Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (33 page)

Don’t even think about it,
he muttered to himself, straining to lug yet another sand-filled barrel out of the sea. Whatever the Flea claimed, failure meant Arin, Arin meant never leaving the Islands, and that meant leaving Kaden and Adare vulnerable, Amie and Ha Lin unavenged.
Don’t even
dream
about it.

On the fifth day, he found himself next to Gwenna, both of them harnessed like oxen to a large cart filled with small boulders. Jakob Rallen, the Master of Cadets, sat perched atop the pile, a whip in his right hand.

“Onward, mules!” he shouted in that shrill voice of his, cracking the whip close enough to Valyn’s ear that it drew blood. “Onward.”

Gwenna glanced over. Half her face had purpled with a vicious bruise, but there was no surrender in those green eyes. “On three?” she gasped, leaning forward to brace herself against the halter.

“What if we just strangled him with the whip and called it a day?” Valyn asked, forcing his weight against the collar, driving with his legs until the whole wagon creaked reluctantly into motion. The whip came down again, this time nicking Gwenna’s cheek.

“Strangling’s not my style,” she replied. She was a head shorter than Valyn, but she was strong, and with the two of them hauling the cart, it slowly gained speed, jolting over the rocky ground.

“How ’bout a flickwick in his bed?” Valyn gasped, heaving air into his ragged lungs as he strained against the traces.

“Too quick. Plus, a slob like him—we’d be scraping gobbets of fat off the ceiling.”

Valyn grinned in spite of the pain. “What if we toss him out of the cart and drag the thing over him?”

“I’ll follow your lead, oh my prince,” Gwenna replied before another crack of the whip silenced both of them.

He caught occasional glimpses of Ha Lin. On the third day, he managed to watch her briefly as she swam the harbor, dragging a barge behind her, her face a rictus of determination. He wanted to call out, to offer some encouragement, but it was all he could do to stand, and she was clearly past hearing anything but the salt waves sloshing in her ears. He tried to linger, to wait for her to reach the breakwater, but one of the trainers drove a hard fist into his kidney and sent him stumbling off down the rocks for yet another torturous circuit of the coast.

Each evening, the grinding midday sun bled into the horizon, and Valyn struggled on in darkness, shivering and chattering in the waves, his mind worn to a dull nub, his body depleted past pain, past suffering, into dead, leaden numbness.

At some point on what he thought was the sixth day, he found himself side by side in the surf with Laith, the two of them wrestling a swamped smallboat up out of the waves.

“Pull,” Valyn urged him, straining at the ropes himself until he thought his tendons would tear.
“Pull!”

“If you tell me to pull one more time,” Laith responded breathlessly, hauling for all he was worth, “I am going to put down these ropes and bash the nose into your royal face.”

Valyn had no idea if it was a joke or not. The other cadet certainly sounded serious, but after six days of dead rat and endless agony, he didn’t care. “Pull!” he shouted again, bursting into helpless laughter. Some dim, lost part of him recognized the insanity in the sound, but it was powerless to stop it.
“Pull, you fucker!”
he screamed.

Laith bellowed right back at him, words as crazed and desperate as his own, and together they dragged that boat up onto the shingle only to be told to dump it, right it, and then swim it out to the ship swinging at anchor a mile offshore.

Valyn was convinced during that swim that he was going to die. His heart had never hammered so hard inside his chest. He felt like every breath was bringing up blood and lung, and when he spat into the waves, he saw pink flecking the foam. It was possible, he knew, for the body to simply quit. Cadets had died of burst hearts before, their bodies battered, then broken under the physical strain.
Fine,
he panted to himself, towing the recalcitrant boat through the waves toward that ship that never seemed to grow any closer.
This is a fine place to die.

When he heaved himself onto the deck at last, the Flea and Adaman Fane were there, scowling and shouting something Valyn couldn’t understand. What were the words? He peered around blearily for something to haul, to hit, to hurt, but there was nothing, just the wide expanse of scrubbed deck. As he stared in stupefaction, the words started to penetrate, like water dripping through a poorly thatched roof.

“… you hear me, you idiot?” Fane was shouting, waving a thick finger at him from a few feet away. “You’re done, at least for now. I suggest you hit the deck and get a few hours’ sleep.”

