In the end, Kaz left Li watching over Doran, who had fallen into a semi-conscious state. They had a feeling the human had already told them everything he knew about the dragons anyway, and Kaz desperately wished they’d been able to keep the other human, Joneh, alive. It sounded like he could have given them a lot more information.

Unfortunately, with Doran’s last statement still ringing in his ears, Kaz couldn’t convince himself it was worthwhile to continue interrogating him without the others. So now he was standing in the street behind the Bard and Bee, waiting for someone to answer his knock while Li told him what the human was doing.

Raff definitely took baths, but he also didn’t usually have clean clothes to change into. Lianhua, on the other hand, wore fuulong silk, which repelled dirt, and still seemed to either find time to wash her clothes or replace them with clean ones. Perhaps this was a difference between male and female humans? Or perhaps Lianhua was simply unusual?

The door opened, and the hairless male who sold drinks looked out at Kaz. His expression went from suspicious to surprised, and he opened the door wider, motioning for Kaz to come in.

Kaz shook his head, imagining the sound suppression rune as he said, “I need to bring something to my friends.”

Some of the suspicion returned as the man peered at Kaz’s empty hands, then lingered on the pouch at his belt. “What is it?”

Shaking his head, Kaz said, “We captured a human who may have information about what Adara wants to know. He’s-”

The other male hissed, motioning for Kaz to stop speaking. “Are you stupid? We don’t say her name, and we sure as-”

Kaz cut him off in turn. Making a small ki-light, which usually seemed to be enough to convince humans that he could use ki, Kaz said, “No one can hear us. Can I bring this person in or not?”

“She’s not here right now,” the male said.

“I can wait.”

The human looked conflicted. “Samara and I are busy working, so we can’t watch you. She wouldn’t like it.”

Kaz sighed. “I can bring this person here so she can question him, or I can do it myself, and she may not get a chance. Which would you prefer?”

“Curse it,” the other male muttered. “Fine, but I’m locking you in. You’ll be staying there until she gets back.”

Kaz nodded. He dismissed the rune, then turned and jumped straight to the roof of the building next to the Bard and Bee, ignoring the human’s gasp of surprise. It took less than a minute to run back across the roofs, even given the fact that he had to wait until no one was passing by in the streets below. He had to admit, he could see why Chi Yincang preferred to jump rather than walk. It wasn’t quite flying, but it was closer to that than walking.

Li was standing next to Doran, staring at him as he lay curled up in the deepest corner of shadow. His breathing was fast and shallow, and he looked far too hot. His borrowed clothes were soaked in sweat and sticking to his body.

This time, Kaz didn’t even try to pretend the other male was walking partially on his own. Kaz just picked him up and laid him across his shoulders, giving him a faint trickle of blue ki for healing, as well as black to hopefully help cool him down. It seemed to work, because as Kaz jumped back over the roofs, the human’s breathing slowed and deepened.

Li asked as they crouched on the edge of the final roof, watching two human females walk by. They were chatting and laughing, far too caught up in their conversation to notice him practically glaring at them.

“Probably. He mainly needs time and water, I think,” Kaz murmured. One of the females looked up as he spoke, and at first he thought she’d somehow heard him, but instead she stared down the street, then gave her friend a perfunctory farewell and rushed away.

Kaz waited until both females were out of sight before jumping down, then hurried across the deserted street to rap on the now-familiar door. This time it was the red-haired female, Samara, who brought the food who opened the door. She gaped at Kaz and Li, who hovered in the air behind him.

“What-?”

By this time, Kaz was more than tired of explaining himself to humans. Why did they always ask questions when it was clearly time for action? The female was supposed to let him in, not find out why he was carrying an unconscious male.

Turning to the side, Kaz pushed past her, trying to be as gentle about it as he could. “This male needs help,” he told her, as if it wasn’t obvious.

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“Oh. Oh! Yes, then… You can go downstairs.” She held up a key, almost as if she’d forgotten what it was for. “I’m supposed to lock you in.”

Kaz just nodded, shifting his burden to make it easier to pass through the narrow tunnel to the dusty back room. The female pushed aside the box covering the hatch, then opened it, and Kaz hurried down the stairs. Li’s wings were too wide now to fly down the stairs, so she landed awkwardly on Kaz’s head, clinging with her invisible front claws in a way that would have been impossible if she really only had wings and rear legs.

Li complained as they descended, trying to wrap her tail around Kaz’s neck, but unable to do so because of the body draped across his shoulders.

Kaz sent her an image of a huge dragon, lifting the roof from a human house so she could stare at the occupants inside. “Maybe instead of turning into a human, you can just become larger and smaller dragons,” he told her.

Li said thoughtfully.

