Chapter Eighty-six (Patreon)

Sneaking back through the den was as easy as sneaking out had been. The few females were still distracted, and the guards mostly trailed the females, so as long as Kaz avoided the first, the second quite literally followed. Kaz, on the other hand, felt like his guilt must be painted on him as brightly as the Redmanes dyed red manes. Surely, if anyone did see him, they would know exactly what he’d been up to, and he and the humans would be attacked or expelled from the den.

No one saw him, however, whether because of Li’s camouflage skill, or because the resident kobolds had better things to do than worry about wandering pups, and soon he flung himself back over the short wall dividing the quarantine zone from the rest of the females. This time he had a better idea how much strength he needed, and managed not to trip over himself in the process. In fact, he landed in an easy crouch that probably would have impressed Raff, and possibly even Chi Yincang. Unfortunately, no one saw it, and even Kaz himself was too focused on his goal to do more than be glad that he hadn’t fallen on his face this time.

Lianhua was still in the hut with Ehlan, and the blur of black and white ki that was Chi Yincang stood in the shadows nearby. Kaz ignored the male, and scratched gently at the thick leather of the door.

It took long enough that he was starting to think Lianhua hadn’t heard him, but eventually the light of her dantians shifted, rose, and came closer. He stepped back as she pushed the door open and peered out, her pale face seeming to hover in the darkness inside the hut.

“I need to speak to you,” Kaz told her, forcing himself not to glance toward Chi Yincang’s hiding place. Instead, he turned his palm up and drew the rune she used to muffle sound on it with his finger.

Lianhua’s eyes widened, and she nodded. Turning to look back into the hut, she said softly, “I’ll be back,” then stepped out and closed the door behind her.

Kaz’s ears perked as he tried to catch any sound from within the hut, and his nose twitched. He didn’t hear or smell Hod, at least not strongly enough to indicate that the other male was still here, so who was Lianhua talking to?

The human smiled sadly, glancing behind her. “It’s… a habit. I don’t know if she can hear me, but I always say it anyway.”

Kaz’s heart ached for her, but he nodded. “Can we talk in your hut?”

Instead of answering, Lianhua turned and walked away. Kaz and Chi Yincang followed as she led the way back to a hut nearby. There were only about a dozen in this small area, and the one she’d chosen was as far away from Gaoda’s as it was possible to get, but fairly close to Ehlan’s. Kaz thought it was rather telling that she was more willing to be close to a potentially crazed core-eating kobold than the other human.

When Lianhua opened the door to her hut, she paused, looking right at the spot where Chi Yincang stood. “Go,” she said. “Get something to eat, or stare at Gaoda for a while. I’m fine.”

Kaz finally allowed himself to look toward Chi Yincang as well, and saw when the blotch of ki finally moved away. Lianhua didn’t seem to sense it quite as clearly, because it took her another few seconds before she finally whispered, “Can you see him?”

He almost jumped. Had she decided to trust him? He supposed she must have, since she’d asked him to help her grandmother, but it still felt strange to see the look of expectation on her face.

“He went toward Gaoda’s hut,” Kaz admitted, and Lianhua’s eyes widened, as if she hadn’t actually expected him to answer. Kaz was confused. Did she believe him, or not?

Lianhua must have been able to see his internal conflict, because she sighed softly and motioned to the interior of her hut. Kaz entered, and she followed him, allowing the door to fall closed behind them.

When they were both seated in the center of the hut, Lianhua lifted her hand. Hesitantly, she held it up and lightly traced the rune on her palm. “Can you-?”

Kaz shrugged. “I don’t know. I can make the ball of light, but I haven’t tried the voice changing one.”

“Sound obscuration,” Lianhua corrected absently, shaking her head in amazement. “I’ve only used the light rune a few times, but you’ve already learned it?”

Kaz nodded, then shook his head. “Yes, but what the rune I use isn’t quite the same as yours. I tried yours, and it wouldn’t work, but I think Li suggested a change, and when I tried that, it did work. The light it makes is different, though.”

