Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  It hurt—and Shai knew pain. She remembered it, though she tried not to: the agony of her slow death. The pain that no spell, no drug, could wholly mask. This pain was the same, a pain that slipped beneath her consciousness like a knife; it cut out sound, sight, thought.

  She did not have enough power to fill Xhea’s need, but the tether pulled and pulled and pulled nonetheless.

  “Xhea,” Shai whispered. The name left her lips like a whimper. “Xhea, please…”

  She did not know whether she spoke the words or sent them down the tether with her magic, and perhaps it did not matter: there was no reply. No hint, even, that Xhea remembered her existence. There was only that relentless pull.

  A pull on her magic—and on something else. For Shai reached out, her hand stretching toward the dark heart, and realized that her fingertips had grown transparent.

  She knew, then, what was happening; she understood the cause for her pain. She didn’t have enough magic to keep Xhea alive, and so Xhea drew on Shai’s spirit instead.

  Shai had seen the ghost Ieren devoured; now she understood that spirit’s pain and his rage. His helplessness. For there was nothing that she could do to stop that inexorable pull that was tearing her apart and consuming her in pieces.

  But it wasn’t true, was it? For she, unlike that ghost—unlike the other ghosts that Xhea had seen bound to dark magic children—she had the power to make a choice.

  Cut the tether, Shai thought.

  She could not. No—she would not. It was the only way she might save herself, but would doom Xhea in an instant. Xhea would burn. So much dark magic and nothing to protect her from its power? She would be smoke and ash without time to cry out.

  Shai cried out in her stead. She wept. She whimpered. She had died once; now she was dying again, and for all the slow pain and horror of that first death, this one was infinitely worse.

  And still she stood.

  Xhea had, in asking for Shai’s help, accepted her own death; Shai, too, had allowed her to make that choice. She had understood some small fraction of what her friend was asking of her. Now she understood the rest, even if Xhea did not.

  Her own unmaking.

  Was it too great a price to pay? In that moment, it felt that way.

  Yet Shai thought of the refugees in the ruins, the children sheltering in the warehouse. Lorn and Emara and Mercks, Torrence and Daye, Edren’s useless councilors—all the people she had met here on the ground. All the people she had never met, all the names she’d never learn. Surely, they deserved a chance to live—a chance to survive.

  One life—one person’s pain and suffering—traded for the lives of so many. Was it worth it?

  Once she had said no—she had rejected that life and path and pain. A Radiant bound to a Tower, perpetually dying; it had seemed the worst thing she could imagine.

  Now she was being unmade entirely. She tried to see her hands, and could not; glanced down through her tears and saw no feet anymore, no calves, no knees. She would have screamed for the pain had she any voice left—and still she stood. For them. For Xhea. Because she was the only one who could.

  Her choice. Xhea’s choice.

  Perhaps it was the same in the end.

  Shai stood, weeping, unraveling into nothingness, as the Lower City crumbled around her.

  A tunnel collapsed. There came a rush of soil and stone, a cloud of choking dust that washed through her—or through what was left of her. All went suddenly dark and Shai did not know if it was because the hall in which she stood had collapsed, or her magic had been extinguished, or she had been struck blind.

  Xhea…

  No words left. No hope.

  She could not see, could not scream. She could not feel anything anymore, not even pain.

  All that was left was darkness.

  Dust.

  Dust in her mouth, dust gritty in her eyes; the smell of dust in her nose.

  Slowly Xhea raised her head and blinked, tears washing away the grit. She coughed. Tried to spit and choked instead.

  Everything hurt.

  It took a moment to get her arms under her; her muscles ached and trembled and slipped across the dust-coated tile. A moment more, then she pushed, slowly rolling herself over. She just lay there, staring at the ceiling.

  Or, rather, where the ceiling had been. Above her was only a span of dirty plumbing pipe and structural girders, the ceiling having fallen entirely.

  Well, Xhea thought, dazed, that explains the dust.

