“There won’t be anything left,” Shai whispered at last.
Nothing for the Spire to destroy; nothing for them to save.
From the Lower City’s far side came the low thump of an explosion, then the roar of a building falling. It echoed through the city streets like thunder, deafening; the buildings around her trembled with the impact. A moment, then a great cloud of dust bloomed above Senn’s territory.
They can’t do this. Xhea realized that she was gritting her teeth so hard that her jaw ached, and her hand was wrapped into a white-knuckled fist around the top of her cane. They can’t do this, she thought, but demonstrably she was wrong. There came another low thump that felt like a punch to her gut, another cloud of dust rising, and somewhere in the Lower City another building fell.
Too late, she thought; Too slow—
But already she was running, or trying to, forcing her tired leg to hold her as she rushed down the rock-strewn street toward the burned-out market, and the dark magic heart that lived beneath it.
The streets were deserted. Doors stood wide, and windows were thrown open, unbarred, unshuttered. Laundry hung from snapped lines, the precious clothing dangling into the alleys below.
Behind her, Shai wove another elevator spell—but slowly, so slowly, and Xhea couldn’t stand to wait. She walked and with every jarring step she grew angrier. No words to shape that anger, nor the need to speak it; it only swelled within her, and her magic tried to rise on that tide.
The binding felt like wire bands dug deep into her flesh, cutting into her, making her bleed; it constricted her every breath, the beat of her heart, the movement of her limbs. And despite its cracks and the thin wisps of magic that escaped, it held.
Xhea stumbled from the pain, gasping, and caught herself with her cane. She grabbed the wall of a nearby building, pushing herself up, scraping her palm bloody against the rough brick. Her magic pushed against its bonds, writhing and fighting, and the spell did not yield. She wept with the pain, with the rage, and staggered onward.
Some part of Rown’s territory still stood; these streets with their low buildings and reclaimed shops had never been the most prosperous. There was more damage as she moved toward Senn’s territory—broken Senn, burned Senn, its one-time riches in ashes across the ground.
Senn itself remained standing, its smoke-stained sides whole—but the rest? Xhea turned a corner and found a whole stretch of Senn’s territory just… gone. It might have been a bomb site. Only piles of rubble remained.
And Edren? She could not see the ancient hotel from where she stood, or Edren’s arena; she could not see any part of their territory. And Orren? From that direction, she heard shouts and laughter and the sound of something grinding, stone on stone.
The market, she thought. Just get to the market. If she could reach Farrow—if she could touch its living sides, all that twining black—she could speak to the Lower City. She could make it understand. There was still time, she could—
Another explosion rocked the streets, echoes reverberating, and a cloud of dust rushed skyward from Orren’s territory. The sound rang in Xhea’s ears. The buildings around her trembled, shaking free small pieces of stone and brick and concrete that smashed on the ground. Xhea made a sound, low and pained—she brushed the tears from her cheeks, angrily, messily—and kept walking.
“Almost got it,” Shai said, holding aloft her new elevator spell—but she, too, wept. Her ghostly fingers slipped and fumbled with the spell lines.
Just get to the market.
“People in the street!” came a call from nearby. Xhea stopped and stood swaying, shivering, looking around as she attempted to pinpoint the speaker.
A sentry.
Another voice called in reply.
She followed the sound, and there they were: sentries on the rooftops and balconies of the nearby buildings.
The bridges that had once spanned from roof to roof had been cut away. The laundry lines and prayer flags were likewise gone, cut or left to hang, limp and dirty, from broken railings. She thought she saw a body, too, in one of those alleys, limp and unresponsive. She did not look closer.
Xhea looked from one sentry to another, watching their weapons rise. They held this territory safe not from the Lower City dwellers anymore, she realized, nor from any fear of the walkers, but from each other.
Shai abruptly cut her light, dulling her natural radiance to a faint glow. But they had already been spotted.
“This is claimed territory!” called one. “By right of Tower Helta, I order you to turn around.”
By right of Tower Helta? Xhea’s magic strained against its bonds. This is my home.
Other sentries took up the call, repeating the threat even if they could not see her, a small girl in the middle of the empty street. They named other Towers in other voices: Lozan, Elemere, Jhen, Tolair. The names meant nothing to her; she blocked them out.
Xhea said only, “Shai?” Her voice strained and quiet.
“Ready.” The elevator spell bloomed.
Xhea did not see who fired upon her, or only fell, screaming, to the street. The elevator strands wrapped around her, bright, glittering—and repelled the spells that attempted to surround her. The air burned, smelling sharp and metallic like the wake of a lightning strike.
Shai’s elevator enclosed her and lifted her up. But it wasn’t just an elevator anymore, and at last Xhea understood Shai’s delay: it was elevator and shield both.
“Are you hurt?” Shai was saying from outside that bubble. “Xhea, talk to me!”
Xhea licked her lip, tasting blood. “I’m okay,” she managed, and tried to send reassurance down their link. But all she felt was anger—anger and fear, one twisting into the other until she did not know which made her hands shake or her breathing shudder in her chest; did not know which bid her magic to rise. Thin streamers of black lifted now from her skin, and for all that they were faint and weak, they sizzled against the bright ribbons of the spell around her.
