The passage was dark, steps folding back around themselves over and over as they rose. There were doors on every fourth turning, along with some evidence that the females they’d met weren’t the first humans to flee this way. Bloody handprints marked the wall near the first door, and the second door buckled inward, as if something large had struck it from the outside. That one wouldn’t open.
The third door was promisingly unmarked and undamaged, opening easily beneath Kyla’s gentle tug. A rush of heat and the almost overwhelming stench of terror and blood reached the kobold’s sensitive noses, causing the young female to pull back sharply. The door jumped in its frame as it closed, but the sounds of the people crowded just outside completely covered the sound.
In sheer self-defense, Kaz sketched the sound-muffling rune, reducing the noise to something bearable. It wasn’t as if opening the door had truly changed the sound, but adding the sight and smell, as well as the stifling heat, had made the reality of what was happening undeniable.
The people in the stadium were utterly panicked. No matter how long the dragon perched overhead or the xiyi spoke, nothing would allow these people to calm down again except fleeing this place. If the humans realized there was a way to escape, however narrow and precarious it might be, they would trample each other in an effort to use it.
“We can’t allow anyone to see us,” Kaz said. “Not even the humans. They’re too frightened to be rational.”
Kyla stared from him to the door. “But aren’t we here to save them?”
Were they? Kaz was here because he was trying to keep Li safe, otherwise he would have waited until Raff and the others were ready to go. Li had come because she believed the dragon who attacked her family was here. Kyla was here… Well, according to Kyla, she was here to save the humans, which made her the only one with that as her primary goal.
Still, Kaz nodded. His dragon, however, was more honest.
Kaz’s gaze caught on the fuergar, who held something shiny in her jaws. She stopped by Kyla’s paws and dropped it, and the copper coin wobbled a few times before falling still. Kyla bent down to pick it up, gently stroking the rodent’s head as she did so, and Kaz said, “She does that when she wants you to follow, doesn’t she?”
Kyla glanced at the door, then at her pet. “I’m not sure. She might just be bringing me food.”
Kaz thought of all the times Li had tried to - or succeeded in - eating things he found, and briefly wondered what it would be like to have such a generous friend. Li bit him for the images flickering through his mind, but it was a teasing kind of bite, and he felt tension drain from both of them as she hissed into his ear.
She puffed a cool cloud of fog that circled his muzzle and said,
Well, that was true. Probably. He almost got another nip for that, but Kyla was speaking, so they both turned their attention to her.
“Let’s find all the doors and then decide which one to use,” she said. “Ija says a chief who acts in haste, regrets at leisure.” That seemed reasonable enough to Kaz, so they turned their paws back to the steps.
The area beyond the fourth door was much clearer than the third. They could see humans crowded outside, but the mass of them couldn’t seem to decide what they wanted to do. Most of them stared down into the area where Kaz, Li, and Raff had fought in the tournament, but others had their eyes locked onto the dragon who still roared and breathed fire overhead.
“Not this one,” he said, pulling back. Kyla looked uncertain, but Mei was already scampering higher, so the young kobold nodded, and they went on.
The stairs ended at the fifth door, but even before Kyla tugged the door open, he knew this was the one. The power that made up the dragon almost surrounded him here, the tail draping down the outside of the building while the main mass of it sat almost directly overhead. If he was going to be able to affect it at all, he needed to be close.
“There’s no one up here,” Kyla told him after thrusting her nose through the crack. “They all ran down, I think, so it’s just empty.”
Kaz nodded, then dropped the rune. Distant, muted sounds sprang into clarity, and he heard a voice, booming over everything else.
“...do not wish to harm any more of you than necessary. You are all my people, and after a thousand years, some of you may even still bear our blood. Simply submit to the examination and the duqiu or fangqiu, and you will be allowed to leave.”
Kaz stiffened. Snen had called the rune-stone in his neck a duqiu, and the ones used on the human chiefs, including the king and his family, were fangqiu. Kaz still wasn’t entirely clear what the stones did, but given how desperate the xiyi were to have them removed, and the way the king and the other males had been drained, there was more to it than simply tracking, impersonating, and enforcing loyalty.
