Words. I think I have words now. I tried them. “Yesterday was exhausting,” I carefully enunciated and felt proud of myself when I made sense. Why didn’t it feel like yesterday? My eyes drifted to the window. “I don’t see the sun.”
“It’s up.” Chi flapped toward the east unhelpfully. “Over there somewhere. I have a very important question to ask: did you kiss her?”
I gave him an unimpressed look. Why was this idiot my friend, again? “You’re a little too emotionally involved in my romance, Chi.”
“Oooh, was it a good kiss? Did you see rainbows and fireworks and kittens?”
Smirking up at him, I rolled to my back, scooting up a little so I could half-recline against the headboard. “You think I stopped at one?”
He giggled, actually giggled.
“You are such a girl,” I informed him.
“Every girl around us could take you apart with their bare hands,” he pointed out, still giggling and far too happy.
“You’ll notice I didn’t say it within their hearing.” Seriously, what was wrong with him? Chi was never this silly, especially not before the first cup of coffee. “Chi. How much sleep did you get?”
“I dunno, couple of hours?”
I shoved him back to the bed and forced him under the covers. “Sleep. You’re punch drunk from not enough sleep.” I glanced at the window and found that the sky didn’t have the slightest hint of brightness to it. ‘Sun up in the east somewhere’ my eyeball.
“You think if Rena fell for you, I have a chance with Vee?” he asked wistfully as he settled dutifully under the covers.
Ah. That was the real reason why he’d woken up, right there. Or at least the real reason why he’d woken me up instead of being a reasonable adult and rolling back over. “I think you need to ask yourself, which would you regret more? Taking the chance or having her slip away from you? You can’t walk this tightrope forever.”
“I know,” he whispered. His eyes slid shut but I didn’t believe for one moment he had fallen back asleep.
I couldn’t let him linger in that uncertainty so I sighed and offered, “Rena figured it out, who you’re in love with. She’s going to try sounding Vee out about the idea in the morning, subtly.”
Chi’s eyes snapped back open and he jerked into a sitting position. “Really?! I owe her.”
“You do.” I punched him playfully in the arm. “So go to sleep, stop waking me up at bird hours.”
“Okay.” Happy, he snuggled back in. Then he froze again. “Wait, what if she says she’s not interested?”
I had patience. Somewhere. It was hard to find it at dark o’clock, was all. “Chi. You seriously mean to tell me you don’t know how to seduce a woman?”
“Err…not successfully? You know, so she actually stays? How did you do it?”
I grumbled and sighed. “How about we have this conversation when we actually know you need it?”
“Right, that’s fair.” He flopped back down, curling up again, and it took more than a few minutes for his breathing to grow heavy.
For several taut minutes, I waited for him to jerk back up again, asking some other crazy question, but apparently he didn’t have any more for tonight. His breathing settled and he uncurled slowly, relaxing over the bed. I relaxed as he did, eyes already sliding shut.
My friends were such incredibly high maintenance.
I had one leg into my pants when I heard Nora’s voice clearly through multiple walls: “Waking someone up, according to the Conventions and Accords, Paragraph 3, is subject to corporal punishment! Especially for a repeat offender!”
I snorted a laugh and asked Chi, “Nora isn’t a morning person, is she?”
He snickered as he dragged a comb through his hair. “Only Maksohm dares to wake her up, and he does it by throwing things at her from the doorway. Does that answer your question?”
“I’LL HAVE YOU COURT-MARTIALLED, DAH’LIL, IF YOU DON’T QUIT!”
“No, but that did.” I’d never heard Nora be that vocal but on the other hand, I’d never seen her that exhausted either. I couldn’t hear what Maksohm said, but something hard and heavy hit the wall. I’d bet anything he just had a shoe lobbed at his head. Maksohm hopefully understood that sometimes retreat was the better part of valor. Otherwise Nora might wake up and get out of bed just so she could kill him.
