*
Valyn had never set foot on Irsk; the island was off-limits to cadets. He’d seen it from ships, however, and from the air during flight training, barrel drops, and the like. Unlike the other islands in the chain, all of which could boast some vegetation and fresh running water, Irsk was a grim place, all black limestone cliffs and jagged coast, rising abruptly from the water like a fist of hard stone. It was barely half a mile across, too small to support any life aside from the gulls and terns that nested all over the crags. Valyn had never realized that the island played any role in the Trial, and once he’d stepped out of the smallboat and onto a rocky promontory that served as a natural wharf, he looked around, a nagging splinter of worry gouging at him as he followed the others inland.
A narrow path threaded through the jutting rock, pressing ever higher until it spilled into a rough bowl, maybe thirty paces across, at what Valyn took to be the island’s center. Cliffs rose in a circle around them, steep as the walls of an amphitheater. Above them, the gulls circled, shrieking in anger at having been driven from their nests. Valyn, however, like the rest of the cadets, had eyes only for the stout steel cage in the center of the bowl, its iron footings sunk into the rock itself. Beside it stood an old man, hair thin and gray, body trembling with fatigue or exertion. Or fear. There was plenty for him to be frightened of. The cage, not four feet from where he stood, contained two creatures that Valyn could only describe as monsters.
“These are slarn,” Daveen Shaleel began, stepping forward once everyone had assembled and gesturing to the beasts inside the cage. “Both maidens. About six years old and a third their mature weight.”
Valyn stared. So did everyone else.
Referring to the creatures as maidens seemed like some sort of grotesque joke. They looked more like nightmares, five feet of sinuous, reptilian flesh and scale ending in a mouth filled with razor teeth. Their skin glistened the sickening, translucent white of shattered eggs or rotted fish bellies, a web of blue and purple veins snaking beneath the surface. He was reminded of the flayed corpses he had studied on the Islands years before, only these creatures were very much alive, prowling around the small cage on short, powerful legs tipped with savage-looking claws.
“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.