“We can’t let them do that to all those people,” Kyla said, reaching for the door.
Kaz reached out and caught her hand. She glared until he said, “You’re right. But the first thing we need to do is get rid of the false dragon. It’s terrifying. After that, maybe people will be brave enough to fight back, or at least run without killing each other.”
“How do we do that?” Kyla asked.
Li gave a little sniff.
Kaz felt his ear twitch, but said, “We’ll handle that. You watch for anyone who might try to stop us. Xiyi or more of their human servants. We don’t know who’s here.”
He wished Kyla could see the strange lack of energy that he now knew was an indication that someone was a servant of the xiyi. Though perhaps it was more accurate to say that they served Jianying? He hadn’t figured out exactly what the relationship between xiyi and dragon was yet.
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Kyla nodded, but her eyes were contemplative. “If the male is the one who needs protecting, then the female will protect him.”
Kaz blinked. He hadn’t looked at it that way, but she was right. Even a few weeks ago, he never would have asked or expected a female to protect him, a male. Though the fact that she was his cousin made it a matter of family rather than simply tribe, it was still expected that males protected females, even with their lives.
Pressing his hand to his chest, Kaz bowed over it, saluting warrior to warrior, rather than male to female. He would trust his ferocious little cousin at his back, and know that no one could guard it better.
“Thank you,” he said, and her tail wagged.
They went out the door together, each hidden in their own ways. Kyla and Mei went down the stairs between the long rows of benches, looking for any humans left in this part of the stadium. Kaz noted that the benches and stairs were painted in chipped and faded blue, and wondered vaguely if the warriors the brave human female had mentioned were still there. If so, he hoped his cousin could charm them as thoroughly as she had Jinn and Reina. It would be sad if they had to fight the very people they were meant to help.
Kaz and Li, on the other hand, looked around and realized that there was no ‘up’. They needed to reach the illusory dragon, but it was perched atop the walls, which extended a good fifteen feet overhead. Worse, those walls were beginning to crumble beneath the creature’s weight, making them unstable. The whole structure looked like it might cave in at any time.
Li climbed up to perch with her back legs on Kaz’s shoulder, and used one of her front feet to balance against his head. He expected her to fly off, looking for a safe way up, but instead she seemed focused on the broken wall.
It was as if Kaz had been wearing Raff’s darklenses and she had removed them from his eyes. Of course the false Jianying couldn’t damage the stadium. His fire was real enough, but he wasn’t, in spite of the fact that Kyla had been able to touch him. The destruction he’d wrought had to be as illusory as he was.
Looking around, Kaz saw two versions of the world. The first one was what someone wanted him to see: a cracked wall, crumbled rubble, burned and smashed benches. There were even a few crumpled bodies that faded into smoky ki, all but vanishing as they were slowly painted over by reality. The walls were battered by time and weather, but intact, as were the benches, and, to his relief, no one lay dead among the debris. He eyed the distance to the top of a half-seen wall. It was higher than a single-level building, perhaps so that no one would climb it and get hurt. Still, he thought he could make it.
Li set her jaw on his head, right between his ears, and puffed out a cloud that settled slowly down around his muzzle, cooling him as the image of the black dragon blew out another stream of fire. He was beginning to see a pattern in the shifting and fire-breathing, as if someone had set it all to repeat itself so that they didn’t have to continue paying attention to it.
“Are you ready?” he murmured.
It was close, but only because Kaz was afraid he would go over the wall and end up falling to his death. He didn’t want to think of the howl his cousin would make about him if he got this far only to fail so spectacularly at the last moment.
Li said as Kaz dug his claws into the bricks that no longer appeared to be there.
he told her, pulling himself up to straddle the wall. He wondered if it would look like he was hanging in mid-air if someone else happened to see him. The dragon’s leg was only ten feet away now, so even though the surface he walked on faded in and out of sight, he was sure he would make it.
