Lorelle of the Dark, page 13
There was, but she couldn’t tell him why. That was the last thing she could do.
“It’s a chance,” Lorelle whispered, repeating herself. “I have to take it. To find Rhenn. To protect you.”
“Going alone into the arms of someone dangerous isn’t the way to find Rhenn,” Khyven said.
In the shadows behind Khyven and Vohn, who were both staring at her, a knot formed, unfolded, and revealed the black silhouette of the Nox. He reached up and pushed back his cowl, revealing his dark face. It was so subtle that if she hadn't been looking right at that corner, she wouldn't have seen him. Neither Khyven nor Vohn noticed.
The Nox opened his cloak and extended his hand, his third and final offer.
She’d wanted to say goodbye to this beautiful little family, maybe even risk hugging Khyven before pulling away from him. But they simply wouldn’t allow it, and she had run out of time.
“I’m sorry…" she murmured to Khyven. The soul-bond flared and tears filled her eyes. “I’ll come back with the Plunnos.”
“If I see that Nox again, I'm going to kill him,” Khyven growled.
She started toward Khyven and saw him react, saw the soul-bond pull at him. His arms twitched, coming up to take hold of her, but she used her momentum to move swiftly past him, toward the corner, toward the darkness.
Confusion crossed Khyven’s face, and he turned as she passed him, his arms raised.
“It’s my fault we lost Rhenn,” she said. “I’m going to fix it. Just me. I’m not going to lose you, too. I-I can’t risk that. Please understand.”
“No. I don’t understand,” Khyven said. “If there’s a Plunnos, we go after it. Not you. We do this together—”
Khyven and Vohn saw the Nox at the same moment, and it was like time slowed down. Vohn’s jaw dropped. Khyven’s confusion turned into rage and he drew his sword.
The Nox’s arms closed over Lorelle’s shoulders as she fell into his embrace.
Khyven leapt forward. By Lotura, the man was fast. He almost reached them.
“Khyven!” Vohn shouted. “Don’t let him take her!”
The darkness of the Nox's cloak folded around her. She felt a cold wash of sensation, just like entering the noktum.
The room vanished.
Chapter Sixteen
Khyven
The blue wind swept from behind Khyven like a hurricane when he saw the damned Nox appear. Mind and body blended into one as he threw himself at the foul thing. He saw blue funnels, one on the right side of the Nox’s neck, just behind Lorelle’s head, and one on the Nox’s left side, exposed behind the curve of Lorelle’s waist. Khyven could reach them. He could stab those spots.
His body lengthened. His sword stretched, straight and true—
The darkness folded in on Lorelle and the Nox. They vanished.
Khyven’s sword drove into the wall with a sharp ring and the crunch of marble. It jolted his arm and he twisted, hitting the wall with his shoulder.
He rebounded instantly, crouching and glaring at the other shadows in the room, waiting for the Nox to reappear. That cloak—or perhaps the Nox itself—could jump from shadow to shadow.
But the blue wind lost focus, became an indistinct haze, like a fog hovering throughout the room, searching for an opponent. The Nox was gone.
Lorelle was gone.
“No!” Vohn said again. “No, no, no!”
“Senji damn it!” Khyven whirled around, seeking, hoping.
Show yourself, he thought. Just show yourself once.
But the blue wind didn’t need eyes to see its opponent. There was nothing in the room. The Nox—and Lorelle—were gone.
“You knew there was a Nox in the palace?” Vohn accused.
“Where is Slayter?”
“No!” Vohn’s voice cracked like a whip, and Khyven looked at him, surprised. “How long has that thing been creeping around the palace? How long did you know?”
“Vohn, this isn’t the time—”
“You stone-headed Ringer!” Vohn said sharply. “You’re not in the Night Ring anymore. We work as a team. Do you even know what it is that just grabbed our friend?”
“My next kill,” Khyven growled.
“Oh, fine then.” Vohn crossed his arms over his chest. “Go on. Kill him.”
Khyven looked around the room, but the Nox and Lorelle were gone.
