Wik put a hand on my shoulder. “You have it backwards, Kirit. Civik has been trying to help.”
“I made a mistake,” Civik whispered. “A lot of mistakes. But I am fighting now.” His eyes rolled, searching for light he’d never find.
“When he returned to the Spire and lost his first challenge,” Wik said, “he was allowed to concede. And then he didn’t stop challenging. His injuries didn’t matter. He kept flying. When Rumul finally beat him, he broke Civik’s collarbone. Civik was no longer able to fly beyond the Spire without help. He couldn’t return to Densira.”
I turned on Wik. “And who are you? Rumul’s man? Like Sellis?”
Wik shook his head. “I see the good the Singers do, and I defend the city. But Rumul’s decisions have consequences for everyone. I supported Terrin and wanted the city to know what he had to say. I was one of a few who wanted this. There are others.”
“What was it that Terrin wanted to say?”
“It has to do with the skymouths,” Wik said slowly. “But it has been decided.”
Civik coughed, ignoring Wik. “Ezarit? Does she live?” So he did remember. He’d drawn into himself, his arms wrapped around his chest.
“She does,” I said. “Though she seems to be at the end of her ability to negotiate with the Singers.”
I heard Moc gasp.
Civik hung his head. “That is my fault too.”
“What does that mean?”
He answered me. “If I’d lost properly, or had told her everything, she would have had more to bargain with.”
Then the timing clicked. Civik’s initial downfall. My mother’s challenge. Her voice telling me the story, after the wingtest. I was ruthless, Kirit. She’d fought Civik. To gain her security in the towers.
I looked around Civik’s alcove. The pipes, the smell of fresh air and old bone. His sunken, gray cheeks. The darkness. “Are you in pain?”
He shook his head. Then nodded. “Always, a little. Enough.”
“You were a Singer and a skymouth shouter. Why are you down here?”
Wik answered instead. “He challenged Rumul. Who could have killed him.” I frowned, though I understood. Wik continued. “But shouters’ voices? They’re valuable. Civik could no longer fly, but Rumul went to great lengths to keep him alive.”
Civik’s voice. The rasp of it. Stilling with one shout a skymouth, all teeth and maw and grasping tentacles. That was one power Rumul lacked, except when he could control it in others. I looked more closely at my father. His lips were chapped and cracked. His clothing very dirty. He was thinner than Wik, by far.
Rumul might have been keeping him alive, but it was a very near thing. And I couldn’t imagine Civik outside the Spire, being flown by another Singer, in the midst of a skymouth migration. There was something else that I was missing.
My hand went to my throat. “How does Rumul use Civik’s voice inside the Spire?”
There was a long pause. No one answered me.
“It has been decided,” Wik said, looking away.
Terrin’s challenge. “What did he want to tell the city?”
Civik’s laugh was a sour echo. “Secrets.”
Wik took my hand and tried to pull me out of the alcove. I refused to budge. Finally, he said, “Come. I will show you.”
He took a long loop of knotted rope from the wall near Civik’s alcove. The ladder wells had been filled in below this level. Going below the windbeaters, I remembered, was forbidden. We headed for the Gyre’s edge. Wik tied the rope to bone hooks carved in the wall and tossed the loop into the depths of the Spire.
18. DOWNTOWER
We climbed down the rope, far into the darkness below the occupied tiers, until we reached a thick set of nets. Multiple layers of them.
Wik touched my arm. Whispered, “Stay very quiet.” Then he walked slowly towards the center of the Gyre, across the nets.
An acrid smell grew stronger as I followed his path. The nets rose and fell with our motion, but also with an odd pressure from below our feet. I wobbled and fought hard to keep my balance. When I looked down, I could not see anything but shadowy ropes and more darkness.
Wik reached the center of the netting and pulled on a series of knots. An access gate opened to the space below. He lowered himself through the hole, tugging on my sleeve to guide me, then closed the gate behind us.
I relaxed my hands, which had tightened into fists. Tried to calm myself. I would not regret demanding to know. This was where I’d wanted to be.
It wasn’t where I wanted to be at all.
We stood in the center of the nets and Wik said, “Kirit, you must control your voice in here, as we’ve practiced. You must not make any mistakes.”
Something moved beyond the nets. Something big.
The hair on my arms rose.
“Do not shout. Do not speak. Just echo.” Wik’s lips touched my ear, his voice sounded almost inside my head.
My eyes adjusted, slowly. I could now see where Wik’s face was, his cheek a different shade of darkness than the shadowed walls around us. I saw the quick flashes of his teeth.
But that was all. Wik was right. This was not a time for using my eyes.
His voice was patient, and urgent. “You will understand soon. Just echo.”
I was still learning how to echo and hum; the combination was difficult. Now I hummed through my nose while clicking and tried to remember to breathe. The movement on the other side of the net stopped.
“We would have had to do this anyway, to complete your training,” Wik whispered.
The completion of my training was skymouth shouting. I stopped echoing. “Is a skymouth caught in the nets?”
I imagined a mouth opening beside me, tentacles reaching for me, with only ropework between us.
I tried to refocus, to corral in my thoughts. Breathe and echo.
I heard the shape of something beyond the nets. Something large, in motion. I turned and echoed again. More of the same shape, slightly smaller. I could not breathe.
“Not one skymouth,” Wik said, his voice close in my ear again. “Many.”
I stopped humming. Darkness surrounded me. Wik’s hand brushed my arm.
I bit back a scream.
“Many?” My voice rose, and there was a rasp on the other side of the net. Motion. Faster. The ropes bulged towards us.
Something tugged at my hair. My robe. Something that slid and grabbed and pulled. My entire body went gooseflesh. I could not breathe at all.
Wik hummed, and the sinister motion slowed. The tentacles receded. My breath returned, but my mouth was dry. It took time to rebuild my echo. For a moment, I was overwhelmed by the darkness, blinded with fear.
“We are safe here,” Wik said, stopping his echo once mine had started again. “The nets will hold.”
I kept echoing, hearing the coils and tentacles, the long bodies of the penned skymouths that my hum was defining around us. When they moved, the echo blurred into a confusion of roiled air. “Why?” The nets went dark again when I stopped echoing to ask the question. But even in the dark, I could see the pattern of the nets. I had seen it before, on Naton’s bone chips. This was what he had carved. The blueprint for these nets. A skymouth pen.
“Some of the skymouths here will be used for their sinew, for bridges. Some give us the ink that lines their glands,” Wik said, lifting my hand and putting his thumb on the mark Rumul had given me. Wik hummed again, and I joined him. The movement around us stilled.
After a moment, he tapped my hand and whispered, “They sleep. Your first test, passed.”
“Why keep so many, once you’ve caught them?”
Wik didn’t answer at first. Then, “Why, indeed. You should ask Rumul. The problem isn’t that we are keeping them. Singers have always kept one or two for training.”