“Agent Dah’lil Maksohm,” Rena responded promptly. “Agent Maksohm is the man who shielded us at every shard we tackled and when we faced Toh’sellor itself. His shields and barriers are the strongest I’ve ever seen, and he is undoubtedly a qualified expert.”
Fairfax nodded, pleased at this immediate answer. “I’ll request that he join the meeting.”
I translated ‘request’ as ‘order’ without difficulty. “President Fairfax, as it happens, Maksohm’s actually our team leader. He’s currently here, just caching up on matters remotely with Foxboro’s HQ. He has every intention of joining us as soon as he’s done.”
She blinked at me in slight surprise. “I’d almost forgotten. You’re one of my dedicated teams. He’s on your team?”
“We actually requested him,” Rena admitted with a shrug and smile. “He’s such a joy to work with, and I need a barrier specialist with the jobs I tend to take on, so we asked for him.”
“And got him.” Fairfax’s expression became knowing and somewhat enigmatic. “I see. I’ll still put in the request for him to join us through official channels, but I’ll leave catching him up to speed to you.”
That sounded like a fair division of labor to me. Rena agreed as she said, “Of course. Thank you, President Fairfax.”
Leaning in to speak in a more confidential tone, she inquired, “What word do we have on locating Toh’sellor?”
Chi thankfully took this one and shook his head grimly. “Nothing at this point. Rena was able to see part of the portal spell they used to steal it, so we know it’s somewhere along the east coast, but whether it’s Sira or Perrone is anyone’s guess. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack without knowing if it’s a wooden or metal needle.”
“There’s been a few isolated incidents of Toh’sellor’s minions popping up,” Rena added, fundamentally incapable of not telling a superior everything. She ran the president through the facts of the Njorage Incident, as I called it, and Fairfax’s expression went darker with every word.
Fairfax did not like this report but was professional enough to see that yelling at us wouldn’t magically fix the problem. “Then we are waiting, Agents?”
“For the other shoe to fall,” Rena agreed with a wince. “We know for a fact that Toh’sellor managed to take some dirt and trace minerals with it when they portaled it out. We know that they don’t have the same barrier containment practices that the Maksohm family does, or anyone else in the MISD. What barriers they are using apparently siphon power off of Toh’sellor instead of caging it, and that’s playing with fire. Their barriers are going to fail, sooner rather than later, and when they do, they’ll have given Toh’sellor the means to fight back. It’s going to go wrong very quickly.”
“Which is when its location will be obvious,” Fairfax concluded with an unhappy sigh.
“None of us like the answer,” I confessed to her, spreading my hands out in an open shrug. “But we don’t know what else to do. The thieves were unfortunately clever about covering their tracks.”
She acknowledged that with a grim nod. “For now, we must trust that it will be reported quickly when Toh’sellor does spiral out of control. Since that’s the case, Renata, I request that you keep your team close to you at all times. You probably realize this already, but you are my response team to this disaster. I want you ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Rena gave her a professional smile that only harbored a twinge of worry. “I feel better when they’re with me anyway.”
“I imagine so.” Fairfax dismissed us with a wave. “Go rest, I’ll send in the request.”
Frankly relieved to not be shut up in the room anymore, I led the way out and down the stairs, Rena and Chi on my heels. When we arrived at our hotel lobby, Rena paused and gave both of us a considering look.
I didn’t do anything to deserve that look, did I? “What?”
“Why don’t you and Chi find some place to spar?” she suggested with this look on her face that said she knew very well that I felt antsy inside my own skin. “All I’ll be doing is talking to Maksohm, anyway.”
That was a good point. I looked to Chi, found him nodding like a puppet with its strings cut, and felt the immediate future brighten a little. It’d been a while since I could really cut loose. “Sure. There’s an open field out near the train tracks, we’ll be there.”
