Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One by Karina Sumner-Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

easy.
    Again Shai frowned, looking from Orren to Xhea and back again. “It has to do with me, doesn’t it? The thing that happened.”
    “Yes.” She turned to Shai, shifting her eyes’ focus to see the magic that imbued the ghost. It was stronger now, brighter: Shai seemed almost to glow. “I’ve seen a ghost like you before—a ghost who sparkled with magic. Someone had put spells on him. On his body, and . . . on his ghost.”
    “Spells?” Shai glanced down at her hands as if she too might see the magic that wove through her. “What were they supposed to do?”
    “Bring him back to life.”
    It was a ludicrous idea, even in concept. No one—certainly no one in the Lower City—had enough magic to return life to the dead. Even with a skilled caster and assistance with the ghost, resurrection would require so much magic, so much power, as to be impossible. Magic to prepare the body, magic to prepare the ghost, magic to join the two and more to bind them. Magic to slow time’s ravages and heal damage that the body could not. Magic to animate the flesh and tie it to the ghost’s will: spells upon spells, one for every part of the body that needed to move; spells upon spells to animate every muscle in the face and mouth, lips and throat, required for even the most garbled of speech. Magic as fuel guzzled down: energy enough to make any person a force in the City. Energy enough to keep a Tower aloft.
    Still, someone had tried—there, within those twisted walls. And she, gods save her, had helped.
    “Heal him?” Shai asked. “But how could that be bad?”
    Xhea shook her head, coins chiming, as if the memories and the emotions that swelled in their wake might be brushed away like flies. “Not heal him.” She managed to keep her voice steady. “Force his spirit back into his dead body—and keep him there.” Trap him, no matter how much he fought or screamed or cried. No matter how much it hurt him, or how he pleaded. And what use were pleas that only Xhea could hear?
    It was hard to think of those days; harder still to accept that she’d helped willingly, even eagerly. After a year of near uselessness within Orren, the debt of her indenture increasing as she struggled to earn her keep with menial chores, Xhea had confessed her ability to see ghosts. Then there had been work for her—and sudden interest from Orren’s elite. They started with small jobs to prove her skills: speaking to a ghost, banishing another, changing tethers to a dizzying array of anchors. Only later did she realize that they’d been testing her for the one job they cared about.
    They explained little of their goals, these men and women she’d known more by reputation than as living beings: the skyscraper’s few casters, their magic strong enough—or so it was said—to have lived in the City proper but who chose to live in the Lower City like gods among mortals. Even with their power, preparations had taken weeks, spells woven from threads of magic, layered lines of will and intent that bound spirit and body both. Xhea had guided the casters to the ghost that she alone could see, and had steadied the ghost when he had struggled or shied away. The ghost had glimmered, then, as he moved: the spells’ roots dug deep into his spirit, sparking as he fought to be free.
    “But . . . why?”
    “I don’t know,” Xhea whispered. “They didn’t want to know something from him—they forbade me to speak to him. I thought he might have been someone important, but that’s not how they treated him. I even thought that they might have been using him for his magic. They hooked him up to the skyscrapers’ systems, as if he were a battery—maybe you can get more magic from a man when his body doesn’t use it to live?” She shook her head. In all the time she’d thought about it, all the sleepless nights, the pieces had never quite fit.
    “He was dead,” Xhea said. “I mean, he had to have died for his ghost to be free—but they’d