Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  She felt as the Lower City recognized the invitation inherent in her gesture, her desire to listen, to speak. There came a surge of magic—

  A deafening chorus of joy and worry and welcome—

  And, beneath that, something else. Something darker.

  Pain. Betrayal.

  Xhea gasped and she was falling—

  She could not feel her body. She could not feel her hands, but she could feel the streets and the broken rubble of the market. She could not feel whether she was hot or cold, could not feel the ashy earth beneath her; instead, she was the earth—she was the ground and the buildings and the magic that filled them all.

  She was the Lower City—and she hurt.

  A second passed, an hour, a year—she did not know; there was only the magic. Anyone else might have been killed by that communion. As it was, she fought not to lose herself entirely.

  “Slower,” she told it—or tried to.

  A moment, then the rush eased. Instead, she saw images, felt sensations: Dark water, falling. Rain cascading over her, through her. The warmth of a thick blanket. The comfort of a full stomach.

  It meant magic, Xhea realized. Dark magic: the Lower City’s food, its body and blood.

  She’d seen it herself: the Central Spire, the great floating pillar around which the Towers spun, gathered the wisps of dark magic created by the City and poured it on the ground in a thick, roiling column. Dumped like waste, that magic poisoned the people that lived below—and had, over time, sparked life in the barren ground.

  That rain turned hard, stinging. A storm at midnight, winds raging. A blanket too thin to keep her warm, no matter how tight she wrapped it. The aching hollow of hunger.

  The hurt of loss. Betrayal.

  Something had changed in the magic poured down from the City above, Xhea understood at last. For though that magic fell, night after night, something was different. Something was wrong.

  The sensations continued, cascading through her one after the other as the living Lower City sang and sang.

  Pain, sharp and burning—

  A twist of smoke turned dark, and darker still—

  Acrid smoke, a child’s cry—

  “No,” she said again, “slower, not so much—”

  But there was more—layer upon layer of images, sensations, meaning—and Xhea could not catch them all, could not hold them.

  She was lost, overwhelmed; every way she turned was wrong, and then she was falling, falling.

  Darkness.

  Magic was a cold, dark lake, and Xhea surfaced gasping. Her body felt weighted, heavy against the concrete; her chest heaved as she struggled to remember the rhythms of breath.

  But Shai was there, the ghost shining like a beacon; Xhea reached for her with shaking hands. She touched the tether that joined them and felt—stronger, somehow. Steadier. Felt some of Shai’s magic flow into her through that link, balancing the tide of dark.

  “The Lower City,” Xhea said, and then had to break off, coughing. Sweetness, why hadn’t she thought to bring water? Still she tried: “The Central Spire is—”

  “Breathe,” Shai told her. The ghost knelt by Xhea’s feet, her blond hair falling forward like a shining curtain. “It’s okay, just breathe.”

  It took time to steady her breathing; longer to calm her heart’s frantic beat. Xhea held to Shai with hands and tether both, as if the ghost were her anchor to the world.

  It was so easy to be overwhelmed by magic—and the living Lower City was nothing but magic. So easy to lose all sense of time and place and herself.

  “How long?” Xhea whispered. More than a minute, for all that her communication with the Lower City had seemed to run at the speed of thought. Her eyes were crusted with the salt of dried tears; her tongue was thick, her throat parched. The light’s angle had changed, too; Farrow’s shadow, once long and thin as it stretched across the barren ground, had grown short.

  “Nearly four hours.”

  Shai’s voice held no reproach, and yet Xhea started nonetheless, making the charms and coins bound into her hair clink and chime as they fell across her shoulders.

  There came a sound, then, echoing around them. Not magic, but a sound in truth: a clarion call that rang out across the Lower City and echoed through the twisted streets and alleyways. A sound that came from above.

  Shai turned, her hands rising in reflex, some half-formed spell twining about her fingers like a slender ribbon.