“No, you won’t find him,” Vohn said, coldly watching Khyven’s fruitless search. “Because Nox are every bit as magical as Lorelle, and their magic has to do with shadows. He’s gone. And you’d have known this if you’d thought of yourself as part of a team instead of the lone Ringer and shared this information with me. We could have taken precautions.”
“I… met him earlier tonight,” Khyven admitted. “Lorelle indicated that maybe he was a friend.”
Vohn threw his hands up. “And you believed that?”
“I didn’t even know what a Nox was,” Khyven said. “I… honestly, I thought he was a dark-skinned Luminent.”
“He is. The evil kind. That’s why you tell me when something like this happens. You tell me and Slayter if a magical creature is suddenly walking around free in the Senji-be-damned palace. Do you know what Nox do to Luminents?”
Khyven felt a cold hardness growing in his gut as Vohn berated him. He hadn’t wanted to say anything about Lorelle’s paramour because he hadn’t wanted it to be true. She’d fled from him and he was afraid if he angered her even more, she…
She what? Wouldn’t like him anymore?
Vohn was right. He’d been foolish.
“I’m sorry,” Khyven said.
“Good. Now answer my question, because frankly a little bit of education in that Ringer head of yours could have changed this entire mess. Do you know what they do to Luminents?” Vohn repeated pointedly.
“No.”
“Two things. They kill them or they turn them. Clearly, this is the latter.”
“Turn them?”
Vohn was as angry as Khyven had ever seen him. “Turn them into a Nox. Now you’re going to tell me everything you know about that Nox, every single detail of your interaction, and we’re going to try to piece together what’s going on here. And just maybe we can save Lorelle.”
“I think she bonded with him, Vohn. I think he’s the one she—”
The door burst open and Slayter limped through. When he was strolling calmly in his full-length robes it was almost impossible to tell he’d lost his leg. But whenever he moved too fast, he limped.
Vohn and Khyven whirled to face him.
“I’m an idiot,” Slayter said as though he’d been having a conversation with them seconds ago and was just now picking it back up. He breathed like he’d limped all the way up the steps from his laboratory.
“Where is Lorelle? Is she here?” He glanced around the room.
“Slayter—”
“Good, she’s not here,” he said. “I think it’s better if I relay this to you first.”
“Slayter,” Vohn said. “Something has happened—”
“It’s him.” Slayter pointed at Khyven.
Vohn turned his angry gaze on Khyven like the Shadowvar wanted to say “Yes, it certainly is him. He’s ruined everything!”
“I can’t believe I was so dense,” Slayter continued, shaking his head and hobbling toward his usual chair at the back of the table. “Right in front of my face, and I missed it.” He glanced at them apologetically. “I don’t usually do that, so I offer my apologies. I should have seen it. The important thing is that I have seen it now, I suppose, and maybe we can do something about it. Yes… Yes, I think we might be able to do something about it.”
“Slayter,” Vohn interjected. “Stop babbling! Tell us what you’re on about.”
Slayter looked up, confused, as though he had just told them. “Oh,” he said. “Of course, it only seems obvious once you see it. I had the same problem—”
“Slayter!”
“It’s him.” He pointed at Khyven.
“You already said that,” Vohn said with strained patience. “What is him?”
“The soul-bond. Lorelle’s soul-bond. He’s the one. It’s Khyven.”
Vohn’s gaze snapped to Khyven, his eyes wide.
The bottom of Khyven’s stomach dropped away.
Chapter Seventeen
Khyven
Both Khyven and Vohn blurted out responses at the same time.
“I’m the one—That’s impossible!—she bonded—He would—with?—have known!”
Slayter blinked. “Could you repeat that, please?”
Khyven blurted, “I’m the one she bonded with?”
Annoyed, the mage narrowed his eyes, as though he’d already gone over this ground. “Yes,” he said with exaggerated slowness. Khyven wanted to punch him.
“That’s impossible!” Vohn said. “He would have known.”
“He was unconscious,” Slayter explained.
“A Luminent can’t bond with someone who’s unconscious,” Vohn insisted.
“She most certainly can,” Slayter said. “Or rather, she can start the bond.”
