“I doubt that,” she muttered, tugging at the straps again. Not that she actually needed a pack, since she had six different storage devices hidden around her person, but the pack made her look more like other humans. Or at least that was what she hoped. She’d seen so few humans in the st eight hundred years, so she might be entirely wrong.
Looking up, she met the Woodbde-blue eyes of the kobold who watched her, solemn as ever. They’d spent a fair amount of time together over the st few months, and she’d never once seen him wag his tail except when he was talking with his bond-beast, the dragon. Even then, he always stopped as soon as he realized she’d noticed, and brought his attention back to whatever they were working on.
“Are you certain you understand how the ki-crystal patterns work?” she asked, feeling a little desperate. “The feedback loops can be-”
He nodded, and she had to admit that he was probably right. He’d picked up the way the various crystal patterns worked remarkably quickly, especially given that it had taken her more than a century to put it all together. It was almost like he could actually see the energy flowing through the cycles, but while she’d heard of such things in her youth, she very much doubted a random kobold had developed anything so powerful without her noticing.
“And the ptforms? You had trouble with the more mechanical aspects, so-” She stopped as Kaz tilted his head.
“I understand it,” he told her, “and you left those di-a-grams for me.” He was careful with the new word, as he seemed to be with everything. “It’s time for you to go.”
The words were inexorable, though there was no weight behind them, not in the way she had once tried to use her words against him. There was no doubt in her mind, however, that in spite of how much older she was and how much stronger she should be, if it came to a battle, she would lose. Not that it would come to that.
“I’m scared,” she whispered, more to Eizri than to Kaz, but Kaz was the one who answered.
“We removed the runes from your dantian, and you have your disguise,” he said, nodding toward the heavy bracer on her right arm. It had taken a long time to find a way to make herself look more human again, but she’d had a lot of time on her hands. Of course, once she perfected the device, she’d immediately put it away, never to be used again, because looking at herself in the mirror was too painful when she knew the monster still y beneath.
Kaz sighed, gncing at the portal beside her. It showed a tunnel that, as far as she could tell, didn’t actually exist, and she’d been avoiding using it for more than a month now. “Goodbye, Shom,” he said, almost gently, and her traitorous feet carried her out of the mountain.
The st time she’d stepped into the sunshine, she immediately felt like someone had split her head open with one of her rgest hammers. She’d barely managed to drag herself back inside, bleeding from eyes, ears, and mouth, and she flinched as she stepped onto the soft, loamy soil, more than half expecting the same thing to happen again.
It didn’t. Instead, she felt mud squish up around boots that hadn’t been designed with mud in mind. Sunlight warmed her hair, and somewhere a bird sang. The only things that ran from her eyes were tears.
Eizri’s voice was awed.
She cast her mind back. Hadn’t she told him? But no, of course she hadn’t, because she avoided talking about the world that was lost to her, even with him. The closest she’d gotten was when she described her mother so that he could paint the picture on her wall. It wasn’t right, because she didn’t have words for the way the eyes were supposed to gleam with intelligence and love, and she didn’t know how to describe the curve of lips that were always smiling, in spite of everything. Besides, the only human Eizri had had to use as a basis of comparison was Shom herself, and that was really no comparison at all.
Turning her face up, she closed her eyes, letting her mind drift in the dim red glow that was sunlight through eyelids. Eizri only saw what she did, so she knew she was taking that cerulean arch away from him as well, but he didn’t compin. It would still be there when she opened her eyes again, after all.
“The sky is blue, but so is water,” she told him. “Most water, anyway. And flowers, and robin eggs, and some fruits.”
White things? Frowning, she opened her eyes again and stared into the sky. “Those are clouds. They’re made of water, I think. Rain falls from them, as well as snow, and sometimes ice.”
If she closed her eyes again, she could picture him. He’d been small, like Ky, and at first she’d thought of him like a pet. Just another kobold. By then, she’d long since stopped letting herself think of them as anything like people, because doing so reminded her of exactly what she really was. When they met, Eizri was young, barely returned from his spirit hunt, but when the Voice asked for the best artist in the Deep, they sent him to her, all blue fur, spindly legs, and bright eyes.