Sniggering under my breath, I finished pulling my pants on, and none too soon, either. Our door jerked open and Rena took a half step inside. I jumped a little, startled, still without a shirt on. “Rena! Not that I mind, you’ve seen me shirtless before, but….”
“What?” she asked, deliberately obtuse.
“Ahh, did you want to ogle your honey-bear?” Chi cooed, needling.
I expected Rena to blush, but instead she waggled her eyebrows in a lecherous manner I did NOT teach her, I had no idea where she picked that up from. I blamed Chi. “It is a nice view,” she leered, eyes flickering over me.
“You have the next fifty years to ogle me,” I informed her, crossing over to plant a quick morning kiss on her. And wasn’t that nice, that I now could do that? After two years of restraint, the idea that I could freely kiss her whenever was a heady one. “What is it?”
“Can you grab some more of that hot chocolate from the pharmacy and perhaps a—” her eyes darted to Chi before she lowered her voice to a murmur “—pack of Moon Drops?”
If living with my sisters hadn’t taught me about that once a month ailment a woman suffers through, being attached to Rena finished the job. I wasn’t even embarrassed by it anymore. “Ah. Sure.”
“Two packs, actually,” she requested with a grimace. “Vee’s suffering too.”
“While I’m perfectly fine knowing what’s going on with you, can you not tell me things about my other female teammates?” I grimaced, more than a little pained. “There is such a thing as too much information.”
She gave me that expressive roll of the eyes that said she thought I was being silly but she didn’t see the need to call me on it. “Yes, yes. Just drop them off in my room. I’ll get breakfast for you. Maksohm wants us in the meeting room, so we’re eating in there.”
“Roger.” I turned back, pulling on shirt and boots, weapons, and did a quick tie around my hair to keep it from falling in my face. They’d fuzzed out enough that strands escaped and tickled the back of my neck. I hadn’t had a chance to redo my braids in a while and didn’t see the opportunity in my near future, so tying it up seemed my best option at the moment.
I went as requested, grabbing the boxes of medicine and the makings of three hot chocolates, because my mother raised no idiot. The surest way to lose a hand was to give two women chocolate while the third watched. Especially with the way that Nora (doesn’t) wake up.
By the time I made it to the meeting room, three mugs in my hands, they had already started. Everyone sat around the table with plates in front of them, a chart of the area in the clear space in the middle, with stacks of reports and papers being passed around as people consulted them. I leaned over each woman’s shoulder, dispensing the mugs, getting a smile of delight each time.
Chi watched me do this and raised a challenging eyebrow at me. “You were ordered to get two hot chocolates.”
“I was,” I agreed easily, taking my seat next to Rena. Oh good, she had loaded my plate with bacon and got me green tea. I knew I liked her for a reason.
“But you got three.”
“You’re very observant this morning.”
“Bannen,” he said with overly exaggerated patience, “do we need to talk about your pathological need to stay on women’s good sides?”
“I think we just did.”
Nora snorted, and for the first time that morning, didn’t look ready to behead someone with her bare hands. “He’s thoughtful, Chinna, which is how you endear yourself to women. We like it. Thank you, Bannen, I feel less inclined to kill everyone in the room now.”
There was no safe response to that except, “You
’re welcome. Let me know if you want another.”
“See?” Chi asked the table at large. “Pathological need to make women happy. Bannen, my friend, what trauma did you experience to make you like this?”
I gave him a flat look. “I’m the youngest sibling of five sisters.”
Yez chuckled. “That would do it. Chi, do I need to get you a hot chocolate so you don’t feel left out?”
Lip sticking out in an obvious pout, Chi mumbled, “No.”
“You are twelve,” I informed him, trying not to laugh and probably failing. “I’ll get you one later, after the meeting.”
“I’m glad someone remembers this is supposed to be a meeting,” Maksohm drawled from the head of the table. “Now, can I begin?”
