Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  “Your wife said—” Xhea began, and was waved to silence.

  “I know what she said. Silly harpy.” He turned away as he spoke, hiding his face, and Xhea ignored the hand he lifted to wipe his eyes.

  Since the woman’s death just over two years before, they had come to Xhea once a month to argue with her as their intermediary. Not that they needed her once their arguments got going. She had never questioned their desire to continue bickering long after death should have made such mundane considerations moot—and not because she was paid for her part in the arguments, though that didn’t hurt. No, it was the tether between them, strong and wider around than her arm, that joined them heart to heart.

  The man rose from his crate, nodded farewell to Xhea, and turned away. His wife walked beside him, her groundless steps falling perfectly in time to his, their hands but a breath apart.

  “All clear,” Shai said. She descended from her lookout perch atop the corner of the roof, and stared speculatively after the couple. “I don’t know whether it makes me happy or sad to see them like that.”

  Xhea shrugged and glanced into the lunch bag that the man had provided for her services. She needed food, but it felt anticlimactic to complete a job and still see the world cast in gray. Yet the sparks of magic that Shai used to help her regain control of her power—and the memory of her reaction to bright magic in the hospital—had forced Xhea to seek other payment. The rise of her own magic, it seemed, had changed her, and she could only try not to yearn for that old rush or the brilliance with which bright magic had painted her vision.

  If anything, it seemed that her customers—those few she’d managed to find—appreciated the change. The old man had always paid her fairly, but this time, amidst the carefully wrapped sandwich rolls that she’d requested, she found a few extras: a hardboiled egg, a stick of dried fruit, and sugar cookies in a twist of thin paper. The wife’s additions, Xhea had no doubt, the husband guided in his choices even in her absence.

  She took a hasty bite of one of the sandwich rolls before heading toward the alley’s opposite end and peering cautiously around the corner. “No hunters?” she asked Shai. “No sign of our pale-haired friend?”

  “Nothing yet,” Shai confirmed.

  While they’d managed to evade capture largely due to Xhea’s knowledge of the Lower City streets and ability to travel deep underground, it was only Shai’s sentry work that allowed them some small measure of freedom. Even their near-escapes had cost her only bruises. But Xhea had hoped that the pursuit would die off after a few days—a week at the most. Instead, they faced more hunters, more money offered for Xhea’s detainment—and now, something new.

  The last few days Shai and Xhea had both caught sight of a City man on their trail. He never followed so closely that they could say that he was trailing them—yet he was never far enough away that either discounted the idea. He never ran, never seemed to be looking for anyone at all; just walked, careful and slow, without letting so much as a puddle soil the hem of his pants or an errant breeze muss his white-blonde hair. But he asked about her, let it be known that he had a job for which he required Xhea’s services—a good job, a paying job.

  Xhea didn’t know what made her more nervous: the thought that this was yet another Allenai ploy, or the possibility that she was carefully evading the most potentially lucrative job available.

  The road was clear. Xhea kept her pace to a quick walk to avoid unnecessary attention, but still heads turned, and she grimaced in irritation. If this continued, she’d have to consider a radical change in hairstyle to just get down the street.

  When they reached the subway exit that they’d used that morning, Xhea didn’t need Shai’s warning to come to an early stop.

  “Be careful, it’s—”

  “I know, I see it.” She cautiously stepped closer. Dormant, the entrapment spell was difficult to see, its hanging tendrils all but invisible in the shadow of the subway’s entrance stair. It was a more complex spell than the first few she’d seen, more finely woven and with only a faint glimmer revealing its presence, though its shape had become familiar enough that she didn’t need to read its purpose. “This makes—what? Seven in the past few days?”

  “Eight,” Shai said, descending to stand at her side. “Don’t forget the one by the market.”

