Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (34 page)

“We don’t know,” Shaleel replied. “We’ve never come across the king.”

“Where are they from?” Valyn asked, glancing around him. The island didn’t look like it could support
one
slarn, let alone thousands.

“Here,” Shaleel said, extending a hand down, toward the earth. “There’s a network of caves beneath Irsk, dozens of miles of caves. The slarn live there. That’s where Hull’s Trial takes place.”

The cadets drew in a collective breath. They’d all seen caves—Kettral training covered just about every type of terrain conceivable. The vast majority of their time, however, had been spent on the ocean, in the air, struggling through the mangroves or laboring around the beaches of Qarsh. The thought of descending into a maze of passageways buried beneath hundreds of thousands of tons of stone and sea, passageways stocked with monsters like the slarn, was more than a little unsettling.

“They don’t have eyes,” Annick said.

Valyn peered closer. The creatures had been turned away from him when he first stepped into the bowl, but now he saw that the sniper was right. At the front of the face, where the eyes should have been, there was only a swath of translucent skin, white as curdled milk.

“No need for eyes in the darkness,” Valyn realized, speaking the words aloud as they came to him.

“I notice that they more than make up for it in teeth,” Laith quipped, baring his own incisors. “Those things are as long as my belt knife.”

“They’re also poison,” Shaleel put in. “Paralytic.”

“Deadly?” Annick asked without taking her eyes from the slarn.

“Not for humans. The slarn mostly hunt smaller game, seafowl that wander into the cave, other subterranean creatures.”

“What’s the recovery time?”

Shaleel shook her head grimly. “Never.

“Carl,” the woman continued, gesturing to the gray-haired man trembling beside the cage, largely forgotten in the flurry of questions about the slarn. “Please step forward.”

The man shuffled a pace forward and stood unsteadily, his limbs racked with spasms.

“Carl once stood where you stand today.”

It was hard to tell if Carl nodded or not, his head was twitching so badly. Yellow, watery eyes rolled from side to side in their sockets. The skin around his mouth hung slack, revealing loose, decaying teeth. His lips turned up in something that might have been a grin, but the expression seemed forced and unwilling, as though his face had rebelled against his mind.

“Do you remember the day, Carl?” Shaleel asked, not ungently.

“I d-d-do…,” the man stammered, biting down on the end of the word as though to keep the unruly syllables clamped inside his mouth.

“Carl was a good cadet. Fast. Strong. Smart. Just like all of you.” She fixed them with that low, steady stare.

“He doesn’t look so smart,” Yurl cracked. He stepped forward, feinting a punch toward the shaking man’s stomach. Carl took an uncertain step back, stumbled, and almost fell.

As Yurl shook his head in disgust, he turned to find himself looking at the Flea, who had slid up silently through the crowd. The trainer was shorter than Yurl by a head and older by at least twenty years, gnarled and pockmarked where the youth was clean-limbed and handsome. None of that seemed to bother him in the slightest. He took Yurl by the elbow with one hand and guided him back toward the assembled cadets.

“You will show respect,” he said quietly, but not so quietly that the others failed to hear, “or you will spend your life envying Carl.”

Yurl jerked his arm away. The Flea, for his part, just watched him the way a weary peasant might watch his own hearth, face flat and unreadable. He didn’t look like much, didn’t look like any iron-cold killer of men, but on the Islands, where everyone was hard as nails and awe was about as common as ineptitude, all the soldiers, even veterans, seemed to stand in something like awe of the Flea. After a tense moment Yurl shut his mouth, turned on his heel, and stepped back.

Shaleel watched the scene unfold with a small frown on her face, then nodded. “I was just about to ask Carl how old he is.” She turned back to the former cadet. “How old are you, Carl?”

“Thir-thir-thirty-eight,” the man managed, nodding convulsively as he spoke.

Valyn considered the man more closely. Carl was a human husk, all tendon and peeling skin. Wrinkles creased his face, and his thin gray hair barely covered his scalp. He looked closer to eighty than forty.

