Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(100)

“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.