  “No,” the ghost said. “They can’t—”

  Again the sound came, louder—and it was familiar, for all that Xhea had never heard it before. It was a sound described in stories, a sound not heard for decades—at least not here on the ground.

  Would that it had stayed that way.

  Out in the burned ruin of the market, people had stilled. They stood now with blackened hands slack at their sides, their mouths agape, whatever small objects they had reclaimed from the rubble dropped to lie forgotten at their feet. The ghosts, too, stopped and turned, the sound enough to break into even their grief and loss and denial.

  As one, they looked up.

  The sound came a third time, loudest of all. The dust shivered with it, puffs of ash rising; windows rattled in their panes. The voices that had cried out in fear or surprise from the first two calls now fell silent, leaving that high, shimmering note to echo through the Lower City uncontested.

  Xhea closed her eyes.

  Days, she thought in slow despair. For days she had heard whispers of the Lower City’s song, awake and in dream. It had been calling for her.

  Calling for help.

  She’d ignored it, or failed to respond, and each was its own kind of failure. Now she understood—but it was too late.

  The Messenger fell from the Central Spire like a shooting star, haloed in brilliant light. It wasn’t necessary, Xhea thought; surely the sound had been announcement enough. Yet the Messenger glowed so brightly she had to raise her hand against the glare, helpless to do anything but stare.

  Xhea watched as the figure came to within a stone’s throw of the ground. A male Messenger, unless she missed her guess. He wore a uniform that she knew only from stories, pale and edged with light, the aggressive cut suggesting both speed and strength. She knew the uniform was white and gold; in her black-and-white vision, Xhea saw not just white, but faint, detailed patterns, as if poems were written into the fabric.

  Even without the uniform, they would have known the man was from the Spire from the blur of glowing magic where his face should have been. It cascaded like a waterfall, endlessly flowing, and only suggestions of features showed beneath: dark shadows of eyes, the horizontal slash of a mouth.

  As shocked as Xhea felt—as much as the shock showed on the faces of the gathered onlookers, a crowd that grew larger by the moment—Shai’s expression was worse.

  “A Messenger?” the ghost whispered. “Here?”

  Messengers only went to the City’s elite—Tower council members, the best casters, those who ruled in thought and deed—bringing word of things too important to be borne by spell alone. A spell could be intercepted, if with difficulty; a spell could be twisted or changed by a talented caster. But a Messenger? Never. Their identities were hidden, their loyalty unshakable. And the penalty for interfering with one—or with a message they bore—was death.

  Only twice before had a Messenger come to the Lower City, and one of those times was so long ago that Xhea suspected the story was more legend than truth, a tale grown large in the telling. The other time…

  Xhea shook her head. That time, nearly a century before, there had been a plague in the Lower City. Shipping routes to the ground were shut down as even the poorer Towers refused to do business with the infected. Lacking resources, the skyscrapers struggled to help their own citizens. The unaffiliated—the poorest of the Lower City dwellers—were left to fend for themselves.

  Bodies, it was said, were piled along the curbs and dumped in back alleys like refuse.

  A
nyone with the contacts in the City—or the strength left with which to send a message—pleaded for help from those above. But weeks passed before the Central Spire sent an acknowledgment. Their response, delivered by shining Messenger, had been four words.

  No assistance is forthcoming.

  “He’s not here for you,” Xhea told Shai. She meant the words for comfort, but they sounded harsh, accusing. She tried again: “He’s here because…”

  Because the Spire is trying to kill the living Lower City.

  Or so the entity believed. It was a preposterous thought; the words caught behind her teeth. But Shai didn’t notice, only stared up in horror.

  Slowly, Xhea pushed herself to her feet with aid of her cane, then took a few careful steps from the wall that shielded her. She wanted to run, to hide, and knew there was no point in either.

  Judging that the crowd beneath his feet had grown large enough, the Messenger held his arms wide. Spheres of light flew out from the motion, scattering in every direction. Xhea flinched as one flew over her head, expecting a spell, a bomb, a shock of light—

  “Magical relays,” Shai murmured, seemingly stunned; her attention never left the Messenger. “They project the sound of his voice.”

