Elfhome

20: BLACKBIRD SING

“Tommy, Keiko Shoji is at the gate. She says that Jin Wong wants to meet with you.”

The great and holy Jin Wong. The Buddha of the tengu. He was a secret legend of Pittsburgh the entire time Tommy was growing up. Somehow it was fitting that Tinker had produced Jin out of thin air. And the mighty Jin wanted to meet with the half-oni?

Tommy leaned forward to see the front gate. At a distance, Riki’s young female cousin looked like a little fierce bird. What was Jin thinking, sending her? Did he think Tommy would be less likely to hurt a female? If he did, then he was an idiot.

But Tommy was curious. This was the mountain coming to Mohammed. If he was going to make the ban on tengu stick, he couldn’t meet with Jin at the racetrack. He needed a neutral ground. Someplace where the tengu were at a disadvantage, which meant indoors. “Tell him that we’ll meet him at the aviary in an hour.”

“The what?”

“He’ll know what it is.”

The National Aviary was on the North Side. His mother used to bring Tommy down to see the birds. When he was very small, it was an ancient facility with a few hundred Earth birds and curious elves. Over the years, new buildings had been added and filled with birds from Elfhome and researchers from Earth.

It wasn’t until he was inside and watching the brightly colored songbirds flit through the mock woodland that he remembered why he’d loved the aviary as a child. In the American cartoons, the small and defenseless birds always outwitted the bigger cats and dogs. He could come and see the tiny yellow finches and the small roadrunners and have hope that one day he would be able to defeat his father.

Tommy avoided the new buildings, keeping to the birds of Earth in the old sections. He settled among the owls and waited for the common enemy. The tengu swept into the aviary, a flock of crow black. Jin wore nothing to single him out as the leader of the tengu except the lack of weapons.

Jin was a surprisingly slight man. Tall. Lean. Quiet. He had a weird sense of presence, though, that made him impossible to miss. It was like every cell in his body was silently shouting, “I am.”

He came with a platoon of bodyguards that Tommy knew by sight as the most kickass of the tengu. Males and females that even the best of his father’s warriors would be leery of tangling with. It was clear that they would all die to keep Jin safe. Warriors of the cause.

That Jin was bound to the whim of a little girl like Tinker would be nearly laughable if she didn’t have the habit of redefining the world.

“I’m here,” Tommy growled. “What do you want?”

Jin spoke quietly, without any anger in his voice. “I wish to apologize.” Jin bowed deeply to Tommy. “Those who have wronged you have been punished. I have made it clear to my people that I will not tolerate this type of activity.”

Tommy bit down on the disdaining laugh that wanted out. A man like Jin Wong didn’t come in person and apologize, not to the likes of him. There was more to this. “And?”

“I ask that you reopen the racetrack to my people.”

Yeah, that’s what he thought. “No. Saying you’re sorry and slapping your people on the wrists will not make this better between us.”

“I put to death those that wronged you.”

Tommy went still in surprise. “You killed them?”

“What they did was inexcusable.” Jin’s eyes were hard and cold. The male was deadly serious.

“You killed all ten of Team Providence?” Tommy asked just to be clear.

“There were thirty tengu involved. The ten on the team and the twenty that laid the bets. I questioned them all closely to discover what they had done and why. They all knew what was planned and cooperated in it, so they were all treated equally. I executed all but one for their crimes. We’re still looking for the last one.”

They weren’t going to find him. Tommy had made sure of that. Was this an elaborate scam to get Tommy to confess? Jin could wait for the end of time if that was the case. Oh, wait, Jin had been to the end of time and had come back.

“You killed twenty-nine of your own people for trying to cheat me?”

“We were enslaved by the oni for thousands of years.” Jin tapped the cage holding a great horned owl. The large bird clicked its beak at the crow. “For the first time ever, we have the hope for lasting peace. At this moment, though, that is all it is: a hope. The elves must win this war with the oni, and we must fight alongside the elves, the humans, and the half-oni.”

“No, no, don’t put us into that mix. We’re flying solo. Hell, half my people are under the age of ten, and a quarter of the other half are pregnant. We don’t want to fight anyone.”

Jin gave Tommy a sad smile. “You have broken your ties with the oni — that is all that is important to me. The tengu has one enemy, and only one enemy. I do not want my people to ever lose sight of that.”

Twenty-nine tengu. Dead. Tommy couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. That was more than his three aunts and all his younger cousins combined. Lined up and killed in cold blood by the person they would die to protect. The one person that should have been protecting them.

“I don’t get it,” Tommy said. “They lost. They didn’t win the race or get the money.”

“This is not about the race or the money,” Jin said. “This is about truth, trust, and vigilance. Team Providence knew that I would have stopped them, so they kept their plans secret from me. They lied by omission.”

Kenji had admitted that much before Tommy killed him.

Jin continued to list Team Providence’s crimes. “They knew that Team Big Sky and Team Tinker were favorites, so they took the rifle with them to assure a win. They knew too that Oilcan is our domi’s cousin and that she has adopted Blue Sky. Yet still they loaded the gun and sent their shooter to the grandstand roof.”

Tommy hadn’t considered the connections of the two targets. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Team Providence might have won the race if they had shot Blue or Oilcan, but their people would have been washed in blood immediately afterward.

And how soon after the tengu’s apparent betrayal would the half-oni massacre follow?

Jin read the flow of realizations on Tommy’s face. “Yes, our fate is tied. Windwolf was willing to trust the tengu because the half-oni saved him from Malice. Because I could stand as sama for all of the tengu, the elves were willing to believe that you would become Beholden to a domana.”

