Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  She stared, and at last saw the faint glimmer around each of their hands, brief pulses of power that vanished as quickly as they appeared, absorbed into the surfaces that they touched so intently. They were feeding the Tower, Xhea realized. With every beat of their hearts, every breath and thought, the life within their very cells was sent into Eridian.

  She stepped forward, and one by one they opened their eyes.

  In her plan—if she even had the right to use the word for such a tangled mess of half-conceived ideas—she had assumed she could follow Shai’s tether to where the ghost was being held, slipping through the Tower’s morning crowds as she did the Lower City market: if not unobtrusively, then at least largely ignored. Yet while few in the Lower City could see her magic, magical talent was the rule above. The gift that made Lorn’s family powerful enough to reign as the Lower City’s elite was commonplace in the City proper—average, if not weak.

  So she stood before the gathered citizens of Eridian veiled by the swirling darkness she no longer knew how to dispel, and they stared. Seeing her—seeing her magic. The ground died at her feet, a spreading pool of black; and they stared.

  Xhea stared back, looking from one face to another, settling nowhere. Say something, she thought. Say anything—anything to break the terrible weight of silence, the pressure of their eyes upon her.

  There came a whisper from the crowd to her right and she turned. By a lift tube stood a familiar pale-haired man. As she watched, bright sparks flowed between his fingers, weaving a spell faster than Xhea had ever before seen. She just had time to recognize the shape of a message spell before it lifted from his hands, up and away, vanishing in the light of the Tower’s heart above.

  “Derren,” Xhea said, thinking: no, not when she’d come so close. Derren met her eyes and smiled.

  “Now this is an unexpected surprise.”

  “Yes,” Xhea said, mind spinning. “I’ve . . . I’ve come to take you up on your offer. Am I too late?”

  She braced for his reaction, expecting more than the slow raise of a single pale eyebrow. “That’s why you’ve come?” he asked.

  “Of course.” Xhea spread her arms, holding tight to her pipe. “Why else?”

  Oh, why else indeed? Yet if she could not sneak in unaware, or storm the gates, why not walk in invited? A mental clock ticked in time to her heartbeat, to the tether’s stuttering pull, Shai’s silent cry.

  Derren smiled thinly. “Such an unexpected surprise.” He started to gesture across the crowded garden when a returning message drew his attention. “Ah, here we are.” He beckoned it forward, and the spell unfurled to settle, petal-soft, across his face before dissolving. Derren paused, and gave her a considering look.

  “Tell me—the ghosts in your care. Do they matter to you?”

  “Matter?” She could feel the question’s hidden weight and took a leap of faith, hoping that he knew enough of her reputation to believe her answer. “What can they matter? They’re dead.”

  “And the ghost you had with you when last we met. What was she to you?”

  Xhea grimaced. “I’d say a payment, but a missed opportunity is more like it. Couple of bidders interested in claiming that one, then she up and vanishes. A year’s income, gone.” Yet even as she spoke, her mind reeled: he’d seen Shai’s glow. He’d known she was there. Who was this man?

  “Why?” she asked. “What’s it matter?”

  “That’s not for me to say.” He gestured to the lift. “After you. We can discuss the details of our arrangement on the way.”

  As he came to stand beside her, she made a gesture of her own, smoke-like ribbons trailing from her fingers as she raised her hand. “I think not,” she said, keeping her tone casual and vaguely threatening. Better that than: sorry, no can do, this stuff’s entirely out of my control.

  “As you wish,” he said, clearly humoring her. “After me.”

  He stepped into the empty air of the tube. With a rush of light, a platform formed beneath his feet, the glimmering spellwork as steady as the floor. He extended both hands and his magic flowed. There were no movements of his fingers, no whispered words, and yet Xhea watched as spells seemed to write themselves in midair, complex patterns writhing and joining too fast for her to read, almost too fast to follow. The lines twined around the lift spells beneath him, amplifying and reinforcing the platform. Xhea had never seen a working like it—and he did it without hesitation, seemingly without thought.