  It was true. “People of the Lower City,” the Messenger proclaimed, and Xhea heard not just his words but their echoes. It sounded like dozens of people spoke in unison: a ringing choir made of a single voice.

  The Messenger waited until those echoes faded. “People of the Lower City,” he repeated. “Draw near.”

  The gathered Lower City dwellers, suspicious, moved no closer. The Messenger continued, his upper-City accent clear despite the distortion.

  “By order of the Central Spire, all inhabitants of the Lower City are required to evacuate immediately. The Spire has claimed this territory as its own. You have three days to leave the area.”

  There were gasps, shouts—Xhea knew not what else. She couldn’t hear over the sudden sound of her heart pounding in her ears.

  Three days. Xhea blinked, stared, swallowed. Three days. The words didn’t make sense, no matter that she repeated them like some terrible mantra.

  Again the Messenger gestured. A coiled spell flew from his outstretched palm and expanded into a great pane of light. No, not a pane, but a map. An aerial view of the Lower City spread across that surface, depicted in perfect clarity. Even from this distance, Xhea could make out roads, rooftops, and the few stunted, scraggly trees that managed to grow in the Lower City core.

  Though her feet were firmly on the ground, that sudden twist in perspective was dizzying. Xhea gripped her cane to keep herself steady, wishing she could look away.

  Like a dark tide, gray washed across the map, flooding out from the center. Xhea tried to judge the shade; it was probably red, she thought, or maybe green. Wider that stain spread, and wider, until almost all of the Lower City was darkened by its shadow.

  “The Central Spire claims this territory,” the Messenger repeated. He gestured to the map as if any might have missed it; as if every face in the crowd wasn’t uplifted, features writ with stunned dismay. In contrast, the Messenger only seemed bored.

  The living Lower City was right. If Xhea had harbored any lingering thoughts that she’d misunderstood the entity’s meaning, they were banished. Why else would the Spire want to claim this territory? The ruins of the city that had come before and the homes made within those painstakingly preserved structures had no true value to the Spire, nothing worth the effort it would take to claim it.

  Until now.

  She had wondered, distantly, what the Central Spire thought of recent events in the Lower City. It was clear that the Spire cared little for the people on the ground, nor for how those people might suffer as a result of the dark magic poured down upon them, night after night. The Spire did not care that Lower City dwellers’ own magic was thin and weak; that they died young, or sickened frequently, or were poisoned by the very walls around them, the ground beneath their feet. That they could not go underground without being overwhelmed by the pain of the dark magic that had soaked into the earth through those untold years.

  And the living Lower City itself? For, she’d thought, surely the Spire knew what they had made—what their dumped waste magic had created. The Towers were no different, born of the power poured into them; they were living entities that existed within the grown metal of their structures, for all that those structures knew no ground.

  It had never occurred to her that the Spire had not known of the living Lower City’s existence at all—not until it had reached up at Xhea’s command and caught a newborn Tower as it fell from the sky.

  “It’s my fault,” she whispered, too quietly even for Shai to hear.

  Maybe it was true. But it was Farrow’s fault, too—Ahrent Altaigh and the casters he led, for forcing their skyscraper’s transformation too early, too quickly. It was Rown’s fault for creating the desolation and the chaos that had sparked Farrow’s desperate rise, and now made Farrow’s new location and the tangle of black that held it so very apparent, even from above.

  Xhea barely knew anyone in Farrow, then or now, for all that it was the place where she’d been born. She didn’t care for anyone there. And yet, she had not been able to just let them die, smashed on the ground for others’ mistakes.

  Would you change it? Xhea asked herself. Knowing this would be the consequence, would you let Farrow fall?

  She did not know, only felt her stomach drop away at the thought.

  Sound grew as the gathered crowd understood. They shouted about their homes, their businesses, about the food supply and the dangers in the ruins beyond. Their panicked voices raised in overlapping clamor.

