Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  “Ignore them,” Shai whispered. “Look at me.”

  The woman—the walker—stopped. Raised her head slowly, blank eyes staring as she looked at Shai, and opened her mouth.

  She did not speak—Shai could not call the sound that came from that parched-lipped mouth a word. It was barely more than a breath, a groan. There came a pause, then the walker inhaled, sniffing.

  Not human, Shai thought. Not anymore.

  The hunters too had frozen—not seeing Shai or her light, only thinking that the walker’s sudden stillness presaged some new, vicious attack.

  Shai stepped past the barrier and its defenders until she stood before the woman with her arms outstretched. Shai’s body was magic—her face and her flesh, her arms and her clothing, her very sense of self. Magic, too, filled her hands as if light were a liquid that pooled in her cupped palms.

  She glowed brighter, shining as if she might rival the Towers and the stars above them, shining to rival the golden Spire. She could tell the moment her light passed into the visible spectrum—the defenders gasped, and the hunters stumbled back, blinded. The walkers only stared.

  Magic—her magic—was the power of life. Unshaped, it was like cool, clean water, washing the world clean. It bathed the walker’s upraised face and the broken ruins around them. Shadows stretched from Shai in every direction.

  Magic was the power of life, and yet she wished it could bring death. Not death like the one the hunters promised with their makeshift weapons; not death like the one she saw along the gleaming edges of Emara’s long, curved blades.

  Death like the one Xhea had granted to a single walker, what seemed a lifetime ago.

  Death as a gift, if such a thing could truly be said. A death soft and gentle; a closing of eyes, a laying down of burdens. An end to all things—even this.

  Here, now? There was not time. Because behind the woman stood another walker; behind him, another still. She could hear them now in the ruins all around, coming in from the badlands like a tide.

  “Here,” Shai whispered to them, rising. She opened her hands and magic poured from her. “I’m here. Come to me.”

  Somewhere to her left, someone screamed—an attack, Shai thought. Yet the sound broke off as Shai’s light distracted the attacking walker. She heard footsteps—and, in their wake, a low whimpering.

  “Ignore them.” Shai raised her voice, letting the sound echo across the ruins—and why not? For if the walkers could see her magic, perhaps they could hear her. Perhaps they could look into her eyes, the way she looked into theirs—perhaps, somewhere in their lost and broken minds, they could understand.

  “Forget them, all of them. You wanted magic? Here.”

  Shai stepped from the barricade, moving farther into the ruins. Upraised faces turned to watch her go—walker and human alike. But only the walkers followed.

  There were so many. Shai had thought she’d seen them all, one night or another; had thought, foolishly, that she could count their numbers, some gathered dozens. Yet this was beyond anything she’d imagined.

  Crack!

  Shai did not know the source of the noise, only felt as something passed through her, fast and hot. It did not hurt—and yet the sharpness of the sensation made her pause.

  She looked down, and watched as the first walker she’d drawn collapsed to the ground, a gaping bloody hole in her chest. Gunshot, Shai thought, or an offensive spell—and it was all the same in the end. The walker’s blood—the woman’s blood—flowed hot and dark onto the rocky ground.

  It was foolish to weep. Better a dead walker than a dead child, a dead man, a dead woman. But watching as that once-human creature shuddered and struggled to draw her last few breaths, Shai could not help the tears that cascaded down her cheeks.

  Again that sound came—crack!—and another walker fell. And another. And another.

  She had made them into targets for some unseen marksman.

  No, Shai thought, and watched as the walkers fell. Creatures that had once been a boy of no more than twenty and an old man, a girl with a bent back, an woman with long blonde hair, a man with only one hand.

  She did not see her father fall, but perhaps she had only been looking the other way—perhaps his was one of those dark shapes upon the ground. Or perhaps he was on the Lower City’s other side; perhaps he was even now terrorizing refugees far beyond the reach of even her brilliant light.

  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

  Yet for all the blood, wine-dark in shadow, brilliant ruby in the light she cast, there were more walkers still standing. More walkers, truly, than bullets or spells might reach.

