Its ki swelled, and Li pulled on their shared cycle as she roared louder, trying to force her opponent to yield. The end result was that two more voices joined the outcry, but both made sounds of pain. Lianhua and Kyla would be the true losers in this battle if Kaz didn’t do something quickly.
With a sweep of his arm, Kaz sliced through the thin layer of stone remaining ahead of him. He would have liked to stride or leap through like Chi Yincang or even Raff, but instead he barely avoided tumbling onto his nose as a circle of rock shattered to the floor in the cave ahead, causing Kyla to flicker in and out of visibility as she instinctively tried to hide.
“Stop this!” Kaz said as he straightened. Reaching out, he took hold of the strange kobold’s ki, intending to take only as much as he needed to to convince her to do as he said. To his shock, however, he felt the power slip out of his grasp, but not without delivering a stinging blow that made his whole cycle shudder. Li caught an echo of his surprise and pain, and her roar faltered.
Fortunately, the stranger pulled her own ki in as well, her eyes wide as she stared at Kaz. Then she shook her head, and her expression settled into what looked like a habitual snarl. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to take things that don’t belong to you? Get caught, and you might get hurt.”
Raff and Yingtao were in the room now, though it looked like Yingtao might have crawled. She was kneeling beside Lianhua, while Raff helped Kyla up. Yingtao looked quietly furious, while Raff gripped his sword, looking oddly like a lopo without its stony camouflage since he wasn’t wearing any of his armor. Kyla looked more shaken than afraid, but Lianhua… Lianhua was grinning.
“You’re Dongwu,” she said, as if her words made all the sense in the world. “I’d wondered if you might be, I don’t know, some sort of unspoken kobold queen, like Vega was the hidden chief of the Magmablades, especially after you went into the Luzhijia. But that didn’t quite make sense, not with the social structure I’ve seen here. Idla and the others truly believe in their own power. They’re not just your mouthpieces. Except when they are.”
Somehow, her grin grew even larger, and there was no sign of the gentle, quiet female Kaz was used to. No, this was the scholar. She had put together the pieces of a puzzle, and she was happy.
“We know Nucai and Zhangwo somehow survived for centuries after Qiangde died, so why wouldn’t you be here, too? Each of you look like some combination of your kobolds and the humans you once were, which explains the-” Her hand circled, indicating the heavy leather clothing that covered the strange female’s body.
“And the threes indicate your homes, of course. But why are there no sevens? Were they forgotten? And why aren’t you sitting in a web, controlling everything like Zhangwo? Did the kobolds stop listening to you? Except we know they didn’t, because you did go into the Luzhijia, but, but… That was a calculated risk, wasn’t it? I bet you aren’t usually ‘Shom’ when you go there, are you? No, you’d go as someone else. Or maybe something else? The Voice? Is that it? Do you have some way to-”
“Stop it!” the leather-clad female said, but there was more exhaustion than true anger in her voice. She rubbed her short muzzle, which Kaz could now see was covered in patchy yellow-brown fur, as was the rest of her exposed flesh. Not that there was much of that. She wore pants, as well as a sort of bulky coat that met the leather gloves that concealed her hands. Her paws were even hidden within something like shoes.
“Damn it,” she muttered. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. When Idla told me you were looking for information about the Diushi, I knew it was only a matter of time.”
“You’re really Dongwu?”
The question came from Kyla, who was staring at the older female with a sort of horrified awe. She took a step forward, pulling away from Raff, who was trying to hide her. “You can’t be,” Kyla said. “Dongwu was horrible. She made us. Played with our ancestors like they were nothing but the balls of fur we give to puppies as toys. I liked you.”
A flicker of something like pain crossed Dongwu’s - Shom’s? - face. “It wasn’t like that,” she said. “At least, it wasn’t supposed to be. But it doesn’t matter.” Her eyes, which were, strangely, utterly and completely human, passed over them all. “Now that you know, you have to listen to me. This mountain is mine, and I command you to leave it. If traders want to return in six months time, they may do so, but you,” and now her eyes were definitely fixed on Lianhua, “need to leave. Today.”
Before Lianhua had a chance to speak, Dongwu whirled, half-crouching as she held out her hand. One of the hammers that had fallen when Kaz and Li made their entrance was suddenly spinning through the air, the handle slapping into her palm as the tool lit with all five types of ki. Dongwu twisted, neatly avoiding the blade that flashed through the air, thrown from Yingtao’s position beside Lianhua, and the hammer was aimed at Li.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Kaz caught the hammer. He didn’t even think of doing anything else. His hand gripped the bulky metal hammer-head, which glittered with the distinctive sheen of mithril, and he jerked as another mind touched his.
“Who’s Xion Wu?” Kaz gasped out, already moving to block another blow. The hammer never came down, however, as Dongwu stepped backward, the skin beneath her uneven fur paling.
