Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  She could not imagine how Rown had bought such a thing—nor what Tower would ever have sold one. But it, Shai knew with cold certainty, was the true threat. Not the people that crept through the streets, nor the weapons they bore. Not the spells she saw glittering in the hands of those few Rown attackers strong enough to cast a spell worth fearing. In comparison, they were nothing at all.

  If a spell generator could destroy a Tower, what might it do to the Lower City?

  That is, if Rown could gather power enough to fuel it.

  That was her only hope—Edren’s only hope, any of the skyscrapers’ hopes at all. For if the spells a protective generator could produce were hugely powerful, it could not create magic out of thin air. The magic had to come from somewhere; and Shai could only pray, fervent and staring, that the impoverished skyscraper had not the power to make good their threat.

  Shai turned and fell, streaking star-like toward the ground. Lorn had not gone far: trapped just inside Edren’s main door, he stood in the ancient hotel’s former lobby ringed by protective guards. There was still a spot of his father’s blood, dark now and dried, beneath his eye like a blackened tear.

  Guards surrounded him—and unlike the black-clad security members that Shai had, once and again, judged so harshly, these men and women looked dangerous. Gladiators, she thought, and having seen Emara move in the hall above she had sudden respect for these combatants. Emara herself was nowhere to be seen, but Pol, her father, stood nearby, watching the monitors and listening in a way that made Shai think that the man missed nothing.

  Shai struggled to think what words she might shape in warning. Would he know what a protective spell generator was? Would anyone here? Gun was too simple—weapon, maybe? Powerful weapon atop Rown. Even after all her practice, it would take time to shape those words—and she knew that the warning itself, such as it was, was all but useless.

  If only Xhea—

  She cut the thought off. She would just have to find a spell that would give her a voice, that was all; and it mattered little that her attempts to date had ended in abject failure. Shai pushed toward Lorn, kindling a light to draw attention to her presence.

  Again the hunter banged on the door, and Lorn tensed.

  “Bring me their terms,” he said at last. He spoke calmly, carefully, reasoned and in control—and in sharp contrast to his obvious rage in the last council meeting. He turned away from Shai’s light, looking toward the door. “At least let us see what they want.”

  As a squad of four gladiators took their position behind a lone security guard, Lorn stepped out of sight, Pol following. One of his guards urged him to go deeper into the skyscraper, and he waved their words aside. No one spoke as the young guard unchained the doors. No one so much as breathed.

  The doors swung open. No shots were fired, no knives came glittering through that opening. There was only the young woman—no longer smiling, no longer quite so calm—with that envelope in her hand. She looked at the young Edren guard who crept cautiously toward her, eyes wide and jaw set, as if he expected to be shot at any moment.

  The Rown hunter cocked her head and looked at him, that smile playing about her lips once more. “Have you come to offer your surrender?” She held the envelope toward him almost as an afterthought, and used the white flag to dab sweat from her brow.

  “We’ll see,” the guard said, and scurried back inside.

  The doors slammed closed, but not fast enough to hide the sound of the young hunter’s laughter.

  When Lorn read out Rown’s list of terms, Shai was not surprised at the very first item: Edren’s immediate and full surrender of the Radiant ghost. And it was a very long list.

  Lorn had to know about the spell generator, Shai thought, before he could make the right choice when it came to Rown’s terms. If there was a right choice. To let the skyscraper fall without a fight? Even she could not imagine it. Yet he had to know the true consequence of saying no—here, now—when he knew not of the force that might be wielded against them.

  Except Rown couldn’t possibly power the spell generator; it had to be a threat, one on which they could never follow through. Of course, she might power such a thing …

  Shai stopped.

  No, she thought. No.

  It didn’t matter that the terms were addressed to Edren; seeing what she’d seen, knowing what she knew, she’d choose oblivion over turning herself over to Rown’s armed and incapable hands. Shai set her jaw.

