Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  As if a flaring protection spell were anything at which to gape. But here, now, amidst so many exhausted protectors? Perhaps it was.

  Shai pointed toward the Lower City core and the dark magic rising above the ragged ruins of the buildings.

  It wants to destroy the City above, she wrote. The whole City.

  Lorn stilled; beside him, Emara reached for her knives. Daye, as usual, did nothing. It was Torrence who spoke.

  “Well,” he said. “That sounds messy.”

  That was one way of putting it.

  For she looked up, and saw Towers arrayed above them; Towers moving, spinning. She did not know what any of them might do when the Lower City’s dark magic reached them—did not know whether that magic could reach them, or what else the Lower City had planned. Even so, she feared it. It wouldn’t take much to destroy what was left of these people, or the little they still had.

  In the City’s center, magic spread across the sky, gold and green and blue, flowing toward the Spire. Light built along the Spire’s length, and Shai knew they were readying another strike.

  Shai wondered what the Spire told them, the officials who now ruled those Towers—that the Lower City was a danger, a threat? It hadn’t been—not until the City had tried to destroy it, the buildings and entity both. More likely, she realized, they had simply offered terms for those loans that only a fool would turn down. For Shai knew fortunes when she saw them, the riches of untold thousands pooling across the sky.

  “No rest for the wicked.” Torrence was laughing. “Give it here,” he said to Daye, who had already lifted one end of the heavy spell generator. She passed him the end, moved, then heaved the other end into the air. Shai knew the weight of those spires; she had tried and failed to lift them herself. Torrence grunted as he took its weight—but Daye? She didn’t even flinch.

  Wait, Shai wrote, and reached for the generator. Don’t think, she reminded herself; she didn’t need a careful weavings as with the elevator, only a shape woven on instinct. She sent a spell into the metal—not quite a tracking spell, but something similar. She thought of a length of chain broken into three pieces, and attached one of those pieces to each battered generator.

  She nodded and let the second two spell generators be taken away. As Torrence and Daye carried theirs toward a battered aircar, Lorn called for an aide and for another car to be brought from the encampment’s interior. Shai left them to their planning.

  She went to the base of the spell generator already mounted within the encampment. She placed her hand on that cold metal, then let her fingers sink slowly within it.

  There were spells there—not spells like the ones that she wove, all unthinking, in bright magic; not spells, either, like trained spellcasters used, those careful patterns of magic and intent. These spells were part of the metal itself; the spire was the spell.

  It was inert now; no magic flowed through it, latent or otherwise; and the storage coil installed at its base was dead. But spell generators weren’t meant to be fueled by such things; they were grown parts of the Towers themselves, used to power flowing through them the way living flesh was used to blood.

  The analogy was more apt than she first knew, Shai realized as she let her awareness sink deeper into the metal. For the spell generator was not just a structure grown by a Tower, but was—or had once been—part of a Tower, as much a piece of that living being as her arm or leg was part of her.

  It was not alive anymore; yet it remembered the flow of power the way Shai remembered living.

  As Shai funneled magic into it, it shivered in response. Magic twisted around the generator, through it, weaving complicated patterns before arcing up in a great fountain of light. It created a dome. At first it was small, protecting only a span of some twenty feet or more, but as she poured magic into it the spell spread, becoming wider, arcing higher with every passing moment.

  Shai had seen this spell generator and its twin working on Farrow’s rooftop as the doomed skyscraper had attempted to rise. Then, the domes of protective magic that the two had created had been bright, glittering, and tinged with gold.

  Despite the similarity in the shape that now opened over Edren’s refugees like an umbrella, this spell was different. For she was no mere storage coil, feeding the generator raw power; she wove her magic as it left her, shaping and changing those spells in turn.

  She thought of protection—a wall against the dangers of the world, a barrier past which no blade might fall. But she thought too of gentler things: of the peace she’d found in the safest moments of her life, lying curled in the grass beneath the glorious light of Allenai’s living heart. She thought of beginnings. Of the children sheltering in these ruins; of the trees out here reaching for the sky.

