Chapter Eighty-four (Patreon)

There was no joy to be found in hardtack, but Raff was right about one thing: it was filling. Kaz managed to eat most of his portion, but Li absolutely refused after trying one bite. Raff thought it was hilarious that the ‘rat’ was picky, but he didn’t seem to have any other options, so soon enough Kaz bid him farewell and left to find something for the dragon to eat.

His nose told him that food was available somewhere outside the circle of quarantined huts, but when he got close to the gate, the kobold guarding it glared so fiercely that he veered off. Hod had said that food was limited in the den, and he obviously wasn’t a Redmane, so he wouldn’t be allowed to eat anyway.

Logic didn’t prevent Li from filling his mind with constant complaints, however, and soon enough he found himself staring at the low wall again. He was nowhere near the gate this time, and while two males were walking in circles around the wall, what he could see of them looked bored. Their eyes were half-focused, and their ears drooped slightly, rather than swiveling to follow each sound.

“Can you hide us?” he asked the dragon, sending her a picture of the two of them, hiding behind the stalagmite only feet from the Copperstriker den.

She agreed eagerly, and this time when she did… whatever she did, he sensed something rise up around them. It was almost like a cloud, smothering the sight and scent of them. He frowned, turning to look at the inside of it, then set her down and stepped away. She started to follow, and he told her to stay and hide herself.

Glancing around, Kaz didn’t see anyone nearby, so he took a few more steps away, and the vaguely fuergar-shaped dragon on the ground began to blur. He narrowed his eyes, pushing more ki into them, and the blur resolved itself into a dragon again.

Li whistled angrily, and he felt a kind of push against his ki, shoving it back at him, and he realized that some part of him was actually reaching out toward her, or at least where he knew she was. As far as he could tell, most people with ki did keep it inside their bodies most of the time, so he pulled his in as well, locking it inside his own skin.

Instantly, everything around him lost a little of its depth, and he realized just how much he had come to depend on what his ki was telling him. Was that what Lianhua meant by ‘aura’? She had said she could sense it, and that his had changed, so was this extension of his self what she sensed? When had he started doing it? Was it when he was lost in the paths between, and suddenly even the darkest of tunnels was lit by the ki of every tiny plant and animal?

He struggled to hold himself to the level of anyone else, but each time he looked toward Li, within a few moments, she shoved some creeping tendril of his power back at him, and finally he gave up. He thought it would be worthwhile to try again, in case they ran into someone or something like Lianhua, but for now it was enough to know that Li really was all but invisible to anyone who couldn’t sense ki. Unlike whatever Chi Yincang did, when she moved, the illusion of absence was broken, but so long as she held still, the sight and smell of her faded into the background, becoming something his mind dismissed as familiar or unimportant.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Kaz relaxed, allowing his ki to flow freely again as he stepped forward and picked up what his mind had been trying to convince him was just a rock. Li clicked happily as she wound her way up his arm and settled back into place again.

He stroked her head gently, then turned to eye the wall behind them. Now that he had a better idea how the illusion worked, he thought that they could climb over undetected so long as they didn’t try it while one of the guards was close by.

Unfortunately, he was on the flat side of the wall, so he couldn’t place his paws on the bone structure to help him get over. He glanced around again before sidling over to press his back up against it. A crossbar fell across his shoulders, and another just below his tail, and there was just enough give in the leather that if he moved quickly-

He heard the scrape of claws on stone, and froze. Li did the same, and he could feel her pull on their combined ki as she concealed them. This would be a good test, to let them know if their trick would hold up under the scrutiny of a guard.

Gray-furred ears appeared around the curve of the wall, bobbing up and down as the warrior walked along. He was shorter than Kaz, so his eyes only appeared over the wall on each rising step. His pace was measured, but slow, and, like the others Kaz had seen, he seemed more interested in his own thoughts than whatever was going on inside the wall. As he approached, he seemed to stare straight into Kaz’s eyes for a heart-stopping moment, and then he was gone, completely failing to acknowledge Kaz or Li’s presence.

Kaz’s tail wagged, undoubtedly breaking the semblance of wall or stone, or whatever the guard saw, but the male had already walked by. Kaz waited until the warrior vanished around the curve of the wall, knowing that he now had anywhere from three to five minutes before another guard came along. The enclosure wasn’t large, but the guards were in no hurry, either.

Before he could change his mind, Kaz pushed power into his arms and set his hands on the top of the wall. He expected to feel his muscles strain as he lifted himself from the ground, and his paws scrabble for purchase on the bone structure hidden on the other side of the leather, but instead he nearly flew over the wall, scraping his still-painful ear on the rough stone of the low ceiling.

