The Broken Knife

As Kaz drew close, he felt the pull on his ki that told him Raff was attempting to cultivate, so he knew the other male was alive and conscious. Wondering if he had grown strong enough to prevent people from stealing his power, he stretched out a hand, and for a moment it seemed like it was going to work. Since Raff was reaching for mana, and Kaz’s ki was so dense, the other male simply wasn’t able to break it down enough to take it.

Then Kaz’s ki shifted, all moving toward Raff like iron toward a lodestone, and Kaz said, “Stop. Raff. Let me help you.” Had Raff ever figured out that he could be unintentionally dangerous to Kaz? He was smarter than he liked to appear, and Kaz and Lianhua hadn’t always been as cautious as they could have been when speaking around him.

Raff’s eyes, which had been closed in pain or concentration, cracked open. He gave a weak smile, then gasped, and the pull on Kaz’s ki stopped. “Had a…potion,” he whispered, grimacing as his chest moved. His hand opened, and a glass bottle fell from it.

Kaz picked the bottle up, sniffing it. The few drops remaining had neither ki nor mana in them, so it might simply be medicine, but he had no way of knowing. It certainly wasn’t like any of the medicines Rega had used. He dropped the bottle again and pulled on his friend’s shirt, ripping it open to reveal the wound.

It was bad, but not as bad as Kaz was afraid it might be. Whatever the gray-haired male had done had punched all the way through Raff’s body, but lopo tongues did the same thing, and kobolds sometimes survived their strikes. It simply depended on what organs and arteries had been damaged, if any.

Kaz closed his eyes, focusing on the flow of mana in Raff’s body. It was disordered, but not completely chaotic, focused mainly around the messy hole punched through Raff’s left side. It had missed the heart, or the other male would probably already be dead, but when it broke his ribs, it left scattered shards of bone within the chest cavity. It was actually a largish piece of bone that had made the hole out of Raff’s back, but that wound wasn’t as bad as it had seemed at first, so Kaz pressed his hands firmly over the chest wound and focused on the internal injuries.

There were four, no, five bone splinters, but only two were immediately concerning. The first had actually punctured a lung, but was also blocking the hole so the lung could continue to function. The second was much too close to one of the large arteries leading away from the heart, and each time the heart beat or Raff moved, it shifted a little closer. Kaz didn’t know if it could actually make a hole in the artery without any force behind it, but he didn’t want to take the chance.

Glancing toward Li, he made sure that the enemy human was still down. He was, and though the wounds on his neck and shoulders were oozing fitfully, none of them was truly dangerous, so this hadn’t been completely pointless. They still had someone to interrogate.

But first, Kaz focused, gathering his ki into the smallest amount he felt he could control with any precision. Cautiously, he formed it around the bone splinter closest to Raff’s heart, holding it in place. What should he do with it, though? If he tried to put it back where it belonged, he would just damage more of the flesh between here and there.

So instead, he crushed it much as he had once crushed a monster’s core, but with more precision and efficiency. Clamping down, he brought metal ki and earth ki together, turning the piece of bone into dust between them, then burned the dust to nothing with fire ki. As he did, Raff groaned, but his heart continued beating, so Kaz ignored it.

One by one, he repeated the process with three more splinters that sat in the spaces between tissues, muscles, and organs. Then he gently pushed the various larger pieces of the ribs into place, using wood ki to bind them back together. When he was done, it was obvious that he was still missing pieces, but he thought it would hold together, at least for now.

Which left the bone sliver in Raff’s left lung. It was down toward the bottom, and it had impaled the organ cleanly, without tearing it. In theory, Kaz simply had to remove it and then patch the hole long enough for Raff’s body cultivation to step in and finish the job.

Envisioning a tiny set of fingers, Kaz gripped the end of the splinter. Could he split his focus well enough to make sure that no blood got in and no air escaped? Normally, Li would handle part of it, but she had to watch their prisoner and be ready in case someone else came along. If she didn’t, and if there were others with these two, or someone came to investigate the yelling, they might be dead or captured themselves before they even realized they were no longer alone.

Before he could doubt himself too much, Kaz pulled, flooding the lung with blue ki as he did so, creating a barrier between ‘in’ and ‘out’. He imagined a leaf; a thin, flexible, seemingly fragile thing, covering the small hole. Something alive to bond to something else alive, and he only relaxed when leaf merged with delicate flesh. He quickly got rid of the offending piece of bone, and only then did he open up his sight to take in the full image.

Raff’s organs were strong, the heart pounding an insistent rhythm as the large male’s lungs moved all-important air in and out. He was taking shallow breaths, but Kaz couldn’t blame him for that. He had three badly broken ribs, a great deal of bruising, and holes in his chest and back, as well as a sealed hole in his left lung. And that was only the worst of it.

Leaning back, Kaz opened his eyes and tried to look pleased with his work. “Don’t laugh,” he told the other male, repeating something Rega used to tell her young patients. Ironically, it almost always made them smile at least, and it worked this time, too. Raff’s lips turned up, and though there was a worrisome gray cast beneath the rich color of his skin, he didn’t seem to be in immediate danger.

“How bad is it, Blue?” he asked, looking like he was preparing for the worst.

Kaz pushed as much blue ki as he could spare into his friend’s chest, his eyes widening as he saw the skin begin to knit together in front of his eyes. The ribs were still broken, but the fine cracks vanished, as if the ki he gave them was the resin Lianhua said her grandfather used to repair broken dishes. The ribs would probably never be the same, but as long as they were strong, what did that matter?

The delicate tissue of the lung was holding as well, inflating and deflating exactly as it should, so Kaz leaned back, huffing a bit as his head swam. He had quite a lot of blue ki now, and he’d poured almost all of it into Raff. Raff, whose body usually held only mana and the tiniest bit of red ki. Kaz had been completely focused on saving his friend’s life, and hadn’t taken the time to wonder what might happen when he changed the other male’s balance of power so thoroughly.

