The building where Raff should have been waiting was empty. The door was closed but unlocked, and Raff’s scent mingled with that of all the others, leading back into the cavern where the dragons rested. Kyla entered the building, looking for any sign that they had discovered Raff’s weapon or his lack of a duqiu. She found the hole Mei had chewed in the wall, hidden beneath and behind a small table that also had Raff’s scent on it.

The only smell of blood was mingled with the acrid odor of the melted duqiu, and when Kyla used a little power to quickly opened a few of the locked boxes in the long sleeping room, she found more human clothing, a little food, and some copper-gold coins which even Mei seemed uninterested in. Instead, the fuergar kept sniffing at a flattened circle of something that smelled like food, but didn’t look like it.

Kyla crouched down by the rodent, holding out the circle, which was a good six inches across and three or four inches deep. Mei hesitated only briefly before taking a large bite, revealing that the hard red surface was actually some kind of skin or wrapper, and inside was…cheese.

Kyla really did like cheese, and she’d had to use quite a lot of power recently, between hiding and using power-bolts. So she and the fuergar took a few moments to hollow out the circle of cheese. It tasted different than the cheese they’d eaten in Adara’s hidden den, but it was just as good. And as long as they were eating cheese, it seemed reasonable to eat the hard bread and dried meat that was also in the boxes she’d already opened, which made her even more interested in opening the rest.

Kyla had come for Raff, but Raff wasn’t here, and she didn’t smell blood or fear, so she wasn’t really worried about him. Yes, there was the distant roaring, which sounded a bit like a very, very large Li, but it had faded quite a bit as she moved away from the cavern where the captives had been held, and by now it was little more than an annoyance, except when it pushed at her power as if trying to snuff it out. Neither she nor Mei would be snuffed, however, so mostly she ignored it. Mostly.

There were three more small boxes, each at the end of a bed, but with the power of the cheese filling her belly, it was easy enough to melt one lock while Mei simply bit the other two off. Inside, they found more clothes, food - which they ate, even though Kyla, for one, was beginning to feel full - and a good-sized knife, which Kyla gleefully added to her belt.

She had found a short, dull knife among the things in Adara’s boxes and promptly made it her own. It didn’t have a sheath, but she had claws, time, and the remains of her own backpack to work with. It hadn’t taken too long to craft a simple sheath, and while the backpack no longer had a flap to close, it also didn’t have much to hold, since she’d stuffed all of her ruined possessions into an empty box.

Her new knife, however, came with a lovely sheath made out of some material she didn’t recognize. It was actually somewhat flexible, as well as sturdy, so she thought it would probably work for any number of blades, not just another one of the same shape as this one. Whatever the material was, it could be very useful to her people, so she added it to the very long mental list of items she planned to tell Ija about when she returned home. It went right after bread, which was right after cheese.

Kyla was about to follow Raff’s scent out of the building when Mei squeaked, drawing her attention to what looked like a bare wall. Undeterred, the fuergar bit into the wood, which rapidly gave way, leaving a rodent-sized hole. Mei scampered through, and Kyla crossed the room again, leaning down to stare into the hole. Not surprisingly, it was dark, so she summoned a light to the space just beyond her snout, illuminating a small room filled with very interesting objects.

It took less than a minute to break away enough of the wood to allow Kyla into the space as well, though she was too late to stop Mei from eating most of a large pile of pure gold coins that had spilled out of a bag with a hole neatly nibbled into one side. That was all right, though, since the only thing interesting about those coins was the fact that Kyla’s training told her they were Imperial gold, rather than the local coins.

Shelves lined the wall, holding neatly stacked objects. Each stack was marked with a piece of paper with writing on it. Kyla didn’t recognize many of the runes, which she blamed on what Lianhua called ‘linguistic drift’, and not her own failings as a student. Great Aunt Sika had been quite insistent that all of the pups, including the males, at least try to read and write, even though it had to be kept a secret from Vega. Kyla herself had been fascinated enough by the old chiefs’ books that she paid more attention than usual to those lessons.

Which meant her people probably didn’t have these runes, or they had changed since kobolds learned them. If Kyla had listened to Lianhua during Kaz’s lessons, perhaps she would be able to interpret this, but honestly, she’d stopped listening after linguistic drift.

But Kyla recognized the scent that hung heavy on the particularly large stack on the right-hand side of the lowest shelf. There was no doubt that was Raff’s sweaty, musky odor, which meant these were probably his things. She couldn’t take them all, but she dug through until she found the little pouch he called a ‘storage item’.

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She knew about the magical containers, of course. All of the Great Chiefs had one, as did a few chiefs of lesser tribes. She also knew they couldn’t be used by anyone but their owner, at least not until quite some time after their owner died, so there was no point in trying to find out what was inside. Still, she was sure there had to be some way to transfer one short of killing the owner and waiting, though the chiefs certainly weren’t going to tell anyone what it was.

