Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Despite its slender shape, the Spire was huge almost beyond imagining. But then, so was the living Lower City. In memory, she saw it: the Lower City stretched beneath her, all those broken structures—and the expanse of shadow beneath. She had felt how deep into the earth that power spread; far deeper than the Lower City was wide.

  Again Xhea thought, Why would the Spire want to destroy the living Lower City? She smiled, the expression thin and tense, and did not open her eyes.

  For seeing it there, that huge creature of living dark magic, she had realized: it was a threat. The Lower City was the only magical entity, bright or dark, large enough to rival the Spire’s power.

  And if the Lower City might rival that power, might it not best it?

  Alive, the Lower City was a threat to not only the Spire, but the whole of the City above, all of the Towers. No wonder they wanted it dead.

  And the Spire itself? It would have to kill another living magical entity, one that had offered no threat but that of its existence. What does it think?

  Xhea stared into the brilliant light above her as if written in those patterns she might see evidence of the Spire’s empathy, or meaning, or regret; but there was only magic, only light. No matter how far she looked, or how hard, she could not see the Spire’s heart.

  Xhea was still frowning over that absence when sleep came to claim her, dragging her down into darkness.

  Night was falling.

  Slipping through Allenai’s exterior wall, Shai was startled to find that the sun was but a brilliant sliver on the horizon, the hazy sky lit orange and red. Closer, everything was falling into shade and shadow, and heavy clouds in the east threatened rain.

  Hours had passed since she’d spoken with her mother; hours upon hours lost to her seemingly brief communion with Allenai’s living heart. Longer than she would have thought possible.

  The spell generators. She had thought she’d have hours to create the spell that would enable her to transport them to the refugees in the ruins; hours, too, to help set them up and prepare for nightfall. No hope of that now.

  Even so, with a spark of magic sent to Allenai in farewell, Shai fell toward Farrow. The wind did not touch her; and the Towers’ nighttime defenses, as they came to life around her, let her pass unhindered.

  As she descended, she looked at the Lower City cast in the sun’s ember glow. The shadows of the skyscrapers were stretched long and dark across the broken ground. Any other day, this was when the Lower City dwellers would be returning to their homes and barring their doors. Yet even from so high, she could tell that there were people in the streets—and not just those from the poorer Towers.

  Shai slowed her descent as she tried to understand what was happening. Watching as people stumbled from their homes—watching them fight and shout and hurl rocks at the buildings in which they’d lived. No, she realized; not at the buildings, but the people who had stolen them.

  They’re being evicted, Shai realized in horror. For all that she saw fights and struggles, the flash of blade and spell alike, it was clear: the people of the poorer Towers now controlled the Lower City.

  Not everyone had surrendered to the Towers, or gone willingly. There were bodies lying in the streets, seemingly whole and uninjured; the spelled weapons from the City above made death so much cleaner.

  Shai landed feather-light on Farrow’s gravel rooftop, and looked at the spell generators in dismay. One thing at a time. She tried to block out all else, focusing on one of the generators. But she had no clever thoughts now, no rush of image and emotion to help her shape her power; her fear was a cold, sick weight in the base of her stomach.

  Every time she blinked, she saw those bodies lying unmoving.

  See the spell, she told herself instead, trying to draw upon her magic lessons as a child. What had her teacher told her? Understand the shape of the spell you’re creating before you call forth the first spark. That was, after all, how everyone else wove magic.

  As her breath fell into a calming rhythm, she closed her eyes and imagined them: the spell anchors, solid and true; the lines of intent, which captured the spell’s meaning whole; and the many spell lines, which would weave together to execute that intent.

  Lift. Stabilize. Transport. It was, she realized, like an elevator’s propulsion spell wrought in miniature.

  Yet Shai had only begun to weave the spell anchors when there came a loud, low thud from nearby. Shai jumped, her head jerking up and her spell scattering as she spun toward the source of the noise.

  There. One of the shorter buildings visible in Orren’s territory was now surrounded by a billowing cloud of dust, and even from so far distant she heard debris hitting the ground. She heard screaming.

  She moved to the edge of Farrow’s rooftop, watching as another detonation blew out part of the building’s wall. A moment, then the building crumbled in on itself and collapsed—only to have the falling pieces caught by a spell. Sparking bright, the spell sorted the rubble, pulling metal rebar, pipes, and wiring to a shipping container and casting the rest aside.

  Shai stared, aghast—then forced her gaze back to the generators. Xhea’s plan was good, but not one that Shai could execute on her own. At least not in time to save those who were even now hiding in what scant protection the ruins could offer.

  Out in the ruins beyond, fires glowed. Some were small, hidden lights—the kind of fire that might be quickly extinguished. Others blazed high and bright, as if to defy the darkness and the dangers it held. But night was falling; the walkers would arrive soon.

  She needed another plan, quickly.

  Perhaps she could create a simple version of the spell the generators emitted, which she could use to create a shelter. But her spells woven on instinct were inefficient; she would use too much magic, exhaust herself—and Xhea, too, as she drew on the girl’s power—long before dawn.

  What they needed now was not magic, but real, strong walls.

  Shai’s eyes went wide. The warehouse.

