Agents of Order

by T. R. Cameron

  Her phone buzzed, and she looked down to find a text from an unknown number. She frowned as she read it. Agent Sheen, your presence is requested by the Lady. However, you are no longer permitted to portal into Stonesreach. Please present yourself to her in three hours.

  Her frown deepened. If the Lady of the Kemana was upset with her, that was one thing, but revoking her permission to portal in meant that she would have to walk all those steps again. And climb them again if we don’t fix whatever’s broken. She put her palms on the table and used them to push herself to her feet, already feeling the future pain in her legs from the steep staircases that led into the underground city.

  She headed to the elevator that would take her to the lowest level of the facility. “Friday, let Cara know that she’s in charge for the next twelve hours or so and that I’ll be in the kemana.” It was standard protocol to hand leadership off when she would be out of contact, and they did it regularly during her training sessions and journeys to Oriceran on sword-searching missions with Nylotte. The AI chimed to acknowledge her request.

  The floor was empty when she exited the lift, which was a bonus. She strode quickly to the equipping area and opened her locker. Technology was forbidden, nonfunctional, or both in the kemana, so her guns and grenades would stay at home. Diana withdrew an extra pair of potions, doubling up on her healing and energy flasks as she slid them into her belt. She retrieved the black uniform shirt and donned it but didn’t tuck it in to hide the gear she carried. Kayleigh had made her an alternate version of the stylish spy boots a few weeks before without the holster for the Ruger. Instead, each held a stiletto down the back and a brace of throwing knives. She pushed her feet into them and stomped to set her heels, enjoying the echoes that followed.

  She was ready to go, but something still didn’t feel right. Okay. If I insult the Lady, so be it. She can cut me some slack in return for making me walk. Diana pulled the shirt off and located her special vest—the only one on this planet to feature a layer of titanium chain on the inside—and strapped it on. She slipped a bowie knife into the back sheath and put the dark uniform top over it. When she looked in the full-length mirror on the wall next to the exit door, it seemed obvious that she wouldn’t really fool anyone, but she hoped to earn a point or two for at least attempting not to offend.

  With a sigh over the extra pain the additional weight of the chain would add to her legs, she summoned a portal to the parking area near the kemana's outer entrance. Maybe I should use my force power and fly through the tunnel instead. She snorted. That’d be sure to tick them off.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Diana stepped from the portal into a darkened corner of the parking lot. The highway overhead cast shadows in the diffuse light from the clouds, and she materialized unseen. She crossed to the unremarkable gate and freed it with a spell, lacking patience for the icon-search she’d had to do before. With each step along the earthen tunnel, her ire at the situation grew.

  She was scowling when she reached the inner door. It was guarded, as always, by a bored-looking Kilomea. “Diana Sheen.” He nodded and opened for her as she presumed he would do for anyone magical. Lady Alayne had explained long before that the checkpoint was primarily to keep humans from wandering where they shouldn’t be for their own safety as well as for the security of the kemana.

  The tunnel transformed from hewn rock to carved stone in the same ivory color that dominated the city beyond it. As she neared the threshold, purple light seeped in from above and tinted the floor with the same shade. She paused before entering to admire the layout of Stonesreach, particularly the way the streets appeared to be rays of a sun from a child’s drawing that emanated from the glittering white castle in the distance that was home to the leader of the community.

  And she is not on my list of favorite people, at the moment. Lady Alayne had always been prickly and was clearly much more concerned with the goings-on of the city below the surface than the one above. Which is appropriate, she acknowledged with an inward sigh. I miss the days where things were less muddy. What I wouldn’t give for the purity of a fight with Cresnan right about now. She chuckled at the thought of the first Kilomea she’d encountered, then sobered as she remembered his ultimate fate.

