Few enough buildings were left standing out in the ruins; fewer still with any hope of being made habitable—many of which had already been claimed as replacements for those that had burned. Building materials were at a premium; so many people needed nails or boards or sheets of metal to replace sagging roofs, all in the hope of creating something that could keep them safe when night fell—and from freezing when winter arrived.
Xhea shook her head. Whatever their motive, the Spire’s pronouncement was a death sentence for the Lower City. Their lives and livelihoods were precarious as it was; many of the displaced wouldn’t make it through the winter unless they fell on the mercy of friends, family, or one of the skyscrapers. Indenture contracts were signed that way; normal folks became Rown hunters, and hunters became gladiators in Edren’s arena. There were countless ways to lose one’s self and soul, and in times of desperation one Lower City dweller or another had found them all.
None of which even touched what the loss of the market had done to the Lower City’s food supply and the delivery of the various goods supplied by the poorest Towers—the few, above, who deigned to do business with the Lower City. The few desperate enough to need the renai.
It was one thing to have lost so much already. But to lose everything? Every building, every home, every street. The skyscrapers themselves. Everything that lay beneath. It was too much, almost, to comprehend.
Soon, one’s affiliation wouldn’t matter, Edren or Orren or Senn, Rown or fallen Farrow. One and all, the Lower City dwellers would starve, or freeze, or be torn apart by the night walkers when the rotting walls gave way to those insistent hands. People would kill each other for shelter, or a morsel of food, or a blanket.
Herself included. That is, if this sweetness blighted binding spell didn’t kill her first. Xhea tightened her grip on her cane. Already her magic, bound into that cold, hard knot, pressed against the inside of her breastbone like an insistent finger. Her stomach ached.
Just get to Edren, she told herself, as if the skyscraper and her allies within had any hope of keeping such fates at bay. She stared at Torrence and Daye’s backs, clung to her cane, and tried to hurry her steps.
She felt Shai’s presence, too, just behind her left shoulder; felt the light of her Radiant magic fall upon her like sunlight. Xhea glanced over her shoulder. To her eyes, Shai looked worried, but no different; yet her expression did nothing to hide the emotion that Xhea felt from her.
Anger. Sorrow. Loss.
And not just about the Spire’s pronouncement. There was something terribly personal in the feelings—a hurt that Xhea sensed but could not explain.
Was it right to acknowledge such things? Emotions sent to her seemingly without Shai’s knowledge or intent. Xhea felt as if she was prying into the ghost’s heart and mind without permission, and she shied away from such intrusion.
Yet it seemed wrong, too, to know that her friend was upset and to ignore it.
As they turned down a side street that was calmer than the main thoroughfare—if barely—Xhea caught Shai’s eye.
“What is it?” she murmured, quiet enough that Torrence and Daye might pretend not to hear.
Shai shook her head, and let the distance between them increase by half a step. “It’s nothing.” She forced her lips into a smile.
Maybe she should have let it go, let the ghost speak to her in her own time—if at all—and yet Xhea couldn’t stand the sight of that flat, fake smile. Couldn’t stand the thought that Shai was lying to her.
In the street some ten feet ahead of them, a fight broke out. Two men grappled, with a third encouraging them with shouts and curses. No weapons drawn, only flying fists and faces flushed dark with anger.
Torrence and Daye stopped as one, then ushered Xhea toward the shelter of the buildings at the road’s edge.
“Let me handle this,” Torrence said. At Daye’s look, he raised his hands, his unsheathed blade held like an afterthought. “Diplomacy first, right? Then you can bash their heads together.”
Daye nodded.
“Gentlemen.” Torrence’s loud voice carried. He pushed his way toward the fighting men, while Daye gave Xhea a look that said she was not to move.
Xhea ignored her. Instead she turned to Shai, who stood now at her side with her head bowed and her restless hands clasped together. The facade was cracking; even were it not for the link that joined them, Xhea would have known her misery.
