I pushed the needle through the skins, denting my fingers and drawing blood when I had to, pushing too hard.
My arms ached, and my knees grew numb from kneeling as I seamed one hide to the next. Soon, I held an acrid cloak of shame and death that clung to me wetly when I wrapped myself in it, making me shudder.
“Clouds,” a small voice whispered, just above my head. Moc had climbed onto the pens. He helped me adjust the cloak so that it hung low over my face, dripping and filled with an unbearable musk. I was grateful again for the lenses, which kept the worst of the gore from my eyes. I tried to breathe through my mouth, tried to avoid throwing up at the stench.
Then I left the pens, and, using the slops rope, began my slow climb up the inside of the Spire, wingless, and, I hoped, completely unexpected.
I lifted my hand. It was a shimmer in the air. I was as invisible as a skymouth.
27. CHALLENGE
Once I climbed from a prison within the walls of the Spire, half starved, my skin torn. Once, I begged for my life and traded my will for a pair of wings.
I would not beg this time. I was a Singer, and a citizen. They would hear me. They would free my mother. They would find another way to protect the city. They would admit what they’d done in its name.
I clung to the refuse ropes, lifting myself up arm over arm, past the windbeaters’ tier. Unseen, I glimpsed my father rousing his peers, preparing them. I saw a closed vat over a new fire. Rot gas, heating. My face grim beneath my hood, I continued to climb.
Above me, the Spire’s mouth opened, distant and toothed with the last of the night’s stars. I had to reach it, and the council’s tier below it. Each tier I passed brought me closer.
After ten tiers, I rested an arm on the railing of an observer’s gallery and flexed my aching hands. The skymouth skins had thinned and turned silver where they had rubbed too hard against the fibers of the refuse ropes.
A bone hook clattered to the floor of the tier. My clumsy hand had knocked it loose from its prop against the gallery wall. A Singer must have left it there to push challengers away from the walls. I looked around the tier, a novice level. Saw only one bleary-eyed, gray-robed acolyte trudging with a bucket towards the pulleys. He didn’t give the noise a second look.
The wind knocked things over, shook things loose. Now I was the wind, come to knock at the Spire’s walls.
Once the novice had finished disposing of his stink, I returned to the refuse rope and continued climbing. I had to move faster now. The ropes would soon be put to hard use.
A breeze wound its way up the Gyre. Were my wings with me, it might have lifted me slowly up the last few tiers. I didn’t have time to look down to see if the breeze was natural or created by the first of the windbeaters working the vents. I had to climb.
Hand over hand, feet twisting in the ropes for extra purchase, I climbed alone, save for the kaviks that passed me and tried to coat me with their waste. One hit its target, my shoulder, and the white goo splattered. The guano slid off the skymouth hide and continued its fall into the Gyre. I remained unmarked, hidden. “Incredible,” I whispered, thinking of the littlemouth in my pocket. My voice sounded strained and worn.
The dark night and the dimness of the tower helped me climb past many tiers without incident. But I had been lucky for too long. The refuse rope jerked against my hands, and I clung to it, yanked upwards at a fast clip as someone hauled on the rope from above. I saw a face peering over the edge confused. Lurai, looking for tangles in the rope and finding none.
My heart rode high in my throat, threatening to choke me. I was so close. Then the pulling stopped. I swung on the rope as it halted its rise. Above me, Lurai circled his tier, headed for another pulley. One that worked.
Relief slowed my heart a bit, but I knew this was a short-lived reprieve. I had to climb faster.
Lights began to appear in alcoves. Oil lamp sprites moved up and down ladders. I heard whispering, but could not make out the words through my cloak.
I heard a familiar melody. What sounded like Ezarit’s voice, muffled, singing The Rise. The city’s version. At least it sounded like Ezarit’s voice, from very far away. With a clatter, followed by shouts, the song broke off. But not for long. Another voice, from a much closer tier, boomed across the Gyre. Wik. Singing The Rise in response to Ezarit. He sang the Spire’s version to her, telling her the truth. It was a subtle rebellion. One that cheered me on. Five tiers to go. Four. I sweated and choked inside the cloak. My skin stung from the still-acrid veins that I, in my hurry, hadn’t scraped away.
Below me, windbeaters began practicing their dancelike movements. The edge of my cloak flapped, slapping at my feet. The rope twisted, and I scrambled for balance. The novices just waking and the windbeaters not aligned with Civik would spot me soon. Hurry, Kirit.
A pair of carvers dropped over the gallery edge nearest the Spire’s opening and hung suspended above me. They spoke quietly as they continued work on the fierce decorations scraped into the newest Gyre wall.
I was nearly to the council’s tier, but I could not move without them seeing the rope shake.
As I wavered about what to do next, my foot slipped. In my scramble to recover, the sewn-together hides began to slide from my head and shoulders. I could not hold them in place and still keep climbing.
With one hand, I managed to grab the trailing edge of the cloak I’d made from dead skymouth culls before it fell away completely. I hung, revealed, at the edge of the council tier. Air struck my skin where the hide had touched it, painful and raw.
With arms on fire from the climb, I slung the cloak over the tier edge and grabbed the nearest gallery railing. Pulled myself up and over it. I rested for a moment, a pile of oil-damp, foul-smelling girl, my cheek pressed against the young bone of the tier. My scalp burned. Some hair had torn away when the cloak slipped. The palms of my hands bled. The skin on my arms and face was red from contact with the hides. I pulled my lenses away from my face and down to my neck. I shooed off the pain as one of the carvers approached.
“All right, Singer?” she said, curious at my appearance. My lack of wings.
“Very,” I said with all the breath I had. “Special training for night flying,” I added.
She shrugged and went back to her work. Rumul may have had Singers searching for me, but he’d failed to inform the novices. My familiarity to the carvers, from many days of punishment as I had learned the Spire’s ways, was now another kind of invisibility. I approached the council unchallenged, dragging the cloak behind me.
The council huddled in Rumul’s alcove, crowding the space and spilling into the passageway.
Below, more voices began to sing. The morning ritual of The Rise had begun. Sound surrounded me: the story of the city and how the Singers saved it from ruin. In her enclosure beneath Rumul’s alcove, my mother might have been able to hear the singing as I had, once.
A shout from the rooftop broke the song’s rhythm. I crouched behind a spine as an older Singer climbed down from outside and rushed to Rumul’s chambers.
“Fliers approaching! A Magister and four others,” he said.
“Who summoned them?” Rumul’s voice rang clear over the song coming up from the tiers below.
The council broke its huddle. I hauled the stinking cloak back over my head. Obscured myself. Delequerriat, Rumul.
Several Singers began speaking at once. Over the tumult, I heard Wik say, “Let them land. Perhaps they have found Kirit.”
The other Singers murmured agreement.