Kaz looked down, but his view was blocked by the stone on which he stood. The sound of scratching heralded a hand, then a wary face that peered up over the carved muzzle, looking ready to leap up or drop back down at the first sign of movement. It was Bek, and his teeth were visible, lips pulled back beneath his wary eyes. Those eyes skimmed over Kaz and Li, where they stood covered by Li’s power.

“Nothing,” Bek barked, but he didn’t climb back down. Instead, he pulled himself to his paws, then crossed over to the large stone eyes glaring down at anyone who dared to enter the gaping maw below. Staring into the closest eye, he growled softly, then sighed and ducked his head in something that wasn’t quite a bow, making Kaz remember that the Copperstrikers had only risen from the mid-levels recently. Did they still repeat the old howls about their dragon master and the Voice?

After another moment, Bek deliberately turned his back on the eyes, staring straight toward Kaz and Li, where they perched on the very tip of the dragon’s nose. Kaz briefly thought the other male would walk along the narrow muzzle toward them, but instead, Bek finally climbed back down. Kaz was about to do the same when a voice stopped him.

“Baji said you thought you smelled something?” a familiar voice asked. It was a little higher than most kobold voices, thanks to its owner’s small stature and narrow build. Kaz moved back to the end of the carved nose and peered around a nostril to see Pilla’s long copper fur and steady brown eyes, which were fixed on Bek.

Bek glanced around, then nodded. “I need your eyes,” he murmured, his deep growl so quiet even Kaz had to strain to pick it up. “After that mande made it up the stairs, I don’t trust mine anymore.”

Kaz flinched. He’d never seen a mande himself, but he’d heard the howls. Every part of the creature bore a slow-acting but incurable poison. The creatures would strike from within their perfect camouflage, then track their victim for days if necessary, eventually finding and feasting on the dead body. They moved very slowly, but could climb walls as easily as walk across the floor, making it next to impossible to find them. The best way to catch and kill one was to wait by its previous victim and have a female attack the monster from a distance when she noticed parts of the body vanishing.

Pilla nodded, and then her eyes began to glow with red and yellow ki. Her central dantian drained quickly as she looked around, and Kaz dodged backwards, suddenly worried that she might be able to see him even through Li’s camouflage. Presumably she had seen the mande somehow, and the howls made it sound like that monster was, for all practical purposes, invisible.

The Copperstriker chief stepped back into Kaz’s line of sight a moment later, however, staring straight up at him. She blinked, shaking her head so her long ears swayed. “Did you check up there?” she asked Bek as her eyes faded back to normal. Her channels and dantians were all but empty now, and Kaz wondered how she was still upright, until he saw Bek’s hand surreptitiously grasping her elbow.

Bek nodded. “I did. I felt like I was being watched, but you know how it is in this cavern. Feels like that statue is just waiting to eat us all.”

Pilla chuffed a soft laugh, still looking up toward Kaz and Li. “Does it look…better to you? Like someone cleaned it up?”

The broad, powerful male flinched, glancing around. “Yes. I thought I was imagining it.”

The chief shook her head. “No. I want someone to go down the stairs tomorrow. Baji or Mik. Someone we can trust to know what to say in front of others.”

Bek’s ears twitched. “You said we were going to wait until someone came up.”

Pilla’s eyes slanted toward Bek, and Kaz fell back, released from her gaze. He could still hear them talking, but he couldn’t see them, and they shouldn’t be able to see him, even if he was visible. “I changed my mind. Chiefs are allowed to do that.” Her tone was dry, but not chastising. Bek had been out of line to question her order, but it was obvious that she didn’t really mind.

“Yes, my chief,” Bek said, his voice slightly muffled. Was he bowing or smiling? Both?

“I wish Kaz had come back,” she murmured, for no apparent reason. “Soon I’ll need to take a mate, and none of the options suit me as well.”

“That Bonewalker warrior seemed good,” Bek said in a neutral tone. “The green-furred one.”

Pilla sighed. “Yes, I’ll probably choose him. But he didn’t talk back to me. Not once.”

“Males aren’t supposed to talk back to females.”

“Kaz did,” Pilla said.

“Kaz was a very strange puppy,” Bek agreed.

Silence, then the sound of claws scratching on stone as they walked away. One set hesitated, and Pilla spoke a little more loudly as she said, “I liked him. I hope he’s safe.” Then her claws clicked away, and Kaz let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

Li asked, and there was something in her voice besides concern.

Kaz was so full of conflicting feelings that it was hard to answer, but he finally managed.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Kaz hesitated.

Li shifted in his arms.

Kaz dragged his eyes back from the direction Pilla and Bek had gone. All he could see was darkness and the cavern wall, but he could almost sense Pilla’s bright core moving away. It wasn’t quite a connection, more like that strange sense of ‘kobold that direction’ which vanished when they entered the mountain again, but it was enough to make him think.

