Chapter Eighty-eight (Patreon)

Time stretched. Had it been ten minutes, or twenty? Turning his eyes toward the shimmering cord that linked his ki cycle to Li’s, he watched, trying to determine how far away she was, and if she was moving further from him, or returning. He was actually relieved to see that while he could tell which direction she had gone, the link really didn’t seem to grow any weaker as she moved away. He could even still feel her emotions, though not as clearly as usual. She was focused on her task, so it could simply be that she wasn’t feeling anything particularly strongly at the moment.

After a while, even this activity failed to hold his attention, and he found himself leaning back against the hut, dozing lightly. He even jerked upright once or twice when he realized that he was about to fall into a deeper sleep. Thus, it came as a complete surprise to him when Chi Yincang stepped out of the shadows.

The dark male stood there, studying Kaz for a long moment, then looked at the door behind him before speaking. “I have prepared a meal. I must inform the lady.”

Kaz swallowed hard. If Raff or Gaoda had come, Kaz was fairly confident he could talk them out of going inside. Gaoda’s weakness was his desire for Lianhua’s affection, while Raff would probably be willing to accept a simple, “She’s resting.” Chi Yincang, however, had no weaknesses, so far as Kaz could determine, and adhered to his own internal code without deviation.

Still, he had to try, so he said, “She asked me to keep watch so she could sleep.” Chi Yincang obeyed any orders given to him without question, so perhaps he would go away if Kaz also claimed to be following orders.

“She said she was hungry,” Chi Yincang said, stepping forward implacably.

Kaz set his paws, determined to at least try, but the human moved so fast that Kaz had no chance to respond. Before he knew it, Kaz had been picked up and moved to the side, and Chi Yincang was peering into the dark space inside the hut.

Just as quickly, the other male stepped back, nodding to Kaz as he gently closed the door.

“I will wait,” he said, and settled into position on the other side of the door, hands clasped behind him as he began to scan the surrounding area for threats.

An awkward silence fell, at least on Kaz’s part. Chi Yincang didn’t seem to have emotions, but Kaz probably felt uncomfortable enough for both of them. If Lianhua came back while the human was standing there, Kaz’s lie would be exposed. Chi Yincang already knew too much about Kaz. What if he decided that Kaz wasn’t trustworthy, and told Gaoda everything? Could the male even speak that much? Did he have a daily limit? He had already used at least fifteen words. If his maximum was twenty, did that mean Kaz would be safe until tomorrow?

Kaz shook away these fanciful musings, then cleared his throat, glancing sidelong at Chi Yincang. He needed an excuse to leave, so he could at least try to find and stop Lianhua before she got back.

“Lianhua asked me to check on the kobold female in half an hour, and make sure she’s still resting. I should… do that.”

For the barest moment, one corner of Chi Yincang’s mouth seemed to twitch, and then he nodded. Kaz took this as understanding and turned toward the hut where the female kobold was resting. Quickly, he checked in on Li, finding that she was noticeably more tired than she had been before. She had hidden Kaz both ways, and now Lianhua once, and Lianhua was larger, so the dragon was close to reaching her limit.

Kaz hesitated outside the hut with the muddy yellow and black core lying inside. He should just glance inside, then make his way back to the wall. But he could feel Chi Yincang’s eyes on him. He was sure the human would expect Kaz to return to his position, not go wandering off, which meant Kaz would need to do something considerably riskier. He needed to go through the hut.

Opening the door, Kaz resisted the urge to look back at Chi Yincang before he ducked inside. Fortunately, it seemed that Ehlan really was asleep, and he wasn’t instantly driven back out when she started howling. He crept across the space as quietly as he could, wrinkling his nose against the smell of unwashed kobold and sickness, barely concealed by the powerful, musky scent of jejing moss.

It was pitch black in the hut, so even Kaz’s enhanced vision couldn’t see anything except the ki that flowed through Ehlan’s channels like sludge. He should create a light rune, make sure that there was nothing on the floor for him to trip over, then cross to the other side of the hut and cut an opening in the stretched hide just large enough to wriggle out of.

