged them, like you were drugged. She's doing it still.” His face turned ashen at my words.

Djonn finished the last firebug. “She'll pay for that, someday.” He was clear of the heartbone drug now, and sounded angry to have been so used. I hoped Moc would be the same.

Allmoons was tomorrow. The year's shortest day, when the city gathered to light banners of Remembrance. So many banners clustered around the towers this year. The city looked very unlucky.

To restore the city's luck, Dix wanted to throw our friends into the clouds without wings.

“She'll pay for it tonight. We have the message chips, the delivery system, the lighter-than-air. We can go now.” Only we had no way to signal our allies in the towers.

*   *   *

Ceetcee found me pacing, trying to work that one out. She hugged me tight.

“Where's Kirit?” I asked.

“She, Doran, and Beliak went to try something with the undercloud littlemouths after they heard about the birds. They think Doran's guards might see their lights from the towers, especially if they can get littlemouths to signal to one another up the towers.”

“We're guessing that the littlemouths use light—and maybe echoes too—to communicate in the clouds,” Djonn said. “They have to communicate somehow or else they'd lose each other. Just like us.”

Ceetcee chuckled, nervous. “If it works, Kirit thinks she can send messages that way. Doran's people have spread through the city, talking to people about Dix. They need a way to know when we're going up.” She looked at her hands before I had a chance to say anything. “We came up with most of the plan while you were at Laria. Your news about the birds confirms what Doran suspected.”

“It's a good plan.” It didn't matter to me who came up with which elements. We were pieces of an artifex's mechanism, working together to stop Dix. We were nearly ready.

I hoped Doran was telling the truth about how much support he still had in the city.

“Surprise is our best weapon,” Djonn said, putting his firebugs into a sack and giving them to Ciel. He was right. But surprise belonged to our enemies, too.

*   *   *

We carefully rigged the air sacks Aliati had stolen with the extra wingstraps we'd taken from the council field. Each flier who would be tied below them—myself, Ciel, Ceetcee, Beliak, Aliati, Doran, and Kirit—held enough ballast that we would rise slowly, until we were ready to enter Laria.

“We won't attack if we don't have to,” I reminded them. “We want to talk and to remove Dix from the tower alive. Rumul too. Meantime, Beliak and Ceetcee will get Moc, Wik, and Hiroli.”

“And the man whose knife this is?” Kirit lifted the blade that had killed Ezarit.

The guard playing Justice with Dix at Gigrit. “Him too, if he's there. Taken alive. We need to show the city who they are and what they've been doing. The city needs answers.”

Aliati nodded, grimly. “We'll try.”

Atop the ghost tower, Djonn waited beside the net he'd set up, and the whirlwind he'd rigged beside it. The spare wings raked the air in a circle when he twisted the improvised haft he'd made from tools in the smugglers' cache. “It's modified to spin twice as fast.”

He handed Ciel and me pieces of flint from his toolbox. “If the first person to fall through the clouds could be Kirit, or Ciel, that would be useful,” he said. “They could help me.”

Kirit laughed a little. “No promises,” she said.

I thought about it. Kirit and Ciel could sing the littlemouths into signaling, once Djonn's net was ready for us. “Do you want Ciel to stay?”

Ciel, already strapped into an air sack rig, made an affronted noise. “I'm going! My brother's up there. And Kirit's going.”

Djonn agreed. “You need her to float highest above Laria. She's the only one light enough.”

No one asked if Kirit wanted to stay below.

Ciel promised she would come down as soon as her part of the job was done, and we ascended to the cloudtop and prepared to let the first air sack rise as dusk darkened the city.

The air, colder than I remembered, and very dry, smelled of home: oil lamps and cook fires. The towers rising high above us blocked out the stars.

Attached to a skymouth husk that was also attached to Laria, Ciel drifted almost invisible in the sky.

After the sun set, during the darkest moment of the city's year, Kirit began to keen. I held my breath, hoping it would work.

She flew in a circle around Laria, mourning Ezarit, the lost councilors, the Singers. As she passed, the littlemouths clinging to the tower began to luminesce.

This was the signal to Doran's guards to begin making a distraction on nearby towers, to summon Dix's blackwings away from Laria.

The lights faded as Kirit completed her circuit. In the closest tower, Ginth, we heard yelling from far uptower, a fight breaking out. Had the guard seen the signal? I hoped so.

Kirit returned to the ledge in time for us to strap her into the lighter-than-air sacks. We slowly let ourselves rise unseen up the spider tower's side, the updrafts buffeting us, but not knocking us off course.

In the dark, we were invisible. Above, Dix's guards bristled at the top of Laria, peering at the ruckus on Ginth. Meanwhile, towertops in the distance began to light up with Remembrance fires.

Far above us and to the west, a riot horn sounded from Bissel. Another from Naza. A group of blackwings leapt from the top of Laria and raced towards the towers, flying to protect the city, as Dix had promised she would.

You cannot lead through fear.
Ezarit's words. I would honor their truth. I wished I could hear them again, from her own mouth, but that would never be. Instead, I vowed not to let fear keep me from acting, either.

My thoughts churned as we rose silent in the crisp air. Ceetcee and Beliak released a sack of ballast, bones from the bone eater cairn. I did the same.