“What is it?” Xhea asked. “What is it really?”
“I…”
“Shai,” she said. Just that.
“Really,” Shai said. “I’m just being silly.” She looked away, tears standing in her eyes.
“Don’t.” It wasn’t a request, wasn’t a plea, for all that some part of her wanted to beg. Whatever had happened, whatever she’d missed when unconsciousness had claimed her, it mattered. If it mattered to Shai, it mattered to her.
Please don’t turn away from me, Xhea thought, little though she could say the words.
Yet perhaps Shai heard nonetheless. She took a shuddering breath and moved closer, her steps almost hesitant. “Take my hand.” The ghost’s own hand, when she reached out, was shaking.
Xhea frowned, not understanding, but did as the ghost asked. She reached, taking Shai’s hand in her own as she had done so many times before, in fear and in comfort, in hope and in reassurance—and felt her fingers slide through.
It was not like touching any other ghost. Though she could interact with the dead, most ghosts felt like little more than a heavy, chill fog. But Shai? Shai felt real to her—real in every possible sense of the word.
And now this.
She knew it was only a consequence of the binding; there wasn’t enough magic left in her hand to push against Shai’s power. But even when she’d exhausted her magic rescuing Shai, months before—even when people had been able, briefly, to touch her skin without pain—Shai had been able to hold her hand.
It’s not just a simple binding, is it? Xhea realized. They’ve done something more to me. Something else. The thought made her feel cold.
“We’re still together,” Xhea said then. She touched the spelled tether that linked them; it was strong and wide and unbroken. “We’re still bound.”
“I know,” Shai whispered. She glanced away, embarrassed. “I told you, I’m just being foolish.”
Except Xhea felt it too: an ache deep within her, a feeling that she could not name, to have Shai here—and yet so far away. Untouchable.
While the living could touch her with only mild discomfort. Despite all the times she’d wished she could banish the pain of her touch, the change now felt like a loss.
“There we go,” Torrence said, returning. He dusted his hands on his legs. “No problem.” His knife, Xhea noted, had been put away, and he wore an expression of boyish glee that usually accompanied violence. Again they pressed forward, and Xhea spared but a glance for the men sprawled and groaning on the ground—all three of them. A little boy stooped beside them, hastily searching their pockets.
Shai spoke, clearly searching for a way to change the topic. “What did the Lower City tell you,” she asked, “before the Messenger came?”
Xhea shook her head. That conversation had ended not an hour or two before; already it felt like a lifetime.
So as she walked she spoke to Shai under her breath, relaying her conversation with the living Lower City—if conversation was even the right word. The experience had more in common with throwing oneself into a flooding cistern than it did with talking.
“The Central Spire was trying to poison it,” she explained. “Or so it believed.”
“For how long?” Shai asked, and her voice was approaching normal.
Xhea shrugged. “A few days after Farrow fell, maybe?” It was hard to tell; sentient earth had a strange concept of time’s passage.
“How do you poison a creature made of magic?”
Xhea frowned. It had been so clear; but some of her understanding—her compre
hension of the entity’s message—had been lost upon waking.
At Daye’s direction, she turned down an alley to dodge a group of upset people gathered outside their homes. Torrence took one look at the woman at the crowd’s center—a woman who pointed at the building’s rooftop as she wailed something unintelligible—and shook his head. Avoid, avoid. Xhea wasn’t inclined to disagree; she’d take the alleyway’s thick muck over that nonsense any day.
“I think,” she said to Shai, “that they did something to the dark magic that they dump on the ground. Twisted it somehow, maybe turned it into a spell.”
“But it didn’t work?”
“Obviously.”
“And what did it do to the people down here?” Shai asked. “All that magic.” It was a question, Xhea realized, embarrassed, that she’d not considered.
“I don’t know.”
Had it done anything? How could it not? Yet she could only wonder how it had affected the bright magic users around her. Sweetness and blight, she hadn’t even noticed it herself.