  Even Xhea had to admit, they were clever creations. With no signature to which to key them, the spells had been designed to activate upon touching a living person who lacked bright magic—meaning that most Lower City dwellers could pass the spells by without harm while Xhea alone would be caught. She and Shai found them all across the Lower City, mainly outside subway entrances and in the doorways and niches that were Xhea’s known loitering spots. Clever, she thought, but blighted annoying.

  While Shai examined the spell, Xhea crouched to peer at the stones that were arranged beneath it in a wide X. Such markings, like the spells themselves, had become familiar. She didn’t always find stones: once there had been a scrap of fabric held down by a piece of rounded glass; another time she’d found the cracked plastic casings of two antique ballpoint pens forming an arrow that pointed to the spell.

  She frowned as she looked at the stones. If she were as magic-poor as she seemed and unable to see the dormant spells, this might have been her only warning. Difficult as it was to admit, someone was trying to protect her. The thought troubled her almost as much as the spells.

  Carefully, she picked up a stone and turned it over in her hand, its worn edges cool against her skin. There was nothing distinctive about it, yet she studied it as if she might feel the hand that had held it before her or know its intent. Why this, she thought to her unknown ally. Why now?

  “Xhea,” Shai said. “You’re radiating.”

  Xhea opened her eyes, not knowing when she had closed them, and looked at her hand. Was she angry? Afraid? She would have said no; yet her own power made lie of the unspoken words, curling about her fingers like ink in midair.

  The easiest way to be rid of the entrapment spells was to blast them with her magic, Xhea thought, watching the black power. A torrent of dark, and the spells would unravel. If only their destruction wouldn’t cause more trouble than their absence was worth; the last thing she wanted was to let her enemies, potential or otherwise, to know of her strange power or its effects.

  “Do the breathing exercises,” Shai said. “Like I showed you.”

  Xhea grimaced, but nodded and tried to calm her thoughts. Shai had run her through various breathing exercises in an effort to help her curb her rising power; but keeping the exercises straight—and doing them right—was proving more of a challenge. There were patterns to help her enter a state of relaxation, patterns to clear her thoughts and focus her mind, patterns to increase awareness of her power, and patterns to make that awareness grow dim. On and on. Xhea could only imagine the trial and error hyperventilation that had gone into their development.

  Slowly she drew in a deep breath and held it as she counted, then exhaled in a thin stream, doubling her earlier count. Again, slower this time, and again, slower still. The curl of dark began to dissipate. How was it, she wondered as she drew another deep breath, that the power could come to her entirely unheeded, and yet its sudden absence felt like loss?

  “You’re doing really well,” Shai said. “You got control faster than last time. And I didn’t need to shock you.”

  “Small mercies.” Xhea tried to ignore the unspoken fact that she was radiating more, not less, with each passing day, no matter how quickly the exercises helped her regain control. It was terrifying, when she let herself think of it at all. Instead, she dropped the stone and rose. “Come on, we can try the next station.”

  Yet as they walked, all she could think of was her hand wreathed in black—and with so little provocation. Anxious, she fumbled in her pockets until she found an old cigarette and a match with which to light it. The rush of smoke as she inhaled—true smoke, pale and acrid—was like a balm, far more calming
than any breathing exercises.

  “Is this normal?” she asked Shai at last, gesturing with her cigarette as if movement could encompass the tangle of her thoughts. “What’s happening to me, I mean. My magic.”

  Shai tilted her head, considering. “Probably not for someone with no control. But basic energy management is taught at a young age, when the power isn’t so strong.”

  “So has no one else had their power manifest this late?”

  “Your magic didn’t suddenly appear. You just stopped poisoning yourself.” Shai glanced at the cigarette. “Or mostly stopped, anyway,” she muttered. Xhea blew smoke through the ghost’s midsection in reply.

  “If we work on the theory that bright magic is the opposite of yours, then being paid was helping keep your power suppressed. Did you ever call on your magic before?”

  “Never.” She had run to find whatever source of bright magic she could at the slightest hint that the darkness inside her was stirring, burning it away like fog in the morning sun.

