WHEN WE ARRIVED BACK AT the battle site, a swarm of six-inch bugs were crawling over the bodies, tearing at the exposed flesh with their pincers and slowly consuming them. They were Flesh-Cleaners, blind four-legged insects that feasted on flesh too small or too rotten for other predators. I chased them away with a spray of flame from my hand and all three of us set to work.
With our bodies rested and No-Kill’s help, the gnome corpses were buried quickly, their final resting place a mountain of rocks and dirt in the biggest of the tunnels. The sickly-sweet smell began to recede.
Once again No-Kill seemed more exhausted than the two of us. I gave No-Kill a few strips of glowbug meat from my haversack, much to Khavi’s chagrin. He stared daggers at our prisoner as she consumed the lion’s share of our meagre supplies. She didn’t seem to like the taste, though, which helped.
The grim business was finished, and we turned towards the gnomish settlement, No-Kill walking before us. Our weapons remained sheathed, although Khavi kept his claw resting on the hilt at all times. The route we took was different this time, through smaller, poorly maintained passages that were covered in dust.
The idea was strange to me and must have been strange to Khavi too. All kobold tunnels were either maintained to the common standard and well patrolled, irrespective of their use, or collapsed to prevent their use by our enemies. I couldn’t understand the thought process that would allow a race to be so lackadaisical with the defence of their community.
Their existence proved useful to us though. Based on my reckoning, the journey to the gnome settlement was shortened significantly.
I was glad for this, and glad No-Kill was cooperating with us, although every time she helpfully bypassed one of the gnomish traps or led us through a hidden side passage, I could feel Khavi’s rage building. He hated being shown up, hated not being right, and most of all, he hated taking orders from a gnome.
No-Kill took us to the wide passage to the underground stream. My instincts begged me not to approach the water again, but No-Kill waved for us to proceed.
We did, weapons in hand, and as we drew close, the water once again rose up to meet us. The elemental's body coalesced from the flow of the river, limbs made of bubbling water dripping onto the stone as it regarded Khavi and I impassively.
No-Kill said something in her own tongue and the monster relaxed, slowly sinking back down into the water like a wineskin with a hole in it, becoming one with the stream once again.
“Do you think it can still see us?” I asked, peering at the water.
“Maybe it’s a trap,” replied Khavi.
“It didn’t kill us before; it won’t now,” I said, a faint hint of exasperation creeping into my tone.
“No kill,” said No-Kill, pointing to the river and then to my backpack. I fished out the empty bug-container and handed it to her. Moving to the water, No-Kill leaned down and filled it with a single scoop, screwing on the lid and handing it back, beaming widely.
How could she be so friendly to us all of a sudden? Khavi hated her, but I could feel my resentment weaken. It was difficult to be angry and suspicious of someone who was so cheery.
At least we had water again. I worried, though, if some part of the elemental was inside the bottle, and what might happen to my insides if I drank it. Would the creature burst out from within me? Would my body absorb it and take control of my very blood, using my vital fluids as the new carrier for its spirit?
Sometimes knowledge of magic can be a scary thing indeed. At times like these I envied Khavi with his much more simple thought processes and outlook on life.
Khavi snatched the hollow glowbug from No-Kill’s hands, growling angrily. “Well, at least it replaced what it drank,” he said, unscrewing the top and sniffing within. He regarded the water with the same caution one might give to a vial of poison.
Perhaps he and I thought more alike than I had guessed. Khavi gave the bottle’s contents another suspicious sniff, then he dipped a claw and tasted it, rolling the drop around on his tongue. Unable to find anything immediately wrong he screwed the top back on and thrust it to me. “Bah.”
“It’s water,” I said.
“What if it put the water monster in the bottle?”
I was reluctant to let Khavi know I was thinking the same thing, so I just replaced it back in my backpack. “It’s twenty kobolds tall. There’s no way it could fit in a tiny bottle.”
“Gnomish magic is built on deception. What if it’s a fragment of the monster?”
“Are you afraid of a water elemental the size of a glowbug? Look, if No-Kill wanted to smash us with the thing, she’s had ample opportunity to do so.”
“She?” asked Khavi questioningly, inclining his head. “You’ve been doing that for a while now. Monsters shouldn’t be addressed with such familiarity.”
“It is clearly female.”
He wrinkled his snout. “How can you tell? They all look alike to me.”
“Tzala told me that the females of the surface races have two squishy flesh-growths on their chests. That’s how you know they’re female.”
“What purpose would they serve?”
“Apparently they use them to nourish their young.”
“They allow their hatchlings to eat their own flesh?” Khavi shook his head and looked away, sticking his tongue out. “That’s vile.”
“They have their ways of raising children,” I said, although I immediately regretted bringing up the subject around Khavi. “And we have ours. It’s just how they are.”
