The Broken Knife

Li’s power fell around her and Kaz, making them vanish. Chi Yincang stepped up into the air, disappearing just as effectively. Mei leaped into Kyla’s arms, after which the two of them faded into the subtle shimmer of Kyla’s technique. Everyone else scattered, with Yingtao and Lianhua staying close enough to be involved if they were needed, while the other females moved further away. This left Snen standing alone in the space just outside his hut, and for a moment the xiyi looked surprised, but then he let out a short hiss that might have been laughter.

A second xiyi entered the dim lantern light. This one was a bit taller than Snen, who in turn stood about the same height as Lianhua. Its scales were deep green, and its clothing was more like that of humans, rather than Snen’s simple loincloth and cloak.

“Sao, Snengriak,” the new xiyi said, lifting a clawed hand. “Has anything happened? Perhaps the herbs rose up in rebellion?” Its words sounded like a joke, but the tone was sour.

Snen shook his head, stepping to the side so he was in deeper shadow. From a distance, his injuries weren’t obvious, but as the other drew closer, there could be no doubt that something had, indeed, happened.

“Nothing except that you’re late again, Chekdrusk,” Snen said. “Dinner will be cold before I get any.”

For an instant, Chekdrusk bared sharp teeth. “If you had let me drop that false dragonet from the mountain when I wanted to, neither of us would be waiting to eat. We would have been served first in the dining hall, as is our right as hunters.”

Snen sighed. “The shamans would have been pleased to receive a fuergar that could disguise itself as a dragon, and you know it.”

“I know that by the time I become a hunter again, Zhihs will have tired of waiting to choose her mate.”

“And I know that Zhihs never had any intention of accepting your offer in the first place,” Snen said, with the voice of someone repeating the words of an argument that no longer had any meaning.

Chekdrusk walked past Kyla, then Chi Yincang, never noticing anything. By the time he reached Kaz and Li, however, he was close enough to see the bloodstains on Snen’s cloak. He slowed, eyes narrowing. “Are you sure-?”

Kaz pushed a red ki-bolt into the xiyi’s chest. The scales popped and sizzled, releasing a scent reminiscent of cooking binyi. Chekdrusk screeched, clutching at the wound, but Kaz wasn’t done. With a flick of his mage-blade, he cut away the cord holding Chekdrusk’s whistle, allowing it to drop and skitter across the stone floor. Once the threat of dragons was gone, Kaz slid the tip of his blade between two of the long, overlapping scales beneath the xiyi’s jaw. Chekdrusk froze as blood trickled out between the scales, his eyes flicking to the kobold who seemed to have come from nowhere, then halting on Li.

“The…dragonet…”he choked, eyes so wide the white showed around the edges of the large irises.

Snen stepped forward, removing a small knife from Chekdrusk’s belt. Tossing it aside, he said almost gently, “Guards don’t talk about dragons.” Then he turned the knife around and struck a sharp blow to the base of Chekdrusk’s skull, which would have driven Kaz’s knife into the green xiyi’s jaw if Kaz hadn’t managed to pull his hand back in time.

Slowly, everyone else approached, every one of them staring from Snen to Chekdrusk’s crumpled form. Snen’s head swayed from side to side in what seemed to be his version of a shrug. “I said I didn’t like him.” He looked at the fallen xiyi, muttering, “You will never be good enough for my egg-sister.”

Yingtao produced a rope from the storage item concealed within her sleeve, tying the xiyi up with ruthless efficiency and a skill that made Kaz glad she wasn’t his enemy. Chi Yincang then carried Chekdrusk into the battered hut, where he was left to wake in his own time. Kaz was certain that however long that waking took, it would be incredibly painful for him to attempt to move, much less escape. He hadn’t put enough power into his ki-bolt to seriously injure the reptilian, but the burn would certainly hurt a great deal.

After that, at Lianhua’s insistence, Chi Yincang jumped and climbed back up to where they’d left Doran, and the human, too, was left with the unconscious xiyi. Yingtao said Doran would remain unconscious for at least two more hours, but she tied him up anyway.

The whole group crept down the tunnel at last, and the passage turned out to be only a few hundred feet long. The smell of food had stomachs rumbling by the time they were halfway, and if their situation hadn’t been so perilous, the sounds of quiet growling in the darkness would have been quite amusing.

The tunnel opened up onto a cavern that was perhaps a third the size of the original one. One large building occupied the middle of it, but most of the space was taken up by an area that looked almost exactly like a kobold dining cave, while another section held what looked like a natural pool fed by a gently trickling fall of water. Instinctively, Kaz looked up as he entered, checking for lopo, but while there were stalactites, none of them held any power.

Snen gestured to their left, where another passage branched off of the main cavern. They had decided the females and Chi Yincang would wait with the xiyi while Kaz, Li, Kyla, and Mei went to find Raff. Lianhua was less than pleased about this, but even she admitted it was wisdom, and so she waited.