  “So you didn’t just stop keeping it suppressed. You started using it, too. You opened a door that you can’t close again.”

  Xhea nodded. “’Course,” she said, “we don’t really know anything about any of this. It could be poisoning me, couldn’t it? Killing me just as surely as I kill everything around me.”

  Shai shrugged in unconscious mimic of Xhea’s own gesture. “True enough.”

  “Don’t try to soften the blow or anything.”

  They walked in silence for a time before Xhea was able to put the question that had been bothering her into words. “But . . . you believe I can learn to control this, right? Really control it. I’m not . . .”—and oh, she cringed to say it aloud—“not like you, am I?”

  It was a long moment before Shai replied. “I think you’ll be strong. And I think it’ll be a while before you know your full strength—or what to do with it. But you can’t become what I am.”

  “You were always . . . Radiant?”

  Shai nodded, and softly she replied, “Always.” An untold depth in that single word. She added, “It’s not a disease, you know. My magic. It’s not something to fear.”

  “But it killed you. It made your people want to enslave you. How is that okay?”

  Shai smiled, and it was a strange smile; a smile that Xhea did not know how to read. “It doesn’t need to be okay,” the ghost said. “It just is. Yes, the magic killed me, but it also made me. It shaped me and I shaped it, like water and a stream bed. It killed me . . . but Xhea, when I was alive I did some glorious things.”

  Shai looked at the City far above, sunlight bright on her face. In that moment Xhea wished that she could see color, for it seemed that more than mere light played across the ghost’s features, and all the languid brilliance of the Towers’ aurora gleamed in her eyes.

  Xhea stopped as they rounded the next corner. The subway entrance that had been safe but hours before was now marked with an entrapment spell that hovered by the crumbling stairs, reaching with near-invisible arms. Yet it wasn’t the spell that stopped her, but the man crouched beneath it. Neat and perfectly coiffed, the pale-haired City man reached to place a stone beneath the spell, completing the tell-tale X.

  He was her unknown ally?

  No, she realized, watching him. He wasn’t placing the stone—he was removing it. She had time for the realization, nothing more, for the man sat back on his heels and turned as if he’d heard her silence, felt her stillness. Their eyes met, and for a moment the air seemed to vibrate between them.

  “Hello,” he called, and the strange tension between them snapped. He brushed his hands on his pants and stood, the entrapment spell’s dormant tendrils drifting over his hair and shoulders like long fingers.

  “Hello,” Xhea replied. She dropped the remains of her cigarette and ground it out, using the motion to disguise her quick scan of the area. No one else was paying attention to either her or the man—that she could see. Not that it meant a blighted thing.

  Behind her, Shai faded back, putting the building’s crumbling corner between her and the stranger. They’d yet to ascertain how easily a citizen could see the ghost by her radiant magic, and this didn’t seem like a terribly good time to find out.

  “Escape routes,” Xhea murmured. “Quick.”

  The man stepped forward, and the heel of his shoe clicked on the broken pavement, a sharp, decisive sound. “You must be Xhea,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  His hands stayed loose at his side, no movement betraying the beginnings of a spell or a weapon concealed in a pocket—not that his sharply tailored outfit would allow something so crass. Yet there was something about him that set all her mental alarms to ringing—and the last thing she wanted was to find out why.

  She took a step backward, and he raised a hand to stop her. “Wait.” Another moment, and he raised the other hand, showing her his palms. “I’m not here to accost you,” he said. “Just give you an offer. You don’t like it, you can walk away, no problem.”

  Run, Xhea thought, even as her mouth said, “What kind of offer?”

  “I’m looking to hire you on a short-term contract—an estimated three weeks in duration.”

  Three weeks was short term? Xhea swallowed her exclamation. “Why?” she managed.

  “I’ll be honest,” he said, lowering his hands. “We can afford you. The extent of the service we require—the extent of the haunting—would result in a truly exorbitant price if we went to anyone else. We could provide you with whatever payment you needed—more than you could imagine—and not break our budget. A mutually profitable arrangement, yes?”

