For some reason Maksohm stared at me with that penetrating look again. “You can see the full spell design?”
“My eyes are very good,” I responded with a slight smile. I turned back to the pillar and it took a moment to adjust my usual spell to disintegrate wood, as I had to work through that airtight barrier, but my magic didn’t really care if there was a barrier there or not. What needed to be destroyed would poof. I spoke an incantation, blinked back into normal sight, and the wood became dust within a second.
Maksohm swore viciously and jumped about a foot in the air.
“Good thing we’re doing this now, as generally jumping like a spooked cat in the middle of a fight gets people stabbed,” Bannen said to no one in particular, observing Maksohm’s reaction. “You didn’t really think she could get through your barrier, did you.”
It wasn’t a question but Maksohm answered it anyway. “No one has in the past ten years. Magus Rocci, I’m told you are a Void Mage but I’ve never heard the term and I need a full explanation of what that means.”
“It means I can destroy anything.” I paused and thought about that, but it basically summed up my abilities. “I do mean anything. Everything. It doesn’t matter what kind of protections there are, or if it’s a solid or gas; if I want it gone, my magic can do it. The only constraints I have are distance. I have to see every aspect of a spell or object in order to destroy it.”
“On the flip side, she’s terrible with anything that smacks of creation magic,” Bannen supplied, helpfully stepping in when my mouth stumbled to a stop. “She can barely do communication spells, or portal spells, so please don’t ask it of her unless it’s an emergency. Anything else is a no-go. Her eyes are excellent, though, she can pinpoint a weakness in either a spell or object in a flash. Just don’t expect her to be able to do anything over extreme distances. She has to see it with her natural eyes. Magnifying spells, or telescopes, or binoculars don’t work with her.”
“I think I see why you’re called the Void Mage,” Maksohm stated slowly, turning all of this information over and over in his mind. I could see the wheels turning from here. “You literally void anything you wish to.”
“That’s the sum of it,” I agreed calmly.
“Even Toh’sellor,” he said and it strangely sounded like a question, an unvoiced one that I didn’t know how to interpret or answer.
“That one’s a little more challenging,” I admitted with brutal honesty. “Toh’sellor is a strange concoction of air, gases, magic and some other element I’ve never been able to define. Each shard I’ve encountered is a slight variation as well, no two being exactly alike. I have kept notes on each one, if anyone cares to see them.”
“Oh, we will, Magus, we will.”
“Speaking of shards,” Chi gave Maksohm a more serious study, “the last time we went in, Vee held the shield for us, but it was a…which one did you use, Vee?”
“Locked Variation,” she answered promptly with a grimace. “Which meant I had to hold a shield over each person so we could individually move. Maksohm, by any chance can you hold a Moving Variation over a group of six?”
Maksohm took our question with his eyebrow raised an nth degree, his look adequately conveying that we were all idiots forever questioning his talent and genius and he would find some creative way to punish us for it later. “Of course I can.”
Smiling a little too brightly, Chi assured him, “Never doubted you, just wanted to make sure.”
That quirked eyebrow went up another degree, calling Chi out for that line of bull. The man had very expressive eyebrows, what could I say?
I didn’t doubt Maksohm could, as his magical signature screamed stability and strength. The man practically was a walking barrier. “Do you know where we need to go next? Do you need another demonstration before we leave?”
“No to the demonstration, although I thank you for that, it was very…enlightening.” I took enlightening to mean disturbing. “The shard that we’re assigned to is in Sira, so we have quite the trip ahead of us to get there. I also have another Specialist coming that will meet us up there before we charge the castle gates, so to speak.”
I nodded approvingly. “Sounds good. Do we leave tomorrow?”
“That’s the plan.” Maksohm for some reason looked cautiously at Vee and Chi before adding, “Let’s talk about our destination over a late lunch, shall we?