Kaz almost missed a step, and then they were in the short passage at the bottom of the stairs. The human female used her key to unlock the door, then stood aside so Kaz could carry his burden and his dragon through the doorway, which suddenly seemed much smaller than others of its kind.

When he was through, the human simply swung the door closed between them, and he heard the lock click as the key was turned. A moment later, the female said, “Da said to tell you that if you break the door, your friends’ll be trapped in there, so just sit and wait.”

They listened as her footsteps retreated up the stairs, and then Li flew off Kaz’s head, landing on the back of a chair. Kaz lowered Doran to the ground, then crossed to the door. Without looking at Li, he said, “Why would I go back to the mountain?”

Li sighed, stretching out so her tail hung from one end of the chair, and she could lay her chin on her front feet. she said,

“I don’t have any real friends there,” Kaz answered almost automatically as he closed his eyes. He needed mana, not ki, which was simultaneously very easy and very difficult for him. His ki drifted into mana as it left his body, but all he could do with that was push it away. What he needed was mana he could actually manipulate, which meant he had to weave together all of the colors of ki into a single piece. It was something he hadn’t done since the mosui city, and he frowned as he started pulling on threads of sapphire, gold, obsidian, ruby, and moonstone.

One by one, Li sent Kaz images of other kobolds. Avli and her new mate, Dett. Ija. Little Gram and his friend Chix. The healer, Jul. Kaz’s great-aunt, Sika. Loyal Ratre. Dax, Nogz, and Eld, left behind in the nameless city the husede and kobolds were supposed to share. Silly young Ilto, with his round, fluffy ears. Pilla. Pia. Nadi, the kind Stoneborn den-mother. The few remaining members of the Broken Knives, now the Longknives, who deserved to know the truth of their history. Even Ogden, the husede who was one of Kaz’s rare friends from the time his tribe was rising through the mountain, one failed luegat at a time.

Kaz’s mind stilled as he looked at each one. Some wagged their tails, happy to see him, while others were solemn or even stern. Each had touched his life, just as he had touched theirs, at least for a little while. Were they friends? Not all of them, perhaps, but he still longed to know that they were safe. He cared about them, and knew that there was a great deal left of their howls.

“You’re right,” he admitted. “I needed to leave, but I also need to go back. But there’s no way I can defeat Nucai.” He remembered that terrible, ancient being, and the pressure of his power and fury when Kaz escaped.

And that was the real reason he felt such a compulsion to grow stronger, even at the risk of his own life. The sooner he became strong, the sooner he could go back, and the more likely it was that he could survive a direct confrontation with Nucai. He still didn’t know what that confrontation might look like, but if it came to a fight, he wanted to have a chance.

Li told him.

Kaz chuffed a laugh, sending the dragon an image of herself, joined by a vastly oversized Mei, slowly chewing up the mountain one level at a time, as all the occupants fled to the Deep. They only stopped when the top of the Tree came into view.

Li took over the image, and with a great deal of satisfaction, the false Li bit off the Tree, right down to its roots. In doing so, she ate Emperor Qiangde’s skeleton and the fractured remains of his core, then burped out a cloud of fire and vapor, which engulfed a tiny, screaming Nucai.

He shook his head. “They need the Tree,” he reminded her.

she told him, sniffing. Li was still enjoying her own mental image of a pathetic, vanquished Nucai.

His dragon had a point. Nucai clearly used the Tree in some way, and though Kaz thought the presences that flowed through the Tree were neutral, if not benign, they were linked to the ki-crystals Qiangde had placed in the top of the Tree. He also knew Qiangde had planted the Tree in the first place. Was that only to create a place he could cultivate and grow stronger, or had he had some other use for it?

In Kaz’s experience, nothing that monstrous dragon did was good for the kobolds, other than causing them to be created in the first place. Honestly, even that was a dark part of their history, since no one involved had volunteered for the task, except possibly Dongwu, who actually carried out Qiangde’s twisted experiments.

A soft groan escaped Doran, and the human stirred, rolling onto his side. Kaz shook his head sharply, chasing away these thoughts. There was nothing he could do about them right now, and he needed to get Doran to Lianhua.

Closing his eyes again, Kaz focused on the threads he’d pulled from his ki, only to find that at some point their forms had shifted, becoming streaks of colored charcoal, rather than thread. One color layered atop another, merging into a single deep gray mass, much as his charcoals had done when he tried to draw a picture explaining how ki and mana worked. Somehow, it was much easier than when he’d tried to force his ki to weave into cloth, and he was even able to adjust the depth of the color until it ‘matched’ what he remembered Adara doing.

Cautiously, he reached out and touched the handle of the door. Ki flared, and runes raced across the door’s surface. The latch clicked.