Lorelle of the Dark, page 5
“Zaith?” E’lan cried, frightened. “Zaith!”
He screamed denial inside his mind, but no sound emerged. He fought with every ounce of his strength, but his body no longer obeyed him. It belonged to the Dark. It belonged to Lord Tovos.
“You will serve me willingly,” Lord Tovos said.
Yes, gods! Please! Yes, I will serve. I will serve! he shouted into the quiet, but his mouth made no sound. And if the Lord could hear him, he ignored the pleas.
“Or unwillingly,” Lord Tovos said.
Zaith’s muscles jerked. The dagger slashed sideways, cutting down to the bone. E’lan jerked. Her eyes flew wide with surprise and blood poured down her neck and chest. Horror squeezed Zaith’s sanity and he screamed inside the prison of his mind.
The light faded from E’lan’s beautiful eyes and her head fell forward.
“But you will serve,” Lord Tovos said.
Chapter Three
Khyven
Khyven kept his cowl low as he stalked through the gritty streets, trying to let his anger drift away on the chilly air. He was still groggy from the somnul Lorelle had shot him with. Again. The woman had become inconsolable since Rhenn had vanished. The moment Rhenn had been abducted, Lorelle had slammed shut a gate between herself and the rest of them.
So yesterday, Khyven had cornered her in her room—a rarity because Lorelle didn’t seem to be sleeping in her room anymore—and he’d refused to move until she talked to him. So, she’d raised her blowgun and shot him.
He’d looked at her incredulously as he slid to his knees. She’d walked past him, her eyes haunted.
He’d woken to Vohn’s worried ministrations, which had faded instantly when Khyven told the Shadowvar what had happened.
“Well, what did you do to her?” Vohn had asked angrily.
“Nothing! I just wanted her to tell us what she’s doing!”
“We agreed that I was going to talk to her.”
“Well, I—”
“Did we agree on that or didn’t we?”
“Look, I—”
“We work as a team, Khyven. and when we agree on something, we stick to it.” Vohn had stalked away in disgust, leaving Khyven on the floor, still woozy, to follow as best he could. “Come on,” he said over his shoulder, “Slayter has found Shalure.”
Now Khyven was striding through the seedy side of Usara just north of Umberland Street. He’d frequented this part of town when he’d first won his freedom after forty wins. This was where he’d drunk his first sip of ale since his capture.
And this was where Slayter had identified the shkazat den known as The Dreamweaver.
He didn’t make eye contact with anyone and kept his face shielded by the cowl. He thought he’d been famous before the Battle of the Queen’s Return, as they were calling it, but that had been nothing. It seemed everyone knew Khyven the Unkillable now.
He slowed at the mouth of the alley just beyond Hornway Street. In the dark recesses, on the left-hand side, a short staircase led down to a door. Loitering beside the door, leaning against the wall, was someone who was supposed to look like an alley drunk, but that wasn’t true. Khyven knew a guard when he saw one. Despite his ratty clothes and the bottle in his hand, the man’s eyes were watchful.
Khyven turned up the alley.
“I’m looking for Shalure Chadrone,” he said to the guard.
“And I suppose I should know this person,” the guard said without even a hint of slurred speech.
“This tall.” Khyven held up his hand, palm down. “Auburn hair. Doesn’t talk much.”
“Piss off. Do I look like I’m hiding her in my armpit—?”
Khyven grabbed the guard and slammed him against the wall. “No. You look like a man who’s about to bleed.”
A dagger flashed into the man’s hand and he tried to stab Khyven. Khyven twisted, avoiding the point, but he caught the man’s fist.
“Bad move,” Khyven said. He wrenched the wrist and it snapped.
The guard gagged. Khyven kicked the man in the groin and cross-faced him with an elbow. The dagger clattered to the stones and the guard collapsed next to it. He curled into himself, holding his broken wrist and twitching. Khyven kicked the dagger into the shadows, crouched, and put his face next to the whimpering man.
“You could’ve answered the question,” Khyven said in a low voice. “Could’ve made this easy.”
