When Kaz last saw one of these carvings, he had truly been a puppy, still too young to realize that no one cared about his opinions or ideas. He had told Katri that he thought the rectangles and little figures looked like the city in the Deep they had been forced to leave so recently. She had been young enough to listen, and the two of them had had a brief moment where they let their imaginations run wild together, before Oda overheard and grasped both of them by the scruff of their necks. She had lifted Kaz into the air, ignoring his flailing, but allowed Katri to keep her paws on the ground.
“What did I tell you to do?” she had barked, and it took them a moment to remember.
“Gather anything the Goldfangs won’t notice is missing,” Katri answered for both of them, since Kaz was unable to speak.
Oda gave Kaz a little shake and set him down, releasing Katri as well. Kaz immediately sank down into a crouch, staring up at his mother with his ears flat and tail lowered as submissively as possible.
“That’s right,” Oda hissed, glancing around, “and now you’ve told anyone close enough to overhear. Go join the rest of the puppies, and I don’t want to see or hear you again until the task is complete.”
Katri scampered away, but Oda’s paw came down on Kaz’s tail as he scrambled to follow. Oda crouched down, silver-blue eyes glaring into his darker ones. “The carvings are a lie,” she had growled. “Everything the ancients ever said, everything they left, it’s all a lie.”
She stabbed a taloned finger toward the carving. “That is just a bunch of scratches on the wall, created by fools like your father, who thought that truth could be found in history and art. Ignore it, and you’ll live a happier life.” Reaching out, she roughly tousled the fur on top of his head, the gesture as close to affection as she had ever come. Then, standing, she strode away without another word, leaving him with a bruised tail and a broken heart.
Kaz drew in a sharp breath as the memory burst like a bubble, leaving him staring at a dark stone wall. Something tugged at the fur on his cheek, and it took a moment for him to realize that it was Li, awkwardly petting him, much as he stroked her scales when she was upset.
Turning his head, he looked at her and attempted a smile. “It was a long time ago, and she joined the ancestors-” How long ago? Two weeks? Three? Each tribe kept their own time, since there was no definitive cycle within the mountain. Gaoda, with his ever-present time-keeping device, might be the only one who could truly say how long Oda Broken Knife had been dead, and Kaz would never ask him.
Instead, Kaz focused on the thing in front of him. This carving was sharp, in much better condition than the one that stood by the stairs that had been used by generation upon generation of kobolds. Even if no one had intentionally damaged it, who knew how many paws had stumbled as they walked up or down the too-tall steps, how many hands reached out to catch themselves on the closest surface? The tops of the buildings had been rounded, figures chipped, and the central hollow filthy with the debris of years that could well add up to centuries.
Now, Kaz leaned forward, squinting as he tried to see the details that age and use had destroyed in the other carving. He reached out as if to touch a single small, hunched figure, wondering if its posture was intentional, or the result of some long-forgotten slip of the artist’s chisel. But no, many of the others looked the same. In fact, all of the ones on that central level looked as if they were bent over, their hands too large, and their heads too round.
His finger hovered, loathe to touch, to damage something so perfectly preserved, but lingering over three distinctly different sorts of figures. The ones with the rounded posture were the easiest to pick out. They had neither ears nor tails, and their legs were angled the wrong way. He might almost have thought they were humans, except that their noses were far too long and pointed.
There were clearly kobolds, mingling freely among the crouching creatures on every level except the central one. The large ears, tails, long but blunt noses, and knees that bent correctly were clear indicators of their identity.
The third group was as strange as the first, though entirely different, and far rarer. There were only three or four hidden amongst dozens of the others, but they were instantly recognizable because of the strip of triangles that ran from the top of their heads to the tip of those tails. Other than that, they looked much like kobolds, though their tails were a bit too thick, and the ears too small and pointed. Kaz thought they might actually be kobolds, wearing some kind of ancient armor. Perhaps these were the kobold leaders of the time? Females usually didn’t wear armor, since they had their ki-shields, which would make these male warriors instead.
Li made a strange sort of trilling sound, and Kaz looked toward her, realizing that he had drawn close to the central building or tunnel that passed through the middle of all the layers. The spiky kobolds were all close to it, though there weren’t any on that middle layer. No, only the crouched, rounded creatures walked there, and Kaz wondered why, though he doubted he would ever know.
The dragon on his shoulder had been staring at the map, clearly just as fascinated as Kaz was, and now her head darted out, mouth wide as she lunged for the glowing square in the center of the image. It was faint, noticeable only because of its red color and the eerie luminescence that it cast on its surroundings, but clearly Li had decided that it was edible. Her teeth scraped on stone, and she jerked back, a red spark gripped between her teeth. Before Kaz could react, she tilted her head and swallowed.
