Kaz’s light was a small, flickering thing. It looked like a flame, rather than the pure, clear light of both Gaoda and Lianhua’s ki. Still, it was enough. He could see his hands, and the craggy slope down which he crawled. The sounds coming from below didn’t sound quite so ominous, and he no longer felt like something lurked in the darkness, waiting.
Drawing in a deep breath, Kaz pushed himself away from the rock, resuming his movement downwards. Without Lianhua’s reassuring presence, he couldn’t slip back into that trance-like state that had allowed him to look within himself, but that was fine. He didn’t know how much farther he had to go, but surely it wasn’t more than a hundred feet or so, given how clear the sounds of battle had become. He could distinctly hear the humans calling to each other, and the occasional grunt or yell.
“...can’t you do anything?” That was Gaoda’s voice.
“They’re too high up. If I can’t reach ‘em, I can’t hit ‘em.” Raff said, sounding frustrated.
“Chi Yincang! There!” Lianhua called, and a flash of light illuminated the shaft from below.
A strange, gravelly screech followed, along with Gaoda and Raff’s shouts of triumph.
“One left!” Gaoda called. “Raff, draw it out.”
Looking down over his shoulder, Kaz saw Lianhua standing on the ground at the bottom of the pit, holding her empty bow, her eyes locked on something above and to her right. It was only another nine or ten yards to the ground, but now that he was close enough, Kaz could tell the shaft ended a good twenty feet above her head, leaving him only another two or three yards to traverse.
Kaz’s light flickered, guttered, and went out as he stopped feeding it power, but the radiant glow of Lianhua’s orb made up for the loss. The world dimmed, but Kaz’s surroundings didn’t fall back into darkness, so he just continued climbing down, though he wasn’t sure what he would do when he reached the bottom.
Lianhua dodged to the side as a gray spike the width of her arm flashed through the spot where she’d been standing. Kaz froze in place. That was a lopo tongue, but it was by far the largest he’d ever seen. Still, the barbed shape and the way it moved were distinctive, so he had no doubt what it was.
As Lianhua jumped, she nocked and aimed a ki arrow, shooting it back in the direction from which the tongue had come. A second arrow followed the first, but Kaz could tell by the frustrated look on her face that she hadn’t dealt the lopo a serious blow.
Kaz’s lower paw scratched at the slope, then dangled into space before he pulled it up. In that instant, a much smaller gray spike stabbed through the air where his paw had been, scraping against the edge of the shaft and breaking free a few chips of stone. These fell on Lianhua’s head, and she flinched back, turning her bow toward the new threat.
When she saw Kaz crouched at the end of the tunnel, an expression of near-panic filled her face. “No! Stay there!” Her voice was thin, but Kaz’s claws bit into the stone in response.
A second small lopo tongue quested toward him, curling up around the lip of the tunnel opening. The hooks on the end glistened with the paralytic poison the lopo produced, and Kaz scrambled away from it. He knew from experience that the tongue could stretch to three or four times the length of the lopo’s body, and he had no idea how large or far away this one was.
A burst of light pulsed from Lianhua’s bow, and an arrow flew toward Kaz, striking just out of sight against the ceiling of the cavern below him. A creature squalled, and the tongue thrashed, its barbs catching on the fragile edge of stone around the lip of the opening through which Kaz stared. To his horror, another, larger chunk of stone tore away, tumbling toward Lianhua, who stepped to the side, out of its way. The rock cracked to the floor, shattering into several larger chunks, and apparently drawing the attention of the large lopo again.
One of the huge gray tongues appeared again, lashing out at the human female, and this time she didn’t manage to dodge completely. She had been watching Kaz as he scrambled to find new footing, and only turned her head when Raff shouted her name. She immediately rolled, but the tongue clipped her, spinning her around and making her tumble to the ground. Fortunately, she wasn’t impaled, but she lay there, trying to catch her breath.
Raff appeared, his sword slashing through the air as yet another tongue struck out at the fallen female. The weapon sliced through the tongue, severing the tip so it fell, writhing on the floor. Raff kicked it away and turned his back on Lianhua as she shakily pulled herself to her feet. He held his weapon at the ready, fending off two more attempts by the lopo to stab and pull up one or both of the humans.
