They were given a room at the top of the hall, with three beds and a window over the cloud. It had no lock, but two guards stood in the corridor outside. When Ronald opened the door to look at them, they looked back at him without a word, until he closed it again.
"We’re guests," he said. "Guests with guards."
Nobody slept.
Ronald walked up and down the room with his fists closed. He was so angry that he couldn’t stand still. Tamsin sat on her bed with her slate on her knees. For once, she didn’t write anything on it. Mav stood at the window and looked down at the lights of the city.
There were thousands of them. Most were small and yellow, like candles. Down on the lowest terraces, near the edge of the mountain, one window was lit brighter than the rest, with white cloth hanging over it. Mav didn’t need anyone to tell him whose window it was.
"We can’t let them do it," Ronald said at last. "She’s 10, Mav. She’s a child."
"I know."
"So what are we going to do?"
Mav didn’t answer at once. He had been asking himself the same thing since the hall of the stone, and every answer that he found was bad.
"It isn’t our World," he said slowly. "We don’t know these people. We don’t know how many guards the Speaker has, or how strong they are. If we fight them, we might lose, and then we’ll never get home." He hated how calm his own voice sounded. "If we don’t fight, she dies tomorrow. The World goes on exactly as it has for a hundred years."
"That’s not an answer."
"No. It’s what I know."
Ronald stopped walking and looked at him. For a moment, Mav thought that he was going to shout. But Ronald only shook his head and sat down heavily on his bed.
"I hate this place," he said.
"I know," Mav said again. He didn’t have anything else.
Tamsin spoke for the first time in an hour. Her voice was very quiet.
"When I was little, my father used to say that the worst people in the world are the ones who are sure they’re doing good." She looked down at her empty slate. "The Speaker is sure. Did you see his face? He wasn’t enjoying it. He thinks that he’s saving everyone."
"Maybe he is," Mav said.
"Maybe. I don’t think that she thinks so."
Nobody asked who she meant. They had all seen the white cloth over the window.
-----
The knock came a little after midnight. It didn’t come from the door.
Mav turned. Someone was hanging outside the window, holding on to the stone with long gray fingers, wings spread against the wind. She tapped on the glass again, very softly.
He opened the window. The wind came in with her, and she climbed through it into the room and folded her wings.
She was young, perhaps 20, and shorter than Hessan. Her skin was a darker gray, like stone after rain. She had cut her white hair very short, almost to her skull. One of her wings had an old scar across it, a long pale line where it had been torn and had healed badly. She wore no robe, only a plain tunic with a bone knife at her belt.
She looked at the three of them, then at Mav’s scarf.
"I am Tova," she said. Her voice was lower than the others’, with the same hollow sound. "My sister is Nia. She is the girl in the cage tomorrow."
Nobody said anything. Tamsin had put down her slate.
"I saw what Old Hesk did on the terrace," Tova said. "Hesk has never knelt to anyone. Not to the Speaker, not to anyone. So I came to see you for myself."
"I’m not your master," Mav said.
"I know. He is dead. Hesk knows it too, in her mind." She touched her own chest. "But she knelt all the same, because of what she saw on you. I want to know what you are."
Mav didn’t answer that. After a moment, Tova seemed to accept that he wouldn’t. She sat down on the floor with her back against the wall and her wings folded around her knees.
"Then I’ll tell you what I am," she said.
-----
She was one of the young. That was what the old people called them, as if it were an illness.
There were a few hundred of them, all born in the last 30 years, and all of them had grown up with the lot. Every month, they had watched someone go to the stone. It had been their friends, their teachers, their parents. Last year, Tova’s mother had gone. This month, it was her sister.
"My mother went to the stone singing," Tova said. "Everyone said that it was beautiful. I was there. I watched her stop singing." Her voice was very steady, but her hands were not. "The old ones say that it keeps the World alive. That’s true. But what kind of World is it, if we live by eating our own children?"
"What do the young want?" Tamsin asked.
"To stop. To let the stone go dark." Tova lifted her chin. "When the stone dies, the Drift breaks. We know that. So we want to leave before it does."
"Leave how?" Mav asked. "There’s no arch."
"There are the vortices." She pointed out of the window, at the dark sky. "They open all the time, everywhere, high and low. Most of them lead nowhere. You go in, and you never come out, or you come out in the middle of a fire, or under the ground. But a few of them lead to real places, to Worlds where something could live."
"How do you know which ones?"
"We don’t." Tova looked up at him. "The hawks do."
Mav went very still.
"There are hawks at the high roost, at the top of the mountain," Tova said. "They came through the vortices a long time ago, before the master died. He kept them. They are old and very big, and they can see which vortex leads somewhere. Nobody knows how. The master used them to travel. When he was gone, the Speaker kept them." Her hands tightened on her knees. "His guards keep the roost day and night. Nobody goes up there without his word. The young have asked to leave a hundred times, but he always says no."
"Why?" Ronald asked.
"Because if the young leave, there will be nobody left to go to the stone," Tova said simply. "The old ones are too few."
"How many of the young are there?" Mav asked.
"Three hundred, perhaps a little more. None of us are stronger than rank D. The Speaker’s guards are older, and some of them are rank C." Tova looked at her own thin hands. "We are builders, like our parents. We can raise a wall in an hour, but we have never killed anything bigger than a bird."
She said it without shame, as a plain fact. Mav liked her for that.
Ronald swore under his breath. Tamsin had picked up her slate again, and she was writing very fast, as if writing it down would make it less terrible.
Mav looked out of the window at the dark shape of the mountain above the city. He thought of the hawks on the cliffs, flying into the funnel without fear, as if they knew exactly where it went.
They had known. They had been coming here.
He had been thinking about getting home since the moment he landed, and now he knew where the door was. It was at the top of that mountain, inside a roost full of guards.
Tova wanted those hawks to save her people.
Mav needed those hawks too.