Li hid Kaz as they crept toward the large building, but Kyla was able to move much more quickly, so she and Mei reached the building first. The little female was remarkably good at remaining utterly silent, but Mei was even better. The fuergar had already gnawed a small hole in the building’s wall by the time Kaz and Li arrived, and they saw her long tail vanish into its shadowy depths.

The remaining three crouched in the darkness beside the building, each hoping that Mei understood what was being asked of her, and that she would succeed. Kaz wished Raff’s mana hadn’t been bound, because identifying his pattern of red sparks would have been relatively simple from this close. Without that, however, he had to depend on a fuergar who was, he suspected, rapidly becoming something more.

Five minutes stretched to ten, and just when he and Li were creating a backup plan, the rodent poked her nose out of her little tunnel and squeaked softly. She ran into Kyla’s arms as a deep but quiet voice said, “Kyla?”

Kyla’s ears perked up straight in pleasure, and Kaz felt his own do the same. He leaned down, whispering, “Kyla, Kaz, and Li. The others are here as well, but they won’t come unless they must.”

Raff snorted softly. “The boss thinks I’m back here draining my bilgewater, but they won’t buy that for too long. If you’re gettin’ me out of here, you’d best get to it.”

Once again, Kaz had no idea what half of Raff’s words meant, so he just asked, “Can you leave this building?”

“Nah. It’s locked, and we’re supposed to be sleepin’ like good little boys. I’ve got a spot right by the door, but that’s also where the head xiyi is standin’, so if you go in that way, there’s gonna be fighting.” Raff hesitated. “It’s kinda strange to say, but these guys aren’t so bad. I’d kinda regret killin’ them. Not to mention I’ve got one of those stone balls in my neck, which would probably kill me if I tried. And they threatened to feed us to the dragons.”

“Did they?” Kaz asked, so startled he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Doran had said that his partner had nightmares about being eaten by a dragon, but after seeing this place, Kaz had assumed it was just the imaginings of a terrified human. Perhaps not, though. Surely the xiyi wouldn’t threaten something they weren’t willing to carry out.

Kyla crouched down beside Kaz, whispering, “Mei can make the hole bigger, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Kaz shook his head. He was rapidly coming to a realization he didn’t like at all. “Raff, if you leave, what will happen?”

Raff sighed, and Kaz suspected the human had already reached the same conclusion. “If, huh? Yeah, they’ll notice right away. They’ve got kobolds, too. Cute little furballs, even with all the teeth and claws. Never really noticed that before, since they were always trying to snack on my innards. But I suspect they’d sniff me…us out, right quick.”

“If we promise to come back for you-” Kaz began, but Kyla grasped his arm so hard it almost hurt.

“No!” she gasped. “We have to save Raff. He’s stupid and rude, but he gives me rides and he’s the only one who’ll play with me when I’m bored.”

A big hand reached through the hole, feeling around until it could pat Kyla’s knee. “S’alright, kid. He’s right. I’ve got a better idea, though, if we can make it work. Blue, can you take this thing outta my neck?”

Kaz thought for a moment, and then Li sent a picture into his mind. It was ridiculous, and more than a little risky, but it was the best way.

“Maybe,” he said. “Lay down on the floor with the back of your neck toward the hole.”

It took so long for Raff to answer that Kaz thought someone might have caught him, but then he heard rustling and a soft grunt. “My ribs still hurt somethin’ fierce, Blue. Can you do something about that, as long as you’re at it?” His tone indicated he was joking, but Kaz nodded, even though his friend couldn’t see it.

Li slid down from Kaz’s back, then walked between Kaz and Kyla, who still looked very unhappy with the way things were going. The dragon laid down on her belly, stretching out her long neck and wriggling forward until her head passed into the hole.

Kaz watched through Li’s eyes as everything grew dark, then light again. It was always a little odd to see things from her perspective, and Raff’s broad neck seemed enormous to her. There was a red cut in the skin just above the spot where neck and shoulders met, but as always, Kaz couldn’t detect the orb itself.

“Stay where you are,” he said, “but can you feel the orb with your fingers?”

Raff grunted and twisted some more. He was built for strength, and though he was more flexible than it seemed like he should be, it took an awkward moment for him to find the little nodule beneath his skin. It was a little lower than the cut, and Kaz was glad he hadn’t assumed that the ball would still be there.

“This will hurt,” he warned, and then Li bit down hard.

Raff’s body cultivation was at what Lianhua called the Iron stage, and his skin was at least as hard as that metal. Fortunately, Li’s teeth were even stronger, thanks to her own growth and what she gained through her link with Kaz.

As Kaz formed a tiny pocket of ki inside Raff’s flesh, surrounding the rune-sphere, Li tore the thing from its resting place. It wasn’t a neat, tidy slice like the xiyi had used to place it. No, this was a bleeding wound at least a little bigger than Kaz felt it absolutely had to be.