Kaz’s heart was pounding in his chest, but he turned his body around so his head hung down toward the open hole. Cautiously, he extended a hand into open air, then yanked it back. Nothing happened, so he tried again, letting the limb remain for a few rapid heartbeats this time. Then, satisfied that the lopo that had been trying to get him was either dead or distracted, Kaz poked his head down, into the cavern below, taking in everything he could during the moment before he retreated once again.
The cavern ceiling was absolutely blanketed in stalactites. How many of these were lopo, and how many were innocent mineral deposits, Kaz didn’t know, but even in his brief glance, he had been able to see tentacles hanging limply from the splayed-open tips of at least a dozen lopo the humans had already killed. All of the dead ones were three to five feet long, which was about what Kaz had expected. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said of the one that was attacking the humans.
The thing was easily three yards long, by far the largest lopo Kaz had ever seen. He had no idea how many tongues the thing had, but at least a dozen were waving around, though several were shorter than the others, looking like they had already met Raff or Chi Yincang’s blades.
Chi Yincang was leaping through the air as nimbly as ever, his weapon striking out at the lopo, but it looked like he couldn’t get past the tongues to reach the monster itself. For some reason, Gaoda was hiding behind a stand of stalagmites, rather than shooting his ki balls at the creature, while Raff was just standing, though he was clearly ready to attack anything that came close enough. The situation seemed to be at a standoff, with the humans unable to attack the lopo directly, while the lopo couldn’t get past the human’s impenetrable defense.
The blood was gathering in Kaz’s head, making it pound painfully, so he turned around again, desperately trying to figure out what to do. He couldn’t get down without help, but even if he survived the fall, there was nothing he could do to help. He’d seen Oda and Rega kill a few small lopo, but they just threw what he now thought of as ki at them until they died. He had ki - at least he was fairly certain that his power was the same as that of the humans - but he didn’t know how to use it the same way they could, even if he was willing to reveal his abilities to them.
“Kaz!”
Blinking, Kaz focused on Lianhua again. She held her arms out invitingly, indicating that he should jump to her. Raff had caught him from such a height once before, but the female was so much more fragile-looking than the tall male, Kaz thought the impact might crush her, killing them both. She looked confident, but Kaz found that he wasn’t, at least not enough to convince his hands to release the stone wall.
Lianhua waved her arms in a ‘come on’ gesture. “Kaz! We’re going to retreat. Jump down so we can run for it.”
“C’mon, Blue,” Raff called from behind her, fending off another attack before throwing a look up at Kaz. “Gaoda’s out of mana, and I think even Chi Yincang’s slowin’ down.”
“Shoot through the mouth,” Kaz yelled back. “That’s its weakness!”
Raff let out a snort that carried all the way to Kaz. “Y’think we haven’t figured that out? There’re too many tentacles in the way, and it’s not like we need to kill the thing anyway. Come on!” His sword whipped out, blocking the blow of yet another tongue. He didn’t manage to cut through it this time, though, and sparks flew as his metal blade slid along the rough surface of the appendage.
Kaz was baffled. The humans had seemed so powerful. How could Gaoda ‘run out’ of mana? He didn’t have a core, but surely he could just keep pulling in more of the gray energy that seemed to fill the air around them. Why couldn’t Chi Yincang simply slice through the tongues, reducing them to stubs, then strike deep into the lopo’s defenseless gullet? Raff had no long-range attacks, and Lianhua’s arrows didn’t seem to be able to deal any real damage to the lopo’s stone-like tongues, and she couldn’t shoot past them, into the monster’s maw.
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A tongue slid down Raff’s sword, wrapping itself around his hand, where its barbs tried to bury themselves in his skin. It slipped away as Raff shook it off, but Raff swayed a little as he looked up at Kaz and growled, “Come now, or stay behind!”
Kaz drew in a shaking breath, but released his grip on the wall, allowing his body to slide down over the steeply slanted surface, though he was unable to prevent his hands from grasping at the lip of the shaft at the very last moment. His claws scratched at the stone, breaking off a few more chips that fell beside him.
As the moment stretched, his eye caught one, and it glinted like the crystal in the stone Lianhua had used to represent the lost civilization for which she searched. The shard of rock tumbled end over end, hanging in the air beside him until his body impacted Lianhua’s arms, and time sped back up. The stone dropped out of his sight, clattering against the limestone floor.
