Ren of Atikala Read online

  THE CAVERN STRETCHED ON ENDLESSLY and the minutes turned to hours. My arm grew tired holding my blade, but I dared not take it away from the gnome for one instant. I stared at No-Kill’s back, trying to stare through its body and into its heart to see if it was as black and shrivelled as the kobold leaders had told me it had to be. Everyone knew that gnomes had black and twisted hearts, writhed and gnarly like knotted rope, belying their twisted and unnatural otherworldly origin.

  The gnome slowed its pace, strange water sticking to its whole body. I spent a moment examining the fluid trickling down the back of its neck, beading as it ran over scaleless skin. Was her body crying? Is that why she slowed down, why her feet dragged on the stone? I studied the gnome’s walk, a slow, easy pace that was in stark contrast to the efficient march of Khavi and I. Was the creature really so weak that the act of walking made her whole body burst into tears?

  “Do you think they feel fear?” I asked, staring at her wild yellow hair that bounced all around as she walked. Our Leaders told us that gnomes were too simple to have such emotions, but No-Kill certainly seemed more complex than a ravening killer.

  “They’re monsters,” said Khavi. “Monsters don’t feel fear.”

  “That is what they say, but I don’t know,” I said. “It seems frightened enough.”

  “So do glowbugs if you stomp near them,” said Khavi, “that’s not fear in the way we feel it, that’s just survival instinct. It doesn’t want to die, that’s all. Any animal feels the same way, even the mindless insects, and we eat those.”

  I poked No-Kill in the back with my blade to hurry it up, drawing a yelp as it scurried forward. “It’s right to be afraid,” I said to Khavi. “It should fear death.”

  Khavi gave a chuckle. “In this case, yes. I’ll enjoy seeing this one’s insides. Perhaps they are as dark as they say.”

  We walked for a little more, our claws scraping over the cold stone of the underworld. I switched the blade into my weaker right arm, weighed down by my buckler as well as my sword, but it was a relief for my left arm, which was almost numb.

  “How do you think they breed?” asked Khavi. “How many eggs do you think they lay a year?”

  “Probably less than us,” I said, “they tend to be fewer in number in the same area and consume more resources. That’s what my teachers say.” I recalled some of their lessons, trying to remember if this fact had come up. “Perhaps one a year?”

  Khavi nodded thoughtfully. “So fewer than us, then.”

  “That’s why when we fight, we are content with losses that are two to one. One individual affects their society greater than one of ours. It is a disadvantage of their kind, one of their many.”

  “Perhaps we could break into their nursery then,” Khavi said. “If we could, your flames could burn their eggs to a crisp.”

  The thought turned my stomach. “I’d rather not kill younglings if I could avoid it.”

  “Why not?” Khavi snarled. “Do you think the gnomes had such reservations about our young when they collapsed our tunnels? How many kobold eggs were crushed only hours ago by these feyspawn?”

  I grimaced, baring my teeth as I imagined the hunks of stone falling through the glass ceiling of the crèche, annihilating them in an instant. “No,” I said. “I suppose they didn’t care.”

  “Then the nursery should be our goal, to maximise the damage we do. The gnomes stole our entire community’s future—we should at least put a dent in theirs.”

  I flexed my tired left hand at my side, clicking my claws together, feeling the wellspring of dragon magic within rumble in my veins. I imagined a gnome egg, round and fat like the one walking in front of me, and pictured a wave of my fire rolling over it, heating it until it popped, the tiny, squirming gnome inside boiled alive in its own juices.

  The mental image was disturbing, but this was no less than they deserved, I had to remind myself, and no less than they had wished upon my own kind.

  “So Khavi, speaking of the future, what do you see in it for us?”

  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 toward
s 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.