Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  The Lower City could not form a shield strong enough to stop the Spire’s blows. It could not make a weapon to strike back. It did not know how—nor did Xhea.

  Yet it had her knowledge of the workings of the Spire itself. It understood what she did—and, struggling to understand why the Spire would consider the Lower City a threat, Xhea had looked down and seen the vast expanse of ground that was the Lower City core. She’d seen the shadow of the magic beneath it—and had known that that power was just a dim reflection of what waited, sunk deep into the earth.

  Xhea had not understood how much of that magic was unshaped, unclaimed, untested. Had not known how much the living Lower City would have to learn to make good the threat she’d seen in its vast depth of power.

  She’d only had that sudden insight, and instinct had said that the Lower City was, or could be, dangerous. That it was, or could be, a threat.

  The living Lower City had rejected some part of her knowledge, she understood now; it had not believed that the Spire would truly strike it—or, in striking, that the Spire’s aim would be to kill. The Spire had been its everything: its life and breath, its food and warmth and comfort. Now, it knew itself betrayed.

  At last, the Lower City believed her.

  And, in believing, the threat that Xhea had imagined became real.

  “Sweetness,” she breathed, aghast. “Sweetness and blight.”

  The rising magic seeped into her, and in that power Xhea saw its intent, as if the Lower City whispered into her ear. Oh, yes, the Lower City understood death—hers and its own; it understood the Spire’s desire. But what she heard echoing now in its song would only be suicide.

  “Shai,” she started, “it’s going to—”

  Shai had already drawn away, her eyes wide. “I know.” That knowledge reverberated between them, one to the other; so, too, did a sudden thought of the refugees out in the ruins. Xhea had never been to those encampments, yet she saw them now in quick, confusing flashes. Barricades with spelled walls, makeshift barriers with people huddled behind.

  Little to protect anyone from falling debris, or magic, or fire. And there would, they knew, be all three—and that was a best case scenario.

  “The defensive spell generators—I asked Torrence and Daye—”

  Xhea nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Go.”

  Because if those spell generators had been brought to the refugees in the ruins, then Shai could power them. And if she could not protect everyone, then at least she could protect some. There would be a future for people here, one way or another.

  But Xhea needed to stay, because only here did she have any chance of speaking to the Lower City, guiding its actions or shifting its course. She couldn’t move away from the destruction, couldn’t head to the ruins or the badlands beyond; she had to move toward.

  There was no shelter here, not in a building or its remains, not in the tunnels. No, she could only think of one place that she might go; she thought of dark walls turned liquid as they wrapped around her, protecting her, drawing her inward and letting her rise.

  Farrow. Not the skyscraper itself, but the tendrils that surrounded it; the only part of all this vast ground that the Lower City had truly claimed.

  Shai nodded, accepting her decision. There was no way around it. To speak to the Lower City Xhea had to remain within reach of its magic—within reach of its heart—and there was nowhere left within the Lower City’s boundaries that might be called safe. Not anymore.

  And death? That was inevitable. Already Xhea knew that her body would not long withstand the damage that had been done inside the Lower City’s living heart—or the power that poured from her even now. For all that she, too, was a creature of dark magic, she was also but a girl with a small, failing body.

  No words, then; no need to speak them.

  Shai reached for her, and Xhea accepted her embrace. Arms wrapped around one another, they rose. No elevator spell, now; no attempts at a shield. Only Shai’s power, raw and shaped by her will.

  Xhea did not watch the ground fall away, though it was not her familiar fear that made her turn away. Instead, she rested her head against Shai’s shoulder and felt the other girl’s pale hair whisper across her face, soft as breath.

  She closed her eyes and tried not to think.

  At last her feet touched Farrow’s rooftop, feather-light. It took Xhea a moment to find her balance; her legs shook, and her knee was weak, and for all that she felt calm her heart pounded frantically inside her chest. But magic flowed through her, hers and Shai’s, and she would not be afraid.

