She’d stared at the Towers’ pointed underbellies her whole life, watching as they rose and fell, merged and reshaped in an incomprehensible political dance. Now a Tower loomed before her, so close she could almost touch it. Its grown metal flesh shimmered like sunlight across water, and Xhea imagined it to be water’s blue, deep and hazed almost gray.
“We have to direct the elevator,” Shai said.
She only knew that their destination lay south, and so they pointed southward, hand in hand. Xhea gasped as the elevator accelerated and merged into the line of aircars that zipped through the gaps separating the Towers. They rose and fell with the stream of traffic, moving between the massive airborne structures with the ease of breath. Briefly, she caught the bored expression on a fellow traveler’s face as he sped by in an elevator of his own. Something bubbled up inside her, and it was only as she pressed the fingers of her free hand to her mouth that she realized it was laughter.
Focus, Xhea reminded herself, and none too soon; within moments, the elevator’s swift passage brought them to the cluster of Towers she had identified from the ground. She’d thought them small, and though they were dwarfed by the central Towers, each was far larger than all of the skyscrapers combined. She craned upward just trying to catch a glimpse of the peaks of their top defensive spires.
“Do you recognize—?”
“No,” Shai said, her voice gone hollow. “But I can feel it pulling.”
“Your Tower?”
“My body.”
Shai moved to point in the direction her second tether led and Xhea hurriedly mimicked the gesture. The elevator dove out of the aircar traffic at their command.
Their destination was a wide Tower, its central structure a misshapen orb like a blown-glass ornament gone wrong. Though it bore defensive spires on both top and bottom, even Xhea’s untrained eye could see the obvious angles of attack another Tower might use, great sections of its bulk protected by neither spire nor spell.
Traffic thinned as they approached and circled toward the main landing bay. The Tower was dark—red, perhaps, or even brown—but as they neared, Xhea saw patches of discoloration along its side, and the air around it was almost still, undisturbed by spell exhaust. Xhea had seen Towers far younger and less damaged attacked and absorbed in a hostile takeover: materials, magic, and citizens alike physically absorbed by a more powerful Tower. Only location seemed to have spared this one a similar fate.
She glanced at Shai. From the cut of her dress to her bewilderment with the Lower City, everything about Shai spoke of close familiarity with luxury. Yet she had died here, in a Tower so old and poor that it risked falling from the sky.
Xhea blinked as they entered the Tower’s shadowed landing bay. There was little to see: the gaping space held only a cluster of worn aircars parked to one side, while a row of poorly marked doors ran along the far wall, all closed. It felt like a parking garage—albeit larger, cleaner, and in better repair than the ones she knew.
The elevator set her down so gently that it was a moment before Xhea realized she could feel the floor. The spell peeled away as quickly as it had formed, the bright ribbons fluttering down around her and vanishing.
“I didn’t pay,” she said, watching the elevator swoop across the cavernous space and back into the sunshine. Not that she was complaining.
“Registers the signature,” Shai whispered, staring blankly at an interior door. She released Xhea’s hand and pressed her palm to her chest as if she might feel the echo of a living heart. “I don’t . . .” she said. “I can’t . . .”
“Can’t what?” Xhea massaged her numbed fingers.
Shai closed her eyes, her face tightening in pain, and pressed her hands harder against her sternum, fingers splayed. No, Xhea realized; Shai was holding the place where the tether joined them, both hands flat as if to keep the tether from unraveling.
“Shai,” she said. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“I can’t . . .” Shai was just loud enough to hear. “I can’t stay.” Slowly, slowly, she opened her eyes, lashes rising to reveal irises that gleamed silver. Their eyes met. “Find me,” Shai said, and was gone.
Xhea braced as the tether snapped back against her chest. The free end swung as it sought the suddenly absent ghost, and—though thin—it was still tangible enough to handle. Xhea sighted off the tether’s length; wherever Shai was being kept, it was on a higher floor than this. Magic stirred in the pit of her stomach—slow, but curious.
“Not now,” she hissed.
