To say that everyone was surprised when they returned without Raff was an understatement. Once Kaz explained, however, everyone except Kyla and Jinn seemed to agree he’d made the right decision.
“If he has a weapon and his strength, I’m sure he’ll be well,” Lianhua said, though she didn’t look quite as certain as she tried to sound. “And we won’t leave without him. The timing simply isn’t right yet.”
By now, Jinn was practically twitching with frustration. “Would you say that if he was your brother?” she demanded, glaring from Lianhua to Kaz.
Lianhua’s eyes flickered away and she sighed. “Perhaps not, but you are his sister, not someone with whom he has adventured. You didn’t see him battle a monstrous amalgamation of all things unholy, nor did you see him fight his way through an underground city full of enemies. Here, he has only a few xiyi and, excuse me Kaz, stunted kobolds to battle, and plenty of time to reach his full strength before doing so. And that’s only if he can’t hold on and sneak away sometime when he isn’t being watched.”
Snen nodded. “From here, it is less than ten minutes to the surface. If this friend waits for the right moment, he can be halfway out before anyone notices he’s missing. We once had a human who nearly made it, simply by timing his escape correctly.”
“And was he eaten by dragons or poisoned by one of your horrible devices?” Jinn asked furiously.
Kaz understood why the female was worried about her brother, and honestly, it warmed his heart. He couldn’t remember a time when Katri stood up for him like this. On the other hand, arguing about it now was only delaying Raff’s eventual rescue.
Reina obviously felt the same way, because she took a deep breath, straightening her shoulders as she said, “And do you think standing here is helping him? If we’re caught because we lingered, does that make the risk he’s taking worthwhile? Raff is an adult, and this is his choice. We should respect that.”
Much like siblings, the two females seemed to argue as often as they got along, but this time when Jinn opened her mouth to continue the quarrel, she closed it again. “You’re right,” she mumbled. “It’s just that I worry about him. All the time. When I was young, what he did sounded so exciting, but now all I can think is that he could die somewhere, and we would never even know.” Tears stood in her eyes as she finished speaking.
“We have a saying,” Snen said, startling them all. “Fengan meiyoushe, fengan yiqie. In risking nothing, you risk everything. Your brother has chosen to take a risk in order to allow you to regain your people, and I am doing the same for a chance to regain mine.” He leaned forward, bowing his head. “Please, we need to go.”
No one had a response to this, so together, they skulked around the edge of the open space, careful to make no noise at all. When they reached the exit, however, Jinn wasn’t the only member of the party to cast a glance back toward the dimly lit building they left behind.
Just as Snen had told them, they passed four tunnels, each marked with runes scratched into the stone near the entrance, just as a kobold tribe might do deep within long-held territory. Lianhua lost half a step at each of these runes, her eyes scanning them as if burning them into her memory, but if they were new to her, she didn’t stop to ask what they meant. None of them spoke, not knowing who or what might be near enough to hear sound carried down a passage.
At the fifth tunnel, Chi Yincang reappeared beside Lianhua, the first time Kaz had seen him since before they entered the passage. The dark male glanced from Snen to the opening ahead and nodded briefly before bowing to Lianhua. He vanished again as quickly as he’d come, but Kaz chose to interpret the exchange to mean that Chi Yincang was confirming the xiyi’s words, and there was, indeed, an exit in that direction.
As soon as Chi Yincang disappeared, Adara split off from the rest of the group. She took one step down the dark tunnel, then glanced back, meeting Lianhua’s startled gaze. Slowly, she closed a single eye, lifting a hand to press her mouth against the palm, then blowing across her hand toward Yingtao. Lianhua’s hand darted out, silently intercepting whatever the gesture meant, and one corner of Adara’s mouth turned up in a smile. Then she was gone, leaving the rest of them to stare after her with mixed expressions of shock and outrage.
There was nothing to be done about the female abandoning them, however, so Snen led them on past that turning, and three more after that. At the ninth intersection, the xiyi took them left, and then through a series of winding passages that Kaz was only able to keep track of because of his experience in quickly memorizing new territories.
He began to notice patterns in the runes as they turned, and it seemed they were following a particular one that looked uncomfortably like the symbol Kyla had identified as ‘dragon’, and Lianhua called ‘Emperor’. There was enough difference, however, that Kaz couldn’t be certain it had anything to do with that one. He had already learned that two similar runes could mean wildly varying things, and while Lianhua assured him he would eventually be able to puzzle them out from other runes nearby, he wasn’t there yet.