Valyn stared, his jaw slack. Then his legs collapsed beneath him and he fell into stunned, desperate darkness.

23

Three hours wasn’t much sleep, not even by Kettral standards, but after seven unrelenting days and nights, each more brutal than the one before, Valyn fell to the hard deck of the ship that would take them to Irsk, the most remote of the Qirin chain, as if the planks were a feather mattress, slept a blank sleep with no dreams, and woke only when an ungentle boot gouged into his ribs. He rolled to his feet, baffled and disoriented, but groping for his belt knife all the same, trying desperately to remember where he was, to find his footing on the rolling deck, to ready himself for a continuation of the suffering that had become his life.

“You’ve got an hour before we make land.” It was Chent Rall, a short veteran built like a bulldog with a personality to match. “I suggest you use it to get below and stuff down some chow.”

“Chow?” Valyn repeated dumbly, trying to shake the fog from his head. All around him, the other trainers were rousting their charges from where they had dropped like dead men to the deck. The ship was rolling softly with the swells, her masts creaking as the boat heeled to port, running before a decent southerly wind.

“Yeah, chow,” Rall repeated. “The stuff you put in your mouth. The good news is: you’re done eating rat. The bad news is, after this you might be done eating, period. Not a lot to munch on down in the Hole.”

Valyn didn’t know what the man was talking about, but there was a gravity to that last word, a menace.

“What’s the hole?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. You want to eat, or you want to chat?”

Valyn’s stomach rumbled angrily and he nodded. He had no idea what lay ahead, but, as Hendran wrote,
A choice between tactics and food is no choice at all. A soldier cannot live on tactics. He cannot improvise food.

The vessel’s tiny galley was a madness of clutching hands, raised voices, and the stench of unwashed bodies as twenty-one starving cadets jostled one another to shove the steaming food into their mouths. It wasn’t much—bean stew, a couple trenchers of diced meat—but it was warm and, more important, it wasn’t rat. Along with everyone else, Valyn shoveled up great handfuls and stuffed it into his mouth, wary that this apparent kindness, like so many others during the week, would prove a trap.

Someone touched his shoulder and he spun around, raising his fists, to find himself looking into Ha Lin’s eyes. She had always been slender, but the exertions of the past days had rendered her positively skeletal. One of her eyes had swollen shut, and the skin surrounding it faded from purple to a jaundiced yellow. Someone or something had opened a new gash across her forehead, one deep enough to leave a nasty scar.

“Eira’s mercy, Lin,” he gasped, choking on the water he had been gulping down.

She grimaced. “Save it. We’re all beaten up.”

That was true enough. Just in the course of grubbing his meager share of food, Valyn had seen broken fingers, busted noses, and newly missing teeth. His own third rib stabbed into him at every breath, and he had a suspicion he’d snapped it, but no idea when, or how. He’d always thought the veterans acquired their scars flying actual missions, but he was starting to wonder if they took the worst of their beatings during the Trial.

“How was it?” he asked, struggling to find the right words. “The last week, I mean.”

“Terrible,” she responded flatly, “just the way they planned it.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m here, aren’t I? You don’t see me on a ship to Arin.” There was something of the old steel back in her voice.

“Of course not. But you look—” He put a hand on her arm. It was thin as a stick. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine.”

“Listen…,” he began, leaning closer, trying to achieve some kind of privacy in the hopeless tangle of bodies and voices.

“Not now, Valyn. I didn’t come over here to be fussed over and mothered. I wanted to tell you to watch yourself in whatever’s coming next. Watch Yurl.”

“I’ll do more than watch him, if I have the chance.” The words came out sounding like bluster, but Valyn meant every one of them. Training was dangerous by its very nature, and the Trial even more so. Accidents could happen, could be
made
to happen.

Lin stared at him, a smile haunting her lips, then gone. “That cuts both ways,” she hissed. “He’ll be out there looking for you, too, and he’s got a lot fewer scruples.” She lowered her voice and glanced back over her shoulder before continuing. “There’s something I need to tell you. Back on the bluffs, when they beat the living shit out of me, I got in a few shots of my own. If you
do
come up against Yurl, his left ankle—” She shook her head, suddenly hesitant. “I can’t be sure—he seemed all right this past week—but I think I felt something pull, one of the tendons. You remember when Gent busted his ankle in the arena four years back? No one noticed. He could run and fight, but then in that swamp extract, he twisted it the wrong way and … snap.”

