Chapter Ninety-two (Patreon)

*WARNING* I don't do this often, but there is a brief description of what could be seen as torture in this chapter (not Kaz, don't worry). Kaz learns something important from it, but you may want to skip it. I'll mark before and after the scene with ***

Now that Kaz had figured out the trick of not being blinded by the crystal ki, he was able to look properly at the mosui and husede that populated the city. All of them held differing amounts of mana in their bodies, and eventually, he was even able to make out a slowly spinning central dantian inside the chest of a particularly weak mosui.

More than once, he saw a strange contraption that looked like a chair balanced on top of two long, slender bones. These chairs were carried by two or more husede, in spite of the fact that riding in a niu-drawn cart would probably have been both more comfortable and more efficient. The mosui riding in these were draped in red crystals so saturated with ki that they were more akin to ruby than carnelian.

Cloth was everywhere, and Kaz recognized it as the textured fabric woven from the long, coarse fur of the niu. He hadn’t seen so much of it since he’d lived in the Deep, and even there it was less common than this. The husede all wore clothing the natural brown or gray of the fur, but some of the mosui were wrapped in cloth nearly as colorful as that worn by Gaoda and Lianhua. Their arms and legs were so short that they nearly vanished into the folds of fabric, revealing only the long claws poking from their sleeves and their short, tentacled noses sticking out of the neck of the robes.

All of the kobolds and husede wore collars, though some of the ones worn by husede were decorated with gemstones. Not a single musui was similarly bound, and no matter how confident or independent a kobold or husede seemed, Kaz could see them cringe away when a musui came near. They particularly avoided the musui in the chairs, practically pressing themselves against the walls in order to stay out of their way.

Surta kept up a near-constant stream of chatter as he led them through the busy streets. It was both informative and familiar, since Raff had a tendency to do something very similar. The gray-furred kobold, however, was very cautious whenever he directly mentioned the musui. If he said something in any way negative, he used hand gestures to get the point across, rather than words.

When they turned a corner and nearly ran into two husede bearing a musui in a chair, Surta stuck out an arm, halting Kaz in his tracks, then bowed his head. Kaz quickly did the same, and noticed out of the corner of his eye that even the stony Dax tilted his chin downwards, though not as much as Surta or Kaz.

The musui was speaking to another of its race in their high-pitched, chittering language. The two seemed to be in disagreement over which of them should go down the street ahead before the other one. Their voices rose higher and higher, until they became a barely-audible screech, and Kaz had to pull ki from his ears in order to avoid having his hearing damaged.

***

At last, the mosui sitting in the more distant chair lifted its flat hand. The gray mist of mana gathered in the air, and both of the husede bearing the other mosui’s chair gave terrible, deep cries of agony and collapsed to their knees. One of them, unable to take the pain, dropped the bones that had been resting on his shoulder, and his mosui had to grab at its chair as it nearly tumbled from its seat.

Surta pressed Kaz back, almost dancing out of the way as the husede trembled and cried out, and the musui came up holding a particularly large and clear red crystal. Mana swirled around the crystal and the creature’s hand, and Kaz, realizing what was about to happen, allowed a hint of red ki back into his eyes.

All of the crystals around him flared into blinding brilliance, and so did the collars of the other husede. They, too, fell to their knees, though neither of them dropped their burden as their jaws clenched and their heads bowed against the torment.

***

After a moment, both musui dropped their hands, and the husede slumped as their collars returned to lifeless gray metal. Kaz released the red ki in his eyes, allowing the glare of ki around him to return to a comfortable level, but his mind was spinning.

The fallen chair was picked up, and both mosui soon continued on their way. The mosui who had managed to make the husede drop the other’s chair went first, with the other one trailing silently behind. All four husede were noticeably paler than they had been, their lead-gray skin drained to a silver tone.

Once Surta decided it was safe to proceed, they went on, and eventually Kaz asked, “What happened back there?”

Surta glanced around, then shrugged. “All of the,” he made the gesture for ‘musui’, “can activate the collars, but some are better at it than others. They never attack each other, so when there’s a conflict, they do something like that to determine which one’s stronger. You have to watch out for it, because some of them accidentally get anyone else nearby, too.”

He paused, muzzle wrinkling in distaste. “I’d rather work in the mines every day than be one of their servants. I might live longer, but what kind of life would it be?”

After that, he shifted back to more neutral topics, explaining that the chairs were called ‘palanquins’, and that the bearers were specially selected for their strength and resilience. He also pointed out that the rare kobolds they saw - other than themselves - all had fur of colors other than brown or gray. Red fur seemed to be especially prized, and Kaz even saw one male with crimson fur woven with gleaming red crystals following after a palanquin bearing a particularly richly robed musui.

