The Broken Knife

Kaz ran as fast as he dared, nose twitching as he tracked the warm, sweet scent of things that didn’t belong in the cool, dank caverns and tunnels of the mountain. Someday, he would have to ask Lianhua what made those smells, and why their scent hung so heavily around her. Someday, someday… when he found her again.

The smell didn’t grow any stronger, but it wasn’t noticeably weaker, either, and he could only hope he was running the right direction. Eventually, there would be a beginning or an end, and then he would know, but for now, he simply tracked, allowing a greater amount of ki to leak from his channels and into his nose, even as his nasal passages began to burn with the sensation of every odor that had ever passed through these still, quiet tunnels.

Fuergar. A nest. Down the tunnel to his right, but not where he needed to go.

Kobolds. New ones. Not the same as the guards or the gatherers he had scented before.

The reek of jiao, burning, burning. The soothing scent of jejing, and cleansing water.

Copper. Copper. Iron. Copper.

And Lianhua. A miasma of Lianhua. This way. That. Li bit him once when he nearly ran out across a cavern with a lopo hanging high overhead. The trail circled, and so did he, only vaguely wondering why the tribe hadn’t brought the beast down if they knew it was there. A trap for strange kobolds encroaching on their territory, perhaps?

The nearly forgotten image of golden sheaths reinforcing his channels slipped, and he stumbled as his legs grew at once too weak and too strong, thrusting him forward uncontrollably until Li caught the vision and stabilized it, sending him worried frustration as she did so.

Kaz stopped, one hand against the wall as he panted, and felt something wet touch his lip. He reached up, wiping it away, and saw that it gleamed red, but was filled with mingled ki that made it burn in his vision. Blood. His nose was bleeding, and he’d pushed so much ki into it that the blood was saturated.

Li scampered down his arm, sniffing at the blood, then began to lick it with flashes of her delicate tongue. When the smear of crimson was all but gone, she shifted to licking his face, and he huffed a single, short laugh.

“Soon, you’ll simply give in to temptation and try to eat me, thus fulfilling the prophecies of every den-mother in every tribe ever,” he chided her, wiping away a fresh flow as it threatened to drip into his own mouth.

Amusement, and satisfaction. The picture of the golden dragon in his mind grew and grew, then snapped its mouth shut over the little blue kobold, swallowing it whole. Not a threat or a promise. Teasing.

He shook his head, and Li hissed in dissatisfaction as her tongue missed his face. “You’re a greedy thing,” he said, but held still until the blood and his breathing slowed.

At last, Kaz gave an experimental sniff, and found that while his nostrils felt oddly clogged, they worked, and he could still smell Lianhua. He rubbed his snout tiredly.

“I need to rest,” he muttered. “What am I doing, running through unknown territory? I knew better than this by the time I was five. It doesn’t matter that I can see and smell better than before. All it takes is one thing I didn’t see, and-” He shivered.

Li lifted from his arm, circled around him twice, then dropped back down to settle around his neck again. She sent him an image of a sleeping kobold, with a fierce dragon standing over him, watching.

He rubbed her head gently, stroking the scaled cheek until she leaned into the pressure, just enough to let him know she didn’t dislike it. “I know, you’ll protect me. But the humans are getting further ahead all the time. I just want to find them!”

He knew she felt his frustration, and she whistled softly, showing him a dragon, darting through tunnels, searching, searching.

“No,” he told her. “We need to stay together.” That was his answer every time she had suggested something similar. Yes, they could explore twice as much territory if they split up, but if one of them was hurt or killed, the other would probably never even know it had happened until their link was abruptly severed. They belonged together.

More worry, and he sighed, giving her long neck a final stroke. “I’m all right. I just need to keep going. I can rest when we find them.”

He meant it, but at the same time his paws felt like they’d been dipped in molten lead as he began to move again. He was more cautious with the amount of ki he allowed into his nose, but that also made it harder to pick up the faint scent he followed, especially when it passed through the trails of beasts and kobolds. Twice, he had to turn around and go back, and each time it was harder to convince himself he wasn’t just imagining the lingering trace.

Until he found the stairs.

It was just another corner, saturated with the ever-present musk of kobolds and the reek of copper, and he turned, drawing in his next deep breath. He didn’t even notice the shift in light until Li squeaked and half-lifted from him, grasping his fur in her mouth as she desperately tried to drag him backwards. He blinked, nearly yelping from the sudden sharp pain, and his paw went back, leg giving out, so he landed on the ground with a soft thump, Li pulled from the air after him.

Sharp barks rang out from the open space he’d been about to enter, and the click of claws on stone grew louder as at least two kobolds ran toward him. Kaz looked around wildly, then rolled into a gap between two imperfectly-broken stalactites and a short section of flowstone. It was dark, and whoever was coming would have to go around.

Li crouched against his chest, clinging tightly to his fur, and he could tell she was concentrating. She had long since stopped whatever she had done to keep the Copperstriker guard from noticing them, and he could almost feel it snap back into place around them.

Two males turned the corner, claws scratching against the stone. Both held bone clubs with copper teeth embedded in the surface, but one was taller and slim, while the other had the same kind of squat, powerful build as the others Kaz had seen.

The squat one stopped, lips pulled back to show the longest fangs Kaz had ever seen on a kobold. They overlapped his lower lip, gleaming in the dim light coming from behind him. The ruff around his neck was so dense his jaw vanished into it.

The slim male went on a few feet, then stopped, looking back uncertainly. “Bek?”