  Again she coughed and tried to force herself toward sitting. Her hands shook, and her breathing was thin and ragged; her heart pounded too hard in her chest, trying to beat its way into oblivion. But it was her skin that hurt the most, as if the flesh of her whole body were raw and burned, sensitized to every touch, every movement.

  The magic. She did not know where the thought came from; did not understand what it meant. Yet she looked down and saw dark magic clinging to her hand. Dark magic rose from her in wisps and tatters like early morning fog.

  And behind her—

  No, she would not look. Something in her quailed at the thought, making her shudder and whimper.

  She could not stand, and so Xhea dragged herself forward with her arms, scraping her tender body across the gritty, dust-coated ground. Suddenly she could breathe again. She pulled herself forward once more, leaving a trail in the dirt. Again. Again. At last she let herself collapse, sagging back to the tile and resting her trembling arms.

  It was an effort to keep her eyes open.

  But there was something, something…

  “Shai?” Her voice was a raw croak. Xhea coughed, choked, spat dust and tried again. Louder this time: “Shai?”

  No reply. The tether was still there, bound to her sternum—weaker, somehow, and thinner, but undeniably present. She reached for the tether—and touched flesh. Tender, aching flesh—her own.

  Xhea looked down in confusion.

  She had been wearing her too-large jacket with its many pockets, and a thin shirt beneath. The pants she’d gotten in Orren: dark and strong with pockets down both legs. Now she wore only rags and tatters. What fabric remained was thin and ashy and shredded at her touch.

  She raised her hand, and only then realized that, as she moved, her hair was silent. No braids there amongst the tangled dark; no coins and charms bound into its length. It was all gone—lank and unbound, the strands’ natural volume was weighted down by sweat and dust.

  The heart, she thought, and looked behind her.

  The Lower City’s living heart flared, a swirling mass of black. Just looking at it hurt her eyes; hurt, she realized, her skin. Every wisp of dark power that washed over her felt like sandpaper across her tender, scalded flesh.

  She remembered walking into it—remembered being lost to it, mind and magic and body alike. She remembered dying.

  Yet she was here.

  Again the magic pushed her: Go, it seemed to say, urging her onward. Go.

  She flinched from that touch, but tried to comply. It had, she realized, saved her—drawn back and deposited her on the floor, outside its flaring boundaries.

  It understood death now, and it did not want her to die.

  I’ve never been terribly big on the idea myself.

  But there was no safety in its dark nimbus. She turned and dragged herself farther down the hall, until her outstretched hands encountered something hard. Not debris—something long and twisted, buried in the dust of the ceiling’s collapse. Xhea reached for it, drew it forth. Her cane.

  She wanted to laugh, but could not remember how. Wanted to stand, and did not have the strength. So she only pulled herself, body length by body length, all the way to the hall’s end.

  It was so quiet. She could hear the Lower City’s heart; and yet its song was like an echo of her heartbeat, its rise and fall like the rhythms of her breath. Constant, comforting—and a sound her conscious mind need not heed.

  Xhea did not let herself think about what that imp
lied.

  There were sounds, too, of debris falling, of walls cracked and crumbling, of rocks hitting the ground like hail. But no voices. Not so much as a whisper of the one voice she needed to hear.

  “Shai? Where are you?”

  Her aching eyes followed the tether to its end.

  Xhea stared for a long moment, uncomprehending. Shai hung in midair, seemingly unconscious. Or, at least, what was left of her.

  Her arms had vanished to above the elbow, her legs to above the knee. Those limbs did not end bluntly, only faded to nothing. The rest of her seemed whole, but not untouched; for when Xhea looked at her, she realized that she could see through her to the broken hall beyond. There was no sign of her Radiant glow—not so much as a glint or a flicker of that light.

  Shai’s eyes were closed, her lips slack and unmoving, her pale hair hanging limp about her face and shoulders. There was no pain written in Shai’s expression. It should have been a relief, and was not; for neither was there hope or joy or sorrow. No sign, in those familiar, beloved features, of awareness at all.

