Seton, not liking monkeys, fussed in a blur of colors along Vee’s back, but refused to come out and fight with the rest of us. Vee used one of my spare swords, and Chi’s hands blurred as he loosed one arrow after the next with deadly accuracy. I kept glancing towards Maksohm, double-checking his status, and found him safely inside the barrier each time.
“This street clear,” Rena announced, a little superfluously, as every monkey on the street disappeared into dust at the same moment. “Let’s get to higher land. I can do more from up top now that I know what to do.”
“There’s a staircase over there leading to a hill park.” I pointed down a narrow alley to the opposite street.
She nodded, already turning that direction. “Perfect. Dah’lil! We’re moving!”
“Go!” he encouraged, but stayed planted. Well, he couldn’t move, not with all of those people to protect, and he hadn’t anchored the barrier. I recognized the type of barrier well enough to know this was one of his transient ones.
We ran one at a time down the alley, the width of it constraining us to do so, then shot out the other end with Vee in front. She barely got two feet out when something hit her hard, the sword getting knocked loose from her hand. I had an instant to worry, for my heart to jolt in my chest, because there was only so much anyone could do against a minion of Toh’sellor barehanded. Even a giantess had limits.
Then Vee reached out for the nearest thing to her, which just so happened to be Chi, and snagged him roughly by the thighs. He squawked and flopped like a worm being tossed into a koi pond, too surprised to get even a word out. Vee didn’t even seem to register it, just whirled him about like he was a bat, knocking every monkey within range of him about like bowling pins. Then she threw him straight up into the air, and even at that impossible angle, he righted himself and started firing, landing in a crouch.
It was a stunning maneuver, really, but I didn’t for one minute think it a practiced one. Chi would never agree to be a club, for one thing, and the way he’d reacted when Vee grabbed him was nothing but sheer panic. I couldn’t believe she’d just done that to her own husband, but as previously established, Vee didn’t tend to think straight when monkeys were involved.
Whether or not Chi was okay, he still managed to get enough breathing room for us to get out of the alley, Vee retrieving her sword. I kept a close eye on them as we hightailed it for the hillside park, but Chi had taken down the monkeys closest to us. That didn’t mean we were in the clear, we had many others gaining ground on us. Toh’sellor’s minions tended to have some sort of hunting instinct in them. They’d go for anything moving.
We scrambled up the stairs. I saw to my dismay they were not in good condition—some of them cracked, the worst ones sliding a little sideways as the ground under them shifted with water erosion. I kept one eye over my shoulder, anxious to reach the top before we got hit, as fighting on stairs was rather a pain.
So of course we got hit on the stairs.
Monkeys hit from either side, swinging down from the trees nearby, and I nearly didn’t see them in time to stop them from hitting Rena. I went sideways, meeting them head on, hitting hard. Despite their size, they were bloody fast, and it took more than one attempt to cut down some of them. I whirled, double-checking that nothing snuck up on my right side, feeling my braids smack me in the ear at the abrupt maneuver. In the process, my heel didn’t quite catch the step as I’d planned, and I skittered sideways, leaving the stairs altogether and landing tail-first in the dirt next to it.
Owww. Well, that was graceful.
A hand caught my jacket collar before I could scramble up and physically lifted me back to my feet. “Thanks, Vee.”
“Get off the stairs,” she ordered everyone crisply.
Only too glad to comply, we hurried up them, Chi taking out anything still trying to ambush us from above. Rena didn’t leave our sides, already speaking the beginning of her spell by the time we gained the top. In ordinary circumstances, I would have enjoyed the serene and very cultivated garden, perhaps sat on one of the stone benches and watched the koi dance in the pond for a while. Now I only looked to the trees, afraid other monkeys hid there to take advantage of the unwary.
The vantage point did serve us well, as Rena got the spell off in record time and took down every monkey within line of sight in the process. She paused, staring, waiting for any sort of movement to catch her eye. Nothing. “I think we have all the ones in this area.”
