Kaz leaned forward, peering into the cavern at the end of the long, low tunnel. The last time he’d seen it, it held several huts and the remaining males from the Sharpjaw tribe. The fulan had taken its toll on the females of their tribe, and even though they all knew it was likely that the females were dead, they had refused to leave them behind entirely.

Their leader, Zyle, sent several of the younger warriors with Kaz and the humans, in hopes that they, at least, would live. Kaz left, knowing that it was unlikely he would ever return, and if he did, they would probably all be dead. But here he was, and the fulan was dying back, so he had dared to hope that Zyle and the others might have survived. Unfortunately, no guards had been at what was left of the gate, or at the stairs, which did not bode well.

Kaz gave a soft, questioning yip as he stepped into the cavern. Li called up her own shield, then ran forward a few steps and lifted off, flying away through the low-ceilinged cavern before Kaz could call her back. There was something about the heavy silence that told him all he needed to know.

Li said after a minute. She didn’t finish her sentence, but Kaz could see what she didn’t want to tell him. There was dried blood pooled on the stones beneath his paws. Too much blood. He picked his way around it, but sometimes he just couldn’t avoid it, since the ceiling was too low to allow him to jump across.

he told her. He watched the strong, glittering bond between them shift as she turned around, and waited until she glided back down beside him. Stroking her head as much for his own reassurance as hers, he continued through the cavern, looking into the huts. Many of them were intact, while others were little more than shreds of leather and splinters of bone. The blood was usually near these.

“This is Zyle’s hut,” he murmured as they drew close to it. It was one of the intact ones, and he yipped again before pushing the door open. He half expected to see the old kobold, either alive or dead, but it was as empty as the others he’d seen. That is, not quite empty, because some of the former occupant’s belongings were still there.

Li said finally, and Kaz nodded in reluctant agreement. He had truly hoped that he might be able to persuade any remaining Sharpjaws to go to the mosui city with him. He suspected that most of the once-powerful tribes in the mid-levels had been decimated by the fulan, and their remaining members might move to the city once they knew it existed. Even Zyle might have been convinced if he believed that any surviving females would go there.

As Kaz turned to go, his eye caught on something tucked beneath a large, flat-bottomed bowl, of the type kobolds used for washing loincloths and dishes. He spun back, crouching to lift the bowl, revealing a single piece of scraped-down leather covered in painted runes. The runes were far from the graceful strokes Kaz was used to seeing in Lianhua’s books, and he squinted at the thick, blocky markings as he tried to make sense of them.

“I think…it wants this taken to someone else. I can’t read the name, though.” He touched the rune that he thought was the name, but though it bore some similarity to a few of the runes Lianhua had taught him, he couldn’t make sense of it.

Li stood on her back legs, and he held it down so she could see the page. She didn’t care about reading the way Kaz did, so even though they’d shared the same lessons, she just scanned the runes without any real comprehension.

Kaz chuffed slightly. “There’s more to it. Something about his…mate? I think? Or mother.” He touched the rune, which was probably also a name, but had the mark indicating it was referring to a female. Sliding his finger along, he said, “This is definitely the rune for death, but I can’t tell if it’s past or present.”

Li said, dropping back to all four feet. The dragon sounded almost smug at the idea that Kaz’s cousin might be better at some runes than Lianhua. Kaz knew Li liked the human female, but she had definitely grown to like Kyla more since they passed through the Incinerator together, even though he doubted she would ever admit it.

Kaz nodded and rolled up the fragile piece of leather, tucking it into his pouch. With a sigh, he admitted, “There’s nothing here. We should go.”

Li nodded, and they both stepped back out into the dark den. Kaz drew in a deep breath, hoping to catch some hint of which direction either the Sharpjaws or their attacker had gone, but the scents were so faded that he couldn’t pick one out to follow.

Li flew off, heading back toward the entrance of the den, but Kaz hesitated. Closing his eyes, he pictured the old male as clearly as he could. Zyle’s patchy gray fur, bent posture, and rheumy brown eyes came into sharp focus, and Kaz focused on him, and his own desire to find the elder Sharpjaw.

For an instant, he thought it might work, but then the connection to that greater sense of ‘kobold’ was gone, leaving only an emptiness that Kaz somehow knew meant Zyle was nowhere to be found. He bowed his head, giving the soft howl that called a kobold’s ancestors to guide him to their den, and after a moment, Li picked it up, giving a high-pitched roar of sorrow.

=+=+=+=

They left that level behind, and then another, and though they heard strange sounds in the distance, nothing came for them, nor did they see or smell kobolds. Kaz’s effort to burn out the remaining fulan was the only sign that anyone had been through these levels recently, though in places he could still see the remains of his own paw prints, as well as those of his companions.

When he came to the top of the stairs leading to the level where the Redmanes lived, Kaz stopped and looked around. He was carrying Li again, since the dead gray spores were thick here, and it was hard for her to maintain her own shield while plowing through layers of grainy dust.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Why haven’t the husede made it here?” he asked, though he knew Li had no more answer than he did. He still had a creeping dread that it might be his fault, that they’d needed the black goo that had burned up in the storage cavern, and when they discovered that it was all gone, they had had to fall back on firemoss oil and the power of the few female kobolds available, who were all Redmanes. That wouldn’t have gotten them very far.

