EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (371 page)

He looked confused.

I switched hands again, pressing the blade into my left hand again, but it was still numb; eventually I just let my weapon dangle by my side. No-Kill would get a swift poke if she tried anything. “I mean,” I said, “do you really think we can get to our kin in Ssarsdale? Through the gnomes, through the humans, then to the surface. Then a week’s journey across the surface in the open, then down again. We are but two, and we aim to travel through lands bristling with enemies without a map, supplies, or even any idea if our cousins at our destination will let us inside.”

Khavi gave a mirthless chuckle, clapping his hands together. “You speak of assaulting the gnome city as though there is some way that does not end with our defeat.”

“It never hurts to have a plan,” I said, “and we still have the scroll. If we strike them fast and hard, it is unlikely the gnomes will be expecting it. Yeznen taught me that.”

“Yeznen has not fought a real battle in nearly thirty years,” said Khavi, “and he favours the spear. This shows his weakness. Me, I prefer to get in close.” He reached out and tapped the metal of my sword with his claw. “And this…I don’t even know what this
is
. It’s like a sword made for a hatchling, coupled with the smallest shield in the entire world. You could barely block a dagger with either of them, let alone a sword like mine.”

I was too stiff and sore to offer any real argument. “I like the light weapon,” I said, “and I like the buckler. It allows me to keep my hand free so I can cast.”

“I think you’re spreading yourself too thin. Either fight or cast spells. You should focus your strength and get yourself a real weapon, or focus on killing with your magic.”

The discussion frustrated me. I disliked the criticism in his words. We were both still kobolds, and we were on the same side. I didn’t want to talk about this anymore and gestured to No-Kill with my shield arm. “What kind of weapons do you think they wield?”

Khavi shrugged. “The one we saw before had a pickaxe.”

“I think that was a worker. Not a warrior. His bearing was not like ours; he was…” I struggled. “Inexperienced, but angry.” I turned that thought over in my mind. “It’s the arrogance of their kind. They think we are weak, but they simply fail to understand that our strength lies in our numbers. That gnome may have been able to beat me or you, but not the two of us together. That’s why we’re here, and his body is rotting on that spike.”

Khavi snorted derisively. “Who can fathom the minds of monsters?”

“I can’t.” I reached over and rubbed my numb left arm. “But as for their weapons, I guess they have what we have,” I said. “Spears and the like.”

“I guess.” Khavi peered at me curiously, as though seeing something in my expression. “Hey,” he asked, “are you okay?”

I closed my eyes, stopping, the tip of my blade tinking on the stone. “I don’t know,” I said, a sudden intense feeling washing over me. “I want to go home.”

“Home doesn’t exist anymore,” said Khavi, the words drifting softly out of his lips, so unlike the strength they had when he normally spoke.

A giant hand gripped my heart, crushing me from the inside. I swallowed down my feelings, forcing my mind to quiet.

No-Kill had kept walking. “Stop,” I said, but she didn’t. “Hey! Stop! Hey gnome-breath, stop!”

“That’s not an insult to her,” said Khavi, “she
has
gnome-breath.”

No-Kill stopped, turning back to face us. Her face was crying more than the rest of her, and her body’s tears soaked the armpits of her tunic and all down her back.

“Stop crying.”

No-Kill stared at us both in bewilderment.

“Stop crying!” I took a step forward, growling, my eyes fixed on No-Kill’s. “I said stop crying! Stop it! Stop!”

“No kill! No kill!”

“STOP SAYING THAT!”

I roared and swung my blade up high, then sliced it down towards her head. The gnome shrieked, falling onto her backside. I wasn’t expecting her to fall that way, but in hindsight it should have been obvious. She had strangely arranged knees and no tail. How she could stand at all without a tail was a mystery to me.

My blade slammed into the stone. I screamed arcane words and raised a claw to burn the monster, but Khavi grabbed me, yanking my hand back and closing it, squeezing my fist in his grip.

