And she could see—
No.
Xhea looked away. Across the Lower City, Orren and Senn were too far distant for her to see anything but flickers of light—of magic—from their windows and roofs and from within their ancient walls. Beside them Edren seemed to blaze, magic shining from its windows, its walls, crackling like lightning from the peaks of its rooftop antennas. Not nearly so bright as the Towers above, but brilliant against the Lower City’s firefly flickers.
Shai, she thought, shocked—but where had the ghost’s Radiant power been flowing, day after day, night after night, but into Edren itself? Storage coils and structural spells could only hold so much; staring at that brilliant light, it was all too easy to see why Lorn had feared unbalancing the Lower City. Edren’s very walls glowed with magic.
Xhea wished that she could reach across all that empty space and connect with Shai; her magic stirred restlessly at the thought. She’s okay, she told herself, for surely Edren would not gleam so brightly were it not for the ghost’s continued presence. Xhea’s growing fear that Shai had, in fact, been lost from the world when her tether had been cut eased—and yet she did not like the thought that lingered in its wake. The thought that Shai had abandoned her.
I’m sorry, she thought, as if the words might traverse the emptiness between them. Whatever she had done, however she had hurt Shai—
She blinked, and swallowed, and looked away.
As for Farrow, Xhea could only imagine how the skyscraper would look to her now, viewed from afar. She wondered whether it too glowed like a beacon, lit by the spells woven though its walls—and by the magic even now being funneled into it from room after room of unconscious people, those connecting wires, that dark binding magic.
As Xhea turned to Ahrent, only then did she see that it was not Edren that held his attention, nor the skyscraper in which they stood, but Rown. Following his gaze, Xhea looked to Farrow’s nearest neighbor: the wide and hulking shape of skyscraper Rown, with the low, flat buildings of the warehouse district at its back, stretched out like an army.
It was not yet dawn; so why, Xhea thought, did Rown seem to roil within? All the dim lights of their people did not rest nor sleep, but moved ceaselessly within the skyscraper’s confines. If people at such distance were but ants, then Rown was the anthill, and it had just been kicked.
“I had plans,” Ahrent Altaigh said quietly, as if these were not the first words he had spoken in many long minutes. “Careful plans, crafted and honed over many years. Good plans, even. Plans that were finally coming to fruition.”
There was a span of silence. The rising sun’s light turned the Towers into silhouettes against the sky’s brightening gray, casting their shadows like seeds across some barren ground.
“Were?” Xhea asked at last. For what had she been doing if not helping with the achievement of those plans, in spite of herself?
“Are.” Ahrent smiled, a faint and humorless lifting of his lips—though not at her, it seemed, but at his reflection in the window glass. At the Lower City beyond. “Plans are ruined, change, grow—even mine.”
Something in the way he said it … “Is that my fault?” Xhea asked.
He glanced at her and laughed, the sound amused but not cutting, not cruel. “Your fault? No. No more than it is mine, or anyone else’s. People never act quite as we expect, do they?”
You least of all. She felt a thin thread of fear at the thought, running like a cold rivulet down her back, and it was all she could do to suppress her shiver.
Run, she thought, run away—though she knew not what she feared. As if this fear was anything from which swift feet might save her. As if her feet might ever again be swift.
“Ah,” he said. “There.”
Again Xhea blinked, the focus of her vision shifting, and she thought—No, he can’t see it, he couldn’t possibly—
Only to realize what truly held his attention. For there, in the darkened streets, she saw dim lights moving—blinked, and had the lights vanish, only to see dark-clad figures in their place, creeping through the shadows.
Though she had once walked from Orren to Edren unprotected in the hours before dawn, the sight made her breath catch nonetheless. At night, the streets belonged to the walkers, no matter how well armed one might be. The span of risk that they called “night” only ended with true dawn: light bright enough to chase away the once-human creatures.
Yet these people did not move like frightened Lower City dwellers, in fear of their lives, but hunters, their movements cautious, economical, slow. At Farrow’s peak, safe behind window glass, she was too far distant to do more than catch glimpses of their movement. Even so, she imagined she could hear the whisper of rough fabric, the slight crunch of boot soles against the rocky pavement, the creak of equipment.
There were so many of them—more, every moment that she watched. Ten turned to twenty, to fifty, and she traced their path back to its source: Rown.
“What are they doing?” Xhea asked quietly. But she knew. Of course she knew.
From her vantage their paths were laid out clear as any map: they arrowed toward the other skyscrapers, Edren, Orren, and Senn. As she watched, their numbers divided and divided again, groups taking different paths.
Ahrent Altaigh said, “The underground barricades are guarded now—more so, in some places, than the skyscrapers’ main entrances. Open attacks, fighting in the streets …” He shook his head. “That wasn’t supposed to begin for another week, at the least. But plans change. Rown has always been too eager.”
“Rown fights at your command?” She didn’t bother to hide her incredulity.
“One way or another.”
“And you’re in charge here?”
He raised a slow eyebrow. “Farrow is commanded by Alden Kian-Farrow, as it has been these past four years. Strong lad, spitting image of his father. Hasn’t been seen much lately, though.”
