Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  “If there was ever a time to forgive and forget,” Shai started, but the words weren’t right. They dried in her mouth like dead leaves; they crackled between her teeth. She didn’t know who, in the end, she was trying to convince. Those that needed her words couldn’t even hear her.

  So Shai schooled herself to calm as Xhea explained to Edren’s gathered council what she had learned from the living Lower City. She, like Xhea, tried to ignore the councilors’ expressions of skepticism and scorn, their reactions tempered only by Lorn and Emara’s complete belief.

  The cold reality of the situation was setting in, now that the first rush of confusion had passed. Shai stared at her hands, the window, the wall, and tried to keep herself still.

  Except as she watched, her hands curled into fists, seemingly of their own accord. She was angry, she realized. She was so, so angry. She wanted suddenly to scream or cry, to throw something, to rage at—what? The Central Spire, the City above? The desperate poor themselves? She did not know, only felt the emotion as if it were a burning rock lodged low in her throat.

  She knew that once she would not have cried out at the Messenger’s announcement, or thought the crowd’s anger to be just. Once she wouldn’t have spared a second thought to the Spire’s actions, or to the fates of the people on the ground. It wasn’t that she had been callous or cruel; only that such matters would have been, in every possible way, beneath her.

  Shai had come to terms with the person she’d been, or was trying to. Even so, the shame was a weight, heavy to bear.

  At last Xhea finished her explanation and sat back while the councilors discussed the possible import of her words.

  “What is it?” Xhea asked her, little louder than a whisper.

  Shai gave an awkward half-shrug. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Xhea pointed to the spelled tether and all that link now implied. Even if no words had traveled down that length, she had felt some echo of Shai’s distress.

  “Do you have an idea? Something you could recommend? Because if you do I’ll tell them, you know I will.”

  Shai took a deep, shuddering breath, suddenly unable to hold Xhea’s gaze.

  Did she have something to recommend? She should. Here she was, the supposed dead-girl savior of the Lower City, the one who had shielded them as Rown fired on the unarmed, the one who called down rain from the blue sky to put out the fires.

  And she had nothing. Nothing at all.

  For the first time, living or dead, her power was inconsequential. Before she had felt helpless, ignorant of the workings of her own magic and limited by the stark realities of her death. She had thought herself useless, had been frustrated by her inability to enact change or control her fate—but never before had she been powerless.

  She looked down at her hands, their Radiant glow, and knew that she could give every spark of power she’d generated in life and death and still have no chance of fighting back. No chance of protecting those around her, or defending them.

  Not against the Central Spire.

  “I don’t know what to do.” The words made her want to weep. She was supposed to help them—she was supposed to fix this—and could do nothing. She couldn’t even help her friend.

  If being a Radiant had no value, what good was she? Just some ghostly dead girl, hanging on past her expiry date.

  “Me either,” Xhea said. “But maybe Edren or one of the other skyscrapers…”

  But in the history of the City, no one, no matter how rich or influential, had crossed the Central Spire. Not ever. Before today, it had never occurred to Shai that anyone would want to. The Spire was no government, no commanding body; they only maintained the structure in which the City operated. They kept peace between the Towers; they approved mergers and acquisitions; they even dealt with the Towers’ worst criminals. But for the most part, they let life in the City run its course, each Tower operating under its own rules, its own patterns of living, without any interference.

  As it should be. Or so she had always believed.

  Yet the Spire had power, one that—if what Xhea had shared was true—was based on their rigid control of the rare talents of dark magic users. Children, all, who were needed to create the bindings that had held Shai to life, despite her body’s pain and failure; bindings that had tied her spirit and her magic alike to Allenai, sending her vast power into the Tower’s coffers and its heart. They alone could create the bindings that tied Radiants to their Tower, in life or death.

  Without the Spire, the whole City would slowly crumble and fall. She was nothing compared to the Spire—none of them were.

  “How do we even know the girl is telling the truth?”