“Doesn’t he have to look in her eyes and—”
Slayter waved that away like he was shooing a fly. “You’re not understanding what a soul-bond actually is. A Luminent soul-bond can go one way. It’s why Lorelle has always been so reserved, lest she accidentally start a bond with someone. If Lorelle had already formed feelings for Khyven, which I think is safe to say she had by then—we all had—letting them show while he was unconscious would actually have felt safer to her. She could have started the bond while he was incapable of refusing.”
“I wouldn’t have refused,” Khyven said.
“Or trying to bond and failing. That too.”
“I wouldn’t have failed to bond.”
“Actually, you probably would have,” Slayter said.
“How do you know that?”
“Most likely you would have.”
“Most likely?”
“It’s so incredibly rare for a Human to actually succeed in a soul-bond with a Luminent that I only found one recorded instance in my library. Unfortunately, there are a number of instances of Luminents failing to soul-bond with a Human, then they wither and die.” Slayter tapped his chin thoughtfully like he was considering a mathematically problem. “I’d give you one chance in a hundred maybe.”
“So… still possible,” Khyven said.
“Let me put it in terms you’ll understand: Imagine Lorelle’s soul is a tapestry with a hundred horizontal threads and a hundred vertical threads. She rips it in half, gives it to you. That now becomes part of your tiny Human soul.”
“Tiny?”
Slayter held up his hand as he continued. “Imagine your soul is a tapestry. Except it’s five horizontal threads and five vertical threads. Let’s say you rip your soul in half and give that half to her. All right? Are you with me so far? Well now you’ve both begun the bonding. You’ve both acquiesced. There’s still one more step. The remaining threads of your half-soul must then be tied to the remaining threads of her half-soul except… you can’t! Because she has a hundred threads and you only have five. That is how the bonding fails.”
Khyven’s belly felt cold. “That can’t be true.”
“I’m speculating, of course,” Slayter said. “The odds could be much worse.”
“Could they be better? Maybe you don’t know… Maybe I have more threads in my soul than you think.”
Slayter smiled. “I do like how you always believe you can win.” He cocked his head. “I wonder how much of a factor that has played in your ability to win forty-nine bouts in the Night Ring—”
“Slayter…” Vohn warned, bringing the mage back to the present.
“Yes, of course.” Slayter snapped out of his mental calculations and focused on Vohn. “Well, the good news is that with all of us working together I’d say we could improve Khyven’s odds of a successful bond from one-in-a-hundred to one-in-fifty. Maybe one-in-twenty. Consulting with Lorelle, of course.”
“Except,” Vohn said. “Now we have a new problem—”
Slayter suddenly snapped his fingers. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “That’s why the Giant’s blood worked so well!” Slayter considered, marveling at whatever was happening in his mind. “Even I was surprised about how well it worked. I mean, the vial was two thousand years old, wasn’t it? I didn’t have many doubts that it was real Giant’s blood—I was relatively certain about that—but I wasn’t sure if it would actually do anything. It was the very essence of a gamble. But I had to try something, didn’t I? I didn’t say this at the time, but I didn’t think it would actually bring him back to life. I even lamented wasting that precious vial on a lost cause—no offense, Khyven. I think my greatest hope was that the Giant’s blood would slow the worsening of the poison. I knew it didn’t have the ability to reconstruct your already-damaged tissues, but lo and behold, I was wrong! You started repairing yourself as though the Giant’s blood was a miracle cure. I’ve been speculating ever since how it healed your body so quickly. But, actually, I was right. The Giant’s blood made you more resistant to the ongoing damage of the Helm, but it was the vitality that Lorelle pushed into you that healed you. She literally gave you new life.” He shook his head. “Right in front of me. Ah, I’ve been blind. I tell you, I don’t remember the last time I’d so thoroughly failed to—”
“Slayter!” Vohn snapped.
Slayter sat up and nodded. “Right. Of course. Let’s get to work. The poor thing must be in excruciating pain by now, standing so close to the balm for her woes yet resisting her impulses. Now that we know the problem, we can get started on the solution. Where is she?”