Quickly, Kyla grabbed all of Raff’s smaller items, then dug through the other stacks to see if she could find anything else that looked like it might be a storage item. To her disappointment, there were only three, but perhaps they weren’t as common as she‘d thought. Or perhaps they didn’t have to be pouches or bags? Could some other item be hiding unknown treasures?

She had no time to figure that out, however, because the disconcerting roaring had reached new heights, and it really was time to find Raff. Not that that should be difficult, since he’d gone into the other cavern, and there was no way out of there other than the tunnel leading back here or the crack Mei had led them all to in the first place. She doubted the xiyi knew about that, however, or they would have done something about it.

It was hard to turn her back on the stacks of things, but she managed, turning away and racing toward the tunnel that carried Raff’s scent, as fast as her paws could carry her. Mei was somehow even faster, running ahead as she dodged in and out of shadows, scampering along next to walls wherever possible.

The tunnel almost felt like home, other than the confusion of strange smells that filled it and the near-constant humming in her ears produced by the distant roaring. Which made it not like home at all, because there Kyla would know every smell, every sound, where danger lurked and safety lay, and here she knew nothing. Nothing but a big, rude, smelly human, who carried her on his shoulders and sometimes tickled her paws just like her father had when she was little.

There was no sound in the cavern. No humans spoke, no xiyi wandered from task to task, no carts clattered as they were drawn away to parts unknown. No one moved except the kobolds. The small, stunted beings ran around, many of them on all fours, their noses to the ground. At least half of them didn’t even have on loincloths, and numb-minds would have seemed intelligent in comparison. At least most numb-minds could speak a few words and fight or help gather, but these things were just…beasts.

Kyla had ignored them as much as she could. Looked away when they were called, closed her ears to their barks and whines, which carried up to the crevice where she crouched. But no matter what she did, she found her eyes drawn back to them. Especially one. Their chief.

Because this was what she had risked in leaving the mountain. Howls of the Fallen were few and far between, not even those of the Deep willing to linger on the idea for too long. Tribes who could no longer survive within the mountain must leave, and when they left, they became little more than mindless animals.

There was no way to stop this inevitable decline, and no one had ever returned to say how long it took. More than a week, certainly, so Kyla believed she was safe. But Kaz? Kaz intended to live outside the mountain. It had been one thing when she believed he was dying, but once she overheard Jul tell her father, Rudu, that Kaz would recover, she knew the decline couldn’t be as rapid as the howls claimed. There was no way a healer would allow - even encourage! - a male who could be valuable to all of the tribes to go outside unless he believed that male would return.

Besides, she knew from the old chiefs’ books that female kobolds used to travel to the human capital to bargain with those who ruled there. Only females went, never males, but they couldn’t reach Cliffcross, deal with the humans, and return in a week or less. That meant Kyla should be safe enough for the time it took to perform her spirit hunt, and by going with the humans, she could watch over Kaz while she was at it. If he began to show signs of deterioration, she would tell them that he had to return to the mountain.

Of course, she hadn’t known then that her cousin was so stupid that it would be difficult to tell when he began to Fall, but Kyla knew him well enough by now that she thought she would see other signs. For example, the male less than ten feet from her was currently sitting on the ground scratching at his ear with his back leg. His back leg! His tongue hung from the side of his mouth, he was drooling, and his eyes were closed as if in bliss.

Experimentally, Kyla scratched at her own ear. With her hand, of course. Did it really feel that good?

Something sharp poked into her back, just beneath her left ribs. “Stay,” someone growled, but Kyla ignored the voice, leaping forward as she summoned a shield as close to her fur as she could. It wouldn’t stop the blade that was already there, but it would keep any more attacks from reaching her.

The small pain failed to become a larger one, and Kyla spun, summoning a power-bolt. The female kobold, chief of this tribe of Fallen Ones, had dropped her knife and was down on the ground, desperately pulling at Mei, who hung from the back of her leg. The brown-furred female kobold was howling loudly, and when Kyla glanced behind her, she could see that the male kobold was staring straight at her, teeth bared in a snarl.

Kyla charged for the chief, knowing that the best way to stop a male was to reach the female he was trying to guard. Besides, if that idiot female thought to pick up her knife, or if she actually had power, she might hurt Mei, and Kyla would never, ever allow that to happen.

Lifting her muzzle, Kyla added her own call to the sudden flood of barks and howls filling the cavern, rising up to where the dragons watched, shifting and stretching their wings in their little dens. Kyla didn’t call for help in the way she’d been taught. Instead, she made the one sound she knew might actually draw the only ally within hearing distance.

Kyla gave a puppy’s welcoming yip.