“What in the name of Pellis is going on?” Raff demanded, staring after them.
Everyone turned to look at Kaz, and he shook his head, snapping his jaw closed when he realized it was hanging open. “Idil must have declared vara on the Graybelly tribe. She used the rockfall to separate their leader from the majority of her forces, and now she’s going to kill Lignan. If she succeeds, she can take at least the two lower levels from the Graybellys, and use the captured resources to launch an attack on the ones above. If she does it right, Kellin, Ren, and the others won’t even see it coming, but Idil will still be protected by tradition, since she announced her intention to the tribe’s chief.”
Gaoda looked impressed. “This Idil sounds like a semi-competent tactician. I’m almost glad we don’t need to kill her after all. Now!” He clapped his hands together as if squashing a cave gnat. “Where’s the next staircase?”
Kaz stared at him. “You promised Ren you’d take her message to Lignan.”
The human shrugged. “Well, that was then. Now that the Ironclaws have so conveniently gotten out of our way, let’s just get on with it, shall we?”
Drawing in a deep breath, Kaz let it out slowly, but his mind was busy churning through options. “There is another set of stairs below this one,” he admitted, and Gaoda grinned until Kaz went on. “But it’s blocked. A great stone fell and shattered it long ago, and it’s almost impossible to get through.”
Gaoda snorted. “Almost? If you kobolds can make it, we can as well.”
“Can you turn to mist?” Kaz asked.
“What?”
He nodded. “There is a narrow space through which a small kobold can pass. I crawled through it once, when the Broken Knives and the Ironclaws were still allowed to pass through each other’s territory, so long as we didn’t disturb anything. One of the Ironclaw pups told me there was a cave full of glowing stones on the other end, and I believed him. It was so tight that by the time I realized how far I’d gone, I couldn’t turn around or go back. I simply had to continue, though more than once I thought I would die there.”
He was vastly understating the abject terror he’d suffered for unknown hours on end. Lost in blackness, with no idea if the tight passage through which he slithered would simply end, he had cried and called for his family, but no one could hear his howls.
“When I did reach the end, there was no cave, just another tunnel, and another staircase. I couldn’t bear to return the way I’d come, so I wandered until I met a Graybelly male. Fortunately, most tribes will return lost pups without claiming them, and he showed me how to get back to our level. I actually met Ogden as I was wandering home, and I was so confused and frightened that I bit him.”
Lianhua looked horrified, but Gaoda just demanded, “And what is the point of that story?”
Kaz looked pointedly at Raff’s bulk, then each of the other humans, all of whom were larger than any adult kobold. “Unless you can shrink to the size of a pup, or Chi Yincang can carve away hundreds of feet of solid stone, we’ll have to use the passage in Graybelly territory. It’s part of the one Idil blocked, so we can only hope it hasn’t also collapsed. As far as I know, those are the only two paths down on the next level.”
Gaoda gritted his teeth. “Then we’ll go to the Graybelly passage, and kill anyone who gets in our way.”
“Which will be everyone,” Kaz said. “Right now, anyone who isn’t a member of their own tribe is an enemy. You’ll have to murder dozens or even hundreds of kobolds.”
“No,” Lianhua said, firmly. “Gaoda, you promised.”
Gaoda forced a conciliatory smile. “Of course. Then we’ll just wait. We can negotiate with whoever wins.”
Kaz shook his head again. “You heard Ogden. Idil still hates Oda. If she wins, she’ll deny you passage, or even try to kill us, just because I’m with you.”
The human waved that off. “Just claim you’re someone else.”
“That won’t work, either,” Kaz told him. “My fur marks me as Oda’s son. Blue-furred kobolds are rare even in the Deep, and I haven’t met another since we passed the mid-levels.”
Lianhua was watching Kaz, her gaze thoughtful, and now she said, “We already have the message from Ren. If we aid Lignan, and deliver that, she’ll certainly grant us passage, and maybe a safe place to sleep for the night. I’m tired, and I could use a bath.”
Gaoda managed another smile for the female, and nodded. “Of course, cousin.” He looked at Raff. “Kill any Ironclaws you see,” he told the warrior, before slanting a smug smile at Lianhua. “You won’t mind that, right, cousin? We’re just making sure this Lignan knows we’re… friends.”
Her shoulders tightened beneath her robe, but she nodded. “Of course not, Gaoda Xiang.”
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The stairs were long, but before they were halfway down, the sounds of battle could be heard. Metal claws clashed with stone hammers, and howls of pain and victory alike echoed up the steps. They found the first dead kobold sprawled across the bottom steps. He was a Graybelly guard, his gray breastplate mostly intact, but the rest of his body was all but torn apart. His partner lay just a little further on, and Kaz hoped he had been able to send up a warning howl before he was taken down.
After that, there was a short stretch of empty hall, though streaks of blood marked the stone beneath Kaz’s paws, but they followed the sounds of battle to a large, open cavern. Here lay carnage. Bodies were scattered tail-deep in places, and as Kaz watched, a female launched a ferocious missile of pure power toward another female, knocking her back and breaking her concentration. The shimmering shield surrounding her and her guard fell, and the kobolds surrounding them howled in triumph as they flooded forward.