Li shook her head, clicking softly. Kaz nodded, but that didn’t make the guilt go away. Surely he could have found a way to defend himself that wouldn’t have resulted in burning an entire level of the city. Li huffed a sigh and laid her chin on his shoulder. she said reasonably, and Kaz started down the stairs.

As usual, the spores vanished the moment they entered the stairwell. Kaz held Li out, and she launched into the air, gliding down the stairs and then flying back up again. It was tricky, even at her much-reduced size, but she was getting quite good at knowing just how much she could hold her wings in without falling.

The red ki-stones tucked away in alcoves along the walls flickered at Kaz as he went by. He couldn’t help but feel that while they had once seemed eerie, almost threatening, the light now appeared almost cheerful. They were definitely brighter than they had been, as they should be, since he gave them more power every time he passed through an arch. They always drained whatever red ki he gave them in an instant, but increasingly he felt like they understood that they couldn’t take more than he offered.

They heard the first sounds when they were less than halfway down the stairs. These weren’t the distant, muffled sounds he’d become used to, but rather a loud keening, roaring, screeching noise, as of a hundred creatures all screaming at once. Kaz had heard sounds like that before, though this was the worst by far. Somewhere down there was a shiyan.

When they got close enough to hear the scratching and scraping of something huge moving around at the bottom of the stairs, Kaz called Li back. Together, they stared into the red-lit dimness. Li said.

Kaz nodded. As far as he was aware, there were only a few sets of stairs on each mid-level, and he knew better than most. The mental map he saw when he connected to the mountain certainly had gaps in it, and there could be a staircase with no ki-stones left in one of those places, but this was by far the closest set of stairs, and the one that connected to the system of broad hallways that was the only relatively safe way through. Did anyone else even know about the other one on this level, or was it one of the hidden stairways?

Li asked.

Kaz’s ears twitched in amusement. He had done that, but he didn’t think he would need to this time. “Now that the stairs are working properly, whatever that is can’t come up after us, so we should be able to get a look at it and decide then.”

Li said as a rumbling crash came from below. Kaz winced. That definitely didn’t sound good, and he suspected he’d need to give the stairs a good amount of Earth ki to repair the damage in the cavern below.

“It won’t throw anything at us if it doesn’t know we’re there,” Kaz offered, and Li was forced to admit he was right. Her ki fell over them, and they vanished from sight.

Even after they were concealed, Kaz moved slowly, and not only so he didn’t drain Li’s ki faster than her core could replace it. He’d run into too many people who could sense ki, even if they couldn’t see it like he did, and shiyan gained power and possibly abilities from each core they ate. Janjio, for instance, had an uncanny ability to know which kobold was using power to attack it and go after that one. Their eyes were tiny, able to do little more than sense light, so how did they know who to kill first, if not through something they sensed in the echoes of their screams?

His first sight of the thing made him glad he’d moved slowly, but not because it seemed to sense him. No, it was simply that this was a monstrosity greater than any of the ones he’d seen before, and he needed time to take it in.

The main body, which occupied a large part of the huge cavern below, was composed of something that looked like solid slime, with chunks of bodies dissolving inside it. Its immense size should have meant it was trapped in that space, but it seemed able to squash that part of itself into any shape it needed, though it preferred to be able to expand completely.

That part matched the description Ghazt had given of a muju, but those were usually all but immobile, hanging almost invisibly across a tunnel until something simply walked into them, at which point they engulfed their prey, which smothered inside their gelatinous folds. This had probably started out as a muju, but as with every shiyan he’d seen, it had some visible remnant of every cored creature it had eaten.

There were dozens of kobold parts, from heads to paws, along with insectile legs, chitinous jaws, antennae, wide woshi mouths, janjio wings, the dangling luminescent orbs that hung from the heads of dengyu, and a dozen other things he could barely recognize. Some legs had a dozen other legs protruding from them, and he was almost certain that there was a smaller kobold head inside the toothy maw of a renyu. It looked like nothing more than a bowl of random body parts that had been smashed together into a single gruesome mass.

Kaz swallowed hard. It was more horrifying than he could possibly describe that he might once - however briefly - have been something like this. What creature had Nucai fed the original Kaz’s core to? Had the body he’d considered his own started out as a zhiwu or a fuergar? He’d once had to fight a fuergar the size of a small kobold, so that wasn’t that great of a stretch.

Li’s hard, scaly head thumped into his jaw, and when he looked down at her, she clicked her sharp teeth at him. she asked, and Kaz gave a choked bark of laughter.

“No,” he told her, his voice rough. “I know I’m not…that. But I could have been, far too easily.”

she told him, glaring even as she leaned against his chest comfortingly.

And he was. Whatever he might have been, he was Kaz now, and in the process of becoming something much, much more. He defined who and what he was, and he was Li’s Kaz, and his own Kaz, and that would never change. Not again.

Drawing in a deep breath, Kaz nodded. “Let’s go closer,” he said. “I have an idea.”