Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(103)

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.