Another shot hit the exterior of that spell with a sharp crack, and Xhea shuddered from the impact.
“I should have done them separately,” Shai was saying in distress, not seeming to realize that she was speaking aloud. “I should have—”
“Shai, hurry,” Xhea said, and Shai pushed the spell forward.
They skimmed across the broken streets, through the rain-wet rubble and damaged buildings.
The market, Xhea thought again, the words a mantra. Just get to the market. As if once she reached the ring of burned structures—as if once she stood in Farrow’s shadow—everything else would stop. No buildings falling around her, no loss of everything she had ever known—no attack coming on the heels of dawn’s light.
No one shooting at her in the blighted streets of her own home.
Get to Farrow, she thought, as if those words could drown out the others that echoed through her mind, their chorus deafening: Too late, too late, too late.
In the distance, she saw glimpses of Edren and Orren: the peak of dark Orren, its broken crown of girders stabbing upward; and, briefly, the top few floors of Edren, the former hotel.
Each had been, if not her home, then her one-time shelter. Memories crowded within those walls, good and bad and in-between. Her stomach twisted as she saw spells covering both structures—spells that glittered across their façades like stars pulled from the darkened sky, faint lines between those bright points like the markings of constellations.
They stood, but not for long.
Then the market was before her, a stretching wasteland of burned-out black. The elevator slowed.
Nothing new there; even the ghosts had fled this place. No sign of sentries—no sign, even, of the poorer Towers’ presence. There was only Farrow. Xhea imagined that whatever resources of value might pulled from Farrow’s walls would be mitigated by the cost of drilling through the Lower City’s twining embrace—and the effects of the dark magic that infused those vines.
Even so, she felt
exposed as they crossed that open stretch. At last Shai set her down at Farrow’s base and allowed the modified spell to disperse. A moment, then another flared above Xhea—brighter, stronger, and infinitely simpler. A shielding spell, like the one Shai had used to protect the market.
“I’ll watch over you,” Shai said. She shone, her eyes fierce and angry for all their tears, and Xhea had the sudden feeling that everything could fall—Farrow and the market, the whole of the Lower City—before Shai let anything cross that barrier.
Xhea reached for Farrow.
Beneath her fingers, the smooth, black surface of Farrow’s side vibrated. She could hear the living Lower City’s song if she listened—it shivered in the air around her—and yet it was so hard to let herself fall into its rhythms. Her heart was too loud, her breathing too ragged; she leaned forward, resting her head against those black vines, and conjured calm.
Steady, she told herself. Focus.
It hurt to call her magic. She’d thought of her power as a cold, dark lake, as a smooth, hard stone—yet those images were wrong. A lake could not be bound by chains of power; a stone could not bleed. And she felt as if she were bleeding; the ribbons of power that slipped through the cracks felt not so much like magic escaping, but some part of her draining away.
Still she called upon that power, drawing it up past the pain and sending it into the dark structure that held Farrow aloft. Into the living Lower City.
I’m here, she whispered. Hear me.
Her thin stream of magic flowed into the entity below and all around her. The Lower City’s song was louder now, clearer, seeming to echo not from the air but from the corners of her mind, surging through her like a second heartbeat.
Hear me, she said, but it did not. There was only that song, echoing on and on.
Xhea pulled harder on her magic, fighting the bindings. She needed more magic, stronger magic. If she couldn’t even get the living Lower City to hear her, she had no chance of telling it what she’d learned—no chance of making it understand.
The effort made her gasp, the pain of the bindings twisting inside her as if the spell was a blade, seeking her heart. But her power rose—darker, blacker, as if it had been stained by her blood—and she poured it into the living Lower City.
Once she had been oblivious to the Lower City’s song, no matter that it had surrounded her, waking and asleep; now she tried to clear all else from her mind, as if the whole world had been reduced to that sound. No pavement below her, no cool, damp air; no sound of buildings falling, one after the other, to the broken ground.
Please, Xhea said. You have to listen. Can you hear me?
But that song, she realized, had changed. Where once it had seemed slow and constant, its rise and fall speaking of sleep and stability and the slow turn of seasons, it was now quick and hard and faltering. Again there came the sound of an explosion, a hard clap like thunder directly overhead, and again the Lower City’s song rose, the sound low and aching. Almost a groan.
It’s hurting, she realized. She remembered its pain when Farrow had been torn from the ground; remembered, too, the pain of the market fire and the line that Rown’s weapon had scored across its living heart. No weapon had been turned upon it yet—not directly—but it hurt nonetheless.
The living Lower City was part of these buildings. Its magic and awareness filled each structure in the Lower City core, each skyscraper and warehouse, each apartment and shopping complex and stretch of broken ground.
Now they were falling. One by one they were falling, and the entity felt each loss the way she might feel the loss of a finger or a toe, her hair ripped out by its roots. If those wounds, those losses, were not enough to kill it, they were nonetheless enough to fill almost the whole of its awareness.