  So Shai walked, a blazing torch shaped like a person, out into the ruins and away, a tide of walkers trailing behind her.

  Xhea slowly pushed herself off the floor.

  “I am going to get a new knee,” she muttered. “I’m going to cut this one out and throw it in a hole and leave it there until it dies.” Because it was that or scream, and she would be blighted if she let Lissel know how much her little spell had hurt.

  “Should have hit her harder.” Didn’t matter how young she looked; didn’t matter that, without magic, Xhea could probably break her like a twig. If she let the girl keep playing to her strengths, Xhea would be the one broken.

  Leaning heavily on her cane, she limped into the hall.

  It was quiet, no hint of the laundry machines’ swish and tumble, the only sound the distant patter of departing feet and the chime of Xhea’s hair. Xhea turned, spotting Lissel and Abelane farther along the hall. Abelane was walking first, stumbling as if pushed by invisible hands.

  Xhea’s heart pounded, and she bit her lip as she hurried after them, her knee protesting every step. She had not found Abelane just to lose her. Not again. Not like this.

  She could not catch them, only staggered in their wake until they vanished beyond the hall’s slow curve. Yet she saw where they’d gone: one of those doors, which she would have thought only another bedroom, was open a crack. Bright light spilled into the hall beyond.

  Xhea pushed the door open and stepped inside, her arrival announced in a clatter of charms.

  The room was large by Lower City standards; here, it probably counted as small. There was a sitting area in one corner, plush chairs gathered around a wooden table, with a long, low bed nearby, a folded blanket at its foot. There were two doors in the far wall: one seemed normal, though it bore three locks, while the other came only to Xhea’s waist and was as wide as it was high.

  Yet it was the object in the center of the room that drew her eye. It was long and black and rectangular with curved edges and corners. It had a lid that opened on invisible hinges and now gaped wide like a long, toothless mouth.

  A coffin.

  Abelane stood before it, bound, Lissel at her side. Only Lissel’s ghost showed any true fear; at the far end of his tether, he cowered behind one of the plush chairs as if it might shield him.

  Lissel stroked the coffin’s open edge, her touch gentle, almost reverent. Without turning, she said, “They bring the prisoners in here, through that door.” She lifted a hand, gestured. “One prisoner, two guards. Sometimes the prisoner is drugged or restrained; those times they’re taken to the bed and tied down. Sometimes they come willingly.”

  Not fighting, Xhea thought, is not the same as being willing.

  “They sit. Sometimes they talk and we have cookies and tea. They can be pretty funny, prisoners, and it’s nice to get to know them a little first.”

  Still Lissel did not turn, only stood touching the coffin, her dark waterfall of hair streaming down her back. Next to Abelane, she looked so small, almost inconsequential.

  Abelane stared at Xhea, her expression intense, as if she could send silent words flying between them with that look. And perhaps she could; for Xhea wanted to recoil, age-old habit commanding: Run. Find shelter. Defend yourself.

  But this was not the Lower City market; this dark magic child was like nothing that she and Abelane had faced
together all those years ago. What good would running do? What good was hiding? Xhea would not be like the ghost in the far corner, a spirit so damaged that he could do nothing but crouch and cringe and hope that this time the pain passed him by.

  “What are you doing?” Xhea asked instead.

  Lissel glanced over her shoulder, the movement slightly stiff. She’d have bruises soon.

  “Isn’t this what you wanted?” she replied. “You had so many questions about the prisoner transfers. Secret questions. The easiest way is just to show you.”

  “I know what you do. I don’t need to see it again.”

  At last Lissel turned. “Then why did you want to come here? Why all the questions?” Her tone was light, innocent; her expression was anything but. How old is this girl? Xhea suddenly wondered. She looked six; Xhea had thought she was probably eight or nine. But there was something hard and vicious under her sweet, young face—something that transcended age. Defied it.

  “Shouldn’t I want to know about the Spire?” Xhea asked, deflecting. “About why I’m here?”

