The only people paying any attention to the puppy were Kaz and Lianhua, and they stared at her. “What dragon?” Kaz asked.
She shrugged and took another bite of the thick mushroom. As she swallowed it, she glanced toward her sister, Ija, who was talking to Avli and looked much more relaxed now that the fate of her tribe had been decided. The warriors who had been hovering near the Magmablades in case they made any attempt to escape had joined the rest of their cohort, and both Sika and Rudu were standing out of the way, near the wall, looking exhausted.
Kyla leaned in, lowering her voice. “The dragon at the top of the Tree. No one’s really supposed to go near it, you know,” she confided, “but doesn’t it just look like it wants to be climbed?”
She turned to gaze fondly at the enormous plant. “So I did. Just once or twice. Maybe three times. But when you get up to where the top meets the ceiling, there’s a kind of cave, and in the cave is the dragon.”
She reached up to tug her ear. “I was a little scared the first time I saw it, and I climbed down so fast I almost fell. But it didn’t chase me or anything, and it was so much fun getting up there that I did it again. It’s just an old skeleton, but it’s all curled up around a couple of big, giant rocks, and I don’t know how those got up there at all.”
Li heard this through Kaz, and grew bold enough to venture slightly closer to the skeleton. When nothing happened, she drew nearer and nearer, until she could almost touch one of the claws that were as long as her whole body. There she stopped, staring at what lay inside the curve of the bones.
A ki crystal. Not just any ki crystal, but one almost as large as the skull itself. Li moved so she could see more clearly, and they realized that the crystal stretched from the ceiling down, vanishing into the brown stalk of the Tree. A matching crystal was clutched in the other skeletal paw, but this one practically hummed with gold ki.
Kaz shook his head and looked down at Kyla. “How do you climb it?”
She shrugged, but her golden eyes were sparkling. “Want me to show you? If we hurry, I bet we can be too far up for them to stop us before they even notice.”
Kaz glanced at Lianhua, who looked almost as excited as the puppy. “Do you want to go?” he asked her.
Lianhua grinned, then covered her exposed teeth with her hand. “Oh, yes. I was a champion tree climber when I was little.”
They looked toward Raff, who was standing with his hand on the hilt of his sword, clearly doing his best not to look bored out of his mind as they waited. He was focused on the kobolds surrounding them, especially Idla, and Kaz didn’t think he was even paying attention to them until he picked up one foot and tapped the toe against the ground with a soft metallic clink.
“Can’t do it,” he murmured from the side of his mouth, not even glancing at them. “Too big an’ too heavy. Not sneaky. Chi Yincang’s got this.”
Neither Kaz nor Lianhua even bothered checking to be sure Chi Yincang had heard this. Somehow, he always did, and Raff was right, it would be much easier for the agile Chi Yincang to climb than for the tall, armor-clad Raff to do so.
Looking back at Kyla, Kaz gave a nod, and the puppy’s tail began to wag enthusiastically. She glanced around, and then muttered something under her breath. When the last syllable rolled off her tongue, she seemed to shimmer with heat, and Kaz found his eyes sliding away from her. He knew when she headed for the Tree, not even bothering to sidle around to the far side first, but he couldn’t actually bring himself to focus on her.
Lianhua blinked several times, then looked in the direction Kyla was walking before glancing away again. “I lost her,” she murmured. “I mean, I can still sense her, but I can’t see her any more.”
The way the puppy was hiding was entirely different from what Chi Yincang did, burning through her red ki at a startling rate, but it was just as effective, and Kaz wondered if she would teach it to him. It didn’t last long, but by the time the haze covering her went away, she was above eye level, and ascending rapidly.
Kaz shook his head, chuffing softly. “Let’s go,” he said to Lianhua, and the human managed to tear her eyes away from the bright pink puppy.
Lacking any form of concealment, since Li was still cautiously investigating the skeleton, the two of them circled around to one side, acting as if they just wanted to examine the Tree from another angle. As they did, Raff took a single step to his right, his massive body blocking the kobolds’ view of them. Immediately, Kaz and Lianhua sprang toward the Tree, and Lianhua’s delicate foot coverings fell away from her feet as she grabbed hold of the rough surface.
“Bark is softer than it looks,” she said quickly, “so it can break away when you put weight on it. Just find really thick parts, and you should be fine.”
Kaz dug in his claws, feeling the unexpected give as he did so. Of course, since his claws could now stab into stone, albeit with difficulty, that shouldn’t be so surprising. Still, he tried to find handholds that looked particularly sturdy, rather than just depending on the grip of his claws.
Lianhua’s foot slipped when they were about twenty feet up, and the resultant shower of bark drew the attention of the kobolds still standing around at the bottom of the Tree. Idla howled after them, sounding furious, but no one tried to follow, so Kaz just ignored it.
He was getting better and better at judging his handholds, long experience of climbing stone walls helping him figure out what would hold his weight. When he passed Lianhua, he was actually rather proud of himself, until a blur of black and white bounded past, jumping lightly from one bulge of bark to another.
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Kaz did manage to beat Lianhua to the first branch, but the female promptly pulled herself up and jumped to the next branch almost as easily as Chi Yincang. Kaz stared after her, but wasn’t quite ready yet to attempt to emulate her, so he continued up the slow way. In his mind, Li laughed at his dejected sigh.
The first bone he saw was the very tip of a claw, extending over the edge of the topmost branch, and the point was still so sharp that he carefully avoided it as he pulled himself over the edge. The claw itself was as long as his arm, and the thick bone of the arm came up to his waist. The rest of the skeleton was curled up in the nearly flat, open area where the gigantic branches curved away from them, and now that Kaz was here, he could see that there was a gap of almost fifty feet from the top of the main stalk of the tree to the ceiling.
