Chapter Sixty-One (Patreon)

Kaz didn’t know how long he lay, trapped in the slimy, dark hole he and Chi Yincang had dug through the monster, but he was just trying to decide whether his lungs or the pain in his paws would make him pass out first when something grasped his ear. The thing yanked, slipped, then tried again, this time managing to pull on the fur at the back of his head, choking him. The fingers - because he was fairly sure that’s what they were - shifted again, closed around the looser skin at the back of his neck, and pulled.

Kaz slid out into the ochre-tinged light of the cavern and immediately began to gasp for air. He blinked blearily, his eyes burning as whatever fluid the creature used instead of blood seeped into them, and he rolled over, groaning and trying to rub the pain away. His arms barely responded to his commands, and his hands felt like meaty lumps, but he managed well enough to be able to see a little.

Chi Yincang stood over him, expressionless, as he waited for Kaz to recover. When he saw that Kaz’s eyes were open, he extended a hand down, and Kaz tried to lift his own up to meet it. He failed miserably, the arm and hand falling back to land against his chest with a soft squelch. Chi Yincang very nearly looked disgusted as he leaned over and slid his arms under Kaz’s body, lifting him up before the human’s body tensed, and they were in the air.

When they landed, Lianhua was there, and she immediately began to look Kaz over, though her worried voice faded in and out of Kaz’s hearing as the pain in his paws began to recede, and the pain in his head came to the forefront.

Something nudged his cheek, and Kaz managed to blink back the darkness that was trying to take him as his head rolled and he looked into Li’s swirling gaze. The hint of blue he’d seen there before was more prominent now, chasing flurries of black and white from the golden depths, and he sank into them.

<Idiot.> The single word was as clear as any that he had ever heard, but the voice was unfamiliar. And inside his head.

Kaz blinked, licking his lips. He cringed at the acid bite and rancid flavor of the fluid that covered him, but managed to say, “Li?”

It was Lianhua who answered, however, her face popping up behind Li’s, smiling broadly. “Kaz? Are you all right? You have a nasty wound on your head, and I think one of your toes is broken, but otherwise you seem to be okay.”

She held up four fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

He squinted, and for just a second, the four fingers became two, but then they split again, this time taking her head with them. Both Lianhuas frowned at his lack of response.

“Kaz?” Her hand moved, and something touched a spot just behind his right ear. A flash of pain stabbed through him, and he yelped.

“I’m so, so sorry,” Lianhua said, though he couldn’t get his eyes to focus well enough to see if she had returned to being her singular self. “It doesn’t want to stop bleeding, so I had to change out the bandage. It’s not too bad, I think. The bone seems intact, and you’ll have a very rakish scar when it heals.”

The pain faded to a background hum again, and her face formed out of the colorful blur that was all he could see. She still had four eyes, but that was better than two complete heads, and he wasn’t absolutely certain that she hadn’t always had four eyes, and he was just imagining that she might once have had only two.

She bit her lip. “The kobolds have agreed to let us go down to their den with them. They have to… take the bodies home, so they’re going soon.”

Kaz’s chest tightened. “How… many?”

“I… Don’t worry about that right now.” She tried to smile, then leaned forward, lowering her voice. “I’m not gathering ki right now. Can I carry you?”

His eyes widened, bringing on a fresh round of pain, but he did manage to turn his attention inward just well enough to tell two things. First, that only Li and the seed were currently draining his ki, and second, that the sheaths Li was holding around his channels were all that was preventing his ki from leaking out and trying to kill him. Again.

He rolled his head to the side and met Li’s eyes again. “Thank you,” he whispered.

Gold flooded her eyes, chasing out the other colors, and she edged forward, pressing against his shoulder as a deep feeling of concern came through their bond. It was quickly followed by an image of an enormous dragon glowering down at a tiny, very apologetic kobold. Kaz sent agreement, and felt the dragon’s familiar weight settle against him more firmly as she returned satisfaction at his recognition of his failings.

Gentle hands slid beneath him, setting off a dozen small wounds that hadn’t even been noticeable until he was moved. He whimpered, closing his eyes, and distantly heard Lianhua’s soft apology. He was jostled as she shifted him in her arms, then everything was stillness until she began to move.

With each step, Kaz wished that he could simply sink into unconsciousness, but his mind clung stubbornly to awareness as the light around him deepened from pale orange-red to the deep crimson of the eternal flames that lined the stairway. Lianhua stepped down, and a jolt of pain ran through him again when her foot landed on the first stair.

Step after step, they traveled down, and Kaz thought he might drown in the troughs between the waves of pain. He began to count the spikes of agony as they burned through him, and he had just reached three hundred and eight when they finally stopped.