My wife waved us both off, already heading for the dining room. I had no doubt she’d find some sugary concoction sweet enough to make her teeth ache and devour it as she updated Maksohm. Chi and I went up to our rooms long enough to fetch weapons and then were back down again in a thrice, heading for the street. The field I’d mentioned was relatively close by, only a few minutes’ walk, and I enjoyed the hub and bustle of the city as we dodged in and out of evening traffic. Heaberlin, even at this time of the evening, had quite a bit of energy to it. Nothing was quiet about this city, especially not with the very noisy snow underfoot. There wasn’t a lot of it, but enough coated the ground that it crunched as people crossed it.
Chi waited until we’d reached the field before stating, “When Vee gets done with the reports, I want to try something with her.”
“Hey, you’re the ones married, why are you asking for my opinion?” I waggled my eyebrows at him, getting a snicker.
“Not that, you troll,” he responded, still snickering. “I meant, I want to try an idea I got at the committee meeting. You know how giants have their own earth magic?”
“Sure.” Not that I’d ever seen it in action, but the legends were something else. Supposedly, the giants had certain songs, certain movements, that engaged the energy of the earth. They were able to flatten hills, raise mountains, and do all sorts of really cool things with their earth magic. “But Vee said she’s not that good at it.”
“She’s not,” Chi agreed frankly, scratching at the back of one ear. “But she’s able to do the basics. It occurred to me that if we give her enough time, enough practice, maybe she’ll be able to create a higher vantage point for me and Rena to work from. If we can get her up high, somewhere a little more protected, wouldn’t it be easier for Rena to face Toh’sellor?”
I thought this through and couldn’t see anything wrong with the idea. Rena had always struggled because we literally had to fight to get her a direct line of sight. If we could get her up high, that would axe half the problem. “But if this is really an option, why hasn’t Vee tried it before?”
“She’s really insecure with it,” Chi admitted, lifting both shoulders in a shrug. “In fact, I thought she could only use it in desperate situations, that she didn’t have much control. Turned out she can use it just fine, just doesn’t like to, according to Vee’s mother. But the giants, they’re always competing, trying to do really complex stuff. I figure, if Vee understands we don’t need complex, just up, maybe she’d be more game to try.”
Even if it didn’t work as Chi expected, it would give us something else to focus on, something to strive towards. We needed that kind of energy right now more than anything. Worry would erode our patience otherwise. “I’m certainly game to try. Alright, how would you like to spar?”
“Let’s warm up first.” Chi laid down quiver and arrows, dropping down to the ground to stretch.
I followed suit, and it felt good to get the blood moving again, as sitting still for so long put a cramp in my legs. We spent several minutes stretching, and when I felt like I could bend over and touch the ground without straining anything, I popped back up. “Hand-to-hand?”
“Well, we caaaan…” Chi trailed off suggestively. His grin promised danger and fun in equal measure. I loved that grin. “Or we could play the archery version of dodgeball.”
“I have no idea what that is but am totally on board. What are the rules?”
“You start off about thirty feet away,” Chi waved a hand to indicate the far end of the field, “and I try to shoot you. If you can tag me witho
ut getting an arrow in you, you win.”
“That sounds super fun,” I promised him, adrenaline already kicking in, “but I think our respective wives would shoot us ourselves if they caught us playing it.”
“If,” Chi repeated, eyebrows waggling in invitation.
I immediately saw his point. “If. I can work with if. One game?”
“Naw, we can at least get two in before Rena’s done talking to Maksohm.”
He was likely right.
I might, possibly, have failed to think this through.
At least, the look on my wife’s face indicated a lack of thought on my part. She had her arms crossed, a finger tapping, eyebrow quirked at that particular angle that indicated I’d done something stupid. I only get that look at times like these. Chi knelt next to me, and how we ended up kneeling and cowing in front of Rena, I didn’t know, but it did seem like the safer decision at the moment. Survival instincts were good for something. It had sent us both to our knees when she’d evaporated an arrow in mid-flight, announcing her presence on the field, and screeched at us to stop.