  Diana took a deep breath like a swimmer about to dive into a pool and crossed the threshold into the kemana proper. She stood at the top of the long staircase that cut through the rings of modest homes arranged in tiers on the way down. The activation of her danger sense came as a complete shock and her mind reeled as the world slowed around her. Despite her preparations, she’d not really believed there was any peril to be faced on this journey. Her mental voice chided her, “Always the optimist. Look out!”

  She caught the glow of the fireball from the corner of her eye and leaned back to let it pass through the space her head had just occupied. Idiots. You should have used shadow. I might not have seen it. She turned to find the culprit but there was no one in sight. She breathed a charm to dispel illusion but nothing was revealed. Time accelerated again, and she looked down to see a pair of angry-looking Kilomea racing up the stairs from the tier below. Her first inclination was to engage them directly, but that would leave her vulnerable to attacks from the other sides, including from the mysterious fire-thrower.

  Acting on instinct, she darted to her left and surged into a full run toward the nearest houses. This level was all dark, as it had been every time she’d visited the kemana. Damn it. No help to be had here. That triggered an idea, and she opened her mental defenses a smidgen to try to send her mentor a telepathic message. She stumbled and fell forward as pain lanced through her skull and obliterated the very possibility of thought, and she reflexively snapped the barriers around her mind back into place.

  Her hands were bleeding from where they’d scraped the ground but she pushed awkwardly to her feet. The first house flashed past as she ran through what would be its backyard and suddenly, her instincts screamed a warning. An immediate slide allowed her to narrowly avoid the blade that whipped menacingly over her head, and she darted up in a fury. Enough of this. She extended her arms and touched her thumbs together to summon a wide cone of fire aimed at her barely seen opponent.

  There was a scream as the flame washed over a giant Kilomea, the largest she’d ever encountered, and set him ablaze. In the flickering glow, she saw the two in pursuit had closed the distance and that another she hadn’t noticed before emerged from the space between the houses. That one ignored his burning partner and stalked past him as he approached. He swung something that looked like a motherloving halberd, with a curved blade on the left of the long staff, and spikes on the top and right. She thought about drawing one of her various knives, the Bowie in particular, and grinned. There is enough magic around, and I have extra potions. Let’s mess this bastard up. She put her fists together, one atop the other, and a blade of force extended from them to stop at about the length of a samurai sword. Another trickle of power added fire to the edges. She smiled at her enemy. “I'm ready to dance when you are, scumbag.”

  Her skills with the sword were rusty as the martial art that had used it was many years in her past. However, some of the basics were still deep in her muscle memory, waiting to be called upon. His downward stroke seemed intended to end the fight in one blow. Diana avoided it by scurrying to the side and watched it pass. She made a horizontal chop with her own blade with the same intent, but he dodged and managed to keep his skull attached to his body. The next attacks with the halberd were stabs with the point, using it as a poorly balanced spear. They were fast enough that she was forced to focus exclusively on defense. She deflected the spear to the left, right, then left again with brisk swings of her blade. Her opponent made his mistake when he whipped the weapon around his head and brought it across, blade-first, in a sideways strike at her midsection.

  She had been waiting for an attack exactly like that and closed the distance between them in a fast shuffle to position herself too close to him for th
e blade to connect. She slashed down, not at him but at the shaft of the halberd, and her flaming force sword sliced through it without slowing. Before he could retaliate, she turned the weapon at the bottom of the strike and chopped it upward, driving forward with her back foot to cleave him from leg to shoulder. He fell soundlessly, the wound so severe it stole his consciousness immediately.

  The move finished with a downward flourish and she was surprised when it was deflected by another weapon. She sprawled from the impact and a blade whistled as it cut through the space she’d just vacated. Oh, right, the first two. Of course they have swords too. Why wouldn’t they? She growled at the surrounding darkness, cursed the fact that her tech didn’t work, and thought unkind things about the crystals above for being so dim at the moment. Then she grinned, released the sword with one hand, and summoned a fireball in the other.

