The Broken Knife

As Reina tried to pull herself together enough to explain, Kaz looked around at the females, most of whom huddled behind beds and against the walls, all staring at him. A few had their fists balled up, and one even held a wooden knife that must have been carved from a piece of one of the beds, which were the only furniture.

“We’re getting you out,” Kaz told them. “Get ready to run. We’re going to go gather the prisoners from the other two buildings, and then we’ll be back.”

None of the females was particularly small, and Kaz thought Jinn and Reina were actually some of the youngest among them. Briefly, he wondered if there were no children with enough dragon heritage for the fangqiu to work, or if they were in one of the other two buildings.

“I’ll stay here,” Jinn said, her eyes on Reina. “If another xiyi comes in, I’ll kill it.”

That was actually a good point. If they all left, it was quite possible that another guard or, possibly worse, a shaman could come in. Kaz wasn’t too concerned about being able to kill them, as well, but there was the possibility that they might either use more of the prisoners as shields, or start killing the humans.

A particularly loud shriek came from just outside the building, and Kaz started moving toward the door. “I need you or Reina so the humans will trust me.” He held up the hand clutching the bloody mage-knife, showing off the blue fur that covered his arm.

Jinn frowned. “Can’t you just change back? Look like a human again, I mean?”

He shook his head. Even if he really wanted to, he didn’t think it would be that easy, and it would definitely take far too much of his ki. “I can’t,” he told her, and grasped the handle of the door. Not surprisingly, it was locked, but Jinn crouched by the body of the xiyi she’d killed. Her fingers shook, making the ring of keys jingle as she lifted them from his belt and tossed them to Kaz.

There were only three of the long metal tools, and Kaz was glad Lianhua had shown him how to use one during their brief stay at the inn in Wheldrake. The second key opened the door, revealing a xiyi, crouched and snarling, with a long blade in his hands. Kaz supposed he should have expected it, but these guards had so little ki in them that they were next to impossible to see, making them practically invisible to him.

He readied himself, pulling up his shield as Li came down from overhead, diving toward this new threat. Then the xiyi’s eyes rounded, and he simply toppled forward, collapsing as Kaz stepped aside. Kyla stood behind him, her own eyes almost as large as the xiyi’s, and her little knife dripping red.

“I’ll…watch this group. You don’t have to worry about them,” she said, looking past Kaz at the circle of shocked faces. Reina was the only one who looked truly happy to see her, a smile on the princess’ face as she said something to the woman she’d been hugging.

There was no time, so Kaz just laid his hand on Kyla’s head, briefly, as they traded places. There was another xiyi on the ground a few feet away, but he was definitely dead, so Kaz ignored him, moving instead toward the next building, with Jinn right behind him.

Li couldn’t fly through the doorway, so instead she rose up through the hole in the roof. She bobbled wildly as an arrow scraped along her side, but thankfully it didn’t penetrate her scales. A xiyi had climbed the farthest building, and even as she watched, he nocked another arrow.

Then Chi Yincang was there, and the two halves of the reptilian went in opposite directions. The dark warrior’s eyes briefly caught on Li, now rapidly descending toward her kobold, and he nodded as if in satisfaction before leaping back into battle.

Kaz watched the whole thing through Li’s eyes, but couldn’t see the xiyi beyond the building that loomed before him, so he simply added another debt to what he owed Chi Yincang and continued moving. Li landed beside him as he slipped one of the two remaining keys into the lock on the second building and turned it. The door opened.

Once again, a xiyi waited immediately on the other side, but this time Kaz was expecting it, so his shield was in place. The knife skipped and slid away from him as his own hand impacted the reptilian’s long, muscular torso. A ki-bolt discharged directly into the xiyi’s flesh, blowing him straight backwards into a second xiyi. This one stumbled back, instinctively catching at his companion, but quickly allowed the body to slide down onto the floor.

Two more xiyi came at Kaz, while a third emerged from the shadows around the corner of the building. This one no longer carried a lantern, choosing instead to walk in darkness and hold his bow ready to fire. Which he did. Jinn staggered as the arrow sank into her left arm, but in spite of the wound, she flipped her knife and threw it, once again leaving the hilt standing in the eye socket of her attacker.

Kaz didn’t see any more as he ducked, coming up inside the closest xiyi’s reach, another ki-bolt lifting this one from his claws as well. A burbling hiss escaped the reptilian as air left his lungs for the last time. That left two more on Kaz, but Li took one, her wings beating at him, knocking his weapon from his hands as the dragon tore into his chest with her ki-powered rear claws.

The remaining xiyi came straight for Kaz, who was trying to decide whether to use another ki-bolt - thus draining his power but definitely killing his opponent - or his knife, which left the possibility of survival and retaliation. Before he could decide, someone grabbed the xiyi’s head from behind, twisting the long neck until it snapped, then dropping the body to the ground.

Kaz barely took time to see that the person who’d helped him was a tall, dark-skinned human female with long, iron-gray braids, before he was on the final xiyi. Li had done considerable damage to this one, including steaming one side of his face, but she held one of her wings tight against her back, and Kaz could feel her pain through their bond.