Of course, we’d frantically explained that Chi hadn’t been really shooting at me, just doing speed drills while putting arrows into flight in my general direction. The explanation had not gone over that well. As in, it didn’t even get off the ground.
“Archery dodgeball,” she repeated, a wealth of innuendo in those syllables. “In failing light. With only that one spastic street light to see by.”
I keenly felt every hint of icy breeze that wafted through the rips in my shirt. Not that Chi had managed to hit skin—please, my reflexes were better than that—but the shirt had definitely seen better days. The jacket was a completely lost cause. Some of the rips were near my chest area, and whenever they fluttered the slightest bit, they caught Rena’s eyes. It did not help my situation one little bit.
Chi did his best to look innocent. He was not good at it. “I wasn’t seriously aiming at him.”
He totally had been. Maybe not at the start of the first game, but he’d been frustrated enough by the fourth that he’d really, truly tried to shoot me. Hence the rips. I possessed enough intelligence to not call him on that white lie.
“Thank you, Chi, that makes this all better,” Rena responded with saccharine sweetness.
Every man with a wife recognized that tone. Chi wisely clamped his mouth shut, realizing he’d already hit rock bottom, no point in digging further.
Those cool grey eyes switched to me. “Bannen. Explain this to me.”
“Okay,” I agreed, frantically wondering how I could phrase this to get us out of trouble.
“Explain it to me the way you’d explain it to Chi,” she continued with a pointed look. “A drunk Chi.”
Now that took all the fairness out of the equation. “Well, see, we were already restless, I mean you knew that, that’s why you sent us out here to spar, right? Right, so we get out here, and we really did stretch first, I feel that’s a key point to make, we were very stretched and limber before we started, but it’s an empty field, as you can see, there’s no training dummies or equipment to use, and we’re not mages, so magicking up opponents is obviously a no-go, and it’s a little hard for an archer and a swordsman to spar, that seems fundamentally obvious, so we had to get creative on how to really work out with each other, and there’s only so much you can do except work on speed drills.” I spread my hands in the best pantomime of ‘what am I supposed to do’ I’d ever managed. Judging by the way her eyes narrowed, she remained unimpressed by this effort.
“Speed drills. Really. That’s what you’re going with?”
I gave her my best smile. “Really effective speed drills.”
For some reason she heaved a gusty sigh, for all the world as if she’d been handed two problems that she couldn’t murder. “Chi.”
He braced to attention, still kneeling. “Here.”
“I’m calling Vee so you can explain this to her.”
Chi’s face immediately fell. “Rena, I thought we were friends!”
Ignoring this, she continued, “I’m going to give you both a guideline. Before you do any drills, speed or otherwise, you have to ask yourself two questions: First, would I let my wife do this? Second, do I want to tell my wife I did this? If the answer is no to either question, don’t do it.”
That seemed perfectly reasonable but also less fun. Looking at my wife’s very unhappy face, I decided silence was the better part of valor and bit my tongue. I felt vaguely bad about worrying her, as she was obviously rattled still about arriving at the field to see Chi shooting at me. Also felt kind of guilty, but, y’know. Them’s the breaks.
“You’re done for the night,” she informed us. “Up.”
We obediently got up and trailed after her, heading back toward the hotel like scolded puppies who had tracked mud into the house.
Chi leaned in to whisper, “I’m suddenly afraid of my wife.”
So his sanity decided to kick in now, huh? I was probably going to be on the couch tonight with the mood Rena was in. I glared at him. “This is the last time I listen to you.”
“You had fun,” he pointed out, his irrepressible humor bouncing back to the fore.
“Not that suggestion,” I corrected disparagingly. “The suggestion we go a fourth time. If we’d stopped at three, we wouldn’t have been caught.”
Grimacing, Chi allowed, “We should have stopped at three.”