  “Now, please,” Derren said, all politeness and steel, and Xhea entered the tube at his side.

  The platform shuddered at her slight weight, and she was all but blinded by the sudden surge of Derren’s magic. In the twisting spell lines, Xhea glimpsed patterns that spoke of strength and stability and endurance—could feel their sudden heat through her boots. The magic cascading from her eroded the spells holding them aloft; yet as fast as the spell-lines sputtered and died, Derren’s magic mended what she ruined so unthinkingly.

  The spells shuddered again and they rose. Xhea couldn’t bear to watch the ground drop away and so she looked up. The lift tube around her was so tall that she couldn’t see its top, branching in countless directions like a great tree. Floors rushed by, allowing her glimpses of gently curving halls and wide chambers, children’s play areas, gardens and dining halls and open pools. All dim now, empty and waiting.

  She thought, I never could have done this alone. Never. But what she said was, “Let’s talk payment.”

  Derren spared her a sideways glance. “Without knowing the nature of the job?”

  Clumsy. She tried to recover. “You said that’s not for you to say—but you’re clearly able to make me an offer. Considering how fast we’re going, I’m guessing it’s important.” She shrugged. “I want to know how much ‘important’ is worth to you. Or, rather, to me.”

  The lift tube around them branched, and branched again. She didn’t see how Derren guided them along one route rather than another; yet, unerringly, they moved toward the Tower’s core. The tether joining her to Shai strengthened with every passing second. Light began to shimmer through the tube’s frosted length: Eridian’s heart, she realized. The Tower’s living magic pulsed just beyond her reach. She clasped her hands together, white-knuckled, sweating.

  “I offered you renai before—but there are other options, should that not be to your liking. A life like this, for example.” Derren gestured at the walls with a hand streaming magic.

  “I can’t live in a Tower,” Xhea said, all scorn and haloed darkness. Thinking: especially not this one.

  “Clearly. Yet you could have enough to eat and drink. Clothes to keep you warm in winter. A place to live that isn’t leaking or rotting or buried underground. And you would be safe. You would have protection from a source that no one in the Lower City would dare cross.”

  It took Xhea a moment to find her voice. “You’re offering me—what, Eridian’s patronage? For one job?”

  “One or more—that’s for you to decide.”

  Then Xhea heard Shai screaming.

  At first the sound was barely audible over the wind of their passage and the sizzle of the spells beneath them fading, dying and being reborn. The sound grew as they approached until it took effort for Xhea not cover her ears with her hands. The tether had given her only the resonance of a scream, echoing breathless and undying.

  The sound was far worse.

  Whatever she might have replied—whatever Derren might have made of her reaction—was lost on their arrival. The lift shuddered to a stop, open to a room that was as large, if not larger, than the garden below. No trees, here, no bushes or statues. Nothing to hide what was happening.

  “Oh sweetness,” Xhea whispered. “Sweetness and blight.”

  They were directly above Eridian’s heart. Power rose through a glass-clear floor in great shimmering arcs, like flares lifting from the surface of an uncertain sun. The chamber was huge, echoing, but everything seemed to be made from crystal: wherever she looked, brigh
t facets reflected the light—the magic—and amplified it until the very air vibrated. It felt like a physical force, pushing against her like heavy hands, choking her, stealing breath and strength alike. Glimpses of color shimmered across Xhea’s vision, blurring the world around her, and she felt a surge of fear. Yet fear was a defense in itself: the instinctive swirl of dark energy it conjured was just enough to keep the power from swamping her.

  Xhea stood frozen until Derren pulled her from the lift tube and she stumbled, barely catching her unsteady weight with the length of pipe. It was her only motion; she could but stare, wide-eyed and incapacitated by shock.

  There were no storage coils here, no makeshift medical bed with tubes and wires. But it was the same. She’d sworn never again—those whispered words sometimes all that lulled her trembling self to sleep, alone in the darkness—and yet here it was, a nightmare reborn in light. Her fingers quivered as if to reach for the silver knife that Orren had taken from her—though whether to grab it or throw it away, she did not know.