“Inside…” the man grunted. “She’s inside. Just don’t hurt…”
“Thank you.” Khyven stood, sized up the small door and kicked it in. He stepped quickly down the two steps and into the smoky room.
The shkazat den burst into a flurry of action. Three men and a woman playing Senji Stones jumped straight up like they’d been hit by lightning, upending the board and scattering pieces everywhere.
A scantily clad woman dancing on a tiny stage at the back squeaked and cringed, covering herself with her hands. The drunk men watching her turned and threw bleary glances Khyven’s way.
Everyone at the bar to Khyven’s left sat up, and one man fell off his stool, pitching his beer over his shoulder. The raucous noise of the den dropped into silence.
The bartender reached beneath the bar and came up with a cudgel and a snarl. Two bouncers—one on the far side of the bar and one close—came for Khyven.
He pivoted. The nearest bouncer threw a wild haymaker, no doubt intending to punch Khyven’s head all the way to the Hundred Mile Sea.
He lunged inside the punch, which was still on the way, and planted a palm squarely in the man’s chest with all his strength. The bouncer flew backward, crashing through a table and a chair before hitting the wall and crumpling. He groaned, barely moving.
The second bouncer pushed his way through the now shrieking and running crowd, dagger in hand. Khyven instinctively put his hand on the pommel of his own dagger and half drew it, but he managed to stop himself.
He was angry enough to kill someone, but that wasn’t why he was here. This wasn’t the Night Ring, after all.
He heard Vohn’s voice in his head.
You can’t just go around killing people you don’t like. That doesn’t work when you are the authority instead of the oppressed. Diplomacy, Khyven. Use diplomacy.
Khyven, of course, wasn’t the authority. He didn’t want to be an authority. But since Rhenn had been abducted and Lorelle had effectively become a ghost, the kingdom of Usara was down to few options, and Khyven was one of them.
He jammed the dagger into its sheath and stepped back as the man closed with him, dagger high overhead for a downward strike.
Of course, Khyven’s retreat was a feint. Once the dagger went up he scissor-stepped in, pinning the hand high and snake-striking the bouncer in the throat.
The man’s arm went slack and he choked and doubled over. Khyven gripped the man’s neck and wrist, pivoted, and slammed him into the wall. The man miraculously held onto his dagger.
“Drop it,” Khyven commanded.
He didn’t.
“Drop it or I drop you.” Khyven squeezed the man’s wrist to the breaking point, feeling the bones bow.
The dagger thunked to the floorboards.
“Good choice.” Khyven threw him to ground and turned in time to face the bartender, who’d come up behind Khyven, brandishing the cudgel.
Khyven threw back his cowl. He gave an iron smile, then gestured, welcoming the man forward.
Whispers shot through the crowd. Khyven’s scarred face, a memento from his battle with the Helm of Darkness, was easy to recognize.
“That’s Khyven the Unkillable!” one of the patrons murmured.
“It’s Khyven the Unkillable,” another chimed in at the same time.
“Khyven the Unkillable is here!”
The bartender hesitated, cudgel lifted high. He glanced at the broken door, then at the two fallen bouncers. His befuddled mind seemed to do the math.
“Shalure Chadrone,” Khyven said.
The bartender narrowed his eyes. There was defiance there. He opened his mouth to lie, but Khyven cut him off.
“Don’t,” he said menacingly. “No one’s dead yet. Don’t be the first.”
The man’s defiance flickered and faded. He lowered his cudgel and the tip clunked against the wooden floor. He reluctantly jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “In the back.”
Khyven nodded tersely.
See Vohn? Diplomacy.
He strode to a small door to the left of the stage. It was about half the size of a normal door, like the hatch to a cellar or crawl space. He opened it and ducked through.
Inside was the shkazat den. The smoke in this room was tinged blue and it hung thickly in the air. A number of divans and pallets for the patrons who smoked the mind-numbing drug were scattered beneath the low ceiling.
Khyven narrowed his eyes and kept his lips shut to keep from inhaling any more of the hallucinatory blue smoke than necessary. He had no wish to see his nightmares come to life, or to be lulled into the dim euphoria that held the half dozen people strewn on the pallets in thrall.