  The belligerent voice from midway down the table made them both turn. The man that Xhea referred to as Councilor Horse-Face leaned forward and waved a dismissive hand in Xhea’s direction. In taking over Edren’s council, Lorn had cleared out many of his father’s handpicked councilors—but not, it seemed, all.

  Emara Pol-Edren responded—the tall, dusky-skinned woman who commanded just as much of this skyscraper these days as did her husband. “Don’t,” she said, and if her voice was soft it was not yielding. “We don’t have time for pointless arguments, Councilor Lorris.”

  Councilor Lorris waved again. “Fine, fine. But what does that even mean, that the Spire wants to destroy some magic creature? I don’t see how it helps us.”

  “It gives us insight into the Spire’s motivation. It helps us predict and plan.”

  He laughed then, loud and mocking. “Predict what? The method of our execution should we choose to stay?” He looked around the table. “That is what you’re trying to find, is it not? A way that we can stay.”

  “We’re trying to find a way that we can stay alive,” another councilor replied, but Shai didn’t see who, didn’t turn to seek his face.

  Lorn Edren saw to the heart of the matter. He spoke, his voice a bass rumble, directing his words someplace above and behind Xhea’s head: “The Lower City is a creature of magic just like the Towers. Shai, how would you kill a Tower?”

  For all that she was visible only to Xhea, Edren’s officials were aware of Shai. Of those, Lorn and Emara alone attempted to speak to the empty air where they sensed her presence. Usually, she appreciated the effort. Today, seeing Lorn speak to the wallpaper near her left shoulder was just one more frustration.

  Even as she considered his words, Shai shook her head. Towers struggled for position, they fought for altitude, they merged—and sometimes, very rarely, split—but they were not killed. But Towers could—and did—die. Everything living had its end.

  “You don’t kill Towers,” she said. “They grow old and weak. They slip to the City’s fringes. They fall from the sky.”

  Xhea relayed those quiet words—then held up her hand to forestall interruption. She seemed to know, even before Shai herself did, that there was more.

  Struggling to fill that sudden silence, Shai thought: They could be starved of magic—but what else?

  “Dark magic.” Shai looked to Xhea. “Your power balances out bright magic, unravels spells. Theoretically, couldn’t enough dark magic kill a Tower?”

  “Theoretically,” Xhea said with a shrug. “But do you really think they’d dump enough raw bright magic on the Lower City to kill it?”

  Thinking of the currency that magic represented, Shai shook her head. “No,” she started—only to have one of the councilors speak over her, responding to Xhea’s words.

  “Pure bright magic doesn’t kill,” he protested.

  “Shut that man up,” Xhea snapped.

  Shai felt a surge of gratitude. As if he could tell a dead girl what had or had not killed her.

  “I don’t know what good a physical attack would be,” Shai said, warming to her topic. “Nothing living could move against the dark magic of the Lower City and survive. And you said that the living entity’s not just part of the buildings, it’s the ground itself.”

  Xhea nodded and c
onveyed the words. “Throwing rocks doesn’t seem particularly effective,” she added. “But what if they destroyed all the buildings, ripped them up, scattered the rubble wide…?” Even as she spoke her eyes grew distant, considering the implications of her own idea.

  “You could hurt it,” Shai said. Towers sometimes lost great chunks of themselves to offensive spells, or in failed hostile takeovers. Such wounds caused the Towers pain, hindered their movements and damaged their systems; bad wounds could take years to heal. She thought, too, of what Xhea had said when she first discovered the living Lower City’s presence: that it felt the loss of Farrow, ripped from the ground.

  “You could hurt it,” Shai said again, “the way a person would be hurt by the loss of a limb. But it might survive such a loss.”

  “So if it’s a physical attack, they’d have to—what? Scoop out the whole of the Lower City, earth and tunnels and all?”

  “Is that even possible?” Lorn asked quietly, his words measured, considering.

  “Theoretically,” Shai said. Because, if she tried, she could imagine the spell one might weave to achieve such an end—or, at least, that spell’s beginnings. Despite her instinctive ability with magic, she knew too little of true spellcasting to construct such a complex working.