“Any hint of Toh’sellor?” I asked, praying she said yes. I wanted an end to this madness.
“Unfortunately not. I don’t think it’s here.” Rena almost said something else, but visibly bit it back, shaking her head. “We can talk about it later. For now, let’s clear the streets.”
It took six bloody, frantic, exhausting hours to clear the streets of Njorage. I didn’t like one second of it. We corralled one monkey for Rena to study and believe me, that was not fun, that was anti-fun. I thought herding baby cats difficult until I tried monkeys. All we had to do was corner it long enough for Maksohm to throw a shield down around it, caging it in place. Sounded simple in theory, so why that took nearly twenty minutes was beyond me. Rena promised to deal with it after she finished studying it. Eventually, we fetched to a stop at the northern corner of the city and Maksohm called about, asking for any trouble we’d missed, only to find we’d finally gotten them all. Thank sarding deities for that.
A nice woman took one look at us and dragged us into her little diner, sat us down, and served us whatever she had on hand. We consumed all of it like a band of locusts. She could have been the world’s worst cook and I wouldn’t have noticed, that’s how starved I felt.
Vee got up for thirds, Rena and Maksohm moved to the front of the restaurant to make a quick report to Salvatore, and I lay with my head on the table, wanting a hot bath. We were in Njorage, after all; I demanded a hot bath. “Onsen,” I whined to Chi.
“I hear ya, brother. As soon as those two get done chattering at the boss-man, let’s go find one.” Chi abruptly snickered, lifting a hand to cover most of his mouth.
As nothing funny had happened, I demanded in a tired groan, “What?”
“I can’t believe you fell on the stairs,” he explained, snickering even louder.
“Vee used you like a bat to hit a bunch of monkeys, and you’re mocking me for missing a step?”
Chi’s head tipped to the side. “There’s a difference between a teammate and spouse betraying you in a horrible, unforgiveable way and just being such a klutz that you can’t manage a set of stairs.”
I had no chance to respond to that as Rena abruptly came back to the table and dropped into the chair next to me. “Well, that wasn’t a fun report to give.”
“Screaming, spitting, monstrous monkeys loose in the street?” Chi made a face, like he’d bitten into something rotten. “I imagine so. What did you tell him?”
“Bare bones, because that’s basically all I have at this point. That, and a lot of conjecture.” Rena leaned sideways, letting me support her head for a moment. I knew then she was exhausted and stressed because she wasn’t generally this cuddly in public. “The monkeys we saw were very, very odd. Toh’sellor’s nowhere to be found in the city, so technically they shouldn’t be able to run about like this. It’s too far away to influence them.”
“Yeah, we noticed,” I groaned. “Not that it seemed to kill their bloodlust any.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference with the bloodthirsty little blighters,” Chi grumbled darkly. “So how did they manage to get here?”
“Maksohm went looking and he thinks they were portaled here. I need to take a second look at the site myself, although he tells me it was so badly disintegrated, he found nothing more than a hint of a portal being there. But it looks like someone portaled them here. Worse,” her mouth worked for a moment, as if searching for a way to explain, “it looks like they’ve been modified.”
I waited
a beat for her to expound. Vee and Maksohm rejoined us at the table and for their benefit, I tried to catch them up. “Rena thinks the monkeys were modified. I assume by something other than Toh’sellor?”
She gave me a thankful nod. “Yes, sorry, I meant that. There was this protective coating over their core, a strange sort of barrier anchored to it that I’ve never seen before. It was…I’m not sure how to explain. It seemed to function rather like an embryonic sac.”
“Different from the corpses, then?”
“Yes,” she grimaced. “Not quite sure how, I need to study that, and I will in a minute. But different from the corpses. These weren’t seedlings, they weren’t built for just harnessing energy, that much I’m sure of. They were too functional for that.”