Once this fact was drawn to his attention, Kaz found himself fingering his own bleached gray fur, deeply grateful that he was no longer blue. Having watched what happened when a collar was activated, he thought he might be able to remove the collar, or at least keep the musui from activating it,  but if he was trapped in the city, constantly being watched, he doubted he would get far.

The streets grew more and more crowded until they reached one packed with so many beings that they could barely move. Kaz had never been so surrounded by other people before, even when he was a pup, because Oda had rarely allowed him out of their den, even then. Most of what he remembered about the city in the Deep had been seen from a distance.

They were jostled forward as still more people arrived, and slowly they shifted forward, one step at a time. Surta reached out and pulled Kaz back a few times, as the crowd threatened to separate them, and Kaz wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or not.

Eventually, Kaz became so overwhelmed by the sounds and smells and touches of a hundred strangers that he retreated into himself, allowing Surta to continue guiding him forward as needed. Instead of thinking about his body, Kaz focused on the link between himself and Li, discovering, to his joy, that the dragon was finally waking up.

Instantly, he bombarded her with images, asking where she was and what had happened. The pictures and emotions he got in return were unusually weak, but he wasn’t sure if that was because of distance, or if Li was still recovering from whatever had happened to her. He was grateful, at least, that no pain trickled through the connection, so it seemed that the dragon was uninjured.

Closing his eyes, Kaz concentrated on the fuzzy pictures he was receiving. Not too surprisingly, Li’s primary understanding of where she was now was that it was red. That and the fact that the thread between them was still level indicated that she was probably in the city somewhere, but he could only get images, not sound, and ‘red’ didn’t help narrow it down for him at all.

Giving up on that, Kaz instead sent picture after picture of Lianhua, then the swiveling map and the stairs that led down to this level. He tried to get across the idea that he wanted to know what had happened, and where Lianhua was, but it took the dragon quite a while to understand.

Lianhua wasn’t with Li any more. Wherever Li was, it was tight and red, and she couldn’t see anyone or anything else. All she remembered of how she got there was going down the stairs, still perched on Lianhua’s shoulder, and the two of them almost immediately tumbling down into a pit much like the one Kaz had fallen into. Everything went dark at that point, and when she woke just a moment before Kaz reached out to her, she was alone.

Then her thread began to drop. The angle at which it connected them sank so precipitously, that at first Kaz was terrified she might have been dropped down one of the long passages that passed through five or six levels at once. Trapped and unable to fly, there was no way she could survive, but he felt no fear coming from her. In fact, she didn’t seem to notice that she was suddenly descending at all, and when the link stabilized again and she was still safe, Kaz felt a deep shudder of relief pass through him.

He felt a hard elbow in his ribs, and when he opened his eyes, Surta was staring at him, frowning. “You all right, pup?” the older male demanded. “We’re here, and you’re almost as quiet as Dax back there.”

Kaz nodded and tried to smile. They were still surrounded by a crowd, though it did seem to have thinned a bit. It looked like they were still in the city, however, so Kaz wasn’t sure what Surta meant by saying they were ‘here’. Kobolds didn’t mine much in the upper levels, since the ore available there wasn’t particularly useful, but he remembered what mines looked like, and this certainly wasn’t it.

“I’m fine,” he managed, waving to indicate the press of people around them. “Just not used to this.”

Surta yipped a laugh. “Don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of time to recover soon enough. Once we reach the mine, you’ll probably never see anyone other than your shift again.”

Kaz shook his head. “Shift?”

The other nodded. “They don’t bother giving us day and night cycles. There are bells that tell you when to eat, when to sleep, when to go to work. Each of us is part of a shift, then a squad. When you’re doing one thing, the other shifts are doing something different, so you’ll barely even see them, much less anyone else. If you’re lucky, they may choose you to go pull in a new captive, but otherwise you’ll be in the mine for the rest of your life.”

“You seem like you’ve done this a lot, though,” Kaz said, and Surta grinned, tongue lolling briefly over sharp white teeth.

“Like I said. Lucky. Come on, it’s our turn.”

Kaz turned, seeing that Dax was stepping almost eagerly onto a square absolutely covered in the brightest red crystals Kaz had seen yet. The air nearly hummed with power, and Kaz thought the skin of his paws would be burned by their heat, but they were the same temperature as the stone floor he stepped off of.

All around them, others were standing on similar squares. Some held primarily musui, while others carried husede and a few bright-furred male kobolds. As Kaz watched, one of the husede reached out to touch the top of a pedestal in the center of his crystal-encrusted square. A faint trail of mana formed around his finger, and then the whole group shimmered and vanished. No one cried out or seemed surprised, and another group immediately piled onto the platform.

Kaz spun, staring at the single husede standing beside the pedestal in the middle of their own square. She and Surta finished speaking, and she stretched out a finger with a tiny cloud of mana already gathering around the tip. Kaz didn’t even have time to yelp before red ki swallowed him whole.