It didn’t take long for Hod to arrange for new huts to be fabricated for the humans. It seemed that some of the floor to ceiling walls were mobile, while others were fixed in place with some powerful sealant, possibly yanchong slime. A few of the mobile walls were shifted, and four huts became two, giving each male his own place to sleep, though Kaz wasn’t sure Chi Yincang would actually use one.
Kaz got his own hut as well, in spite of his low status as a male pup. If the kobolds of the mid-levels were strict and formal about some things, they seemed to be more relaxed about others, including their response to the oddity that was Kaz. Kaz was glad to know he would have privacy, but he didn’t leave his pack there while Hod showed them the way to the female’s part of the den. He wouldn’t risk someone else going through his things while he wasn’t there.
Raff didn’t complain about carrying Kaz as Hod briefly showed them the tunnel that led to the cavern containing the den’s water source, as well as an open area that held a single female surrounded by five males, all of whom were watching the female as warily as if she was a beast who had somehow managed to sneak into their den. The female was doing her best to ignore them as she maintained the fire over which a large pot simmered.
Kaz squinted as they walked past, but as far as he could tell, her core was clean, though dim. It held only red ki, which pulsed and flowed exactly as it should. Kaz wasn’t sure if he’d be able to see the rusty taint of fulan from that distance, but he was certain that this female hadn’t eaten anyone else’s core.
The line between the male and female areas of the den was stark. There was a line of the shorter, moveable walls splitting one section of huts from the rest, with a second line a few feet beyond that one. Males paced in the gap between the two, their eyes turned inward, like the threat they feared was the kobolds within, rather than the monsters assaulting the den from the outside.
A single piece of low wall served as a gate in each line, but the gate was reinforced with a bone bar that could easily be lifted and replaced. The bar was on the outside, indicating, again, that it was there to keep the females contained, rather than preventing anything else from entering.
Raff and Chi Yincang could easily have climbed or jumped over the wall, which would probably have reached Kaz’s chin, if he was standing on his own two feet. They waited patiently, however, as male kobolds unlatched and opened the gates on Hod’s orders, allowing the humans inside.
The first thing Kaz noticed was the quiet. The male’s section of the den had the usual low murmur of voices, the clicking of claws, the sound of heavy breathing and clash of weapons as a few warriors trained, along with a constant thread of coughing coming from those exposed to the spores. Here, there was little of that. The few females he saw spoke to each other rarely and from a distance, their eyes filled with exhaustion and fear. He didn’t even hear any puppies at play, which reminded him unpleasantly of his own tribe, while making him draw even more unpleasant conclusions about where the puppies might be.
When they reached the huts Gaoda and Lianhua had been assigned, Kaz saw that they were inside yet another of the rings of low walls. Outside this circle within a circle, a few of the males paced, watching warily, hands resting on their weapons. It wasn’t just the humans who were being observed, either, though the others were a little less obvious. Everywhere Kaz looked, males were wandering the paths between huts, lingering anywhere a female was visible, gazes wary and alert.
Hod nodded to the male who opened the gate. “These males may visit the females.” He turned to Raff, Kaz, and Chi Yincang. “The females must remain within until you leave the den tomorrow. The sickness can take up to a week to show itself, so new females must stay here for seven days before being allowed into the larger area.”
Kaz frowned. So the Redmanes thought this was a plague? Why, then, had they allowed Kaz and the others in at all? Shouldn’t they be afraid of either allowing in someone contagious, or infecting healthy people? They did seem to have made the connection between the madness and the fulan, as well as the fact that only females got ‘sick’, so obviously they had figured out enough to believe isolation was sufficient.
Raff scratched his face fur with a gloved finger, causing things Kaz didn’t want to think about to fall out in a shower of flakes. “Y’know it’s not a disease, right?” he asked, looking uncomfortable. “That fulan stuff contaminates cores, which makes anyone who’s got one go nuts. Then they start killin’ other people to get their cores, and things get nasty. One person can’t contaminate another one, though.”
Hod heaved a sigh, his face settling into a mask of grief. “We know. It… took a while for us to figure that out though, and by the time we did, our chief was infected. Most of the time, she can’t speak any longer, but she’s still alive, so we can’t change what she ordered put in place.”