Rena and I stowed the copies of our contracts in our bags as we headed out for lunch. Maksohm managed to avoid all questions about our destination until he had us seated in a nice little sandwich shop across the street from the MISD headquarters. At this hour, not many patrons were there, just a few regulars lingering over crumbs. It smelled nice and fresh with baking bread and slow roast mingling enticingly. Nothing about the décor struck me as remarkable—just white walls, landscape paintings, wooden tables and chairs. Vee chose a table with a bench at it; that way it would more easily support her weight and she didn’t have to balance half her backside on a narrow chair.
We put in our orders—me ordering twice as much as Rena because the breakfast on the train this morning had been abysmal—and then I sat back, ready for a show. Something about Maksohm’s evasive tactics with Chi and Vee suggested there would be fireworks.
The other two agents had picked up on it as well, as Vee asked suspiciously, “We’re not going to like this, are we?”
“We’re going to Njorage next,” Maksohm said bluntly, although his eyes looked vaguely apologetic.
“No!” Vee and Chi protested in perfect, tandem panic. They gave him a look so aghast, Maksohm might as well have suggested the ritualistic butchering of a basket of baby bunnies.
“The shard there is dangerously on the verge of splintering past the barrier,” Maksohm began, logical, impassive.
I didn’t know the man all that well but it seemed to me like he had a banked gleam in his eye. Some part of him enjoyed this. Clearing my throat, I ventured, “Is there something about this city we need to know about…” I trailed off invitingly.
Neither agent would look at me, still glaring daggers at Maksohm.
My attention bounced between the three of them, avidly curious and expecting a good story. Rena’s did as well.
Unbending enough to explain, Maksohm focused on me. “They have tremendously bad luck at Njorage. They’ve only been there twice and the first time was mildly embarrassing, but the second time was worse. Vee shot Chi—”
Vee interrupted vehemently. “He asked me to shoot him!”
An escaped, muffled laugh nearly erupted from Rena. “Really?” she demanded.
Turning a hurt, betrayed look on his partner, Chi slammed a palm down on the table and denied just as vehemently, “I did not ask you to shoot me, that is not what I said!”
“You did too!”
“I so did not, Vee!”
Sensing that they would digress into five year olds in a minute, I struggled to bring them back on track. “Wait, start at the beginning. What happened?”
“I hate monkeys,” Chi told me flatly, burning with a sort of righteous indignation. “There’s monkeys in Njorage. Hordes of them. They’re grey and white, they like the cold and the mountains, and they have no sense of shyness when it comes to people. They walk right up to them, perch on their fences, completely shameless. While I was up there, I accidentally bumped into one, trapping his tail against my shoulder, and he screeched fit to kill, calling all of his buddies, and then they swarmed me like some sort of furry locusts, and I’m not armed because I’d just come out of the sarding bath—”
Rena looked nearly purple from the strain of not laughing. She put a hand on my thigh, using it to prop herself up, fingers nearly biting into my flesh. The touch of her sent my brain on a brief loop but I yanked it firmly back to the conversation, not willing to be completely sidetracked by her. Aside from being dangerous, I would miss what Chi would say next, and the mental picture Chi painted was too good to lose any part of it.
&n
bsp; “—and I’m in nothing more than one of those ridiculous towels, and they’re biting and clawing at me, so I start screaming for help because I can’t get them off of me, and then Vee shows up and I think I’m saved,” here, Chi paused to give her a wounded, betrayed look all over again, “but no, I’m not saved because my own partner shoots me with my own bow.”
“Seton likes monkeys, he wouldn’t let me use him,” Vee defended herself, shoulders thrown back, chin up, indignant.
“Vee. You SHOT ME.”
“I’m a bad shot, you know that!”
“You could have beaten them off with your hands!”
“I didn’t want them to bite me!”
“Like they were biting me?!” Chi demanded. “And you broke my bow!”
My voice sounded a little choked as I declared, “I love how that’s as important as you being shot.”