Vee held up both hands. “Wait, wait. You’re telling me that someone deliberately took minions of Toh’sellor and gave them each protective barriers to preserve them in that state, then portaled them here? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I think,” Maksohm said quietly, “that it makes all the wrong sorts of sense. We wondered why someone would steal Toh’sellor, what they could possibly use it for. We assumed as a weapon. But it only carries the potential to be either a threat or to turn it loose once against a single target. But perhaps we overlooked another obvious means to exploit it. Perhaps these people are churning out Toh’sellor minions, a version of berserker troops, to use instead. They would have to develop a means to preserve the minions out of Toh’sellor’s immediate range….”
I winced as he trailed off suggestively. “Like here, with the monkeys. Why here, though? Njorage’s not much of a tactical target.”
“Testing ground,” Chi suggested unhappily. “They wanted to test how far they could send them before it failed, maybe.”
“I don’t know what they were testing.” Rena sat back up with a sigh, worry pinching around her eyes and mouth. She took my hand in hers, gripping it in a way that looked for comfort more than relayed affection. “They could have also been testing our response time to such minions. Who knows? I don’t know what their conclusions are, either, but I do know mine. This is dangerous, what they’re doing. If they’ve taken monkeys to test with, then we can safely assume they’ll test on other things too. The familiars that were kidnapped? The magical artifacts? Other things we didn’t see in the reports? I think all of that is fair game at the moment. Either way, we’re in for an insane amount of traveling and fighting if they start popping things through portals.”
Familiars. They’d taken familiars. Until that moment, my mind hadn’t really considered the ramifications of that. But if they were taking familiars, unique magical artifacts, all to run experiments on, then didn’t that mean I was a target too? I was one of the most unique familiars in the world. If they were looking for good lab rats, I was unfortunately at the top of a very short list. My hand spasmed in hers at the idea. Rena shot me a quick look, her hold on me tightening.
“Director Salvatore’s putting together a notice to all MISD agents,” Maksohm informed us all, sounding exhausted. “We’re to use portals as much as possible when responding to these issues. We can’t afford civilian causalities by taking conventional means of travel. Any agent within our vicinity capable of portal magic is to immediately help transport us.”
That did take a worry off my mind. Portal magic was draining. I didn’t want to see either Vee or Maksohm trying to fight like they did today while drained. My other worry I shelved, as I had enough to on my plate and I didn’t want to shoulder that one too.
“That’s a problem for another day.” Maksohm stood, waving us all to follow him. “For now, we have been generously offered rooms at the very prestigious Thousand Blossom Hotel, and I for one intend to soak in the onsen until they kick me out.”
Standing, I agreed whole-heartedly, “I second this motion.”
“Carried,” Rena sing-songed, brightening perceptibly. “Lead on, fearless leader.”
Bannen sent me off to soak with the warning that I had to come out in four hours otherwise he’d come in after me. I soaked in the onsen for as long as possible, but the water in there was ‘hot’ to put it mildly. The human body could withstand that for only so long before it started to overheat, so I had to leave eventually. Three hours was my limit.
The women’s locker room was directly next door to the men’s, so I could clearly hear every word from the other side. Well, I say that because Bannen could be loud without really meaning to.
“You’re already out?” he demanded incredulously of someone. “I don’t understand how people can shower in five minutes. Even when I go as fast as I can, I still have to shampoo my hair, and condition, and scrub myself, and shave, and cut myself shaving, and use the blood in my summoning of the dark lord, and then travel to another dimension to ward off my enemies, and then come back and dry off—how do you do that in five minutes?”
“Two in one shampoo/conditioner,” Chi deadpanned back.
I laughed under my breath as they squabbled. I was so glad for Bannen’s sake that we got to keep Chi. He was really another brother to Bannen, and I think Bannen missed having siblings to horse around with. I wasn’t really good for that sort of thing. Chi clearly enjoyed having someone around with a similar sense of humor, too.
Vee toweled her hair dry, the wet strands messy around her shoulders, a grin quirking her mouth up. “What are we going to do with those two?”