“To recap what we already know, we lost five agents to a mind down yesterday.” Maksohm didn’t grimace but the very dry way he reported this illustrated his feelings on the matter. “It will take them a week to become functional again. I examined the barrier around the mountain yesterday and what I saw is not encouraging. The multiple shards inside the barrier are weakening the shields at an exponential rate and we either need to dedicate new agents to applying more layers or we have to destroy Toh’sellor before they fail.”
“I’m not sold on the idea of shifting agents from our strike force to cover the barrier,” Yez stated firmly. “We’d be robbing the right hand to give to the left if we did that.”
Maksohm inclined his head. “I agree. But that means we’re down five shield specialists and we’ll have to reconfigure our teams to go in. It also means we can’t bring as many fighters in, as we don’t have the ability to shield everyone. It became very obvious to me yesterday that we’ll need to double the shields.”
I followed this but didn’t, looking to Rena with a cocked eyebrow. “I thought the shields we used the first time worked fine?”
“For a short jaunt.” Rena’s mouth set in a grim line. “The energy inside has escalated higher than was reported. The shields took an unbelievable amount of damage and I saw signs of a few agents showing symptoms.”
Symptoms? “What symptoms?”
“Frankly, at the tail end, a few suffered side effects from Toh’sellor’s energy.”
My mind flashed to the three agents that had been sick as dogs afterwards, scratching at their skin as if they’d been infested with fleas and itching powder at the same time, convulsing up whatever had been in their stomachs. “Oh. That’s…not good.”
“A simple shield, no matter how reinforced, is not going to be enough to protect anyone.” Maksohm said those words between clenched teeth, hating every syllable. “We’ll need to do individual shields around each person as well as a main shield. I need two decisions today: how many people do we take, and when do we go?”
I didn’t know enough about shields to offer an opinion so instead I watched the mages carefully, waiting on them to decide. My job, after all, was only to execute whatever decision they made.
“My first question,” Vee tapped the report at her elbow with a finger, “is can we actually create a base camp with just three mages? Can a shield they craft withstand Toh’sellor for any real length of time?”
“They can manage to shield an area for six hours at a time, if the area is small enough.”
“So in order for them to manage a shield that lasts sixteen hours, we’d have to assign nine agents to dedicated shield duty.” Nora tore a biscuit in half, frowning down at it as if the crumbles held all of the answers. “Three of them won’t be of much use in the fight later, they’ll still be recovering, and we’ll have to abandon the camp, as holding it will be useless.”
Maksohm grimaced but didn’t deny it. “How much of an area can we cover, that’s my real question. That limits how many teams we can bring in with us.”
Rena swallowed before asking, “The shield design that you want to use for this is a Base Spell, correct?”
“That’s usually what we use, yes. It’s proven to be the most effective for long-term use against Toh’sellor.”
“Are you using the Condensed or Striated Variation?”
“Condensed, its properties make it impervious to energy manipulation—” Nora explained earnestly.
What followed became a very intense discussion that used words I thought I understood, just not in this context. I basically heard ‘Math, math, magic, math, magic maybe, math.’ Yez seemed to follow along, at least, as he nodded here and there and made humming noises. Chi never glanced up from his plate, intent on clearing it of every crumb.
Leaning sideways, I asked him a low voice, “Are you getting any of this?”
“Some of the ‘an’s’ and ‘buts,’” he said cheerfully. “Don’t worry about it, they’ll break it down for us after they reach a decision. Our job is to kill things. Not understand them.”
“Thank magic for that,” I grumbled as I really had no clue what they were talking about. I tried tuning in again for a moment.
“—redesign of the second song might enable us to carry the shield until we can anchor it in the fourth quarter,” Rena said thoughtfully.
“The drain of it would be significant if we allowed the Hexian clause to stay in effect.” Maksohm didn’t sound like he disagreed, more like he could be persuaded.
I shook my head. They still didn’t make any sense. I think I’d wait for the summary later. Instead, I pushed my plate away so I could grab a sheet of paper and a pencil, working up some basic figures. The average person needed a hundred square feet in order to sleep, have room to put luggage down, and all of that. Well, they could normally make do with eighty, but we’d also be forced to cook out there and map out some way to have a latrine in one corner, so I decided to err on being generous and say one hundred.