“What are you going to tell Vee, anyway?” I asked, morbidly curious.
“As little as possible.”
I wished him luck with that.
I had never in my life been so glad to see Maksohm. When I’d volunteered to go to the meeting with Chi and Bannen, I’d failed to properly realize that I was going with Chi and Bannen. Those two can find trouble faster than gold can disappear into a beggar’s purse. Seriously, what had I been thinking, volunteering to take these two? It was like volunteering to babysit two twelve-year-olds. Armed twelve-year-olds.
Maksohm and Vee met us outside of the hotel, clearly on their way to meet us. Vee spotted us first, of course, and made a beeline with Seton in one hand. As soon as she reached Chi, she bopped him on the head.
Chi rubbed at his abused head and glared up at his wife. “You don’t even know what I did!”
“Rena looks ready to murder you, you’re as guilty as a dog that dragged a dead, muddy cat into the house, and Bannen has rips all in his clothes,” Vee retorted, beyond exasperated. “I can do the math well enough. Rena, what did they do?”
“Archery dodgeball,” I answered succinctly.
Rolling her eyes, Vee smacked the back of Chi’s head again, which he mostly dodged.
Hands held up defensively, Chi wailed, “I said I was sorry!”
“You didn’t mean it,” Vee retorted. “If you’re going to do speed drills like that, put something on the tips.”
He stared up at her as if she’d just spouted wisdom of the ages. “Sards, why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you’re both idiots,” Maksohm informed him, coming up to stand with us. “Rena, sorry I left you with these two. I wasn’t thinking.”
“I wasn’t either,” I sighed, waving away his apology. “It’s as much my fault as yours.”
Maksohm gave the two men a measuring look, making them squirm, even as he assured me, “We’re nearly done with the reports. When is our meeting time with the committee tomorrow?”
“They normally start about nine. President Fairfax indicated that we could come in a little earlier, as she has some questions for you,” I related. “The corpses?”
“Dealt with, thankfully,” Maksohm responded, a tired and sad smile quirking his lips up. “I did ask someone to stop by Archives and check on a few things for me, mostly to see if there were any follow-up reports on the kidnapped familiars. I also wanted to know just where the corpses came from.”
Bannen asked the obvious. “Did you
find anything?”
“For the familiars, unfortunately not,” Vee answered, shortening her stride for the rest of us as we headed back toward the hotel. “But the corpses were all from Alyadar.”
“The corpses are generally explainable if it’s near a medical college,” Maksohm threw in over his shoulder. “But Alyadar doesn’t have one.”
I nodded slowly, thinking hard. “That is strange. I suppose it wasn’t a report that really grabbed our attention, considering, although in hindsight it should have. We weren’t all that worried when the monkeys were reported stolen, and look what they did with them.”
“I’m perfectly a-okay with the monkeys being stolen,” Chi informed us seriously. “I want them to steal more. By ‘more’ I mean all. But I don’t want them to give them back.”
We all took that statement as due, because, Chi. And monkeys. Not a lot of love lost there.
“I did stop in at the front desk and ask them to change accommodations for us.” I fell into step with him, leading the group, explaining as we dodged the other pedestrians on the sidewalk. “We changed our hotel rooms to one with a suite. It gives us four rooms with a central living space. It’s a little too much room for us, but it was actually cheaper than three separate rooms. Vee, I requested they put a king-sized bed into one of the rooms, they promised they’d do it before tonight.”
“Bless you,” she responded fervently. “It’s the one thing that annoys me about travel, having my feet hang off the end of the bed.”
“And I sleep better if she’s not tossing, so double thanks,” Chi pitched in.
I knew that to be the case, hence my request. “Well, it looks like we’ll be here another week or two the way these meetings are going. I figured you might as well sleep on a properly sized bed. A lot of thought goes into planning a building like this one. And we’re still apparently in discussions about where to build the thing. Not many countries want to host it.”
Remnants Page 12