Lianhua set Kaz’s paws down with a soft grunt, and he looked up to see that her face was pale. She pressed a hand against her side as she gave him a pained smile. “One of those tentacles grabbed my leg when I landed, and then you saw that last one hit me. No serious damage, thanks to my silks, but it hurts.”
Raff raced by, grabbing Lianhua and Kaz and tucking them under his arms as he passed. “No talking,” he panted, “just running.” His feet seemed to drag, a far cry from his usual dexterity, and Kaz felt the arm wrapped around his waist trembling. Still, the human ran on, though Gaoda soon passed them, with Chi Yincang close behind him, bounding backward as he whirled his weapon, holding off the tongues stabbing at them.
As soon as they were out of reach of the monstrous lopo, Raff unceremoniously dropped Kaz onto his tail, then lowered Lianhua more gently to the ground before falling to his knees. Kaz scrambled to his feet, staring at the human, whose position brought his face down nearly to Kaz’s level. Now that he was this close, Kaz could see that Raff’s face was covered with tiny scratches, as was every other section of exposed skin. Glancing around, Kaz noted similarly oozing superficial wounds on all the males, though Chi Yincang had noticeably fewer.
Gaoda sat down abruptly, his blue silk robe so heavy with dust that it drooped, instead of seeming to float in the motionless air as it usually did. A puff rose from him at the impact, leaving the cloth noticeably cleaner, though the dust quickly resettled on Gaoda’s hair and skin, turning him nearly as gray as the lopo.
He glared at Kaz. “Did you forget to tell us a few things about these lopo, kobold?”
Kaz blinked, but refused to shrink back. “I tried to warn you. You said you could handle it.”
Raff snorted, and Lianhua nodded, though even she looked a little uncertain.
Seeing the looks the humans directed at him, Kaz edged away from them. “I was right behind you! If you were overwhelmed, and I somehow survived, I’d have had to try to get home on my own. We’re too deep, with too many enemies behind us. There’s no way I could make it without you.”
Lianhua sent Kaz an apologetic glance and nodded with more confidence, while Raff finally put away the sword Kaz had only just noticed he was still holding. Chi Yincang was as silent as ever, but Kaz no longer felt menace emanating from him.
Gaoda huffed out an angry breath. “Fine. But next time, tell us when the karma-cursed monster has poison, and that its skin is impervious to ki-attacks.”
Kaz had nodded at the first point, but froze at the second. “But it’s not.” He looked around at them all, seeing their pallor, and taking in their many small injuries. “There’s a paralytic in their saliva, but you said nothing here could hurt you, and I’ve seen females kill them with power before.”
“How, exactly?” Lianhua asked.
Kaz closed his eyes, thinking back. The first time he’d seen a lopo up close had been during one of the many times the tribe had to retreat after losing a luegat. The monsters were rare to the point of being extinct in the Deep, because none of the powerful tribes would allow a young one to survive until it reached breeding age, and every inch of the lower levels was controlled by one of those tribes. There had been several lopo in the mid-levels, but Oda somehow knew where they were, and guided the Broken Knives around the beasts each time. It wasn’t until they reached the heights that they actually confronted one of the things.
Vul, Bik’s father, and one of the last strong males in the tribe, had been impaled and pulled up into the darkness at the top of a particularly large cavern. The tribe had to pass through the cavern in order to reach the unclaimed territory where Oda planned to settle, and they couldn’t just let it pick them off one by one, so Rega threw a light up toward the ceiling, and when the lopo sent out a tongue to stab at it, Oda hurled power directly into its open mouth.
Frowning, Kaz flipped through the pages of his memory, seeing the other three times Oda or Rega had killed a lopo. Each time, they lured it into opening its mouth, then fired power deep inside the creature through the opening.
“The mouth,” Kaz said. “The skin is nearly invulnerable once they reach their full size, so you have to hit the throat.” He opened his eyes, looking around at the humans. “I didn’t know you couldn’t use power on the skin either. Neither Oda nor Rega ever even tried it.”
Raff sighed, and his arms went limp, so he fell flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. Several stalactites hung above them, but they were all small enough that even if they were lopo, their tongues wouldn’t be long enough to reach the party. Young lopo usually preyed on large insects, then flying creatures like janjio and lanma, not ground-dwelling creatures.
“Don’t suppose you know a cure for this paralytic, then, Blue?” he asked, slurring slightly. “I’m resistant to poison, but I haven’t felt this weak since I was a kid.”
