by Wen Spencer
"We will solve this problem you caused," Earth Son said. "Damn these humans and their gate."
"We can't blame this on them," Wolf said. "We elves went to Onihida and led the oni to Earth. If we hadn't done that, none of this would have happened."
He did not bother to point out that it was the Stone Clan who had gone to Onihida.
Earth Son countered it as if he had made the statement aloud. "The humans built the gate in orbit."
Wolf shook his head. "The oni stranded on Earth used the humans to build the gate—and manipulated them to keep it functioning."
"Why are you defending them?" Earth Son snapped. "It's unlikely that they're all innocent in this."
"Yes, some might be guilty," Wolf allowed. "But not all of them."
Earth Son waved the truth away. "Bah, they're just as bad as the oni—breeding like mice."
"Fie, fie," Forest Moss whispered. "We were all blind beings even before the oni burned out our eyes. Why should such arrogant fools as we listen to the warnings of the human natives? Of course the cave was a mystical place with mysterious goings and monstrous comings. What importance to us that humans were forever losing their way to other worlds and rarely coming back? What did it matter that we recognized nothing of ourselves in their stories?"
"Oh, please, shut him up," Jewel Tear hissed.
"Oh! Oh!" Forest Moss leapt to his feet and wailed, waving his hands over his head. "It's all so ugly! No, no, who cares if perchance we might learn something important? We must close our ears to this wailing of a madman!"
"Forest Moss!" True Flame snapped. "Sit!"
The male sat so abruptly that Wolf wondered if the outburst had been yet another example of Forest Moss using his reputation of being mad.
"Does anything he has to say have any relevance to what we need to do here?" Jewel Tear asked. "It seems to me that our task is simple. Do findings to track down the oni nests and burn them out. Instead we are sitting here constantly being distracted by the mad one's ramblings. By his own account, he was shortsighted in his venture. So he was caught and tortured—but all that hinges on one gross error; on the first moment of discovery, his party have fought their way clear and returned to the pathway."
"I had dealt with discovery by humans many times," Forest Moss said. "A show of power, a few trinkets, and we would be safe enough to pass on. How was I to know that the oni were monsters under the skin?"
"I'm trying to determine what the Stone Clan brings to the table," True Flame said. "And what they will come away with."
Earth Son made an opening bid. "Since the Wind Clan is demonstrating that it cannot hold the Westernlands, we will take them over."
Wolf shook his head and begain to tick off his strong points. "We are providing access to the fire esva. Without our assistance, you would have to deal with the oni and a dragon with only defensive spells."
"You can't withhold the fire esva the crown," Earth Son stated.
Was he being naïve, or clumsy in his attempt to undermine the Wind Clan's position?
"I did not suggest that." Wolf used small words. "I'm only pointing out that we are providing attack spells on two fronts, plus my four Hands, and ten enclaves. The Wind Clan can hold its own here—the same cannot be said of the Stone Clan."
"Yet you called for help."
"Because we did not know then—nor do we know now—the strength of the oni," Wolf stated. "We would rather give up some part of our holdings than give the oni a stronghold here."
"Which the crown sees as a strength, not a weakness," True Flame said. "We are limiting the amount awarded to Stone Clan. The area in question will be Pittsburgh and the surrounding land. Excluded will be the enclaves owned by the Wind Clan households."
"We want both virgin land and that from Earth," Earth Son said.
"And I want the sekasha, Galloping Storm Horse on Wind," Forest Moss said.
Startled silence went through the room.
"Never," Wolf snarled.
"If you release him, he can serve me," Moss pressed on.
"He looks to my domi," Wolf said. "He is her First. She also holds Singing Storm on Wind."
"That cross-caste mistake?" Moss made a sound of disgust. "Your domi can release Galloping Storm Horse and keep the mutt."
"She will not release him." Wolf was sure of this. "She loves him dearly. The oni captured him because they knew he would be an effective whipping boy for her. All that she did was to protect him."
"It is a simple thing—" Forest Moss started.
The two Stone Clan Firsts, Thorne Scratch and Tiger Eye, and True Flame's First, Red Knife, stepped forward to loom over their domana's shoulders. Wolf felt Wraith Arrow behind him, joining the other Firsts at the table.
"This is not for you to discuss," Red Knife said quietly. "No beholding will be broken in this manner."
Earth Son coughed and carried on. "We're asking for a hundred thousand sen of virgin land for each of us, plus half of the city, to be awarded immediately."
The land, ultimately, Wolf did not care about. The three hundred thousand sen was a small price to pay for the safety of his people—and perhaps all of Elfhome. He did not want, however, to put humans under the care of the Stone Clan. He shook his head. "I granted the humans an extension of their treaty to work out issues among themselves. I think at this time it would be unwise to start procedures on dividing up the city."
"Who gave you the authority to agree to that?" Earth Son asked.
