Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(104)

“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.