The Broken Knife

Kaz had been both right and wrong about what the map represented. There really was a city, but it wasn’t ruined. The buildings were sturdy and well-maintained, looking much like the ones in the Deep, except that they were taller. Kobolds preferred low buildings, including ones that they themselves had to duck to enter. It seemed that the mosui, or whoever had created these, liked buildings that went from floor to ceiling, especially if that ceiling was thirty feet above their heads. There were even round holes cut in the walls all the way up, presumably to allow fresh air and light into the upper portion.

Because it was light. There were red, glowing crystals everywhere, and Kaz thought that all the ki that had been missing from the rest of the level had somehow found its way here. Tiny, crushed crystals coated the walls in a smooth, lacquered finish, while larger ones had been set into recesses along every street and most especially the ceiling. Complex patterns of small crystals flowing into large ones decorated the ceiling in the same style as the carvings that could be found on and near the ancient stairways.

Every crystal was filled with ki, burning so brightly that Kaz nearly went blind until he thought to pull as much of his own ki from his eyes as possible. It was strange to return to something so close to the vision he’d been born with, but once the crystals were little more than gently luminescent stones, he could at least walk down the street without running into a cart or tripping over his own paws.

And there were streets. Real streets, not just paths winding between huts. They ran straight and true, in a clearly intentional pattern that met at square intersections, where leather and bone carts - pulled by horned, hump-shouldered niu that Kaz only recognized from distant memories of the Deep - waited for each other in a system that clearly made sense to the drivers, but none at all to Kaz.

“What is this place?” Kaz murmured, not really expecting an answer. To his surprise, Surta glanced at him and sighed.

“I’m sure you haven’t been to the Deep,” the older male said, “so I’ll explain it. Look. Those beasts are niu. Avoid their horns and make sure they’re fed on time, and you’ll be fine. They eat yumi reeds, and if you’re really lucky, you’ll be sent to harvest those instead of to the mines. I haven’t been to the yumi pools myself, but I’ve met a few warriors who started out there and then were transferred to the mines later, and they say it’s not bad work.”

He looked Kaz up and down, then shook his head. “The big ones usually go to the mines, though, so I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Anyway, those buildings are actually several rooms stacked on top of each other. There are stairs inside that go between the levels, just like in the mountain, except that the stairs are a lot shorter, because the mosui are-”

Surta walked his fingers over the back of his arm, rocking his hand from side to side while keeping the top part of his fingers together, mocking the waddling gait created by the mosui’s short legs. Kaz shot a worried glance at their mosui’s back, but the creature was walking along as if he hadn’t noticed anything. Kaz remembered that Surta had said their eyesight was bad. Was that why he’d used a hand gesture to finish his sentence?

With a distinctly malicious look at the mosui, Surta waggled his hands in the air meaningfully. “They use their captives for everything. Mining, building, gathering, taking care of the niu, all of it.” He pretended to try to pick something up, acting as if his fingers were five times their usual size, and made a comically surprised face when he ‘fumbled’ whatever it was. It made sense that the mosui’s wide, flat hands and oversized claws would make delicate tasks difficult for them.

Kaz looked around again, seeing the city with fresh eyes. Surta was right. Most of the figures surrounding them were the short, round mosui, but mixed among them were a few kobolds, as well as-

“Are those husede?” he demanded.

Surta gave a sly grin. “They are. We don’t get them in the mines very often. The mosui prefer them as personal servants and drivers. More ‘civilized’ or something.”

Kaz shook his head. Husede, which Raff had once called Gray Dwarves, looked like someone had taken a human and crushed them down to half their original height before dying them an iron-gray color. The only one Kaz had ever met was his old friend Ogden, who ran the platform that traveled between several of the upper levels. Ogden didn’t like to talk about his past, but Kaz had guessed from the few hints he dropped that part of the reason he’d come to the mountain was because there were no other husede here.

“Where did they come from?” he asked.

