Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (11 page)

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.

Dark magic rose at that touch, and Xhea let it come. It moved like a dark tide, easing through Xhea’s body and down through her arms, pulled toward Shai’s bright fire.
There
, Xhea told it, guiding it toward the healing spells;
there
and
there
. The magic turned at her command. One by one the spells began to fail, flicker and go dark, drowned beneath a tide of shadow; one by one they uncoiled, lines of magic releasing their hold on Shai’s dying body, their power unraveling and spinning into nothing.

It should be harder
, Xhea thought. There was no pain, no hesitation; only the flow of magic, slow and gentle as breath.