  Of new leaves unfurling.

  The spell that arced now above her was not gold but green, and it shimmered the way leaves did in a breeze.

  A surge of emotion from Xhea—fear and awe in equal measure—made Shai look away from her working.

  There, beyond the boundaries formed by the glowing green spell, she saw a pillar of light and darkness. The Spire. Light formed its peak, and light gleamed down its sides all the way to the central living platforms that held the gardens Shai had so loved as a child. Beneath that, light gave way to shadow.

  Dark magic crawled up the Spire’s golden sides from the Lower City’s great funnel of power. That magic seeped into the Spire, running up the channels that Xhea had seen, and unraveled all in its wake. Dark magic, too, wrapped around the Spire’s exterior in a long, lazy spiral, twisting around and around as it reached ever higher.

  As Shai watched, that power dug deeper into the Spire, clenched tight, and pulled.

  The Spire was impossibly huge, impossibly powerful; but within the Lower City’s grasp, it shuddered. Even from such a distance Shai could see the motion that reverberated along its length: it trembled, as if in fear. At that motion, the Spire’s uppermost peak snapped in two.

  Shai was not the only one watching in shock; someone screamed, a sound that was echoed by countless voices in the ruins. Echoed, she felt sure, by countless voices in the City itself.

  It was just a small piece that fell, spinning, toward the ground—a small piece, that is, for the Spire. Yet that length was at least a third of the size of many Towers, perhaps half of the height of some of the poorer Towers out on the City’s edges; and what it lacked in mass, it made up for in momentum.

  It hit one of the Spire’s uppermost living platforms, carving out a deep chunk and sending glittering shards raining down. The fragment of the Spire’s peak tumbled, end over end, into the Towers below it.

  Defensive spells flared from the nearest Towers, red and violet and a roiling, twisting blue. Towers pushed that piece aside—pushed it, truly, toward their neighbors, though whether by accident or design Shai could not tell.

  The fragment struck the side of one Tower, and another; and despite the defensive spells that shone like burning wings, she could see it had done damage. Down the fragment fell, bashed from one Tower to another before at last tumbling into the empty air between the City and the ground.

  “Protect them,” she whispered to those Towers, as if her words might fly from her lips and to the Towers’ hearts; as if she could not already see their grown flesh turned liquid, healing the damage that piece had wrought. Protect the people, she meant. For in that moment, her goal and that of the Towers’ seemed one: to save the lives of those who counted on them.

  One defensive spell generator was already working, its green-tinged fountain of power arcing across the refugees’ shelters. She could feel, too, the spells she’d placed on the other two generators; they were like little sparks of herself, held at a distance. Both had stopped moving.

  “I hope you’ve got them anchored,” Shai whispered to Torrence and Daye, and whomever Lorn had sent in the other direction. She hoped that the other refugees had allowed the generators to be placed in their own encampments—or that they had been mou
nted somewhere safe nearby. For as she watched broken fragments of the Spire and Towers alike rain down, she knew she had no more time to spare.

  Shai had stretched the protective dome from the single spell generator to its limits; she could feel the spells in the metal protest as she tried to twist their lines to go a little farther, a little wider. This, then, was what she had to work with.

  Now for the hard part.

  Shai reached for the spells she’d placed on the generators. She envisioned those three pieces of a chain linked once more together, one to the other in a single whole, unbroken and strong no matter the distance between the links. Felt them, as if they were things she might grasp in her outstretched hands, and joined her power to them.

  In the far distance, roughly where she had pointed, she saw first one then the other spell generator flare to life. They, too, were green, though the haze of dust and dark magic between them shadowed that color.

  Like this, she told the generators, pushing at the spells woven into their metal. The spell that she held was the template, and she struggled to get the second two generators to follow suit.