  But Lorn was saying, “I can’t accept these terms. I can’t even accept a small fraction of them.”

  “Wait,” Pol said, his quiet voice carrying. “They did not set a timeframe for a response. Stall. We need that time to prepare.”

  Lorn hesitated, nodded. He did not ask, Prepare for what? Already, the outcome felt inevitable: not whether there would be fighting in the streets, but when.

  Shai re-kindled her light, not knowing when she’d let it go out, and made it blink until she caught Lorn’s attention. She started her message: Weapon—

  She got no farther. There came a sound of a commotion: distant voices raised, a shout of defiance, then the clash of blades. Confusion, inside and out, as they tried to figure out what was happening and where.

  “Senn!” someone called. “Senn’s fighting back!”

  “Senn?” Lorn asked incredulously. In the conversations Shai had overheard, Edren’s council had categorized Senn as the most eager to compromise. The only reason Verrus hadn’t started his Lower City takeover with Senn, he’d said, was that they posed no true challenge, just administrative hassle.

  It wasn’t the first thing he had been wrong about, and she doubted it would be his last. Though, she mentally amended, death might affect his rate of error.

  Outside, the streets surrounding Edren were all but empty. Though a few stragglers remained, resolutely standing around Edren, the rest of the hunters had turned and run toward Senn.

  It was Pol who spoke first. “The situation,” he said, “has changed.”

  When the first blast hit, they didn’t know what it was; they only heard the sound of an explosion. The concussive wave hit a moment later, rushing through the streets in a thick cloud of dust, making those outside cringe and close their eyes.

  “Bomb detonation in the market,” came the shouted report.

  But in that pressure wave, Shai had tasted more than thick summer air and dust and burning; she’d tasted magic, sharp like a lightning strike. It had flowed through the walls and doors where the dust and debris pinged like a rain of stones, and through her, hot and fast and stinging.

  Bright magic could heal and shape and grow—but this magic had been warped and tangled into a wave of destructive force.

  The market, she thought. Senn’s market. She could only pray to absent gods that people had stayed inside this morning. Let no vendors have gone to open their stalls or spread their temporary blankets of goods across the cracked asphalt; let Rown’s hunters have kept the shoppers at bay, none venturing out early for the best pick of the morning’s food, aid to mend a broken tool, supplies for that day’s repairs. Let the market have been empty.

  But it hadn’t been.

  Not thinking, Shai rushed toward the market at the speed of thought, leaving Edren behind. Soldiers in the streets, and hunters, and some few scrabbling fights: she ignored them all. The first thing that she saw was not the debris scattered far and wide, not the tongues of flame that even now rose from the market’s center, but the building close to the market’s far edge, collapsed.

  She saw the blood.

  She saw the little girl lying sprawled on the broken ground, blood on her lips, blood in a halo around her head. Her hair, a tangle of tightly wound black curls, was matted to her forehead on one side of her face, and her dark brown eyes were open, staring. She couldn’t have been more than four years old.

  Shai raised her hands, magic flowing bright from her fingertips, but there was no use in healing—no use, even, in trying. The girl was alrea
dy dead.

  Beyond her, a man was splayed out on the ground. He looked fit and muscular, and he wore a blade at his side—and what use was it, what use was any of it, against an enemy that struck without warning? An enemy that targeted homes, that targeted children.

  Shai walked, passing the little girl, passing the man who might have been the girl’s father, and farther still. She walked as if she were in a dream, and the noises all around her—the shouts and screams and the wail of a siren, the roar and crackle of a raging fire—seemed distant, as if they echoed from impossibly far away. She took another step, sliding across air, and another.

  Watching, waiting, to see someone rise from the rubble. But no one did.

  When she reached the side of the collapsed building, she looked deeper; and while she could find the lingering warmth of bodies buried beneath that weight of brick and stone, she saw no flicker of magic. She saw no hint of life.