He yelped, elbows buckling in surprise, and tumbled down to the ground with a thump. He was at least on the other side, but this certainly wasn’t how he’d intended to land, and he rubbed his tail gingerly as he climbed to his feet again.

Li hovered in the air in front of him, having taken off at some point during his ignominious fall, and she was clearly amused. He glared at her, and she sent him a hopefully-exaggerated image of himself falling tail over ears after practically bouncing off the ceiling. If it had happened to someone else, he might have admitted that it looked ridiculous, but as it was, he muttered, “You could at least wait until you’re sure I’m not hurt.”

With a few flaps of her wings, the dragon circled his head, then settled down on his shoulder. He felt a twinge of pain as she did something just out of his sight, and when her head reappeared, there was a small smear of blood on her nose.

Kaz clapped his hand to his head and felt warm liquid beneath his fingers as he gingerly probed the spot where he’d struck his head. It was, of course, the same place he’d hit it during the battle before they met the Copperstrikers. He didn’t feel the nauseating headache that had accompanied the original injury, however, so he thought he’d just managed to tear the wound open again a bit.

“I am not food,” he hissed, crouching down to move away from the wall.

Li sent back a noncommittal response, but he was almost certain it was her version of a joke. He didn’t think she was still licking the wound, at least, which was something.

Lifting his nose, Kaz sniffed, following the scent of food as well as his own memory of the path they’d taken to get here. He doubted he could get over both of the walls that separated the females from the rest of the den as easily as he had the one surrounding the quarantine area, but surely there was food inside somewhere. The pot the single female had been stirring wasn’t nearly large enough to feed the whole tribe.

He dodged to the side, pressing up against the wall of a hut as a female turned a corner ahead. Li’s camouflage was in full effect, though, or perhaps the female was simply so focused on her own thoughts that she didn’t pay any attention to a strange male as she passed by. Her brown eyes were dull, her tail drooped, and he could count her ribs beneath her fur, so Kaz thought it was entirely possible that she just didn’t care enough to look up. Even the light of her core was so subdued that it was barely visible.

She turned another corner while Kaz was still caught up in his own thoughts, wondering just how bad things were in this den that an adult female looked so underfed. Females usually ate first, even when food was scarce, but while Kaz thought the Redmane males were perhaps a little thin, this female was nearly emaciated.

That made him feel guilty for trying to find and steal some of whatever food they did have, but only Lianhua and Raff would be willing to feed Li from their own stores, and Li had already turned up her nose at Raff’s offering. Still, the dragon didn’t eat that much, and Kaz himself wasn’t starving any more, thanks to the hardtack and water. They wouldn’t take enough to feed a pup, and surely that wouldn’t matter.

With that settled, at least in his own mind, Kaz set out again, wary of both wandering females and the guards he’d seen before. He quickly realized that he could see the females coming, just by looking for ki moving around him, and soon he was so busy watching cores that he barely noticed when a male almost tripped over him. Li had to bite his sore ear in order to bring his attention back to his immediate surroundings, but fortunately the guard turned the other way, and they didn’t have to test whether Kaz managed to freeze in time for the dragon to conceal them.

It was too close a call, however, and after that Kaz worked his way over to a wall, stopping with his back pressed up against it each time he caught sight of a new core. He was shocked and dismayed at how few there were. Most of the huts were empty, and where there were cores, they were usually pressed against the ground as if the female was lying down. Only a few females seemed to be up and moving, but Kaz had no idea if that was because they were too weak, or if something else was going on. None of them showed the tell-tale signs of being corrupted by fulan or an ingested core, but they were all so weak that they looked like a fire on the verge of going out.

Kaz heard a soft whine as he passed yet another hut with yet another single core-light inside, and it took him a moment to realize that he had made the sound. Everything about this felt wrong, though, and if it weren’t for Li’s insistent feeling of hunger, he would have turned around and gone back several minutes ago.

Then he turned another corner and saw something that made him stop in his tracks.

A map. Or rather, the map. The one he remembered from the time the Broken Knives had passed through the mid-levels. Though this was… different.

He closed his eyes, dredging his memory for details, and finally realized what had changed. Before, he was certain there had been eighteen stylized sets of stairs carved at equidistant points around the outside of the design, but this one had only nine. More than that, those nine were set far closer to what had made him tell Lianhua that he believed the mosui lived in a city.

A multitude of rectangles stood, pressed close against one another in nine stacked layers, with tiny figures carved around their bases. At the very center, piercing through them all, stood a single vertical rectangle, and in the middle of that - on the fifth layer, no matter whether you counted from the top or the bottom - was a single square lit by the same eternal light that burned in alcoves along every set of ancient stairs.

Kaz had only one interpretation for this image: nine levels, filled with buildings, and a single building, or perhaps a single tunnel, that passed through the center of every one.