“Well, at least we know it hasn’t spawned. It still has both.” He paused. “Maybe they grow back?”
That was likely. We continued on, leaving the sweet-smelling water behind us, once more walking through tunnels lined with the glowing crystalline growths.
The passage began to open, wider and wider, towards a faint purple glow—a dot at the end of a vast funnel. As we drew closer, the source became clear. An opaque wall of energy ran from floor to ceiling, thick and shimmering purple. A grid of arrow slits were carved into the tunnel walls, each approximately a kobold and a half’s height above the other and surrounded on either side by spear holes. Near the ceiling, more slits were spaced farther apart and the steel tips of ballista bolts poked, armed and ready to fire. Below our feet were grates designed to filter away poisonous gasses and flooding waters, others filled with a black liquid that smelled of flammable oil. Some were filled with arrays of darts, angled upwards in a wide cone, their tips wickedly sharp. My power felt faint, an unseen force suppressing my magic, silencing the inner roar of the dragons within my soul, a feeling that was amplified the closer I came to the end.
With every step down the long corridor, I expected to die. We were being toyed with; silent watchers waited to give the signal to kill.
We made it all the way to the end, closer to our enemies than, any others of our kind had ever done before. We stood outside the entrance to the gnome city, staring down the sights of enough arrows to repel an army ten thousand strong. Here we were, two tired and footsore kobolds and a gnome whose intentions were as opaque as the shimmering wall that stood between us and the city. We were nothing before the might of these fortifications.
Yet they did not kill us.
No-Kill gestured for us to put away our weapons. I did so, and as my rapier slid into its sheath, a sinking feeling grew in my belly. The ominously silent defences stared us down, hundreds of dark slits mocking us, mutely daring two reptilians to attack for the amusement of all. How did I ever think we had a hope of succeeding?
No-Kill called something in her own tongue but received no reply. She turned to us and pointed to the floor. “No march,” she said, jabbing her finger at my feet, then towards the opaque shimmering wall. “No march. Kobold die. No march.”
“No march,” I echoed. No-Kill stepped through the purple wall and vanished.
Khavi exhaled a loud hissing sigh beside me. “Perhaps she is going to tell them to cut us down,” he said, his
eyes darting from arrowslit to arrowslit, expecting to be shot at any moment. “We should have kept her in front of us as a shield.”
“I don’t see anyone at the ballistas,” I said, pointing to crossbows that stood without crew, their loaded bolts pointing beyond us to the entrance.
“Perhaps they are invisible. Our own defences use invisibility to confound our enemies.”
“It doesn’t make sense to use invisibility to mask the presence of siege engine crews. Our sorcerers could simply lob fireballs into the rooms. Being unable to be seen doesn’t mean you can’t be burned.”
“It’s a trick,” Khavi insisted, “some kind of wicked deception. Perhaps they intend to test our will?”
“To what purpose?”
“They saw us coming,” he reasoned. “The gnomes have much reason to fear us. Perhaps the weapon crews deserted.”
Khavi was so fixated on seeing danger that he couldn’t see the broader picture. What was odd about the gnomish defenses wasn’t that our enemies were waiting for the right time to pull some ingenious trick on us, it was that they didn’t seem to be waiting at all. “You think that dozens, possibly hundreds, of gnome defenders pissed themselves and ran because two kobolds approached their gates?”
“I don’t know what to think!” Khavi hissed, and snapped his jaws. “I just want them to get it over with! They should kill us already instead of drawing it out!”
The tip of one of the bolts gleamed in the crystal light. It seemed so sharp. “Do not wish for death so easily.”
The purple glow became a bright light, and I brought my hand up to shield my eyes. It faded quickly, and when the spots cleared, the wall had dropped away. A tunnel climbed the length of my sight.
No-Kill stood on the other side of the passage, a purple glowing orb in her hand, the light fading as the last of the wall evaporated. She beckoned us forward, then turned up the incline, moving out of sight.
“Ren?” said Khavi.
I turned to him, eyeridge raised. “Yes?”
“I’ve always obeyed your orders, haven’t I?”
“Yes, you have.” I hesitated. “Are you all right?”
He looked directly at me, and there was something in his eyes—something dark and sinister, something fierce and determined, something I had never really seen in him before.
“Ren, we need word to reach Ssarsdale, to warn our cousins and prepare the army for war, and you have seen the gnome defences. You’re a sorcerer, you’ve got the dragon’s art; you’re a leader. You’re young, yes, but you’ve got potential. If this hadn’t happened, you would probably be running Atikala in a few generations.”
“Khavi, what are you—”
“I want you to use the scroll to seal up the arrow slits,” he said, his hand hovering over the hilt of his sword. “You should be able to do it before they fire. Then, turn around and run away from here, and make for Ssarsdale. Tell them what happened today, and do what your duty compels you to do. I know what mine tells me—that this gnome has lived too long, that I can’t go on living knowing that Atikala is in ruins.”
