Kaz stayed by Li, using the pressure of his hand on her cool, smooth scales to remind himself who and where he was. He would need to take care of these cores, and soon, but that would be a difficult task in many ways, and just for a moment he wanted to experience some joy. From the way Heishe and the others were acting, he had a feeling that was exactly what he was about to get.
They reached the innocuous-seeming table where Nucai had committed so many horrors, and paused. Kaz looked around, trying to tell if any of the other cores nearby were different in any way. If he remembered correctly, they still didn’t know what had happened to the Horse, Goat, Monkey, or Pig. He still had only the faintest idea what a pig or goat looked like, but surely the cores of members of the Twelve would seem different, even in their coatings of wei. Though, come to think of it, whose core had been in Qiangde’s pouch?
He had just turned to ask Heishe when the wall next to the table cracked. Fkes of wei fell to the floor, and then a tiny hole appeared. That hole became much rger very quickly, revealing the busily-working jaws of a very familiar rodent.
Mei didn’t seem to like the taste of the wei at all, shaking her head and spitting out as much of it as she could. Kaz and Li moved forward - though Li took a moment to let Shom slide from her back - and used fingers and cws to pry off chunks of the white substance. This allowed Mei to eat the stone by itself, and the fuergar gave them a brief gnce of gratitude before focusing on the white core sitting on the rim of the rge bowl built into the table.
Without pausing, Mei leaped from her fresh tunnel, scrambling only slightly to keep her footing as she nded. Opening her jaws in a way that made Kaz blink, she swallowed the old Rat’s core whole. Everything froze.
The world turned to look at Mei, and Mei stared back, her beady eyes taking it all in. Her core pulsed, shifting so far toward Metal that the other colors all but vanished, which didn’t appear to bother Mei in the least. Ki flooded out, filling the rodent’s body until Kaz had to blink against the pure white light. Something snapped into pce, another fragment of a broken teacup glued back together, and Mei shook her head. When her eyes met Kaz’s this time, there was a new depth to the intelligence he saw there, but she didn’t speak. Instead, she turned her back, leaped into the hole she’d made, and scrambled back up toward the surface.
As she did, Kaz heard Ky’s voice echoing down the small tunnel. “Mei? Mei, come back! The pups are squeaking!” Her voice was more than a little frantic, and Kaz let his tongue loll in a grin before sobering.
“Heishe, you said some of the Twelve have families, didn’t you?” he asked. “Will it matter that she has pups?”
Heishe’s head swayed. “Not at all. We each make our own choices about how we live our lives, and so long as we protect the bance and those we accepted as ours, no one will question what we do.”
Kaz definitely needed to spend some time speaking to Heishe about what was expected of him, but right now he had enough to do, and he was quite certain that his pce was here, at least for now. Everything else would come in due time.
The Rabbit huffed a happy little breath, her long ears twitching.
Kaz bowed his head. He had never expected them to help him with this, and the fact that she had even thought to do so warmed him from deep within his heart. “You need to heal, Tu, and so does Hu.” He wasn’t quite ready to call them Sister and Brother yet. “I will have help.”
She nodded, then gnced around again.
Kaz managed a credible ugh, then opened his mind to Ky again. “Did Mei make it back to you?”
He could feel his cousin’s relief, followed closely by irritation.
Kaz and Li exchanged amused gnces. “She’s just full, I think. But could you ask her to make her tunnel rger? We’re going to need a better way in and out of here. And ask the chiefs to send away anyone they can’t trust to be able to resist cores.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Kaz felt…something, from someone he had never been able to reach before. Resignation and agreement came to him, and then small noises began to emerge from the tunnel. Kaz turned to Heishe, startled. “Can I speak to all of you? Including Mei?”
Heishe’s tongue flickered in a ugh.
“Then how did Qiangde capture any of you without the others knowing?” he demanded without thinking, and all three of the other Divine Beasts flinched.
Heishe sighed.
Kaz shook his head. He had seen over and over how pride led to defeat. Not that pride was itself foolish, because he was also coming to see that those who were too humble never believed that they were capable of making a difference, or worthy of being a leader, and thus never tried. There had to be some middle ground, and he hoped that someday he might find it.
The wall cracked again, but this time Mei didn’t bite through the coating of wei that still covered the wall around her original hole. Instead, she squeaked loudly, and Kaz watched her bright core scamper back up the tunnel, leaving them behind. Clearly, Mei had better things to do, like taking care of her pups.
The Tiger took care of the final yer with a single swipe of his massive paw, and wei fell, covering the ground in a fresh coating of sharp white chips. Kaz wasn’t surprised to see that the tunnel thus revealed was rge enough even for a kobold, but he wasn’t quite sure what the huge Tiger was going to do. Would they have to call Mei back a third time, or should Kaz begin to cut through the stone himself?
