by Colt, K. J.
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 FIVE
THE 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!”
“Impossible,” said Khavi, but I could see it, as clear as the light of a placid glowbug. The kobold’s chest rose and fell, ever so slightly, pulsing with life.
Gripping the worn thread of the tunic with both hands, I tore it in half, exposing the whole of the dead kobold’s torso, and as I did, the corpse’s skin burst like a bug hit with a mace. Uncountable numbers of spiders, each no bigger than one of my scales, poured from the corpse’s chest, mouth, and empty eye sockets, a living swarm that washed over me, covering my arms and face, their diminutive legs skittering all over my scales as they ran over my body.
I shrieked and slapped at my face and arms, a thick carpet of arachnids growing out, spilling out over the bare stone.
“Get them off, get them off, get them off!”
I flailed around on the ground. The heavy flat of Khavi’s blade thunked into my side, squashing dozens of the creatures, but scores more took their place, crawling insects replacing their fallen brethren faster than he could kill them.
Then they began to bite.
The burning venom surged into my body, and I shrieked again, thrashing and kicking, Khavi’s sword hitting over and over to little effect. The swarm of vermin stuck to his blade in clumps, crawling up towards the weapon’s hilt and swimming through the vicious fluid clinging to the steel. Khavi waved the sword around wildly, sending spiders and glowbug juice everywhere.
I turned my thoughts inward, to the fire that welled in my veins. My lack of restful sleep in the previous night had drained my power, and the biting, burning feel of the spiders swarming all over me jumbled the words in my head. I conjured images of dragon fire, of surging heat and burning metal, but the only result was a thick outpouring of smoke from my broken claws.
I rolled over and over on the stone ground, flailing my arms madly as the spiders bit me again and again, their fangs finding the gaps between my scales and injecting their poison into my skin.
Warm liquid splashed against my leather jerkin and light flooded my vision. I thought
for a moment that the spell I’d cast had worked belatedly, but a rich sweet smell filled my nostrils. One I knew intimately, and I knew the truth. Glowbug juice. Energy rich, nutritious, and luminescent, the fluid was a staple of our diets and a critical tool for our survival in the dark underground. However, it had one property that always unnerved those who understood it, who were educated and could see the dangers of such things.
It was flammable.
Khavi’s sword lay on the ground, swarming with spiders, its owner with a flint and steel in his hands.
“No, no, no, no, NO!”
But it was too late. Khavi struck the two together, showering my body with golden sparks, igniting the fluid and bathing the whole area in light. The spider swarm collectively understood the burning fire to be the death of them all and flowed off me and away.
It didn't matter that they were gone. The feeling of them on me had been too much. I thrashed around on the ground, my armour on fire, the scent of roasting human skin mixed with the acrid scent of burned glowbug juice. I snapped off the clips of my jerkin, rolling out of it, the flaming remains of my armour basking the area in orange luminescence. I panted and slapped at my scales, fearing the flames were still upon me or that the hundreds of crawling legs would return.
Glowbug juice burned brightly, but I hadn’t felt any pain. The flames had consumed a part of the cloth under my armour. There was a sooty mark, but despite the black stain, my scales were unharmed.
Aside from a few I found and crushed with the palm of my hand, my body was free of the vermin. My armour, though, quickly burned through and became a useless pile of charred leather. The light from the burning jerkin lit up the cavern, which was almost fifty feet high and wide, the passage stretching off to the gloom on either side. All around me, hanging in the air like the ropes of a bridge, were dozens of spider webs, the threads as thick as my arm. Many had dried corpses strung out on them, hanging like cloth thrown over a line to dry. Khavi and I had, miraculously, missed all of the strands on our way down.
“What is this place?” I said, my voice tinged with awe.
“I don’t know,” replied Khavi. He struck the flint over his blade, igniting it in a burst of light.
“Will you stop doing that?” I shouted at him, “You set me on fire!”
“You were covered in bugs!”
“Spiders are arachnids, not bugs, and you set me on fire!”
“Well,” huffed Khavi, “the bugs are gone at least.”
“They’re not—urgh. Forget it.”
I grimaced as the venom worked its way through my veins, stinging me from the inside, but I grit my fangs and bore it out. I was a warrior, and I was accustomed to pain. Pain was passing. I would live or I would die.
After a moment the burning faded. I stripped off the last of my armour and the cloth padding underneath, clad only in my scales and the pouch of my eggshells around my neck.
As I did my scales crawled. Khavi’s eyes were watching me. I stared back at him, his eyes roaming over my body, and I was reminded that he was assigned to breed with me before the disaster had taken our city. The thought had completely fled my mind until that moment, and I suspected that he had not put much thought into it either, but the look he gave my naked body brought that little problem back to mind.
The strangest thing, though, was that I was more comfortable than I thought. He'd seen me without clothing before, but there was something subtly different here. We weren't hatchlings huddled together for warmth anymore, or trainees struggling under Yeznen's whip. Now we were adults, assigned to be together.
I thought I would feel dirty, feel objectified, or feel threatened by the change in atmosphere; instead, there was simply a vague feeling of unease. Perhaps I was more comfortable with him than I thought. Perhaps my reluctance to do my duty with him was simply my inexperience in these matters.