If we did a skeleton crew, taking in the bare minimum, I estimated it would take four teams of seven, so twenty-eight people. That meant twenty-eight hundred square feet. Easy, basic math. We’d be sleeping basically on top of each other, but we’d manage for the few days it took to get this done. I personally hoped Rena could manage it in two, but from the geek-speak going on at the other end of the table, it seemed like we could manage more than two days.
Chi glanced at my numbers, nodded approvingly, and called out, “Twenty-eight hundred square feet for four teams!”
That paused an argument in its tracks. Maksohm snapped his fingers, calling for my page. I passed it down, where his eyes rapidly scanned through my figures, and he gave a grunt of approval. “In that case—” and he went off once again into terms I couldn’t understand.
Turning, I gave Chi a confused look. “I thought you didn’t understand what they were arguing about.”
“No clue,” he admitted easily, eyes crinkling up at the corners, “but after ten years of sitting through meetings like this, I have finely honed instincts. I know when to yell out information. With that, my job is done. They’ll be at this a while yet, let’s go get some hot chocolate.”
We might as well.
Taking our time, because neither of us would be of much use in there, I actually loaded up a tray full of mugs with people’s addiction of preference before moseying back to the meeting room. The breakfast plates had been cleared at some point, replaced with multiple diagrams and notes, hastily written down. I dispensed drinks, getting a good look at each person’s notes as I did so, and the only person’s that made the remotest sense to me was Yez. But that figured.
Chi plonked down in his seat, crossing his legs at the ankles, hands over his stomach as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “What’d we miss?”
“Magic and math,” Vee answered with a knowing look in his direction. “The short version is this: we agree with Bannen’s assessment that we can only cover about twenty-eight hundred square feet with a barrier. That means we’re limited to four teams of seven.
“Any larger size than that doesn’t pay out well; it would require ten agents for each eight hour shift to hold up a barrier, sacrificing thirty people,�
�� Maksohm explained. “Not worth it. What we’ll do instead is have a satellite group, made of two teams, that will handle any emergency situations. I’m not naïve enough to hope that we’ll just be able to blaze through like usual without something serious cropping up. They’ll be able to huddle together under a much smaller shield, nearby if we need them, but with the freedom to retreat if someone’s seriously injured.”
I let out a small breath, trying to not be obvious about how relieved I felt. Rena’s all-or-nothing attitude about this mission frankly unnerved me because that attitude just begged for trouble. To see Maksohm craft a backup plan, and people dedicated to help the injured or fight the unusual, comforted me to no end. “Odds are people are going to be injured fighting our way inside. It’s going to be too intense, for too long of a stretch; not expecting at least a few injuries isn’t realistic. So I’m glad we’ll have dedicated medics. By my math, that leaves fourteen agents free.”
He heard the unspoken question and nodded, “Those fourteen are going to help with the main barrier, try to strengthen it. The last thing we need is another shard popping up in town while we’re inside dealing with the main threat. I want them on hand out here just in case.”
The strategy had a soundness, a practical element, that soothed me. Moments like these, I saw the weight and experience in Maksohm and knew precisely why when something went wrong, every agent turned to Maksohm first for guidance.
I glanced at Rena, curious what she thought about this. She had that satisfied look on her face of an answer found that she liked. Well, if she thought this the best plan, it likely was. My Rena’s smart about this kind of thing.
“So how long are we planning to stay in there for?” Chi asked.
“Two days,” Nora’s mouth pursed unhappily, like the words tasted bad as she spat them out, “but we’ll plan for three, just to be on the safe side. Rena seems to think she’ll either figure this out in a few hours or not at all, but we want to do as much damage inside as possible, weaken the area, before it can overwhelm the barrier anyway.”
The Void Mage (The Familiar and Mage Book 2) Page 27