Instead, he found himself fascinated by the battle between the yellow and black ki. Without the distraction of Lianhua or the visual horror of Ehlan’s situation, he could see that the two colors were vying for supremacy in Ehlan’s core. Relatively clean yellow ki still cycled through the female’s Vessels, up to her head, spun slowly in her upper dantian, then flowed back down, where it met a black dam.

Slowly, Kaz crept forward, sliding his paws over cold stone, until he was leaning forward, staring at the swirl of color only he could see. He sank into it, seeing yellows and golds mingling with black, darkly contaminated power, until it seemed that Ehlan’s core snapped into focus before his eyes, much as Li’s had once done, when he nearly ate her core after she saved his life.

Ehlan’s core wasn’t cracked, like his had been. Instead, it looked like something dark was trying to eat it. Now, he could see that the black ki was saturated with rusty red, and it bulged out of the side of what he thought was Ehlan’s original core. Darkness was slowly wrapping around the core’s center, which held only the faintest trace of the gold color that the yellow ki could obtain when it grew strong enough.

Instinctively, he understood that Ehlan had eaten an infected black core. Had she already been infected herself at that point? Surely she had been. If not, why would she eat it? But he remembered the compulsive desire he’d felt when he’d seen Li’s core, and wondered. Was the desire to ingest cores something all kobolds felt? He had never been told of such a thing, though warriors were supposed to give any cores they found to their chief. He’d never really wondered what they did with them, but was it possible that they ate them? Was this how the infestation had begun; with females doing what they always did, and unknowingly becoming infected? There were so few creatures with cores in the upper levels, and the ones that did have cores were the largest and most powerful, so they were rarely killed. Did Katri even know that this was what she would need to do in order to grow stronger?

He stilled, bile rising in his throat. There was one easy source of cores, though, wasn’t there? Females prepared other females for burning, and no male was allowed to see what those preparations entailed, even her mate. By the time a female was brought out, she was already ready for the pyre, including being thoroughly wrapped in jejing, which would cover both the sight and scent of blood on the body.

Did kobold chiefs eat the cores of their fallen female tribe-members? Was it possible that Rega had planned to do that to Oda, but the appearance of the core-eating monster had prevented it? Was it even possible that the core-eating monster who had slain half of Kaz’s tribe and driven them from their den was a female kobold? A kobold gone rogue, hunting other females in order to grow stronger, and completely indifferent to how many males she had to butcher in order to get what she wanted? Had Katri eaten the cores of Mital and her daughters?

No. No, that was a dark tunnel to follow, and it led to a whole nest of lopo. Even if he escaped, he would be poisoned by these thoughts, and though he intended to leave the mountain with Lianhua once he helped her find the evidence she needed, he didn’t hate his people. He didn’t belong with them, but they weren’t bad, and he knew all too well just how hard it was to survive in a world built of stone and bone.

Blinking, he focused again on the core hanging in the darkness before him. No matter how or why Ehlan had eaten the black core, the simple fact was that she had. Her body was unable to handle the black ki, which itself threw into question all the doubts he had been having.

If a female couldn’t process ki that wasn’t of her own type, then wouldn’t she risk making herself sick any time she ate one? Unless female kobolds had some way to determine whether a core was compatible with them or not, and Kaz was almost certain that they didn’t understand enough about their own power to have figured something like that out.

He shook his head. The important thing was, Kaz might be able to help the female lying before him. If he failed, he would likely break her core, which would kill her, but from what he could see, it would be a kinder death than the one she was currently heading for.

He started to stretch out his own ki, then hesitated. If he touched contaminated ki, would his become contaminated as well? Simply being in the same hut, breathing the same air, hadn’t been enough, but what if this was the first step? Could he isolate and excise any fulan that made it into his own body? And what if the contaminated ki crossed the link between him and Li? Would it kill or damage the dragon as well? Was trying to save a strange kobold worth the risk?

Ehlan’s core pulsed, pushing out another slow trickle of yellow ki, trying to take in the returning ki from the other end of the cycle. That ki was thoroughly drenched with the black, however, rendering it a murky yellowish-gray, and Kaz could almost feel the core’s pain as it tried to resist the very power that was meant to keep it alive.