Drawing in a deep breath, Kaz stood, feeling the sturdy wall beneath his paws. It was at least eighteen inches thick, and compared to some of the ledges and passages he’d traversed in the mountain, this was like walking down a city street. Only this was actually safer, since no errant carts were coming toward him at breakneck speeds.
Eight steps later, Kaz closed his eyes. His normal vision was only confusing him, and if he needed to see what was happening, he could look through Li’s eyes as she perched on the wall beside him. The great ‘dragon’ ignored them both, continuing to repeat the same motions over and over. The clawed foot beside Kaz shifted, dense ki lifting, then coming back down, right on top of him.
He felt the pressure of it. His head was pushed down toward his shoulders, ears squashed flat, as his belief that what he felt was false warred with someone else’s belief that it was real. Kaz’s core spun as fast as he had ever felt it, pushing out his own ki; white, black, gold, red, and finally blue. The surface burst, popping like a bubble, and Kaz was inside the dragon.
He was drowning in someone else’s ki. It was thick and murky, and he felt like he was breathing smoke, though the fire the dragon produced was pure ki. He turned his face up, ‘seeing’ a burst of red forming within the black before the dragon shifted again, lifting its wings and sending forth an explosion of fire.
Strangely - or perhaps not, given that he was surrounded by black ki - it was cool inside the image, though for a moment he felt a deep pang of fear at the chill. Chi Yincang’s black and white ki was cool, but not cold, but Kaz had frozen his aunt Vega by surrounding her red ki with his own black and white. The hoyi, giant insects who lived on the mosui levels, created their frozen nests by using their own black and white ki in opposition to the red ki crystals that grew there. And here Kaz was, staring up at red ki while surrounded by black and white.
Somehow - probably because whoever had created this image understood ki better than Kaz did - the three kinds of ki didn’t interact. Instead, fire did as fire does, while water and metal worked together to create illusion. Which left Kaz shivering as he stood within the image of a scaled leg that was longer than he was tall.
And what should he do now that he was here? If this was mana, he could probably pull it apart, dispersing it back into the world with a wave of his hands. If the mage creating it was skilled, it might be more difficult, as it had been when Kaz faced the mana-stick-wielding male beneath the mage academy. Every time Kaz tried to pull his mana apart, he had put it back together again, at least until Li and Kyla broke his concentration.
That was a pointless tunnel of thought, however, since this was ki. If the creature had a core, Kaz could try to crush it, but it didn’t. The ki was simply there, all around him, as if he really had stepped into the body of a powerful beast.
But that ki still had to come from somewhere, didn’t it? Mana was everywhere, all the time, but not ki. Ki was created by cores, or refined from mana by living creatures that didn’t have cores. So where was the ki for this false dragon coming from? Or perhaps the better question was, where was the ki for the dragon’s flame coming from? The dragon was stable, but the flame came and went, which implied it was being created or refined by a living creature.
The ki around Kaz shifted as the ‘dragon’ prepared to step back to its original location, and Kaz moved with it. The sensation of being crushed and then surrounded by the foreign ki had been quite unpleasant, so he jumped upward, hoping to land in the location memory and Li’s eyes told him he needed to be. At the top of his arc, however, his ears entered the area where the fire ki first formed, and he flinched away as frost formed on their tips. There was the cold he’d so belatedly expected, but it was contained within that small area.
As his paws came to rest on the wall again, he wondered what would happen if he introduced more red ki than the person sending it expected. Would that careful containment continue to hold, or would it burst? Rather than draining or dispersing this image, could he overload it?
Between them, he and Li had quite a lot of red ki, and while Li used hers to heat her own breath or mimic Kyla’s hiding technique, she didn’t need it. Kaz could probably come close to doubling the amount of red ki in the dragon’s flames, but he would only be able to do it once.
Kaz looked up. The red ki was forming again, right on time, and he began to pull all the red ki he had from his central dantian, allowing it to re-enter his cycle. His channels grew warm, pushing away the chill that surrounded him.
he told her.
Stretching out his hand, Kaz pushed fire into fire. The world froze and then exploded.