The question became moot when they turned away from the rune the next time it appeared, Snen stretching out an arm to stop them. He lifted a finger to his lips in a universal symbol for quiet, and Lianhua shook her head, gesturing for everyone to draw close to her. She sketched the symbol for ‘silence’ on the wall beside her, flooding it with her ki, and a dome of power swallowed them up.
“You can speak,” she told Snen, “but this is a large area to cover, so hurry, please.”
If Snen was a human, his eyebrows would probably have climbed toward his hairline, but instead his long neck curved and his whole head reared back in surprise. He looked at Kaz, however, and spoke quickly. “This is where my friend works. I must share with him what Kaz told me of how to remove the duqiu and fangqiu. Otherwise, if I die, the knowledge will be lost with me. Remain here, and I will return momentarily.”
Lianhua’s brows furrowed, and she said, “How do we know you haven’t brought us to a room full of guards, and as soon as you leave, they’ll descend upon us?” Kaz didn’t get the feeling that she truly believed the xiyi intended to betray them, more that she was asking because the question was clearly visible in Jinn and Reina’s eyes.
Kaz gritted his teeth but nodded, and Lianhua brushed away her rune. Li’s core spun, and she vanished to all eyes except Kaz’s. So everyone else watched Snen as he disappeared, while Kaz watched Li instead.
Snen walked down the tunnel, past one intersection, and turned right at the next one. There was no way he couldn’t feel Li’s weight, but he gave no sign of it, not even turning to look at the space where she clung.
A few feet down this passage, a piece of cloth hung over another opening, providing some semblance of privacy to the space beyond. It wasn’t as good as a hut, at least not to Kaz, but better than nothing. The cloth was dyed a bright and cheerful yellow, and when Snen swept it aside with his arm, it seemed heavy and well-made.
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Inside, a figure sat hunched over a table, a pen scratching at the page in front of it. A long robe covered the body from neck to floor, concealing almost all of the body and much of the chair in which it sat as well.
Kaz’s breath caught in his throat at the eerie resemblance to Nucai, and Li mantled as she swallowed back a hiss. she said, and Kaz could feel her hesitate, torn between fear and hatred.
Then the figure looked up, and the momentary familiarity vanished, scattered like yumi spores. This was no humanoid with cold, reptilian eyes and too-sharp teeth, but an aged xiyi, who went from confusion to pleasure and back to confusion when he took in his visitor.
The old xiyi’s once-bright scales were now a dull blue-gray, and the spikes that crested his forehead almost seemed to sag. His eyes were yellow as much with age as the natural coloring of his race, and when he stood, he had to brace one hand on the battered wooden desk at which he sat. He held out the other hand to Snen, his long claws cracked and as yellow as his eyes, and his fingers stained with ink. His core, however, burned bright with almost as much blue ki as little Gram, the chief of the newly reformed Woodblade tribe.
“Snengriak, what are you doing here? You should be-”
Snen fell to his knees in front of the old xiyi, his head falling forward in that way he seemed far too familiar with. Li, realizing what he was doing, shifted her body out of the way, nearly slipping from Snen’s scaly shoulders.
“My duqiu is gone, Kus Ukark,” he said, “and I have come to tell you how it was done.”
It was a good thing that Li had moved, because the elder’s fingers were on Snen’s neck, poking and prodding at the wounds there. With surprising surety, they located the place where the orb had rested beneath the skin, finding nothing there but scales, bone, and the tissue that should lay in between.
Kus Ukark - though Kaz and Li thought the first part might be a title of respect - leaned in so close that Li had to wriggle around to Snen’s chest instead. The xiyi’s tongue, smaller and thicker than that of a true dragon, but split at the end, flickered out, touching the injuries left by Kaz and Li’s teeth.
“I taste a kobold,” the old xiyi said, sounding thoroughly confused. “And…a dragon?”
Snen nodded. “A true kobold came, following one of the humans we took today. A friend. He had a dragonet with him. Not quite an adolescent, but no longer a hatchling, I think, though it was very small. Kus, the dragon does not bear the curse.”
Li was less than pleased by this description of her, but Kaz was more focused on something else. Raff often used the word ‘curse’, and given the context Kaz had believed it was simply a word used to express anger or surprise. But Snen wasn’t using it like that, and Kaz would very much like to know what the xiyi did mean.
