The Emperor's blades

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.

He swung the torch behind him in a broad, blazing arc. He hadn’t seen any slarn, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. He had no idea how the creatures hunted. Were they like wolves, harrying their prey until it dropped? Or like the great cats of the Ancaz Mountains, silent, invisible, waiting for their moment before the final strike? He held the light high above him and, with his free hand, loosed a blade from its sheath across his back. As Gwenna said, everything dies if you hit it hard enough.

The next four nests were all the same: empty, or littered with shards of pale white shell. At each one, Valyn felt his hopes flare up only to be doused by a wave of bitter disappointment, thick with the inky taste of fear. The burn from the poison had crept into his shoulder blade, and he tried to calculate what that meant. Shaleel had said a day for the toxin to migrate from the wound in his forearm to his heart. Assuming it moved at a steady pace, that meant he’d been beneath the earth around three quarters of a day. It seemed like no more than an hour. It felt like years.

The slarn found him after the fifth nest. He was so busy checking that they almost caught him unaware, three of them, swarming out of the darkness, sinuous and silent. Valyn glimpsed them out of the corner of his eye and spun, his body dropping instinctively into a low slicing attack that caught the leading creature across the head. The thing let out a piercing shriek, twisting in on itself like a salted slug, gnashing blindly at the air with those awful teeth and recoiling into the shadow. The other two drew back, cocked their heads to the side, and seemed to hesitate. Then they drifted apart, creeping around to come at him from two different directions at once.

Valyn didn’t know a ’Kent-kissing thing about slarn, but he’d spent enough hours in the ring to dislike what was happening. They looked like brutal, mindless beasts, but they were working in concert, coordinating their angles of attack. He leveled the torch at one and his short blade at the other. He knew how to handle two assailants, but he didn’t have to like it. With small, careful steps, he backed toward the wall of the low cavern. As long as he could keep them both in-

The left-hand slarn came at him in a flash of jaws and raking talons, and the second followed a quarter heartbeat after, the motion of both almost too fast to follow. With a roar, Valyn abandoned himself to his years of training, gave up all effort at thought or planning, and let his body move through the forms hammered into it over a thousand dusty hours in the ring. He dived to the right, rolled beneath the leaping creature while slashing upward blindly. The blade hacked deep into the flesh of the belly, lodged there, and twisted free of his grip. He let it go and doubled his grip on the torch as he regained his feet, holding it out in front of him like a broadblade.

The wounded slarn was shrieking a terrible, keening cry, dragging itself in aimless circles while loops of intestine sagged from the long, deep wound. The other creature turned on it and, with a savage snap of its jaws, bit straight through the neck, cutting off the movement and the sound at once. It shook the blood and venom free of its jaws with a flick of its head, then turned that awful eyeless face back to Valyn.

“So you’re the smart one,” he said quietly. “You’re the survivor.”

The slarn’s head weaved to the right on its unnaturally long neck, then back to the left, serpentine and predatory all at once. A human foe would have broken and run after finding two of its companions cut down in as many minutes, but it was hard to imagine anything less human than the slarn. Its tongue flicked out, tasting the air, and it shifted slowly to its left. It was waiting for something, choosing its moment. Valyn didn’t care for that one bit.

“You’re not the only one knows how to attack,” he spat, and hurled his torch directly at the beast’s head. He had no idea how a blind creature could even see the thing coming, let alone react so fast, but it snapped the wood out of the air with a smooth movement, and tossed it to the side. He hadn’t expected that, but then, the Kettral held a somewhat bleak notion of expectations. Planning for what you want, the Flea used to say, is a good way to end up dead. In the space of time it took the slarn to fling aside the torch, Valyn had charged forward and snatched his fallen sword from the belly of the felled beast. As the remaining creature turned to face him, he was already driving the bright blade down in a hard Manjari thrust, straight through the skull, pinning the jaw shut and slamming the whole head to the rock.

