The Broken Knife

They found the first of the fallen females after only a few minutes of walking. If Kaz remembered correctly, she had had a broken arm and a deep gash on her leg. She must not have had a male to defend her once her shield failed, or else her male wasn’t very strong.

She was face down in a patch of fulan, and it looked like Litz and the others had used her as a bridge, just like they had Golik. If Kaz had been one of the females still remaining, he would have become very nervous at about this point, because he didn’t remember this female’s wounds being bad enough to kill her. The blackened fur on her back indicated that she had been struck by a powerful bolt of power, and it must have happened after she and the others arrived on this level.

Kaz looked down at her, debating. They had walked over Golik, mainly because they had to, but there was a tunnel they had passed recently that could take them around this female. A lifetime of training told him that setting his paws on a female’s corpse would bring nothing but trouble.

“Well? Get on with it,” Gaoda demanded from behind him. “Even the fairy of the Long-”

“I’ve asked you not to call me that, Gaoda Xiang,” Lianhua interrupted. “Let Kaz think.”

Kaz sighed. “This is the way I remember, and the path Baji recommended. It’s also obviously the same direction Litz and the other females are going. She knew you would be coming here soon. We could be walking into an ambush.”

Actually, he was more worried about finding more bodies, but he hoped Gaoda and the others would more easily accept a possible ambush as an excuse to change direction. The longer they followed in Litz’s footsteps, the more uncomfortable Kaz became, and he wasn’t entirely sure why.

Raff grunted. “That’s possible. We saw ‘em fight, though. They wouldn’t have a chance, even if they did manage to surprise us.”

Gaoda nodded agreement, and four sets of eyes turned to Kaz. He couldn’t find the words to explain his sense of deep unease, so he just shrugged and set a paw on the female kobold’s leg, aware of everyone else shifting forward as he did so. There was no going back, so he balanced carefully as he walked over her, trying to ignore the feeling of flesh beneath his paws.

When he reached her shoulders, Kaz hesitated. He would have to jump, and in order to remain within the shield, everyone else needed to go at the same time. Raff had actually jumped too far when they all leaped from Golik, popping out of the bubble until everyone else came to a halt. He seemed none the worse for the experience, but his clothes were lightly dusted with spores, so Kaz was glad the male was on Lianhua’s other side.

Kaz leaned forward. The humans had told him how this worked in their culture, and since they couldn’t bark properly, he was using their technique. “Three… Two… Go!” They all jumped, everyone easily clearing the six feet of solid fulan in front of them, though it was obvious from the furrows in it that at least one of the females they followed hadn’t made it.

Once they were all together and ready to continue on, Kaz shot a glance at Lianhua’s slowly draining channels. If they continued at this pace, she might well run out of ki before they reached the stairs. Gritting his teeth, Kaz hurried on, ignoring the instincts that said he was moving too quickly to stop in time to avoid trouble when it found them.

Nearly an hour later, they almost stumbled over the second female. Her cause of death was more obvious than the first, since she had no visible injuries except the hole in her forehead. Someone had killed her, and this time there was no apparent need. She lay to one side of the tunnel, and there was a clear path through the fulan ahead, though the walls were all but coated in the stuff.

Kaz halted several feet away. He felt no urge to look at the body any longer than the brief glance that had already taken it in. This area was particularly thick with the spores hanging in the air, making it difficult to see any details, but the scene was clear enough.

“They’re turning on each other,” Lianhua murmured. “But why?”

Kaz glanced back at her. The air inside the shield was the only clear space, making it obvious where the limits of the bubble were, even without his boosted vision.

“This is the way of kobold females. The dead ones are either a weakness to be eliminated, or they’ve challenged Litz for leadership. That doesn’t always lead to death, but Litz can’t turn her back on them once they rebel, so she’s killing them.”

Lianhua still looked puzzled. “I don’t like it, but I understand that’s how kobold society works. But why now? They’re already alone, trapped in an area with unknown dangers. You told me kobolds find strength in numbers. Why wouldn’t they wait until they get wherever they’re going?”

Kaz frowned. She was right. He had just seen it as a natural part of life, but Litz wasn’t a fool, and it was unlikely that this female had been either. Why wouldn’t they wait until they were safer?

“Maybe they’re arguing about which way to go? This is the shortest path to the next set of stairs, but there should be other dens on this level. Maybe this female had relatives in another tribe, and she wanted to go to them instead of continuing down.”

By now, Raff was looking thoughtful as well. “I know your lot are violent, but why not just let the ones who want to leave go? Split up, like. Plus, you said these levels are full of monsters, but we haven’t seen any sign of beasts.”

The more they spoke the more Kaz realized that he, too, had had these thoughts slowly growing in the back of his mind. He had been trying to ignore them and push forward, but now that they’d been spoken aloud, his own concerns wouldn’t be silent any longer.

He growled a little, and felt Li burrow closer to him. He had been sending her a constant flow of images, letting her see what he saw, and she didn’t seem to like this situation any more than he did.

“What do you want to do?” he asked, frustrated. “Determining why this female was killed won’t help us. I don’t know how to reach the nearest tribe, and the odds are good that they’ve already fled as well. Our only real option is to keep going.”