“Khavi—”
But he was already gone, his eyes solid red, his weapon flying into his hands. A shiver danced down my spine as Khavi’s voice boomed all around, echoing off the stone walls, a primal vocalisation that shook the very foundations of the city.
The scroll was on my hip. I could use it to seal up the arrow slits as he’d suggested, but if they were going to fire, or pull some trick, or stop Khavi in any way, it wouldn’t come from there.
Khavi charged up the incline towards his doom, bellowing his warcry. He reached the top of the lip, disappearing from sight, and his ferocious, fate-defying shout was abruptly silenced.
I turned to the passage behind me. There were other passages, other routes I could take, ones that would bring me to the surface and then to Ssarsdale. I could run or I could stay. There were worse fates than dying here.
My hands trembled right above the scroll. Khavi’s words rang true; my duty called, inexorably pulling me towards my cousins so they could rally an army, assault this city, and make each and every gnome within pay for the kobolds they had crushed underneath the stones. Khavi was the better fighter, his blade strong and sure, but his voice had been silenced instantly. To follow him up that ramp, that incline leading to the city proper, was to embrace certain death. Duty, logic, reason—every part of me that was kobold implored me to use the scroll and retreat, to let Khavi’s death serve a community that no longer existed. The souls of all those kobolds cried out for revenge, pleading with me to return to this very spot with an army at my heels, ready to repay blood with blood.
But try as I might, my feet would not allow me to turn away from Khavi, to take even a single step away from the spot where I stood. Instead I found them moving in front of each other, one by one, moving up the incline and bringing the scene beyond into view.
No-Kill knelt on the crest of the lip, her hands by her sides, staring out at the cavern beyond. Khavi stood beside her, his arms limp and his weapon lying on the ground. For a brief moment I wondered if he was paralysed again.
Then I saw. A vast emptiness, a hole in the underworld disappearing straight down. The entire city had been scooped out by the spoon of a giant, the creature digging down further and further, creating a city-sized well in the earth that stretched out further than I could see. A red glow burned at the bottom of the pit, bright and angry. I could see no smoke. Above was a circle of the brightest light, a yellow disk in the blackness.
The gnomish city had fallen, dropped so far into the underworld that it was beyond sight, plummeting to its destruction below us, falling far enough that there was no rope long enough to reach it.
It was with a terrible realisation that I once again turned back to the entrance to the city and saw the empty ballistas, the unmanned arrow slits with bows left where their wielders had dropped them.
The gnomes had deserted. Weeks ago after their city had fallen out from underneath them. The weight crushed Atikala’s ceiling and, like a collapsing stack of scrolls, buried it beneath the ruins of what had once been an impregnable gnomish fortress.
No-Kill wailed, the first sound any of us had made. She clutched her head, babbling in her fey tongue. She grasped hold of the edge of the abyss, staring at the vast nothingness.
I reached out, touching No-Kill’s uninjured shoulder, drawing her back from the edge. The gnome shuddered and shook, her eyes wetting as her eye-tears came, crying in the right place at last.
The sheer scale of devastation we were facing dissolved my hate. I pulled the gnome I called No-Kill towards me, wrapping my claws around her shoulders and hugged tightly, keeping her eyes away from the endless abyss. The gnome cried into my shoulder, her sobs echoing in the vast chasm.
The reality of what had happened to my own city, as surely destroyed as this one, really, truly hit home for the first time. Atikala was as gone as this nameless place, no less cast into the endless abyss, and there would be just as few survivors. No-Kill and I shared the same pain.
Everything we had known about, cared about, and loved was gone.
So I cried too, and Khavi as well, mourning for the destruction of civilisations, for the massacre of two races, and the hopeless inevitability that presented so many more questions than answers.
No-Kill was first to regain some sense of wit. She let go of me, stepped back, and pointed to the Feyeater.
“Kill,” she implored as she pointed at her heart, her face streaked with tears. “Kill.”
I didn’t say anything, but I felt the dagger slide from its sheath. Khavi was at my side, his claw clasped around the hilt, holding the Feyeater in both hands.
“Khavi,” I said, my voice shaking, “it should be me.”
“No,” he said. “I know you don’t want to. I’ll do it.”
A week ago I would have given everything I had to say that a whole city of gnomes were dead, that it was worth any price to bring our enemi
es to utter ruination. I’d trained my whole life to kill, to use weapons and magic to protect my people, and this was to be my duty. My purpose in life.
Now, though, there was another gnome here, begging for death, one more body I could add to the slaughter. But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want Khavi to kill her, either.