Except, looking back, she wanted to say that she had felt that change, the twist in the cascade of black. As if she could dump all her restless nights and hard, bleary mornings not just on the Lower City calling out to her, but on the Central Spire. The myriad pains of her life bundled up into a neat package and laid at their collective feet.
Perhaps it was even true.
“If they want to kill the Lower City, why don’t they just stop dumping magic down here? Cut off the food supply. Let it starve.” The words sounded harsh, coming from Shai; but, hearing the anger in the ghost’s voice, Xhea knew what she meant. Why kill thousands of living, breathing people instead of just one creature? Why kill so many when you’re just cleaning up your own mess?
Because we’re nothing to them. No worth that’s not measured in magic. Xhea kept the words behind her teeth. Perhaps she should be thankful that the Spire had shown enough concern to give warning—that the Lower City dwellers had been given three days and a chance to leave.
She snorted. As if she should feel grateful that they had been gifted with a slow death, rather than a quick one.
Xhea stumbled and clutched her cane to keep from pitching forward into the muck. A stone, she thought, a crack—and it was only as she gasped that she realized her sudden unsteadiness came not from the ground underfoot but the spell that bound her magic.
It pressed against that hard knot of black power, surging, stuttering. Xhea staggered to a stop, clutching her stomach as if she might reach inside herself and calm the sudden riot of power. Her magic was moving—not rising, as it once had, but twisting with precise control and intent. But not her control—not her intent.
Torrence called her name; she heard running footsteps. Something cold and strange passed through her shoulder, and it was only as she gasped that she realized it was Shai, trying and failing to hold her. Again the spell surged and she stumbled, disoriented, as the world seemed to flip and turn. She swallowed heavily.
But there was a sound. Xhea pried open her eyes, not remembering having closed them, and looked around. The sound cut through the background noise, drowning out the shouts and calls and the distant woman’s unintelligible wails. It was high and sweet and almost musical, rising and falling in a rhythm that reminded her of breath. It wrapped around her and bid her stand, bid her stay; it made her want to let her mind just drift away.
“Do you hear—?” Xhea started, and then realized that the sound was coming from her.
“Xhea,” Shai said. And again, louder. “Xhea, you have to stop.”
Xhea forced her eyes open once more and blinked. “Stop…?”
The sound was like a lullaby, soft and sweet. It calmed her fears. Or maybe it was the magic itself that created this gentle place in her own head—that took away all the fear and panic, and told her she was safe.
That thought alone was enough to make her catch her breath as a rush of adrenaline surged through her. Safe? On the Lower City streets? Oh, that was never true—but especially not now, not here.
“You’re making that sound,” Shai said. “It’s your magic.”
It was her magic, but not her will. Xhea felt the spell within her stealing her power—using it, twisting it. She fought back, but still that song rose, echoing.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, the sound faded and vanished. Gasping, Xhea leaned on her cane and struggled to calm her breathing. At last she looked up, meeting the intense looks of the ghost and two bounty hunters before her.
“It hijacked me,” she managed. “It used my magic.”
“For what?” Torrence asked.
Xhea shook her head. But Shai replied, “It’s a tracking spell.”
“No,” she said, but had no words, no logic, only that flat denial. They couldn’t have—they can’t—
To lock her magic away was one thing—but to use it against her? She shivered, too shocked and appalled even for anger.
“A tracking spell,” she managed. “But who… why…?”
Daye spoke quietly, her words like small, hard stones. “We’d better hurry.”
Better run, Xhea thought, before whoever’s tracking me arrives.
Torrence nodded. “Come on. We’re nearly there.”
They walked in silence the rest of the way to skyscraper Edren.
Inside skyscraper Edren’s main meeting room, Shai stared resolutely out the window. The pane was cracked in one corner, and hazed with untold years of dirt, but was clear enough for her to see outside.