Now that there was only one, the question of whether to save time or power was easy, so Kaz slipped his blade up beneath the xiyi’s ribs, belatedly realizing that the reptilian might keep his heart somewhere other than where Kaz expected it to be. Apparently his strike was true, though, because the xiyi went limp almost instantly, and Kaz was able to catch Li’s falling body as her perch crumpled.

A pang of hot fire went through Li’s left wing, echoing in Kaz’s left shoulder blade. Kaz cradled his dragon protectively as he turned, looking for any more enemies. There were none. Not yet. Like Reina, Jinn now stood in the embrace of one of the occupants of the building, except that this one was male, with short, straight hair of such a bright red that even Raff’s might seem dark in comparison.

The tall female who had snapped the xiyi’s neck stood beside the two of them, her hand on Jinn’s shoulder and an expression of deep relief on her face. This hardened into determination as she looked from Kaz to the younger female, and then at the open door.

The clash of battle could still be heard outside, but the sounds were definitely becoming fainter, probably as the number of remaining xiyi was slowly - or not so slowly - chipped away. Unfortunately, there was no way someone hadn’t gone for help, so reinforcements could arrive at any time. They needed to move.

Apparently the human female came to the same conclusion, because she patted Jinn’s back gently once more, then looked around at the others in the building. There were far fewer of them than there had been in the first building, which made it even more surprising that there were more guards, but from the hard looks on most of their faces, he suspected they hadn’t been nearly as easy to control as the first group.

“Jinn?” the female asked. “What do we need to do?”

Jinn opened her mouth, then closed it and looked at Kaz. The older female followed her gaze, and dark eyebrows rose in surprise, but she just looked at Kaz expectantly.

Kaz clenched his teeth, mind turning over various options, before saying, “Take anyone who can’t fight back to Reina, Kyla, and Mei. Anyone who can help, come with me.”

Jinn turned, face now almost gray beneath her naturally dark skin. Her fingers clutched her upper arm, where blood stained the sleeve. The arrow had been removed or fallen out, so Kaz had momentarily forgotten that she’d been wounded at all. Still, she said, “I’ll go with you.”

Kaz shook his head. “You’ll go back to Reina. You can’t fight like that, and I can’t heal you-” He broke off. He’d been planning to say he couldn’t spare the ki to heal her well enough to allow her to fight, but thinking about it made him realize something else.

She’d been hit by one of the xiyi arrows. Did she now have a duqiu or fangqiu inside her? If so, she was particularly vulnerable to whatever the shamans could do with one of those, since she wasn’t valuable to the xiyi in the same way the others were. A shaman could simply trigger the thing to release its poison, and she would die before anyone had time to react.

Kaz leaped across the room, shifting Li as he pulled out his knife once again. He fed it a pulse of ki, refreshing the gem and causing the blade to flicker with power. He couldn’t ‘see’ the stone, if there was one, and there was no revealing lump just beneath the skin, so he simply muttered, “Sorry,” before slipping the blade in through the wound, trying to find something that didn’t belong.

Jinn yelped, then sobbed out a ragged breath as Kaz probed with the tip of his knife, knowing he was doing further damage, but unable to take the risk of leaving it alone. He felt Jinn shift, moving her other arm, and then something scraped along his blade. Two more careful movements found the edges of the thing, and Kaz formed a circle of ki, knowing he would remove tissue along with the sphere, but unable to be more precise.

A flick of his blade lifted rune-stone and gobbet of flesh from the wound, and he tossed it away without touching it. It landed on a bed - which he absently noted was simply a thin cushion placed on the floor, unlike the elaborate beds in the other building - and began to hiss and bubble as soon as Kaz pulled back his ki.

That done, he turned, finding the point of a knife hovering right in front of his eyes. Li, too, had been caught up in the removal of the sphere, but now she hissed out a cloud of furious steam, making the knife’s wielder pull away just slightly.

At some point, the tall woman had taken Jinn’s knife, stabbing toward Kaz’s ear as he dug around in the young female’s wound. Jinn had caught the older female’s wrist, and though Kaz very much doubted she could actually force the thickly muscled arm to stay, the killing blow hadn’t come.

“What in Pellis’ name did you do?” The female asked, watching Kaz unblinkingly as she shifted the knife from her burned hand to the uninjured one. There was no clumsiness in the gesture, and Kaz guessed she could use both hands to fight, if needed.

“Saved my life, probably, Ma,” Jinn said, though her voice trembled. “The xiyi have these little balls of poison attached to their arrows. I should have realized when the shaft just pulled out and left the head in my arm, but I didn’t-” She swallowed hard, looking at Kaz. “Thank you.”

Ma lowered the weapon, then dipped her head. “Then you have my thanks as well.” One corner of her mouth tilted up in a way that made the resemblance to Raff utterly unmistakeable. “And I never thought I’d be saying that to a kobold. Pellis’ wonders never cease. Now, you said there are more people to save?”

Kaz nodded, and the female turned, pointing to four people, mostly male. “Ricard, Phillipe, Mison, Verena, with me. Jost, take Jeanne and everyone else.” She spun the blade in her hand. “I’ll just borrow this for a little while, Jeanne. Ricard, grab the weapons from these cursed lizards, and let’s go.”