“Where did you hear that name?” she demanded, suddenly focused on Kaz instead of Li. But it was Lianhua who answered.
“Xion Wu. Could be a third century poet, but I doubt it. For someone of the right time period, who would have been exposed to the Diushi court, there’s only one. The daughter of one of the last Emperor’s concubines, mentioned only once in the records of royal family members. She would have been about the same age as Princess Tiyang, but of much lower rank. Royal, but not.”
All eyes turned to the scholar, whose hands were out in front of her, turning the pages of an invisible book. Her eyes were closed, so she didn’t see the look Dongwu gave her. Yingtao did, however, and her hands vanished back into her sleeves, emerging with a matched pair of mithril knives that Kaz recognized. They were the ones Lianhua had traded cloth to Idla for, what seemed years ago.
“Royal, but not,” Dongwu said, her hammer falling to her side. Kaz could almost hear the leather of her gloves creak as she squeezed the handle. “That’s about right. Only good to be married off, but no one wanted a plain little almost-princess who only talked about beating on metal. Doomed to be wasted, like a flower that bloomed, only to wilt again when it received no water.”
Lianhua opened her eyes, and her expression was one that Kaz was far more familiar with. Kind and understanding, she looked like she wanted to reach out and hug the ferocious old monster that had created Kaz’s people.
“It’s terrible to be limited, isn’t it?” she asked. “To be trapped by other people’s expectations, especially when those people claim to love you. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t, but that doesn’t change your own feelings, and your need to escape, even if you have to gnaw off your own leg to do it.” She smiled at Yingtao, who couldn’t see it, and from the way everyone else stared at her, they all knew what she meant.
“I wanted to be a smith,” Dongwu said. “To make things with my own hands, not just draw sketches and wonder if the things I built in my mind would work. I was barely there, so it wouldn’t have mattered if I wasn’t anymore, but they wouldn’t let me go. And then he came, and that world ended, and a new one began. All of us chose our paths. We have no excuses.”
Lianhua stepped out from behind Yingtao, who shifted as if to cover her again, but didn’t, quite. “But in the end, you did the right thing, didn’t you? You betrayed Qiangde, saved the kobolds, and then stepped down, restricting yourself to watching over them for all these years.”
Dongwu gave a very kobold-like bark of laughter. “Oh, no. I wasn’t that brave. I simply hid away as much as possible. I protected my kobolds when I could, but I wasn’t willing to risk my life for them. Luoyan caused Qiangde’s death.”
“Luoyan?” Lianhua asked, frowning. Her hands moved in front of her, and Kaz could see that her ki was draining rapidly. If she needed to fight, she would have nothing left, but her words seemed to be at least as effective as any weapon she could wield against someone as powerful as Luoyan.
“Luoyan Wu,” Dongwu said, as if releasing words she’d been holding in for centuries. Which perhaps she was. “My mother’s brother. He was the Imperial Scholar, which was how Father and Mother met. Very few people knew exactly who and what Qiangde and his descendants were, but Uncle Luoyan had access to the Imperial archives. He figured it out, then approached the Emperor, my father, who in turn called his many-times great grandfather, Qiangde.
“Luoyan was - is - brilliant, but he’d stalled in his cultivation. He was desperate. I don’t know what he told Qiangde, but when the dragon took everything, he also offered a few of us a chance to do, to be, something entirely new. I accepted. Of course I did. So did Pantu, but only because he was too much of a coward to refuse. I think he was one of my uncle’s few mistakes. Pantu was a great politician. He could convince a dragon to eat its own tail.” Dongwu gave a short laugh.
“He was a worthless human being, though, and an even worse leader. I don’t even know how he managed to create his kobolds. Sheer dumb luck, I suppose. That he had aplenty.” She shook her head. “I had no idea anything was happening until suddenly Luoyan's kobolds vanished. Gone from the mountain, as if they’d never been. I found a rotting dragon corpse atop the Tree, and Luoyan was trapped inside, which was the best thing that had happened since my kobolds finally began to breed true, and I could stop making them. And since then, not a single dragon has been able to enter.”
She turned, looking for Li, and found Kaz standing in front of the hole he’d cut in the wall. It had been difficult to convince Li to go back into the tunnel, but sending her an image of himself being smashed by a gigantic hammer had finally done it. “And now there’s another damned dragon here, and a scholar, and you need to MOVE.”
Kaz felt like he’d been struck by that mithril hammer after all. His head echoed with that single word, which he’d felt as much as heard. It sank into him, forming a compulsion that pounded against his mind. Move. Move. MOVE.
But the word broke against Kaz’s ki and his resolve. He would never, ever, stand aside and allow anyone to hurt Li. Every part of his being rebelled against the very idea, and he pushed back, holding firm to a single, inalienable truth. Kaz would protect Li.
Kaz lifted his muzzle, only then realizing that his head had fallen forward into something that was almost a bow. Looking straight into Dongwu’s deep brown eyes, he said, “No.”