They ate what they could find, and drank when they followed the sound of water to tiny pools or glittering droplets slowly falling from the ceiling. Twice, they ran into lopo, but in Kaz’s new vision, their cores burned with shades of yellow and black ki, and neither of them were large enough that their hooked tongues could reach him as he circled around.
He slept, briefly but deeply, while Li remained awake, and the dragon slept as he carried her ever onward into the mountain. Though the path was long and winding, he was certain they must have wandered through at least six or seven levels, even given how far apart the levels were in the heights. Time passed, for others, if not for them, and Kaz grew steadily more certain that the humans must have long since left him behind.
Kaz found himself talking to the little dragon, though he knew silence was far safer. She responded with whistles and clicks, and the flow of feelings and images between them grew stronger and clearer with each small conversation.
Li’s favorite story was the one of her birth, or rather, his acquisition of her egg. She prodded at his mind, flashing images of larger dragons surrounded by smaller dragons, all copies of Li, until Kaz gave in and told the tale again. She shivered and huddled against him each time he mentioned the terrible black dragon who had chased her family away, but at the same time he felt a kind of fierce determination building up inside her to someday find or avenge her parent.
Kaz huffed a little breath as he turned yet another corner in yet another winding passage. He knew he was still going down, and the way had opened out into broader, more finished passages some time ago, but he was still just as lost as he had been when he left the woshi’s den.
“You can’t beat that black dragon,” he told her again. “It was twice as large as your parent, and you’re…” Less than half the size of any of the other baby dragons, he thought, and though he tried to keep it from her, he knew she’d understood.
A wing lifted and beat against his ear, a sharp smack that he’d become far too accustomed to recently. Still, it didn’t really hurt, and he was used to Katri nipping his ears, so the sensation was oddly nostalgic.
He growled softly at her, but he knew she knew he didn’t mean it. “I won’t tell you the story next time you ask, if you’re going to get too angry about it.”
Kaz felt her dismay, but she just hissed at him before settling down in sulky silence. And into that silence, a kobold’s howl resonated, faint but unmistakable.
He froze, his ears perking up. Another howl came, querying, and he turned his head, looking into a deep, narrow fissure in the stone beside him. Too narrow to pass through, but it was a beginning. He had a direction at last.
Kaz had always been good at finding his way. He had a sense of the mountain, an ever-present feeling of knowing exactly where he was in relation to it. Given a single familiar formation, a once-glimpsed cavern, or a certain turn within a tunnel, he could find his way home. He had always been the first to memorize a new territory, and his early habit of exploration had probably developed because he was very rarely truly lost.
Now, he knew the sound had come from this way, and as he hurried forward along what had been just another trackless tunnel only moments before, he knew he needed to turn, then turn, then slip down into a crevice just wide enough to allow him passage. This way would take him toward that sound, and that sound would bring him to more kobolds.
He had noticed that his ears were now as sensitive as his eyes, and his nose even more so. He could tell how long it had been since a fuergar passed before him, and had avoided a large cavern that nearly knocked him over with the sound and stench of janjio.
He caught the first whiff of kobold long before he saw any sign of them, and knew that he was getting close. Too close, perhaps, if the tribe was one of the more aggressive ones. He slowed from what he belatedly realized was a near-run, and then stopped to think about what he was doing.
Li lifted from his shoulder, her scales whispering against one another as she rose. Fragile wings disturbed the air, and for the first time in a while, he flinched, worried that she might be heard.
Turning, he looked up at her, her golden body glowing in his vision, trailed by the string of ki that linked them together. The ring Lianhua had given them seemed to glitter with its own light, snug against the dragon’s small leg.
“You’re going to have to pretend to be a fuergar,” he told her. “And fuergar don’t fly.”
Li hissed unhappily, but settled back against his shoulder, wrapping her tail delicately around his throat. She sent a picture of a plump little rodent crawling into a pack, along with a sense of uncertainty.
He shook his head, fingers touching the remains of his bag, which still clung to his waist. This reminded him that he also held his knife, something that had become such a habit during their wanderings that he had nearly forgotten he could put it down.
Should put it down.
In fact, now that Kaz thought about it, finding kobolds again was probably at least as risky as being lost. To them, he would be a strange male pup with a potentially dangerous beast clinging to his shoulder. He had been far more fortunate than he had any right to expect when Nadi had simply accepted him and Li. This time, however, he wouldn’t have the humans to buffer his meeting with the tribe, rendering him a weak and easily dismissed detail in comparison.
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Plus, he had nearly forgotten about the bizarre changes within himself. He no longer dared to use any but the barest edge of the ki flowing through his still-strained channels, fearing that any shift could upset the fragile balance allowing his core to continue to function. Sometimes the mental image of golden sheaths reinforcing those channels slipped when he became distracted, and once it had taken both him and Li what seemed like ten minutes or more to restore the function of his legs.
In his own vision, he glowed, in a way he was certain he never had before, even when he had thought he was full to overflowing with power. He was almost sure, now, that even Oda had never sensed anything strange about him, which probably meant few, if any, other females would have noticed, other than Rega, who knew him far better than anyone else, including his own sister.
But now? Would he now burn as brightly to them as they did to him? Would they sense the ki that threatened to boil from him, saturating his flesh and his expanded, fractured core? Would any female who saw him strike him down as if he was as much a monster as any janjio or lopo?
Kaz stood, fingers nervously clutching the hilt of a weapon he would never be allowed to keep. A creature most kobolds saw as particularly annoying food clung to his neck, while he seared the air with power too strong to be contained.
