Gorinthians (44 page)

After several moments, when
no ideas formulated, he walked over to her and struck her on the
neck, knocking her out cold. He would have to take her to
Thistledown and hope that the little gnome had some ideas. He
pulled some clothes on her before throwing her light form over his
shoulder, walked across the hall to Jesha’s room and kicked the
door in.

The room was small, with a
single bed and small round table with two chairs next to the
window. Jesha was on the floor in a heap, with thick blood crusted
up in her light hair above her eyes. Her chest rose and fell
rapidly, and her breath came out raggedly. Lochnar set Morindessa
down on the ground next to him and pulled Jesha up to a sitting
position in front of him. As softly as a feather, he began probing
the large gash in her forehead with his fingers. Lochnar’s eyebrows
rose in surprise that she was still alive when he felt the large
crack in her cartilaginous skull. He reached out with his
yar
and began mending the
bone back together, before slowly lacing the tissue together as
well. She still had too little blood left in her body to last very
long, and her body was fevered from the beginnings of an infection.
She would also have to wait on Thistledown. Lochnar never had been
good at healing people. He spent most of his time killing people,
so there was little reason to learn how to heal them.

For the third time in a
week, he used the inner link that he shared with Thistledown,
growling to himself in irritation. “Come to the Lucky Door in North
Fork.” He tried to put a small sense of urgency in the
sending.

He could feel the soldiers
on the ground floor becoming steadily drunker as the evening
progressed. Lochnar closed the door, walked over to the window next
to the table, and looked down into the street where several
soldiers were trying to charm some of the local women, succeeding
as often as not. Still staring out the window, Lochnar began
probing Morindessa with his
yar
, trying to puzzle out the
unexplainable presence of her own spirit in a body that a
Gorinthian had dominated. It was troubling that the Gorinthian had
been able to break through her aura without the aid of
yara
. Morindessa’s Spirit
was filled with relief so strong that Lochnar half expected her
body to awake. Her Spirit was obviously still aware of her
surroundings, even though her body was unconscious, which meant her
Spirit must have been separated from her body even more than
Lochnar first believed. Lochnar continued studying her body, where
it should have fastened to her Spirit. The Tramnel had been burned
off her legs and arms, and there was only a small amount left on
the rest of her skeletal structure. The Gorinthians did not use the
outer shell of Tramnel that grew along the skeletal structure,
enabling a Spirit to latch on to a body and grow with it. Jerard
had created what he called Trenchants for the Gorinthians, small
barbs of coarse spiritual matter that penetrated deeply into the
soft core of Tramnel, making an anchor for the Gorinthian spirit to
attach to the body with. Somehow, the Gorinthian would have to be
removed from her body, and her Tramnel would need to be repaired so
that it could attach to her body once more.

Lochnar turned toward the
door as he felt several of the drunken soldiers moving up the
stairs. Their voices were loud and boisterous, interspersed with
drunken laughter.

“
Lieutenant, are you
through with her yet?” one of the drunken soldiers bawled from down
the hall. “We want a turn, too!”

Lochnar waited until they
were entering the room across from him before quietly opening the
door and moving behind the four inebriated men. They were staring
stupidly at Sander’s comatose body on the floor when Lochnar
entered, whipping his sword out and beheading the first man in one
swift motion. Before the remaining three soldiers had a chance to
start moving, their heads were already rolling across the floor to
join the first. Wiping his blade on Sander’s motionless form,
Lochnar re-sheathed his sword with a sense of satisfaction. For
some reason, killing people always seemed to calm his nerves
down.

Lochnar heard movement in
the room where he had left Morindessa and Jesha. After making a
quick scan of the room with his
yar
, Lochnar strode back across the
hall to the other room, closing the door behind him. Jesha was
shaking Morindessa lightly, trying to rouse her.

“
Leave her be,” Lochnar
growled, scowling at the small Zeran.

Jesha gave a start when she
saw him scowling down at her, but a moment later, she was hovering
over Morindessa again, squeezing her hand. “I can still feel her in
this body, and she needs a friend,” Jesha said in her dual-toned
Zeran voice.