“Hostage, remember? Hostage! Another dead gnome is no good to us, we have a half dozen of those farther back in the tunnel!”

The anger was too much. I struggled against Khavi’s iron grip but he was stronger than I was, stronger than most males. I hadn’t met a male as strong as he was except for Yeznen. “You want to save the feyling?” I shouted.

Khavi levelled his gaze at me, baring his teeth and pressing his snout directly against mine. “I want to kill as many of those slimy, fey loving, foul smelling, hatchling murdering monsters as I can,” he said. “Slowly and painfully and terribly, but I at least have enough wit to keep my blade clean until it’s needed.” Khavi growled in my face, exhaling his hot breath over my snout. “You will have your chance to drown in gnome blood if I have my way,” he said, “but you must be patient.”

He had a point. I went to argue, then snapped my jaw closed.

Khavi released my wrists and stepped away. “What are your orders, patrol leader?”

My blade-hand shook slightly as I wheeled around to our prisoner. “On your feet! We’re—”

The gnome was gone.

“Great,” I said, groaning to myself and looking down the tunnel. A trail of No-Kill’s body-tears ran down the tunnel and disappeared into the gloom.

I shook my head to Khavi. “She could have only gone this way. Come on.”

I let my nose lead the way, following the faint salty scent of No-Kill’s body tears through the winding, twisting caverns of the underworld near the gnomish settlement. Khavi covered our rear.

I wished that I had some spell that would help, but dragon magic was remarkably specific about what it could do. All magic was. Stone magic, favoured by gnomes and dwarves, could reshape the earth and harden flesh to rock. Elven magic was tricky and stealthy, allowing one to move silently and even become completely invisible, but dragon magic had only the power to destroy. Creating arcs of flame or roaring fireballs, conjuring acids powerful enough to melt flesh, cold that could chill its victims straight to the bone, or bolts of electricity that could slay giants.

Fire was my element, but fire would not track down a crying fat gnome who, no doubt, rightly suspected that we were going to kill her when she was no longer useful to us.

“We’re getting close,” I said, reaching out and touching a drop of moisture on the stone. “Besides, I think this tunnel is a dead end. I don’t feel any moving air.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Khavi, “but these tunnels are its home. It knows where it’s going. Why would it lead us to a dead end?”

I shrugged, touching the tip of my tongue to the fluid beading on the tip of my claw to make sure it carried No-Kill’s scent. No-Kill’s body tears were a strange biological feature, but it was no mystery why she drank so much water since most of it just came crying out of her skin anyway. “Panic can lead a creature to take harried actions not well thought through. Tzala taught me that.”

Khavi adjusted his grip, staring out into the gloom behind them. “I must have missed that lesson.”

“A Leader’s lesson,” I explained. “Warriors employ tactics, but Leaders employ strategy. Fear and panic, and the use of the same, can be part of winning.”

My own words filled my heart with a bitter sting. I had spent the last year of my life, a sixth of my existence, learning and studying for a role I would never play. I would be Leader of exactly one kobold, and as everyone knew, one kobold was meaningless. One kobold had never accomplished anything in recorded history. Every achievement was a team effort, a work completed by thousands of cogs and gears all working together in harmony, the glory shared amongst many.

But there would be no more glory. I was once again struck with a powerful surge of sadness and bitter anger. What were we doing wandering this gnomish territory with no army, no realistically achievable plan? We had no weapons except our blades and a scroll I probably couldn’t use. We could only fling ourselves at the unyielding walls of our enemies, to be dashed to pieces by any number of defences.
 

Did we honestly think we could succeed where the might of Atikala had failed?

“Maybe we should cut off one of its legs then,” said Khavi, “just in case it tries to run again. We could seal the stump with some of your fire. It would probably survive.”

The idea had some merit. I straightened my back, staring down the passage ahead. “Probably,” I said, but I pictured the fat gnome with her legs hacked off, screaming and screaming. The idea of inflicting that much pain to a sentient creature didn’t sit right to me. We should just kill it swiftly. “Your sword is big enough to do it, but then we would have to carry her, and she looks heavy. So maybe not.”