Tommy didn’t like that cause and effect.

“In this war, we are allies,” Jin said softly. “And we have only one enemy — the oni. Team Providence shut their eyes and closed their ears and let our enemy take them by the hand.”

“The oni set this up?”

“There was a human in a bar, buying drinks and talking loudly. They don’t remember his name or what he looked like, but they let him fill their hearts with poison. He scattered all the little bits of the plan on the ground like bright jewels and walked away, leaving them to gather them up, piece them together, and then congratulate each other for being so clever to have figured it all out by themselves.”

“Kajo.” Tommy spat the name. The greater blood was famous for using spies to infiltrate groups and splintering them apart. Kenji mentioned something about getting the idea from a drunk human spouting off about how much money he’d won betting on long shots. Tommy had been too focused on finding the hoverbike to delve deeper.

“Yes, it was Kajo. The drunk gave them information that could have only come from Tinker’s datapad that the oni had hacked. No one else in Pittsburgh could have developed the new hoverbike. The snake in the grass poisoned these few and tried to destroy both our people. For that treason, I executed Team Providence.”

Put all together, yes, it was damning. Tommy nodded his understanding of why Jin had killed the tengu involved. Bigotry, greed, and stupidity had combined to nearly destroy them all.

Jin gazed at Tommy levelly. “To continue your ban of my people from your racetracks and other businesses is to allow Kajo to keep the handhold he’s created. He will use it to drive one wedge after another between our people. Do not give the oni control over you. Take back your ban.”

Tommy made a show of lighting a cigarette to give himself time to think. There was no doubt in his mind that Kajo had been behind Team Providence’s scam. The greater blood had always been three steps ahead of Lord Tomtom. Tommy had been torn between joy and embarrassment as Kajo had made his father run in circles. It was all painfully clear that this time, Tommy was the one jerked around. Team Providence were typical tools of the greater blood. People nudged hard in a direction they would already go, given information that they couldn’t otherwise obtain, twisted and lied to and then released to wreak havoc. And all the roadblocks that Tommy had faced had been Kajo maneuvering. The exploited loophole in the rules. The entire bullshit of Tommy not being able to stop a race at his own racetrack. The Wyverns in the stands to watch the baby sekasha race. Tommy flicked the barely smoked cigarette onto the floor and angrily ground it out.

What a sack of shit.

And Jin — the frigging spiritual leader — quietly explaining why he had to blow the brains out of his own people. You don’t kill your people. You protect your people against them—them being everyone else in the world. But then, Tommy never had any of his family spit in his face and try to knife him in the back. A few thousand half-oni might have been born to human mothers since the first Startup, but only a couple hundred had survived to see freedom. Like Tommy had told Jin, half his people were under ten years old.

Was it only a matter of time before Tommy needed to kill cousins to keep the others in line?

Jin was waiting patiently for an answer. Lift the ban? Tommy was still angry with Team Providence, but they were all dead. Keeping the ban in place would be like pissing on a dead man. Easy but pointless.

All this came looping back to Windwolf wanting Tommy to be Beholden. Jin saw them as allies because he thought their fates were linked. They’d be bookends to Tinker and Windwolf. A glorious future of lasting peace, choke-chained by the elves.

“You’re wrong,” Tommy growled. “There’s no happily ever after to chase after. All you did was swap masters, oni for elves. Beholden is just another word for slave.”

Jin gave a bird-like tilt of his head to peer quizzically at Tommy. “Is that how you see it? I don’t. I see myself as a knight at the Round Table.”

“What?”

“Once upon a time, far, far away.” Jin jumped up lightly to the railing in front of the cage. He startled the owl inside, making it rustle its wings nervously. “On Earth, to be exact, in land called England, there was a king by the name of Arthur Pendragon.”

“I know all about that sword in the stone bullshit,” Tommy roared. “I was raised in Pittsburgh, not on Onihida.”

Jin crouched while still balanced on the railing. “The basis for the legend was that Arthur had many powerful warriors who were tearing the land apart with their petty bickering. He brought them together and made them allies by creating a code of conduct. His code contains virtues such as protection of the weak, courage, mercy, and generosity. It was a code that would not allow them to engage in pointless fighting with each other.”

Tommy laughed. “What a fairy tale.”

“No, no, see, it’s actually pure genius. You can’t change other people. You can only change yourself. King Arthur set this high bar, this perfection of justice and good, and said ‘This is what a knight of the Round Table is’ and then left it up to his warriors to prove to themselves that they could measure up to it.”

“You really believe King Arthur existed? Merlin the magician, living backward in time?”

“Odder things have happened — to me.” Jin stood and started to walk down the railing as he talked. “But consider a second example: the bushido code that the samurai followed. They believed that the perfect warrior strove to achieve seven virtues.” He ticked them off with his fingers. “Courage. Respect. Honesty. Honor. Loyalty. Benevolence. Righteousness.”

“Get to the damn point.”

“The elves are not asking you to be a slave. They’re offering you a place at the Round Table. All that they ask is that you strive to be a good man. To be truthful. To be just. To be honorable and loyal.”

“Loyal lapdog. I’ve heard how Tinker calls and you come running like chickens, ready to die in her crazy plan of the day.”

“She is good and kind.” There was steel behind the words. Jin didn’t like people knocking his domi. He stepped down off the railing. “And you know she is. You’ve spent too much time around her not to know.”

“She has you doing things like highjacking dreadnaughts in midair and clearing oni nests.”

“We want to live in peace, and for that, we must create peace to live in.”

Jin locked gazes with him. “Let there be peace between our people. Those that wronged you have been punished. Lift your ban.”

“I’ll think about it.”