Behind him, jar after jar popped as their contents overheated, sending stone lids flying through the air. The cavern was filling with roiling black smoke and the roaring of flames mingled with the clatter of stone striking stone. Kaz’s paws, still soaked in whatever the fluid was, continued to slip and slide from under him, dropping him to the ground with bruising force. He ran without care for the baskets around him, dodging around them, but sometimes knocking them over as he struggled to keep his balance.
Kaz’s fingers clung to the wall, using it both to keep him up and to be sure he didn’t miss some opening that his eyes couldn’t make out in the smoke. He was glad that the ceiling was high, because while it was quickly disappearing behind the billowing clouds, the air around his head was only hazy, and grew clearer the further he got from the center of the conflagration. His paws also became surer as the slime finally wore off, and gradually he grew certain that he was getting ahead.
Still, the fire was an unstoppable force by now, and he was heading back to a cavern which, as far as he knew, had no other exits. While the flames themselves wouldn’t be able to follow him through the long tunnel, the smoke most certainly would, and he knew from experience with the thick smoke created by burning firemoss that inhaling too much could cause injury and even death.
In spite of his desperate hope, his eyes and fingers agreed that there were no openings in the walls. There were no convenient passages, no hidden stairs, not even a carving telling him he needed to go one way or another to reach safety. Far more quickly than he had followed the path out, he found himself at the blasted-out door leading back to the first cavern.
As he paused there, he saw the metal boxes, row upon row of them, each containing the deadly spores of fulan, and he realized that he had something to fear besides the fire itself. When the flames reached those boxes, what would happen? Surely he wouldn’t be lucky enough that the heat would kill the quiescent spores inside, destroying the mosui’s favorite weapon.
No, the boxes would probably burst or melt, releasing some of the spores into the smoke even as the rest of them burned. Destroying fulan was done with fire and heat, so that was good, but what would the amount of spores in the smoke do to anyone who breathed it during the process?
This thought lent a further urgency to Kaz’s desperate need to escape. As much as he didn’t want to die by fire, he didn’t want to become a corrupted atrocity even more. He had considered simply returning to the first cavern, then waiting out the flames, and hoping that his partially-refined lungs could handle breathing smoke. That wouldn’t work if the smoke contained fulan, however.
A sudden thought struck him, and he unbuckled his pack even as he began to jog down the tunnel ahead. Opening his pouch, he dug out the mask made of spiritual bamboo, which he had put away soon after he’d been captured. There had obviously been no need for it then, and he had been afraid someone would take it from him if he didn’t hide it.
Now, he wrapped it around his muzzle again, though it was difficult to tie a knot in the strings behind his head. The mask had done a remarkably good job of filtering out the spores on the way to the Redmane den, and he could only hope it would work as well here. It might even help with the smoke itself, though he could feel the sting of what he had already breathed in his throat and lungs. He was certain it would be worse without the ki inundating his body, but it was still unpleasant.
At the end of the tunnel, he turned away from the direction he had originally come from. He already knew there was nothing there but yumi, and if there were any remaining pursuers, they were probably there. Better to head into the unknown and hope for the best.
The rolls of yumi were larger, and thus took up far more space, but like the boxes and jars in the locked cavern, they went on for row after unchanging row. It was only when he caught a flicker from the corner of his eye and turned his head just in time to see a bundle disappear, along with the platform beneath it, that he realized he was missing the obvious.
There were no niu here. He didn’t smell or see any sign of them, other than the faint traces that lingered on the yumi itself, and there were no carts or any other way to transport the heavy bundles elsewhere. That meant that the platforms on which they sat could go not one, but at least two other places: the fields, and wherever they were sent to be used.
Kaz slowed, then stopped, staring at the red crystals covering the platforms beneath the reeds surrounding him. There were no smaller platforms here, no control columns, which meant Kaz would have to figure out how to make the platform work without a helpful switch. He had seen enough husede use these by now to know that the controls not only converted their mana to ki, but directed that ki based on which button the husede pressed.
Moving closer to the nearest platform, Kaz leaned hard against the bundle of reeds occupying it, managing to roll it far enough so he could see some of the crystals. In his ki-sight, they blazed, but some burned a bit brighter than others. He squinted, trying to see if there was some pattern to it. An arc here, a swoop here, almost like a rune, but there were simply too many parts. Runes were made up of anywhere from one to nine strokes, and there were at least twelve here.
He crouched, setting his fingers to the brighter section, sending it a small burst of ki. It burst into even greater radiance, but nothing else happened. On a hunch, he shifted his touch to the duller area, remembering the gray, broken crystal the husede had removed from the platform he, Surta, and Dax had taken to the mines. Perhaps these crystals were dimmer because they had been used so much, not because they were less important.
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The faint red glow within the stones was harder to spark to life than the others, which had seemed almost eager to take in his power. He pushed harder, compressing his core to get a small burst of additional energy, and for a moment, as ki swept through the platform, he thought it was going to work.
Then, with a sharp crack, several red crystals split simultaneously. He stumbled back, eyes wide, and coughed as he realized that the smoke had grown thicker while he was concentrating. Looking up and behind, it seemed like the wall and ceiling were closing in on him.