What would have happened if he had accepted her offer? What if he followed her now, and promised to come back soon? Would she keep waiting for him? But the answers didn’t really matter. There was only room in his heart for one, and that space was very much taken.

Kaz stroked Li’s head. he told her.

Li sniffed softly, leaning into his hand.

He laughed softly, then glanced down into the cavern below. The Copperstriker guards had returned to their pacing, if they had ever stopped, and Kaz jumped down, landing easily on his paws. No sound betrayed his movement as he and Li entered the stone dragon’s mouth and began to descend the stairs.

The remains of Golik - Pilla and Litz’s brother - still lay sprawled across the bottom of the stairs. His fur was almost gone, as was most of his flesh, and the fulan spores he’d lain in had become fungus. That fungus lay over him in a thick coating of rust-red tendrils, and Kaz stared at it. The air was clear, or close enough, especially compared to what had been there before. Most of the spores that lay on the ground were gray, rather than red, making it look like dust or soot covered the stone.

He had raised a shield the moment he saw the first hint of red, and smelled a faint whiff of fulan, but the fungus was already dying back. Was its life cycle always so fast, or had Zhangwo done something to the spores he used so they would spread more quickly and then die away, leaving the area clear again? Kaz thought that must be it, because he distinctly remembered Rega teaching them a howl about a den that had been abandoned for years after a fulan infestation. Yes, it was difficult to get rid of, but that was because it couldn’t be killed easily, not because it usually spread so quickly.

Thinking about Pilla’s determination to send someone down here, Kaz pulled up the Fire ki he’d managed to regenerate, and used it to immolate Golik’s body. He gave a soft howl as it dissolved into ash, but didn’t offer even the simplest words of mourning. From what he’d seen, Golik’s ancestors were probably better off if he never found his way to them.

“Hopefully, the rest of it isn’t dangerous,” Kaz said, looking for any more of the tell-tale red color. He flared his ki-light so he could see the entire cavern, noting a few more fallen bodies, and burned them as well. He had no idea if they had been kobolds or beasts, but he said, “Fair howls,” as they crumbled anyway.

Li said, but her tone was gentle. She felt his sorrow at the loss of so many kobolds, even if these particular bodies weren’t those of his people.

Kaz sighed, watching as his paws parted the ashes and dead gray spores as he walked by. He kept the shield around his knees, just as Lianhua had, though he wasn’t doing it to conserve ki. He just didn’t want to accidentally allow in any spores as he moved, and this seemed the best way.

“I was hoping the husede might have reached here already, but I suppose it makes sense that they haven’t. If they’re trying to completely clear each level as they go, and they were all as bad as we saw, I’ll be surprised if they’ve even finished the city levels,” he admitted.

Li asked as Kaz burned another unidentifiable body.

Kaz paused, blinking. Husede only had mana, not ki, so what did they do to destroy fulan? They had seemed confident about their ability to do so, which was good, because kobold females not only usually didn’t have enough power to clear out a very large area at a time, but generally would only clear their own territory and any close enough to infect theirs. Kobolds simply didn’t have the resources to help each other anywhere except in the Deep. Life was too hard for kindness.

“I guess we’ll find out,” he told her, pausing to destroy a small patch of fungus the color of dried blood. He couldn’t even tell if it was growing on a body or other plants, but he offered a short howl just in case. “Whatever it is, it hasn’t allowed them to move any more quickly than I would have expected from kobolds alone.”

Then he thought about an enormous storage cavern, filled with containers of a thick black fluid that clung to everything it touched. That stuff had certainly burned well, but he had accidentally destroyed a vast quantity of it. Was that the husede version of firemoss oil, and had Kaz ruined their chance to clear these levels properly? He felt a little sick at the thought, and burned the next patch of still-living fungus with an unnecessarily powerful burst of ki.

Li was still in his arms, since she couldn’t fly or walk while the fulan might still be active. Now, she butted her head gently against his jaw.

Li was right. They’d really been hiding from other kobolds, not the beasts that lived here. Kaz had no intention of fighting anything he didn’t have to, but he suspected he could pull the ki from any cored creature as easily as he had from Ganring, and all shiyan - the creatures warped by fulan - had cores. Unless something managed to sneak up on him and break through his shield, Kaz and Li should be relatively safe. On the other paw, if there was only one shiyan left on a level, that would mean it had eaten all of the others, and it could be very powerful indeed. Kaz definitely didn’t want to touch fulan-twisted ki with his own. No, best to stay quiet and slip through these levels without notice, which shouldn’t be too hard, since everything here was completely and utterly dead.

Kaz continued forward, focused on simply reaching the next set of stairs. He burned every hint of red he saw, and when he heard something large howl in the distance, even his paws hurried through the drifts of dead gray spores.