The spectators roared and looked above me. My guess had been right. Sellis soared over my head, carrying a long bone spear in one hand and a glass knife in the other.
She locked her wings in fighting position and dropped quickly, searching for me.
I pushed out from the wall, twisting into my glide, and circled on her heels.
She made a sharp turn and came at me from the side, intending to crush me against the Gyre wall. Her eyes searched for the best angle to take me out quickly.
I’d seen Sellis fight in the Gyre, and I’d trained with her. I knew the tricks she used. I slammed into her before she could build up speed. Knocked her into a spin that sent her against the far gallery wall. Her pinions clattered against the carvings.
As she fought to recover, I began to shout.
“You know the truth, Sellis. So should the others.”
We were high enough that we could be heard by many of the tiers. At my words, the galleries rumbled. Not everyone here knew what was done in the Singers’ name. Not even Terrin had gone so far as to speak the truth before he won the right to do so.
Tradition.
Sellis would never break the Silence. She would never allow me to do so.
Whose permission did I need to speak? No one’s.
Tradition had created a place where Rumul could breed secrets. I was finished with tradition.
My voice rang rough and barbed across the Gyre.
I shouted the truth for Ezarit, who could not hear me. For Naton and Elna, who were not here. I shouted to the traders from Naza and Bissel, and to the shadows I saw gathered at the Spire’s roof.
“Below you, in the pens, we have bred monsters. This has been done in the city’s name. You were lied to on purpose. The city was deceived.”
“Silence!” Rumul roared from the balcony.
The Singers were so caught up in the fight, and in my words, they did not notice the growing audience on the rooftop. As Sellis and I circled higher on the maelstrom, I thought I could see Ceetcee, Sidra, Dojha, Dikarit, Aliati, and citizens from nearby towers, gathered to witness. Macal had summoned them. I squinted at their robes and colorful wings, dazzled by the bright light of Allsuns.
Sellis threw one of her knives. It flew past my ear and clattered down the carved wall.
She shrieked in frustration. “Shut up, Kirit! You cannot speak! Not until you have won!”
But I kept shouting and more. I sang. I sang of the tiny skymouth in my sleeve. I sang of the attack on Elna the night we blessed the bridge. I sang how Sellis had hung back. How she would have let a blind citizen die.
She paled at this.
I sang to the Spire the horror that the Singers had made, so that no one could deny knowing, so that none could stand by, robed in ignorance and tradition any longer.
As Sellis and I wheeled in the Gyre, first high, then low, I could see the galleries and watch some of the other Singers’ eyes widening. Novices turned to each other, whispering. The council shattered as several members ran for the ladders, hoping to reach the windbeaters and force them to drop me from the sky. Too late.
My voice cracked as I sang of Naton, Tobiat, and Civik, one gone, one broken beyond repair. One lost, then found again.
A rumbling dissent sounded from the very walls of the Spire, even as I continued singing and shouting the Singers’ crimes.
A gust lifted me higher again. The windbeaters supported me.
But I did not stop. I shouted the Spire’s triumphs too. I sang how the Singers saved the city, how they kept its people from warring against one another. How they collected our stories and kindled our culture. I sang Tobiat’s story of Lith.
Finally, I sang the skymouths. My voice grew hoarse, but I sang their past and their present. I sang the pens and the truth about the migrations.
I was still singing when a horrified Sellis threw herself at me. “You lie!” she said. “You will be silenced!” She stabbed at my side with a long bone blade.
And then I screamed, with all the sound that I had left. I had run out of words. I screamed and screamed and screamed.
28. RELEASE
Sellis did not land a second blow. She instead circled with her third knife still aimed, listening. Not to my screams. To the city. From deep in the Spire, the rumbling rose. It built to a roar. The watching Singers clutched their ears.
My scream poured from me anew. My voice, echoing down the Gyre, mixed with the city’s anger until the Spire shook. Sellis wobbled in her glide, too stunned to make the turn, and crashed into a wall. Where sharp bone tools had carved deep gouges long ago, the Spire’s walls now oozed yellow ichor.
Sellis’s hands came away from the wall, and she fell backwards. Her hands were stained yellow with the city’s blood.
My shout continued, though my voice had begun to falter and fade. Then another voice joined mine: Wik’s, strong and deep. Then a third, elderly and tremulous, but shouting from the windbeaters’ tier. Civik. My father. I found my breath again, my voice, and continued to scream.
“You must stop!” Rumul dove from the council tier as he shouted to be heard. “You are breaking the Spire. The city.”
He hurtled like an arrow towards me.
“The Spire isn’t all of the city, it is just one part!” I shouted back. The Gyre echoed with sound.
Rumul’s wings were tucked tight. He aimed to knock me into a pen or a vent. He did not intend to fight. He plummeted, willing to sacrifice himself for Singer secrets, for the Spire. The force of him hitting me knocked my breath out. I was silenced.
But Wik and Civik continued shouting.
Rumul and I fell past the occupied tiers. We fell past the windbeaters.
Fell until Sellis, blind from noise and fear, struck us both. She hit me again with her last knife, slicing my arm. As she struggled to right herself, she knocked Rumul loose with a bone hook gripped in her other hand.
Rumul hit the nets above the pens first, and I fell hard beside him. He struggled as something held him there, pulled at him. A tentacle grazed my leg.
The sounds of the Gyre merged with a new noise from the pens. The skymouths. They were screaming back at me. I was so close to them, my head rocked with pain, and I pulled my arms from my wing grips so that I could cover my ears. I found my breath and resumed shouting. The sinew nets pressed hard against my knees and elbows. Beside me, invisible limbs pulled Rumul’s arms and legs in different directions. He screamed with the pain.
Some of the smaller skymouths gathered beneath me. I could feel their snouts bumping the netting. One grazed its teeth over my hand, a soft gesture. They pushed on the net and then moved backwards as a group, then they pushed forward again. I could not understand what they were doing, but I rose and fell with their motion. I rolled. They pushed me towards the edge of the pens.
The smell was all around me. The musk. My skin burned with it still.
I smelled like them. And they were screaming like me.
We shook the tower with the horrible pitch of our voices. Then the Spire trembled worse than ever before and a terrifying sound wove between my voice and the skymouths’. A sound like a giant wing breaking. Louder. The bone walls of the Spire began to crack.
The Spire shook again, and the city roared, sharp and piercing. I heard a sound no city dweller lives to describe: the sound of bone splitting.
The cracks began to run through the tower, but while another tower would have cracked across its center core, across a tier, the Spire cracked vertically. From one carefully drilled hole to the next, the breaks ran along carvings, forming arches and circles. In many cases, the breaks started where Naton’s carving had gone deepest.