Bloodfire Quest

26

Amid a pungent haze of smoke and ash and mist, cloaked in gloom and wrapped in pain, Aphenglow Elessedil opened her eyes. Somehow she was still in one piece. The last thing she remembered was clinging to the railing of Wend-A-Way’s pilot box as the airship, shattered and burning, plunged earthward, completely out of control and seemingly doomed. She had been thrown backward off the railing with the last explosive attack of the fire launchers mounted on the Federation warship, and stayed conscious for only a moment or two afterward—just long enough to feel Wend-A-Way begin to fall. Then everything had gone dark.

What she knew for certain was that she shouldn’t be alive. She should be dead.

She looked around, still sufficiently dazed that she couldn’t seem to get her bearings. Where was she? She wasn’t aboard the airship any longer. She was lying on the ground; she could feel cool dampness of the earth and grasses beneath her. She shifted her position slightly and caught the red glow of dying embers through the haze. The remains of the airship, she thought.

Then she remembered Arlingfant and Cymrian and the Elven Hunters who had been aboard the airship with her, and she forced herself into a sitting position. A wave of dizziness swept through her, and she seemed to hurt everywhere at once. But when she tested her arms and legs, one by one, she could tell that nothing was broken. Her ribs were another matter. At least several were cracked and perhaps worse. She took a moment to use her magic to layer her midsection with a healing wrap that gave her some relief from the pain.

Then, ignoring what pain still lingered, she forced herself to her feet and took a few steps toward the glow of the embers. She could tell the airship had come down in a forest; the trees closest to her were scarred and ripped by the force of the crash. Pieces of the vessel lay everywhere, scattered about like the bones of a dead thing. She found one of the Elven Hunters only a few feet away, what was left of him barely recognizable. Shivering at the implications of what this might mean about her sister and Cymrian, she stumbled ahead more quickly, looking everywhere at once.

She found the larger part of Wend-A-Way some distance farther on, her hull holed in a dozen places by enemy fire and her decking collapsed. The glow she had seen earlier was emanating from sections of wood planking that were still smoldering. The masts were shattered, and lengths of them lay all around the wreck. One was even caught up in the branches of one of the trees. The parse tubes and light sheaths had been thrown all across the space where the airship had come down. Yards of radian draws hung from the trees like spiderwebs.

She found parts of another of the crewmen nearby, able to tell that it wasn’t Cymrian from the markings on the one remaining forearm. She pushed on through the haze, coughing as the acrid smoke and ash entered her lungs, peering about for signs of her sister and their protector. But she couldn’t find either. She was widening her search to the areas outside the immediate crash site when she remembered the Elfstones. She had chosen not to use them when they had been attacked, relying instead on her Druid magic. But where had she put them? She began searching through her pockets without success. If they had fallen out somewhere during the crash, she would never find them. They had to be on her somewhere.

And they were, tucked in an outside pocket of her pants, down along her thigh. She felt their distinctive shape through the fabric and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Aphen.”

She turned to find Cymrian coming toward her from out of the haze, his clothes soaked, wild and streaked with mud. Blood from a deep cut on his forehead ran down his face. She felt a sudden rush of emotion that surprised her—a sense of relief coupled with something much stronger.

“I can’t find Arling,” she told him at once. “Have you seen her?”

He shook his head. “I just now found my way to you. I was thrown off the ship when she came down. Right into a bog. Arling? I don’t know. She might be anywhere.”

“Let me see that cut,” she said, moving over to examine his head.

She cleaned the wound as best she could with the sleeve of her tunic and then used a small bit of magic to close the gash and initiate the healing. He stood quietly while she did so, his lean feature intense, his eyes turned away. “Are you all right?”

“Better than you, I think. Mostly, I’m just sore. We have to find her, Cymrian.”

He nodded as she finished and stepped away. “We will. Can you walk?”

“As far as you need me to.”

“Then let’s conduct a sweep of the area. Spread out from here. We’ll find her quick enough.”

They began a slow outward circling from the ruins of Wend-A-Way, searching the brush and trees as they went, careful not to neglect the possibility that Arling was caught up in the branches of one of the trees. Around them, mist and smoke swirled through the night, thick and pungent. They were barely able to find their way, but they pushed steadily onward until at last they were far enough from the airship’s remains that the haze had dissipated and they could see clearly again.

“This is close to where I landed,” he said at last, stopping. “Maybe we’re guessing wrong. Maybe she didn’t even get off the ship. She could still be inside, trapped belowdecks. It looked as if the ship collapsed in on herself, so …”

He trailed off. “We’d better go back and have a look.”

Aphenglow didn’t need to be told what he was thinking. If Arling was in the airship wreckage, she had probably been crushed to death on impact.