  One onlooker shouted louder than the rest: “This is my home!”

  The Messenger lifted a hand as if to wave away the words. “Not anymore.”

  Mutters, beneath that—shocked, disbelieving, angry.

  “You want us to evacuate?” another asked. “And go where?”

  A man’s voice added, “Is the Spire paying to evacuate us?”

  “You may go wherever you can afford,” the Messenger replied, his cultured tones weighted by scorn. For a moment, Xhea saw what he saw: a gathered crowd of tired, sweaty people, digging through the rubble for garbage. The nearest buildings were burned and fallen, all tumbled bricks and shattered concrete; the farther buildings were aged and leaning, with sooty laundry hung over balcony railings.

  What use in saving these people, these huddled, needy masses? Who would bother to lift them from the ground, to feed and clothe and house them, when all they would offer in return was yet more burden? No magic to provide, no skills, no renai. No use.

  “Xhea,” Shai said—and pointed.

  Xhea blinked as a ghost stepped from the light of the Messenger’s halo where she’d hidden, tight against his body and those protective spells. She, too, wore the Spire’s uniform, even in death—but it was not pale, like the Messenger’s, but darker. The ghost’s features swam in Xhea’s vision as if blurred by the memory of a shimmering mask. Her hair, though, was distinctive: a cascade of dark, shining curls utterly at odds with the stark look of her uniform.

  Her red uniform, Xhea realized. She was an Enforcer—or the ghost of one.

  If sight of a Messenger in the Lower City was a shock, a uniformed Enforcer would have made everyone flee, screaming, as fast as their feet might carry them. As it was, Xhea stood as if rooted, cold sweat slicking her skin.

  If a Messenger was the embodiment of the Spire’s voice, an Enforcer was their strong arm, the will of the elite made flesh. Xhea saw no weapons on the ghost—though they would have had no power in death. Then again, few Enforcers needed anything so crude as a weapon.

  The ghost stepped away from the Messenger and descended, the thick, near-invisible tether that joined them stretching as she went. Unseen by all but Xhea and the gathered dead, the ghost of the Enforcer began to methodically search the crowd. Xhea watched as she step
ped close to one person after another, looking at their faces, gauging their reactions. Some stood like stone, attention fully on the Messenger, while others shivered as if with sudden chill.

  Xhea turned back to the Messenger and stared for all she was worth, letting her unfeigned shock and dismay control her expression. Even so, she couldn’t help but track the ghost’s progress from her peripheral vision. Couldn’t help but notice that the ghost focused on women—young women, even children, especially those with dark complexions and hair.

  She’s looking for me.

  “Shai,” Xhea murmured, trying not to move her lips. “Stand away from me, and keep your magic—”

  “I know,” Shai replied. Already she’d moved as if to the end of her tether’s limits, and now damped her Radiant glow until that light was only a glimmer, as if it was nothing more than the memory of sunlight on her skin.

  But ghosts had always been able to sense Xhea’s presence. No matter that she looked like just another Lower City dweller, slack-jawed and afraid, she could not hide her power from a ghost.

  She could run—or try. She was rebuilding strength in the knee she’d injured months before, healed and scarred though it was; but even with her brace she couldn’t move quickly—or, given the coins and charms in her hair, quietly. And for all the noise and restlessness of the crowd, people moved toward the Messenger, not away. Running would make her an instant target.

  Target for what? She did not know—and really didn’t want to find out.

  Ghosts could not hurt her—but the Central Spire? The Spire controlled all dark magic and its use within the City. If they had heard of her existence…

  If? Xhea asked herself mockingly. Just a few months before, she’d traveled to the City, snuck into Tower Eridian, and shown her dark magic in front of the Tower’s gathered citizens. She’d poured that power into Eridian’s living heart, wounding it. If anything, she should be grateful that it had taken so long for the Spire to track her down.

  The Messenger kept talking, his stilted words plain and obviously scripted.