Then Hu shimmered and shrank, leaving the Rabbit sitting beside a much smaller creature only about twice her size. His fur was as orange as ever, and the white of his paws and cheeks just as bright, but the bck stripes had faded to a darker shade of orange.
The Tiger lifted a paw to his mouth and licked it, then smoothed the paw over his ears before standing and grabbing the back of the Rabbit’s neck in his teeth. Gracefully, he leaped to the opening in the wall and sauntered up the steep slope, his tail giving a brief twitch, as if in farewell. The st Kaz heard of them was the Rabbit, exciming,
Not long after the two disappeared, a sharp yelp came from above, followed by several pebbles, which were in turn followed by Ky, who somehow managed to nd on her paws when she slid out of the tunnel. Kaz was certain he would have nded on his tail, Dog or not, and found himself slightly envious of his cousin’s grace.
Li told him, and he sighed.
“Kaz!” Ky said, before he could even give the dragon a mock-growl. His cousin was staring around, and he could see the moment when she realized that all of the white orbs were cores, because her tail tucked, her ears fttened, and she let out a low whine. “What is this pce? What did you do?”
Kaz didn’t even know where to start, so he just shook his head. “We need help. All of the white on the walls and the cores will have to be removed, probably by males. I’ll try to make sure the cores go back to the tribes they came from, but I think some of them are very old, and their tribes may not even exist any longer. There’s also a huge room full of books and a pen that writes on its own that Lianhua will want to see. But first I need to gather up the things that came from my pouch.”
He grimaced as he remembered the smell of some of those things. They hadn’t seemed so bad when he picked them up one by one, but all together they were terrible. “Some of the things,” he corrected, before continuing. “Id is still here somewhere, too, along with at least some of the Goldbdes, Goldcoats, and other Goldbde subsidiary tribes. I don’t know where-”
“Here,” came a voice, and they all turned to see Chi Yincang drop down from the hole Kaz had originally broken through the wall. It was much bigger now, with sharp round edges, allowing the dark-haired male to pass through while holding an unconscious kobold. The yellow roots of her fur and tattered but still magnificently decorated loincloth would have told Kaz who she was, even if he hadn’t recognized her damaged core.
“Id,” he said, as Li hissed out a cloud of angry steam.
Chi Yincang’s hand opened, dropping the Goldbde chief to the ground. His dark eyes flicked around, and he seemed to realize that he was going to have to speak, because he sighed so softly Kaz doubted he would have heard it before eating the Dog’s core.
“There were guards,” he said without inflection. “They’re unconscious. More kobolds are in a holding room beyond the books.”
And that was it. “Are they all right?” Kaz asked.
Chi Yincang inclined his head. “Frightened.” He looked at the steep tunnel Mei had created. It was probably rge enough for him, but he would have to wriggle through. He definitely wouldn’t be able to maintain his usual dignity if he tried to use it.
“Lady Lianhua and Yingtao are above?” he asked, as if the amulets around his neck wouldn’t tell him. Though perhaps they wouldn’t, since the wei was still on much of the walls and ceiling.
Ky nodded. “The rest of the Goldbdes are going to make the hole bigger, since Mei won’t do it.”
“Are her babies all right?” Kaz asked, remembering.
His cousin grinned, her tail swinging wildly behind her. “They’re fine. I got to hold them! I had to leave them with Raff while I came down, though.”
As if her words had summoned the rge male, Raff’s voice called down, “Oi, Boss, you all right down there? They’re gonna start digging in a minute.”
Li gave a startled whistle.
Ky bared her teeth in something that could only loosely be called a grin. “Yes, but she ran off without telling him. He said something about that vioting their contract, so I hired him.” She puffed out her chest. “He’s going to stay here and guard the portal, and maybe even hire some other humans to help. Ones who won’t mind working for kobolds.”
Kaz suspected there was more to the story than that, but his shoulders rexed a little as he felt one of his concerns melt away. Lianhua had Chi Yincang and Yingtao, as well as her grandparents, so she was in good hands, but Raff was the only other human Kaz really trusted. He was gd the big man would be staying, no matter what his reasons for doing so might be.
The sound of pickaxes began ringing out from above, and fresh cascades of stone fell down the tunnel. Kaz quickly pced a shield across the opening to keep any more cores from being broken, and hurried to pick up the fallen spheres. Ky and Li immediately began to help, and to Kaz’s surprise, both Heishe and Chi Yincang did as well.
Lifting her voice above the sound of metal on stone, Ky said, “Now, tell me everything.”