Surta shrugged. “Born here, I think. Mostly. Sometimes one comes looking for crystals, following old stories, and gets captured. There was one of those in the mines for a while, but a hoyi got him. He didn’t speak much of our language, but he said most of the others have been here for generations.”

That was fascinating, mainly because that meant that the male and female husede weren’t separated like the male and female kobolds, but it was another word that caught Kaz’s attention and made the fur along his spine lift.

“Hoyi?”

The gray male grinned even wider, showing all his teeth. “Sure. I said the mine was dangerous, right? It’s inside a hoyi nest. The bugs are everywhere.”

The mosui they were following stopped in front of a building, and Kaz nearly ran into Surta when he and Dax followed suit. Turning, the mosui pointed at Kaz with a long claw. “Come,” it screeched, then indicated the other two males. “You. You. Stay.”

Surta shrugged, while Dax just stared into space, expression vacant. The mosui went through the open archway leading into the building, and after a moment of hesitation, Kaz followed.

The space inside was just as bright as outside; the walls, floor, and ceiling painted in the red glow of still more crystals. A collared husede almost as short as the mosui stood there, looking bored, in front of a wall covered in what looked like horizontal metal rods with burnished bone beads bunched up at each end.

Most of the beads were on the left, but there were at least a few on the right end of each rod, except for the topmost one, which had far more beads on the right than the left. A single rune was drawn on the wall above each rod, but the only one that Kaz thought looked vaguely familiar was similar to the one Katri had said meant ‘water’.

The mosui who had captured Kaz squealed and chattered at the husede in its high-pitched voice, and the husede listened as if he could understand. When he answered, his voice was also higher than Kaz had expected, given the rumbling depth of Ogden’s voice, and Kaz blinked, reassessing the squat person.

This husede’s long black hair was done in twisted braids, piled on its head in a fashion that was oddly similar to the way Lianhua wore hers. It even had carved bone rods holding the mass together, the way Lianhua did sometimes. It had no facial hair, but then neither did Ogden. It did, however, have soft bumps on its chest, like Lianhua, and Kaz had a sudden suspicion that it might be a female. He allowed a little ki back into his eyes, first checking to see if Li had woken from her slumber yet - she hadn’t - and then looked at the husede and the mosui.

The red crystals tried to overwhelm him with their brightness again, but Kaz quickly found that if he pulled only the red ki back out of his eyes, it reduced the brilliance significantly. He could still see it, but he didn’t feel like the glare might blind him.

The other two beings in the room were too busy exchanging squeaky chatter to pay any attention to Kaz, so he was able to look at them for as long as he wanted. They were both filled with the gray, undifferentiated fog that he was almost certain was mana, but the cloud inside the mosui was much thicker. The husede had a swirling dantian in her chest, just like Raff, but no core, and no upper or lower dantian to balance the one in the middle. Kaz wondered if he would see a dantian inside the mosui as well, if the thick mana blocking his vision would move out of the way.

Speaking of blocking his vision… The red crystals that coated the walls did exactly that. The thread that linked him to Li vanished through the wall covered in rods and beads, and he couldn’t see anything beyond. If all the mosui were like his captor, he should be able to see their smoky mana moving around outside, but the red ki was so pervasive that he couldn’t see anything past it. He could sense that Li was still alive and unconscious, but other than the five or six feet of gleaming filament that hung in the air before the wall cut it off, that was all the information he had. She, and presumably Lianhua, were ‘that way’, but they could be in the next building, and he wouldn’t know.

The husede clapped her hands sharply, and Kaz blinked, looking at her. She and the mosui were both staring at him, and the mosui was twitching impatiently. The gray-skinned female lifted a hand to the mosui, which clicked its long front teeth together, but settled down.

“You’re a puppy, and a male, correct?” the husede asked, and Kaz was even more certain she was a female. Her voice sounded far more like Lianhua’s than that of any of the males.

