Chapter Two hundred forty-five

Six faces turned toward him as the door opened, and Kaz was glad to see that they all looked better than they had when he saw them last. Adara must have provided them with some way to wash themselves, because the room smelled much better, and they all wore clean clothing.

Kyla was the first to react, jumping over the box she was sitting behind. She ran over and threw her arms around Kaz’s waist, making soft whimpering sounds more appropriate to a much younger pup. Kaz leaned down, touching his forehead to hers.

It was an intimate gesture, but the young kobold was clearly in need of comfort. The pup’s small hand clasped his, and she pressed something into his palm before stepping back and giving him a look, even as her tail wagged wildly.

Kaz had to struggle to keep the frown from his face, even as his fingers closed around the object. What could the pup have to say that she wasn’t willing to talk about in front of everyone? He ran his thumb over the flat, triangular shape, but didn’t look at it.

“Kaz!” Lianhua said, swinging her legs out of the bed she was sharing with Yingtao. She wore a robe he’d never seen before, with very long, wide sleeves, and her hair was braided, looped, and bound into a delicate structure that shouldn’t have been able to stand up, and yet had neither mana nor ki to aid it.

Kaz smiled, then held up his empty hand. “I have a gift for you,” he told her, stepping backwards so they could see the space behind him. Her eyes immediately went to Li, who had adjusted her weary pose to a regal one, with her long neck perfectly arched over her delicately crossed paws.

“Li! You’re so big!” Lianhua exclaimed, and Kaz felt his dragon’s rush of pleasure. It was always good when someone recognized her impressive growth.

Chi Yincang appeared beside the male on the floor, though Kaz barely saw his blur of ki move past. However much stronger Kaz had gotten, Chi Yincang was still ridiculously fast.

“Who?” the dark male asked, pressing his fingers to Doran’s throat, just above the bandages, which were now stained with sweat and a bit of blood.

Quickly, Kaz explained how he’d realized he was being followed, and what happened when he, Raff, and Li had attempted to capture the two humans. As Raff had recommended, he left out the details of Raff’s injury, though he made sure to give all the details he remembered about how the ki had seemed to flow into the males through the stones embedded in their necks.

By the time he was done, Chi Yincang had carried Doran into the hidden den and laid him down on the bed not occupied by the injured human princess. She was the only one still lying down, while everyone else crowded around, staring at the stranger.

“Can you wake him?” Chi Yincang asked.

Kaz nodded. “He collapsed and hit his head when I removed the orb. He gets better when I try to heal him, but I had to find a place to hide him until I could get him here, and I think he got too hot.”

Yingtao laid a hand on Doran’s forehead, gracefully holding her long sleeve out of the way with her other hand. After checking beneath the bandages, peeling back his eyelids, and feeling the male’s head for lumps she nodded, smiling at Kaz. “I agree. He has a small swelling on the back of his head, but it shouldn’t be enough to cause serious damage. His pupils are reactive, and the wounds on his neck are unpleasant, but shallow.”

The female took charge from there, and soon Lianhua and Jinn were holding medicine pots and fresh bandages respectively, while Chi Yincang provided clean water both for cleansing the wounds and for drinking.

Once Doran’s wounds were cleaned, slathered in various unguents, and rebandaged, Yingtao stepped back, her hands disappearing inside her long sleeves. She wore a gentle smile as she said, “Would you please revive him?”

She was looking at Kaz, and he had a feeling this was a kind of test. No healer was without a way to convince an unconscious patient to wake, and Yingtao was clearly as experienced a healer as Rega.

Kaz glanced at Lianhua, who smiled encouragingly, then reached out and pushed blue ki into the male’s head. He avoided the piercing and tearing wounds inflicted by Li’s teeth, focusing on Doran’s brain instead. He was recovering more blue ki with every cycle of his core, but his central dantian was still much diminished. Besides, he thought Yingtao’s remedies would be just as effective as his power, even if they were slower.

It took a few moments, but soon enough Doran’s eyelids flickered, and he moaned softly, his hand twitching. He blinked, gaze hazy, then jerked away from all the eyes intent upon him.

“Who are you?” he demanded, then looked around. “Where am I?”

Kaz lifted a hand, drawing Doran’s attention to him. “Do you remember me?”

The human’s eyes flickered, and then he shook his head. “Never seen you before. Did you people kidnap me? I’m reporting you to the guards!” He tried to swing his legs from the bed, only to find that a knife was suddenly buried deep in the soft fabric beside him.