  “No,” Xhea said, trying to hide her shock at his reply. “Or, yes, but—that wasn’t what I meant.” Her mind spun. There were others like her? Where—and why had she never heard of them? The next thought followed hard on the heels of the first: if there were others who could see ghosts, did they also have her strange dark magic? She forced that line of thinking aside. “I meant why do you need my help.”

  “Ah, yes. Like I said, it’s rather an extensive haunting and . . . a complicated situation.”

  “You need an exorcism? Of the whole Tower?”

  “That’s one solution, and certainly what some are hoping for. But you’re the expert; perhaps you’d be able to recommend a different solution.”

  “For this contract, I’d have to live in your Tower?”

  “We’d provide meals and accommodations, yes. Unless, of course, you’d be more comfortable making your own arrangements, in which case we would be happy to provide you with daily transportation.”

  “Your Tower’s not Allenai, is it?”

  “Allenai?” The man’s pale brows raised in evident confusion. “No. Why?”

  Xhea shrugged. “Not important. How much are you offering?”

  The sum he named was so astronomical that Xhea could barely process it. She stood, staring—knowing she was staring, slack-jawed and stupid, and unable to do anything about it.

  “I’ve heard that you can’t process the energy directly,” he continued as she gaped, “so we could make arrangements for you to be paid an equal amount in goods and services, or hold some of the funds for you to draw on as needed, or—well, I’m sure we could find a satisfactory arrangement.”

  “I need . . .” Xhea choked on the words. “I need . . .”

  “To think about it,” he replied. “Yes, of course. But here, let me give you this.” He reached slowly and carefully into his pocket, and drew forth what Xhea took to be a small metallic chit. A coin? No, she saw as he raised his hand toward her, the metal disc laid flat on his palm. It was more like the token that she’d stolen from Brend’s private food storage, the metal inscribed with a detailed pattern that was almost like a spell.

  “Use this to contact me—I’m known as Derren. We can even arrange for you to have a tour, understand the details of the situation, before you—”

  Xhea steppe
d forward, reaching for the offered disc. Somewhere behind her, Shai cried out. “Xhea, on your right!”

  There was a yell—a harsh, inarticulate sound—

  The pale-haired man, Derren, shouted, “No, not now!”

  A man struck Xhea on her right shoulder, sending her sprawling into the road. She hit the ground hard and tried to roll; cried out as the weight of the man hit her moments later, impacting against her chest and legs. Whoever hit her cried out as well, a sharp sound of pain as their bodies connected, and he flinched away.

  “Grab her,” someone was shouting. “Blight it, just grab her!”

  “Not like that,” another voice said—a familiar voice, though she couldn’t place the speaker. “I told you—”

  Xhea pushed herself away, and fought to gain her feet, but the impact had rattled her, knocked the breath from her chest and set her head to spinning. She stood, stumbled, and almost fell again. Where were her attackers? One on the ground, voices behind her shouting. Which way was the subway entrance?

  “Xhea,” Shai called again, closer this time. “This way—toward my voice.”

  She stumbled forward, gasping for air. Caught sight of Derren being held by a hunter, his perfect hair in sudden disarray. His offered token was on the ground, light glinting from its etched patterns, but there was no time to grab it. Shai was like a beacon before her, the ghost’s light calling her onward.

  “That’s it. Now duck under the spell.”

  Xhea dropped and rolled, feeling each of the stones of the warning X dig into her side. Suddenly she was at the lip of the stairway and rolling down, the broken tile of the stair treads sharp against her shoulders and hip and back. She caught herself after a few stairs, whimpered, and made her way down the rest. Gates barred the subway entrance, but they were old and rusting, and she’d unlocked the chain that bound them years before, only leaving it for show. Yanking away the chain, she pushed the gates open and forced herself through the narrow gap into the cold and shadow beyond.