  Lissel refused to be distracted. “How are the bodies transported, you wanted to know. How to open the door.” She stared at Xhea, her dark eyes intense. “You want out.”

  “I—”

  “And I want you gone.”

  Xhea blinked, surprised. Abelane, too, started within her bonds, then looked from Lissel to Xhea and back again in no little confusion.

  “You’re rude,” Lissel continued imperiously. “You’re a disruption. You’re old and untrained and I don’t like you.”

  “Well, then,” Xhea said. “I guess we have something in common.”

  “There are spells on that door.” She meant the smaller door, Xhea saw; the door that was designed for a coffin. “Tell her, Laney.”

  Abelane swallowed, struggling to school her face to calm, but her voice was almost steady. “There are detection spells that scan the bodies as they go. If they find active magic, the exterior doors won’t open.”

  “Active—?”

  “Bright or dark.”

  Because, Xhea realized, pulling the spirit from a living person stripped that person of their magic; she’d seen enough walkers to know the truth of that. But if she couldn’t escape through that door, then what was the point?

  “But you—” Abelane started, only to break off with a cry as Lissel tightened the spells that bound her.

  “That’s enough,” the girl said dismissively. She looked back to Xhea. “I could disable the spells.”

  Xhea snorted. “If it was that easy, why wouldn’t you leave?”

  Lissel looked at Xhea as if she had lost her mind. “Why would I want to?”

  She rested her hand on the coffin’s edge. Except, Xhea suddenly realized, it wasn’t just a coffin, no matter the resemblance of its shape. For, looking, she could see the glimmer of bright spells within it; faint, dormant spells, that nonetheless made her think of an elevator.

  Xhea shook her head. “Why would you help me?”

  “I don’t have to. I could call for help instead. I could have the bosses down here in minutes, and tell them you tried to escape.” Again that smile, slow and knowing. “But you have something I want.”

  Lissel’s eyes were intense. She stepped toward Xhea, her hands curling at her sides, tangling in her white nightgown.

  “I heard you talking,” the girl continued. “In your rooms before. I heard you talking to Laney.”

  Xhea felt a sick weight in her stomach that had nothing to do with magic. She knew what Lissel was going to say; watched her lips shape the words, helpless to stop their flow.

  “You have a Radiant.”

  Oh, the longing in that voice. The need.

  Xhea looked to the ghost of the man bound to Lissel, that ghost worn thin and gray, cringing at the end of his tether. Not her first bondling, to be sure; not her parent or any other willing sacrifice. Nor, she was willing to bet, would he be her last.

  “No,” Xhea said, but Lissel was not listening.

  “I could live,” she said, almost whispering. “I could live for years. Just think of what I could do, how powerful I could become.”

  That Xhea could imagine all too easily; it was a horror. Yet it was not the thought of what Lissel might do or become that made Xhea recoil, but the knowledge of what she’d do to Shai.

  The binding forces, Abelane had told her; the binding takes. It could steal and twist a ghost’s will until there was nothing left—until the ghost was only an extension of the child’s will.

  Perhaps that was what Xhea had done to Shai already, little though she wished to believe it; perhaps Shai only wanted, only cared—

  No, Xhea thought. She would not believe that, no matter the fear that beat at her chest like a dying bird’s wings. She and Shai had been together long before Xhea had known to make a dark magic binding, before the hunger had risen. They had been separated, Shai wholly free, and still the ghost had come for her, and fought for her, and cared.

  But Lissel would destroy Shai utterly—the person she was, the person she’d become, if not her ghostly being.

  “You can’t just take someone’s bondling,” Xhea protested, grasping desperately for any reason the girl might understand. Remembering Ieren’s rage when she’d so much as come close to his bondling.

  Lissel said, “Don’t worry, I’ve already got a replacement for you.” She pointed at Abelane. “You won’t even have to do it—I’ll give her spirit to you. I’ll even show you how to do it, quick and clean. You’ll never have to be hungry again.”

  Xhea laughed, sharp and bitter. Abelane flinched from the sound.