Valyn nodded. Gent had been furious with the injury, refusing for months to give it the requisite rest, insisting to everyone that it was “fucking fine.”

“Yurl might have some weakness there,” Lin continued, grimacing with uncertainty. “I don’t know. Diminished lateral motion, maybe. Maybe weakness at certain angles … something you could work with, anyway, if you find yourself in a tight spot.”

Valyn considered his friend. As Hendran wrote in his chapter on morale,
There’s a big gap between beaten, and broken.
Yurl and Balendin had taken something from Ha Lin up on the West Bluffs—her pride, her confidence—but the fight was still there. It would take a lot more to wash away her grit.

“He’s not going to get away with it, Lin,” Valyn said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“No,” she agreed, squeezing his arm, smile widening. “He isn’t.” Then, before he could manage another word, she turned back, and he lost her in the press of bodies.

*   *   *

Valyn had never set foot on Irsk; the island was off-limits to cadets. He’d seen it from ships, however, and from the air during flight training, barrel drops, and the like. Unlike the other islands in the chain, all of which could boast some vegetation and fresh running water, Irsk was a grim place, all black limestone cliffs and jagged coast, rising abruptly from the water like a fist of hard stone. It was barely half a mile across, too small to support any life aside from the gulls and terns that nested all over the crags. Valyn had never realized that the island played any role in the Trial, and once he’d stepped out of the smallboat and onto a rocky promontory that served as a natural wharf, he looked around, a nagging splinter of worry gouging at him as he followed the others inland.

A narrow path threaded through the jutting rock, pressing ever higher until it spilled into a rough bowl, maybe thirty paces across, at what Valyn took to be the island’s center. Cliffs rose in a circle around them, steep as the walls of an amphitheater. Above them, the gulls circled, shrieking in anger at having been driven from their nests. Valyn, however, like the rest of the cadets, had eyes only for the stout steel cage in the center of the bowl, its iron footings sunk into the rock itself. Beside it stood an old man, hair thin and gray, body trembling with fatigue or exertion. Or fear. There was plenty for him to be frightened of. The cage, not four feet from where he stood, contained two creatures that Valyn could only describe as monsters.

“These are slarn,” Daveen Shaleel began, stepping forward once everyone had assembled and gesturing to the beasts inside the cage. “Both maidens. About six years old and a third their mature weight.”

Valyn stared. So did everyone else.

Referring to the creatures as
maidens
seemed like some sort of grotesque joke. They looked more like nightmares, five feet of sinuous, reptilian flesh and scale ending in a mouth filled with razor teeth. Their skin glistened the sickening, translucent white of shattered eggs or rotted fish bellies, a web of blue and purple veins snaking beneath the surface. He was reminded of the flayed corpses he had studied on the Islands years before, only these creatures were very much alive, prowling around the small cage on short, powerful legs tipped with savage-looking claws.

“I must have misheard you,” Laith began. He was standing a few feet from Valyn and tilted an ear toward Shaleel as though to catch her words more carefully. “I thought you said these were only the kids.”

“They are,” the woman replied. “Much easier to handle than the full wives and concubines.”

“They look about as easy to handle,” Laith said, eyeing the cage with a dismayed frown, “as a pile of greased eel shit on a marble floor.”

“They’ll die like anything else,” Gwenna said, hefting a short blade, “just as long as you hit ’em hard enough.”

“Maidens,” Annick said flatly, fingering her bow as she spoke. “Concubines. Wives. What about the males?”

Shaleel shook her head. “There are no males. Or, to be more precise, there’s only one. Just as there are thousands of soldier ants to a single queen, there are thousands of wives, maidens, and concubines to a single slarn king.”

“Makes me rethink my positive opinion of harems,” Laith said, eyeing the circling creatures with a mixture of interest and distaste. “The king must be a big, old ugly bastard to keep this lot in line.”