Turning, he began to run again, fleeing the advancing smog, and only stopped when he realized that the wall ahead was stone and not smoke. He had left the worst of it behind again, for now, but it was coming, and he still had no escape.
This time when he pushed at the roll of yumi on a nearby platform, he put ki into his muscles, managing to force it to shift several feet to the side. Another push, and another, stopping only once he could see a good part of the crystals with his physical eyes, as well as his internal ones. He was sure the dimmer crystals were the key, and something tugged at his memory. Runes, seen after he came to the mosui city. Runes on the map, runes on the wall… Wait, what wall?
He thought, frowning, and felt Li grab hold of the memory. The dragon had remained quiet until now, though he could feel her mounting fear through their bond. Now, given something to do, she held and sharpened the moment he needed, holding it before his eyes.
A collared husede, in front of a wall covered in what looked like horizontal metal rods with burnished bone beads bunched up at each end. A single rune was drawn on the wall above each rod, but the only one that Kaz thought looked vaguely familiar was similar to the one Katri had said meant ‘water’.
Those runes labeled each of the nine levels the mosui occupied, and the beads represented each kobold assigned to work on those levels. If the rune for water represented the yumi fields, and these platforms traveled between here, the fields, and wherever they went after this, then- Then, what? He was close, he could tell, but there was some last link he was missing.
More memories flashed through his mind. Every time Katri had shown him a rune, each one he had seen Lianhua draw. The memories were impossibly sharp, brought to the forefront of his mind by Li’s focus on them.
There! That one! He felt Li concentrate on this one, which he had shown her before, but never with such clarity.
Kaz frowned. There was a… blotch, in its head. Right at that spot between the eyes, where the power swirled and gathered before returning to its core, darkness clung, faint but insidious. Kaz prodded it, and the little body squirmed, but he somehow knew that that blockage wasn't supposed to be there, and, stubbornly, he pushed again.
His own vision grew dim as he pulled more and more power from his core, forcing his own cycle to speed up in response, until there was a nearly audible pop and the black spot tore, spinning apart into something that almost looked like the trailing lines of one of the runes Katri had taught him. The strands were caught up in the stream of power flowing through the dragon, and it coughed again as they reached its mouth, spewing out another clot of foul goo.
Runes layered on runes. If this platform traveled to three levels, and the levels were represented by runes, wouldn’t the runes cross in some places, just like the ones that had been blocking Li’s upper dantian? He even knew one of the runes: water.
Closing his eyes, Kaz pulled the image of the runes on the wall behind the husede into perfect clarity. This one, he didn’t need. He layered it over the red blaze of light produced by the crystals on the platform. For a moment, he thought he was completely wrong, because it didn’t match at all, but then he realized he was simply looking at it from the wrong perspective. With a tilt of his head, it shifted, laying perfectly into two swoops and a curve.
Now, which of the other lines did he need? Some would stand for this level, while others would take him elsewhere. He couldn’t just fill them all. He was fairly certain that was what had gone wrong last time; he must have triggered more than one rune at a time, and the platform couldn’t be in three places at once, so it had simply overloaded.
Li placed the image of the wall in front of him again. The husede female, sliding a bone bead along a rod. Above it, other runes on the wall. He knew which one meant ‘mine’, because she had moved the bead representing him along that rod. Take away that one and the one for the yumi fields, or pools, as she had called them, and that left seven.
One after another, Kaz applied them to the remaining lines glowing behind his eyelids, eliminating one, then finding a match, then eliminating three others before the sixth slid into place. Now which was the right one, and what would happen if he tried to send the platform to where it already was?
Opening his eyes, Kaz gave an involuntary cough at the sight of the smoke hanging around his head. He thought he caught a faint whiff of fulan, but that could have been his imagination. In any case, a worried glance at his core revealed no contamination, at least not yet.
He looked around. There were dozens of platforms, so if he accidentally broke a few more, it wouldn’t matter. All that mattered was escaping this place, and not injuring himself in the process. Leaning down, he set his fingers to the platform ahead of him, pulling just the red ki from his cycle, in case the previous failure had been due in part to using the wrong kind.
With a thought, he sent the ki down, into the platform, using too much in his urgency. It flashed through the platform, and he struggled to hold it into the shape of the first of the runes he needed to try. With a crack and a series of loud pops, more crystals broke, rendering this platform as useless as the last.
There was no time to waste, so Kaz simply ran to the next bundle of yumi, shoving it from its platform with an ease driven by desperation. His muscles twinged at the amount of ki he sent them, making him feel jittery and even more anxious, if that was possible.
Drawing in a deep, calming breath, Kaz compressed his core, holding his cycle until he could gather up a fresh thread of pure red ki. The rest he shoved into his central dantian, which finally filled enough that its separate internal spin gained a little speed.
Cautiously, Kaz moved along, fingers trailing as he drew the rune he needed, letting only a trickle of ki escape his grasp like a single thread left behind to mark his trail. When he reached the end, he grasped it, sending ruby fibers back along the path until he brought it all back together in a silken knot.
The platform blazed, and the smoke-filled cavern vanished.