“Thirty-eight years old,” Shaleel repeated, her voice clear and hard where the man’s had quavered. “At thirty-eight, any Kettral still on Qarsh could run the perimeter of the island a half dozen times and then spend the night swimming it. Most of your trainers are older than thirty-eight. Carl, however, has trouble walking up a flight of stairs. We take care of him, of course. He has a beautiful house on Arin, overlooking the bay, and a slave to look after him, day and night. What he doesn’t have is his health. That was taken from him years ago, and that’s why he’s here today. We don’t
ask
him to come here to warn you;
he
asks
us.
” She returned her attention to Carl. “Go ahead. Tell the cadets what happened to you.”

The man gaped at the small crowd as though baffled, his jaw working futilely, a small string of spittle oozing from the side of his mouth. Valyn wondered if he had even heard Shaleel, but then he turned and lifted a wavering hand, pointing one crooked finger directly through the bars of the cage.

“S-s-slarn hap-hap-happened.”

A chill silence descended over the group.

“So we’re going down into the cave,” Annick said finally. “We have to fight these things. If they bite us, we end up like him.”

“Just a matter of not getting bitten,” Yurl said, brushing his blond hair back from his eyes ostentatiously. “Shouldn’t be too tough for anyone competent.”

Shaleel chuckled mirthlessly. “Oh, they’re
going
to bite you,” she replied. “That’s why Fane and the Flea went to all the trouble to haul these two out of Hull’s Hole. We make
sure
they bite you. You’re poisoned before you even go into the Hole. It’s
why
you go into the Hole.”

For a long while the cadets just stared.

“An antidote,” Valyn said at last. There must be something in the caves that would serve as an antidote to the poison.

Shaleel nodded. “The slarn wives have nests scattered all through the caves. In some of those nests are eggs, milk-white things about the size of my fist. Whatever’s in the egg guards the hatchlings against the toxins of their mothers. You find an egg, eat it, and get out—you’re all cured; you’re Kettral.”

“And if not,” Laith concluded, jerking a finger at the gray-haired wreck of a man, “we’re Carl.”

“That’s right. Some of you will end up on Arin either way. It’s your choice whether you go now, get right back on that ship, and leave with your mind and body intact, or if you go down there, into the Hole, and maybe come out shattered.”

She paused and stared out over the group. A few cadets shuffled their feet. Balendin opened his mouth, as though to ask a question, then shook his head and shut it once more. Annick was all business, stringing her bow, although what use that would be in the winding passages of the cavern Valyn had no idea. Talal seemed to be praying quietly. No one stepped forward. Evidently the rigors of the previous week had weeded out all those whose determination fell short of the necessary mark.

Shaleel nodded. “You will have about a day once you’ve been bitten before the damage becomes incurable. Find an egg in that time and find your way back to the surface. There should be enough for all of you, but some will be easier to find than others. You may work in pairs, teams, or alone. You may even work against each other, although given the nature of the Hole, I don’t recommend it. Fane will give each of you a torch. It will provide about ten hours of light.”

“Ten hours is less than a day,” Yurl protested.

“You’re very astute. This is, after all, known as Hull’s Trial.”

The cadets took a moment to digest that piece of information.

“Anything else we ought to know about this ’Kent-kissing cave?” Gwenna demanded at last. She sounded angry rather than scared.

The very corner of Shaleel’s mouth turned up. “It’s dark.”

24

“Dark” was an understatement. Nights were dark. Cellars were dark. The holds of ships were dark. The cave beneath Irsk, on the other hand, plunged everything into an inky blackness so perfect, so absolute, that Valyn could well believe the world itself had vanished and that he crept forward in a vast, unending void with no up or down, no beginning or end. It was no wonder that Hull’s Trial took place here. If the Lord of Darkness himself had chosen a palace, a seat for his empire of blindness, the tortuous twists and turns of the Hole would be entirely appropriate.