That, in itself, was unsettling. I didn't like being afraid.
The silence persisted uncomfortably, and then I reached down and grabbed the cloth padding I had discarded. It was mostly intact, singed on the edges, but I put it on anyway. Covering myself seemed to break the tension, and Khavi finally looked away.
I didn’t feel like talking about what had just happened, so instead, I staggered over to the burst corpse, kicking at it with my foot to ensure that there were no more spiders within.
“I think it’s safe,” Khavi said, grinning at me. I didn’t like the way he did that.
Unwilling to meet his gaze, I turned to the dead Darkguard, a shudder running down my spine as I stared at the empty-eyed corpse, her chest turned outward. I understood now why her expression was so horrified. I imagined the Darkguard as the tide of insects rushed into her eyes and mouth, feeling them lay their eggs into her flesh while she was still alive.
It was best not to think about it.
“Khavi, retrieve the chainmail. The Darkguard doesn’t need it anymore, and I don’t fancy being unarmoured in this place.”
He stared at me like I had ordered him to cut off all his own limbs and head. “There is absolutely no way, in this life or the next, that I am touching that infested thing.”
I sympathised, and being honest with myself, I wouldn’t want to touch it either. As much as I disliked Khavi leering at me, I disliked giving an order I found personally revolting more.
But I needed something to take his attention away from me.
“I don’t care. You burned my armour; I’ll need some more.”
“I saved your life!” protested Khavi.
“You set me on fire.” I reached into my pouch, removing my flint and steel and a glowing vial of my own. “If more spiders remain, I’ll be sure to return the favour.”
He crossed his arms. “It’s not like you could burn anyway.”
I frowned. “Why would you say that?”
“You didn’t before when you were in the furnace.”
I reached for the pouch around my neck. “No, but that was…” I didn’t know how to explain it. “That was just a one-time thing.”
“Was it? The glowbug juice—wasn’t it painful?”
I looked back up at the myriad of criss-crossing spiderwebs above me and at the dried corpses hanging there. Fire was rare underground as it stole breathable air. The forges of the city ran once a day. Even with my magic I’d never touched open flame before today.
Glowbug juice didn’t burn hot, but the mark on my shoulder was undeniable. I couldn’t feel any pain there specifically, but I felt pain all over my body from the spider bites. A burning pain. I couldn’t tell the difference.
My instincts told me not to question this too much.
“I don’t know. The fire was on my armour.” I glared at him. “Armour that you destroyed. So go get the chainmail. Now.”
Kobolds taught our warriors well. Our warriors followed orders even if they would lead to their doom. Still, it was with palpable reluctance that Khavi removed the shirt from the kobold body, careful to keep himself as far away from the hollow corpse as he could.
“Here,” he spat, throwing the mail on the floor at my feet, a shiver running from his feet to his snout.
I picked up the heavy suit of mail and inspected it to verify that there were no more spiderlings present. I had never seen metal armour this close before; each of the finely woven links had held together over however many years she had lain on the floor of the cavern, and I could tell even in the dim light that this was a finely made piece indeed. I slipped it over my head, wriggling into it. It felt comforting and fit me perfectly, a cocoon, the metal rings melding up against my scales snugly.
I had never trained with metal armour, but as the rings of mail nestled in to my body, a memory surged into my mind. A racial memory. Just as we were born with the ability to speak, we sometimes came to know other things as well.
One of my ancestors had used mail like this, had trained with it, fought in it, and died in it. I had no specifics of who this kobold was, a tantalising dangle of the heritag
e I so eagerly wanted to uncover, but try as I might, there was nothing more than the knowledge.
“Like it was made for me.”
The light dimmed. I looked to Khavi poking around the corpse with his weapon. He shoved it under the body, leaving the only available light the smouldering remains of my jerkin.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“There’s something underneath,” said Khavi, then lifted the blade with a grunt. The body, aged and dry, broke apart as he lifted it. A dozen spiders scurried out, and we jumped back, keeping our distance until they were gone.
Underneath the remains was a long, thin dagger sheathed in a humanskin leather scabbard. The hilt was an ornate black onyx carved into a narrow point. I understood what it was. I had seen these kinds of weapons before.
“She was a Darkguard.” I gingerly reached for the weapon, and giving it a shake, checked it all over for spiderlings. “This is a Feyeater.”
“A what?”
“A magical dagger, specifically enchanted to harm gnomes. The edges find its organs more easily, and wounds inflicted on their kind bleed more profusely, as though made by a much larger weapon.” I slid it from its sheath, revealing a blade as black as night, matte, almost invisible in the dim light of the cavern. The perfect assassin’s weapon, tailor-made for its target. “This Darkguard was hunting gnomes.”
“That could come in handy when we catch No-Kill,” said Khavi. “Especially if we end up taking some of its toes.”
I slipped the weapon back into its sheath and strapped it to my belt. “I agree, and anything that hurts gnomes is an asset to us at the moment.”
“Especially this.” Khavi sniffed the air. “Where to now?”
I looked up to the ceiling, but the hole we had fallen through would be impossible to climb to unless we used the thick strands of web as a ladder. Judging by how stuck the corpses were, that was definitely a bad plan.
