They went up three nights later, an hour after midnight.
Tova carried him herself. Two young men from the lower terraces flew beside her with ropes and bags of tools, and a girl of about 15 flew ahead to watch for guards. Nobody spoke. The wind was low at night, and the city below them was dark, except for a few windows. The cloud below the mountain was black.
They flew up the dark side of the mountain, close to the rock, where nobody would see them against the stone. Mav kept his eyes on the cliff in front of him. It was easier than looking down.
"You hate this," Tova said very softly, close to his ear.
"Yes."
"You fight beasts that kill my people, but you’re afraid of the air."
"I grew up in a city," Mav said. "Then I lived at the bottom of a sea. Nothing in my life has prepared me for this."
He felt her laugh, a small, silent shake against his back. It was the first time that he had heard any of the winged people laugh since the children on the terrace. It made him feel a little better, but only a little.
The roost was a great cave near the summit, as wide as a street and much higher than a house. A pale light came from inside it. Tova set him down on a narrow ledge below its mouth and pressed herself against the rock beside him.
Above them, Mav heard the sound of something very large shifting in its sleep.
-----
The guards’ room was a small cave beside the roost, with a single wooden door. Two keepers were asleep inside. The other four sat at the mouth of the roost around a small fire, with their spears across their knees. They were talking quietly and watching the sky. None of them watched the cliff below them.
The two young men climbed to the door of the sleeping room. They took stones from their bags, small flat ones that they had cut that afternoon. Then they began to build.
Mav had seen Reefkin build, and he had seen Sela raise a whole street. But he had never seen anything like this. The young men worked with their hands flat on the stones, and the stones seemed to flow under their fingers like soft clay. They pressed each one into the next, and it held. In less time than it took Mav to cross the ledge, there was a wall in front of the door, as thick as his arm and as hard as the mountain.
The keepers inside didn’t wake.
Then it was his turn.
He cast his Manifestation on the ledge, as close to the rock as he could, in a hollow where the light of the fire didn’t reach. He called Moss, Fern and Reed. The three stalkers came out and pressed themselves against the stone. Their skin turned gray.
[You have borrowed a skill: Lurk.]
They went up the last part of the cliff together, a few steps at a time, stopping whenever one of the keepers looked around. It took a long time. Mav’s arms were shaking when he reached the mouth of the roost, and he was more nervous than he had been in the hall of the Speaker.
The four keepers were three steps away from him. He could smell the smoke of their fire.
He went past them.
-----
The hawks were asleep on ledges along the walls of the cave, high above the floor. There were 12 of them. They were larger than the ones on the cliffs, far larger. Their wings, folded, were longer than Mav was tall. Their feathers were gray-brown and white, and some of them had white streaks on their heads, like old men.
The nearest one was on a low ledge at the back of the cave. It was asleep with its head under its wing.
Mav climbed up to it with Moss beside him. His heart was beating so hard that he was afraid the hawk would hear it. When he was close enough to touch it, he stopped and took the first canteen from his belt.
[You have borrowed a skill: Discharge.]
He put his hand flat on the hawk’s back and let the lightning go.
The great bird jerked and went rigid. Its wings half opened, then locked. Mav opened the canteen and laid the seaweed on the back of its neck, under the feathers, just below the skull.
The lock was heavy. It was heavier than Birch’s had been, which he hadn’t expected. The seaweed pushed against it, but the lock didn’t move. Then he felt One push with it, from inside his own neck, and the pain made his eyes water.
He didn’t stop.
The door turned.
The hawk went still under his hand. A new point opened in Mav’s head. It was sharp, cold and very high, like a star.
[Seaweed. Rank E. Essence: 412/1,600. Host: Cliff Hawk.]
[You have borrowed a skill: Threadsight.]
[Skill: Threadsight]
[The user can see the threads that Awakened leave behind them wherever they go. A fresh thread shines. An old thread is gray. It lasts for one hour. Recharge: one hour.]
[A borrowed skill grows as its borrower grows.]
Mav read it, but he didn’t understand it at first. He had expected something for the air, something to make a dive faster or a beak harder.
Then he looked up, and he froze.
-----
The cave was full of threads.
They hung in the air like spider silk, so fine that he could barely see them, but they were everywhere. Most of them were gray and slack, very old. They crossed the roost from one wall to another and vanished into the rock.
One of them was bright green. It came from his own chest and went back out of the mouth of the cave, down the cliff, along every step that he had climbed that night. He could have followed it all the way back to the cistern.
Two more threads glowed far below his feet. He could see them through the stone, as if the mountain were made of smoke. One was the color of gray rock, and the other was the color of a moth’s wing. They came down from the high terraces, through the long stair and into the heart of the mountain. Then they stopped.
’Ronald,’ he thought. ’Tamsin. Those are the ways the guards took them.’
He could see exactly where they were. If he had wanted to, he could have walked through the mountain along those threads to the hall of the stone.
The hawks saw the paths of people. Every Awakened left a thread behind him wherever he went, through the sky, through an arch, even through a vortex. That was how the hawks knew which vortex led somewhere. If an Awakened had ever passed through it, his thread would still be inside it, and the thread would lead to wherever he had come from. Now Mav had a skill much like the one that made House Stormveil so feared. For now, he could only see the threads. Stormveil’s birds could fly along them, all the way to the World at the end.
Mav sat on the ledge beside the sleeping hawk. He was so happy that he almost laughed out loud. He had come to this World to find something that could fight in the air. He had found something that could see where people went.
He took the second hawk the same way, a little faster, from the ledge beside the first. It was a female, with a white streak across her head. The lock was just as heavy, but this time he knew what to expect.
[Seaweed. Rank E. Essence: 388/1,600. Host: Cliff Hawk.]
He held both of them with his own will, because the locks were loose. When they finally settled, he was so relieved that his hands shook. Neither hawk would speak. Their seaweeds were far too young for that, and they would stay silent until they reached rank D-. But he could feel what they felt. They were very old and very tired. They had been waiting for something for years, without knowing what it was.
Then he looked at the threads again, and he saw the last one.
It was gray, like the others, but it was much thicker. It came out of the back wall of the roost, out of the master’s empty perch, where no hawk had slept in 300 years. It didn’t go up into the sky like the others. It hung down from the mouth of the cave, past the city and past the mountain, straight down.
Mav leaned out over the edge and followed it with his eyes.
It led down, into the cloud.