Sure enough, the scuffling sounds in the distance grew closer, and with them, a dull orange light began to dance off the trees, showing a path through the trees a couple dozen feet down the slope.
Torchlight, Aneirin thought, relieved. Aulds wouldn’t use torches when they had other methods—methods like Rees’s lightfist or Cyriaca Ganlin’s sunsticks or one of the glowpebbles hanging in baskets throughout the Spyre, free to take and use at will by any inhabitant. Which meant whoever this was, he was most likely barren, which meant he might be convinced to help Aneirin.
Still, after having his family slaughtered before his eyes, Aneirin didn’t run down to greet the newcomer on the path as he would have done before. Instead, he stayed where he was, listening as the steps grew closer.
It was, it turned out, three men of varying ages. The one carrying the torch at the front looked grizzled, with a strange sword at his hip that seemed to ripple oddly in the flickering light. The other two were also carrying swords, but they were obviously of simple steel construction.
Swords. Swords usually belonged to guards of merchant caravans or city guards, both of whom could help him. Half of Aneirin wanted to immediately rush down and talk to them, but he continued to hesitate, wariness keeping him in place.
“…supposed to be near here somewhere,” the man in the lead said. Aneirin flinched at the man’s speech, which was heavily accented by Etro’s guttural slur.
“We’ve been looking for weeks,” the younger man at the back of the line whined, again in an Etroean accent. While his sword was steel, it was also finer than the man’s in the middle of the line, and Aneirin recognized the shimmery flash of a dragonsilk cloak, which made him wince inwardly. Growing up on the Slopes, he knew dragonsilk had about as much use in the cold as a sheet of ice. Which meant he was the one with the money in the group.
Money, but apparently little brains. Even his shoes were built more for looks than comfort, Aneirin noticed as the kid delicately picked his way over the same terrain that the other two men strode over with purpose. Whining, the young man said, “I haven’t seen any damned Auldhunds.”
Hearing that, Aneirin felt a rush of relief—anyone looking for Auldhunds couldn’t be on the Vethyle side. He took a step out of the trees.
“They’re here,” the man in the middle snapped. “Whine again and we send you back to the regiment.”
Aneirin froze. A…regiment? Bryda had no standing army. They didn’t need one…
“How are we supposed to kill something that we can’t find?” the boy went on, unimpressed.
“We’re not going to find anything if you keep talking,” the man leading them hissed, looking over his shoulder.
“Right,” the boy laughed. “Because the torch won’t give us away.”
The grizzled old man glanced at the second-in-line, muttered something under his breath, then turned back to the path ahead. The man in the middle sighed deeply. “Kid, you may be son of the city meritor, but guys get lost in war all the time. Best not to disgruntle your travel companions, eh?”
The kid laughed. “What? Him? An uneducated old cobbler’s son who can’t even spell his own name? I should care about him why?”
The man at the front was fast. Faster than the man between them, faster than the kid at the back, faster than a man should have been. In one moment, the kid was chuckling, and in the next, he was on his back on the trail, his throat cut open, the wound like a disintegrating slice of the Void spreading across his neck, the rippling black sword already sliding back into its hilt at the man’s side.
Aneirin gasped and stumbled back behind his tree.
Immediately, the grizzled torch-bearer’s head came up and he scowled up the hill at Aneirin, hefting the torch high.
“Rale’s curse on you!” the man in the middle cried, though he made no move towards the gurgling boy on the ground. “They’re going to ask questions!”
“He was killed by an Auldhund,” the Etroean man said. He valiantly killed a couple of the abominations before succumbing to his wounds, though. His dad should like to hear that.” He was still peering up the hill at Aneirin, whose heart was starting to pound out of control. He had to bite his lip to keep from panting loud enough that they could hear him.
The second man grimaced. “At least help me get him off the trail.”
“Do it yourself. The crows can have his eyes for all I care. One less rich man’s son to make our lives miserable.”
The man made a disgusted sound, but bent to the task of dragging the boy’s twitching corpse off the main trail alone.
Hearing the dragging hiss of a corpse over dirt and pebbles suddenly brought Aneirin back to those moments watching the Vethyles dispose of his family at Ganlin Hall. The vision was so vivid that he gasped and stumbled backwards unconsciously. His foot hit a root and he tripped, hard, and when he thrust his arm down to stop his fall, something in his wrist popped. Aneirin let out a moan between clenched teeth, and suddenly he could barely see through tears.
“You hear that?” the man with the rippling black sword demanded, hefting his torch.
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“Yeah, I farted,” the man muttered, as he grabbed the boy’s flopping corpse in a bear-hug. “Still fighting whatever shit you put in our last meal.”
“No,” the man with the torch said. He nodded directly at Aneirin, squinting. “Up there.”
The man hefting the boy dumped him off into the brush, snorting. “We’re looking for Auldhunds, not rabbits. Pretty sure if one of the unnatural beasts were up there, we’d know it. They’re not known for their smarts.” He was pawing through the boy’s pockets and belongings, taking the purse and silver buckle from his belt.
“Rumor is they used to be Aulds,” the torchbearer said.
“Maybe,” the second man said, dumping the coins and buckle into his own purse and tossing the boy’s empty leather pouch back into the brush with the corpse, “but they aren’t anymore, are they?”
“Yeah, I think there’s something up there,” the old man said, taking a few steps towards Aneirin. His feet crunched in the underbrush as he stepped into the forest.
Aneirin tried to find his reservoir, but fear and pain were splashing his inner image apart as easily as a reflection in water. He held still more out of terror than any logical plan.
“Yeah?” the man digging through the dead kid’s belongings called. “Like what?”