Lianhua was circling the skeleton, one of her little books out as she furiously sketched. “Tendons and ligaments have entirely decomposed, which should have caused the skeleton to break apart into its component pieces, and yet it remains entirely intact. There’s so much ambient ki here that it’s difficult to pinpoint the primary source, but it would probably make an excellent location for cultivation,” she muttered, and Kaz shook his head, tuning her out.
Li had taken off again, flying slowly around the skeleton, and though it was difficult to imagine the true enormity of the thing, her perspective allowed him to see that it almost completely filled the existing space. The creature must have barely fit here when it was alive, and only the complete lack of any remaining flesh left room for Kaz and the others to walk around.
“What happened to it?” he mused, reaching out as if to touch the closest bone. At the last moment, he remembered that he’d promised himself not to touch strange, ki-filled objects any more, and this most definitely counted. Every bone was infused with ki, the power contained within them like water in a bladder. He could see all five colors in nearly equal measure, but they lay still and silent, no cycle remaining in the dead thing before them.
“It has a lot of broken bones,” Kyla said cheerfully, pointing to a shadowy line further up the nearest leg bone. “The ribs are all cracked, too.”
Kaz shook his head, a sudden image of Li with similarly catastrophic injuries filling his mind. It was almost instantly wiped away by a picture of Li, larger than even she had ever imagined herself before, swatting away the fulan-twisted creature they’d fought just before meeting the Sharpjaws. She would be far too strong for anything to hurt her, so Kaz didn’t need to worry.
He looked up as the dragon herself dropped down and landed on his shoulder. The feeling of her warm weight did more to drive away the terrible image than all her reassurances, and he tilted his head toward her. She was still so small and fragile. He needed to figure out what would really allow her to grow properly, and give her as much of it as she could eat.
Li was firmly in favor of this, and purred softly as she leaned against him in turn. She looked toward the stone clutched in the dead dragon’s right paw. It fairly hummed with golden ki, so full that Kaz thought it might actually break if it received much more. Obviously, the kobolds had been filling it more frequently than necessary in an attempt to revive the Tree. Unfortunately, they hadn’t had the right kind of ki to succeed, and their efforts had done more harm than good.
A tentative image formed in Kaz’s head, showing himself chipping away a chunk of the crystal and feeding it to the dragon on his shoulder. After all, the other dragon didn’t need it anymore.
Kaz laughed softly, walking carefully around so he could see the crystal encircled by the huge, skeletal left paw. It was eerie to see the perfectly preserved bones, looking as if the flesh could simply reappear around it at any moment, allowing the dragon to fly away again. Or eat them. Honestly, that seemed like the more feasible option, given how large it was. How much had this creature had to eat every day just in order to survive?
Trying to ignore the dark turn of his thoughts, Kaz eyed the crystal. It looked more like dull gray stone than bright blue ki crystal. Only the faceted shape of it revealed its crystalline nature. Like the other, it vanished into the arched ceiling overhead, and into the material of the Tree below. That was where the similarities ended, however. The golden stone seemed to merge into the cycle of ki inside the Tree, but the blue was barely visible, even from so close.
“Kaz!”
He looked up at the yip, and to his horror, he realized that Kyla had made her way inside the ribcage, and was leaning halfway out between the curve of two ribs. She grinned at him, the tip of her tail waving behind her, and Kaz barely stopped himself from snapping at her.
“Get down,” he barked, trying to keep the harsh edge of fear from his voice. “You’ll fall.”
She shook her head. “There’s a big rock in here. I jump on it and then up between the ribs. Sometimes when Mother is angry, I sit up here for hours until she has time to forget why she’s mad.” A shadow crossed her face as she remembered that her mother was very definitely dead, but there was as much relief as sorrow behind it. Kaz recognized the look, having felt much the same when Oda died.
His voice was much gentler when he said, “Please. I’d feel better if you got down.”
Kyla sighed, but a moment later she slipped from view. After a few seconds, she emerged from the ribcage, her fingers trailing over the pale bone with great familiarity. Clearly, she had come here far more than two or three times.
They had attracted Lianhua’s attention, however, and now the human came over to join them. She had tucked the ends of her robe up into her belt, baring her straight, almost hairless legs, and Kaz and Kyla exchanged a look of mild disgust before politely ignoring what Kaz couldn’t help but think of as a deformity, even though all the humans’ legs looked similar.
“There’s a stone inside the skeleton?” she asked Kyla, pen poised over her page. “Is it like the two in the claws?”
Kyla shook her head, holding her hands about two feet apart. “It's round, about this big, but there’s a big crack all the way through it. When I was younger, I used to push it as high up one of the ribs as I could, and then let it go, and it would roll all over the place inside there. Then a piece broke off, and now it won’t really roll anymore.”
Lianhua’s eyes opened wide, and even her pen stilled on the page. “A core?”
The puppy blinked. “I don’t think so. It’s too big to eat, but I never even wanted to try. Usually if we find a core in a beast, it looks really tasty, even though Father says they’re bad for me.”
Kaz nodded, but Lianhua veered off toward the long ribcage, making her way beneath the long bones of the wings that arched over the skeleton. She squeezed between two ribs, then called, “Kaz! Come and help me with this!”
Driven by curiosity and against his better judgment, Kaz followed Lianhua’s path, careful not to even brush against any of the bones. The dragon had far more ribs than seemed necessary, but Kaz was able to fit between the bottom ones and the curve of the pelvic bone that rose well above his head. He didn’t climb up onto the ribs, but he cautiously made his way up to where they came together before calling Lianhua’s name.
Something scraped against one of the bones above him, and then Lianhua let out an exclamation of surprise as the something fell toward him. Without thinking, Kaz reached up and caught the dragon’s core.