  Xhea made a sound that was too low, too pained to be a cry, and dragged herself to her friend’s side. She pulled on the tether; she could draw Shai down to her, could even almost touch her, but she did not think that it was just a lack of magic—hers or Shai’s—that made her fingers slip through that ghostly flesh unfeeling.

  “Shai,” she whispered, trying to touch the ghost’s face; and, “No, no, no.” Words stopped having meaning, though she spoke nonetheless, quickly, unthinkingly, as if she might come across the word or phrase that would spark life in the fading ghost. As if something, anything, might undo what she had done.

  Abelane was right. The thought fell into Xhea’s mind like a stone, cold and heavy. Abelane’s fear, her anger, her insistence that Xhea did not understand what her power might do had not been so groundless after all.

  Xhea cried, hard and fast and ugly; her sobs stopped her breath, if not her hands’ desperate attempts to bring Shai back toward consciousness. There was so little of Shai to touch, to hold; she seemed to be made more of mist and memory than ghostly flesh. So little of her left.

  Xhea remembered what Abelane had said of the binding: it takes and it takes and it gives nothing back.

  It wasn’t true—or it hadn’t been true. Not until now.

  Xhea realized that, standing in that living heart—despite the magic flowing around her, through her—she’d had no magic to spare. She’d needed all of her power to speak with the entity; she’d needed it, too, to build those barriers, trying to keep herself separate and sane while the Lower City pulled her apart, one curious bit at a time.

  She remembered drawing on Shai’s power and that power filling her, holding her to life. She would have died if it wasn’t for Shai’s support. She would have died a thousand times over.

  Xhea looked at Shai and knew she would have taken those deaths and the pain that would accompany them—would have unspoken her message, swallowed back her magic and bound it hard and tight—if only it might have undone this.

  No, she thought—not bind her magic, but give it back; return power in kind for what she’d taken.

  Her heart hammered in sudden hope as she fumbled for the tether. Her power was no longer bound, and yet it felt weak and quiescent within her—exhausted, she thought, by her time in the Lower City’s living heart. Yet it rose, dark black and coiling like sinuous smoke: her full power, her real power, responding to her demand and the fear that drove it.

  She funnelled her magic into the tether. Slowly at first, the way one might spoon broth into a sick person’s opened mouth, then faster. She felt as Shai absorbed that power, drank it hungrily down—and so she sent more magic, and more.

  As she watched, Shai solidified. Her ghostly flesh gained more substance, bit by bit blocking out Xhea’s view of the debris-covered floor beyond. Shai drew in a slow, shallow breath, and another—the first breaths Xhea had seen her draw in some long minutes.

  But her limbs did not return, not her hands or feet, and there was not so much as a flicker of her magic returning. Shai did not wake.

  Xhea released her magic and sagged back to the ground, exhausted. She reached for Shai, pushed that pale hair from her sallow face. Wept, and watched the tears fall through her.

  “I’m sorry,” Xhea whispered, over and over. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  Is this how the children feel the first time they destroy a bondling? She would have said no—that they couldn’t have felt like this, wouldn’t. If this was how they felt, how could it have not destroyed them utterly? How could they continue, day after day? How could they destroy another ghost, and another, and another?

  They only love the first one. After that, it would be too hard to care for another ghost, knowing what they were going to do, slow or fast or all at once. Knowing that this unmaking was any bondling’s eventual end.

  This wasn’t supposed to have happened to Shai. She was Radiant, and Xhea had always assumed that the bond they had was different. Stronger. Better. Yet Xhea had pulled everything from her nonetheless, all her magic, her very existence—

  Xhea hesitated, then drew back. She could not stop her tears, but she could look through them at Shai’s lifeless face. There was no glimmer of magic there—but then, she thought, normal ghosts, normal bondlings, had none. It was not just power that she had stolen, but Shai’s ghostly flesh.

  It was not just magic Xhea had to return, but something else. Something deeper.

  Her spirit. Her very self.