Kaz’s fists clenched on Raff’s arm, and Li rubbed her head against his jaw soothingly, emitting a sense of concern and reassurance. Kaz couldn’t help the sharp pang of sympathetic sorrow he felt, though. He himself had never seen mates who clearly cared about each other the way this tribe, or at least this kobold, seemed to favor, but he had loved his father like that, and, to a lesser extent, his sister and aunt. It was hard to see someone else suffer the pain of that loss.
Raff’s face showed a hint of sympathy, too, but his eyes were calculating as he asked, “You’ve got an infected female around here? Where? You know you should-”
The fur on Hod’s neck lifted, turning the dyed red circle into a flared collar that framed his burning glare and sharp fangs. “Don’t,” he growled, the word barely intelligible. “She can’t hurt anyone, and I won’t hurt her. The sickness will take its course, and Etla will be chief soon enough.”
Raff’s suddenly stiff expression didn’t relax, and when Kaz glanced to the side, he could see that Chi Yincang was gone. By pushing more power into his eyes than he could really spare at the moment, he could see the faint blur of black and white ki that was the human slipping from shadow to shadow inside the little huddle of huts.
More than that, Kaz could now see the familiar lights of both Gaoda and Lianhua’s dantians, glowing within two of the huts. Gaoda seemed to be lying down, but Lianhua was sitting up, and beside her was a muddy, roiling mass of yellow and black ki.
Kaz barely managed to choke back a gasp, and Li hissed, her wings rising to buffet Kaz’s ears as she half-lifted from his shoulder. He had to reach up and grasp her quickly, but at least the movement drew the attention of Raff and Hod, allowing some of the pressure between them to ease.
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“What’s wrong with your rat, Kaz?” Raff asked, his arm shifting beneath Kaz, as if he wasn’t sure if he should put the kobold and potentially volatile ‘fuergar’ down.
Kaz shook his head, stroking Li’s head. “I think… she sensed something that worried her.” Truth. “She’ll calm down in a minute.” Probably also true, but Li whistled angrily at the presumption of it. She knew there was something dangerous near Lianhua, and while she assured Kaz that she didn’t care about the human female, Kaz did, and so Li didn’t like it. At all.
Kaz looked at Hod and said, “I’d like to go inside now, if possible. Lianhua said she was going to make tea. I like tea.” He knew he sounded a little bit like a numb-mind, but he didn’t care. It was the most innocuous thing he could think of to say, and caused both Hod and Raff to blink.
Hod’s red ruff began to subside as he turned to the nervous-looking warrior who was holding the gate open for them. “I’m going to go check on the others. Howl for me when the male humans are ready to leave.”
Turning to Raff, he added, “I’ll guide you back to your huts when you’re ready.” This was said with such finality that Kaz didn’t even mention that he could do that and spare the older male the trouble. With a final tilt of his chin, Hod left them to it, though his gait was still stiff and his hackles half-raised as he walked away.
Kaz and Raff walked in through the open gate, and the guard closed it behind them with a blatant look of relief. He resumed his patrol, vanishing around the perimeter of the isolation zone on paws that moved a little more quickly than absolutely necessary.
Raff leaned forward, peering between the two closest huts. One of them was the one where Gaoda rested, while the other was empty, at least as far as Kaz could tell.
“Well, should we just start knocking?” Raff asked.
Kaz shook his head and tapped his nose, giving a deep sniff. “That one is Gaoda’s,” he told the male, “and Lianhua is in there.” He pointed to the next hut, which was half-hidden by Gaoda’s. The blur that was Chi Yincang stood in the shadows by the door, though Raff wouldn’t know that. Chi Yincang hadn’t emerged from hiding or gone inside, though, and Kaz hoped that meant Lianhua really was safe. The blob of yellow and black ki certainly hadn’t moved since Kaz first saw it.
Raff shrugged, entirely unaware of any of this, as far as Kaz could tell, and knocked on the door of the hut where Lianhua sat. Her ki shifted, then rose, coming closer. It was cycling slowly but powerfully, and Kaz thought she might have been meditating.
The door creaked open, and Lianhua peered out, amethyst eyes wary. The wariness melted into a smile the moment she saw Raff and Kaz, and she stepped outside, closing the door gently behind her. She had a small, dim ki-orb floating over her shoulder, and as Kaz’s eyes adjusted to the sudden illumination, he realized for the first time that the den was entirely lit by firemoss torches, without a single light generated by a female kobold.