  Shai felt stretched, as if her ghostly body and not just her magic were being pulled in three directions. She staggered and held to the metal and magic of the generator beside her, as if it might steady her.

  Focus, she commanded, and let her breathing fall into a familiar pattern that spoke of calm and steadiness. Despite her fear, her exhilaration, her magic steadied in response, no longer flowing out in a rush but in controlled beams of pure power.

  Once those domes had been spread to their full extent, Shai linked them. Suddenly they were not three arcing domes of power but a protective ring that circled the whole of the Lower City and the refugees that sheltered in the ruins around it.

  Shai gasped as the working took hold, feeling magic pour out of her almost as fast as she created it. Steady, she thought, changing her breathing pattern to one that spoke of strength and stability. Steady.

  But it was not enough. For all her strength, all her power, it was not enough.

  That great ring of green light flickered—and though the part to which she was connected flowed unbroken, her hands held deep within the metal of the spell generator, the defenses in the distant parts thinned and stuttered. Too much distance between the spell generators; too little magic spread too thin.

  She was no Tower. Her heart was made not of pure magic but only the memory of human flesh, weak and fallible; and for all that her unthinking magic turned her into a pillar of blinding light, she was just a person. One person.

  Shai could not save them all, and she wept to know it.

  She barely noticed when another spark of power joined hers. So very little magic; it was hardly a glimmer, especially compared to her flaring light.

  But then came a second spark, and a third, centered around the spell generator that was anchored out near the far edges of what had been Rown and Farrow’s territories. A fourth spark, a fifth, each tiny bit of magic holding a different signature.

  Torrence, she recognized suddenly. Something in one of those pale sparks spoke of the bounty hunter. Daye.

  Then again, a spark, this time on the other spell generator on the Lower City’s far side.

  And another, and another.

  Lorn. Emara. Mercks. Councilor Tranten.

  She would not have said that she would recognize their magical signatures, but she did—she knew them as the weak, flickering sparks of their power entered the spell.

  They were joining her, she realized; the people of the Lower City were adding their magic to hers. She could not see them, they were too far distant; but she could feel them, feel their magic as surely as if those people had stood beside her and placed their hands over hers.

  None were powerful. None, not even the strongest, would have been considered anything of true value in the City above. Certainly not on their own.

  But together? More power flowed into Shai’s working, and more, and the failing spell surged once more to life. It grew stronger and wider, rising to encircle all of the fallen Lower City, a ring of arcing, flaring light that stretched far out into the ruins.

  She could almost hear it singing, the way Xhea might.

  The spell was not green, now, or not only green. Other colors filled the working: the leaf-like glow of her magic was joined by threads of red, twists of orange, a soft haze of blue. Colors twisted over it, through it, dancing like oily rainbows across a puddle’s surface. No boundaries, there; no way to tell Edren’s people from Orren’s or Senn’s, Rown’s or Farrow’s. No way to tell one person’s magic from another.

  Tens turned to a hundred, then more, and more.

  And so they stood, Shai and the people of the Lower City, holding high the shelter that protected them from the dangers of the City above as the Spire fell from the sky.

  The living Lower City grasped the Central Spire and dragged it toward the ground.

  It was not easy. Magic poured from the ground, more magic, dark magic, as the Lower City struggled against the countless spells that held the Spire aloft. Spells, too, flared along the Spire’s length, fighting to maintain its altitude.

  The ground shook with the force of the power rushing through it. The broken bits of the few buildings that still stood began to crumble, and dust rose in clouds across the Lower City’s surface. Farrow, too, shuddered beneath her, swaying like a narrow tree.

  Xhea screamed and stumbled back from Farrow’s edge.

  “No!” she cried, in voice and magic alike. “No, please—you can’t. You’ll break it, you’ll destroy everything!”

  But that, she knew, was its intent.