  “Look,” Lissel said, reaching out, her magic flowing. “I’ll bring down the detection spells. There. You can just get in now,” she said, gesturing to the coffin, “and go. All the way to the ground. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  It was.

  Xhea was the only one who could speak to the Lower City—the only one who could possibly tell it what it had not yet realized: that it was as powerful as the Central Spire. As powerful, perhaps, as dozens and dozens of Towers combined. The City above wanted to hurt it, yes—but it could fight back.

  It could even win.

  Perhaps there was a way to protect their homes, all that they had built; and perhaps those buildings would fall, destroyed by magic, bright or dark. But they didn’t have to die. All the people of the Lower City: Edren and Orren, Rown and Senn and broken Farrow. It loved them, in its inhuman way; the Lower City would not want them harmed. It would save them if it could.

  All she had to do was give up Shai.

  One girl, already dead; one spirit, fuel to years of dark magic. And everyone else might live.

  Surely Xhea’s own pain, her agony at that betrayal, was nothing against the weight of so many lives. Children, Xhea thought. Kids who were like she had been: poor and desperate, never given a chance. I could save them.

  Perhaps it was the only decision that made sense. Perhaps she was a monster in truth, selfish and twisted and every horrible thing that anyone had ever said about her; perhaps she was, in her way, no better than Lissel.

  But Xhea said, “No.” The words came out but a whisper, cracked and broken. She drew a deep breath and looked Lissel in the eye; she saw the threat of the coffin and the threat of Abelane bound, and she said, “No.” Stronger this time, louder. “You cannot have her.”

  “Her?”

  “My bondling. The Radiant. My friend. You cannot have her; not now, not ever.”

  She would, Xhea suddenly knew, die first. She would cut the spelled tether and let the dark magic come boiling up; she would condemn herself to a slow and awful end. But she would not yield.

  Lissel sighed. “I did offer.” She looked to Abelane. “You heard me, right Laney? I gave her a chance. I was even nice.”

  The innocence seemed to fall from her expression like a mask discarded. Something blanker waited behind, cold and uncaring, and Xhea felt the girl’s ma
gic build.

  “No one stands in my way.” Lissel smiled and Xhea could not believe that she had ever thought the girl’s expression sweet. “Not for long.”

  Lissel reached for Xhea and her magic flowed between them in a thin, tight beam of darkness. It struck Xhea in the center of her chest, where Shai’s tether bound, then dug in, deeper and deeper. A hand of dark magic, grasping.

  Xhea cried out and swung her cane; yet the magic was inside her, undoing her from the inside out. The cane fell from her grasp, and Xhea crumpled at Lissel’s feet, writhing, gasping.

  Xhea felt the moment Lissel’s magic connected with the bindings on her magic; there was a short, sharp jerk in the pit of her stomach. The bindings writhed, like her belly was filled with cold, small snakes. The binding moved, changing, rewriting itself.

  No, Xhea thought. She threw all of her power against those bindings and Lissel at their other end.

  Perhaps Lissel was more powerful than Xhea; perhaps all of Xhea’s strength was as nothing in the face of the girl’s ability and training. But it did not matter, for Lissel was just a spoiled, powerful child who’d had everything given to her. She did not know what it was to struggle or to have desperate needs go unanswered. She did not know what it was to fight.

  As Lissel made to tighten those bindings, cutting off Xhea’s magic entirely, Xhea let her power rage. All her hope and fear and desperation went into that magic, fueling it. She threw her magic against the bindings and felt them crack.

  And again. And again.

  A thousand hairline fractures appeared in Lissel’s spell, breaking and disrupting the spelllines as fast as Lissel could weave them.

  Xhea felt as her magic washed over her, giving her a strength of focus she’d not before known. It was no great rush of power—most of the whole remained bound—but it was something.

  She drew, too, on Shai’s strength, and felt as some portion of the ghost’s Radiant magic flowed into her, purified by the binding into a form Xhea’s body could accept. Other things came with it: fear and determination, shock and horror—the image of a blinding light, and a flash of Shai’s father’s face, gaunt and ruined.