Two days later, Kaz sat, staring from his newly sated pouch to the pile of objects he had removed from his torn and battered pack. It took a day and half for the pouch to release him, falling away from his hand while he slept, and when he woke to find it there he had been hesitant to even pick it up again. Still, it hadn’t actually hurt him, and it hadn’t even drawn out his ki until he offered it some, so eventually he managed, mainly because he was reluctant to leave it behind in his room.
Lianhua had locked herself back up in her room, emerging only to give the husede another text to copy. She asked for anything related to the history of the husede,the mosui, or the city itself, but sometimes she found something in one of the documents she was reading that she specifically wanted. It had been all Kaz, Raff, and Chi Yincang could do to make sure she ate regularly, so Kaz hadn’t been able to ask for any more help with the storage pouch.
That was all right, though, because she had told him enough that he could figure out the rest on his own. He thought it was a little odd that the item so specifically took the same amount of each color of ki, even though Lianhua had implied that anyone with ki could use one of these pouches, and no one else had all five colors. Still, perhaps that was how it keyed itself to its particular owner, and now no one but Kaz could use it, just as Lianhua had said. Or perhaps the thing was simply old, and it hadn’t been crafted in the same way as modern storage items. The important thing was that it worked at all.
If it did. Which he hadn’t actually checked yet.
Kaz tugged at his ear while Li looked hungrily at the piles of ki crystals arrayed before him. The crystals used to light the halls near their room seemed to go missing with surprising regularity, and Kaz had noticed that Li was looking a little sleeker and larger than she had even a few days before. He hadn’t said anything, but he also hadn’t given the dragon any of the crystals he had taken during his climb. He had no idea when he would be able to get more ki-rich food for his friend, and he never wanted her to be as malnourished and undersized as he now realized she had been.
Reaching out, Kaz picked up a small rock. It wasn’t anything special, and in fact he had chosen it at random from one of the piles of debris created by the teams of husede and kobolds who were slowly clearly the parts of the city damaged in the fight against Zhangwo.
Slightly nervous, Kaz picked up the innocent-looking pouch and gave it a tiny bit of ki. This time, he used his left hand, so when it clung to his skin, it wasn’t nearly as bothersome as when it had occupied his right. To his relief, it dropped off almost immediately, and he thought that if it hadn’t needed to draw enough blue ki to balance the other colors, it wouldn’t have taken long enough to be noticeable at all.
Once the soft, rich cloth relaxed into his palm, he gingerly drew apart the strings tying it shut. It fell open into an almost full circle as he let out the strings to their greatest length, and unlike the narrow-mouthed pouches the humans used, he thought a small kobold could fit in it, though he was a little too large. He certainly could have put a mosui into it, or at least on it, and he wondered with a hint of dark humor if this bag would keep its contents as perfectly preserved as Lianhua’s pouch, and if so, what the kobolds in the Deep would make of the corpse of one of the mole-people.
Li’s mind was obviously still on her belly, because as Kaz idly pictured himself dropping half a dozen mosui into the bag, Li substituted her open maw for the pouch, and seemed quite pleased with the idea.
Kaz shook his head. Most of the meat they had eaten lately was niu, with some fuergar and janjio brought in from the higher levels. Still, there wasn’t much, and niu tasted strange to him, sweet in a not-unpleasant way, but definitely not familiar. Even though Li seemed able to get nutrition from almost anything, he thought she needed more meat in order to be able to properly use the energy she was getting from her illicit ki-crystal snacks.
“We’ve talked about this,” he chided gently, reaching up for Li to climb onto his arm. She was definitely heavier now, and her body stretched slightly more than the full length of his arm, though much of that was tail.
“You can’t eat intelligent creatures,” he told her. “Even if you didn’t kill them yourself. No one will want to be your friend if they think you might eat them after they die.”
Li clicked sulkily, looking away. She sent an image of a large dragon, humanoid shape clutched in powerful claws, flying away to eat in privacy.
He sighed. “No, not even if you do it in secret. Someone will find out, and knowing you’ve eaten people would make the other people very nervous.”
She glanced to the side, a sly picture of herself gobbling down all of Kaz’s ki crystals dropping into his mind.
He suppressed a chuckle, trying to sound stern. “No. I don’t care if you eat all the red crystals nearby, so long as you don’t get caught, but these are for later. Now shush. I need to focus.”
The dragon whistled, half-offended, but she was curious what Kaz’s new pouch could do as well, so she curled up on the stone beside him, laying her head on her front feet as she watched.
Kaz placed the pouch on the floor, opened to its greatest circumference, then dropped his pebble in the middle of it. Nothing happened. He pulled on the string, closing the bag, then peered inside. As he’d suspected, the rock was still there, sitting in the bottom of the pouch.
“All right,” he muttered. “I’ll feed you, but you’d better stop taking so much.” Kaz supposed he would have to start storing more blue ki in his central dantian, if only to be sure he had enough for the greedy bag. He already had the seed stealing more than half of the gold ki he produced, he didn’t need this object taking his small thread of blue on a regular basis.
With a sigh, Kaz fed the bag another spark of ki, and to his pleasure it took very little this time. He assumed that was because he had just fed it, so perhaps if he simply made a habit of touching it and giving it a bit of energy every now and then, it wouldn’t need so much at once.
This time, when he peered inside, the pebble was gone, and the clean, supple fabric of the bag shone up at him with a subtle sheen. Kaz grinned, then scratched his muzzle. Looking down at Li, he muttered, “Now, how do I get it back?”