The slarn spasmed for a few heartbeats, so powerfully that Valyn thought it was still alive, then went abruptly slack. With a shudder of exhaustion, he wrenched his blade from the thing’s skull, then wiped it carefully across the milky white carcass. As always after a fight, the blood pounded in his ears and his lungs felt as though someone had scoured them with sand. He had no idea how long the skirmish had lasted, but his chest was aching with the toxin now, and even once he picked up the torch, the cavern seemed dim. He had won the battle, he realized grimly, but he was losing the Trial. It didn’t matter how many slarn he killed if he failed to find their eggs. How much time left? An hour? Maybe two? Torch high above him, sword held out in front, he forged deeper into the tunnels.

The full hunting pack caught up with him in a huge chamber bordered by a deep, swift river. He’d been searching behind a sharp tooth of rock and turned to find them flowing into the space, three, five, a full dozen at least, jaws hanging open, pale, eyeless faces bright in the shadow. Valyn’s stomach turned to lead even as he raised his blade. Three had been hard enough, but twelve … even at his best, it was too many, and he was far from at his best. His hand had begun to tremble and his legs felt too weak to keep him up. He’d be lucky to fight one of the ’Kent-kissing things in this condition.

With uneven steps, he backed toward the dark, rushing water. There was nowhere to make a stand, nowhere to run. He risked a glance over his shoulder. The stream was flowing fast and hard, skirting the cavern for a hundred paces before plunging into a dark maw of stone. There was nothing that way but darkness and death, but the slarn were filling the room. When faced with certain annihilation, Hendran wrote, delay. To the doomed man, any future is a friend.

“All right, Hull,” Valyn said, sliding his blade back into his sheath and readying his grip on the torch. “Let’s make a real Trial out of it.” He filled his lungs with air and leapt for the river.

The current caught him in strong, icy fingers and dragged him under, snuffing the light, plunging him into watery blackness. He struggled to right himself, then realized it didn’t matter, and brought the doused torch up with two hands to protect his face. The river was even stronger than it had appeared. It roared in his ears, dragged him along over smoothed stone, threatened to dash him against hidden rocks, all the while plunging him deeper, deeper into the belly of the earth.

Stars began to fill his vision, light where there should be no light. Valyn realized with a strange sort of quiescence that he had chosen wrong, had embraced a cold, dark death miles from anyone he knew. The thought should have both angered and terrified him, but the water on his skin cooled the burning in his lungs, and the darkness wrapped itself around him almost gently. He wanted to see Ha Lin one last time, to tell her he was sorry, to tell her just how much her constant presence had buttressed and steadied him, but she had taken a different passage. I should have taken a different passage, too, he thought idly to himself.

Just as his breath was about to give out, the ceiling of the tunnel relented. He burst to the surface, heaving in deep, labored lungfuls of air. The shock of life hit him like a slap, and after a mindless moment when all he could do was thrash and gulp in the sweet damp air, he fell back into an exhausted float, staring up into darkness. He could see no more here than he had on the other side of the underwater passage, but the current had vanished, and he realized as he groped for the walls on either side that he was in a channel no longer. He took several strokes, then several more, then struck his knee against an underwater shelf. With the weight of his waterlogged blacks pulling him down, back toward the death he had so recently escaped, he pulled himself from the pool and onto a wide stone ledge.

As soon as he regained his breath, he realized something was wrong. He could feel it-the poison-raking at his heart, talons of thin, invisible fire.

“No,” he groaned, rolling onto his side, clutching his torch with trembling hands. “Not yet.”

It took him a dozen tries to light it. His arms felt like lead weights, his lungs wheezed against his chest, and he couldn’t concentrate on the simple striking action of flint against steel. The torch was pitch-soaked, and the flint would make a spark, even wet, but he couldn’t seem to focus on the task.

“Come on, Hull,” he begged as the torch finally caught fire, tossing its flickering light onto dull stone and glinting quartz. “Just a few minutes more.”

With a staggering effort he dragged himself to his knees, panting desperately, then to his feet. The cavern was huge, twice again the size of anything he’d yet encountered, as high as the Temple of Light, back in Annur. Great teeth of stone thrust up from the floor, hung from the ceiling, some joining into huge pillars wider than his arms could span. The place felt like the gullet of some massive beast, heavy, not just with the unfathomable weight of stone, but with a cold, brooding malice.