  Magic she could call forth with will or effort, no matter how painful the experience—but spirit? Xhea did not know how to grasp that, nor how to draw it from her. At least not her own. For, she realized, she had always manipulated spirit, the bodies of ghosts, even when her magic had been but a cold, dark lake in the pit of her stomach.

  Xhea looked down at her trembling, dust-covered hands. She reached for her arms, her chest, the dusty confines of her face—touched her skin as if she might reach beneath and grasp her own ghost within that living flesh. Magic was at her fingertips and drifted about her lips as she whispered quick, desperate words of encouragement. But she felt only skin and dust and sweat, and the ashy threads of her once-beloved jacket decaying to nothing. No hint of the ghost that lay beneath.

  The tether, then.

  Xhea reached inside herself with mental hands, trying to draw forth not magic, but—what?

  Not her anguish. Not hurt or sorrow or regret, but something deeper. Something truer.

  Love, then? All her complicated joy and yearning, her secret hopes and happiness.

  All of them, she thought, and none of them. For she was not her thoughts or her emotions, as much as she was shaped by them; she was not her history, or her memories, or her fears.

  But she was afraid. In that moment, fear coiled through her, stronger even than her magic. There had always been parts of herself that she’d been afraid to share with Shai—to share with anyone. She’d feared what the tether might send to Shai without her knowledge, what stray truth might make its way down that length; for Xhea had known at a level beyond words that if anyone saw those darkest, most secret thoughts and feelings, they would be horrified.

  If Shai knew who Xhea truly was in the depths of her own spirit, then she could not care for her, could not love her. She would draw away as if burned by Xhea’s touch.

  Draw away as everyone else had, leaving Xhea alone.

  Oh, she was afraid—and yet that terror was nothing beside the fear of losing Shai entirely. Xhea looked at Shai’s face—her pale eyelashes resting on her cheeks, the smooth lines of her jaw and chin and throat, the lips that she wished would smile—and she could not imagine Shai abandoning her. Not anymore.

  Xhea knew: she was just… a person. Good and bad, light and dark. And if anyone already knew the truth of her, unspoken, it was Shai.

  Before, she would have said that she had built no barriers in her heart or soul to protect her from her l
ink to Shai. She would have been wrong. For now Xhea opened herself fully to the binding and the ghost on its other end, and felt those mental walls fall away, one by one.

  Xhea wrapped Shai in her arms and drew the ghost to her, holding her as best she could. Her head bowed, Xhea’s tears fell upon the ghost; her breath whispered across Shai’s face and hair. She closed her eyes.

  The living Lower City had opened her up and hollowed her out, searching through the whole of Xhea’s life and identity for understanding. It had taken from her, even as she allowed it; but this? She did not allow Shai to take from her so much as she gave herself, all of herself, like a gift.

  She felt something flow away from her like heat or breath or blood, and despite the weakness of its passing, she did not mourn the loss. Magic flowed too, and emotion, and the light that she could only name hope; each greater and smaller than mere words.

  She felt, too, as something began to return to her through the tether. Slowly at first, a mere whisper, then more.

  And she felt—

  And she knew—

  Xhea choked back a sob, and her tears flowed harder; she tasted their salt on her lips. They were not sad tears anymore, not anguished tears. What flowed into her was more than magic, more than spirit; it was the whole truth of Shai’s self, known and shared.

  She knew that Shai—oh, she knew—

  Not alone, Xhea thought at last, struggling to find words for her joy. Not ever again.

  She heard that thought echo back from Shai; the same truth singing from two different hearts.

  Xhea opened her eyes.

  Shai no longer sagged limp in the awkward circle of Xhea’s arms but rested there calmly, her breathing steady and slow. Carefully, Xhea pushed Shai back, holding her by the shoulders—and she could hold her. Her fingers no longer sank through Shai’s ghostly flesh but held, the pressure of their conflicting magics making that contact feel real.

  Shai’s face no longer looked empty, but merely as if she was sleeping. Her face—the whole of her body—was lit once more with the steady light of her magic. Shadows fled.