Lianhua nodded. “And that’s exactly what we should do. I’d say I have enough power left to keep going for several more hours, so long as nothing hits the shield harder than these spores. The ki here is particularly pure, so I’m almost able to take in enough to replace what I’m using.”

Kaz barely held back a tired laugh. Yes, she was taking in mana, but her dantians were working as slowly as ever to purify it. The ki she took directly from him, however, was already cleansed and could be fed directly into the shield. He was glad that his core was having no difficulty keeping up, but he wasn’t used to having so little ki to work with anymore. Even his broken core had produced more than Lianhua left him, though of course then he’d had to worry about it building up and killing him, so there was that.

“I’m going,” he warned them, and as he stepped forward, they did as well. As they passed, the slumped corpse briefly entered the bubble of their shield, and someone must have brushed against it on the way by, because when he glanced back, it had fallen over, one arm outstretched as if reaching for them.

=+=+=+=

It took another two hours to reach the next set of stairs, at least according to Gaoda’s time-keeping device, which he checked constantly. During that time, they passed through two different areas where they could see signs that the fulan had been burned back, and the air was noticeably clearer for a little while. It never quite cleared completely, and always came back, however, so Lianhua held her shield, though the prismatic gleam of her hair and the brightness of her eyes had faded significantly.

It was strange to see a set of stairs with no guards waiting at the top, and Kaz shivered slightly as he passed between two tall totems made from the largest skulls he’d ever seen. Their eyes were empty pits, and their fanged mouths hung open in silent threat, but no warriors appeared to demand price of passage.

The flight of steps was one of the longest Kaz had ever found, and he remembered the Broken Knives having to rest in the middle. The humans didn’t have any problem, but Kaz lost count when his ankle turned, and he stumbled down several stairs at once, completely leaving the bubble of clean air around Lianhua.

Fortunately, for some reason, nothing grew on or near the staircase, so the fulan had nothing to infect, and the air was almost completely clear. When he tripped, Lianhua hurried to catch up with him, leaving all the other humans behind in the process, and the ensuing squabble meant Kaz wasn’t sure if they’d taken three or four hundred steps by the time they could see the bottom.

They all stopped, staring at the devastation below. There were bodies scattered everywhere, kobold and beast alike, and the spores lay in a thick blanket over everything. Two sets of paw prints wound between the silent mounds, and Kaz vaguely wondered what had happened to the fourth Copperstriker rebel. He was certain Litz’s group of exiles had numbered six, but they had only found Golik and two others.

“What happened here?” Lianhua asked, staring out over the silent battlefield. The spores obscured any details, but kobold knives could be seen protruding from many of the fallen bodies. If it weren’t for that, it would have looked like the beasts had attacked the kobolds for some reason, but it was obvious that the kobolds had killed each other as well as the monsters.

“I don’t know,” Kaz admitted. “Maybe there was a battle, and when beasts came to eat the fallen, another group of kobolds killed them as well? But they would have taken away the bodies to be burned.”

Surprisingly, it was Chi Yincang who answered. “This all happened at once. Look at the spores.”

Shocked silence fell over the group, and then they all turned to examine the scene again. Sure enough, Chi Yincang was right. If two separate events had occurred, the layer of spores coating some of the bodies would have been thicker than on others, and there might even have been paw prints visible as depressions in the spores on the floor. There was only a thin dusting of spores in the prints Kaz assumed had been left by Litz’s group, and given what he could tell of the condition of the bodies, this hadn’t happened more than a day or two ago.

Kaz drew in a deep breath, then coughed, even though he was safely masked and shielded. Just looking at the floating spores made him feel like every breath was tainted.

“We’ll have to go on. The next set of stairs isn’t nearly as far as this one was.” He gestured toward the prints on the floor. “We even have guides, at least as long as the spores remain thick enough to show us which way they went.”

Lianhua closed her eyes, a thin line forming between her brows. “I know we’re trying to be careful, but I think we should hurry. I’m still all right, but by the time we get to the next level, that may not be true, and if it’s as bad as this one…”

Even Gaoda looked grim as he nodded, but a spark still gleamed in his eyes as he looked at Lianhua and held out his arms. “We can go faster if I carry you, cousin. Raff can get the kobold.”

Raff shook his head even before Lianhua could. “I want my hands free. There’s somethin’ wrong with this stuff, and it’s much worse than just some overexcited pollen. We should hurry, but I think it’d be a bad idea t’ let our guards down.”

Gaoda scowled, but glanced at Chi Yincang, who tilted his head in bare agreement. Gaoda turned to glare at Kaz as he spoke with clear reluctance. “You’re the slowest one, and, as you say, we can just follow the footprints, for a while at least. If Lianhua carries you, we can go faster.”

Kaz’s heart pounded at the thought. If the female touched him while she was pulling in so much power, she might take all the ki he had without even knowing she’d done it. He’d been trying very hard not to even brush up against her, and now Gaoda wanted her to carry him?

He shook his head, probably too vigorously, judging from the look Lianhua gave him. “I can go faster, if you’re not worried about running into a pitfall or monsters.”

Raff looked out over the cavern full of bodies. “I don’t think those are our biggest concerns right now. Even with the mask, I don’t want to breathe that. We just need t’ get out before the shield fails.”

Kaz nodded. “Then we run.”