They took a direct line back to Wend-A-Way, leaving Aphen outside to wait as Cymrian began searching through the inside of the hull. He was gone a long time before reappearing. “Nothing,” he said.

They stood together once more, looking everywhere but at each other. “I’ll have to use the Elfstones,” Aphenglow said finally. “It’s risky, but I can’t afford to worry about that. Arling could be dying out there.”

To his credit, Cymrian didn’t argue. He simply nodded.

She pulled out the Stones and dumped them from the pouch into her hand. Closing her fingers about them, she stretched out her arm and formed a picture of her sister’s face, holding it firmly in her mind as she summoned the magic.

The blue light blazed to life and then spun away to their left. She wheeled quickly to square herself up to its beam, fixing the direction as it traveled only a short distance to a jumble of branches that had been torn away in the crash. Beyond was a tangle of grasses in which a body lay prone, nearly invisible against the muddied earth. The light held fast for a moment to mark the spot, then flared and was gone.

Cymrian was already moving. She hurried after him, jamming the Elfstones back in her pocket. It took them only minutes to make their way back through the trees and the brush. Arling lay just a short distance from where they had turned back from their earlier search. Aphen gritted her teeth in fury. They had been only steps away.

She rushed over to her sister and knelt. Arling was covered in mud and bleeding from her nose and mouth. She was breathing, but just barely, and her pulse was weak and unsteady. Quickly, Aphen checked for other injuries without finding any. But since Arling was unconscious it was difficult to be certain.

“She’s in a bad way,” she told Cymrian. “I’m afraid to move her.”

“Can you tell if anything is broken?”

“Doesn’t seem to be.” She felt up and down her sister’s arms and legs without finding any sign of broken bones. She explored Arling’s body, as well. Nothing. “Can you lift her? By her shoulders, but don’t let her head move when you do.”

Cymrian did as she asked, and she felt underneath her sister’s back. She had almost finished her exam when her fingers found metal splinters. Her breath caught in her throat. That last barrage from the Federation fire launchers must have done this. There were at least two, and perhaps more, of those splinters embedded in Arling’s back. It was impossible to tell how deeply they had penetrated, but it seemed likely they were the source of the problem. The splinters, and the impact of Arling’s fall from the ship, would explain a lot.

She took off her cloak and spread it on the ground beside her sister. “Can you roll her over on her stomach?” she asked Cymrian, indicating the cloak.

The Elven Hunter did so—carefully, tenderly, keeping everything as protected as he could manage. Aphen helped by turning Arling at her hips and legs as Cymrian turned her at her shoulders. It took only a moment to lay the injured girl on her stomach. Now both her sister and their protector could see the splinters and the blood that seeped from the wounds they had made. The splinters protruded from halfway up her back, close to where her heart was.

“I’ll have to take them out,” she said, looking at him. “But I don’t know what that will do to her.”

“If you don’t take them out, you know for certain what it will do,” he answered.

She called up her magic and layered her sister with a deadening spell that would numb her body against the pain and help to seal off the wounds as soon as the splinters were removed. She cut away Arling’s tunic to expose her back and was horrified to find that in addition to the larger, more obvious wounds, there were dozens of smaller ones, as well. Arling must have been caught in a hailstorm of metal shards in that last attack. A wave of fear swept through her. If she made a mistake now or if she failed to do enough, she was going to lose her sister.

Before any further thoughts of that sort could take hold, she began the process of extracting the splinters. One by one, she removed them with steady, practiced movements, ripping off the sleeves of her tunic to wipe away blood and debris, pouring small amounts of liquid from her aleskin onto the wounds to help with the cleaning. She worked as quickly as she could, refusing to be distracted by her fears. Cymrian knelt beside her, watching silently. It seemed to her that it took an inordinate amount of time. The larger splinters came out easily enough; they were deeply embedded, but didn’t appear to have penetrated or damaged any bones or the spinal column. The smaller shards were a different matter. Some of them were long and thin and not easily located. She reached inside her sister’s body with her magic, extracting the splinters one by one.

When she had the last of them she cleaned the wounds and sat back, staring down at her sister’s still body. Her breathing hadn’t changed. Her pulse was still irregular. Something wasn’t right. Taking out the splinters hadn’t been enough to solve the problem.

She shook her head, knowing she had to do more, that she had missed something.

Across from her, Cymrian suddenly turned and looked off into the trees. “Someone’s coming.”

She hadn’t heard anything. But she had learned by now that his ears were sharper than hers, in spite of her instincts and her magic. He would not be mistaken about something like this. She stared at him in confusion, saw the look on his face, and quickly said, “Don’t go.”

“You’ll be fine,” he said, already on his feet.

“It’s not me I’m worried about. If you go, you’ll be all alone.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t let whatever’s coming reach you and Arling. I have to stop it.”

“Wait a few more minutes. I’ll come with you.”