Lianhua looked puzzled. “Li suggested a change?”

He scratched his ear awkwardly. “It was when we couldn’t understand each other as well, and I don’t understand how she knew what to do. There seem to be some things she just knows, instinctively. Like kobolds know how to howl, or what different tail wags mean.”

Lianhua started to reach for her pouch, then stopped. “Is it okay if I write this down? No one has ever suggested that dragons are anywhere near as intelligent as Li seems to be, much less that they can understand things like runes.”

Kaz shrugged, then reached up and took Li off his shoulder. The dragon still seemed to be a little sleepy after her recent meal, but she allowed it, though she immediately curled up in his lap instead.

“Can I tell Lianhua about the things you can do?” he asked. “She wants to be able to tell other people, I think, but she can’t tell them how she knows, so I don’t know how useful it will be.”

He glanced at Lianhua surreptitiously, seeing how she took that last statement. To him, it was obvious that no one else could know about Li, but Lianhua seemed very eager to share everything she could.

Lianhua huffed a little laugh and nodded to him, acknowledging the warning, but kept her eyes on Li as the dragon stretched out her forelimbs and wings, yawning widely. Sharp white teeth gleamed in her little mouth, and her tongue curled out over them, reminding Kaz of the gaping maw of the carved lizard-beast that guarded the stairs leading to the mid-levels. Was it possible that it was meant to represent a dragon? But why would someone carve a dragon so deep inside the mountain, and how would they know what one looked like in the first place?

Li gave an inquisitive whistle, drawing Kaz’s wandering thoughts back to her, and he laughed at the image she projected into his mind.

“No, she can’t make you famous. Why would you want her to? If other people knew about you, they would just want to come find you, and they might try to take your core, or just… keep you as a pet. A real pet, not a friend.” Kaz still wasn’t entirely sure what a ‘pet’ was, but while Lianhua spoke of her pet dog with affection, there was also a definite sense of ownership or control.

Li hissed, but seemed to accept this, as did Lianhua, who gave another nod. The little dragon folded her wings and laid her head on Kaz’s leg, clearly uninterested in whatever they were talking about, so long as it didn’t directly involve her.

Kaz smiled at Lianhua. “She says that’s fine. You’ll probably need your book soon anyway.”

Bright curiosity lit Lianhua’s eyes, but she didn’t allow herself to become distracted. She drew book and pen from her pouch. “Can you show me the runes?” she asked. “All of them. The ones you, um, see me using, as well as any that Li has shown you. Told you about?”

“Shown,” he confirmed, carefully accepting the pen and book. The pages felt strangely smooth beneath his fingers, not like the scraped vellum in the chief’s book. He lightly ran a fingertip over it, marveling at the perfectly flat surface, then tried to grip the pen the way Lianhua did. His fingers weren’t shaped exactly like hers, and he had to try a few different positions, but finally he found one that worked, and allowed the ink to flow over the paper.

With only slightly unsteady strokes of the pen, he sketched out the runes he’d seen Lianhua use: light, silence, sound obscuration, and then the significantly more complex shield spell. When he was done, Lianhua stared, eyes wide.

Finally, she let out a long, slow breath, and said, “I’m sorry.” Looking up, she met his eyes. “I believed you could sense power, even that you could see your own ki, and maybe some outside yourself. I even felt you take my rune away from me, and then give it back, so I knew you could manipulate it, at least to some extent. But I honestly didn’t believe that you could see my runes. They’re my image, and seeing them is-” She broke off, shaking her head again.

“It’s impossible,” she said frankly. “And I have more questions than I can even start to ask.”

Kaz was a little overwhelmed by the way she was looking at him, which was disturbingly similar to the way Gaoda looked at her. She didn’t move to take the book back, though, so he just continued on as if he hadn’t noticed, drawing the light rune the way Li had shown him.

