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.”

Khyven felt a chill. Memories flashed unbidden through his mind. The giant raven leaning over him, his glistening black eyes watching Khyven, his chillingly lucid speech issuing forth from that long, sharp beak.

Rauvelos.

“Yes,” Khyven said. “Yes, we do.”