He shook his head. “We don’t have those minutes.” He moved over and knelt beside her. “Take as long as you need with her. Whatever’s out there, I will find a way to stop it.”

She glanced down at her sister, knowing she was losing her, knowing at the same time that she was about to lose him, as well. “Cymrian, no.”

He gave her a momentary smile. “It’s my job to protect you, Aphen.”

She made a small sound in her throat and reached for him, pulling him to her and kissing him hard on the mouth. She held the kiss for a long time, desperate to keep him close, realizing for the first time how terrible it would be to lose him. How many times had he saved her? How many times had he been there for all of them? She hadn’t realized it before—hadn’t let herself accept it, perhaps—not in the way she understood as she kissed him now. But there it was, full-blown and alive in her heart.

She cared for him every bit as much as he cared for her, in spite of all her efforts at distancing herself from his long-held affection for her.

When she released him, she said, “Be strong. I will come for you.”

Her eyes held him fixed in place for a second more. Then he turned away and was gone.

Stoon was not happy. The Federation warship had come out on top in the encounter with the Elven vessel, but as a consequence of the damage inflicted, the latter had gone into a steep dive and disappeared into the depths of Drey Wood, lost beneath a tangle of tree limbs and clouds of mist that obscured the entire forest. To make matters worse, the Federation ship had lost her steering capabilities and so much sail that it had barely managed to land for repairs. Spars, radian draws, and parse tubes alike were smashed and severed and exploded in such numbers that it would take hours, if not days, to put things right.

Realizing that by then they would lose track of the survivors of the crash—if there were any—he made up his mind to go after them on foot. Unfortunately, that meant he would have to release the mutants in the hold, because he certainly wasn’t about to go mucking around in the forest alone. He lacked the necessary skills for that sort of work, and he imagined the Elf who served as Aphenglow’s protector was much better trained in it than he was. Plus, he was not about to wager that any of them were dead, the crash notwithstanding, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way that they were alive and well and enraged enough at what had been done to them to want to make an example of him.

So he would have to use the creatures Edinja had provided. As much as he hated the monsters, he might as well make use of them in the way in which Edinja had intended. He would make up a story later about what had happened—how he had tried to capture the girl and her companions alive but been unable to do so; how the mutants had overreacted to the threat; how he had been lucky to escape with his life. Edinja would have her doubts, but there would be nothing she could do about it at that point.

“Captain,” he announced, once repairs were under way, “I am taking those things in the hold out for a walk. We’ll hunt for the Elves on foot. Stay with the ship. Wait for me. I’ll find you when it’s over.”

He could see the relief in the other’s face and smiled to himself as he started down the ladder into the hold. No pretense of courage in that one. No danger that he would step outside the lines. The captain would be here when he returned.

Belowdecks, submerged in gloom and the dank smells of old wood and stale air, the assassin moved over to the cage. The animals inside were already stirring, hulking forms just visible as they rose from their crouching positions to face him. Their features were blunted and empty of expression, but their eyes watched him carefully. Huge, muscular creatures, any one of them could snap him in two with barely an effort. A part of him was terrified of them, even given his unmatched proficiency at killing. But Edinja had assured him they would do whatever he asked, and she wouldn’t have sent him all this way just to have him killed. So he pushed back his fear, closed off his doubts, and kept his face as blank and fixed as theirs.

He came up to them and stopped. “I’m letting you out. You are to hunt for three Elves—a man and two women. They are out in the surrounding forest somewhere. I will point you in what I think is the right direction. Then you will search. When you find them, I want you to kill them. No hesitation, no stopping to think about it, no mistakes. Kill them. Do you understand me?”

They grunted, one after the other, an indication that they did. Good enough.

He unlocked the cage door, opened it, and stepped back. They lumbered through the opening, stretching their huge arms and hunching their shoulders. They looked about warily, and then faced him, waiting.

“Come outside,” he ordered them, satisfied.

They climbed the ladder and emerged onto the warship deck. Gloom and mist surrounded them, and they could barely see beyond the ship’s railings to the closest of the trees. The captain and crew had moved well away to the stern. Several of the men held blades at the ready. Two of the crew were even manning one of the fire launchers. Stoon shook his head in disgust. What fools. They would be dead before they could bring any of those to bear, should the creatures with him wish it.

He gave the captain a farewell wave and walked to the rope ladder that had been thrown over the side, with the beasts trailing after him. Down the ladder they went, and when they were on the ground, Stoon chose his direction as best he could recall it from when he had seen the Elven airship spiral downward. By then, the Federation ship had herself been sideslipping, so he couldn’t be sure. He hoped his hunters were equipped with good instincts and sharp senses; he hoped they were the hunters Edinja had promised.

But there was only one way to find out.

“Hunt them,” he ordered, pointing west into the mist and trees.

