Idla was pacing back and forth, tail twitching angrily, as Kaz emerged from the hut. Everyone else stood in small groups, separated by tribe, except for the four miserable-looking Magmablades, who were surrounded by Goldblade guards.
Trailed by Lianhua and Raff, Kaz walked directly over and stopped in front of Idla, forcing her to stop midstride. The warrior next to her bridled at the insult, but Kaz ignored him. Idla was tall for a kobold, but Kaz was slightly taller, and he drew himself up to his full height as he spoke.
“If you’re going to force the Magmablades to be part of this, then they should be there when the decisions are made,” he told her, then glanced toward Ija. “Not just a few, but all of them.”
Idla scowled. “I just got word that many of them have already gone into hiding. They’re like fuergar, scurrying into their holes at the first sign of danger.”
“Those were Vega’s orders,” Ija said, sounding as if she was repeating something she’d already said. “Once they get word that she’s dead, most will come back, so long as they won’t be killed on sight.”
“Which they won’t be,” Avli put in, folding her arms across her chest. “Tisdi and I have agreed that so long as none of the Magmablades attacks anyone else, they’ll be allowed to leave the Deep or join another tribe, if someone in it will speak for them.”
“But only as long as the Tree lives,” Idla put in, glaring toward the small group of Magmablades.
Kaz sighed. “Bring the Magmablades, then, and show me to the Tree.”
As it turned out, the Tree was several levels down, but once they got started, they were the fastest levels Kaz had ever traversed. The tunnels were lit by slow-burning torches topped with firemoss, just as he remembered from his most distant memories, and the stairs were perfectly maintained, complete with layers of gold on every third step.
At the top of the first set of stairs, which was only a quarter mile or so from the Goldcoat den, Lianhua stopped to stare, and Kaz allowed himself a moment of pride. In the Deep, the caverns containing the steps weren’t simply places to pass through, as they were in the heights and the mid-levels. Here, the walls were carved, top to bottom and all around, even extending up to the ceiling in some places. The ancient map was there, but it was almost lost among all the other designs and images above and beside it.
“This is astonishing,” Lianhua murmured, not quite touching the delicate rendering of a kobold cradling a puppy. “Why is none of this in the books I’ve read? I had no idea you were such artists.”
Idla’s group had already vanished down the steps, but the Waveblades and Mithrillblades were still passing. Avli paused, looking around as if seeing the beautifully intricate images for the first time. “The Woodblades were responsible for this,” she said wistfully. “I don’t remember them well, but there are paintings, statues, and carvings everywhere in the Deep. They especially liked to capture the images of other kobolds, but anything natural brought them joy, which they then shared with others.”
Kaz crouched down to look at a fuergar, its bright eyes and little nose so realistic that it was hard to believe it was stone, and wouldn’t start quivering as it sniffed the air. Someone came up behind him, and when he looked around, he realized that it was the pink-furred Magmablade puppy, Kyla. Somehow, she had slipped away from her Goldblade watchers, and now she grinned at him.
“I like fuergars,” she told him. “Their round ears and soft little whiskers are very cute.” Lifting her hands, she folded her own ears down to show him what she meant, and with her tufted fur, she managed a credible version of one of the rodents.
“Did you eat too much copper when you were little, then?” he asked her gently. Copper fuergar were more orange by far, but none of the other metals were anywhere close, and some alloys with copper in them were quite pink.
She made a face at him, but before she could respond, a pale-furred hand came to rest on her shoulder. Avli looked down at them, shaking her head. “Kyla,” she murmured, “I know you’re used to running around the Deep, but you must stay with your father and sister right now. Idla would be angry if she knew you were here.”
The young female looked rebellious, but glanced at the stairs and sighed in defeat. “Father told me to stay with him, but Kaz is here. He won’t let anything happen to me.”
She turned large eyes on Kaz, and even though he knew he was being manipulated, he chuckled. She reminded him so much of a young Katri, wild and used to getting her own way.
“I’ll watch her,” he told Avli, and though she looked doubtful, she nodded and stepped back.
“We should continue, then,” the chief said, and followed Dett down the stairs.
Kaz looked at Lianhua, whose pen was moving wildly over one page after another in her book. She was biting her lip as she concentrated, and kobolds passed her by, one after another. Raff stood beside her, looking more and more awkward as the Goldblades at the end of the column approached. At last, he laid a hand on Lianhua’s shoulder, and she jumped, clearly having completely lost track of what they were doing.
“We’ve gotta go,” Raff told her. “Those Goldblades are lookin’ less happy by the second, and they weren’t particularly friendly to start with.” He grinned briefly. “At least not since they got their cloth and realized we aren’t really traders.”
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Hurriedly, Lianhua tucked her book away, and opened her mouth. She stopped before apologizing, however, and just said, “I’m ready to go.”
Kaz nodded approval. No one made a chief do anything they didn’t want to, and acting more like a chief would help establish Lianhua’s place among the other females. It would only undermine her position to allow warriors from another tribe to hurry her along, even though they were supposed to be traveling as a group.
Avli, Dett, and the other two Mithrilblade females walked along with the humans as they went down the stairs. Dett had clearly managed to rest at some point, or else his new role as Avli’s future mate was giving him strength, because he was able to keep up when Raff began taking two steps at a time and Lianhua matched his pace.