  Shai turned. The market was burning. The stalls were scattered, a few left twisted or half-standing, the goods once stored within turned to so much refuse. But it was the main market building that Rown had hit, and the ancient mall that now burned hot and fast, sending a roiling column of black smoke toward the sky. Already people were running toward it with bowls and buckets, trying to form a line—and already the flames were a story high or more, and hot enough that the closest would-be rescuers cringed and stumbled back as the flames shifted in their direction.

  It would spread, she thought, and fast. Through the fallen market tents and to the buildings surrounding them and to Senn itself; the wind was already fanning the flames.

  Shai looked up. On Rown’s roof, she could just see the point of the spell generator as the gunners positioned it for another shot. Only that broke her from her trance of disbelief.

  “You will not!” she cried, as if it were a battle cry—as if anyone could hear. “You will not!”

  Shai wept ghostly, magic-rich tears that fell glittering like stars as she raised her hands, fingers spread, and prepared to face the onslaught.

  A shield, she thought, like the one Lorn had raised to protect his father’s fallen body—but she had no warm, comforting memory to guide her hand in this shaping; no song nor imagined words, no image of light in the darkness. Just grief and rage, each as hot and fierce as the fires that even now rose around her.

  The magic built in her and built, and she did not think nor tell herself not to, only let the power flow from her, light and life springing from her hands to create a great arcing dome over the buildings surrounding the market, over the people fighting the fires—even across Senn.

  She felt the weakness then, a sudden wave of dizziness that sent the world spinning. She felt the magic in her hands pulse and flicker as she struggled to push that half-born shape farther, wider, as if she might save the whole of the Lower City from itself. She felt the rush of power slow.

  You will not, she told her magic, as if it too were a thing she must fight. All her life her power had shaped her, had controlled her, had dictated her path and choices—and yes, even her death. But this time, it would do what she wanted, exactly what she wanted, and it would not falter, and it would not fail.

  She would not fail. Shai stood, magic flaring all around her, as the next shot hurtled down.

  There was pain, then. She had not often felt pain since her death, though she had tried, curious, to find things that might hurt her. She, who had stood within a roaring fire in one of Edren’s ovens and felt nothing but the strange tickling movement of the flames, screamed as the magic struck her and her upraised spell.

  Pain washed through her, sharp and searing, as the shot from Rown’s spell generator blasted across the surface of her shield like a violent rainbow of blue and red and gold. In some places, her magic failed; again there was that terrible concussive boom, and again debris sailed skyward before falling in wide arcs to the ground below. Again flames shot up, burning furiously from the roof of a building that had been too far from Shai’s shield to protect.

  Still the weapon fired, the magic slamming into Shai and her shield with a force she could never have imagined.

  Hold, she thought—repeating it, over and over as her knees bent under the pressure, and her arms felt like they would be crushed by the terrible burning weight. Hold, she told herself, screaming the word, screaming and screaming as if the sound might ease the pressure or take away the pain.

  Hold.

  It was not meant for such use, Rown’s spell; the power flowed and flailed and overloaded, seeking a target it would never find, not here on the ground. It skittered across the surface of Shai’s shield and rebounded—not a roiling column of power now, but like an explosion of burning ribbons, arcing up and out. Shai had no control over where they landed; only knew that those few that fell back toward the ground were flickering and fading even as they fluttered down.

  She did not so much release her spell as let it collapse, and collapsed with it. She yearned for the feel of ground again, hard and real against her cheek; Shai could not fall, not truly, only hover aimlessly in a collapse that knew no end.

  Where, she thought weakly. How …? It had taken all of her strength, all of her magic, to repel that fire. Where had Rown gotten so much power?

  So much power to waste on destruction. For she opened her eyes, and she saw burning. She saw people fallen, bodies empty and unmoving; she saw the Lower City’s carefully preserved buildings crumbling, falling in on themselves, windows shattered, prayer flags fluttering limply across the ground.