The dragon yawned, pink tongue curling into a lazy S with what he knew was entirely feigned disinterest.
Kaz shook his head, then thought back to all the times he’d seen one of the humans remove something from one of their storage items. It certainly didn’t seem difficult, so perhaps it was as easy as- He touched the bag, feeding it ki even as he pictured the rock he’d just put inside. Something shifted inside the cloth, and this time when he looked inside, the pebble was back.
Kaz repeated this process several times, and found that a tiny spark of ki was all it took to make the transfer each time. Once, he licked the stone, then put it inside, and found that when he took it out several minutes later, it was exactly as wet as it had been when it went in. Another time, he used red ki to warm it, and it was still noticeably hot when it came out, no matter how long he waited. He was fairly certain that the pouch was, in fact, keeping objects exactly as they had been when they went in, and he absently wondered what would happen if he put something living into it.
His eye fell on Li, who hissed at him half-heartedly, and his tail wagged as he sent her an image of dropping a little golden dragon into the bag. She hissed again, a little more seriously this time, and returned a picture of herself, dangling a thrashing blue kobold over the splayed-open pouch.
He yipped laughter. “No one else can use it, though,” he reminded her.
Clicking disdainfully, Li pulled harder on her link with Kaz’s core, then fed some of his own ki into the pouch, which promptly spat out the stone he had cooled with black ki some five minutes earlier. She couldn’t produce her own red ki, but she could manipulate Kaz’s, at least enough for this. The tip of her tail twitched, knocking the bag over, and the pouch disgorged the rock, which rolled over to bump gently against Kaz’s knee.
Kaz stared down at the little pebble, feeling first surprised, then pleased. It was actually a good thing that Li could access the contents of his new item. Her little hand-paws were far more dexterous than the mosui’s flat, clawed hands, but she still had a hard time undoing the knot on his pack. Most of the time, he was glad the greedy little thief couldn’t get into his things, but soon she would be large enough to carry this pouch on her own, and if they were separated, or something happened to Kaz, it would be good if she could use it.
While he knew she could tell what he was really feeling, he also knew she was expecting a certain reaction, so he snorted, gently flicking the pebble back at her. It was still noticeably cooler than the surrounding air, so when Li swallowed his test pebble whole, he decided it was time to move on to the next step.
Picking up one of the collar pieces, Kaz checked to make sure it wasn’t the one with the scratches on it. For some reason, he was reluctant to risk the one that had saved Lianhua’s life. Finding that this one was unblemished, Kaz pushed it through the opening of the pouch, even as he fed the bag a bit of ki. Always before, Kaz had released the pebble into the bag, so he was a bit surprised when there was a tug, and the collar half was pulled from his fingers, vanishing into the depths of the pouch.
He shook his fingers slightly, feeling as if he’d been shocked by one of the sparks of light that sometimes jumped between two kobolds. Puppies thought it was particularly fun to roll around on the ground until their fur stood up, then touch their parents or the den-mother. Kaz had never particularly liked the feeling, and he didn’t care for this one, either.
More cautiously, he reached into the pouch, giving it ki as he imagined the collar returning to his hand. Immediately, cool metal pressed into his fingers, pushing its way back out of the pouch with as much vigor as it had gone in. Once the whole collar piece had extruded itself again, he weighed the curve of metal in his palm, eyeing the bag thoughtfully.
Was this why Lianhua and the others had smaller pouches? He could imagine putting something larger inside, then fumbling it when it came shooting back out. He didn’t remember any of the humans having a problem like that, though, including Chi Yincang, who stored his long weapon in a ring on his right middle finger.
Again, this pouch was old, so maybe the method had simply been refined since its creation. Whatever the reason for its enthusiastic acceptance and expulsion of the objects he put inside, he would just have to be ready to catch the things it spat out.
One after another, Kaz fed in most of the objects he had been stuffing into his pack. It had been growing more and more difficult to get them all in without bursting a seam, and when he had only four items left in front of him, he looked at his deflated pack with some bemusement. It was definitely time for a new one, and though leather was as difficult to come by as meat in the city, there was a good amount of niu-fur cloth, and he was certain Eld or Dax would help him get enough to make a new pack.
That left these four things: a wrinkled brown object Lianhua called a ‘seed’, a knife hilt with a sheared-off stub of blade, a complete knife with a rippled blade gleaming the lustrous color of adamantium, and a white orb glowing with lambent black and white ki. Kaz wasn’t quite willing to trust the first three precious items, which he had carried with him since the very top of the mountain, to the bag. If anything happened to any of them, or if he couldn’t get them out again, he would be extremely unhappy.
The fourth, the white, spherical egg Kaz had stolen from the hoyi queen, was there for quite another reason. Kaz had fully intended to eat it since the moment he first held it, but he had been wary of doing so when he was in the middle of attempting to find and free Li, then Lianhua. He had seen what happened to the female kobolds who ate cores taken from other creatures, and though this wasn’t a core, he sensed that it wasn’t far from one, either.
He had intended to ask Lianhua to watch over them when he and Li ate it, but the human was so engrossed in her research that she barely spoke beyond a grunt. She had, however, managed to pull herself out of her thoughts for long enough to tell him that they would be leaving first thing in the morning, and that meant Kaz’s time had run out. If, as he suspected, it took some time and effort for them to absorb the ki inside the egg, they needed to begin now in order to be sure they had enough time to recover before they left the city.
It was time to eat the egg.