“I dunno.” The old man lifted the torch higher. “I heard a thump.”
The second man finished with the body and climbed back onto the path. “Give me that.” He snagged the torch from the first man’s hand. “And next time you get an urge to kill an upstart brat, warn me first. That cloak he was wearing would’ve bought me a new horse.”
The grizzled old man still hadn’t turned from where he was staring right up the hill at Aneirin. “He’s still got the cloak,” he said, scanning the underbrush where Aneirin huddled as he spoke.
“I’d have to spend the next three days trying to get the blood out,” the new torchbearer said, returning to the path and taking the lead. “So let’s see… They’re supposedly living in a cave. Only cave we haven’t checked yet is this one up by the ruins, and we just lost a third of our fighting force.”
A cave, Aneirin’s terrified mind thought, confused. The Citadel had caverns in the basement, but it was an old monastery. It also should have been easy to find in the daylight, perched up on a hill overlooking Old Ariod.
The older man snorted derisively. “That green brat? He’d have done more harm than good.” He slowly, however, turned away from where Aneirin huddled and fell back into line behind the man with the torch.
They hunting Auldhunds, Aneirin thought, finally daring to let out the breath he was holding. Was he in Etro, then? Sometimes Auldhunds decided to leave Bryda and go their own way independent of the Spyre, but they were often hunted as monsters outside Bryda’s boundaries.
Then he realized there was another set of ruins within two hundred miles of Ganlin Hall. The ruins of Nefyti. The cursed place near the Etroean Pass, watched over by a small group of Auldhunds much in the same way the Citadel watched over Ariod.
But Nefyti was within Bryda.
These Etroeans were hunting Auldhunds in Bryda? That was…
…war.
But then again, with the Ganlins dead, the Spyre’s ability to fend off a foreign army had been cut in half. Most of the Aulds capable of smart enchantments—long-term workings of Function that, say, kept the blade of a sword aflame or turned the trees themselves against invaders were now dead.
Aneirin swallowed hard, suddenly very aware of a split sense of duty. As an Auld, his loyalties lay to his family, but they also lay with ensuring the safety of the citizens of Bryda. And while he currently couldn’t give a damn if the Etroeans killed every Auld in the Spyre, Aneirin had heard the horror stories of how the Etroean emperor treated his subjects—tales of whole work camps set to a task, then, once their work was completed and their usefulness over, they were turned loose in the desert without food or water, giving one area in the Etroean Desert in particular the unsavory name of the Waste of Bones.
He pulled himself out of the brush one-handed, testing his wrist. It didn’t want to bend, and when it did, he had to clench his jaw to keep from crying out.
Aneirin looked down at it, undecided. He could try to heal it untrained and risk worse damage if he failed, or he could leave it alone for a more experienced Auld to look at. Healing was one of those things that, if you were not especially talented at it, a wise Auld let someone else do it for him
Then he realized that the other Aulds were dead, and it was up to Aneirin to avenge them.
Aneirin glanced back to where the two men had disappeared on the path, then nervously closed his eyes to find his reservoir. As soon as he was standing on the silvery shores of his very inner energy source, he crouched and dipped his hand into it all the way to the forearm.
Immediately, his arm began to tingle.
This, Aneirin knew, was where students went horribly wrong with just a single thought. With veoh infused into his own body, it only took a single stray thought to change it irrevocably.
Mend, Aneirin thought, as clearly and with as much focus as possible.
Immediately, the brilliant silver energy of his reservoir began to flow towards him, soaking into his arm, draining his inner pond as the tendons started to slip back into place. He kept his fingers beneath the water level, ensuring the connection wasn’t interrupted.
Become as you were before, he willed. Become whole and healthy.
He’d never spent any time working veoh into wounds and his first choice would have been to go to Icel or Rees to heal him, but Icel and Rees were dead and Aneirin was the only one who could ensure the dead were given peace.
Aneirin would see vengeance for his loved ones. If he had to go into the Spyre with a sword and run five feet of steel through every single Vethyle heart, he would do it. The image of a blade in his hand was like a balm to his soul, knowing that justice would someday be dealt.
Then Aneirin felt the veoh grow cold as the bones in his wrist started solidifying into something else, his fingers hardening, taking on the edges of razors.
“Balls!” he cursed, realizing he had let his concentration slip, and in doing so, his stray thought had begun to influence the Form of his forearm. He yanked his hand from his reservoir, but it was already too late. A twisted thing remained, half metal, half flesh, totally unbendable.
I just destroyed my own hand, Aneirin thought. What sort of fool worked his first attempts at healing on himself? Better a wounded chicken or a horse or a dog… Unable to believe he’d been that stupid, Aneirin found himself in a state of shock as he stared down at it. He had curled the fingers into a semi-fist as he worked with the veoh, and now they remained that way forever, laced with metal, the tips of his fingers extruding the edge of a blade—the sword he had been thinking of driving through Vethyle hearts.
Rees could have fixed it. Or maybe Rhydderch Vethyle—the man had a talent for working veoh that seemed to carry well beyond his rank of seven-four—but Rees was dead and the day Aneirin asked something of a Vethyle would be the day he slit his own throat.
Aneirin considered trying to repair the damage himself, but knew that in his current state, with his family dead, himself lost in an unknown part of an unknown country, faced with the fact that he had just maimed himself, Aneirin really couldn’t be sure he would do anything but make it worse.
Cursing his own incompetence, Aneirin yanked his cloak from his shoulders and was in the process of wrapping it around his twisted, unusable left hand when he heard a twig snap nearby. He paused and looked up...