She ran to a door in the far wall, but it was closed tight and sealed. No handle, only the blinking panel of a touchplate. She waved her hand before the plate and poked it a few times with her tingling fingers, wishing that enough bright magic remained from Shai’s touch to garner a response. To come this close, and be stopped by a door . . .
In response to her frustration, Xhea’s magic built like a storm beneath her breastbone and spread through her body, reaching after the ghost. It rose, curling smoke-like around her fingers and the touchplate.
“I said, not . . . oh.” For at the brush of her magic, the spell controlling the door panel sputtered and died. She thought of the dead food chits, the inert payment from Brend—all kept in jacket pockets as her magic had run rampant that very first time.
“Oh,” she said again.
With the latch spell gone, the pressure differential was just enough to open the door a crack. Putting her shoulder against the door and pushing, Xhea forced her way inside.
The curving hall that led from the landing bay was all but silent, only distant murmurs audible over the hiss of air from unseen vents. The overhead lights were cracked and flickering, and the air smelled like a room long closed. The floor was soft beneath her feet—not carpet, Xhea saw, but something growing and slightly damp that reminded her more of mold than moss.
Xhea wondered what she thought she’d find in an impoverished Tower. She could only think: Not this. If anything, this Tower seemed like the Lower City—a once-great place clothed only in the tatters of its former glory.
Her magic pulled toward the ghost, and the broken tether pointed, both saying: Here. Close. Xhea struggled to follow, hurrying down shadowed passages with dusty corners and failing light panels, all overgrown with moss. At last the tether pointed to a door, no different than countless others she had passed, and her stomach clenched in fear. This is Shai, she reminded herself. It was Shai who pulled her, Shai on the end of that line, Shai who had to struggle alone for every moment that Xhea delayed.
Even so, she paused just long enough to slip her silver knife from her pocket and open its blade.
Knife in hand, she knocked on the door.
The door opened.
What had she been about to shout? You can’t do this to her. Maybe, I’m here to stop you. Words she hadn’t known she was readying until they died in her mouth unspoken.
Shai’s father leaned heavily against the doorframe. His eyes moved from her face to the small blade in her hand and back again, no surprise in his expression. No anger. At least, she thought, staring back, no new anger. For beneath his evident exhaustion, she could see rage—an anger so constant it was ingrained in his every movement and breath, etched into the pinched lines of his face.
Xhea blinked, and clutched her knife.
What had she expected? Memory showed her: casters ringed around Shai’s body, the air bright and buzzing with magic. Machinery, maybe; wires and storage coils. She’d expected shouting, and anger; she’d expected a crowd of powerful people, even here, on the City’s farthest fringes.
She’d expected to fail. Strange, how easily she knew it now, how clearly the images came to her: being restrained and screaming, but fighting, always fighting, to free Shai. She hadn’t expected a man who seemed not to have slept or shaved or eaten since she’d seen him last, his clothes rumpled and shoulders weighted by untold weariness. A man who stared at her unspeaking.
The silence grew to fill the space
between them and expanded, like a great bubble where speech and movement died. It expanded into the empty room behind him and the hall to either side, compressing Xhea’s chest until she felt that even breathing was an intrusion.
Still the magic urged her on, whispering: Here. Here. Here.
“I’m here . . .” she started hesitantly, only to be interrupted.
“I know,” he said, his voice heavy. Such rage. Such exhaustion. “I know why you’re here.”
I don’t, she thought. Not anymore.
He stood back and gestured for her to enter, then closed the door softly behind her. Xhea looked around the tiny apartment. Bare walls, bare floor: this, she realized, wasn’t anyone’s home. It smelled stuffy and faintly metallic, bringing a bitter taste to the back of her throat. Carefully, she folded her knife and slipped it into a pocket. This was not a resurrection—she knew that now with perfect certainty—but she was no closer to understanding.
“My daughter must have spoken to you, to tell you we were here.”
“Yes,” Xhea said. “I mean, we spoke, but she had problems remembering.”
Shai’s father ran his hand through his hair, then rubbed his eyes. “But you’re here now. Please tell me that you know how to free her.”