  A body lay prone in the center of the room on an edged and gleaming platform carved of glass. A young woman: eyes open, lips parted, dark hair spread about her face in a mussed tangle, trim body covered with a sheet. She might have been tall had she stood, but Xhea knew at a glance that this girl would never stand again. Though she breathed and her dark eyes jerked as if caught in dreams, her spirit had been torn from her body. It was Shai who now gave the flesh what little life it possessed—Shai who was stuck, half absorbed by the body and fighting wildly to be free. In this room of magic and reflections, her light was the brightest of all.

  Never again. The echoes of the silent words mocked her, and she could have wept. Could have screamed, her voice a living echo of Shai’s. Would have run to her, but Derren had hold of her shoulders, his grip firm despite the discomfort—the pain—of her touch.

  “Easy now,” he said.

  So she only turned to them, the others in the room, two of whom were moving toward her. She knew she had to pretend at this crucial moment, and could not. They were speaking to her, their lips moving as one reached out a hand in greeting, and she heard none of it. There was only a scream that went on and on and on—a sound of pain unending, voiced by one long past the need for breath.

  “You can’t do this,” she said. Faint and barely voiced—but somehow the sound reached Shai. The ghost’s desperate struggles did not cease, but changed: Shai reached blindly for Xhea, her one free hand outstretched and grasping, and when she screamed it was Xhea’s name.

  Do something, Xhea thought in desperation. But with Shai’s scream broken, she heard other sounds: the murmur of slow chants, whispers from the casters that ringed the platform; a few words from the people before her, “—so glad you could—”; and a whimper, soft and yearning.

  Ignoring the two before her, Xhea stepped forward, pushing one aside with a touch of her bare hand against his exposed arm, ignoring the jolt. She moved slowly, not toward the platform but circling it, and Derren let her do that much, his hands on her shoulders as if he guided her steps, the near-contact of their bodies buzzing and numbing her skin. Far enough to see that the room held not one ghost, but two.

  A young woman’s ghost sat curled on the floor, hugging her knees as if to ward against cold. The tether that had held her spirit to her body had been severed—and not cleanly, as Xhea’s knife might have done, but mangled to the point of breaking. The tattered edges still reached from the center of the ghost’s chest and quested toward the body on the platform, until it looked like the young woman bled heart’s blood into the air—a ghost’s blood, not dark but cloudy-white.

  Where the tether’s fraying ends touched the myriad spells that dragged Shai into the young woman’s body, they tangled, spitting and sparking. Shai’s struggles only worsened the twisted mess, her wild flares of magic destroying some spell lines but reinforcing others, and only drawing the tether further into the hopeless tangle of magic.

  “Xhea!” Shai screamed. Her body arched as she was drawn down into the waiting flesh just a little bit more. Another scream and she struggled back up, tearing at the spells that bound her as one might tear out their own hair.

  Xhea stared. Had she thought that she could keep playing along, acting as if this were but a job while she tried to get close enough to Shai to free her? Impossible, now.

  “You can’t do this,” Xhea said again, and this time her voice was hard and cold. She turned. “I’m going to stop you.”

  “Child,” said a man before her—the one who seemed in charge of this ruin of a spellcasting. “Please. I don’t think you understand.” He smiled, and though the expression creased the skin around his mouth into well-worn lines, it did nothing to ease the bruise-like shadows beneath his eyes.

  He was not kind, that much Xhea knew. She jerked her shoulders to throw off Derren’s hands. It was all she could do not ball her hands into fists—little threat to the gathered officials and spellcasters, the least of whom was easily half again her size.

  “You see the problem,” Derren said. “Why we need your help.”

  “What I see—” she started, only to have his hands return to her shoulders and clamp down. Caution—or threat?

  She did see their problem—but not, she thought, the one he meant. Where Orren’s attempted resurrection had been botched by ineptitude and a critical lack of magic, here neither would have been a concern.