  The glow from the flaming sphere revealed vague shapes at least a dozen feet away around her, which was enough to identify her foes as they materialized from the darkness. The original two were present, at a minimum, although there could have been more given the way all the attacks used the same wicked-looking curved sword and the enemies faded back into the shadows after the attack. She was on the defensive, able to divert their stabs and slashes with one hand but unwilling to commit to more while she didn’t know the true number of the opposition.

  The solution slid into her mind at the same moment that her body acted on it. When the next adversary darted in to stab at her, she sidestepped to avoid the blow instead of meeting it straight on and whipped the flaming orb the short distance from her hand to his head. He fell back with a snarl and clawed at the burning hair on his face, and the light revealed his friend a few feet away. She generated and threw another fireball and pushed forward while they were distracted.

  Diana targeted the second as the first seemed on his way to recovering his balance. Her off hand returned to the sword, and she raised it high, the blade parallel to the ground. She stabbed it forward to pierce his shoulder, repeated the move on the other shoulder as he shifted position to protect the first wound, then finished with a brutal forehand slash to his leg that severed vital muscles. He fell and howled in pain.

  The other had recovered and attacked with an outraged shout, slashing his weapon down from her left. She hopped to her right and swept her blade across her body to block the attack but discovered it was only a feint as he suddenly changed trajectory and collided into her. The magical sword vanished when she lost her grip on it, and she stumbled for several steps before she impacted with the wall of the house behind her. The Kilomea was on her immediately, a superior sneer on his ugly face. The range was too close for his blade, so it was hand to hand, the opponents so focused on the battle that there was no room for conversation or even for thought.

  His fist came in from high left, and she blocked it with her forearm. He grasped her throat with the other hand and she latched onto his thumb and bent it against the movement of his wrist joint to free herself to breathe. She maintained control of his arm for only a moment as his knee jerked up. Only a hasty downward punch with the hand she’d used stopped it from connecting with her solar plexus. She flicked a back fist at his nose with that hand, and when he intercepted it easily, she pounded the contemptuous look on his face away with an uppercut from her other that had the strength of her force magic behind it. He was lifted from his feet and dropped onto his back. Before he could recover, she leapt into the attack with a shout and pulled her legs up, then straightened them as she descended. Her heels hammered into both sides of his collarbone and shattered it. He growled at her in either rage or defiance, and she finished the fight with a powerful kick to his temple.

  She spun, suddenly aware that she’d lost focus on anything other than that single opponent, but no more were visible. She’d won. Adrenaline faded as she leaned over and put her hands on her knees, breathing heavily to draw sorely needed oxygen back into her body. Her brain’s return to function heralded the return of her inner voice. “Hey, Diana, have you considered the fact that the summons to the kemana was a ruse intended to draw you into an ambush?” Yes, yes, I have. “Okay, well, here’s a reminder. Something attacked you mentally when you tried to call for help, and Kilomea don’t have that ability as far as we know.”

  Oh, bloody hell. She heard a chittering around her, summoned two more fireballs, and turned in a circle as the new arrivals manifested to try to pinpoint the sound. The light illuminated four portals hovering in the air at each of the cardinal points, presumably with smirking witches and wizards behind them. But that wasn’t what struck fear into her. Her eyes widened as she tried to make sense of what she saw.

  Are those…Mirennas? With metal claws attached to their hands and feet? Oh, sweet mother of Megalon.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The alien monkeys had been slightly dangerous and mostly annoying the last time she’d faced them in the basement of the Museum. Now, though, in greater numbers and with the blades to supplement their attacks, they were downright frightening.

  Diana flung the fireballs into the oncoming ranks, then used a blast of energy to elevate herself. She arced out of the center of the circle and looked for a place to land when a sudden and unexpected force hurtled her toward the ground. She barely managed to increase her own power to avoid breaking bones as she landed and still had to roll to the side to absorb the momentum of her fall.