“I think you’ll live,” he told Raff. “Though I doubt your fur will completely cover the scars.”

Blinking, Raff peered down, craning his neck to try to see the tender scars forming there. Cautiously, he lifted a hand, tracing the fine lines spreading away from the much larger mass in the center. There was still a wound there, just below and to the left of his heart, but it looked days or weeks old, not as though it had happened less than twenty minutes earlier. Kaz suspected that if he could see the other male’s back, it would look the same.

“Pellis’ purple pipe, Blue! What did you do?” He raised his eyes to stare at Kaz, then glanced around and leaned in, wincing as his ribs strained against the ki Kaz used to hold them together. “Don’t tell anybody what just happened here, you understand?” he asked, looking more serious than Kaz had ever seen him before.

“Not Chi Yincang, not Kyla, not even Lianhua.” Raff made a face. “Especially not Lianhua. I know her type. If she knows you can heal people like that, she’ll want you to do it all the time, for just about anybody. Worse, she’ll tell her grandpa, and you’ll never be free again. Keep this a secret, or be prepared to spend the rest of your life trapped by other people’s expectations. Believe me, I know.”

Kaz sat back, watching the way the other male’s body was breaking down and absorbing the ki he’d left behind. He thought about the other humans he’d seen by now, and how even people he’d been told were mages had less mana than Raff did.

“You lied, didn’t you?” he asked. “You could have been a mage, but when they tested you, you failed on purpose, and then you ran away so no one would find out.”

Raff sighed, shifting until he could put a hand on the wall and start to lever himself up. Kaz quickly moved to his other side, sliding his shoulder beneath Raff’s arm. Only when Raff was standing again did the large male meet Kaz’s eyes.

“A secret for a secret,” he said. “You keep mine, and I’ll keep yours, eh?”

a peevish voice interjected. Kaz turned to look at Li, who was watching the two males with slitted eyes. She was never fond of anyone else touching Kaz, and even though she liked Raff, enough was enough.

“Is the other one still alive?” Kaz asked. He didn’t release Raff, but he did focus on Li and her prisoner instead.

Li’s head bobbed.

Something occurred to Kaz, and he tilted his head. “You bit him a lot. Do you think he’s smarter now?”

The dragon blinked, and a warm flush of amusement filled Kaz, flowing through their bond.

While Kaz and Li spoke, Raff had been assessing the situation, and now he clicked his tongue. “Guards aren’t gonna like this. Best to be as far away as possible when they find the dead guy.”

Kaz eyed the limp and bloody form of the yellow-haired male. “Can we claim we’re taking this one to a healer?”

Raff hummed thoughtfully. “It’s a good idea, and it might work if we hadn’t killed one. But even if we stash the body somewhere, there’s too much blood here. We’ll want to wash away as much as we can, but there’s no hiding that something very violent happened. If we’re seen with a wounded man, sooner or later, someone’s going to track us down and ask questions. That blue hair of yours is a dead giveaway, as is your little pet, and even my size and coloring.”

If Kaz was in the mountain, he would leave the dead human for a beast to find, and take the other to another cavern until he could be questioned. There were simply too many people packed into this place for proper skulking and sneaking.

“Li could hide us for a little while,” he offered tentatively. He hadn’t touched the dragon’s ki while healing Raff, and he still had four-fifths of his own ki, or close enough, so Li could probably cover them for long enough to leave this road and get to another one. Maybe.

Raff shook his head. “I’ve seen your lizard do her invisibility trick, and though she’s bigger and stronger than she used to be, even if she could manage it, she’d probably be out for the rest of the day. She’s a good scout and a decent fighter, and I’d rather not lose her.”

Li preened beneath this matter-of-fact praise and stopped glaring at Raff.

“You have any extra clothes in your storage, Blue?” Raff asked, eyeing the living male.

Kaz nodded. “They’re dirty or torn, but I should be able to clean them if I can find a water source.”

To Kaz’s surprise, the undertone to Raff’s skin changed from gray to red. “I, ah, haven’t explained public wells yet, have I? Have you just been using stored water or what we get when we eat at restaurants?”

Kaz nodded again, realizing that he’d missed yet another aspect of human life that was so obvious to them that they didn’t even think to teach him about it. Someday maybe he’d know what questions to ask, at least.

Tapping his storage pouch, Kaz passed ki into it, though he had to borrow a bit of blue from Li so that he wouldn’t make himself dizzy again. A filthy cloak fell into his hand, followed by a stained and ragged shirt.

Raff almost managed a grin. Leaning away from Kaz, he set his shoulder against the wall, grimacing as he looked at the long streak leading down toward the ground. His brows drew together, and he pointed at a red and white chip lying on the stone.

“What…is that?” he asked.

“The attack that injured you blew bits of your ribs out of your back,” Kaz said. “That looks like a piece. Do you want to keep it?” It would make an interesting talisman to hang on a warrior necklace, if Raff ever decided to make one.

“No,” Raff said, voice a bit choked. “Though I guess we shouldn’t leave body parts lying around a murder scene. A good mage can use things like blood and sometimes even hair to track people, which is why we need to thin out this mess before we go.”

Kaz focused his ki, and the bit of bone puffed into dust, then vanished in a fizz of smoke and fire. Kaz went ahead and burned as much of the blood as he could, as long as he was at it. It left a terrible stench and a sooty smear on the walls and ground, but it worked. Raff stared, then looked at Kaz, then back at the spot the bone had been.

“I don’t think I’d like to fight you, Blue,” Raff said.

Kaz shrugged. “Then it’s a good thing you don’t have to.”