Feeling (wrongly) that he had found a sympathetic ear, Chi turned to me, lip quivering. “She doesn’t know her own strength, she pulled that thing past the breaking point, and still the arrow launched, I have no idea how she managed that, she just did, and it didn’t hit a single monkey, but it hit me square in the shoulder with such force that it actually pinned me to the wall!”
I winced. That had to have been painful. “Did it break your shoulder blade?”
“Fortunately missed,” Maksohm inserted quietly.
Vee glared at Chi, also looking a little hurt but mostly embarrassed. “I had to pull him out of the wall first, while still leaving the arrow in, so I didn’t cause more damage. And then find pants for him, because he refused to go to a doctor or Mage Healer without being at least semi-dressed first.”
“My dignity had already been shot full of holes, literally, so I wasn’t going to parade around basically naked on top of it all,” Chi declared to everyone and no one at once.
I did see his point. I personally would have demanded clothes of some sort too, in that sort of situation.
“But you understand,” Vee appealed to us, the two listeners to the tale, “that I never intended to shoot him.”
Chi growled, “It doesn’t change the fact you did shoot me. And broke my bow.”
Turning on him, Vee growled back, “I swear you’re more upset that I broke the bow than being shot.”
“Maybe I am!” Chi declared, slamming a hand down.
They fell into squabbling just like five year olds and I shook my head in wonder. These were supposed to be professional agents, correct?
Maksohm leaned in to whisper to me, “You can now see why they have a rule to not talk about it. They argue like this every single time. The funny thing is, the argument is so well-worn it’s nearly verbatim at this point.”
A detail from the argument poked its head up and I frowned a little. “Wait, if Vee was able to enter the bath…Chi, were you in a public bath?”
“Ah, yes. Njorage is famous for its hot springs, there’s a public bath on every corner up there.” Chi added bitterly, “Not that you can enjoy it because of the monkeys.”
I had to bite the inside of my lip, hard, to keep myself from smiling. Smiling would not win me any friends right now. “If I promise to guard you from the monkeys, will you rest a little easier?”
Chi gave me a look that border-lined adoration. “You promise?”
“Promise.” Don’t smile, don’t laugh, DON’T SMILE, so hard to keep a straight face, sards.
Maksohm let out a cough that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. “With that settled, can we get back to the problem at hand? Yes? We have an agent already on site that will give us the details when we get up there, but for now we need to get on a train to Njorage. I didn’t know precisely when you would arrive, what with your task regarding the Rainbow River, so I didn’t buy train tickets. Are we all able to leave in the morning?”
Everyone nodded, agreeing.
“Good, I’ll get tickets for us after lunch. Now, I do have a few questions for you, Rena.”
We paused naturally as the food arrived, smelling deliciously spicy, the waft of perfectly cooked chicken making me salivate. With the food settled, Rena waved Maksohm to ask, even as she took a healthy bite into her sandwich.
“How close do we need to be to the target?” Maksohm asked bluntly.
“Fifty feet,” I answered for her, since her mouth was still full.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Chi threw up a hand in disbelief. “You can see the exact magical/energy/whatever makeup of a shard of Toh’sellor from fifty feet away? I know that’s the distance you got us to at the last shard, but….”
Rena just looked at him, a cocky tilt to her head. “My eyes are very good.”
“Like you would not believe,” I grumbled to them good-naturedly. “When she gets bored, she bets with people how far something is. She can tell you down to a straw’s width the distance and she’s never wrong. And it’s not limited to that, either. We were once stranded inside the center of a mountain, literally no light anywhere around us, and she navigated our way out and then tunneled toward the top without once tripping.”
Vee’s eyebrows shot up. “Now that is impressive.”
Of course Chi asked the inevitable, “What in thunderation were you idiots doing in the middle of a mountain?”
I thought about answering that and then shook my head. “Long story, I’ll tell you if we’re ever drunk. Anyway, do not question her if she says that she sees something. She’s always right.”