  Much had changed since she’d last stood here. From Shai’s expression, that change had occurred overnight; it had not looked this way when she’d attempted to claim the spell generators.

  The roof had been flat and covered with small gravel pieces; in places, that gravel had been pushed back or worn away, revealing a hard surface covered with years of flaking, sticky black—tar, perhaps, or paint. Now, though it was black, no hint of that surface remained.

  There were only vines—that dark, grown substance. The garages, the chained enclosures where the skyscraper had kept its battered collection of aircars; the welded blocks upon which the spell generators had been mounted; even the rooftop door to the skyscraper itself—all gone, or covered so entirely with black vines that it made no difference.

  Briefly, Shai knelt and pressed her hand to that black surface. “Courage,” she whispered, the word almost lost in the Lower City’s song. But it was not the Lower City to whom she spoke, but Farrow itself—small, pale Farrow, living and struggling within that dark embrace.

  Shai’s hand brightened as she poured magic into the skyscraper. A moment, two, and then she rose.

  Xhea looked at the now-barren wasteland around them; at the Towers above, spinning and spinning, their magic flowing inward. She looked at the Spire, that great pillar of light, as it brightened and prepared another shot.

  She laughed. In spite of everything—or maybe because of it—Xhea laughed.

  “We’ve caused such trouble, you and I.” Her voice was almost lost in the sound of the ground breaking, cracking, falling in upon the tunnels far below. “You ever think that maybe things would be easier if we just gave up and died?”

  “Tried it,” Shai said. “Didn’t solve anything.” Her smile was a flicker of light across her otherwise grave expression.

  For a moment they looked at each other, and then Shai lifted into the air, heading out into the ruins. Xhea did not watch her go, only took a deep breath and walked toward the edge of Farrow’s rooftop.

  Xhea could not see the ground; she did not try to. Instead, she looked across the whole of the Lower City, or what was left of it. Dark magic covered most of the destruction, hiding it beneath a layer of swirling gray fog. Light flashed and flickered within that fog, like lightning dancing within clouds—the remnants of the Spire’s most recent spell, spending itself to nothing as it burned.

  Here and there, bits poked above the fog’s roiling surface—a jutting wall, a broken rooftop—but most was lost to shadow.

  As if that magic was oxygen, Xhea breathed it in. She felt it deep within her lungs, felt it shiver across her skin; felt it, too, in the ground beneath her feet, all those black and twisted vines.

  She exhaled, and her magic flowed with her breath. Magic swirled from her fingertips. Magic dripped from her cheeks—tears she did not remember crying.

  She poured some of herself into that power; it felt, now, almost second nature. Words and emotions and thoughts flowed into that darkness, and sank into the black structure beneath her.

  Listen, Xhea said. I’m here.

  She felt the Lower City’s acknowledgment, but it was faint and distant, a sound nearly lost in the deafening chorus of its song. No swell of recognition or greeting, no joyous echo sung in harmony: the entity’s attention, now, was almost entirely elsewhere.

  Magic, too, had begun to rise—but not in streamers, as before, nor in columns of bl
ack, but in a single dark swirl centered above the Lower City’s heart. Centered, too, directly beneath the Central Spire’s point. It swirled faster as she watched, rising higher.

  Xhea had seen the vortex of power that the Spire poured upon the Lower City night after night. This was its opposite: a tornado of black that pointed not down but up, reaching for the Spire as if it might consume it entirely.

  You can’t, she told it.

  Yet demonstrably it could. For its power rose and rose, darker now, faster, all the waste magic of the whole of the City suddenly surging into the air and reaching for the Spire. It drew the fog-like haze of power from the ruins and pulled it upward; it drew strength from the very ground, and from Farrow’s living walls.

  The Lower City sang, loud and triumphant, as if with force of sound and power it could drive out all pain and sadness.

  You shouldn’t, Xhea corrected.

  It heard her, she knew it did; their magics mingled. They were joined now in thought and power and memory, as surely as she was joined to Shai.