Raff recoiled briefly, biting back an exclamation, then forced himself to lay still as Li spit the bloody ball onto the ground. Strangely, there was no sign of the scraps of flesh that must have come away with it, but Kaz chose to ignore that, at least for now.

Once the deed was done, Kaz sent a rush of blue ki through his dragon, flooding the wound as well as traveling down to the human’s ribs. It was difficult to tell without any mana to trace out the damage, but Kaz thought at least one of them had cracked again, so he refreshed the ki he’d used to bind the pieces together. Once he had given the male as much ki as they could spare, given that he had no idea what lay ahead of them, Li withdrew again.

Li muttered.

Kaz pulled his dragon and his cousin backwards as Raff began to do his version of cultivation. Mana formed from the air around him, tugging on Kaz’s ki even through the wall. Kaz held firm to the idea that his ki belonged only to him - and Li - however, and Raff didn’t manage to steal any power from him. He was interested to note, however, that Kyla’s ki never even shifted toward the human, seeming entirely unaffected by the drain. Was it really just Kaz, then?

Kyla stared at Kaz accusingly as she stumbled back a foot, but when he realized that she was fine, he released her, and she moved to crouch by the hole again. Mei was already there, sniffing the scent of blood that now permeated the air passing through from the other side.

“Raff?” Kyla asked, almost a whimper. “Are you all right?”

This time there was no groaning when Raff moved, but Kaz could see him shift by watching the cloud of mana already gathering in his body move around. “I’m good, kiddo,” Raff said. “Now how do I get out of this place?”

Of course, Raff believed that they could leave the way they’d come in, which wasn’t true at all. Still, Snen had told them the way, and it wasn’t even difficult. If it turned out the xiyi had lied, which Kaz doubted, they would find out soon and come back for Raff.

“There are three tunnels away from this cavern,” Kaz started, but Kyla jumped in eagerly.

“Take the one nearest the eating area, not the one back toward the dragons. Walk past four tunnels, then turn right at the fifth. There’s an entrance to the real sewers there, and you can climb a ladder up to the street. The grate is heavy, but you can lift it,” she said.

“Where’s it come out?”

Kaz and Kyla exchanged a glance. They didn’t intend to use that exit, at least not yet, and it hadn’t even occurred to them to ask.

Raff seemed to understand that, because he chuckled. “No worries. I know Cliffcross like the back of my hand. If you haven’t come to break me out by dinner tomorrow, or if things go sideways, you can meet me at the Bard an’ Bee that night.”

Another look passed between the kobolds, and Kaz said, “Do you remember the fountain? The one where we were supposed to meet if we got separated at the gate?”

“Yeah?”

“Meet us there,” he said. “But if…we don’t come, just leave.”

Raff’s hand came through the wall again, palm up. His voice was unusually serious when he said, “Don’t do anything I would do, eh? And you better be at that fountain, or I’ll come lookin’ for you. I don’t leave friends behind.”

Kyla laid her hand in Raff’s, and the strong fingers closed around it gently, giving it a little squeeze. The young kobold whined softly, then said, “I don’t either.”

“That’s all right, kid,” Raff told her. “You’re not leavin’ me behind. I’m stayin’. That’s a whole different kettle of fish.”

Reluctantly, Kyla released him, and Kaz placed the hilt of his old knife into that empty hand. He didn’t think Raff could use the ki-powered mage knife, but even a dull old blade like this one was better than nothing.

“I’m sorry-” Kaz said, but couldn’t finish. He was sorry for so many things that he couldn’t put them all into words, but the greatest of them was the fact that he planned to leave his friend behind because it was simply too soon for their infiltration to be discovered. Who knew what would happen to the human captives if the xiyi believed even a single human was loose in their territory? Even if the answer was only that the reptilians would immediately send people to hunt him down, the risk was too great. Now that Raff had his power, a weapon, and a way out, surely he would be all right?

“I’ll be fine, Blue,” Raff said, as if he’d heard Kaz’s thoughts. “You go do what you’ve gotta do. You figured out where Reina’s people are, right?”

How did he know? But Kaz said, “We think so.”

“Pellis’ waves carry you then. I’ll see you soon.” Soft scraping sounds reached them as Raff’s mana raised and began to move away. He was already cultivating again, and thickened mana trailed behind him.

“I don’t want to,” Kyla said, and Kaz laid a hand on the tuft of fur between her ears.

Li said as she climbed back up Kaz’s leg and wrapped herself around his back.

Kaz chuffed a little laugh. “We’ll get him as soon as the other humans are free. This is Raff. He’ll be fine.”

Li said, but she pulled her power around them, and Kyla did the same for herself and Li. They had a bunch of strangers to save, and it had better be worth it.