He was so smart, understanding exactly what she wanted, almost as if he could already see it before she finished speaking, and when he started to work, it was like he became someone else. He could crouch in front of a wall for hours, forgetting to eat or sleep, marking out each curve of a mural or stroke of the chisel with painstaking exactness. She had had to convince him to stop long enough to take care of himself, which at first annoyed her, but she eventually found it amusing, because her mother had always compined that she had to do the same thing when Shom - Xion Wu - was designing one of her inventions.
They traveled from the bottom of the mountain to the top, always together, and he was the first person she ever told her story to. The whole thing, not just the nice parts, because he liked her, and he deserved to know she was a monster far worse than any lopo or mande. But all he did was ask a thousand questions about the pace where she’d grown up, and what it was like outside of the mountain. Not wanting to answer, she’d made the mistake of asking about his own life.
That was when she found out what it was like to be a male kobold. To be a kobold in general, but a male in particur. When she’d created them, she’d discovered that the females were far more likely than males to have cores, and she was gd, because she thought that this way at least they would have an equal society. But of course that wasn’t what had happened, and by the time she realized it, by the time Eizri told her, all she could do was try to tilt the st few kobolds the other way, try to even it out, at least a little.
Eizri didn’t have a core, but she was the Voice, and whatever she said was what her kobolds did. She told the st chief to take little, blue-furred Eizri as her mate, and listen to him when he spoke, and that was how the Woodbdes came to be. They were her most loyal kobolds, the only ones who would listen to her even over Nucai.
Eizri grew old without her noticing. He was slower when he worked, but he never failed to come when she called. His pups had pups of their own, but it was only when she saw that there was more white fur on his head than blue that she realized she was going to lose him. He was her only friend, the only soce she had in the twisted world she’d made for herself, and he was going to die.
Years before, after Eizri told her how Nucai, Qiangde, and Zhangwo wasted the lives of all the kobolds, but especially hers, who were expected to do all of the dangerous tasks the others weren’t suited to, she’d stepped away from the other humans. She immersed herself in her work, but hid anything that Qiangde would find useful. She had enough weighing on whatever remained of her conscience without adding more.
Faced with Eizri’s death, however, she found it far too easy to step back into more active experimentation. She drew the line at using sapient creatures this time, and concentrated on the formations of ki-crystals she’d recently begun to focus on. It almost took too long, but she went to Eizri, where he sat in front of his hut, pying with his grand-pups, and asked him if he wanted to live forever.
He told her no. He’d lived a long and happy life, creating art and a tribe where males were treated, if not equally, at least with respect. He was looking forward to joining his ancestors, and then, someday, welcoming his own family to whatever waited beyond death. He was quite cheerful about the whole thing, honestly, just as he had been about everything from the moment she’d met him.
So she walked away. In spite of everything she’d done, and everything she’d been, she desperately wanted to be the person Eizri thought she was, so she let him go. She wrote down her conclusions, closed the book, and forgot about it. Until the day she woke up from the worst nightmare of her life, only to find that it wasn’t a nightmare, and Eizri was right there beside her, trapped in a hammer just as she was in a new, warped body, because one of Qiangde’s minions had found the notes she’d hidden so carefully. She knew, knew, that she should have destroyed them, but she had never been strong enough to erase the things she made, which, in the end, was probably her most damning failure.
That was the first time the idea of killing Qiangde became real to her, but she quickly found that she couldn’t get past that point, that simple thought. Qiangde had made her his, just as much as the kobolds were hers. It took almost another century to convince her uncle that the only way he would ever ascend was if Qiangde was dead.
She had given Nucai everything he needed: all the research, all the inventions, but left the actual pn to him. Her mind simply didn’t work the way his did, with secrets hidden inside puzzles and schemes, all coming together to allow him to find a way around Qiangde’s control. If she could have hit the damned dragon with a big hammer, it would have been done, but for subtlety, she needed Nucai.