Raff instantly waded into the fray, his sword taking out one or two Ironclaws with each swing. Chi Yincang appeared just long enough to strike an enemy down, then leaped into a shadow, vanishing again an instant later. Gaoda’s ball of light split into four pieces, and one of them circled him protectively, while the other three shot out, usually passing right through an unsuspecting female after shattering her shield, though occasionally it splashed into nothingness instead, only to be reformed a moment later.
Now that Kaz knew Lianhua didn’t need his protection, he let his vision shift into that other sight, watching the flow of… What had Gaoda called it? Ki? Was that the same as Raff’s ‘mana’? Or was the gray stuff mana, and ki only the purified colors some people could pull from it?
Always before, Kaz had been terrified to be caught using power, so he’d never dared watch any of his tribe’s females work, not that he’d allowed himself to maintain enough power to shift his vision. Now, he watched with fascination as dozens of females used their power.
The first thing he noticed was that all of them had cores. The solid masses of power in their abdomens were subtly different from Lianhua or Gaoda’s spinning balls of ki, even from the distance at which Kaz stood. However, most of their channels were filled with gray power, like Raff’s, rather than being differentiated into streams of individual color. The narrower their channels were, the less power could flow, and the weaker their attacks were.
One of Gaoda’s energy balls splashed uselessly against the shield of an Ironclaw female with particularly clear pathways, allowing far more power to course through the cycle between her belly and her head. Kaz pushed a little more ki into his eyes, and saw that she was one of the ones with strong lines of color running through the gray.
Her shield flared as two more balls impacted it, and each time he saw power drain from her cycle to feed the shield. On the third blow, the demand was greater than the amount of ki still flowing through her, and her shield shattered. As a nearby Graybelly female took advantage of the moment to send an attack at her, taking her down, Kaz wondered why the Ironclaw hadn’t simply pulled more ki from her core, cycling it faster to produce enough power to maintain her shield.
Slowly, Kaz’s group made their way through the carnage, and the Graybellys, realizing these strangers were helping them, moved out of their way. At first, there were more Graybellys on the ground than Ironclaws, but as they moved further in, Ironclaw bodies began to outnumber Graybellys two to one.
And then they found Idil battling a Graybelly female Kaz assumed was Lignan. He had never seen the Graybelly chief before, but her ki was the purest he’d seen so far, and her channels the widest. She even had a spiral spinning slowly behind her eyes, as did Idil.
Idil’s ki was mostly red and yellow, not quite shining bright enough to qualify as gold. Lignan was full of yellow and white ki, which flowed quickly up her backbone before being spun quickly through the node in her head, where whatever she needed was pulled out, and the remainder sent back down to her belly. This seemed to be far more efficient than those females who pulled directly from their channels, and both Idil and Lignan appeared to have a vast amount of energy. Their battle would likely be won through endurance and skill, rather than sheer, overwhelming power.
Kaz saw one of Gaoda’s ki orbs blast toward Idil, and Kaz grabbed the human’s arm. Gaoda immediately shook him off, throwing Kaz to the floor and knocking the breath out of him with no apparent effort. He did, however, stop what he was doing and look down at Kaz, so Kaz desperately struggled to pull air back into his lungs.
“What?” Gaoda snapped.
“Lignan… has to win… herself,” Kaz gasped. He drew in a few more breaths, and was finally able to speak clearly. “None of you can help her directly, or it will weaken her position within her clan, and among the chiefs of other tribes.”
He saw that Gaoda was unconvinced, and hurried on. “If you help, she’ll be angry, and may refuse to aid you. She certainly won’t let you rest here.”
The human snarled, but said, “Fine.” Raising his voice, he called out over the battlefield, “Chi Yincang, Raff, leave the leader!”
Raff yelled back a cheerful acknowledgement, never slowing in his destruction of the few remaining Ironclaw males. Chi Yincang didn’t say anything, but he also didn’t go after Idil. Gaoda turned his attention to the last of the females wielding the signature metal talons. Judging by the power coursing through their channels, these were Idil’s strongest subordinates, and many of them had varying amounts of different colors mixed into the gray fog that filled them. One even had a rough ball of power in the center of her forehead, though its spin was so sluggish as to be nearly useless.
As the fighting around them slowed, Idil and Lignan both seemed to become aware that something had changed. They glanced around, and Kaz could see Lignan stand straighter, even as Idil’s tail and ears tucked down tight against her body. Still, she didn’t give up. Since she had declared vara, an open battle by the full tribe, rather than luegat, a closed, ritual battle between only a few selected members, she couldn’t retreat. She would either win, or die.
Lignan, whose cycle had been beginning to slow, seemed to find strength in the knowledge that she was now surrounded by her own tribe members. The ball of power in her forehead spun faster than that of any kobold Kaz had seen yet, pulling threads of white and yellow so pure they almost matched the gold and silver the humans wielded.
Meanwhile, Idil’s ki turned dark, losing much of its color. The spiral in her head… wobbled.
Which was the moment Lignan struck. Her core flared to a brilliant ball of light, shedding gray fog as the threads of silver and gold became dense cords. Her shields dropped as she poured every bit of her power into one final blast, which slammed into Idil’s smoky gray shield, shattering it, and then going on to impact with the maroon female’s chest, blowing her off her feet. She yelped pitifully, and then it was done.