  Besides, even if she could design the spell, Shai would never have enough raw magic to power it. But the Central Spire? It was possible.

  “But,” she added, “even if you ripped it whole from the ground, it would still be alive—at least until it starved, lacking new magic.”

  Xhea conveyed this, then suggested, “They could drop it from a great height. The whole of the Lower City lifted into the sky, taken somewhere distant, and let fall.”

  “Sounds inefficient,” a councilor said—a small, pale woman that Shai didn’t recognize. “Not just the cost to scoop it out, but to move it.”

  “You don’t catch and release something you want to kill,” Emara said shortly. She was right.

  “I think we have to assume a magical attack,” Shai said. “But think—pure magic would be likewise inefficient. It’d just be a battle of force, magic against magic, until one ran out of power.”

  Never mind that such a battle would require the City to lose some significant portion of their net worth—which she doubted anyone would accept willingly, or without great need.

  “A spell, then.”

  Shai nodded. Of course, saying “a spell” was about as useful as saying “a weapon”—the range between a pointed rock on a stick and the Towers’ layered defenses was so wide as to be ridiculous. Even so, it was a place to start.

  “Xhea, remember what you said about Rown’s attack? That the shot from their defensive spell generator scored a line on the Lower City’s living heart. It damaged it, right? Even if only a little.”

  It was Xhea’s turn to nod as she relayed Shai’s thought to Edren’s council.

  “That was just one defensive spell generator,” Shai continued. “One, used inexpertly. Every single Tower has dozens, if not more.”

  “And how many does the Spire have?”

  Shai considered; the question had never occurred to her. The Spire’s shape was smooth, a long, slender needle, tapered at each end, with the wider undulations of platforms spaced along its length. Nowhere did defensive spires bristle along that form, as they did on the Towers; she turned the image of the Spire over in her mind, but could not remember seeing spell generators, no matter how small.

  But the Spire was protected. Though she could not say from whence they emanated, protective spells surrounded the Central Spire like great, shimmering veils. Even in daylight, when the Towers’ spells grew dim, the Spire’s golden light shone.

  Maybe the whole Spire is a spell generator. The thought made her uncomfortable and she could not say why.

  “I don’t know,” she said instead.

  “But—if that’s all this is about, killing this thing—then we could come back, couldn’t we?” Councilor Lorris said. “They don’t want our possessions. We can just take everything of value into the ruins by the Spire’s deadline, guard and protect it while they cleanse the Lower City of this creature, and then we can return home. Once the thing is dead, the Spire won’t care what we do. We can go back to our lives. And if we’re fast enough, we could even gain some advantage over Orren and Rown in the process.”

  He sat back in his seat, smug.

  “Absent gods,” Shai murmured. “That man is such a fool.”

  Xhea rolled her eyes in disgust. “Tell me about it.”

  More than a few of the councilors looked at the man as if he had lost his mind, but it was Xhea who turned to him in a clatter of charms, her jaw set.

  “Look,” she said. “Rown had one half-broken, underpowered spell generator trained on the market. Do you remember what happened when they did that? Hmm?” She spoke as if he were a child; his face reddened with every word. “If the Spire or the whole City above was to fire upon the Lower City with even a fraction of the power at their easy disposal, do you actually think anything would survive? Anything?”

  “They do that, and we’ll burn. All of us.”

  Shai blinked. For a moment she had become lost in the enjoyment of turning the ideas over in her mind, exposing their myriad facets. She’d almost forgotten that this was not theory; that they were discussing the destruction of the very walls around them, the ground beneath their feet, every home and structure that she could see out that dirt-clouded window and beyond.

  Lorn spoke into the silence. “We have to proceed, then, as if we can never return. We have teams investigating and holding potential territory in the area directly beyond the arena; we can start there. I asked for a list to be drawn up of the critical systems that cannot be moved beyond Edren’s walls…”

  At Lorn’s words, the small, pale councilor got slowly to her feet. She was silent—and her silence seemed to have a physical force, spreading across the table like the ripples from a thrown stone. When all eyes were on her, she spoke.

