He started to argue. “They’ll see you.”
But Ciel said, “I know how,” and pulled me from the alcove, towards the galleries where the windbeaters worked the Gyre. She grabbed one of the ropes that ran down the Gyre’s sides and handed me a large bucket. It still smelled of stink, but it was empty, and big enough to hold me, if I kept very still.
But the bucket couldn’t hold my patchwork wings. I stripped them off. Felt the small skymouth wrap itself tighter around my shoulder.
I tucked myself as best I could into the bucket. Both twins and Civik, working the ropes together, lowered me down on the cable to the knotted ropes of the pens.
They worked fast, and when the bucket came to rest, I rolled out and ducked into the shadows beneath an overhanging gallery. They reeled up the bucket and disappeared.
Alone in the dark, once all had grown quiet again, I crawled to the center of the nets and let myself into the core of the pens. Felt the captive skymouths bump against the ropes and poke the thin points of tentacles out as I passed. I hummed, and the tentacles receded.
When the skymouths settled, the littlemouth still at my shoulder loosened its grip. “Oh, no you don’t,” I whispered, then tucked it into my robe, by my ribs. I tightened the fastenings to secure it. “You’d be like dinner to your cousins.”
Too close beside me, someone coughed, and I jumped. In the darkness, I could make out a tall form with broad shoulders.
“You made it,” Wik said.
“I did.” My heart pounded from the scare. “How did you get away from the council tier?”
“I told Rumul someone needed to check on the pens. He told me to get them ready to migrate again tomorrow and then return. The council will discuss Ezarit’s fate in a few hours.”
Worse and worse.
“How did you know I’d come here?”
“I didn’t. I’d planned to ask Moc to help find you, but he’s made himself scarce.”
I wanted to laugh, but it was too awful. “He was looking for you. You passed each other. One going up, the other coming down.” I grew serious. “We need to get back up there.”
He wrapped a hand around a thick rope. “They will try to stop you from reaching the council and issuing a challenge, Kirit. Rumul says that the city is already angry. That a sacrifice needs to be made.”
“Did you try to challenge?”
Wik bowed his head. “I began the process. No one would support me. Not with another Conclave possible if the city keeps rumbling. They are frightened. They don’t want to lose my vote on council, if I fail. We were so close to breaking him before the city—” He stopped. Dragged his fingers through his hair. Exhausted. “Instead, I tried to blunt Sellis’s attacks on you, tried to keep them from tearing apart the towers looking for you, the traitor Singer. I told her I’d disposed of you already, but that did not satisfy her, or Rumul.”
I couldn’t imagine it would. “They wanted to dispose of me themselves.” Cloudbound. The first sacrifice at Conclave.
“Yes.”
“Why should I believe you? You led the attack on Densira.”
“I was trying to foil it, Kirit.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. But I saved you. And brought Elna to you.”
That was true. “They have Ezarit now, up there.”
He met my gaze. “She’s being held in Rumul’s enclosure.”
I thought of Ezarit, encased in the walls of the Spire as I once was. “I can’t get to her there.”
“If you win your challenge, you can free her.”
“And if I lose?”
Wik was silent. The nets creaked. “Then I will challenge without support. Like Terrin. And more people will die tomorrow.”
I thought of Nat, and my mother. Of the enclosure’s carved walls. Of the skymouths. I had to try.
Wik reached into the sleeve of his robe and removed his knife and its sheath. He handed these to me. They were heavy in my hands, and the glass blade was dark as the night. I bound the sheath to my arm.
He said, “I’ve been down here too long. They are watching everyone. Every tier. How will you get to the council?”
“It’s better if you don’t know.”
He stared at me. “You are a Singer, Kirit. Truly. The kind we need.” He leaned close, his eyes fierce. “Don’t let them tell you you’re not.” He climbed quickly from the pens and onto the next tier. Then he was gone, leaving me alone, surrounded by skymouths.
When I echoed, the Singers’ skymouths sounded like soft objects, bobbing in the pens. Their tentacles trailed across each other. In the far corner of the pens was a different shape, less buoyant. Not moving.
Any breeding program had successes and losses. I thought of Nat’s whipperlings, his search for the fastest ones. Of my own silk spiders. We didn’t feed the ones that didn’t make enough silk. There were always culls.
I hoped I was right, that it was the same here. Skymouth culls didn’t need their skins any longer.
The rigging and cages designed by Nat’s father for these pens almost seventeen years ago filled the center of the Spire. I stood on the side, echoing, until I found more still shapes. Beyond them, I could hear the harder objects, the pulleys and cams that raised the pens when the Spire rose.
I imagined how far the cages had risen in the intervening years, and what horrors they’d hosted.
Then I took a deep breath and, humming softly, entered the pens. The littlemouth squirmed against my chest. Gripped tighter. I kept moving, gathering the piles of skymouth skins I’d spotted a moment ago.
I walked the outer edge of the pens, humming. The skymouths quieted, though tentacles still reached for me, curled round my ankles.
A roar on my left drew me towards double netting held fast with spidersilk, thick tendons, and something else. Metal wire. Metal. The desperation of that shocked me. The reinforcements were recent and rough-hewn. The big skymouth Wik spoke of at Lith — they must have enclosed it here. And it did not want to be kept. I backed away quickly and gathered the last few dead and dying skymouths from the pens’ edges. My arms filled with them. The deflated bodies and slack limbs slopped over my hands and dragged on the floor, tripping me. Their acrid stench burned my nostrils.
I returned to the center of the pens and put down my burden. I echoed and saw the culls. A dozen of them, piled at my feet. Either they couldn’t survive or their keepers didn’t want them to.
The pens shifted and creaked as their occupants grew restless with the smell of death so near. I hummed while I worked, hoping it would calm them enough to stay their movements.
All the culls were recent, dying now or dead within the last day or two, by my guess. Several were as large as my wings. Not big enough to be farmed for sinew, so left to feed their brethren in the pens.
I took Wik’s knife from my sleeve and dragged its point across the first cull’s skin, separating the hide from the muscle below. I wasn’t sure what I was doing would work, but I had to try. More rank scent filled the room. I gagged and prayed it wouldn’t get worse.
It took an hour to get what I needed.
Above, the night sky showed through the distant opening at the top of the Spire. When I’d begun my task, it was still dark. Now the apex was starting to lighten. The city rumbled again below. I stood on the pens, covered in the gore of dead skymouths and looked up into the Gyre. The galleries and tiers rose to the distant circle of sky.
I put on my lenses to protect my eyes from the increasing burn in the air. The skymouths’ skins stuck to my fingers as I worked.
Good.
I took the skin peeled from the culls and pieced two slippery edges together on my lap. Then I took out the metal needle I’d found on Lith and clumsily tried to thread a thick vein through the needle’s eye in the dim light. Faster, Kirit. Work faster.