Yes, this kobold was a stranger, and a female at that. If she knew she was alone in a hut with a nearly-adult male from another tribe, she would be furious. But Kaz couldn’t just leave her there, suffering. She deserved a peaceful death, if he couldn’t provide a return to health.

Carefully, he separated the colors of his ki. Li took only took gold, white, and black from him, or had until she recently gained a hint of blue. He was able to send only golden ki to the seed, and when the humans stole his ki, they took only their own colors. Each time, it was like to like, but this time, he brought opposing colors to bear instead.

When he was certain not a single hint of yellow or black remained in the ki he stretched forward, Kaz encircled the embattled core with a shell of his own. He denied entry to the contaminated returning ki, and he heard Ehlan’s labored breathing hitch. Somehow, he felt certain that blue was the best color to defeat the black, and with a sharp extension of his will, he used it to mercilessly slice away the lump of black, entirely removing it from the flickering yellow core.

Ehlan spasmed, her body curling in around itself as her breath rattled in her chest, then stopped completely. Her heart still beat in her chest, however, so Kaz continued, encasing the black chunk of core in blue ki, then crushing it, much as the mysterious old male had crushed his own core. Instead of stopping, however, Kaz turned this core to dust. Dust and less than dust, which was swept away with a stuttering cycle of Ehlan’s original core, which was now distinctly flat on one side.

Blue had always been the smallest part of Kaz’s ki, and he had to use the gold and white portions to hold it together, but he managed to push the ki that was currently in Ehlan’s channels up, toward her lungs, then out. The most difficult part to control was what was already in her upper dantian, which clung there stubbornly, much like the rune he had once found inside Li’s dantian, though he hadn’t understood what it was at the time.

This was no rune, however, and when Ehlan’s core gave one final, feeble pulse, Kaz used the clean ki it produced to shove out the last of the corrupted ki that had been produced by the invading core. Reaching out in the darkness, he grasped Ehlan, rolling her to her side as she began to hack and cough, something liquid flooding out of her mouth and nose. Kaz very nearly released her and scrambled back as the horrible scent of the stuff filled the hut, but he had one last thing to do.

Throwing away the last of his hesitation, he released his golden ki, pouring it into Ehlan’s pale core. It flushed instantly brighter, seeming to shudder under the power of his own, and he yanked backwards just before her cycle could pull part of his ki into her core. He had a feeling that might be part of why he and Li were linked, and though he had been willing to try to save Ehlan, he most definitely did not want to be connected to her for life.

Panting and gagging at the stench, Kaz clamped his fingers over his muzzle, trying to pull enough ki out of his nose to dampen the smell. Blinking watering eyes, he focused on Ehlan’s core again.

There was no trace of the black that had been trying to take over her core. There was also no getting around the fact that her core was no more than three-quarters complete. Her cycle spun within her, but the flow was out of balance, and though she was alive, Kaz doubted she would have the power to retain her position as chief. Would she be able to recognize that fact and step down on her own, or would she attempt to retain control of the tribe, leading to a challenge and a humiliating and perhaps deadly defeat?

Kaz didn’t know, and, frankly, couldn’t do anything about it. It was strange to think that while he could probably destroy her core if he could get close enough, if he tried to change her thoughts or opinions, he would be punished and ostracized for attempting to do something so far outside his role as a male pup that he might as well have walked up and tried to pet a janjio.

Still, he had managed to do what he had set out to do, and now he knew he could do it. It had probably been like cutting off an arm to stop lopo poison, rather than burning it out, but it had worked. It was up to Ehlan to decide if she would appreciate being alive more than she regretted being weak. Right now, he had a human and a dragon to find, and they were… that way.

Kaz stared at the stream of ki that trailed away into the darkness, leading to Li. He was certain it had been flat every time he looked at it before, but now it had a distinctly downward tilt. He reached for Li’s feelings, wondering what had happened, and found blankness. The dragon was unconscious or asleep and descending, and Kaz had a terrible feeling he knew what had happened.

Lianhua was going to the mosui city, and she was taking Li with her.