This Kaz had an answer for, and he nodded eagerly. “Firemoss. It’s the same thing we use for torches, if we get lost in the dark. Kobolds carry some with them at all times.”
Gaoda’s eyes lit up, and his hand darted out, aiming for Kaz’s pack. Kaz yelped, barely managing to dodge thanks to the effects of the lopo’s paralytic slowing the human. “I don’t have any!” He spread his arms, backing away. “I, um, used it on the way down here. You all left, and it was dark, so…” He shrugged helplessly, and Gaoda’s teeth ground audibly.
“What good are you, then?” the human mumbled, but turned to look around them instead of trying for the pack again. “Where does this firemoss grow?”
Kaz shrugged. “Everywhere. It has to be near water, but it doesn’t care how much. If there’s even the tiniest trickle, there’s probably some firemoss nearby.” He turned to point back into the deeper area of the cavern, where the huge lopo had fallen quiescent, once again simply looking like a larger-than-normal stalactite.
“There’s probably some in there somewhere,” he told them. “Rega said stalactites form when water seeps through the stone, so each stalactite represents a spot where water has been dripping down for hundreds or thousands of years. The lopo hide among stalactites, so some of them have to be real. Real stalactites mean water, and water means firemoss.”
Lianhua tilted her head, her tone shifting to the almost absent one she used when something had piqued her curiosity. “Why call it firemoss if it grows near water? Just because you use it for torches?”
Grimacing, Kaz admitted, “No. It’s because when the fluid squeezed from the moss catches fire, it burns until it’s completely used up. That’s why we rarely use it for anything other than the torches, which take a very small amount. A few tribes who didn’t have enough adult females to maintain their lights and cooking fire burned down their dens when their stores of oil caught a spark.”
Raff groaned. “An’ you want’ us t’eat that?”
“Oh. No,” Kaz said. “You paint the oil on the wound and then set it on fire. It burns out the paralytic.”
Raff made a protesting noise, but Lianhua said, “Which is already in the bloodstream. How would that work?”
Kaz shrugged helplessly. “It just does. My uncle Kellin was struck by a lopo not long before he was traded to the Graybelly tribe.” He touched his fingers to his left bicep, in the spot his uncle’s wound had been. “Rega burned out the paralytic so quickly it barely had time to take effect.”
If possible, the humans had become even paler, and Gaoda was now on the ground beside Raff. The light orb that was his constant companion flickered and went out. Lianhua sat down as if her legs had given out beneath her, and pulled up her robe to look at a long red scratch on her calf.
“What happens if we just let it run its course?” she asked, glancing from Kaz to Chi Yincang, who was now the only human left on his feet.
Kaz’s ears dropped, and he whined softly. “Not many kobolds survive a lopo attack, but when they do, the firemoss is used immediately. I don’t know what would happen if we didn’t burn it out.”
Chi Yincang’s voice was as colorless as his clothes when he said, “Gaoda Xiang, Raff, and I will survive. We may become unconscious, or simply be unable to move for a time, but we will live.” His black eyes turned to Lianhua. “The young mistress may not.”
Gaoda Xiang’s voice was choked when he said, “Get.. the.. moss, Chi Yin-” His lips froze, and he stared glassily at the ceiling. For a moment, Kaz thought Chi Yincang was wrong, and Gaoda had died, but his chest continued to move up and down, though the movement was shallow.
Chi Yincang attempted to bow, but instead tilted forward, barely able to catch himself on his hands so he didn’t land face-first on the stone. He rolled over, managing to sit upright, but the cords in his neck stood out like the string of a tripwire. His hands flattened on the ground as he attempted to stand, but it was useless.
Meanwhile, Lianhua had removed the belt from her robe and shakily wrapped it around her leg, tying it off just above the knee. When she saw Kaz turn to her, she shrugged jerkily. Her words were slightly garbled as she said, “I don’t know if it will help, but this’s the only wound I have. Maybe… slow the effects long enough… for you to go find some… moss.”
Kaz stared at her, then the others, realizing that the seemingly invincible humans were all thoroughly incapacitated. He gritted his teeth, then stood. Meeting Lianhua’s gaze, he nodded, fists clenching at his side.
“I’ll be right back,” he promised. “Don’t-”
One side of her mouth twitched up, but she didn’t say anything else, so Kaz turned and ran into the darkness.