Kaz nodded, lifting his hand to finger the fur at his throat for the first time in a long time. He used to be very conscious of the emptiness there, but ever since Li started sitting on his shoulder, her tail snugged around his throat, he hadn’t really thought about the absence of a warrior’s necklace. Now, the only thing there was the cold metal of the collar.

The husede clicked her tongue, turning to look at the rods arrayed on the wall behind her. She hummed thoughtfully, the sound oddly pleasant. “We always need people in the mine,” she murmured, staring at the bottommost rod. Kaz wondered if the rune above it meant ‘mine’, and tried to set the image in his mind to ask Lianhua about later. If he was still speaking to her later. If she was even alive.

The female reached out and tapped the first bead on the left side of the rod beneath the word ‘water’, muttering, “Pups are good gatherers. He’d do well at the pools.”

The mosui squealed something that sounded unhappy, and the husede flinched, her finger jerking away from the bead. She glanced back at the mosui and tried to smile.

“Yes, of course I noticed he’s large. He’s also young. If he went to the pools, he might have time to grow even larger, and-”

More screeching, and the husede looked like she would have tucked her tail if she’d had one. It was strange to see someone who looked at all like Ogden with such an expression on their face. Ogden was proud, and proud of his independence. No one else could make the platform work, and Ogden had once told Kaz that he’d been there before the Graybelly tribe took over those levels, and he expected to be there when they were gone. Kaz doubted there was anything anyone could do to break his spirit the way this female seemed to have been broken.

He was surprised when she sent him a look of apology as she slid a bead from left to right on the ‘mine’ rod. It was strange to realize she had probably been trying to help him by giving him an easier job. He gave her a small nod of understanding, and she looked startled, then pleased.

Turning back to the mosui, she bowed slightly and said, “Did you bring some other kobolds? They can escort him. He won’t dare try anything while he’s in the city.” She reached up and fingered the shiny metal ringing her own throat, and the mosui shrieked something, then turned and waddled out.

The husede heaved a relieved breath before turning to look at Kaz. “You’ll have to go to the mines with the kobolds who brought you in. That’s where they send most of the grays, but I’d hoped I might be able to get you a short stint at the pools. It’s easier and safer, though your fur might never dry out again.”

Kaz had a dozen questions, about what the other rods were for, where he might have been sent if his fur was still blue, and why the color of his fur even made a difference, but this female seemed friendly enough and there was really only one question that mattered.

“Where do females go?” he blurted. “I was… There was a female, earlier. I was following her, and-”

Sighing, the husede turned to point at the topmost rod, where only three beads hung on the left side, while dozens more waited silently to the right. “No female kobolds have come in lately, which is good for your friend. Maybe she’ll be smart enough to go back up the stairs before they find her. Females all go to the same place, and they don’t last long.”

He wanted to ask about female humans so badly that a small whine escaped his throat, and the husede misunderstood. She reached out and patted Kaz, who managed not to jerk away from the uninvited touch.

“Don’t give up hope. There’s only one mosui watching the stairs you used, and he’s been busy all day. A human came down earlier, can you imagine? A female, too…” Her words trailed off, eyes narrowing as she stared at him. His ears flattened, but his traitorous tail gave a few wags, revealing his pleasure at finally finding a clue.

Dark eyes bored into him, but finally the husede female leaned forward and said, so softly that even he could barely understand her words, “She was taken to the tower. They all go to the tower. The kobolds don’t survive long, but I don’t know-”

A head poked in through the archway behind them, and Surta’s gratingly cheerful voice said, “Hey, new pup, let’s go. You’re for the mines, and if we don’t go soon, we’ll miss dinner. Not that grub and mushroom stew is much of a meal, but it’s better than nothing, which is what we’ll get if we don’t leave now.”

Jerking away from him, the husede gave Kaz a short nod before turning away, staring at the beads that represented the lives of hundreds of kobolds, trapped in this horrifying city.