  When she had first come to the Lower City, that first day in Xhea’s company they had visited the warehouse of one of Xhea’s contacts: a City man, Wen, who bought and sold artifacts from the city that had come before—or had in life. His son, Brend, had attempted to manage the business since Wen’s death, though his father’s ghost had lingered in the warehouse.

  Yet it was the warehouse itself that caught her attention, not its contents. The building itself was something found nowhere else in the ruins: a new structure, large enough that it might house hundreds. But the refugees would never find it; spells hid the building and subtly warned the curious away.

  Abandoning the generators, Shai fled toward the ruins and tried not to listen as another detonation echoed through the streets. Another Lower City structure crumbled in her wake.

  In the once-deserted streets surrounding the warehouse, much was as Shai had imagined: people huddled behind makeshift barricades or inside fallen structures, weapons raised in readiness. No walkers yet, not while the sun’s light cast the streets in bloody red and shadow—but they would already be waking. Soon they would rise.

  Shai wanted to help the family she saw in a nearby hulk of a building. Small children cowered in the far corner, their parents and two eldest siblings standing over them with bleak, scared faces and knives in their hands.

  She wanted to help the people she saw but a block beyond—a larger group that stood not behind walls but in the middle of the street in a great ring, a roaring bonfire at their backs and a stacked-high pile of rubble before them.

  She wanted—

  But no. Instead she slipped through the wall of the warehouse into the captured daylight beyond. She gasped at the mess within.

  At first Shai thought that refugees must have found their way inside and trashed the artifacts, searching for anything valuable. Instead of the rows of shelves that she remembered, their contents stacked and neatly labeled, there was chaos. Shelves emptied, artifacts cast to the ground; shelves pushed askew o
r even tipped. Against the far wall, a shelf leaned drunkenly, spilling dozens of small objects across the ground: spools and wires and small wooden boxes, batteries and shining discs and things she could not name.

  Nor was the warehouse silent. Near its center she heard sounds: rustling and thumping, a scrape as something was pushed across the floor.

  “Wen?” Shai called softly as she moved toward the noise. “Where are you?”

  A pause, then, “Here,” came the reply, his voice as quiet as hers.

  The old man’s ghost was sitting at the wide wooden table in the building’s center, half-moon glasses perched on his nose like an afterthought. A few small artifacts were spread across the table before him, but they did not hold his attention; he looked only at the man who moved through the shelves nearby.

  “What is he…?” Shai’s voice trailed away as she watched the man sort through the shelves’ contents with frantic haste. She recognized him, though she’d only seen him once before: Brend, Wen’s son.

  Like those outside, Brend looked as though he had not slept in days. His hair was a tousled mess, his eyes heavily shadowed; and the rumpled and dust-smudged appearance of his clothes was in sharp contrast to their cut and style. Still he worked, digging through the artifacts, placing some objects into the box at his feet and casting others aside.

  Shai watched in perplexed silence.

  “Xhea’s friend. The Radiant.” Wen nodded at Shai, recognizing her glow if not her face. He turned back to his son. “Night is falling,” he said, as if in explanation.

  “Yes,” Shai said in slow agreement.

  “He was moving slower before, taking more care, even wrapping the artifacts for transport. Now he just says that over and over. ‘Night is falling.’”

  Wen had not been beyond the warehouse walls, Shai realized; his tether would not let him pass so far. He did not know what was happening in the world beyond.

  So she told him, in spare, stark words, what awaited the Lower City when tomorrow dawned. Told him too of the people outside these walls, and the walkers that would come when darkness fell.

  For a long moment, Wen was silent. “I think,” he said at last, “that he wants to let them in.”

  Watching Brend, Shai couldn’t help but agree—and felt no little relief at the realization. She would not have to find a way to tell him what had to be done, or struggle to pull away the shielding spells and open the doors to those outside. Brend was here, flesh and blood, and could do such tasks without difficulty.

  Except, she couldn’t help but wonder: “How did he know?”

  For she’d seen the City above—or at least she’d seen Allenai, where people strolled about their business as if this were any other day. There had been no announcement of the Spire’s intent; no need for such an announcement to be made. Yet here he was, packing.

  And she remembered: Brend, like his father, was a citizen of Eridian—or had been. Eridian was no more; since the takeover, he would have become an Allenai citizen. Had her mother spread the word, requested help? Had Allenai itself?

  Shai pushed such thoughts aside.

  “He can’t save everything,” Wen said. “I don’t know why he’s trying.” But his voice betrayed something else beneath the words.

  “Why do you think he’s trying?” Shai asked softly.

  There was a pause, punctuated only by the sound of Brend grabbing another artifact and trying to make room for it in the already full box.

  There were so many possible answers, Shai knew. This warehouse had been a key part of Wen’s business, and was now Brend’s; it was, if not the whole of his livelihood, then at least part. Pride was another answer; or perhaps this was just an attempt to make what he could from these resources before they were destroyed or used or taken. The actions of the poorer Towers on a smaller scale.

  Because Shai remembered what Xhea had said about Brend—what Wen hadn’t said in words. What she saw written in Wen’s face now, as he watched his son attempt to pack that box.