I wanted No-Kill to live. I wanted to find out what her name was, and maybe even be her friend. I wanted her to come with us to Ssarsdale, and explain that this gnome wasn’t evil, and then she could spend her days with us, in our new community.
But I couldn’t. No matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t deny that No-Kill was a gnome, and I was a kobold.
I couldn’t say or do anything.
No-Kill slid down onto her knees, her eyes closed, and her head hung. Khavi gently nudged the dagger against her shoulder, letting the impossibly fine tip find a vein. The weapon seemed to hunger for it, sensing the presence of the creature it was enchanted to kill, and I swore the blade stretched, begging to be plunged into gnome flesh.
His strike planned, Khavi raised the blade up above his head, staring down at the gnome whose real name neither of us knew. He hesitated. The dark blade waited patiently as Khavi stared at the gnome that shared our anger and our pain.
Then he plunged the Feyeater into her neck. Blood gushed from the wound, bubbling over and splattering onto Khavi’s claws. No-Kill slumped over in a crumpled heap, her face laying in the rapidly expanding pool of scarlet.
He wiped his claws off on the back of No-Kill’s cloak, then handed the bloodsoaked dagger back to me.
No-Kill’s heart wasn’t black. It was red, healthy and living. Not evil at all.
“Thank you,” I murmured. I went to the body of No-Kill and crouched beside her, reaching out and touching her lifeless body. I was empty. Hollowed as if a piece of myself died.
“I didn’t ask her name,” I said, “or the name of this place…whatever it was.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Khavi. “She’s just a gnome. This hive of them is gone, but there are many more out there, below the earth and even on the surface. Their species is numerous.” His tone became acidic. “You’ll find no end of feylings to dote over if you go looking for them.”
Khavi’s anger was not my own, and his words couldn’t reach me. I felt nothing. I gently rolled No-Kill onto her back and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said to No-Kill’s body, although the words seemed entirely empty. I looked at Khavi. “We should bury her. She wanted that for her kin, she’d want it for herself.”
“I say we just toss the body into the abyss, so she can lay with the others. That’s as good a grave as the rest of the city got, and better than they deserved.”
“I’m still the patrol leader,” I said, “and I say we’re going to bury her.”
“You’ll do that on your own,” spat Khavi, folding his claws and turning to stare at the bottomless abyss.
Such insolence would be normally be punishable by field execution, and as patrol leader I had the authority to do it. If I did, I knew, deep in my heart, that Khavi would accept this ruling. That’s what he was. Strong, loyal, and obedient. I could make him. I could punish him if he didn’t.
But I knew that I had to do this.
“Fine.”
So I did. I wanted to dig a grave for her, much as we had done for her kin, but then I had a better idea. I carried No-Kill’s corpse to a spot near the wall and cleared the dirt and dust away from a section, deep and long, scraping away the soil. I prepared a suitable resting flat stone shelf, then I withdrew the scroll. I unfurled it and began to read.
The scroll’s light was almost painful. The earth itself bent to heed my words. The ground rose up into steps, five in total, then a raised platform with a rectangular box. I had no idea what I was making; I simply imagined the burial mound we had placed No-Kill’s kin into, then tried to make something better and more elaborate, something more deserving of her.
The writing on the scroll faded away to nothing. I stupidly had forgotten a lid for the tomb, so I fetched rocks from the gateway and piled them near the box until I was certain I had enough to cover it.
I gently placed No-Kill’s body within, then one by one, I placed the heavy stones into the tomb, sealing her body within. To be certain, I piled on lumps of glittering crystal from the tunnel further back. I found a large flat stone near the entrance, formerly a trapdoor to defensive tunnels, and used the magical dagger’s tip to inscribe upon it in the language of dragons.
Here lies the gnome with no name, last of her kin.
She faced life with courage and death with the same.
We never knew what her name truly was,
but in another life I would have called her friend.
I placed the plaque at the head of the mound of crystal, taking care that Khavi would not see what I had done. I knew he would hate it. I had taken the only real weapon we had, the only thing stronger than my spells and our steel, and used it to give a proper grave to his enemy. In my mind, though, we had intended to use the scroll to bury gnomes.
In the end it had been used for that purpose.
I joined Khavi staring out at the emptiness that was the abyss, the place where a city of gnomes had once lived and breathed.
Kobolds did not bury their dead. They were incinerated in the city’s furnaces, burned to ashes, used as fuel to heat the nurseries, and sustain the growth of new life. But I knew that gnomes and other species treated the dead with veneration, and for the first time, I began to understand why.
“Where do we go from here?” asked Khavi, his quiet voice echoing faintly from the other side of the cavern walls.
For a moment I didn’t answer, then I shouldered my backpack and breathed deeply of air too sweet and fresh to be from a place that had seen so much death.
“The only way is up,” I said.
We left the dead city, continuing our long climb to the surface.
ACT II
Passage to Salvation