“She’s sleeping finally, I think,” Lianhua murmured, casting a glance at the door behind her. “I found a female kobold in there when I started looking around. She’s tied up, and I think her core may have been contaminated by the fulan. She can’t speak well, and her-”
She stopped, glancing at Raff, and said, “Something seems strange about her,” which Kaz was fairly certain wasn’t what she had started to say.
Raff’s eyes were narrowed in thought, and he said, “Hod told us their chief was ‘infected’, an’ she’s around here somewhere. Unless they’re keeping another monster-in-the-making, you probably found her.”
Lianhua sighed. “I wondered. Her bed is made of a lot of moss for a tribe that isn’t able to find much that isn’t contaminated. She’s wearing a really nice loincloth, too, for a-” She stopped, biting her lip, and this time her sidelong glance was at Kaz.
He sighed and tapped Raff’s arm. The male couldn’t feel it through his metal shell, of course, but it made a soft metallic sound that worked just as well as a touch.
“I’m ready to get down,” Kaz said, and was placed on his paws so quickly that it almost counted as being dropped. Still, Raff had dropped him more than once, so this was actually an improvement.
“Good,” the warrior said. “You need a bath. Again. You’re heavy for a little guy, too.”
Kaz was absolutely certain that his weight was nothing to someone who had refined his body as much as Raff, but he didn’t argue.
“Thank you. I think I’ve recovered enough to walk on my own now.”
Raff snorted. “Then I’ll be out here. No way I’m going into a little hut with one of those things, even if it still looks like a kobold. I suggest you two find a different hut to hang out in, but if you do go back in there, scream if you need help.”
Kaz and Lianhua exchanged glances, then Lianhua smiled at Raff and said, “I think my presence soothes her, so I’ll go back in. It’s up to Kaz if he wants to join me, though.”
Kaz glanced at the door. He’d left the heightened flow of ki to his eyes, and now that he was closer, he could clearly see the rusty stain of fulan, stark against the yellow and black of the chief’s core. He wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea of being in an enclosed space with it, but he was curious.
Litz had seemed quietly furious, but otherwise normal, and he knew she’d eaten at least three cores. He could only see two in this female, but she was already so far gone, and he wondered what the difference was. Was it simply that she had been infected for longer, or was something else keeping the changes wrought by the fulan at bay? And why hadn’t she tried to attack Lianhua? Or had she, but she’d been unsuccessful because she was bound, and Lianhua was choosing not to mention it?
“I’ll go in,” he decided, and Li hissed in his ear. The dragon flapped her wings again, this time lifting away from him except for the claws she had tangled in his fur. She was not happy at the idea of going anywhere near the being inside the hut.
Lianhua reached out as if to pet the dragon, or perhaps take her, and Li’s long neck twisted as she snapped at the human female’s fingers. Kaz jerked back, reaching up to pull Li down into his arms. She bit at him, too, but much less enthusiastically.
Raff watched this interchange with a look of puzzlement that shifted to something too close to contemplation for Kaz’s comfort. He gave an awkward laugh and spoke as if to Li. “You can’t jump off of me. It’s dangerous. No one would just let a fuergar run around in the den.”
He tilted his head so he could watch Raff’s expression, but it didn’t change as much as Kaz had hoped. The big man didn’t say anything, though, just watched Li like he was trying to decide something.
Lianhua trilled a little laugh, lifting her hand to cover her mouth so her teeth didn’t show. “I’m sorry, Li,” she said. “Did I startle you? I won’t do it again.” She tucked her hands into her sleeves as if to prove her sincerity.
Raff opened his mouth, then closed it again, looking between the two of them. “Guess I’ll check out th’ rest of the huts, then. See if there are any other flesh-eating atrocities hiding anywhere. Remember, just scream if you need me.”
Lianhua gave him a chastising look, then stepped to the side, opening the door to the hut behind her. Kaz ducked beneath her arm, keeping his hand on Li’s wings so she couldn’t try to take off again. His legs were still a little weak, so he was focused on the dragon and shifting his ki so he could stay upright, so when he did finally look up, he was entirely unprepared for what he saw.