Lochnar grunted sourly,
walking over to the window. More than likely, the fool girl would
wake the Gorinthian and it would be up to Lochnar to save her fool
neck. Even so, he did not insist that she back away from
Morindessa. He could feel the warmth from Morindessa’s Spirit, a
thick flow that carried love and fondness in it.

Lochnar felt Thistledown’s
presence moving closer, now somewhere near the town gates. Riah’s
resonance seemed more pronounced than it had before she had
disappeared, with a kind of purity in its core that burned brighter
than the sun. Lochnar wondered how giving a piece of his own core
had caused such a drastic effect. That was, however, a question for
another day. The strange girl from the other world must have
learned to control her resonance to some degree, because it was no
louder than the other people around her now.

The torches that lit the
wide road cast flickering shadows on the buildings that lined the
street. Human eyes would have had trouble seeing through the poor
light, but Lochnar’s Talon heritage had given him the same ability
to see well at night that Zerans possessed. After several minutes
of waiting, Thistledown came into sight with the rest of their
group. Riah, Li and Lori were riding three of the horses that
Morindessa had brought with her, with Lendel leading the packhorse
by the lead rope. Li seemed to be wincing at every step her horse
took, and Lendel kept eyeing the packhorse that he was leading
distrustfully. Riah was an accomplished rider, but Lochnar was
surprised to see Lori handling her reigns with a confidence that
came from years of experience riding horses. She must have been
from a wealthy family, wherever she was from.

As Thistledown’s companions
reigned in at the front of the building, an armored soldier walked
toward him purposefully. “This inn is sold out for the night.” The
soldier waved impatiently for them to move on. “You will need to
find another place to sleep.”

Thistledown ignored him,
tying Riah’s reigns to a post at the front of the building. The
soldier shouted something angrily, but before he could utter a
complete word, he slid limply to the ground. Lochnar felt
Thistledown’s
yar
expand into the inn with a wavelength with which Lochnar was
not familiar. A moment later, the inn was silent as the drunken
laughter below him cut off. Frowning, Lochnar tried to puzzle out
what Thistledown had done. The wavelength that Thistledown had
saturated the rest of the inn with had been too weak to forcefully
knock a person out, barely more than a trickle.

“
Thistledown is here,”
Jesha said suddenly, her cat-like eyes widening in surprise. “How
did he know where to find us?”

Lochnar ignored her,
turning to watch Morindessa as Thistledown walked up the stairs.
Just before Thistledown reached the door, Lochnar felt a small
flash of another Spirit’s presence in the building, and then it was
gone, but not before Lochnar recognized it. Feeling the molten fire
rage fill his blood once more, he jerked his sword out at the same
time that he pulled his
yar
back through the link that he shared with
Thistledown, until his entire Spirit was hidden in the realm of
negatives. Pulling his body back into the realm of negatives was
always a painful process, requiring him to sustain his body’s
functions with his Spiritual energy. Jerard had caught him by
surprise the last time they met, leaving him less alive than a
garden slug. He had also left Lochnar a changed person,
inadvertently giving him the keys to a world that he alone
understood.

The door banged open and
Thistledown rushed in, looking at the spot where he knew Lochnar
was standing, though his physical eyes could not see it. “What’s
going on?” he demanded, looking around the room for a
threat.

“
We have company coming,”
Lochnar said, almost a purr. “And now that Terrance is gone, I
think he will be brave enough to come out in the open.”

Chapter 25

Thistledown stood over
Morindessa, studying her with his feral eyes narrowed. Reaching out
with his
yar
, he
felt his awareness merge with the smallest particles that
surrounded them, spreading his Spirit’s energy through the coarse
matter that made up the Physical Realm. As his awareness enveloped
Morindessa’s still form, he felt her
yar
pulsing inside with a frantic
hope, almost on the edge of desperation. At the same time, he could
also feel the subdued
yar
of the Gorinthian that had dominated her body. The
Gorinthian’s link to her physical body would have caused its senses
to shut down with the body that it was attached to when the body
was unconscious, causing the subdued
yar
.