In addition to the darkness, there was pain. A hundred scrapes, cuts, and lacerations from the previous week burned with their tiny, invisible fires, while the ache of muscles beaten past exhaustion harried him at each step. There was pain behind his eyes, pain in his ribs when he breathed, and beneath it all, the ache of the slarn wound, a cold acid gnawing at the flesh of his forearm, singeing the skin and eating into the tissue beneath. The trainers had summoned their charges one by one, barking a name, then gesturing curtly toward the cage. It was up to each cadet to thrust his arm through the bars, to hold it there while the slarn gaped wide its jaws, and then to extricate himself while the creature tore at his limb, thrashing its horrible eyeless head back and forth. According to Shaleel, the fire coursing beneath his skin would grow, would spread, would burn brighter and brighter, hotter and hotter, until it reached his heart. By then, it would be too late.

He’d lost track of the labyrinthine twists and turns within the first hour. Aboveground he had a good sense of direction, but then, aboveground there were dozens of miniscule cues: the sun in your eyes, the breeze in your hair, the feel of the turf beneath your feet. Here there was nothing but sharp corners, slick rock, and darkness. He’d considered lighting his torch a hundred times and a hundred times had thrust down the urge. He was lost already and besides, he would need the light to find the eggs. The slarn nested far beneath the surface, and it seemed better to keep pressing deeper without the torch and to use the light later, when he really needed it.

Of course, “later” was a baffling term in the Hole. With no sun or stars, no bell, no ebb of the tides, it was impossible to gauge the passage of time. He tried counting his footsteps, but exhaustion from the previous week had claimed him once more; it was all he could do to get to a hundred without losing track, and he quickly abandoned count of the hundreds. The only progress he could follow was the ache of the slarn bite as it crept up his arm past his elbow, ice and acid swamping his veins. That was appropriate, he realized. After all, the sun didn’t matter anymore. The tide didn’t matter. The human habits and rituals upon which he had structured his life were distant and useless as the invisible stars. What mattered was the pain and the spread of that pain. The ache was the only hourglass.

Maybe this is what they want us to learn,
he thought to himself blearily.
There are two worlds, one of life and one of darkness, and you cannot inhabit both.
It seemed like a good lesson for a Kettral, a lesson that could never be learned on the earth itself, not in a thousand days of swordplay and barrel drops, the kind of lesson that had to be bleached into the bone.

“A world of life and a world of darkness,” Valyn muttered to himself, dimly aware that he was growing delirious. There was nothing to do about it, nothing but press on into the very belly of the earth, down, down, endlessly down, past forks and branches, wading waist deep in subterranean rivers, clambering over ledges and shelves, walking sometimes, sometimes crawling until his knees and his palms were sticky with blood.

He waited for the pain of the slarn wound to creep toward his shoulder, deadening the entire arm, before he paused, struggled briefly with flint and tinder, then lit the torch. The dancing flame seared his eyes and he squeezed them shut tight for a long time, then opened them slowly, peering carefully through slitted lids.

He stood in a narrow passageway, the floor uneven, the ceiling low and jagged. Tunnels snaked away on either side, gaping mouths down into the earth. He had thought the slickness on the walls was water dripping from the roof of the cavern, but he realized with a shudder of revulsion that it seemed to be some sort of slime, white as an uncooked egg, pale and stringy. The darkness had been frightening, but actually looking at the place was like waking to find the walls of a prison built around you while you slept.
Who’d have thought,
he wondered wearily,
that the darkness was the fucking
good
part?

There was no sign of the other cadets. With all the branches and forks, it seemed entirely possible that he could wander in the catacombs for days without seeing another human being. That was fine, as long as he could find the nests.

“You’re not going to do that standing here staring at the wall,” he mumbled to himself, forcing his legs into motion once more.

He almost stepped over the first nest without realizing it. The twisted mess of slime and shattered stone didn’t look like any sort of nest one would find in the outside world, but then, the slarn had nothing to work with but the rock around them. There was some kind of bird, Valyn remembered vaguely, a bird that built nests out of its own spit or vomit. He couldn’t remember which. It seemed appropriate, somehow, for a creature to cough up its own being to protect its young. Appropriate and awful.

He thrust the torch into the nest, trembling with a combination of eagerness, exhaustion, and the poison that scraped at his veins. He thought, at first, that he’d found an egg, and he laughed out loud until he realized he was looking at a shattered shell. Someone had been here before him. That, or the creature had hatched, was even now crawling through the darkness with a thousand others, growing, hunting, prowling the tunnels for food.