The Emperor's blades

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.”

“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.”