“Is he dead?” Xhea asked.
“Just an addict.”
“A sad story, I’m sure.”
“Heartbreaking.”
“You give him his first taste?”
“Something like that.”
Such honesty. There were places—times—when an admission of such magnitude would have been enough to see a man cast from the skyscraper in body and name. But there was no one here but her and him, and what were such admissions to either? In the Lower City power was no simple birthright, no mere gift of magic, but a thing made and held with iron-hard hands. If one could.
Xhea watched the hunters until they were hidden from sight, wishing that she might cry out in warning or stand in opposition; wishing that there was something, anything, she could do beyond stare as the rising sun turned the sky to ashes.
“Why?” she asked at last.
“Distraction,” Ahrent said simply. “Farrow’s transformation will be … messy, shall we say. Loud and explosive—the kind of thing that will attract attention. All before the skyscraper—the Tower—begins to rise.”
“You started a war to hide noise?”
Ahrent Altaigh smiled thinly. “To distract from Farrow, yes. If anyone understood what we were doing before the Tower lifted, what do you think might happen? There would be a riot, Xhea—worse—as half the Lower City tried to climb on board before we went.”
She heard him. She even understood his logic, no matter that some part of her cried out at its cruelty, its blatant disregard for life—any life, no matter how poor or starved or despairing. For he was right: were it known what Farrow attempted, they would be mobbed. All she had to do was consider what she might have done mere months before; his fears were not unfounded. In the Lower City, desperation was their salt.
You can’t actually accept this.
But she stood at his side, unsteady hands on her cane and the windowsill to keep her balance. Listening. Looking down, despite her fear of heights. Watching. Waiting.
At last: dawn.
Sunlight struck the Central Spire first. L
ight glinted off its peak then fell downward like a curtain, touching the highest Towers, the ones so distant that they seemed like little more than stars—then lower, sparking off Tower sides and defensive spires until the whole City gleamed. Last of all, daylight touched the Lower City, the vast expanse of the ruins and the badlands beyond, chasing the darkness away.
It was not the Lower City that held Xhea’s attention, but the Central Spire around which all the Towers spun. Now, watching, she saw only bright magic, only light; yet it was only as it stopped that she could at last be certain of what she had seen.
For as she’d looked out across the City in the predawn light she’d seen darkness. Not the black of night, that dark broken only by starlight, Towerlight—for what was darkness to her, she who had always seen in places where no light fell? No, it had been black that moved like a column of living smoke.
Magic. Oh, such familiar magic.
She’d seen little of it in the expanses of the City itself, mere wisps and tatters blown across the sky; but they gathered, closer and denser, as they approached the Central Spire, as if the Spire drew that power toward it like a shroud. The darkness had wrapped around the long, needle-like shape of the Spire itself, spiraling around and around—and it had twirled not up, not rising as the City rose, but down in a roiling column to blanket the Lower City below.
For a moment, it had seemed that dark magic hung heavy across the broken buildings of the Lower City like a bank of cloud that did not disperse, only sank slowly into the objects it touched. The buildings, the alleys, the streets.
The ground on which they all rested.
Blink, she’d seen it. Blink, and it was gone.
And again. And again.
Xhea took a long, shuddering breath. She’d never seen anything like it before. That falling magic had been beautiful, in its own strange way—beautiful and utterly horrifying. Even knowing what she did of dark magic and its consequences, she could only guess what that power would do to the Lower City and all of its people.
Except—she already knew, didn’t she? For in the City above, there was nothing different about this morning; she might have seen the same thing any morning, if she’d only known how to look. And if the Spire poured dark magic on the Lower City every night, letting it seep into the people and the buildings and the very earth upon which they all rested, then the City was poisoning them, day by day. They created ground that was anathema to all those who lived upon it, that would sap their magic, their health, their lives.
Xhea tried again to push away the image and all the thoughts it conjured. One thing at a time.
Ahrent turned from the window. “We won’t see more for a while,” he said. “Are you hungry? There’s breakfast.” Xhea agreed, grabbing for the distraction.
She struggled into a seat and let Ahrent serve her noodles and water. Despite her hunger’s roar, she stared down at the food queasily. Right now, in Edren or Orren or Senn, an attack was underway. Rown hunters—unstable at the best of times—were falling on those walls, disrupting their defenses, terrorizing their people.
She knew she should get up from this place, this table, this room; turn her back on all of it, as if even being here was some sort of betrayal. How can you eat breakfast, she asked herself, knowing what you know? Why are you holding a bowl of noodles instead of trying to do something?
But she knew, too, the futility of her efforts. It was as easy to stop Rown’s hunters and trained crazies as it was to raise her hands and stop that dark magic from falling on the Lower City like rain. What might she do but limp in their general direction and wave her new cane like some bent-backed oldster? Shout and rant and get herself killed. However important, however necessary, any intercession was entirely outside her small power.
Yet if she stayed here, for this moment, she might learn more—understand more—and perhaps there would be something she could do that had nothing to do with her failing strength. She had never been one for sitting still, for talking and smiling when there were things to be done; she’d never had time. So it was with ill humor that she turned to her breakfast and tried to pretend that today the sun’s arrival had heralded nothing but another stifling, unpleasant summer day.
