Terry Brooks - Bloodfire Quest

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.

Stoon loped through the forest, working hard to keep pace with the animals ahead of him. The mutants were moving swiftly now, the scent they were following clearly growing stronger as their prey grew nearer. For such large creatures, they were surprisingly agile and silent, bounding ahead like great cats at the hunt. Even as disgusted as he was by what they were, and as contemptuous as he felt of their reduced state, Stoon could admire their athletic skills and feral instincts.