As soon as he was done, Lianhua shifted so she could see it more clearly, then sucked in a breath. She tapped the branching line he’d created with a last flick of the pen. “This changes the rune from the light of the sun to the light given off by a flame. Would you be willing to cast this?”

Kaz frowned. He’d heard them use this word before, and he thought he knew what it meant, but he’d never been able to ask before. “Cast?”

She smiled, shifting back away from him, for which he was grateful. “When we fill an image with ki, it’s called casting. Raff would say ‘casting a spell’, but that’s not quite how we think of it. We’re casting off excess ki, infusing it into the image we’ve created. The clearer that image is, the more likely it is to work. That’s why I use runes. I’ve studied them extensively. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell you why this,” she tapped the swooping line again, “is actually different.”

Kaz thought back to the times he’d seen the humans ‘cast’ something. “Is what Raff does a ‘spell’, then? Because he uses mana directly, instead of refining it into ki?”

Lianhua’s mouth opened, then closed, and she muttered, “Focus, Lianhua. Ask later.” Shaking her head, she said, “I… don’t know. I thought I did, but your question just threw a number of things I’ve believed my entire life into question, so- Maybe?”

She gestured to the page, and Kaz shrugged. Tracing his finger over the second light rune, he pushed ki into it, and the page lit with orange, flickering light.

Lianhua reached out, passing her hand through the orb, which didn’t even waver, and also didn’t seem to hurt her, which Kaz had been half afraid it would. In spite of the fact that Gaoda used light orbs and power orbs interchangeably, it seemed that they weren’t the same.

“It’s warm,” she murmured, “and you’d probably better put it out before it sets my book on fire.”

Kaz blinked down at the page, seeing that it was, indeed, starting to turn a faint golden brown around the lines of the rune. Quickly, he pulled his power back, patting the book with his hand as if trying to put out a fire.

The interior of the hut fell into darkness lit by the glow of the ki inside his, Lianhua, and Li’s bodies. Lianhua traced a new rune into the air, and he watched as she allowed her own power to fill it. Once again, the rune vanished into a blaze of light, entirely obscuring its lines, but he knew it was still there.

Lianhua reached out and took the book, staring at the soft brown color that extended over nearly a quarter of it. The lines of Kaz’s rune were black, and when she gave the page a little shake, a few flakes of ash fell away, leaving a neatly burned shape behind.

“Why did that happen?” Kaz asked, staring at it. “I wanted a white light like yours.”

She closed the book, but didn’t put it away. “What a cultivator can create is limited by their image. I can’t be certain, but I suspect that your image of light is linked to fire, and that’s probably true of female kobolds, as well, since their lights also tend to flicker. I’ve seen a surprising number of bioluminescent plants since we entered the mountain, but the light they give off is relatively faint. So, when you imagined light, even though you were copying me, your understanding of how light is created came from your own experience. My rune didn’t work for you because you don’t have a deep understanding of the light of the sun. How or why Li was able to provide you with the right rune, and why it did work? I have no idea.” She stopped, shaking her head.

Kaz gently stroked Li’s neck, and the dragon purred softly, turning so Kaz could scratch an itchy spot just behind her wing. He complied.

Lianhua sat and watched the two of them, expression pensive, until she finally sat back and said, “Kaz, you didn’t just want to talk about ki and runes, did you? Not that I mind, but once I start asking questions, you probably won’t get me to stop for a day or more. But was there something specific you needed to ask?”

Kaz could have smacked himself. Somehow, the sense of urgency that had compelled him to seek Lianhua out had faded. Yes, he needed to tell her about the strange map and the stairs, but he had relaxed enough to become thoroughly distracted.

“I found another map,” he told her. “Like the one I told you about before. It definitely shows a city, and I don’t think it’s the city in the Deep. There are strange people in it, not just kobolds, and Li ate a stone that was blocking a switch, and when I pressed it, the whole wall moved. Lianhua, there’s a staircase in this den, and I think it goes down into the musui city.”