The creatures stood where they were for a moment, sniffing the air, casting about like dogs before a hunt. They did not look at one another. They did not look at him.

Then one caught a scent that intrigued it and began to move away, the others following.

Stoon, fingering the blades strapped to his waist and legs and body to reassure himself he was ready for whatever would happen next, went after them.

With Cymrian gone, Aphenglow went back to work on her sister’s wounds. She used a fresh infusion of magic to try to wake Arling, but the other’s body resisted such intrusion and refused to respond to the effort—a clear indication that whatever was still wrong was serious. She backed away from her efforts, once again doing a slow, careful examination of her sister’s back and sides where all the damage from the metal shards appeared to be the worst. But everywhere she looked she found the same thing—all of the splinters had been extracted, and blood from the wounds was barely seeping into the bandages.

Aphen sat back. It must have been the impact of her fall. She must have suffered broken ribs or worse. But without obvious bruising or evidence of broken bones, she needed sharper eyes than her own to see inside her sister’s body.

Different eyes.

She took a deep breath to steady herself. Time was slipping away. For Arling. For Cymrian. For all of them.

Then she made the call for help, a deep-throated cry that reverberated through the forest silence. She made it three times and sat back to wait, eyes on the misty dark.

The owl, when it came, was small and nondescript, its colors unremarkable, its presence nonthreatening as it landed on her shoulder and perched there, perfectly still. A bore owl, not well known outside the Westland, and even there seldom seen. She did not look at it, did not acknowledge its presence. Instead she called up the magic she needed to bond with it, to make it her familiar, and when she was done the owl’s eyes were her own, her vision so sharply enhanced that she could see as it did.

Like the owl’s, her eyes stayed open and steady as she began a new search for her sister’s injuries. But now she was seeing so much better than before. Every scratch, every pore, every tiny hair was visible—the ridges on the surface of Arling’s skin, the tiny scars, the shadow of her bones, the minuscule places where wounds had split the skin but had already closed over. And inside her sister’s body the pulsing of veins and capillaries, the slow rise and fall of her lungs, the soft beating of her heart—Aphenglow could see it all.

She searched with owl eyes and Elf fingers, an excruciatingly slow process given the urgency she felt. Where was the damage? Where was the thing that was stealing away her sister’s life?

She found it when she was working her way up her sister’s left side. There, beneath her arm, barely visible even to Aphen’s owl eyes, was a pinprick from which nothing protruded and no blood flowed. Dirt and sweat had obscured it so thoroughly that it was virtually indistinguishable from the skin surrounding it. But when Aphen pulled back the skin from either side of the wound, she saw the sharp glint of metal. She held her finger to its tip without moving it in any direction and sent her magic down its long, slender length to discover that it was nestled against her sister’s ribs and breastbone and buried inside her heart.

She had missed finding it before, thinking it only a part of Arling’s bones. She had rushed herself; she had worked too fast. And it had nearly cost Arling her life.

Aphen sat back, terrified. Six inches of jagged metal, driven into her sister’s heart. She had to extract it at once, but she could do nothing that would cause it to go deeper or cut further. It had penetrated far enough and done such damage already that it was close to ending Arling’s life. It would take only a single mistake to finish the job it had started.

From somewhere not all that far away, she heard the sounds of a struggle and then a howl of anguish.

Faster! She had to work faster!

But that was exactly the wrong thing to do, of course. That was the mistake she had made before. She had to do exactly the opposite. She had to take her time.

Her owl eyes fixed and steady, her fingers splayed to either side of the wound so as to pull back the skin, Aphenglow Elessedil reached downward into the wound with her magic, wrapped its strands around the length of the metal shard, softened the edges and the razor-sharp spurs, and began to pull it out. She had only heard of the procedure; she had never done it herself and never seen it done. The Ard Rhys, it was rumored, had twice performed this form of extraction—but only once successfully. It was immensely difficult. Her invisible grip on the sliver of metal slipped repeatedly. More times than she cared to remember later, it twisted free entirely.

Her face felt hot and damp, and the effort of keeping her eyes open and fixed caused her to experience an ache that threatened to flatten her. But she held firm, stayed steady, and continued her task.

She heard Arling groan. She felt her start to move. No! She stopped what she was doing, waited without breathing, without doing anything but willing her sister to sleep.

After a few mind-numbing seconds, Arling did. Aphen went back to work at once. She was close, so close.

In the distance, another howl. This one was much worse, chilling and raw.

Then the sliver came free, and as it did so she heard Arling give a long, soft sigh. She let the metal shard drop and used her magic to close the wound so that healing could begin. She bent to her sister, feeling for her pulse, listening for her breath.

Both were smooth and even again. She was resting quietly, asleep but no longer threatened.

Aphen removed her tattered cloak and laid it across her sister’s body. Then she was on her feet, racing into the trees.