“Free her?” Xhea asked.
His expression darkened, then he shook his head. “It’s easier, somehow, to think of it that way. Free. Release. Kill. It’s all the same in the end. Just tell me you know what to do.”
“But—” Xhea said and stopped, the words She’s already dead caught between tongue and teeth. Instead she asked slowly, haltingly: “Where is she?”
She already knew the answer. Tether and magic alike pulled her, called to her.
Here. Here. Here.
But she was suddenly afraid, so afraid. She walked in the direction that Shai’s father pointed: down a dark, narrow hall toward a single closed door at its end. Xhea kept her hand steady as she pushed the door open—but only just.
There in the bed lay the body they had sought. It lay still, dressed in a thin nightgown and draped with a white sheet, leaving only arms and face exposed, skin pale as any drowned corpse. Those arms were thin, and the shoulders, all so wasted that Xhea felt she could count the bones beneath. Pale hair spread across the pillow, surrounding a gaunt face—a nightmare’s version of the one she had come to know.
No, Xhea thought. Not it: her. For the body’s chest rose and fell in the slow and faltering rhythm of natural breath.
“Shai?” Xhea’s breath caught in her throat.
It was only then that she realized that the room was unlit, curtains drawn tight over the narrow window on the far wall. It was Shai who lit the space: she glowed, her body laced with so many spells that her flesh was incandescent. The shadows shifted as she breathed. Looking at her, the shock wasn’t that Shai was dying; only that someone so wasted could live at all.
Xhea walked to the bedside and knelt, and now nothing could stop her hands from trembling. “Shai,” she whispered again, and Shai opened her eyes.
Xhea caught no more than a glimpse of pale irises before Shai’s eyelids fluttered closed. Cracked lips parted. Shai’s voice was faint and rough with pain, faltering as she struggled to say, “Hello, Xhea . . . I’m sorry for leaving.”
“It’s okay. I found you anyway.”
“Yes,” Shai said, the word a mere sigh. “Yes.”
Carefully, Xhea examined Shai’s body, shifting her focus to see the magic more clearly. There were spells there—the spells that she must have seen reflected in the ghost—so many, so layered and so bright that Xhea struggled to find meaning in them at all. But it was Shai herself, she realized, that shone with that dazzling light. Shai was filled with magic, pure and strong. It rose seemingly from nowhere, as if her very heart was a spring of power, and flooded through her. Overwhelmed her.
Magic was the energy of life, yes, but this life surged without control. It built upon itself, growing, multiplying: life without end. Mere blood and muscle and bone couldn’t contain so much power. It raged through her, poured from her, and twisted her flesh as it went, leaving brightness and ruin in its wake.
Growth unchecked. Mutation. Cancer.
The spells she saw were not the resurrection spells she’d feared, but attempts to heal, and even they paled in comparison to Shai’s power. There were spells to stem the growth of the tumors in her liver and her lungs, spells attacking the cancers that spread through her bones. There were more spells, spells upon spells, staunching bleeding and energizing her faltering heart, easing the pressure on failing organs, and repairing the damage that illness had wrought. But they were worn now, and failing.
And still that magic leaked from Shai, more magic, bright magic that because of its very nature said to body and tumors alike: Live, grow. What were spells against such raw power? The newest—the brightest—workings were for one purpose only: stopping Shai’s pain.
Xhea pulled back, staring. Shai was rich beyond words, more powerful than Xhea could even dream—and it was killing her.
From the doorway, Shai’s father said, “I cannot save her.” Xhea glanced back, seeing again the heavy circles beneath his eyes, remembering his failing strength, his anger and exhaustion. At last she knew their cause.
Softly, despairing, he said, “I can’t save her, and I can’t find a way to let her die. I don’t know what else to do.”
“But why . . . ?”
At his expression, Xhea fell silent. Unfocusing her eyes once more, Xhea forced herself to look deeper still. The spells’ fierce white was all but blinding; yet she persisted, and her vision adjusted. Still, many long moments passed before she began to see what anchored Shai’s body to life and bound her spirit to that broken flesh. When at last she understood, she could but stare.