He searched the room and spotted Shalure immediately. She lounged on a divan in attire as scanty as the woman on the stage. A man lay next to her, chest-to-back, stroking her arm. He saw Khyven and he sat up. He didn’t have the dull-eyed gaze of the rest of the patrons, and Khyven suddenly knew he wasn’t a patron at all; probably the owner.
The man was snuggled up to her, caressing her arm—and who knew what else—while she lay insensate in the grips of the shkazat. Khyven clenched his teeth.
The blue wind swirled through the room, and a half dozen blue funnels opened up on the man, all dark blue. All killing strikes.
Barely aware that that he’d crossed the room, Khyven suddenly loomed over the divan, dagger in hand. He wanted to stab it into this feckless cur, wanted it so badly the blue wind whipped about in a frenzy. A roar filled Khyven’s ears.
You can’t just go around killing people…
Khyven managed to stay his hand and regain his senses. The man was babbling, holding his hands up in a pacifying gesture.
“… she came to us! She offered payment!”
Khyven grabbed the babbling man by his tunic and hurled him toward the open door. He crashed into one of the empty pallets, rolled, scrambled to his feet, and lunged out of the room.
Khyven knelt next to Shalure. Her eyes were rolled halfway back into her head.
“Shalure,” he said softly.
She smiled dreamily at him, reached a languid hand up and caressed his cheek with fingers so light they might have been made of blue smoke themselves.
“Kah eh,” she said. A small line of frustration wrinkled her brow at the sound of her own voice, like she’d forgotten she couldn’t speak. She came to her senses a little, as if realizing where she was and who he was. She shook her head. “Go,” she said, one of the few words she could articulate since Vamreth had taken her tongue.
He removed his cloak and wrapped it around her.
“Go, Kah eh,” she said, pushing ineffectually against his chest.
He gathered her into his arms and stood, bending over a little to keep from hitting his head on the low ceiling. She went limp and didn’t fight him.
He wanted to scream in frustration, wanted to ask her why she would debase herself by coming here, addling her wits, and letting some stranger paw at her.
But he knew why. He knew why…
And it was his fault.
He held her protectively as he carried her out of the shkazat den. Everyone wisely got out of his way.
Chapter Four
Khyven
Khyven strode through the streets with Shalure in his arms. She soon recovered from her disgruntlement at being taken away from the shkazat den and nestled into him with a dreamy smile. Apparently, shkazat was like that. It pulled a person’s thoughts away from what they didn’t want to see and submerged them in a blind and ignorant fugue.
He took her to the palace, to the room she’d been given by Rhenn before she was taken, and laid her gently in her bed. Shalure ran a slow caress down his arm like she could feel every thread in his long-sleeved tunic. She maintained the dreamy smile, but her eyes slowly slid shut and her hand fell away like a feather, floating to the coverlet. He tucked her under the covers. She would sleep for now, drifting in a haze of the shkazat that was apparently more bearable to her than her actual life.
He stood over her, a frustrated frown on his face. He was good at killing people who were trying to kill him, not making someone live who apparently wanted to die. He had to fix this, but he had no idea how.
In a sensible world, this would have fallen to Lorelle. The beautiful Luminent was a master healer. If anyone could cure Shalure, it was Lorelle.
But it was almost as though Lorelle had been abducted along with Rhenn. Lorelle was here, somewhere in the city, but she flowed in and out of the palace like a ghost. She never seemed to sleep, almost never spoke to Khyven directly, and while she attended the council meetings Vohn had assembled to discuss the fraying state of the kingdom, she rarely stayed long.
The tall grandfather clock in the hall at the top of the stairs chimed midnight, and Khyven let out a long breath. He was late for the council meeting right now, in fact.
He left Shalure, shut the door softly behind him, and walked swiftly up the lantern-lit hallway. There were no servants in this part of the palace at this hour. Everyone but the guards had gone to sleep.
In the Night Ring, Khyven had had his share of problems. His life had always been in danger, for one, and the masters had tried to trip him up constantly. But those problems usually came one at a time and often from one direction. In the palace, problems came unpredictably, plentifully, and they came from all angles.