Valyn stared blearily about him, took a few steps toward a low ledge, stumbled, then forced himself up again. There was something there, something … a nest! It was larger than the rest, much larger, but the combination of stone and calcified slime was the same as everywhere else. Stomach heaving, hands shaking, mind reeling, he staggered forward, tossed the torch onto the bare stone, and dropped to his knees before it. Please, Hull, he thought, with the part of him that could still think, let it not be too late.

He groped blindly into the nest, felt his hands close around an egg, a huge egg, and lifted it out. He stared. Unlike the other slarn spawn, it was black, black as pitch, and almost the size of his head.

“What?” he mumbled, clutching it before him as a starving man might hold a rotten shank of meat. “It’s not white.…”

Was it slarn? The walls of the cavern seemed to be flexing around him. A low grating rasped at his ears. From what seemed like another world, another life in which he had lived under the sun, and his body had obeyed, a life in which other people had cared for him, had tried to help him, the Flea’s voice filled his head: When you’ve only got one choice, you can bitch and moan, or you can draw your blade and start swinging.

“All right, Hull,” Valyn snarled, fumbling his belt knife free of its sheath and plunging it into the shell. The albumen of the egg spurted forth, thick as tar between his fingers and stinking of stone and bile. “I guess it’s time for a drink now, just you and me.”

He raised the shell in both hands above his head like a chalice, then brought it to his lips and tilted it back, his gorge rising even as he gulped down the slick, stinking liquid, gulped it and swallowed, tilting the egg until the black ooze ran down his chin, down the front of his shirt, down his throat, heavy as oil as it filled his stomach. He paused, gasping, savagely wrestled down the urge to vomit, to pour his guts out on the floor, then forced the shell to his lips once more, sobbing mindlessly as he did, slurping and struggling, the slime thick as marrow in his throat.

When there was no more to be had, he collapsed backward, his head against the nest, heart struggling to leap from his chest, skin ablaze, mind a bright spike of pain. Moaning filled his ears, a terrible, wounded sound. He tried to shut it out before he realized that it was coming from his own lips. He curled into a ball, his knees to his chest, while his stomach rolled and seized. This was death, he realized, this was what death felt like, and he squeezed his eyes closed and wished it would hurry up.

After a time-he had no idea how long-he realized the moaning had stopped. His stomach still kicked, but he could straighten out, could sit up. He eased himself back against the wall, then raised a hand, stained splotchy black with the remnants of the egg. He had dropped his torch. It lay on the cold stone a few feet away, still burning. He tried to remember what Shaleel said before she sent them down into the Hole, tried to guess how long he had stumbled in darkness before finding the egg. Pain still gouged at his forearm, but it was the bright pain of an honest wound, not the sick, gnawing burning from before. He took a tentative breath, then a deeper one. His heart seemed to have calmed itself. Once again he considered his black and sticky hand. The feeble torchlight danced across his outstretched arm and fingers, flickering and enigmatic. The light moved, but the hand was steady. For what seemed like the first time in his life, he smiled.

“Hull,” he said, saluting the shadows of the hall. “If you’re listening-next round’s on me.”

And then, as though the darkness itself had heard him, the cavern roared.

Valyn stumbled to his feet, snatched up the rapidly dwindling torch, and wrenched a short blade from its sheath. Slarn didn’t make that sort of sound, at least not the slarn he’d encountered. Nothing made that sort of sound. The bellow came again, a hideous roar of rage and hunger that echoed off the hard stone walls, filling Valyn’s brain, reverberating inside his skull. He forced his legs into motion, lurched toward the nearest passageway a dozen paces distant. Again the roar. Closer this time. Valyn risked a glance over his shoulder and glimpsed, in the distant recess of the cavern, in the fickle penumbra of the torch, a monster carved straight from the bloody dark of nightmare: scales, talons, teeth, all black as smoke steel, a dozen unnatural joints flexing in the shadow. And the size of it … It made the slarn he’d fought in the tunnels above look like puppies.

The king, he realized, dread lurching in his stomach. The underground river had dragged him to the lair of the ’Kent-kissing king. Without another thought, he turned toward the tunnel, praying desperately it was too small for the monster to follow, and fled blindly into the labyrinth.