  No, the difference was that Shai had fought. Perhaps that ghost that Xhea had met so long ago—a hesitant spirit, passive and afraid—would have undergone this process without struggle, slipping into the stolen flesh with no one to hear her cries. But that girl was dead as surely as her body. The ghost that bucked and twisted, screaming as she fought against her bonds, wore dark clothes: a jacket with many pockets, laced boots good for running or kicking or making a stand. This girl had had her father taken from her, only to be faced with his spiritless body; she’d had her sacrifice turned into abduction; and she had, in all likelihood, watched these people sever a young woman’s spirit so that they might have use of her flesh.

  To the man before her she said, “No, you don’t understand. You’re torturing her.”

  When she made to step forward, Derren’s hands clenched like vices against her shoulders—but at a gesture from the man, he released her and stepped away. Still he loomed behind her.

  “Xhea,” said the man. “Your name is Xhea, is it not? I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. This is a routine procedure. We’re not torturing anyone. And yes, we’re asking for your assistance—but this is only a minor delay, I assure you.”

  Perhaps this was a routine procedure. But something about the scene—maybe the stress written in their faces, the sweaty exhaustion of the working casters, or the obvious disarray—spoke of more than routine gone wrong. It was, she thought, very much like Orren’s attempt all those years ago, if vastly different in scale—as if they were trying to re-create something they didn’t quite understand. Yes, the power of Radiants, both living and spirit, were harnessed daily by every Tower in the City, that much Shai had told her; but not, she thought, like this. So what was missing?

  “You’re torturing them,” Xhea said as if he hadn’t spoken. “Shai and that girl whose body you’ve stolen.”

  “We haven’t stolen anything.” An edge of exasperation crept into his voice. “The body you see is that of a girl who was in an accident more than a year ago. She’s brain dead, child—has been for months. There was nothing we could do.”

  “I can see her,” Xhea hissed. “I can see her ghost right there on the floor, weeping and struggling to get back to her body. I can see what you did to her.”

  The man—a politician, he had to be a politician with that neat clothing and a face that could look kind while speaking only misdirection and lies—glanced at the woman who stood beside him, his hands lifting fractionally to suggest a shrug. The woman turned to meet Xhea’s eyes, and Xhea knew that she was no politician: there was too m
uch frustration in the set of her mouth and crease of her eyebrows, too much anger in those eyes, too much weariness in her hand as she pushed a stray strand of hair from her face.

  “Normal people don’t have ghosts,” she said shortly. Spellcaster, Xhea named her, and likely the one managing the details of this disaster; she wondered how many of the spells dragging at Shai had been cast by this woman’s slim fingers. “Only those with very powerful magic remain—and even then it’s not a person, only the shape of their power.”

  Xhea shook her head, the denial causing a clatter of charms. “I can see them,” she repeated, each word sharp. “And they are not just reflections of power, either of them.”

  Idiots, Xhea named them in silence, clenching her jaw until her teeth creaked. Morons and idiots all, to think that the Radiant’s glow was a ghost—to believe that only a Radiant spirit could form a ghost at all, no matter the evidence to the contrary.

  They would have chosen someone with strong magic to be Shai’s vessel—but even so, the young woman’s ghost was but a ghost, no glitter of bright magic to her form. Xhea looked from face to face, from the politicians before her to the three spellcasters who ringed the platform, trying fruitlessly to untangle the spells that bound Shai to the living body. Yet none could see the ghosts or their tethers, regardless of the strength of their power—so what did they see? A shuddering body and a bright magic in the shape of a young girl’s ghost; spells that arced and broke and tangled for no reason that they could discern.

  The caster’s look had sharpened. “The other ghost,” she said. “She’s interfering with the transfer?”

  “Anya,” the politician broke in. “I don’t think we should

  encourage—”

  “She’s here because you thought she could help, Councilman,” Anya snapped. “What does it matter what the girl believes so long as she helps get the job done? I don’t know about you, but I’m out of ideas here—and we’re running out of time. The Tower won’t sustain much more of this.” She gestured at Eridian’s flaring heart.