  No matter that dragging the Central Spire from the sky would kill the Lower City too. The Spire hovered directly above the Lower City’s living heart; there was nowhere it could go but down. To pull the Spire from the sky was like Xhea placing a long knife against her chest, positioning its blade between the curving arches of her ribs, and stabbing the blade directly into her heart.

  Her living heart, her beating heart. Was a heart of magic any different?

  It did not matter what she tried to tell the Lower City, or what words she used; did not matter what images she tried to shape or how desperately she pleaded.

  It would not listen. It did not even try—only held the Central Spire with countless hands of grasping dark magic, wrapped each one tight, and pulled.

  Xhea screamed as part of the Spire broke free and fell, tumbling, toward her. It bounced from one Tower to the next, pushed by defensive spells, until at last it fell with a great booming crash to the earth some span of blocks distant. Senn’s territory, she thought—not that such things had meaning anymore.

  The Spire towered above her, so close that much of its length was lost to her sight, nearly vanishing into the overcast sky high above. But she saw bright magic at its peak, flaring, flashing; all else had already turned dark.

  She could not see the whole of it, but what she could see was coming closer. Harder the Lower City dragged at it, and faster, until suddenly the Spire was not slipping some span of feet but falling.

  As much as she despised the Spire—or, rather, the people who ran it—she did not want them to die. She did not want this. And so Xhea reached out with her magic, not lifting it toward the sky, but sending it down.

  Down into Farrow beneath her, running through the skyscraper’s embrace of vines; down into the underground beneath, all those broken halls. Down into the Lower City’s heart.

  But not to merge with it this time, not to speak, but to bind.

  She no longer had Lissel’s binding as a guide—had not examined the intricate weavings of that spell, only felt its terrible constriction. Yet she knew what she had to do.

  Quickly, before the Lower City noticed or understood her intent, Xhea wrapped bands of dark power around its heart. Those bindings hung loose at first, while she added more and made them stronger. She imagined that they were not just magic but metal, braid
ed and strong; not just bindings but a strong hand holding the Lower City back. Magic rushed out of her, dark and cold, and she felt her panicked breathing slow in response.

  It’s not enough, she thought, as her power as it wrapped around and around. But it was all she had.

  With a sudden jerk, she pulled the bindings tight.

  Xhea had struggled to break Lissel’s binding—had struggled, even, to crack it. The Lower City had no such difficulty. Though she’d poured all of her magic into those bindings, everything she could spare, the Lower City just seemed to shrug, and her bands of power fell away.

  Xhea gasped as that magic was torn from her grasp. Her head spun, dizzy, disoriented.

  She’d known that the Lower City was stronger, infinitely more powerful, but she had thought—

  It didn’t matter now.

  Xhea stared up as the Spire plummeted, stabbing deep into the earth—and into the Lower City’s flaring, beating heart.

  Xhea was cast to the ground and tossed as everything shook and shuddered. Everything was screaming, tearing, grinding, crashing.

  She screamed and could not hear her own voice. Debris fell around her, striking her exposed head and hands, and only her magic—rising thick and dark around her—protected her from worse. It burned away the pieces as they rained upon her.

  At last, Xhea could open her eyes. Farrow should have fallen. It would have fallen a thousand times over if the Lower City didn’t hold it, those dark vines twisting and turning and reshaping themselves around the ancient skyscraper’s structure, holding it aloft after all else had turned to dust.

  Still the Spire fell, on and on, that once-brilliant pillar of light turned dark as it stabbed ever deeper. Dark magic boiled into the air, thick and black: the Lower City’s heart’s blood. The Lower City should have screamed, Xhea thought. But though its song rose and rose, unstoppable, it sang not of pain but triumph.

  And the Lower City lived.

  The Spire shook and shuddered and cracked. Xhea thought of what she’d seen of the Spire, that bare, magic-free space and the dark magic children that lived within it. Lissel and Amel, the kids playing and reading, and all the ghosts bound to them. The Spire’s servants, the other attendants—Abelane’s friends. She could only imagine what was happening to them.