And the worst part was that almost none of them could be solved with a sword.
According to Vohn and Slayter, Rhenn had run the kingdom seemingly effortlessly during the months Khyven had been asleep and near death. He couldn’t fathom how that could be true. Of course, Rhenn hadn’t had to do it in secret like they did. They lied about her whereabouts—and the lie held up for now—but they were going on the second week since Rhenn had been abducted. It wouldn’t hold much longer.
Khyven corralled his thoughts and brought his focus to the present as he opened the door to the queen’s meeting chamber.
Bright lanterns lit the room, and two maps had been rolled out on the table, kept from curling with ornate little brass dragons. One was the map of the crown city of Usara, the other—which Khyven hadn’t seen before—looked like a map of the entire continent of Noksonon. Vohn stood beside the table with a slender hand perched like a bony black spider atop the city map.
Slayter sat at the back of the room, to the right of where Rhenn would be if she were here. He’d propped his stump on the table and was tinkering with the metal prosthetic leg he and Vohn had crafted.
Khyven crossed to the table and sat down in the nearest chair, which was four chairs away from Slayter. There should be a dozen people at this table discussing the fate of the kingdom. But since the queen had vanished, there was only their secret little cabal of four.
Or, well, three. Lorelle the ghost hadn’t yet shown up.
“We have a problem,” Vohn said as Khyven entered.
Slayter chuckled at that.
Vohn glared at the mage. “A new problem, then. Another problem.”
Khyven put on an easy smile, though he didn’t feel it. He’d discovered early on that Vohn could easily whip himself into a frenzy and that remaining calm was the best way to keep that from happening.
“Nope,” Khyven said breezily. “I think today we have to simply say there are no new problems.”
Vohn’s frown deepened. “We can’t say that. It’s not true.”
“I was joking.”
He blinked. “Oh. All right. I understand now. That’s funny.” He nodded tersely.
Slayter laughed. Vohn shot him another glare.
“Where’s Lorelle?” Khyven asked, but he already felt that familiar sinking feeling in his stomach. Whenever he expected to see Lorelle, he felt a growing euphoria. Whenever she failed to show, it pulled at his guts.
Ever since he’d awoken, since she’d kissed him, it had lit a fire within him that he could barely tame. He wanted to grab her, kiss her, but the Lorelle who had leaned over him and said she owed him a kiss had vanished these past two weeks. She seemed to go out of her way to avoid him.
“She’s… well, I couldn’t find her,” Vohn said.
“Don’t tell me that, Vohn.” Khyven ran a hand through his hair, checking his frustration as best he could.
Vohn raised his voice. “Well, what would you like me to tell you? That she’s here?”
When Khyven was moving, when he was throwing people against the wall and punching them like in the shkazat den, he almost felt like his old self again, but in moments like this his body ached like he’d been torn apart and put back together, except the glue they’d used hadn’t dried yet.
He thought back to the night he’d awoken, the night Rhenn had vanished. Slayter had come to Vohn and said he’d detected magic in the palace. When they’d realized both Rhenn and Lorelle were missing, they’d all gone searching. They’d found Lorelle frozen by the Thuros. After Slayter had painstakingly—it had taken him most of an hour—dismantled the spell, Lorelle had frantically told them the story.
Of course, they’d tried to get the Thuros to work. Slayter and Lorelle had tried for two full days while Khyven and Vohn had scrambled to plan some kind of government for a kingdom that suddenly had no queen. In an exchange of frantic ideas, they had spun a story about Rhenn traveling to a secret meeting with the king of Imprevar to cement relations between the two countries. They’d actually sent a half dozen envoys and a dozen guards on a ship to Imprevar the next morning to cover the lie. It was as solid a lie as could be. After all, the king’s daughter had been halfway to Usara to marry Vamreth when Rhenn’s coup had toppled the usurper’s reign. A face-to-face meeting was one of the only things that could smooth that over.
They’d taken Rhenn’s honor guard, the mute knights Orig and Chellit, into their confidence. With Lorelle’s reluctant help—she hadn’t wanted to leave the Thuros even for a second—they’d convinced the knights of the truth of the story.