Bek growled softly, silver-blue eyes sweeping the tunnel opening. They lingered on the shadows in which Kaz crouched, and his broad nostrils quivered as he drew in a deep breath. “Stranger,” the male grunted, and the taller one sniffed, too, frowning.

“Maybe?” he said at last. “But the Muckdiggers came through two days ago. It smells old.”

The older male growled again, then shook his head, a drop of saliva dangling from one fang. “Watch your tongue.”

Shrugging, the slim male put his club back on his belt. “Irondiggers then.” His lip lifted as well, revealing fangs nearly as long as his partners. “Pilla isn’t here. I don’t see why-”

Bek’s hand lashed out, slapping the other male across the face with a loud, meaty thwack. His pale eyes were merciless as they stared at the kobold, who clutched at his bloody lip. “Don’t disrespect the chief.”

A low rumble came from the taller male’s chest, and the two stared at each other before the younger one’s ears lowered, just slightly. He looked away, muttering, “I don’t see anything. It was probably just a fuergar.”

Bek stared for another moment, ruff bristling, before nodding. “Let’s go back.”

The two turned and went back into the cavern, the younger male two full steps behind Bek.

Kaz remained where he was, heart pounding at the close call. He sent deep gratitude and admiration to Li, who tilted her head, eyes whirling white with pride.

Kaz didn’t move until his sharp ears told him the two kobolds were far enough away that they would have difficulty hearing him or getting back before he could hide. Then he crawled out of his little nook, urging Li to climb onto his back so he could slide forward on his belly until his nose just protruded into the cavern.

Freezing again, he waited. Waited for any sound, any sign that he’d been noticed. Bit by bit, he wriggled forward, until at last, he could see.

The stairs.

And not just any stairs, but the last ones before the mid-levels. He hadn’t gone down just six or seven levels, but the full ten remaining before the most obviously deadly section of the entire mountain. A chill went through him at the realization of just how easy it would have been to take a wrong turning, another passage angled down, and end up one level too far. One level he would probably not have survived long enough to climb again.

The gaping maw of some ancient monster framed the stairs, carved from one massive piece of obsidian. Black teeth as tall as any kobold arched like unnatural stalactites, nearly meeting the ones below, even though the ceiling was well over ten feet high. A lolling tongue rolled out over the lower teeth, and in order to reach the steps, you had to climb over that glossy surface, between those teeth, and vanish into the darkness of the gruesome gullet. Every detail was perfectly crafted, gums and teeth and flesh like a real thing, eternally frozen in the act of engulfing its prey.

Kaz’s nose, looking like a far smaller and more innocuous version of this threatening display, twitched. Something deep within his nostril itched, and he scrambled backward as quickly as he dared, desperately rubbing at his snout. At this moment, a sneeze could bring death, but he longed to sneeze oh, so very, very much.

When the urge finally quieted, he scrubbed at his damp eyes and gave a tentative sniff. The scent of fulan tickled his nose, and he grimaced.

Li sent an interrogative thought, and Kaz shook his head. Fulan was a menace, and kobold tribes burned it the moment it was found. It looked like a rust-red powder that appeared on any lichen or moss nearby, quickly causing it to shrivel and die. Once a plant was infected, there was no saving it, and it was best to use firemoss or send females to burn every bit of it in order to prevent the stuff from spreading. Sometimes it appeared in uninhabited areas, and by the time someone found it, it had killed everything except the fungi, disrupting the cycle of life so badly that it could take years for the area to produce enough to support a tribe again.

If there was a large enough patch of the stuff close enough to reek like that, there was no way the Copperstrikers didn’t know about it. Why hadn’t they burned it out yet? Didn’t they know it could spread in a matter of days?

After sending a series of images to Li, explaining what fulan was, Kaz crawled forward again. This time, he kept tight control over his nose, breathing in slowly so he could stop the moment it began to itch. Now that he’d identified the rot, it was hard to smell anything else, and it took far longer than he liked to tease out Lianhua’s scent.

Yes, it definitely continued into the cavern, and presumably down the stairs as well. Kaz vaguely wondered if Gaoda had managed to find another blue kobold to guide them after all, or if the human male had had to settle for a different color. A green, perhaps?

He drew back. None of these thoughts were helping him, though, honestly, he didn’t know what could. The stairs were guarded, which was no surprise, but he had no idea what to do. If it had been a tribe he knew, or even a normal tribe from the heights, he would have taken his chances and trusted that Lianhua had told them he was coming and paid his way along with the rest of the group. Mid-level kobolds, however, were very nearly a whole different creature.

While upper-level tribes were all too aware that their hold on territory and life alike were tenuous, and could easily depend on their neighbor’s goodwill, in the middle levels, each tribe stood or fell on their own. Even if the human female told them he was coming, who knew if they would honor any deals they made?

It was promising, though, that they had let the Irondiggers through. The tribe was one that filled an unusual role within kobold society, never settling anywhere for more than a few days. They wandered the edges of other tribe’s territories, trading things that couldn’t be found on one level with tribes living on the next.

They never engaged in luegat or vara, and many of their members had been expelled from their birth tribes for being too weak or useless. Most tribes looked down on them, though their arrival was also a cause for excitement, since they always seemed to have something interesting or unique. Kaz himself had thought of running away to join them when he had first discovered the power within himself, but they only accepted those who were sent away, not those who fled.

If the Copperstrikers were engaging in trade and negotiating with such a low-ranking tribe for passage, perhaps that meant that their current chief was a reasonable one? It was time for Kaz the skulker, Kaz the lurker, to once again skulk and lurk. If the humans had passed through here, the kobolds would be talking about it, and Kaz would be listening.