Vohn ground his teeth. “She’s gone.”
Slayter glanced around the room, then back at Vohn. “Clearly. Well, someone go get her.”
“She’s gone with a Nox,” Vohn said.
“We have a Nox?” The mage’s eyes lit with interest. “There’s an actual Nox in Usara? In the daylight?”
Vohn threw up his hands in exasperation and looked to Khyven.
“A Nox took Lorelle away,” Khyven said. “About five seconds before you burst through the door. She said he’s going to give her a Plunnos to open the Thuros to go after Rhenn.”
“That’s a lie,” Vohn muttered.
“Then the Nox wrapped her up in a cloak and they vanished,” Khyven finished.
“A cloak?” Slayter’s eyes glimmered with interest. “What kind of cloak?”
“Oh, for the love of Lotura. Lorelle has been kidnapped!” Vohn shouted.
That seemed to reach the mage. “Oh…” he said. “Oh, well that’s no good. Yes, of course. Well, that’s…” He tipped his head slightly back and forth. “Yes, that’s bad. Nox and the Luminents don’t… Well, they kill each other on sight, usually. Back a thousand years ago they did, anyway. Big wars and such. That was when there were still Nox to be seen. There hasn’t been a Nox abroad in the world since—”
“Can we get her back?” Vohn interjected.
Slayter fell silent. He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it, then opened it again, then shut it again. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t think so, no. I mean, unless the Nox brings her back here.”
“You can’t find her…” Khyven waved a hand vaguely, “you know, magically?”
“Yes,” he said. “I could probably do that. We certainly have enough of her personal items to possibly get a fix on her. I could do a location spell in the style of Life Magic. Just a smidgeon, you understand. Line Magic’s version of Life Magic, as it were. So, it wouldn’t be particularly strong and the range would be limited. Of course…” He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “I could increase that range by—”
Khyven sliced his hand through the air like he was physically chopping off the end of Slayter’s sentence. “Then do it.”
“Oh. Well, it wouldn’t matter,” Slayter said.
“Why?”
“I don’t need a spell to tell you where she’s gone.”
“Then tell us!” Khyven said, exasperated.
“She’s in a noktum. The Nox don’t live outside the noktums. Moreover, I’d wager she’s in the Great Noktum.” Slayter’s voice dropped to the lower tone he used when he talked to himself while working out some problem in his head. “All the texts I’ve read about the Nox say they retreated to the Great Noktum after the Luminent Wars. There may be scattered tribes and such in smaller noktums, like the one near us, but unlikely. In fact, I’m almost certain there are no Nox in the noktum near us. We’d have seen some sign of that when you were exploring the—”
“The Great Noktum is hundreds of miles away.” Khyven didn’t know much about Noksonon geography, but the map laid out on the table had it clearly marked, far below the Eternal Desert and the Rhaeg Mountains even. “Surely we can catch them before they get too far.”
“Hardly. You said they vanished into his cloak?”
“That’s what it looked like,” Khyven said.
“Yes,” Vohn confirmed.
“Well, he has a noktum cloak,” Slayter said. “Wherever he wanted to go, he’s already there.”
“Then find her in the Great Noktum,” Khyven interrupted.
“Well, that would hardly matter,” Slayter said.
“Why,” Khyven said through his teeth, “would that not matter?”
Slayter blinked. “You’d die.”
“It would be nice,” Vohn said in a calm-ish tone, “if you would slow down a little bit for us, Slayter. Explain to us what is happening in your mind. Sometimes you forget to do that.”
“My apologies. I will explain. I could locate her. Probably. I might even be able to work a teleportation spell that would take us all the way to the edge of the Great Noktum—if I prepared for a few days. But even if I could do all that and we traveled to the Great Noktum in the blink of an eye, we only have amulets that last for an hour or so. Unless she is right at the edge—which I doubt—you could never make it into and out of there fast enough. The monsters would devour you the moment the amulets’ power faded. Not to mention that, once inside, we would need a master guide to navigate the terrain. And we don’t know anyone who is a master of anything inside the noktum.”