“Well, it’s up to you, but maybe we could hack off a few of its foot-digits then, and let it limp.”

That wasn’t so bad. “That’s a better plan as long as we can stop her from bleeding to death.”

We set off again, walking through the tunnel, our passage lit by the dim blue light of the crystal growths. The colour had been consistent, a faint cyan, but as the tunnel began to dip, it changed slightly, becoming darker and harder to see.

“Odd,” I said, but shrugged off the faint feeling of unease that crept up my tail and continued onward, squinting as I tried to peer through the gloom. There was a faint tug on my shin, like a thread snagging on my leg.

Click. The floor gave way underneath us, folding away, parting like the mouth of some beast and taking the floor away from underfoot. I released my sword, scrambling for the edges of the pit, digging my claws into the stonework as my blade plummeted below me. Khavi scrambled for a purchase on the other side, and I struggled to keep my grip. My broken claws scratched their way across the stone, unable to grip properly, and I fell into the darkness.

Chapter V

T
HE
AIR
HOWLED
AROUND
MY
earholes and the world became dark. I slammed into a hard surface, landing square on my chest. I blindly pushed myself up on my elbows, trying to regain my bearings, but Khavi crashed onto my back, knocking the wind from me. His blade speared into the stone, bouncing away, the cutting edge less than an inch from my face.

“Are you okay?” said Khavi, but I couldn’t answer. He hopped off me, seeming hardly worse for wear after his fall. I could do nothing but curl up on the stone, fighting to breathe.

“You stay here,” he said. “I’ll go make sure it’s safe.” Khavi picked up his blade, moving away from me, inspecting the surrounding area.

A minute of hacking and gasping later, and finally my lungs began to work again. I pushed myself onto my backside, and as I did, a bright light flared at the edge of my vision. Khavi held a vial of glowbug juice, its stopper removed. A drop of the stuff ran down the cutting edge of his weapon. The length of metal glowed like a lantern.

“Where are we?” I asked, climbing to my feet and surveying where we’d fallen. The yellow light of Khavi’s blade cast a pallid radiance that revealed the featureless stone floor beneath us and precious little else. The faint motion of air around me hinted that this chamber was high and wide, open thirty or forty feet in all directions, but beyond that I could see little.

At the edge of our light source, my eyes caught the faint glint of a metal surface, a yellow speck in the empty black void.

“What’s that?” I asked Khavi. The two of us approached carefully, and as we got close, the source became obvious.

A female kobold corpse, withered and mummified, lay belly up on the flat stone, thin cobwebs stretched between her twisted and gnarled limbs. She was clad in an aged but well-preserved shirt of mail.

“This kobold was from Atikala,” I said, crouching over the corpse. “Look at her tunic. If she wore mail, she was more than a patrol leader. This was a skilled soldier…maybe even a Darkguard.”

I could not see a dragon’s claw cloak clasp that was the signet of the Darkguard, elite assassins who travelled in disguise, magical or otherwise. The fact that she wore metal armour, though, signified an elite status that was undeniable.

“What killed her?” asked Khavi, bringing his blade closer, giving more light to see.

I touched her desiccated scales, feeling and exploring until I found a faint hole in the rotten tunic that covered her armour, then another. Two puncture wounds, almost a foot apart on her upper and lower body.

“Picks?” I asked, but shook my head. The wounds were too fine. “Arrows?”

“Who would recover arrows from a corpse but leave an intact suit of mail?”

I didn’t know. I studied the dead kobold’s expression, the features of her face in death. Her maw was open wide and her face was dry and shrunken by the underground air. She wore a scream of dread and horror that age, death, and desiccation could not mask.

I had seen dead bodies before, but nothing like this. My damaged claws explored her body, peeling back the tunic to see more of her armour. “Wait,” I said. “I think she’s still breathing!”