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.
“You will show respect,” he said quietly, but not so quietly that the others failed to hear, “or you will spend your life envying Carl.”
Yurl jerked his arm away. The Flea, for his part, just watched him the way a weary peasant might watch his own hearth, face flat and unreadable. He didn’t look like much, didn’t look like any iron-cold killer of men, but on the Islands, where everyone was hard as nails and awe was about as common as ineptitude, all the soldiers, even veterans, seemed to stand in something like awe of the Flea. After a tense moment Yurl shut his mouth, turned on his heel, and stepped back.
Shaleel watched the scene unfold with a small frown on her face, then nodded. “I was just about to ask Carl how old he is.” She turned back to the former cadet. “How old are you, Carl?”
“Thir-thir-thirty-eight,” the man managed, nodding convulsively as he spoke.
Valyn considered the man more closely. Carl was a human husk, all tendon and peeling skin. Wrinkles creased his face, and his thin gray hair barely covered his scalp. He looked closer to eighty than forty.
“Thirty-eight years old,” Shaleel repeated, her voice clear and hard where the man’s had quavered. “At thirty-eight, any Kettral still on Qarsh could run the perimeter of the island a half dozen times and then spend the night swimming it. Most of your trainers are older than thirty-eight. Carl, however, has trouble walking up a flight of stairs. We take care of him, of course. He has a beautiful house on Arin, overlooking the bay, and a slave to look after him, day and night. What he doesn’t have is his health. That was taken from him years ago, and that’s why he’s here today. We don’t ask him to come here to warn you; he asks us.” She returned her attention to Carl. “Go ahead. Tell the cadets what happened to you.”
The man gaped at the small crowd as though baffled, his jaw working futilely, a small string of spittle oozing from the side of his mouth. Valyn wondered if he had even heard Shaleel, but then he turned and lifted a wavering hand, pointing one crooked finger directly through the bars of the cage.
“S-s-slarn hap-hap-happened.”
A chill silence descended over the group.
“So we’re going down into the cave,” Annick said finally. “We have to fight these things. If they bite us, we end up like him.”
“Just a matter of not getting bitten,” Yurl said, brushing his blond hair back from his eyes ostentatiously. “Shouldn’t be too tough for anyone competent.”
Shaleel chuckled mirthlessly. “Oh, they’re going to bite you,” she replied. “That’s why Fane and the Flea went to all the trouble to haul these two out of Hull’s Hole. We make sure they bite you. You’re poisoned before you even go into the Hole. It’s why you go into the Hole.”
For a long while the cadets just stared.
“An antidote,” Valyn said at last. There must be something in the caves that would serve as an antidote to the poison.
Shaleel nodded. “The slarn wives have nests scattered all through the caves. In some of those nests are eggs, milk-white things about the size of my fist. Whatever’s in the egg guards the hatchlings against the toxins of their mothers. You find an egg, eat it, and get out—you’re all cured; you’re Kettral.”
“And if not,” Laith concluded, jerking a finger at the gray-haired wreck of a man, “we’re Carl.”
“That’s right. Some of you will end up on Arin either way. It’s your choice whether you go now, get right back on that ship, and leave with your mind and body intact, or if you go down there, into the Hole, and maybe come out shattered.”
She paused and stared out over the group. A few cadets shuffled their feet. Balendin opened his mouth, as though to ask a question, then shook his head and shut it once more. Annick was all business, stringing her bow, although what use that would be in the winding passages of the cavern Valyn had no idea. Talal seemed to be praying quietly. No one stepped forward. Evidently the rigors of the previous week had weeded out all those whose determination fell short of the necessary mark.
Shaleel nodded. “You will have about a day once you’ve been bitten before the damage becomes incurable. Find an egg in that time and find your way back to the surface. There should be enough for all of you, but some will be easier to find than others. You may work in pairs, teams, or alone. You may even work against each other, although given the nature of the Hole, I don’t recommend it. Fane will give each of you a torch. It will provide about ten hours of light.”
“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.”