* * *

By the time the torch guttered, flickered, then failed, Valyn knew he was getting close to the surface. He’d been climbing for what seemed like hours, always following the upward path whenever there was a choice. Also there was a tang to the air, the faintest hint of sea salt. He hadn’t noticed it when he descended, but now, as he approached the sun, and sky, and freedom, he flicked out his tongue, tasting it.

Without the torch, the blackness swallowed him once more, just as he had been dreading. To his surprise, however, the absolute pitch no longer seemed quite so terrifying. Rather than an infinite void in which he was destined to wander forever, it felt more like a blanket, still, and soft, and familiar. He paused, trying to get his bearings, and realized he could feel faint hints of movement in the still air, echoes of hints of breezes, the memory of a dream of wind, tickling the hairs on his neck and arms. As he worked his way down the passage, he found that he could anticipate the side corridors, could almost see them in his mind, invisible tunnels of draft snaking away into the blankness.

“Stay down here long enough,” he muttered to himself, “and you might come to like the place.”

As he climbed, the scent of salt grew stronger in his nose. He thought he could even hear the reverberating crash of waves at points, although that was impossible. Holy Hull, he realized, a smile creasing his face, you made it. You’re Kettral now. Of course, he’d have to avoid the other slarn. Avoid them or kill them. The prospect seemed less daunting, however, now that he had purged his veins of the throbbing toxin, now that he was moving steadily toward the surface of the Hole, rather than deeper into the blackness. Hadn’t he already killed three of the bastards? And half-crazed while I was about it.

A slight flicker in the draft brought him up short. There was something toppled across the tunnel, he realized, something impeding the natural flow of air. He knelt carefully and reached out. So close to the end, so close to victory, he didn’t want to break his arm crashing over a pile of rubble. He imagined Lin grinning at him, and Laith, and Gent. Shit, after what he’d been through, he’d even be happy to see Gwenna. Surely they’d made it through as well. Surely they’d found a way to survive.

His fingers came up against something soft, something giving. Cloth, he realized, running his hand along it. Then, with growing unease: A body.

In a few moments he’d found the neck and fitted his fingers to the artery. The skin was cold and clammy. No pulse. Fear mounting inside him, Valyn found the mouth, put his cheek right to the lips and waited, his heart thudding. He could feel the main draft from the sea on his skin, could feel the faint crosscurrent from a fork in the passage a dozen paces ahead, but from the lips, nothing.

“Shit,” he swore, scrambling over the body, trying to get into a position where he could press an ear to the heart. “’Shael take it!”

But Ananshael had been there already, he realized with a wash of cold sorrow. While he’d been struggling for his life in the catacombs below, the Lord of Bones had come and carried off the soul of one of the other cadets, here, so close to the surface. It seemed cruel beyond cruel, but then, neither Ananshael nor Hull promised kindness, not even to their adherents.

With tender, trembling hands, he felt along the body, trying to coax a name from the sprawl of limbs, from the texture of the skin. The blacks were the same, of course, everyone wore blacks, but the body beneath the fabric was a woman’s. Annick? Gwenna? The cloth was rent in dozens of places and sodden with blood. She had died fighting, whoever she was. She had died fighting hard. He felt for the head. Gwenna’s hair was curly, but the hair of the corpse was straight, fine. Black hair, he realized, though the darkness was absolute as ever. He had seen it a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, had seen it wet with salt water, had seen it tossed by the wind as they flew along strapped to a bird’s talons.

He was crying, sobbing in great, silent gulps. He moved his fingers to her face, traced the soft curve of her cheek.

“Hull have mercy,” he choked, pulling her to him, but Hull had no mercy. The gods of mercy would have offered meager trials.

“I’m sorry,” he moaned, gathering her up in his arms. “I’m sorry, Lin. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

They told him later that when he emerged from the Hole, the first thing people noticed was Ha Lin’s body, limp and lifeless, sliced and bleeding, draped in his trembling arms. He was crying, they said, sobbing uncontrollably, his entire body shuddering with the tears. But the Kettral had seen death before; they had seen sorrow. It was his eyes that everyone remembered, eyes that had always been the dark brown of charred wood, but that somehow-fathoms beneath the earth and the ocean, buried in the Owl King’s own temple-had burned past char, past ash, past the blackest hue of pitch or tar until they were simple holes into darkness, perfect circles bored into the night itself.