  A red haze colored her vision as she found her feet. The little monkeys had arranged themselves in a chaotic wave and attacked her the instant they exited the rifts. She turned to fire again and delivered it in large sheets at the creatures’ chest height. Some slid under the attack and vanished from her sight. Others tried to jump over it, but she sustained the flames and they fell into them as they descended. The most clueless continued to run forward until they were immolated. She washed the fire down and then up again to ensure that she obliterated the ones that went low.

  This is all well and good, but it’s draining. Plus, they won’t be stupid enough to keep attacking in a straight line. I need to deal with the jerks holding the portals open. She located the nearest, a heavyset wizard with opulent robes and scars on his face. Where Anik’s imperfections only served to make him more handsome, this man was repellant in every sense of the word. She felt icky by merely being in sight of him.

  Diana sprinted forward on a line toward him, scything flame before her to clear the path. She sensed the little murder monkeys following her, their chittering now a constant hum she feared she’d hear in her nightmares forever. He reacted to her charge by dispelling the portal—good—and lashed out at her with a coursing cone of shadow. Not good. The anti-magic deflectors under her shirt crackled and popped as they protected her from the attack, and in the next moment she was close enough to act, the Mirennas between them already burned away.

  The ongoing power expenditure was draining her, and she feared she wouldn’t have time to use her potions if it ran out. To preserve what she could, she let the fire fall and turned to the skills Nylotte so often berated. She leapt high and pistoned a foot into his chest to force him back. The shocked look on his face made their shared moment extra special, and she smiled as she landed and charged his retreating form again. She kicked his legs out from under him, and when he fell, dropped to the ground with an elbow aimed at his sternum. His scream covered the sound of it breaking, but both confirmed he was out of the battle.

  The agent surged to her feet but a blast of lightning wreathed her and consumed more of her deflectors, and a quartet of monkeys arrived. She yanked the Bowie knife from under her shirt and used it to slice at the nearest, which careened toward her head with its blades extended. Her lean to the side saved her from its weapons, and her strike drove him past her. The next two attacked together, and she sustained slashes down her left arm from one as she pinioned the other with the blade and thrust it all the way through his chest. The falling primate stole the weapon from her hand, and she threw hersel
f sideways to avoid the fourth, who had leapt at her face while she dealt with the others.

  She landed badly and her shin jarred painfully against a rock. Diana cursed herself for not coming fully armored as she forced herself to her feet. She drew a throwing knife from each boot and hurled them at the closest targets. They each struck one of the creatures but only one resulted in a kill. Dammit. Maybe I need lessons from Rath’s teacher. She summoned another jet of flame and swept it across the nearest monkeys and the witch who doubtless hoped not to be noticed as she held the portal open. No such luck, wench.

  The rift vanished when the woman shielded and called up fire to absorb hers. The agent switched powers and released a volley of sharp icicles in an arc to rain down onto the woman’s head. When she lifted her shield reflexively, she created a sheet of ice under her feet, and the witch slipped. Her defenses failed when she fell, and there was only a shrill shriek, quickly cut off, in reaction to the sharpened missiles that punctured her prone form much like a pincushion.

  Her deflectors crackled again and a blast of force lifted her and slammed her back against the rock wall that supported the next tier up. She avoided smacking her head thanks to an instinctive curl as the attack struck, but the impact with the stone cracked a rib—or several. She couldn’t tell. Again. Damn them. The fact that it had done so despite the Kevlar plates protecting her was a testament to her foe’s power. She located the culprit and snarled at the Remembrance’s lead witch.

  Sarah responded with a smile, summoned a large wave of shadow, and threw it at her. Diana had no idea if the magic might contain another portal to send her somewhere nasty—or even if such a thing was possible—so she took a step and used her own force magic to launch in a low arc onto the higher tier. She ducked behind a building and activated one of the charms in her bracelet to fade into the shadows and become less noticeable to all senses, mundane and magical. Chew on that, witch. She retrieved the healing potion from her belt and downed half, then grimaced when she felt the bones move and shift into alignment to meld the broken shards together. It required a monumental effort to keep from screaming during the process, but she managed it.