True Flame glanced at Earth Son. "As viceroy, it was in his authority to do so. But I must ask, on what basis?"
"We're not entirely sure that the orbital gate no longer functions. If my domi failed to destroy it and only damaged it, it is possible Pittsburgh will return to Earth."
"Yes, dividing the city could be premature," True Flame said. "How soon will we know?"
"Shutdown was scheduled for two days from now at midnight," Wolf said. "But if the gate is only damaged, then the humans might delay Shutdown for weeks. Without communication with Earth, it is impossible to know."
"Are we truly going to wait for something that may never happen?" Earth Son asked.
"We are elves, we have time," Wolf said.
"Most convenient for the Wind Clan," Earth Son said.
"We will wait three days, and then speak again on dividing the city." True Flame took out maps of the area. "Let us discuss virgin land."
16: LITTLE MONKEY BRAIN
After a long, long cottony warm sleep, Tinker was able to view the last few days with a saner eye. Thinking of Nathan threatened to drag her back to the painful void of grief, so she considered the last dream with Esme and Black. Obviously, something had gone drastically wrong with Esme, but what did her mother think Tinker could do for her? Esme was in space—someplace—in another universe, far, far away. And who was Black? The tengu woman obviously had been on Earth to meet Tinker's father, but where was she now? Why was Tinker dreaming about her in conjunction with Esme? Was it because Black was a tengu colonist and on one of the ships that Esme crashed into?
The dreams of Alice and Dorothy—little girls lost far from home—held a sad irony; Esme thought Dorothy should stay in Oz—but obviously that wasn't what she wanted for herself now. So what did she want from Tinker? Even if Esme's ship had crashed, that would have taken place eighteen years ago, shortly before Tinker was born.
In the movie the yellow brick road started when Dorothy crashed the house into Oz—bringing a stain of sepia on a world of lush color. The Discontinuity appeared as a stain of blue. Tinker's nightmares had gotten out of hand the same day that the Ghostlands had formed—even if the first one with Esme and Black had come two days later. The first dream had been Alice in Wonderland, the second The Wizard of Oz, and the last was Esme going through the hyperphase gate; little girls crashing into other worlds.
Tinker sprawled in the enclave garden, watching the sun shift through the tree branches. As usual, she had a full Hand standing around, doing nothing b
ut watching her think. They shifted to full alert as someone came through the gate into this private area. Lemonseed carried in a tray of tea and cookies—midmorning snack. Tinker started to sit up but Lemonseed tsked at her and crouched beside her to lay out a mini picnic. Exquisite china bowls of pale tea. Little perfect cookies. A platter of rich rosewood. A small square of printed silk.
Esme wasn't the only girl who fell into another world.
"Can you have lunch packed?" Tinker knew that the enclave's staff most likely had the meal half-finished. "We're going out."
"Yes, domi." Lemonseed bowed and left to make it so.
"Where are we going?" Stormsong asked.
We? How did it get to this point that she was so comfortable with having all these people in her life? No, she guessed she wasn't really at ease—but the edges of her discomfort were wearing away. Like the fact that she could strip in front of Pony without thinking. That it took Lemonseed's arrival to remind her that an entire staff of nearly a hundred people were poised around her—waiting for her to do something. Anything. Be the domi. Save the world again.
"The scrap yard," she told Stormsong but thought "Home."
She drained the tea to be polite, gathered up the cookies, and went to change.
Two newspapers, still neatly folded and bagged, lay in the driveway of the scrap yard. She picked them up on her way in, wondering why Oilcan hadn't brought them in. Tinker expected to find her cousin at work and was both relieved and disappointed that he wasn't. She didn't know how he would take Nathan's death. To her, it was a dark well of guilt and grief with a crumbling edge. She was trying to keep her distance just so she could keep functioning. Ironically, she was fairly sure she could deal with Oilcan being angry at her more than she could help him with his grief.
"You know—I just don't get it," Stormsong said as Tinker was puttering around her workshop, trying to get back into being herself.
"Get what?" Tinker asked.
"This place, you, and Windwolf—it just doesn't—doesn't make sense."
"Yeah, I've never understood why he fell in love with someone like me."
"I do. You can go toe to toe with him. It's this place that doesn't make sense. You two are too big for something like this."
"Big?"
"With your abilities—why did you limit yourself to this tiny corner of the world?"
That sounded like Lain—who had always pushed for her to go to college, leave Pittsburgh, do something more with her life. She thought her plans were big enough, but it suddenly dawned on her that they were plans she laid out when she was thirteen. They seemed huge when she was a child—certainly they were larger than what other people planned—but yes, she'd grown to fit, and then the limits started to chafe. Had Lain seen a truth that she herself was blind to?
She veered from that line of thinking and distracted herself by poking at her insecurities. "I think it's fairly obvious what attracted Windwolf to me: I look like Jewel Tear. She's his perfect woman. And I can't measure up to that—elegance."
"No. You only think that because you've never met Otter Dance."
