Raff sighed deeply. “Never known a woman who could get into so much trouble in such a short amount of time,” he muttered. Staring from Kaz to Chi Yincang, he ran his hand over the short bristles on his chin.
“I… can’t,” he finally said. “It’s bad enough that I’m here now, rather than buying new gear so I don’t get my rear handed to me if I face someone strong in the tournament. My best chance to find my sister is to win my bout and have the criers callin’ my name all over town. Jinn needs me, but Lianhua has th’ two of you-”
Li hissed angrily.
“Three of you lookin’ for her,” Raff corrected. He took a step back, then hesitated and held out a hand, looking at Chi Yincang. “You lot still owe me for the rest of our contract. If you head down there, the odds are good we’ll never see each other again, one way or the other, so I’ll be needin’ that now.”
Chi Yincang’s face was set, but he still hadn’t regained his composure enough to return to his usual impassive expression. His brows lowered, but he nodded, just once. Reaching into his pouch, he pulled out two more pouches that were only slightly smaller than the first.
Raff accepted these, bouncing them in his palm exactly twice before dropping them into his own pouch and backing up again. He drew in a deep breath. “I hope y’ find her. Them. I really do.”
Chi Yincang didn’t respond, so Kaz did. “I hope you find your sister, as well. It’s a brother’s duty to guard his sisters until he takes his own mate.”
Raff huffed a little laugh, a hint of his usual grin coming through as he tilted his head. “I hope I’m wrong, and the puppy is safe, Blue. I hope you find her.”
“Me, too,” Kaz said, and then Raff was gone, jogging away back down the street toward the busy intersection. A breeze blew up, carrying his scent back to them, and Kaz drew in a deep breath, memorizing the smell, certain that he would be able to find the other male if they were ever close enough again.
A soft sound made Kaz turn toward Chi Yincang, seeing that the other male was still watching Raff walk away. He looked… disappointed? The dark male was difficult to read at the best of times, and Kaz didn’t know what to do with this whole new side of him.
“We go alone, then,” Chi Yincang finally said, and Kaz could see him struggle to get his expression under control. The creases between his brows and bracketing his mouth smoothed out, and he ran his black eyes over Kaz and Li.
“Can your dragon scout for us?” Chi Yincang asked.
Kaz hesitated. “She can,” he said carefully, “but that pit is dangerous. Maybe even for her. It would be best to go together.”
A hint of the furrow between the straight brows returned. Chi Yincang looked down into the pit. “Dangerous in what way? Other than the obvious.”
Kaz stepped up beside him, looking down into the red fog, which swirled with sluggish reluctance, like a pool of slime into which a stone had been dropped. “It’s filled with ki,” he said, “but there’s something wrong with it. It’s not like fulan contamination, or not exactly, but if I were you, I wouldn’t cultivate down there.”
“Will it hurt Lianhua or Yingtao?” Chi Yincang asked quickly.
Kaz glanced toward Li, who was huddling unhappily on his shoulder. “So long as they don’t cultivate within it, it should be fine. I think.”
“But it won’t hurt you or the dragon?” Chi Yincang asked. “Since you produce your own ki.”
So the other male had been listening to Kaz and Lianhua. Not that Kaz had really doubted it, but Chi Yincang had never commented on it before. Not that he commented on much.
“I… think so,” Kaz repeated.
Li whistled softly, pulling away from Kaz and shaking out her wings.
Kaz reached up to touch her, though he didn’t quite hold on. “Please,” he murmured. “Stay with us. Me.”
Li’s head drooped, then turned so she could look directly into Kaz’s eyes.
He didn’t like it. No, Kaz hated it. But she was right. Moreover, it was her choice. If she wanted to take the risk, all he could do was try to dissuade her, and then wish her the best if she chose to go anyway.
“Here,” he said, digging into his pouch. Pulling out the largest chip of black ki crystal he had left, he offered it to her. “Water to defeat fire,” he said, and she ate it gladly, the lump of it sliding down her long throat until he could see black ki rise up, filling her body.
Li lifted to her back paws, not even bothering to conceal the front pair, since it seemed that no one walked in this part of the city, and so there was no one to see.
Chi Yincang leaned over the low wall, gaze intent. “Where did she go?”
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Kaz looked at him sharply. “You can’t see her either?”
The other male shook his head. “She disappeared, almost like someone using the Art of Shadow. That darkness is unnatural.”
Kaz had tried to tell him that, but it was interesting that the effects of the murky ki were visible to normal sight as well. It was also interesting that Kaz was no longer able to completely turn off his special sight. Was that a result of the ki he’d used to heal his eyes, or simply refining his body and ki?
Silence. Too much silence. The bond remained, steady and strong, but Li’s voice was gone. Kaz reached for her sight, already knowing that he would fail, and found only darkness.
Li? He called in his mind as loudly as he could. There was no response, so he leaned over the wall and howled. “Li! Li! Come back!” Was he speaking words or barking like a kobold? Did he care? He needed her to return.
A hand closed on his shoulder, keeping Kaz from tipping over into the darkness. “What happened?” asked Chi Yincang, and Kaz shook his head, throat tight.
“She’s gone,” he finally managed to whisper.
Chi Yincang said a word in a language Kaz didn’t know, and grasped the wall, pushing on it. The top of it was smooth, the stones carved or cut to precise planes, leaving nowhere to tie a rope. The short distance of sheer cliff they could see below looked completely natural, with rocky protrusions that should make it easy to climb.