The spells that hid in the depths of Shai’s body were old and infinitely stronger than those that fought her illness: that much was clear despite their seeming frailty. The individual spell lines were thin as threads, woven into intricate patterns the likes of which she’d never seen. Neither did this working shine as bright magic did, but had the dull gleam of tarnished mental. A true master wove these spells, Xhea knew. Only a magical genius could have created that pattern, the intricate steel-wire lace that bound Shai, body, magic and spirit.
A genius, but a dark one.
Some of the spells were akin to a resurrection spell, distinguished only by the skill, delicacy—and yes, beauty—with which they’d been wrought. She watched as magic flowed through the hair-fine shape: forcing life into dying cells, breath into a collapsing chest, blood through failing vessels. More and more, tapping into Shai’s great wellspring of magical energy, pulling it from her body and taking it to places far beyond Xhea’s sight or understanding. Together they bound Shai’s spirit, forcing her to animate flesh too broken to live.
Had she feared Shai’s resurrection? Instead someone had ensured she would never die. No matter her pain or suffering, regardless of what ravages illness inflicted, the lacework spells forced her to live.
“Who did this?” Xhea whispered.
Shai’s ragged breathing was the only reply.
Xhea knew now what Shai’s father had hoped to achieve by separating Shai’s ghost from her body—not knowing of the tether that bound her; not seeing, as Xhea did, how deeply the spell was imbedded in her spirit. Xhea had begun to wonder if she might free Shai by simply cutting the second tether—and perhaps that would help enable her body to die. But something of Shai’s spirit would die too, bound in that wirework lace, leaving her no more than a fraction of her true self. Leaving her, Xhea realized, as the person she had met, lost and disoriented, with a gap-ridden memory. If anything of her survived the separation at all.
This was not a problem she could cut away with her silver knife.
And yet . . .
Two days before, there would have been nothing more she could have done; but Shai’s presence had changed so very much. Xhea felt her own magic,
dark and newly woken, ease through her body at the thought. With it, she had unraveled spells, destroyed bright magic, at a touch. Why not this?
Xhea turned to Shai’s father for permission.
“There is something I could try,” she said slowly. “I don’t know . . . I mean, I can’t . . .”
“Try,” he said. Only that.
He took a deep breath before coming into the room and kneeling at Shai’s bedside. So carefully, he took one of her hands into his own, and gently stroked its back with a single trembling finger.
“Shai.” Xhea called to the girl as she had the ghost. “Shai, look at me.”
Shai gave a faint gasp, and her wasted body shuddered as she attempted to move. She was too weak to lift her head; but as Xhea called again, soft and insistent, she managed to open her eyes. They were glassy with fever, pupils wide within the pale rings of her irises, and Xhea knew that it wasn’t her sight that made the blue of Shai’s eyes look so empty or so gray.
“Shai,” Xhea said again. “I’m going to try to help you. If you’ll let me.”
The darkness filled her, calm and slow. It did not reach for Shai, or test Xhea’s tenuous control. It only waited.
“Dad?” Shai whispered.
“I’m here, baby.” Again he stroked her hand, fingers trembling. “It’s okay. It’s almost over.”
“Yes,” Shai whispered. Her eyelids fluttered closed.
“That’s my brave girl,” her father said, his voice breaking. “My brave, brave girl.”
Oh, would that Xhea were so brave. Yet her hands were steady, now, her breath even and slow. She stroked the hair from Shai’s face, then leaned down and brushed her lips against Shai’s fevered forehead. It did not hurt to touch her, nor did she feel a shock; there was only an intensity of feeling, as if that moment of contact echoed between them.
Xhea pulled back, the chime of the coins in her hair the only sound in the small room. Carefully, she placed one hand on Shai’s stomach and the other on her chest above her heart. Shai’s heat seemed to burn through her nightgown and the shroud of her sheet. Beneath, Xhea felt the shape of Shai’s bones, the hard lumps of her tumors, and the tingle of bright magic so strong it thrummed like a live wire.
Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One Page 8