  “Why are we discussing fleeing as our first option? Running, hiding, salvaging what we can.” She looked from one person to another, and though her eyes never lifted toward Shai, even she felt that gaze like an accusation. “We’re going to give up our homes, just like that? Why aren’t we trying to fight back?”

  “Better our homes,” another councilor said quietly, “than our lives.”

  “And what good are our lives out there? What you’re discussing is the end of Edren, the end of everything we’ve built, everything we’ve preserved—everything we are.”

  “Edren is more than these walls,” Emara said. “More than territory.”

  The councilor gave a thin, tight-lipped smile. “And you know as well as I do how little those other things will be worth out in the ruins. If we’re our people, then leaving means our people are going to die. Or did you mean less tangible things? Loyalty, trust, togetherness—how long do you think those values will survive? Or do you forget, gladiator, what desperation can do to a person?”

  “I hung up my blades, Councilor Tranten.” Emara’s voice had gone cold. “It has been years since I fought for spectators, you know that. Nor is this a show to be put on for the Spire or anyone else’s amusement.”

  Again that smile, a thin gleam of teeth. “Better polish those blades then, Councilor Pol-Edren. Looks like you’re going to need them.”

  Into the sudden quiet there came the sound of a distant crash, then shouting. Emara and Councilor Tranten turned as one, their eyes going to the door. Others started speaking, rising from their chairs. Xhea glanced at Shai and that look was all she needed.

  “On it.”

  Shai sped through the wall into the hall beyond. Only one of the black-clad security guards stationed outside the door remained; the other had run to the end of the hall, jammed the elevator doors open, and was now attempting to hold the stairwell door shut.

  “We need backup!” he shouted into the microphone clipped to his shoul
der.

  A device on his belt crackled, and then came a torrent of words, all chopped and garbled by static. Multiple people spoke over each other, voices tense, shouting.

  “—on the fifth—”

  “—seven through nine, repeat we have—”

  “—can’t hold!”

  As Shai listened, wide-eyed, one word stood out: intruders. She froze, remembering the last time intruders had walked Edren’s halls. Remembering the metallic smell of blood, the red sprays on the wallpaper—

  The clashing blades, a man falling to the floor—

  And Lorn screaming her name as he attempted to defend his father’s body. Shai shook herself, struggling to push the memories aside.

  Quickly now, she told herself. No matter what her fear said, she’d faced worse than a few armed thugs. Taking a deep breath, Shai let herself fall through the floor.

  On the floor below, she arrived just in time to watch a pair of heavily armed intruders take out an Edren security guard—and not with the blades or projectile weapons they carried, but a spell. The speed was shocking. One moment, the guard had the intruders in his sights, demanding that they lay down their weapons. A whip-like flash of light, and the guard’s eyes rolled back in his head. He crumpled to the floor, boneless.

  An intruder kicked the guard’s battered gun across the floor and kept walking.

  “Seventh floor,” the intruder said, her voice clipped. “All clear.” No radio; a spark of a message spell leapt from her lips.

  On the sixth floor, and the fifth, Shai found more of the same: Edren guards no more than huddled lumps on the floor, sprawled in doorways or pushed against the baseboards, their radios crackling unanswered. Most were not wounded—at least nothing worse than a bloody nose or a messy cut. They were still breathing.

  Despite the sudden outcry, the intruders had done much of their work in silence. Where Shai expected to find fights or tense standoffs, there were only intruders, fallen guards, and Edren citizens huddled behind closed doors.

  The intruders themselves wore mismatched clothing, protective vests and jackets or sometimes dark T-shirts that displayed muscled arms and the hard expanses of their chests. No insignia that she could see—not Rown’s or Orren’s or anyone else’s. Their weapons were an odd collection of knives, projectile weapons, and short, hard clubs—chosen, it seemed, entirely by preference.