To Kaz’s surprise, it was Yingtao, with her gentle smile and calm demeanor, who slowly withdrew a knife Kaz recognized as one of the pair Lianhua had traded Idla for. Had she gotten those for her friend, not herself?

“You followed our friend,” Yingtao said conversationally, her smile never wavering. “Your companion died trying to fight him. We would very much like to know why, and who sent you. And,” she turned the very long, delicate blade so the light caught the finely-honed edge, “I suggest you answer both promptly and truthfully.”

At this, Lianhua looked resigned, Chi Yincang looked distinctly proud, and both of the other human females looked as surprised as Kaz felt. He’d known Yingtao was hiding something, but he honestly hadn’t suspected this. If she was a kobold, she would have made an excellent chief.

Unsurprisingly, Doran’s response was a bit different. He attempted to scramble backward, but found that at some point while Yingtao was caring for him, she had bound his hands and feet. He thrashed, but was utterly unable to move.

“I don’t know why they wanted him followed!” he all but shouted. At Yingtao’s raised brow, he hastily added, “They’re having all the mages fighting in the tournament tracked. There are so many, they ran out of people, so they started making teams like ours. One trusted employee, one temporary contract worker. Joneh’s the one who knew what’s going on. They were particularly interested in Kaz because of his wyvern, but I don’t know why.”

“You were supposed to report back and let ‘them’ know who I talked to and where I went,” Kaz prompted.

Doran nodded eagerly. “That’s it. Follow you, report back. It was kind of nice, because you kept wandering around, and I got to see Cliffcross. I’ve never been here before-”

“Where do you come from?” Lianhua interrupted.

“Uh, Slavik. But my grandmother is from Holiander, so I know the language,” Doran said.

Lianhua frowned. “The Diushi Empire didn’t extend that far, so they don’t share the common language. Why would they hire from so far away? It’d be easier to hire people from the Empire or even the outskirts of Holiander.”

“That’s easy,” Doran said. “They wanted people without any ties to this country. People who wouldn’t know anyone. They almost didn’t hire me, but I told them my babi had no family left here, and they needed someone who could talk to the customs officers.”

“Who is ‘they’,” Chi Yincang asked.

For the first time, Doran looked hesitant. “The scalies. They’re these, um, giant, walking, talking lizards. Just another demi-human, I guess, but not one I’d ever heard of. They’re very secretive. Don’t want anyone talking about them. That’s why they pay us so well and put in the-” he rolled his neck, wincing as he pulled on the wound left behind by the missing orb. 

Kaz looked at Chi Yincang. “Do you still have the stone I took from Reina’s wound?”

Silently, Chi Yincang held out his hand. Even Kaz hadn’t seen him remove the rune-carved stone from his pouch, but there it was. Doran’s eyes widened as he saw it.

“Yeah! One of those! They had piles and piles of them. Just went down the line right behind us, cut open our necks with their freaky long claws, then slid one of those in underneath the skin.” Doran shuddered. “Worst part of the whole thing, even though they had one of their mages heal us right up. I still thought it was worth it for the pay. Until today.”

“What happens when you finish your contract?” Yingtao asked. “They take you home? Do they take out the stone as well?”

Doran shrugged. “My cousin actually recommended me for the job. I guess they’ve been coming for the tournament for the past ten years or so. He got married last year, so he couldn’t come this time. He says they don’t take out the little balls, but after a while you don’t even notice them. They’re supposedly used to track you down in case you try to take off, but they said,” he swallowed hard, “if you tell anybody anything, it’d blow up and kill you. There are stories of guys who thought it was a line, you know, to get you to follow the rules. They’re not… pretty.”

Lianhua leaned forward. “Where are these ‘scalies’ now?”

Again, the human shook his head. “They have us in a warehouse on the east side. That’s where we stay unless we’re told to go out and deal with other humans. I haven’t actually seen a scalie since the day they stuck that thing in my neck.”

“Who else knows about this?” Reina asked suddenly. They all turned to see her sitting on the edge of her bed. Her face was pale, with bright red spots blazing on her cheeks, but Kaz didn’t think it was because of her injury.

Doran’s brows drew together. “I mean, everyone I talked to. We just bring in our carts and goods, sign papers and talk to officials, and then after the tournament, we leave again.”