Yet at last, Xhea felt a shiver of recognition. Some small part of the living Lower City’s attention turned toward her, and it heard in her magic what she felt—the shock and horror of seeing the rubble that had been Rown, the helpless pain of watching the buildings fall. It song swelled in acknowledgment.
Listen, Xhea said, you have to listen—
But somewhere, a bright magic spell was tearing a structure apart, brick from brick, walls from foundation, and the living Lower City turned away.
There was a sound; Xhea opened her eyes to see that the black vines beside her hand had once again parted and a small space waited just beyond. She took a deep breath. The Lower City could protect her, she knew—it could draw her down into the underground as surely as it had opened that passage for her to rise to Farrow, no matter how weak her magic.
And, weak, she needed to go closer. She needed to be there, right by its living heart, if she was to have any chance of convincing it to fight back. It, too, wanted her there—for the comfort of her presence, it seemed, as everything fell apart.
She turned to Shai, and she did not have to speak. The ghost only looked at her, and said, “No.” No discussion, no opportunity for rebuttal: only that flat, hard denial.
“No?” Xhea shook her head. “What do you mean, no?”
Shai shook her head, the magic of her shield a shimmering veil between them. “I mean we’re too late, Xhea. Too slow. There’s no way we can stop them anymore.”
Xhea glanced up past the shielding spell, only just realizing that her attempt at communication may have taken more than the bare minute it had felt. Above, the sky was not black anymore, not darkest gray, but a pale shade that spoke of dawn’s approach. Towerlight still shimmered, countless shades of gray that mixed and clashed and faded one into the other. Towers rose and Towers fell, and the City spun on, oblivious.
It was the power between those Towers that Xhea sought—power so faint that even she struggled to see its presence. All those wisps of dark magic swirling toward the Central Spire, that spinning vortex. She turned, and there was the column of black falling from the Spire’s lowermost point, a great waterfall of magic that cascaded down and blanketed them all.
There’s still time, Xhea thought. Time to send it back, time to make them pay. She raised a defiant hand, meaning to show Shai—
But even as she watched, those faint streamers of power thinned; the vortex slowed. And that column of power—the one that, over and over, she had imagined surging back into the City in a huge, powerful blast—trickled slowly, slowly, to nothing.
Around her, the scavenging Towers did their work, taking the Lower City apart piece by piece and claiming the poor treasures found within. The buildings were crushed, they crumbled and fell, and the living Lower City cried out, its song one of pain and loss.
If that song had words, it would only be the one that Shai had spoken; the one that echoed even now through Xhea’s heart: No. No, no, no.
Even so, she said, “We have to save it.”
“Xhea, no.” Shai pushed the shield wide and reached for her, struggling to hold Xhea’s shoulders, to draw Xhea toward her. “We have to go. There’s nothing left to save!”
“You’re wrong,” Xhea said, because it was here, it was right here. The Lower City was the ground beneath her feet, it was the buildings as they were falling. It was singing and singing and she was not going to let it die. Not now. Not after everything.
But dawn was coming.
Xhea looked over Shai’s shoulder at the Spire and she could see no change—no new surge of magic, no sign of a spell building—and yet she did not know what to look for. Three days, they had said; they had to have meant three full days. Surely the Spire would not attack until sunset.
She did not know. Oh, she did not know.
“I have to get closer,” she said instead, glancing back to that small space opened within Farrow’s supporting vines. “It’ll hear me then. I have to go toward its heart.”
Even the thought of it drew her: all that dark power, magic incarnate. She remembered its pull urging her forward without thought or reason; remembered its welcome, that comforting darkness.
“It will kill you,” Shai said. She was not wron
g. “And for what?”
“Because,” Xhea said—and her words vanished.
“Because,” she tried again, and struggled, fighting to give shape to what she felt. If she screamed and screamed, perhaps that would express some small part of what burned inside her, the rage and the hurt and the injustice of it all. She took those feelings and made to wrap them in magic and push them down the tether to Shai, raw and fierce and true.
But no. Even Shai did not need that from her, no matter its truth.
“Because no one else will,” she said instead. “Not now, not ever. This.” Xhea pointed to the destruction around them. “This is what they do. They kill and they wound and they maim. They tear away people’s souls and think it just. They bind people to their walls for their power, their luxury, and think that the pain of a few is sufficient coin to buy the happiness of the many.”
They. Did she mean the Central Spire, the Towers—the whole of the City above? All of them, none of them.
“How long, Shai?” Xhea whispered, her voice breaking. Her heart breaking. “How long have they been doing this?” The city that had come before was in ruins; its ancient bones were even now falling. A hundred years. A thousand. An age of life and death, and beneath it all, this misery.
“How long will we let them continue?”
“We cannot stop them,” Shai said. “Not the whole of the City.” She said it as if the City were the whole of the world, the whole of everything—and maybe she was right.
“No,” Xhea said. “But we could try.”
She met Shai’s eyes, and just… looked at her. She had such perfect eyes, pale silver to her vision, and brimming now with tears. She was, Xhea thought, the most beautiful person she’d ever known.
See me, Xhea thought. If anyone could see her and understand her tangled truths, it was Shai. Her truest and unlikeliest of friends. The light to her dark. The missing piece of her hurt and broken heart.
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