Once more, she drew in a deep breath, taking in the nearly forgotten scents of leaves and dust and the deep, musky smell of the earth. “I showed you snow once, at the top of the mountain. It’s cold and white. Do you remember?”
There was a silence, and then,
Her eyes burned again. Eizri remembered everything that happened before he was pced in the hammer, but more recent events sometimes escaped him. She honestly wasn’t sure if the voice to which she spoke really was her friend, or if it was some ki-powered copy that sounded like him. Had he gone on to the ancestors as he hoped, or was he trapped, just like she was? She doubted if she would ever know, and without being sure he would be released if she broke the hammer, she couldn’t bring herself to do so.
“It’s crunchy,” she told him. “Like very small, frozen pieces of stone.” That wasn’t right, of course, but he had no other basis of comparison, and he would probably forget this soon enough.
She chuckled. “No, I suppose not. It can be fun, though. I built a man made of snow when I was young. It almost never snowed where I grew up, but I remember once-”
“Did it move?”
She spun, staring at the little pink-furred kobold who had just stepped out of the tunnel behind her. “What?” she asked bnkly.
“The man made of snow. Was it like one of your ptforms? Did it move?” Ky asked, her arms folded across her chest defensively.
“No. I was just…probably about your age. I hadn’t learned how to do anything like that yet. Why are you here?” Shom took a step backwards, as if she wasn’t over a thousand years old, and the girl facing her wasn’t little more than a puppy.
Ky drew in a deep breath. “Kaz told me you were leaving.”
Did he tell you he told me to go? she wondered dryly, but just nodded.
“I wrote in the magic book Lianhua gave me. Reina has one that matches, and when I write in my book, Reina can read it. The humans aren’t allowed to camp here any more, so I told her to send someone for you, even though it’s not time for a caravan,” Ky said. She stared at Shom. “Kaz said you could make yourself look like a human.”
Shom lifted her arm, showing off the bracer. “I can.”
Curiosity sparked in Ky’s eyes. “Can I see?”
Shom almost said no, but she’d have to use it eventually, if she didn’t want the people she met to see her as either a particurly ugly, hairy human, or a particurly ugly, balding kobold. So instead she pictured herself, the way she’d been before Qiangde stole the st shreds of her humanity from her, and cycled ki through the device.
The illusion was convincing enough that when she looked down, she saw smooth skin in the gap between her glove and her sleeve. Slowly, she drew the rough leather off her hand, and stared at the smooth ovals of her nails. There was even dirt beneath them, just as there always had been when she was actually human.
“I haven’t forgiven you,” Ky said, pulling Shom out of the contemption of her own illusory flesh. The young kobold’s eyes were clear, and there was no anger in them. “I don’t know your whole howl,” she said, “but I know what you did, and you’re not my friend anymore. You probably don’t even care, but I needed to tell you that.”
It felt like Qiangde had returned and cmped his cws around her chest, squeezing the breath from her lungs, but Ky didn’t stop to let Shom answer before continuing. “But when I needed a pce to go, and someone even my mother was afraid to anger, you were there. So I hope… I hope you find some people who don’t know what you did, and you can be friends with them. I hope maybe you can be happy. Somewhere else.”
Every word was a spike in her heart, but Shom knew she deserved it. The person she’d been inside the mountain wasn’t someone anyone should trust with something so fragile and precious as friendship.
“Thank you,” she said softly, not sure what else to say.
Ky hesitated, as if she was about to say something else, then nodded and stepped back into the tunnel. She should have been visible for some distance as she walked away, but somehow she was just gone, leaving Shom and Eizri behind.
Finally, Shom said, “I’ve been thinking about taking a new name. What do you think about Elian?” She turned her back on the tunnel opening and began to walk down the muddy road, feeling her toes squish in her boots as the seams began to leak.
She tilted her face up toward the sun and smiled. “You think so? I guess that’s okay. Eizri is a good name.”