“Tell me,” Kus Ukark said, and Snen did. It was brief, and often less than flattering to one member of the party or another, but it was all true, and the older xiyi listened with every evidence of fascination.
When it was done, Snen looked up at Kus Ukark, his eyes bright and hopeful. The older xiyi hissed thoughtfully, and did something none of them expected. His hand shot forward, almost poking Li in the eye. The dragon jerked back, dropping her concealment as she, too, hissed, releasing a cloud of vapor that was only cool because she’d been too surprised to produce heat as well.
Kus Ukark instantly dropped his head, baring the back of his neck to Li. His scales were so thin and frail that the ball of the rune-stone beneath his skin stood out as a break in the pattern of his backbone.
“This one begs your pardon, wronged one,” the old xiyi said, “but can you understand me?”
Li blinked. This was the first time since she met Lianhua that anyone had seemed properly awed by her mere presence. Even Lianhua no longer acted like that, however, the female having lost much of her admiration of Li’s majesty during their time as captives of the mosui.
Slowly, Li nodded her head.
Kus Ukark pressed himself even closer to the floor, his old joints creaking, and his tail protruding from beneath his robe. “This one begs you to forgive him,” he said. “In our haste and our pain, we inflicted upon you the same sorrow you once gave us. But our people never lost their ability to think, to regret what we did not have, which meant it was possible for us to achieve freedom. We took that from you, and it is the greatest shame of our lives.”
Neither Li nor Kaz understood what this meant, and since Snen, too, was now bowing beside his friend, it was obvious that the xiyi weren’t going to explain. With no better idea what to do, Li raised one wing and bowed her head with slow grace, like Lianhua with her fan.
Both xiyi breathed a sigh of relief, but when Snen went to stand, Kus Ukark grabbed the younger reptilian and held him in place. Shifting backward, he pointed to one of the larger wounds on Snen’s neck. “You and the kobold did this?”
Kus Ukark’s head was almost on the ground this time as he said, “Can this old one beg for the ss-same?” he asked, voice lingering on the sibilants.
Then the old xiyi simply laid flat on the ground, hands outstretched in supplication. “Pleasssse,” he hissed.
So Kaz reached out and caught the knobby little stone in a field of ki, and Li bit him. She was far gentler than she had been with Raff, but there was no way to make tearing a foreign object from someone’s body with her teeth into a pleasant experience.
Kaz hadn’t been certain it would work, given the distance that separated him from his dragon, but when Li spat the bloody sphere onto the stone, Kus Ukark was still alive. He remained alive as he and Snen recoiled from the object, which dissolved into a hissing black sludge within a heartbeat of Kaz releasing it from its casing of ki.
That was far faster than when Kaz had removed the sphere from Doran, and now he wished he’d watched when Li removed Raff’s duqiu, and when Kaz himself removed Snen’s. Had those, too, broken down almost instantly, or had they taken several seconds like Doran’s? And why was the one taken from Reina’s side the only one that had remained intact?
Dragons couldn’t cry, but they could sniffle, and both Snen and Kus Ukark were now doing exactly that. They held each other, apparently overwhelmed by this in a way that Snen losing his rune-stone after a battle hadn’t caused.
More importantly, however, was what was happening in Kus Ukark’s belly. While the duqiu had seemed utterly inert, its removal proved that was far from true. Now that it was gone, the old xiyi’s core was pulsing far more quickly than it had before, and there was a faint tinge of black and yellow ki joining the brilliant blue. The frail reptilian was already responding to the increase in his ki, moving with renewed vigor as he climbed to his paws.
Of course, as soon as he was up, Kus Ukark bowed again. “This old male thanks you, gracious one. He is unworthy of your-”
Li really wanted to bite him again. It had been nice to be respected for a little while, but it really seemed to take much too long. She was ready to get back to Kaz, and as far as she could tell, Snen had done what he came to do.
Kaz understood, but silently urged her to be patient. So instead of giving in to the urge, Li leaped upward, regaining her place on Snen’s neck and shoulders before pointedly winking out of sight once again.
Both xiyi froze, and then Kus Ukark laughed, a now-familiar rasping hiss, and Kaz finally realized why it was so pleasant. It was strongly reminiscent of Li’s purr, though there was more sibilance and less rumble to the sound. Li was pleased at the comparison, and back in the tunnel, surrounded by silent, worried humans, Kaz’s tail began to wag.