"Pony's mother?"
"Ever notice that Pony is the shortest of the sekasha? Otter Dance is half Stone Clan sekasha."
Tinker turned to look at Pony standing beside Cloudwalker; he was half a head shorter yet wider in the shoulders and deeper in the chest than Cloudwalker. Pony was the most compact elf she'd ever met until the Stone Clan arrived. Now that she looked at him, she could see points of similarity. His eyes were brown where everyone else's were blue. The shape of his face was different.
"You mean we—Jewel Tear and I—look like Otter Dance?"
"To know Otter Dance is to love her. Personalitywise, you're much more like Otter Dance than Jewel Tear could ever pretend to be—and she did try."
Tinker wasn't sure how to feel about that. She cleared her iboard. She needed a project—something big and complex—to keep from thinking about Nathan and all the messy bits of her life. Something that would help keep Pittsburgh safe from the elves, the oni—and the dragon. Oh gods, in all the chaos she'd forgotten about the dragon. There was a worthwhile project, especially since she hadn't collected enough data on the Ghostlands yet.
She called up an animation program and created a quick rough model of the dragon, using a ferret body, a male lion's head, and a snakeskin to cover the frame. Dragging the dragon model out onto the iboard, she let it gallop across the white screen. There had been a spell painted onto the dragon's hide. She wasn't sure what the spell did. Was it how the dragon raised its shield or was it what the oni were using to control the dragon? It seemed to her that the wild waving of the mane might have triggered the shields—much like the domana hand gestures triggered theirs.
"What do you think?" she asked Pony. "How did the dragon raise its shield?"
Pony put his hands to his head and wriggled his fingers. "Its mane."
Stormsong and the others who had been in the valley with her that morning nodded in agreement.
Okay, so the mane worked like domana fingers. She paused the dragon, added a "shield" effect to her model, and restarted the animation. "Next question is—does anything breach the shield?"
"Our shields do not stop light and air, because we must see and breathe," Pony said. "There is a limit to the force they can absorb. They will take a hundred shots fired in a hundred heartbeats, but not a hundred fired in one heartbeat."
"So light and air." Tinker opened a window in the corner of the iboard and noted this.
"Spell arrows don't affect the dragon," Cloudwalker reminded her.
Tinker wrote: Different frequency of light? And then thinking of Pony driving his sword point through the shield, she added, Speed of kinetic weapon?
"Pony, can I see your sword?"
He drew his sword and held it out to her to examine. "Careful, domi, it is very sharp."
She knew that the ejae had magically tempered ironwood blades, but she had never examined them closely before. It was a single length of rich cherry colored wood with a bone guard. The very tip came to a fine point. There was no sign of the spell that had created the blade, which she supposed was necessary since the sekasha used their swords while their shield spells were active. The surface area of its tip was smaller than a bullet; if they both struck at the same speed, the ejae would have a greater PSI. Pony's slow push through the dragon's shield might indicate speed was more important than force.
She wasn't sure how they could use a "slow" weapon against the dragon. It would be unlikely that the beastie would ever stand still like that again. She considered a giant glue trap, sleep gas, and mega stun guns. They all had their drawbacks from "what do you use as bait?" to "would it do anything but just piss the dragon off?" That got her wondering about what would affect the dragon once they got past its shields. Where were its vital organs? Would poison necessarily kill it? Elves couldn't tolerate some of the food humans ate in abundance. The inverse could be true—what was poisonous for Elfhome creatures might not hurt the dragon.
Maybe the stupid dream was telling her that she needed to melt the dragon with a bucket of water. Waterjets had jet speeds around Mach 3 and could cut through several inches of steel. She didn't have any in her junkyard, but perhaps she could salvage one and modify it. . . .
The sekasha were rubbing off on her. She really liked the simple "hit it with a big gun" solution. Too bad they couldn't simply make the shield go away so "a big gun" was a safe bet.
Her stomach growled. She realized that she had spent hours in front of the iboard.
"What time is it?" Maybe she should take a break to eat the packed lunch.
"I'm not sure. That clock is broken." Stormsong pointed to an old alarm clock that Tinker had dismantled to use in a project.
We've murdered time, it's always six o'clock.
Wait—wasn't that a line from Alice in Wonderland? During the tea party, didn't they talk about time not working for them? She sorted through the things she broug
ht from the enclave, found the book, and flipped through it. Under the drawing of the Mad Hatter, there was a footnote that caught her eye.
Arthur Stanley Eddington, as well as less distinguished writers on relativity theory, have compared the Mad Tea Party, where it is always six o'clock, with that portion of De Sitter's model of the cosmos in which time stands eternally still. (See Chapter 10 of Eddington's Space Time and Gravitation.)
"Oh shit." Tinker took out her datapad and pulled up her father's plans on the gate.
"Shit?" Pony asked.
"Excrement," Stormsong translated. "It's a curse."