The shield specialist took that information in, chewed on it for a moment, then turned to Rena. “You’re telling me that you can analyze the energy and component structure of something enough to dismantle it from fifty feet away?”
I felt a little surprised, as normally Rena had to explain how her magic worked first, but then I realized that as a shield specialist, Maksohm might very well be Rena’s natural opposite. He had to analyze something in order to build a shield around it. If you reversed the effects, he in essence had to go through a similar initial process that she did.
Rena gave him a slight smile that only looked a trifle smug.
He didn’t say it out loud but Maksohm clearly had a hard time believing her.
“I think a demonstration is in order,” Chi popped up and headed for the opposite side of the room. “Now, Rena, I am going to go write something on the far wall, that’s about fifty feet, isn’t it?”
“Fifty-three feet and four inches, close enough,” she agreed, amused at this case of show and tell.
Chi blinked. “Bannen wasn’t kidding about how accurately you can judge distances, was he?”
“Not in the slightest.” Rena shooed him on. “Go on, write something.”
With almost a skip in his step, Chi snagged a pencil from the front counter and a napkin and went to the opposite wall, writing something that looked a little small for normal handwriting, but who was I to judge? He wrote only a sentence and then whirled away, like a stage performer revealing some trick.
Rena read it off without a second of hesitation: “Bannen owes me lunch, make him pay up.”
I laughed outright. “I’ll pay you next time, Chinny-chin-chin.”
Chi grinned at me. “Promises, promises. Rena is the responsible one, I trust her to remind you. That satisfy you, Maksohm?”
Maksohm rubbed at his forehead as if he had a brooding headache just waiting to pounce. “This is becoming stranger by the second. Rena, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have a proper discussion about your magic and abilities while we’re on the train. I seem to have more questions than I do answers.”
Rena’s smile went taut, a little false around the edges for a moment, and I knew why. No one, aside from the mage that figured it out, her two masters, and Gill, knew the truth about Rena’s magic. They didn’t really know how it worked, or that it slowly killed her on a daily basis with only her bond to me mitigating the damage. We both were of the opinion that some things were better left unspoken, so she didn’t tell people any of that information voluntarily. No doub
t the specialists of the MISD were trustworthy people, but a secret was best kept when not noised abroad.
“I’ll answer what I can,” she responded truthfully.
We boarded the train the next morning just after the sun inched its way over the horizon. I wasn’t really a morning person, although I could function just fine, so I managed to navigate through the narrow hallway in the train without bumping into every wall. The same could not be said for everyone else. Vee apparently didn’t do mornings (or at least, pre-dawn awakenings) as she had her arms around Chi’s shoulders and her cheek resting on the top of his head, slumped over him like a dying cat. Chi had both of their bags in hand, guiding her without a word, a small sleepy smile of affection and amusement on his face.
Maksohm looked rather awake, and Rena hadn’t completely managed to enter the land of the living, but at least she moved under her own power.
In deference to Vee’s size, we had one of the larger train cabins, which meant we had more than six inches between the two benches and a padded row of seats on either side. We threw our bags up in the overhead racks, settling immediately to avoid being tossed back and forth when the train got underway. Somehow, without discussion, Rena, Maksohm and I ended up on one bench, Vee and Chi on the other. Chi sat in the corner, slightly angled so his spine pressed toward the window, Vee sprawling out so that her head lay cushioned on his lap. Even then her legs draped along the floor, crossed at the ankle, butting up against the door. With a sigh, she settled and went right back to sleep.
Tangling his hand in her dark chocolate hair, Chi looked out the window, expression peaceful. In the short time I’d known him, I’d never seen him so content or still.
If he wasn’t in love with Vee, I’d eat my boots.
The train started chugging, a slightly jerky motion that we could feel but didn’t disrupt our balance. We’d barely pulled out of the station when Rena tugged at a lock of hair, peering at it doubtfully, then giving me a hopeful look.
The Void Mage (The Familiar and Mage Book 2) Page 6