Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(102)

“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 f*cking good part?