Kyla, however, found it much more difficult, and after the second time she stumbled over her own paws and nearly went tumbling down the stairs, Kaz picked her up and carried her. Neither she nor Li appreciated this, but Kaz told them both that it was this or leave Kyla behind. Li was fine with that, but Kyla settled down quickly enough, even though she kept trying to touch Li’s golden tail.
The stairs weren’t long - only a few hundred steps - and the next flight began in the same cavern where the first ended. In the heights, this arrangement was rare, with most staircases separated by a mile or more, though there was often a crevice or hole that could be used to pass between levels if needed.
Here in the Deep, however, stairs were never far apart, and Kaz could sense that they were simply circling around the outside of the mountain as they descended. Kaz understood why, and he was very much looking forward to when Lianhua and the other humans first saw the real Deep.
Predictably, Lianhua wanted to stop and sketch in each of the landing caverns, but soon enough Idla figured out what was going on and stayed, staring, for as long as Lianhua lingered. By the fourth one, the human simply gave a melancholy sigh and went on, leaving the echoing chamber full of carvings behind.
As they went, they drew quite a bit of attention, since there were warriors at each level, as well as other kobolds passing freely as they went about their day. More than once, a small group of kobolds, their fur almost always one bright color or another, would stop and stare as the large group passed by. No one challenged them, and a few even cowered once they saw the three chiefs scattered throughout the line.
After five flights of stairs, Kaz knew they were getting close, and he hurried his pace, jumping down several stairs at once. He still held Kyla, and though she looked nervous the first time he did this, soon enough she gave little yips of excitement each time he bounded into the air. Raff and Lianhua stared as he passed them, and started to hurry up as well, but Kaz paused to grin at them.
“Let me go ahead just a bit,” he told them, and Kyla giggled. She, too, knew what was coming, and clearly she had caught his excitement.
Li could see it all in Kaz’s mind, and when he took the last leap, jumping down six steps at once, the dragon lifted from his shoulder, flying alongside him. They passed through into the cavern below at the same moment, and Kaz stopped, stunned as much by his feeling of homecoming as by the actual sight of the city in the Deep.
Where the other caverns were simply large open spaces, with a set of stairs on one side, a few tunnels leading away, and another set of stairs on the other side, this cavern had only three sides, with the fourth gaping wide. The unnaturally smooth stone of the floor had been burnished by hundreds of years of passing kobold paws, gleaming darkly in the light of hovering ki orbs.
Kaz crossed to the far side, staring down at the dizzying drop. This was the real reason they called it the Deep. Not because it was made up of the lowest levels, but because it was a single, enormous pit, carved out of the center of the mountain. The wall was all but sheer, with only a few small protrusions marring its surface. Hundreds of feet simply fell away, though the stairs continued to circle around the vast open area ahead, in some places completely exposed where the inside wall had been removed.
In the center of that space, so large that the far side was lost in shadow, lay the city. When he was a pup, staring out from one of these caves, he had marveled at the bright colors and flickering lights that populated it. He could see the small, distant shapes of thousands of kobolds, moving through the streets. He remembered seeing blue and red mingling freely among the others, but now, almost all of the tiny figures had gold, black, or white fur.
This was the only place where kobolds lived in tall buildings made of stone. Having spent time in the mosui city, he could see the similarities, though the buildings here had been altered over the years, and were painted in a riot of colors. Not only the colors of ki and the five tribes, but every shade in between; oranges and purples vied with brilliant pinks and deep greens. And above them all were the mushrooms and glow worms.
Eerie green fungus covered the walls, from the city level, hundreds of feet down, to the ceiling high overhead. Where there were no mushrooms, the glow worms thrived, hanging from the damp roof in a sheet of twinkling lights. Massive stalactites hung, dwarfed by the space around them, built up by millennia of water trickling slowly through the mountain above.
As he leaned out, Kaz could see the glowing openings of a hundred caves just like this one, places where tunnels or dens met the sheer wall and opened into space. He once lived in one of those, though he thought it was probably halfway down the wall from where he was now, and while he no longer remembered their name, it was quite likely that his parents’ adoptive tribe was somewhere down there as well.
The sound of Raff’s footsteps on the ground reminded him why he was here, and he turned just in time to catch Lianhua and Raff’s expressions as they entered the cave. For the first time, Lianhua didn’t turn immediately to the walls beside her, her attention captured instead by the glowing mushrooms visible through the opening on the far side. The humans couldn’t yet see the city, which was below their sightline, but as they crossed toward him, he knew the moment they did.
Lianhua drew in a sharp breath, and Raff actually staggered back, away from the steep drop. Kaz hadn’t noticed that the human had a fear of heights before, but there had always been a slope or something to hang onto as they descended through the mountain. This was simply a chasm, and the floor just ended at the edge.
“Is that the city?” Lianhua breathed, and Kaz didn’t answer. There was only one answer possible, so she was just asking to say something, which the humans seemed compelled to do.
They all stood silently for quite some time, listening to the click of claws crossing the stone floor behind them, the drip of water falling from countless stalactites, and the distant echo of howls rising from the Deep. At last Kyla had had enough, and wiggled with enough vigor to let Kaz know that she was really serious this time.
Kaz turned to put her down, and found himself face to face with Idla. She had a small smile on her face, and seemed more relaxed than he’d seen her since she first appeared, pretending to be nothing more than an affable trader.
Beside him, Lianhua turned as well, as did Raff, though the male was several feet further from the edge. Idla tilted her head, her tail wagging gently as she said, “Welcome back to the Deep, Kaz Woodblade.”