  It heard her—and it did not agree. It pushed her words and the magic aside as if they meant nothing, as if it could not even stand to listen.

  Xhea could listen, and did; and suddenly within the rise and fall of its wailing song she heard a sound that had not been there before. It was not voice or melody, rhythm or harmony. It was the beat that underlay it, the truth that had become the bedrock for the whole of the Lower City’s being.

  If Xhea had a word for that sound, it would be only this: Gone, gone, gone.

  Its walls were gone, its people were gone. Its streets and buildings, its skyscrapers and tunnels—they were gone, all of them gone. The Lower City was breaking, it was broken, it was gone and still it lived. It lived and it fought back because it could do no less.

  In the echoes of that pain, Xhea heard something else.

  Alone, the Lower City sang. Alone, alone, alone.

  The City that had birthed it wished only for its death; the Towers had turned against it. The Central Spire, which the living Lower City had always thought of as the giver of life and sustenance, formed the blade that sought its end.

  Of everything else, what was left? Only rubble, each stone torn apart. Only dust and ash and ruin.

  Xhea knew that pain. She had given it the words that now echoed through the fallen structures of her home.

  Gone. Alone.

  But it was not true. No matter how it felt, no matter how that truth seemed to echo down through the very core of its heart, it was not true.

  No, Xhea said. She sank to Farrow’s rooftop and pressed her hands to that black surface as if she might press her meaning into its very being. I’m here. Your people are here, in the ruins just beyond. We have not abandoned you.

  That inverse funnel of power twisted higher. It was beyond the height of Farrow now, reaching into the empty space that separated the Lower City from the City above. It did not hesitate at her words; it did not even slow.

  You are not the buildings, she told it. You can shape yourself, as the Towers do. You can make something new—something stronger, something better. But please, don’t do this.

  Again, that light flashed midway down the Spire—a precursor, only, to its final attack. And it would be the final attack, Xhea thought; for all the Lower City’s magic, all its sudden rage, it could not withstand the City’s concentrated power.

  But the Lower City was not going to give it a chance to fire again. The vortex of dark magic reached the Spire’s lowermost point.

  “You can’t!” Xhea cried. Her voice echoed, thin and breaking, across the broken landscape.

  It did not listen. Instead, the Lower City reached up with all its strength, all its dark power, and began to pull the Central Spire from the sky.

  Shai fled toward the ruins, and it took all of her strength not to look behind her. She felt the pressure of the Lower City’s rising dark magic, sure as Xhea felt the pain of the bright magic of the Spire’s attacks.

  Xhea had given the Lower City her life. Her understanding, yes, and her knowledge—but her years, too, of anger and loneliness. It did not live those experiences as she had, one at a time and growing slowly from each. Instead, it gained them in a single gulp, and the things she had learned these past months must have seemed small against the pressure of the rest.

  Or maybe it was only that those were the experiences that spoke to it, twin to its own.

  It is not wrong, Shai thought—for she could almost hear the edges of its song; a hint of its meaning echoed to her from Xhea. So much loss, there; so much anger and betrayal. The Lower City lay in ruins. The Spire had turned on it, and many of the richer Towers.

  They meant to destroy the Lower City and now the Lower City was bent on destroying them in kind. There was symmetry in that. Not justice, not peace. But symmetry.

  Shai had seen the refugees’ camps in darkness; daylight was no kinder. Though the ancient, broken walls were stronger now than anything left in the Lower City, they offered poor shelter.

  But people were moving, she saw as she rushed past. They no longer huddled behind the walls but ventured beyond them. Hesitantly, in places; in obvious fear of the uncertain ground around them, and wary of conflict with their new neighbors, but moving even so.

  There was work to be done.

  While some of the refugees stared at the clashing magic at the heart of what had once been their home, others turned resolutely away. Shai saw tears on a woman’s face as she bent over her work, building a wall with stones and rough mortar. A father held his child close, rocking her, shielding her eyes from the light of the Spire’s strikes, while next to him an older boy stirred the watery soup that was to be their breakfast.