Riah came into the room and
knelt down on the other side of Morindessa, reaching out to brush a
lock of dark hair out of Morindessa’s face. The rest of their
growing group of companions stood in the hallway, trying to peer in
the door to see what was happening.

Frowning in puzzlement,
Thistledown studied the few remaining contact points that
Morindessa’s Spirit still had with her body. There were only a few
million at the most, with the greater part of them centering on her
brain and spine. Shaking his head slightly, Thistledown wondered
how Morindessa had managed to hang on to her body at all.
Gorinthians never left a Spirit connected to their host.

Thistledown looked up toward
the door where Seranova and Ferrich watched anxiously. “Seranova, I
need to borrow your Chasel,” Thistledown said crisply, hoping that
he was not mistaken in what it would do to Morindessa.

Seranova stared at him in
shock. “How did you know I have a Chasel?”

“
That’s not important,”
Thistledown said impatiently. “If you want to help Morindessa, then
please just hand it over.”

Seranova flushed slightly,
pulling her pack off her back and setting it on the floor in front
of her. Thistledown felt his eyebrows rise slightly in surprise as
she plunged the first half of her body into her pack, rummaging
around while she muttered to herself. Where had she come by a
traveler sack? Terrance and he were among the only remaining people
alive who knew how to make traveler sacks. She must have found it
somewhere, though how it had stayed intact for several thousand
years was a mystery.

Seranova emerged from her
traveler sack with a leather pouch, holding it carefully by the
drawstrings as she handed it to Thistledown. Untying the
drawstrings, Thistledown quickly hardened a layer of elements on
the Spiritual plane that would block the Chasel from affecting
anything beyond himself and Morindessa. Taking a deep breath,
Thistledown dropped the small statue of a winged man into his palm.
It immediately began glowing with an incandescent light that
banished all of the shadows from the room. Thistledown felt the
Gorinthian’s Trenchants burn off in a flash, and he hurriedly
dropped the Chasel back into the leather bag.

As soon as Thistledown felt
the Gorinthian awake, its Spirit losing its hold of Morindessa’s
body, he wrapped thick layers of hardened Spiritual elements around
the evicted Spirit. It thrashed around, trying to break free of the
tight cocoon, still writhing in pain from the searing of its
Trenchants. Pushing down the sense of pity that arose from his
stomach, Thistledown aligned the dense, negative elements that he
carried in his Virtual Scrip until they formed a swirling drain.
The communion plane emitted a scream that made no sound as
Thistledown tore the Gorinthian's spirit to pieces, until all that
remained were the base Spiritual elements that had made up its
being. Thistledown pulled his store of negative elements back into
his Virtual Scrip, along with the new Spiritual elements he had
dissolved from the Gorinthian. Thistledown and Terrance used the
Spiritual elements to barter with some of the Elementals who had
not chosen sides. They were always eager to grow, now that most of
the Spiritual elements in the universe were used up.

Thistledown felt waves of
intense relief emanate from Morindessa as the Gorinthian Spirit
disappeared from her body. Looking up at Riah, Thistledown took
another deep breath, “So far so good.”

She smiled at him
encouragingly, her exquisite face shining with confidence. Reaching
into his Virtual Scrip with his
yar
, he pulled out several varieties
of Tramnel, comparing them to the few remaining traces of Tramnel
that were still on Morindessa’s body. Tramnel was similar to blood,
in that a person’s body would only work with Tramnel of the same
class. There were also hundreds of different kinds of Tramnel. He
sighed in relief as he found a web of Tramnel that matched the
remaining contact points on Morindessa’s body. Carefully, he began
grafting the rough textured substance that was a mix of both
Spiritual and Physical matter to Morindessa’s skeletal structure.
Her body convulsed wildly as the foreign material merged itself to
her body. Thistledown winced in sympathy, knowing too well the pain
he was causing her by grafting Tramnel to her body. It took several
minutes to complete the process and her body writhed on the ground
the entire time while Riah stroked her hair
comfortingly.