Xhea took a bite—and gagged. She fought the reaction, choking down the food. She was hungry—but not, it seemed, for food. Oh, she could weep. Instead, she took another forkful of noodles and forced herself to chew and swallow.
“I was told that you did well yesterday,” Ahrent said, seeming not to notice her struggle.
“Were you?” The words were flat and uninflected. Inwardly, she winced; she never could play nice.
“Indeed. Together, you and Ieren bound eleven souls—and that with your morning spent in instruction.”
Eleven. It hadn’t seemed—she hadn’t thought—
Something in her expression stopped him; whatever it was he had been about to say went unspoken. Instead he sighed and placed his spoon deliberately on the table.
“I did this wrong,” he said at last. “All of it. I should have never had you taken like I did. I should have asked you for your help from the first.”
Xhea put down her spoon in purposeful mimic and raised a slow eyebrow. “You said Edren turned away your messages.”
“They did. But I should have tried harder. Should have tried something else.”
Not because of the violence, Xhea knew; not because of the fear that choice had caused, the hurt and death. Not because of what that choice had done to her, or to Shai, or even to Mercks. No, he regretted his decision only because it put him here, in this room with a conflicted and unmannered girl staring across the table at him—the unwilling key to his plans.
Ahrent Altaigh shook his head. “I am a caster, Xhea, not a leader. Not a politician. I have tried both, and found my skills little suited to either.”
“You can’t lie,” she said; the words sounded almost like recrimination. “Not well, anyway.” Something about his voice, the way he spoke, made even his truths hard to swallow. He should have asked Torrence for pointers.
“No,” he said, almost smiling. “Not well. So no lies: I thought that even if we started out on the wrong foot, I’d have enough time to convince you—enough time to make you believe in what we are doing.”
Some part of her already did. Yet the process, the awfulness of the coin with which they had to pay for this transition—what Ieren had done, what she had done at his side—repelled her in equal measure. She did not know what to think anymore; she did not know what to believe.
She was not so good at lying herself, it seemed; she felt as if her thoughts were written across her forehead in shining letters.
“You don’t even need me,” she said. “You have Ieren.”
“Yes. But the Spire sent him to us years before I thought they’d accept our petition to rise—and Xhea, they don’t give second chances. This is their test to see if we’re worthy.”
“The Spire?” she asked. “Petition?” The Central Spire was the heart of the City; it did not govern so much as set the rule of law within which all Towers had to operate, and punish those who stepped out of line.
It all comes back to the Spire. Ieren had named the Central Spire his home. And she herself, blinking in disbelief, had seen in that pre-dawn light—
Again she pushed the memory away.
“They control all use of dark magic, and thus the bindings that create the Towers’ hearts. All dark magic users live and die under the Spire’s control. All except you.”
Which only cemented Xhea’s belief that Eridian’s attempt to steal Shai had been highly illegal, for there had been no dark magic user there at all, no one to assist Eridian’s casters with the binding. She remembered, too, the awful mess they had made by trying—though she doubted that they would have faced any consequences for either the attempt or the mangling thereof had Tower Allenai not fallen upon them like a sword from the sky.
“Necessary, then,” Xhea murmured. From Ahrent’s look, she
might win an award for understatement.
“Yes,” he said. “Very. The Spire’s approval is needed for any change requiring a spirit binding—connecting a Radiant to their Tower, birthing a new Tower’s heart. In sending us Ieren earlier than we planned, they accelerated our timeline—and today, Rown has accelerated it again.
“When I tell you that we have put years into planning this transformation, I need you to understand that I mean years beyond the span of my own life. The spells that we’re weaving even now into Farrow’s walls and foundations were designed more than a hundred years ago. We train spellcasters—work in magic—only so that we’ll have the people we need to complete the spell-work.”
Xhea snorted. She’d seen the size and the complexity of the spells, yes—but a hundred years? “As if you’ve had this super-secret project for a blighted century and no one noticed. Especially with everyone working on it.” She said this last mockingly.
“Not everyone,” Ahrent said, “but the best of us. The ones with real vision. Some of the people we train go to work for the other skyscrapers, or strike out on their own—or even, sometimes, find work and citizenship in the City. Of course they do. But the best stay right here, working together on something that’s greater than all of us combined.”
Xhea shook her head and glanced away, made uncomfortable by his fervor. It was safer to look at her noodles, forlorn curls smeared with sauce; safer to lift her spoon and choke down another bite while her stomach churned and roared.
“As for Ieren …” Ahrent hesitated.
His hesitation made her look up; his expression made her go still. Suddenly she remembered all the things Ieren himself had said that she hadn’t quite understood. Remembered the sight of the boy as she’d seen him when she’d first woken in Farrow’s basement: wide-eyed, quivering and feverish, the energy of his words a stark contrast to his body’s weary lethargy.
No ghost, then, to hold him steady. And now?
“Ieren’s dying.”
“Yes.”
“How long does he …” She shook her head. “How long?”
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