  Brend had never loved the warehouse. He had never loved this work—not the artifacts or the people he had to deal with to acquire them, Xhea not least among them. He had only a fraction of his father’s eye for value, and little of Wen’s head for business. Yet he had kept this place and its contacts—had continued doing the work, though he struggled and swore and only slowly improved—and for what?

  “For me.” Wen took off his glasses. The old man was not crying, Shai saw, but it seemed that was only a matter of will. “He’s trying for me.”

  Trying to save what was left of his father’s legacy.

  No, Shai realized, her imagined breath catching in her throat. Trying to save what’s left of his father.

  It was a goal she understood all too well, despite the difference in their circumstances. There was no way to bring life back to the dead. Brend could no more see or speak to his father than Shai could to hers; they were gone, each in their own way, their haunting of flesh and spirit a reminder of what had been lost.

  Yet Brend knew, too, that his father lingered here. Xhea had conveyed messages between them; she had, time and again, reminded Brend that Wen was here, watching—bound not to a person, but a place.

  Brend lifted another item and looked around, trying to find a box not already filled to overflowing. Trying to find a place to put the item he held now in his shaking hands—whatever it was. But for all the distress evident in his fingers’ rough trembling, it was his face that made Shai go still.

  He was weeping. Not in the way that Shai had seen her own father weep, and then only rarely. Not the way that men were told to weep: tears choked back, forced down, suppressed with anger and will and a facade of indifference. Instead, tears flowed down his cheeks freely and dripped from his stubbled chin; his breath caught in his throat. He brushed those tears away almost absently, only trying to see past them that he might finish his work.

  His father’s work.

  Yet it was work that would know no end—not if he were to open the doors and let the refugees inside.

  It seemed Brend’s thoughts followed a similar path, for at last he drew a long, shuddering breath and stopped moving. He looked down at the metal thing in his hands, its surface pitted with rust and water stains, the plastic of its electrical cord cracked with age; then slowly lowered it to the ground.

  “There’s too much,” Brend whispered—speaking, it seemed, to the warehouse around him, empty but for the artifacts and the two ghosts who hung now on his quiet, defeated words. “Too much for days, never mind hours.”

  “I didn’t tell him…” Wen said. “I never asked…”

  He looked away—looked to Shai. “The dead don’t get choices anymore, do we? All our choices have been made, all our days are in the past. We only get to linger, and watch as everything we built begins to crumble.”

  Xhea should be here. Clumsy as Xhea was with matters of life and death—matters, truly, of emotion—she knew Wen far better than Shai did. Perhaps she would know what to say.

  Shai’s hand reached out as if of its own accord. Her fingers touched Wen’s shoulder, and—when he did not draw away—rested there in comfort.

  “We still get choices,” Shai said. “There is always a choice. Even here. Even now.”

  Hadn’t she struggled with similar thoughts? The weight of hopelessness, sorrow, and regret; thinking that there was nothing she could do, no matter what she tried. Yet she, unlike Wen, had power.

  Wen did not shrug off her hand, yet neither did he acknowledge her words; he only turned away, bowing his head. A long moment passed, then he stood from his chair and walked toward his son and the mess that surrounded him.

  “Is this why I stayed, then?” Wen asked softly. “For the knowledge that nothing truly lasts forever? Because I knew that. I knew that nothing I built would last much beyond the span of my days. And yet I had the hope…” He shook his head. “Foolish hope.”

  Before him, Brend closed the box and carried it to a pile of oth
er boxes seemingly packed with similar haste. Carefully, he wove a spell, and in its twisted strands Shai could see simple commands: lift, carry, hide. One by one, the boxes rose and moved in a neat line up to the warehouse’s second level.

  Shai asked, “Why did you stay? If not for this, then why?”

  Wen looked around, his tired gaze scanning the shelves and the artifacts, the table and the mess and the daylight spell that lit them all.

  “In the hope that something would last. Memory, perhaps, or hope of recollection.” Again he shook his head in slow denial. “Do you know how long the city that came before stood? Or the civilizations that came before it? Because the things I found in the ruins—the things brought to me, the things I saved and protected—told far more than our scant histories ever did. So many people. So many lives we can barely even imagine. I could not bring them back, but I’d hoped…

  “Time takes away so much. No,” he said then, his voice turning angry. “Time takes away everything.”

  “Yes,” Shai said, because it was true. She suddenly felt like she could breathe again. “It does. All of this will be gone one day. Your warehouse and the artifacts. The Lower City and the Towers and the Central Spire. Gone like the city that came before is gone. Only dust and ash and ruin, and then not even that. Gone, even, from memory.

  “And yet we’re here.”

  Wen looked at her, startled. Her words, it seemed, were not the comfort he had expected—nor the confirmation, perhaps, that he’d sought. Because for all that she agreed, Shai’s voice held none of his despair.

  “Wen.” Shai moved to stand before him, not as a young girl to an aged companion—not even, truth be told, as a friend. Only as a ghost: a creature of memory and magic, will and hope and regret. She lifted her incorporeal hands to his shoulders and stared into the watery expanse of his old, tired eyes. “Tell me. Why did you stay?”