“Raff said no one has ever come back,” Kaz whispered.
“That’s right,” a voice said behind them, and both males turned, seeing Raff standing there. His cheeks were dark, and he wouldn’t meet their eyes as he said, “I thought I could at least help you get started. Come on.”
Turning away, he moved along the edge of the crevice. Kaz and Chi Yincang followed, though Kaz sent many glances back toward the trailing line of ki.
They crossed the road, then Raff hopped one of the low walls, stepping into the thick green grass beyond. One of the large human homes nestled among bizarrely cubic bushes at the end of a short road made of packed dirt.
Glancing back at them, Raff said, “Bit of cachet among a certain sort, livin’ here. Within sight of the college, and clingin’ to Pellis’ backside, down by the Cliff. But this one belongs to someone I used to know. He’s a bit of an idiot, and at one point he’d just about worked up the courage to toss himself down that ginormous pit. A few of us convinced him that if he wanted to throw his life away, he should just get married and have an heir first. So he did, and his wife promptly convinced him to buy a place closer to the palace.”
He’d continued along the low wall surrounding the Cliff, but now he paused, glanced around, and jumped over it. Kaz fully expected him to fall, but he didn’t. Instead, he balanced on a single step that clung to the wall about a foot below ground level.
“Mignon liked to hold little parties down here,” he said, taking another step. He sank down even further, and when Kaz looked, he saw that there were a whole series of steps, each about a foot further down and leading into the pit.
Kaz followed Raff, glad to see that the steps led back toward where he had last seen Li. The link of ki between them was still moving, at least a bit, so he knew she was alive and exploring, but he desperately missed the sound of her voice and the sense of her that hung constantly in the background of his mind.
After twenty-five steps, Raff stood on a platform. It stuck straight out from the steep cliff, somehow holding tight in spite of having no visible means of support. It was made of wood, perhaps ten feet long and six feet deep, painted a bright yellow color that had begun to fade but still retained a cheerful feeling that was entirely countered by the dreary fog that hung just below its lower edge.
“Can’t see a thing in this,” Raff muttered, then jumped slightly as Chi Yincang landed lightly beside them. The other male hadn’t bothered with the stairs, simply vaulted down once he saw where the platform was.
“Pellis curse it, Chi!” Raff yelped. “One of these days, you’re gonna give someone a heart attack.”
The corner of Chi Yincang’s mouth twitched upward ever so slightly before he turned to look down into the red smog. Crouching, he thrust his left hand into it, turning his arm this way and that as he examined the effects.
“Eerie, ain’t it?” Raff asked. “Like puttin’ your hand into a jar of pitch. Never hurt us any, but when we were young idiots, we’d come down here to drink and play with the darkness.” He shook his head. “Amazin’ none of us ever fell in, honestly. That’s not why I brought you down here, though.”
Crossing to the other side of the wooden platform, he leaned down and pulled on something draping over the edge. Foot by foot, he hauled up part of a rope that gleamed a dull gray to Kaz’s eyes. “I don’t even know how long this thing is, but as far as we could tell, it didn’t reach the bottom. Mignon bought it from a dealer in magic items who swore that it’d never break, and couldn’t be cut.” He picked it up and pulled on it, grunting with effort. The mana inside it darkened, but the rope didn’t snap or even fray.
A blade whistled through the air, the only warning Raff got before Chi Yincang’s vicious weapon impacted the rope. A few strands thrummed, then popped, but the majority of the rope remained intact. Chi Yincang spun the long handle, and his ring sparked with ki as the weapon returned to its storage device.
“It will do,” Chi Yincang said, and his mask of composure was firmly in place. He reached beneath his robe and pulled out the amulet again. Kaz saw more ki flow as he gave it power. The cord of blue, white, and black ki reappeared, and somehow Kaz was entirely unsurprised to see that it nearly overlapped the one binding him to Li. Wherever the dragon and the human females were, Kaz had a feeling they would find each other soon, if they hadn’t already.
“How will we get from here to there?” Kaz asked, pointing. The connection didn’t lead straight ahead, but back the way they’d come, intersecting with that bright blur of relatively clean ki in the midst of the tainted gloom.
“We’ll figure that out when we get there,” Chi Yincang said grimly, taking the rope in one hand. Black and white ki flowed into that hand, seeming to merge with the mana in the rope, until the two blurred together. It was intriguing, and reminded Kaz of how Li described her ability to hide. Was what Chi Yincang did akin to Li’s trick? Did he, too, merge his ki with the power inherent in the world around him?
Without another word, Chi Yincang stepped back into darkness and fell, only the swirling of the mists showing that he had passed through. Kaz swallowed hard, but really, there was no choice. Li was there, and so was Lianhua. Kaz was going.
He gripped the rope. Instead of stiff leather, niu fur, or the slightly spiky strips of yumi, it was made of something smooth and soft. Cautiously, he passed a bit of his ki into it, ready to let go if it tried to steal power from him. To his great relief, it accepted the ki, but there was no awareness to it, and it made no attempt to take more than he offered. It did, however, feel like he was gripping it just a little more tightly, while still being able to slide his hand easily over the surface.
“Go on then,” Raff said, his voice rough. He met Kaz’s eyes. “And good luck.”
Kaz nodded and stepped over the edge.