He could go no further. Whether a male killed Li or took away the knife, or a female struck Kaz himself down, walking into the territory of these kobolds would be like climbing into the maw of a lopo without waiting for it to stab him with its tongue. Even if he left Li and the knife behind, tucked away in some convenient shelter, his own flesh could easily betray him.
No. He had to hide. Had to treat these kobolds as if they were as much a threat as any other monster lurking within the mountain. If he could figure out where he was, and how to reach the stairs, perhaps he could yet catch up with the humans. Their ignorance and their strength were his only protection now.
Kaz drew in a slow, shuddering breath, the lingering scent of kobolds tracing through his nostrils; fur and musk and something like… metal? Yes, metal, but with the sharp, distinctive tang of copper. So, a tribe who used copper. What form did it take? Weapons? Armor?
He cast his mind back, letting the bloody aroma pull him into memory. The Coppertalons were higher than this, he was certain, and the Coppermane tribe was all but destroyed by the Silverfists in a particularly vicious luegat, so he doubted they still had enough kobolds to cling to a territory this close to the middle of the mountain. There was a tribe whose lead male wielded two copper knives at once, and another whose females wore the copper-coated skulls of fuergar mounted on their shoulders. Knowing which one this was would help Kaz place himself on his mental map.
But how to find out without risking detection? He was already close enough that his own scent might give his presence away. He could try finding something to cover his smell, but every kobold knew the odor of the plants that were commonly used for that purpose, so that in itself could be suspicious.
Then he remembered Rega, and the ‘forbidden magic’ she used to cover the smell of the Broken Knives as they retreated into the fuergar nest. Whatever she had done, it had kept the core hunter from finding them, at least long enough for Kaz to find them first. How had she done it? Were there convenient instructions in the chief’s book, or was it something that was taught, mother to daughter, whispered in secret caves and hidden away by silence?
But Kaz had a core, too, and so did Li. More importantly, the little dragon’s core was still fully functional. Could they figure out what trick Rega had used? And, as long as they were at it, perhaps they could also discover how Oda and Katri hid in shadow. If he could trick the kobold’s senses, he could approach close enough to gather the information he needed.
Closing his eyes, Kaz tried to remember the feeling of muffled, distant scent lingering in his nose. The smells had been familiar, but old, all but lost within the overwhelming musk of the fuergar nest. One faint, unfamiliar smell could easily be made to vanish beneath a flood of more urgent information, if Kaz could only figure out how to do it.
A twinge stabbed through his belly as he unconsciously shifted the ki in his nose. Smells grew stronger, then weaker, but he could tell he was only affecting his own senses, and each time, something fragile and infinitely deadly shifted inside him.
Li’s sharp teeth latched onto his ear, and Kaz snapped out of the near-stupor he had been sinking toward. His belly churned, and he crouched, arms wrapping around his body as he whimpered softly.
A picture formed. The little golden dragon’s mouth swelled, teeth growing larger and larger, until they finally snapped, open and closed, biting off the snout of a miniature blue kobold. There was no blood, and the kobold, who had been simply standing there as the dragon grew, just continued staring into the distance, apparently unconcerned about its abrupt disfigurement.
Kaz tilted his head. “You think you can do it?” he asked Li.
She lifted a wing, preening the edges of a scale with teeth far smaller than those of her mental counterpart. Calm self-satisfaction came through their link.
Kaz blinked. How could she possibly know? She had still been in her egg when Rega died, so Li couldn’t even have figured it out by observing Kaz’s aunt.
Sensing his doubt and confusion, Li hissed softly, and he felt her core pulse with power. Abruptly, the scent of kobolds and copper faded, then vanished, and Kaz clapped a hand to his snout in sudden concern that the little dragonling might somehow have managed to eat his nose without him noticing.
All seemed to be in order, however, and Kaz quickly discovered that the effect wasn’t nearly as complete as it had seemed at first. It was simply that his sense of smell had returned to something much closer to where he had started, without the recent enhancement granted by his seeping ki.
“Can you do that to other kobolds?” he asked the dragon. “Or just me? Is it because our ki is linked?”
Li shook her head, then shifted from foot to foot. She wasn’t as certain as she’d like him to believe, but he could tell she believed she could do it. When he asked her how, a deep feeling of ambivalence reached him. The image of the clear blue sky grew within his mind; he felt wind sweep over wing membranes, and warmth radiate from the blazing orb above. Li had never seen the sky, never flown in it, but she knew.
Was it instinct? What kind of instinct told her how to conceal her smell? Was it something dragons did? Perhaps a skill they used to sneak up on their prey?
Kaz shared a picture of Katri, covered by the shadow shield, hiding from swooping janjio as the humans killed the attacking beasts. “Can you do this as well?”
The golden head tilted. Left. Right. Black and white swirls spun in golden eyes. Agreement but contradiction. Yes but no. Something similar, perhaps, but not the same.
It was enough. It would have to be enough. Enough, at least, to move forward. He should see totems before there was any real risk of notice, and that by itself might tell him what tribe this was and at least what general area they were in. As long as the tribe wasn’t on alert, the only guards should be with groups of gatherers, and so long as Kaz himself was as silent as he could be, he should hear them before they heard him.
Crouching, Kaz trimmed the long claws on his toes. Usually, they were kept long, and many adults even sharpened them. They were another weapon in the too-small arsenal of an individual kobold. Right now, however, even a single extra click or scrape might be enough to put a warrior on alert. He had to be stealthy. No sound, no sight, no smell. Today, he would be the stalking beast among the kobolds.