  Shai’s heart lifted as she approached Edren’s encampment. The walls still stood, and Edren’s people worked to make them higher, stronger—and towering above those walls like a bare flagpole stood a defensive spell generator.

  Shai looked at that pitted length of metal—its cross-spars twisted and broken, its directional controls all but gone—and smiled in relief. It did not mean salvation—but it meant they had a chance.

  “Ghost incoming,” said a voice as Shai approached. She looked down at Torrence.

  A bruise marred the left side of his face, its mottled red already darkening toward blue; his left eye was nearly swollen shut. He had been lying in a nest of blankets near the generator’s mounted base, his head pillowed on his arms, as nearby others stood and argued.

  Or, rather, Lorn, Emara and Councilor Tranten argued. Daye stood beside them, her arms crossed, looking like nothing so much as a disapproving statue.

  At Shai’s arrival, Torrence’s lips lifted in a lazy grin and he pushed himself up, as if rest could be denied in light of whatever entertainment Shai now offered.

  Others, too, turned toward Shai’s light; she shone into the visual spectrum without meaning to, so much power flowing through her now that she could not bear the thought of holding it back. No matter—she would need all this power and more if she had any hope of pushing the generator’s defensive spells wide enough to cover even a fraction of the refugees.

  “Shai,” Lorn started, and as he turned toward her glow she was surprised to see that Torrence wasn’t the only one with a damaged face. An angry cut sliced across Lorn’s forehead, swollen and pulling against the hasty stitches that held it closed. “We were just—”

  Torrence, of all people, cut him off. “Perhaps you can help us,” he said, the sharpness of his gaze belying his lazy tone. “We were discussing what to do with these.”

  He kicked aside the dirty fabric that had covered the second spell generator.

  No, Shai thought, her eyes widening in surprise. There were two more spell generators. Torrence and Daye had retrieved the two generators from Farrow’s rooftop, as well as the one from Rown. They’d reached Rown before it had fallen—or had stolen it from Rown’s refugees, and right now it mattered little which.

  Lorn brought for
th a rough-sketched map of their encampment, a variety of symbols sketched in ash indicating proposed placements of the second two generators. “We thought,” he began—but this time it was Shai who cut him off.

  She wrote in midair, You need to take them to the refugees on the Lower City’s other side. There. She gestured at a location roughly a third around that encircling ring from their current position. And there. Another third.

  Voices rose to debate and again Shai gestured, cutting them off. She wasn’t interested in discussion.

  Already she could see a swell of dark magic in the Lower City’s center, a rising vortex of power. She saw its intent written in those swirling patterns, black on shadowed gray; the Lower City spoke only of vengeance now. It spoke of death—its own, and that of the City above.

  Shai pressed her hand to her chest where the spelled tether was bound. She felt Xhea’s distress as if it were her own; felt the girl’s urgency building beneath her breastbone. Whatever Xhea was doing to calm the Lower City’s anger, it wasn’t working.

  Closer, on the edge of the Lower City’s limits, there was a detonation—a flicker of the Spire’s last attack, the spell striking out as it died. Magic discharging, nothing more. Yet rock scattered from that point to fall upon the refugees like hail. Most chunks were small, little larger than a tooth or eye—but she saw, too, bits of brick and concrete that were the size of a man’s fist, a person’s head.

  Shai moved without thinking. She reached, fingers spread wide, and knocked the pieces from the sky with a surge of bright magic. She wove spells fast as thought: spells to break apart the larger pieces, turning them to nothing but dust and fragments; spells, too, to slow their dangerous velocity. Bits rained down on Edren’s encampment.

  Farther, where there were no such protections, Shai heard screams.

  Faster, she thought, looking to the spell generator. She had to work faster.

  Below her, conversation had stopped. She lowered herself to the ground at Torrence’s side, feet touching down as if she might stand on that rocky ground. They were looking at her, staring.