“We’re rather forced to keep them at this point. I have a piece of paper that says so.” I did bring my hair tie in here, right? Ah, there it was, bottom corner of the basket. Catching my hair up in a sloppy bun, I tied it up there, not caring how it looked. I felt pangs of vague hunger but it was always hard for me to feel any real appetite while hot. Perhaps I should go find some tea and a place to sit and cool down. Dinner was likely ready, after all. I only had an hour or two before the dining room closed.
We both went up to our rooms briefly to put our dirty clothes inside, but Vee apparently had the same notion as she followed me down the stairs and through the main lobby, finding a small tea station set up near the veranda doors. They were closed because of the winter cold, but we could still see through the glass doors clearly. It looked out over a very carefully cultivated garden, beautiful and serene, everything crisp and clean under the blanket of snow. Fixing a cup of green tea, I headed over to a small grouping of chairs and found Maksohm already settled there. It always took me a moment to adjust when I saw him out of uniform. In the soft grey yukata, hair still damp from the baths and curling a little over his forehead, he looked strangely younger and more vulnerable.
Glancing up, he spied my approach and waved me into a nearby chair. “Come join me. It’s quite a lovely garden.”
“It is,” I agreed, taking the chair closer to him. It gave Vee the wider section to sit in and hopefully enough room to accommodate her legs. Settling in, I sipped at my tea and beamed at the flavor. Now that was good tea.
We drank our tea and stared at the icy pond, the snow softly coming down over the garden, snowflakes forming up around the edges of the glass doors. Very peaceful. Completely different from how the rest of the day had gone.
“Rena,” Maksohm started, his face drawing into a troubled frown, “I know you studied that monkey for a good hour before you headed for the baths, but I didn’t get a chance to hear your conclusions.”
Vee snorted. “Trouble.”
I inclined my head toward her. “More or less. It was a very strange concoction of shielding and energy barriers.”
“Energy barriers?” he responded in clear astonishment.
His reaction made it clear he knew what I referred to, which relieved me, as I wasn’t even sure how to begin to explain them. I’d only stumbled across them about two years ago. They weren’t popular, more working theory than anything truly marketable. On paper, they were to be an alternative power source to coal or gas, something clean and more powerful. A barrier set up aro
und an engine would harvest energy from sun (or wind, or water, depending on its designated source) and then convert and store that energy until the engine demanded it. It worked, but not for long. The power to maintain the energy barrier, magically speaking, was exorbitant. It took a mage’s full concentration to keep it going for any amount of time, and the longest stretch on record was twelve hours. If someone ever got it working, they’d make a minor fortune, but it hadn’t happened yet.
Or so I’d thought, until today. “They clearly were. Or at least, that’s how they were functioning. I’ve never seen that particular design before, but…” I spread my hands in an open shrug. “Despite what my husband thinks, I am not the fount of all knowledge.”
Maksohm snorted. “Nor do I expect you to be. Describe to me exactly what you saw.”
I was really afraid he’d ask that. “The shielding was in layers. The outer layer was something very similar to your shields for containing Toh’sellor’s energy.”
Vee and Maksohm nodded, showing they were following.
“The energy barrier tied into it. No…‘tied into’ isn’t the right wording.” I paused, frustrated, trying to find the right words and feeling like I failed. I hated describing work, I really did. “More like the energy barrier was integrated into the shielding to function with it. The energy barrier’s design designated that it source Toh’sellor’s energy in part to power the barrier, in part to keep the one inside the barrier functioning. And then, in the core of it, was pure Toh’sellor core, like what I’ve seen from minions before. But the effects were limited; I would say none of them had full exposure to Toh’sellor. Or maybe full exposure, but for a very brief amount of time.”
Vee’s eyebrows climbed right into her hairline and stayed there. “I’m not following. The energy barrier fed off Toh’sellor’s energy inside the monkey?”
“No.” I grimaced and had a feeling I was making a hash of explaining this. “No, the energy barrier had been filled with Toh’sellor’s energy before it came here. There wouldn’t have been enough in the monkey to power it more than a minute.”
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