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Kaz pulled Li from his shoulder, a sudden panicked memory of the greedy little creature nearly choking on Lianhua’s gold ring filling his mind. Her tongue flickered out, however, and she made a contented little sound. Whatever had been emitting the light, it was now on its way to her belly, and she was clearly pleased about it.
Worried, Kaz watched her long throat for any sign that the object was stuck. He was often amazed at the size of the bites she could choke down, but this was a hard piece of rock or gem, not a soft, at least partially chewed, piece of meat or fungus. There was no sign of the thing’s passage, though, and Li clearly wasn’t in distress, so Kaz settled for glaring at her and pushing his own feelings of concern through their bond.
“At least let me look it over, first. Maybe I could have broken it so it would be a little smaller or something. I don’t know what dragons are supposed to eat, and so far you’ve eaten plenty of things I wouldn’t have called food, but at least wait until I’m ready,” he told her, gently prodding her belly.
Li gave him a dismissive glance from half-lidded eyes. She knew what dragons could eat, and she knew what would make her sick, which in this case was the disgusting brownish-gray lumps Raff had tried to serve her, and not the tasty glowing rock she’d just ingested.
Kaz sighed, looking back at the wall. To him, the square that had previously held the red thing was now a gaping black hole, and the strangely compelling effect of the carving was entirely lost without its uncanny glow.
He pointed to the dark square with an accusing finger. “They’re going to notice this, you know. There’s no way to hide it.”
Li returned an image of the carving, lost in darkness behind empty huts.
Kaz sighed. “That’s true, I suppose,” he admitted reluctantly. “It’s not like this is in the center of the den. No one even lives nearby, and no one has come to see who’s making all the noise, even though I completely forgot we were supposed to be hiding.”
Li’s head bobbed, and she withdrew one small clawed hand from his fur, pressing it against her abdomen instead. Opening her mouth, she gave a tiny, squeaky burp, then yawned widely.
He chuckled, completely unable to remain angry when she seemed so pleased. “Fine then,” he muttered, lowering his gaze. “Maybe there’s a rock around here that’s about the right size. If I put something else in there, maybe they’ll just think it finally ran out of power. It’s not like there haven’t been plenty of other strange things happening around here lately.”
Spying a chunk of limestone that looked to be about the right size to fit into the hole, he bent over and picked it up. He rolled it between his fingers, then held it up beside the gap, which now seemed much smaller than it had when he hadn’t had something to compare it to. In fact, his rock was much too large, so he dropped it, distantly hearing it roll away as he peered into the little square.
It was deep. Much deeper than Li could possibly have stuck her head into in such a short amount of time. The red light must have been coming from something that just capped the finger-sized hollow space beyond.
At that thought, Kaz found that he was lifting his hand, one finger extended toward the opening. There was no way that it was a good idea to poke his finger into the dark and unknown space that had been concealed behind the flickering rock, but he did it anyway.
At the fullest extension of his digit, he touched something. The something clicked, and then gave way beneath the pressure. Kaz yelped and jumped back, yanking his hand away from the wall as Li whistled, sending him a very distinct sense of ‘and you got after me for touching things?’
Kaz stumbled, and something rolled out from beneath his paw, sending him falling backward to land on his rear for the second time that day. It was a good thing that he had begun the process of tempering his body, or he’d spend all of his time nursing a bruised tail.
With a surprisingly quiet grinding sound, the wall pivoted on its central axis, one edge nearly running into Kaz’s paws as he jerked them out of the way, scrambling backwards until he bumped into one of the huts that sheltered this forgotten section of the den.
When it became clear that the section of stone - which was at least six feet high, almost as wide, and a good foot thick, except for its beveled edges - was done moving, Kaz cautiously climbed back to his paws. Looking down, he saw that what he had dismissed as natural grooves in the floor were actually arcs where the casual movement of tons of stone had scraped away rock.
This passage had obviously been opened many times, and he didn’t think the last time had been centuries before. For one thing, the huts that had seemed to be placed awkwardly close to the wall now provided perfectly defensible passages for retreating kobolds who might need to escape down this hole.
Which begged the question: what was beyond the opening?
Kaz glanced around, half expecting to see a dozen Redmanes charging toward him, or perhaps only Hod, demanding to know what Kaz thought he was doing, literally poking around where he wasn’t supposed to be. There was no one there, however, and Kaz stepped forward, peering down into what should have been pure, utter darkness. Instead, he saw the telltale glow of red, flickering lights, and tall steps that vanished into the descending distance.
He had found the Redmane’s stairs, and there was no way they led anywhere except deep into mosui territory.
Kaz jerked backwards, feeling as if some furious monster might come charging up those stairs at him, aware of his intrusion as the kobolds apparently were not. His elbow bumped painfully into the pivoting door, and it spun slowly away from him, quietly crunching back into place as if it had never opened.
Swallowing hard, Kaz looked around one more time, but the den was still nearly silent, seeming all but abandoned. He needed to talk to Lianhua, and he needed to do it now.