“That’s it,” Lianhua’s tired voice murmured, though he couldn’t force his eyes open any longer. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but they’re taking us to someplace we can rest now.”

Voices came from around him, the smoothly accented tones of the humans mixing with the rough, familiar sound of kobolds. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they began to move again, though it wasn’t as bad this time. Kaz had never before appreciated how gracefully Lianhua moved, but now he did, and he thought that if he didn’t die, he would have to let her know how nice it was to be carried by someone who didn’t slap the ground with their paws like Raff. The metallic sound of the human’s steps mingled with the murmur of voices and the shifting light against his eyelids and the weight of Li’s warm body against his chest, and he finally…

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Kaz woke with a start, arms and legs jumping as his breath caught in his throat. A protesting hiss sounded as Li lifted her head from where she was sleeping on his chest and stared down at him. She sent him an image of a golden dragon resting peacefully when a great, rude blue kobold bumped into her, selfishly waking her.

He drew in a long, slow breath, honestly surprised to find that he was still breathing at all, and reached up to gently stroke the little dragon. “I’m sorry, Li. I’ll try not to disturb you the next time I come back from the brink of death.”

A soft chuckle sounded, and Kaz jumped, eliciting another hiss from Li as Kaz looked for the source of the sound. He managed to roll onto one side, allowing him to see the figure of an old, stooped kobold sitting beside him.

“You weren’t that badly off, pup,” the kobold said, leaning forward so his broad nose and warm brown eyes came more fully into the light cast by the firemoss torch set into the wall nearby. “I was a little worried about that wound on your head, but you responded to voices and other stimuli. You just took your time about waking up.”

Kaz blinked. “Stimuli?”

The old male raised a hand, showing Kaz a long, pointed bone needle. He grinned, and Kaz could see that he was missing more teeth than he had left. “Old trick. Poke a sleeper with a needle, and if he jumps, he’ll wake, sooner or later.”

Kaz suddenly felt prickles running up his arms and legs, and wondered just how many times this ancient warrior had poked him. He struggled to a sitting position, then shook out his arms, trying to chase off the feeling. When he tried to do the same to his legs, however, he stopped immediately, whimpering at the pain in his paw.

The strange kobold nodded sagely, setting his needle on the stone beside him. Kaz could see zhiwu webs and jejing moss there as well, so it seemed that this was the tribe’s healer, for males at least. “You twisted your left paw badly,” he said, pointing to the offending limb. “It swelled up to the size of a rougu ready for picking. You’re probably better off having slept through that. We ran out of mamu a few days ago.”

Mamu was a fairly rare lichen that numbed any part of the body that touched it. Kobolds harvested it whenever they found it, and once it was boiled, it could be stored in a clean bladder for quite some time, though it grew less effective over time. In Kaz’s experience, life in the mountain was rarely so peaceful that mamu had to be discarded because it was no longer useful.

Kaz shook his head, and the hut walls surrounding them only swayed a little. He pressed his hand to his head. “What happened?”

The kobold shrugged, standing. This process took more than a minute, and required several stages, and by the time he was done, Kaz felt like he should have gotten up and helped, even though he was the one who was injured.

“That’s a very good question, pup. From what Pils says, one of the abominations appeared, and you saved him, Regz, and Civ.”

That was three. There had been six males guarding the stairs. Kaz’s ears flattened, and a dull thump of pain came from the right side of his head. It wasn’t bad, though, so he only winced a little as he said, “Three?”

The other sighed. “Three more than would have come back without you and your friends, pup. It might not seem like much to you, but to us…”

He trailed off, then pressed his fist to his chest and very, very slowly bowed. To Kaz.

“Pils is my son’s pup. The last. When the howl came, I thought that was the end of my line. Thank you for saving him,” he said.

Kaz choked, unable to speak, so he just nodded. Feeling the depth of his emotion, Li pressed close against his chest, whistling softly.

Brown eyes flicked to her as the old male straightened again, at least as much as he was able. He shook his head. “You’re a strange one, but let no one speak against you, or old Zyle will break their teeth.” He laughed, the sound more of a cackle than a chuckle, and turned to make his way toward the door, which was outlined by dim light that seared Kaz’s eyes as he tried to focus on it.

“I’ll tell your friends you’re awake. They’ll be glad to see you. That Lianhua has been trying to get to you since you arrived, but we don’t allow females in the den right now.”

Kaz opened his mouth to ask why, then closed it again as the old kobold exited, letting the door fall shut behind him. It didn’t matter; he knew why. Females, for the first time in the history of the kobolds, were the enemy.