She couldn’t see the market from here, only the dark shape of Farrow held aloft; she couldn’t see the crowd that roared and surged at its base. Instead, she peered down onto the streets below and the rooftops of nearby buildings. On one roof, she could see a woman frantically dismantling some sort of antenna array, coiling up wires and pulling down the corroded metal tines that reached skyward like branches. On another, a pale-skinned man sat with a sleeping infant in his lap; the man’s head was bowed and his shoulders shook as if with sobs.
Behind her, Edren’s ruling council was meeting. Arguing, really. If she let those familiar voices pour over her like autumn rain, they sounded little different than the crowd outside. She’d thought…
Shai shook her head, frustrated. She’d thought that coming here would make everything better. They seemed foolish, now, those beliefs that had grown in the dark of her subconscious; she pulled them out into the light where they curled and crisped to nothing.
Somehow, she’d believed that, here, Xhea would be safe—that they might deal with the binding or the call it sent out, and protect Xhea from whomever wanted to muzzle and claim her. She’d thought that Edren would have explanations, if not solutions. As if Lorn Edren, or Emara, or any of the people gathered now around the battered table behind her could say anything, do anything to change the fate that now bore down upon them like a Tower in full flight.
It was not that she’d been lying to herself. It was only that instinct had shouted louder than sense, telling her, Go home and everything will be okay.
She didn’t know when some part of her had begun to think of Edren as home—and doubted now whether anything could be made okay. Again she shook her head, as if denial might push back reality or the despair it birthed.
There, she thought. Outside the window she watched a spell rise. Up close, she knew it would have been a shining sphere of magic, with rainbow hues shimmering across its surface. From a distance it was no more than a bright glint, like a star lifting skyward.
A message spell. And not the first she had seen.
Shai waited a long moment, not listening to the debate behind her, not watching the small moments play out on the ground below. Just waiting.
And—there. Another spell rose, brighter than the first, faster, lifting from the Lower City’s far side where Farrow had once stood. A long moment, and then another lifted from a neighborhood nearby; and another, flying upward from somewhere near Senn.
In the
time she had stood here, Shai had seen so many message spells fly to the City above that she had lost count. Edren, too, had sent messages upward. They were probably sending more even now, as the council debated.
Those messages were requests for help sent to the Towers. Some were going to the skyscrapers’ allies and trading partners, the poorer Towers on the City’s fringes; others to the richer Towers that they’d courted or from which they’d sometimes bought goods. She imagined some were going to extended family members or one-time friends—anyone and everyone who now had full citizenship, no matter how distant the tie. She’d even seen a few rise to the Central Spire itself, begging, she imagined, for mercy. For an explanation. For a stay of execution.
But in all the time she’d watched, Shai had not seen any message spells fall to the Lower City in reply. Nor had she seen any fly from one skyscraper to another, no matter that the clogged streets made hand delivery impossible.
All the hands outstretched, pleading for help, were raised to the sky.
“They should be working together,” Shai said at last. “The skyscrapers, all of them.” She turned to Xhea, who sat at the meeting table’s far end.
Xhea looked at her incredulously. “You think that’s going to happen? After what Rown did?” She spoke softly in an attempt not to interrupt the discussion, but heads turned toward her nonetheless.
Shai knew what Rown had done. She had seen the dead and the dying—dead children, even. She had stood in the burning market, the air thick with smoke and embers, and exhausted her magic defending against their attack. She knew the weight of blame that rested squarely on Rown’s shoulders. But the actions of the leadership—the actions of some hundred of their citizens, truth be told—should not condemn them all.
She knew, too, the edges of Edren’s feud with Orren—the murder of Orren’s ruling family in the war ten years before, and the assassination of Lorn’s father, Verrus Edren, which Shai had witnessed. There would be other stories, other feuds and wars and betrayals.
Whatever the weight of the skyscrapers’ history and politics—whatever retribution they deserved—it was not this.
Towers Fall Page 5