“Officials, yes,” Jinn said, “but who else? Nobles? Maybe even members of the royal family?”

The male laughed outright. “Nobody like that. I doubt if anyone I talk to has ever even seen a noble except at a distance.”

Kaz had been thinking hard for a while, and now he pulled his roll of art supplies from his pouch and laid them out across the box Kyla had been hiding behind. As he did, he caught sight of something that almost made him pause, but a glance at his cousin convinced him to carry on.

As the questioning continued, producing nothing helpful, Kaz drew a quick sketch on one of his few remaining pieces of paper. Seeing what he was doing, Li, Kyla, and Mei leaned in, watching intently, until he hesitated on filling in some of the colors and Li brought back the memory. It was immediately after he accidentally restored the collapsed stairs to the Deep, and among the things that were repaired was the one and only clear and fresh map of the Deep he’d ever seen. The figures there were actually painted, as they must have been when it was first carved, and he’d been able to make out details he never would have seen otherwise.

Finally, he looked down at the page, and though it wasn’t perfect, it was a reasonable representation of one of the figures Kaz had already begun to think of as dragon-people. He now knew that they were exactly that, born from feeding dragon cores to cored humans who had been infected with fulan spores. In addition, the ‘humans’ selected for these experiments were all descendants of the first Diushi emperor, who was actually a dragon. That meant that even before they ate the cores, they were already descended from dragons, which only made their final forms that much closer to their ancestor’s original one.

Holding up the picture, Kaz asked, “Is this a scalie?”

Doran blinked. “How the-? Yeah. I never saw any wings, but they always wear capes or cloaks, so I guess they could be under there.”

Kaz looked at Lianhua, and they both understood what that meant. Doran’s ‘scalies’ were the third kind of kobold, the ones Qiangde had forced out of the mountain in his last moments. Far from vanishing or moving away, they had stayed, and were now in Cliffcross. And, unless Kaz was very much mistaken, they were either controlling or controlled by dragons.

After that, many more questions were asked, but most of them resulted in the same information, or rather, lack thereof. They found out far more about Doran himself than they would ever need to know, and it should be easy enough to track down this ‘warehouse’ where the rest of the humans were being kept. Of course, when Doran and Joneh didn’t come back, the wise thing to do would be to move them all, so Kaz had his doubts if they would find much there when they were finally able to look. Perhaps Adara could arrange something, but the rest of them weren’t going to get far.

Slowly, Kaz let the humans’ conversation fade into the background and instead turned to look at Kyla. She was back in the pillow-lined den she’d made for herself, and when she saw she had his attention, she shifted to the side, revealing the edge of the dark hole he’d noticed earlier. Then she opened her hand, showing the empty palm, and Kaz remembered the little thing she’d handed him earlier.

Dipping his fingers into his pouch, Kaz removed the little triangle. It was handy that as long as he didn’t give it any ki, he could just use it as a regular pouch, since he hadn’t actually had an opportunity to look at this thing properly. Not that it took long, because it was very familiar.

Glancing back at Lianhua, Kaz wished he knew why his cousin was being so secretive. If he used ki to cover their conversation, Lianhua might well notice, and that would be the end of any opportunity for a private conversation.

Instead, Kaz pointed from the gleaming red scale in his hand to the hole in the wall. Kyla nodded, then ran her hand over the ground, using her fingers like four little legs. The hand-creature vanished into the hole, and Kyla looked expectantly at him.

Mei. The fuergar had made the hole, and probably brought back the scale, too. But still, why the secrecy?

Seeing his confusion, Kyla rolled her eyes. Raising her palm to her nose, she gave a deep sniff. Kaz mimicked the motion. At first, his almost-human nose didn’t pick anything up beyond a faint stench, reminiscent of the way Mei, Jinn, and Reina had smelled after getting out of the sewer. If Kyla and Li had smelled like that as well, it had been burned away when they passed through the ‘incinerator’ that Kaz now believed was the captive fire of the Divine creature called Fengji.

Kyla gave another deep sniff, and Kaz pushed ki into his nose. Something dry and dusty, but perhaps vaguely similar to Li’s scent. That was to be expected, since the reptilian kobolds, who called themselves the xiyi, were so closely related to dragons.

More ki, another long inhale, and this time he caught it. Kobolds. His kind of kobolds. The xiyi had dragons, but they also had kobolds.