  Shai looked again to Rown. They did not have the power for another shot, she thought, watching the new stillness on that distant rooftop. She breathed a whisper of thanks to absent gods, knowing that if they had, she lacked the power to deflect it. Still, the market was burning.

  She looked to her hands. They seemed to be only hands, with pale skin and short nails. She saw no glimmer of magic beneath, no matter how long she looked.

  I have nothing, she thought. I have nothing left to give.

  Even so, she forced herself upright, forced herself to move forward—because she would try nonetheless.

  Xhea looked away from Ahrent Altaigh to the wide windows behind him. Outside, the Lower City was burning.

  She stared. It was not the smoke of cooking fires or Senn’s generators firing up for the day, but smoke that was thick and dark and choking. The market’s on fire, Xhea thought. She could see the flicker of pale flames, like tongues lapping at the smoke.

  “Ahrent,” she said—or meant to. Her mouth did not move, nor did sound emerge past the barrier of her lips. She just stared, and, staring, drew his attention.

  He turned. Froze.

  “They can’t,” he murmured, or something like it. “They can’t possibly …”

  Rown fired again.

  Watching, at first Xhea did not understand what she was seeing; did not connect the roiling flow of magic that shot out sudden and powerful enough to make the early-morning streets seem bright as midday, to the fires she saw below. It came from Rown’s rooftop, and in that moment she could see neither its source nor target, just the sudden surge of magic itself. The spell flew in a line, not arrow-straight but like a thousand winding ribbons of magic that curled and caught and twisted in midair, shining brilliant gray and white.

  Her angle was wrong to see that magic strike the ground, but she saw its effect: the sudden spray of debris that arced skyward; a second spray of magic that glittered in the air; and then, suddenly, fire. A column of flame shot upward, blooming, and then came the smoke.

  Farrow’s windows rattled.

  Xhea could not hear the screams. It was only her mind that filled them in and in her mind that they echoed. She wanted, suddenly, desperately, to cover her ears as if the gesture might silence her imagination. Silence, in truth, the sounds that must even now echo through the Lower City streets.

  She looked to Rown and the shape that she could now just make out upon its rooftop, its cloth covering drawn aside
. It appeared to be a long metal rod, reinforced near its base, with short cross-spars at irregular intervals down its length.

  “What is that thing?” Xhea asked. The words were little louder than a whisper; it felt as if she could barely draw breath.

  Ahrent didn’t answer. “Go,” he said, and if the request sounded like a command she was willing to let it pass. “Down to the thirty-fourth floor. I’ll be there soon. Daye, take her.”

  Xhea turned, looking at the woman with something like shock. She’d forgotten Daye was there. Daye’s face was as impassive as ever, as if there were no fire, no smoke, no future going horribly awry. She just waited in silence as Xhea struggled out of her chair and made her unsteady way to the elevators.

  “But—” Xhea started.

  Ahrent cut her off with a sharp gesture. “We’re starting the transformation. Now go.”

  Xhea looked back once. Rising, the columns of smoke had begun to disperse, casting all the Lower City in a thick, dark haze. It was only after the doors had closed and the elevator lurched into movement that Daye spoke.

  “It was a Tower’s defensive spire,” Daye said. She stared at the elevator doors, or perhaps their reflections, twisted by the scuffed and dented metal. “Ahrent bought three. Two are on Farrow’s roof. One was traded to Rown as part of their agreement—but was supposed to be broken.”

  Xhea had never heard that many words from Daye, never mind in a row.

  “A defensive spire?” she said, and oh, she had so very many questions. She asked the most pressing: “Why would they use it to destroy the Lower City?”

  A fire of that size was always a problem—but now? For all the humidity in the air, it hadn’t rained properly for weeks, and the sun had been merciless. Water stores across the city would be down to mere puddles. All those wooden slats and canvas awnings, rope bridges and makeshift shelter walls … they were going to burn, all of them burn, and Xhea could not think of a force great enough to stop them.