Elfhome

26: PROVIDENCE

“Domi.” Pony woke Tinker in full dark. “The tengu have come to speak with you.”

She flailed in bed, momentarily confounded by darkness and the fact that her right arm was bound tight to her side. “Which ones?”

“It is Jin Wong.” Pony helped her sit up. “And I believe he has brought his entire household.”

Surely Pony wasn’t right; Jin’s entire household was all twenty thousand tengu.

“In the middle of the night?”

“You wanted to talk to them.”

She did? It took her a minute to remember that when they were splinting her arm, she had told Riki that that she wanted to ask him about greater bloods. Apparently Riki decided that Jin would have more information.

“Yes, I did.” Only, she wanted to talk to them in small, manageable numbers. All did not sound small to her. Now that she was awake, she could hear the rustle of wings, and distant drumming. “Get me some light.”

As Pony activated a spell light, Tinker stumbled into her closet to grab something to wear. She had on the blue cheetah-print cami and boy shorts, but she’d rather meet the entire tengu flock in something other than her Victoria Secrets. She grabbed a dress of deep green silk. She really needed to do something about her wardrobe.

Lemonseed was waiting as Tinker came out of the closet. “Domi, they are asking if we can cancel the defensive spells.”

Pony had on his warrior’s mask and gave Tinker a shake of his head, meaning he didn’t think it was safe to let down their guard. Lemonseed, though, was waiting for Tinker’s word.

When she had called Jin, he had come to her alone and unarmed, trusting that he’d be safe with her. He was asking her to trust him this time.

“Cancel them,” Tinker said. “And bring Jin into the courtyard. That way the overflow of tengu can perch on the roof.”

Lemonseed’s eyes widened at the thought of tengu on the roof, but she bowed and hurried away.

Tinker went out into the courtyard to find that all the spell lights had been removed, pitching the acre of peach trees into darkness. Black wings churned unseen in the sky overhead, masked by branches. Shrill flutes and thin tin gongs had joined the drumming, growing louder as the musicians came through the main hall.

Her Hand pressed in tightly around her, hands gripped tight to their ejae, ready to draw.

Small figures came spilling out the hall, carrying paper lanterns. Tinker lost count after the first dozen that swarmed through the courtyard, slowly lighting up the area as more and more moved among the trees. One came hurrying up to her. It was little Joey Shoji, dressed in a white tunic trimmed in red and carrying a lantern nearly as big as he was.

“Joey, what’s going on?” Tinker asked.

He pressed a finger to his lips. “Shhh, Providence is coming.”

Jin had told her once that Providence was the guardian spirit of the tengu. As the Chosen, he was considered Providence’s child. From what she could gather, though, the guardian spirit was actually a dragon.

Did that mean there was yet another dragon in Pittsburgh?

Behind the lantern bearers came musicians. The flutes were shrill. The gongs looked like and sounded like battered cooking pots. The drums ranged in tones from high and thin to sharp and woody. They made a sharp-edged music with no discernible melody. Just as she thought musicians were playing completely solo to each other, they all sped up slightly at the same moment.

Finally Jin appeared, dressed in robes of white. He was dancing, slowly, mechanically, almost like a series of poses. Before each new pose, he would take a quick step forward, so that he was stuttering his way through the dark trees, like a series of still photographs.

Riki followed behind Jin, dressed in black, winged, armed with swords, and his face painted for war. A dozen armed tengu followed, all with swords but no pistols and rifles. Riki’s younger cousin, Kieko, was among the armed honor guard.

The possession included a small shrine being carried by a dozen males and a drum nearly eight feet across carried by another dozen. The big drum was settled into a stand; six drummers circled it and stood waiting. There was no sign of Providence. It seemed like an elaborate party to have without the guest of honor in attendance. Then again, if Providence was in Pittsburgh, Riki probably wouldn’t have kidnapped and strip-searched Tinker two weeks earlier, looking for signs that she was Impatience’s Chosen. He seemed desperate for a new guardian for the tengu. Or was it that without Jin, Providence wouldn’t protect the tengu?

The thrilling near-discordant flute music suddenly stopped, and for a moment the only noise was the wind through the leaves.

All six drummers struck once, a single deep heartbeat of sound.

A second simultaneous downbeat. Then a third.

Then in a sudden, wild of assault of drumming, all the drummers, perfectly in time with each other, beat out one massive rhythm.

Jin moved to the shrine, bowed low to it, and opened the front.

Tinker gasped as she saw what lay inside the little shrine: a dragon hide.

Jin lifted out the hide and turned, holding the head above him. The hide settled over his shoulders, cloaking him from view. The flutes broke out in their shrill discord and the gongs clattered fast and furious.

Jin started to dance forward again, faster, but still in the odd stuttering poses. This time the poses made more sense. Each could have been a photograph of Impatience as the little dragon moved without the fluidity of life.

Tinker realized she had covered her mouth in horror and her hand was still pressed tight to her mouth. For one horrific moment, she thought that the skin might belong to Impatience, but the color was wrong: a deep gold instead of blood red. This was Providence? Or at least the skin of the tengu’s guardian spirit? What had happened to him? What kind of monster skinned a massively intelligent being? And why in hell had the tengu brought his skin to her? The elves’ insistence on burning their dead seemed suddenly sane and pure.

Jin the dragon danced in a wide circle around Tinker and her Hand. The big drum throbbed like a massive heartbeat against her skin as the flutes shrieked. The dragon head dipped and rose and turned in a parody of Impatience’s curious investigation of his surroundings. Empty eyes took in the night sky, the rooftops crowded with silent tengu, the honor guard kneeling on the ground, the little lantern bearers. Louder and faster the music rushed toward a climax.

A wind suddenly blasted through the trees, and Tinker felt magic surge up as Jin suddenly froze and the music instantly stopped.

The dragon head had been turned away from her.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose as it slowly turned to look at her with gleaming eyes. The mane that had laid down Jin’s back rose, crackling with power.

“Tinker haenanan.” The voice was too deep, too gravelly, too loud to be Jin’s. “Manamana daaaaa sobadadada.”

“Princess Tinker,” Riki murmured in Elvish from his bowed position. “Our great guardian Providence greets you.”

This was entirely too creepy.

“You never told me that he was dead,” Tinker whispered in English.

Riki winced and gave a slight warning shake of his head. Providence, apparently, could understand English fine; the dragon laughed. Its breath blasted warm over her, smelling like wind after a rainstorm. His words rolled over her, seemingly unending. Jin had told her once that dragons were long-winded and indirect and trying to hurry them was considered impolite.

“It is the folly of youth,” Riki translated even as Providence spoke. “Ignorant of great pain and death, the young believe that they are above harm. We moved through the worlds, following our whims, believing nothing could hurt us. But we were wrong. Like all things, it was only a matter of time.

“I was not the first to fall. The earliest ones were caught fast by their bodies, their minds free to seek out help. They bore stories of a growing evil, covetous of our powers, which sought to take them for themselves. This evil rendered down our helpless brothers, tearing them asunder and gifting their slaves with tattered pieces of our souls.

“Still, we did not understand our danger. We simply put this world under edict and left it to its own fate. We felt it was not our place to act, as it was not the world we were born to. But then the evil branched out to Earth, like a growing cancer, and this time we attempted to check its spread. We searched out bridges to Onihida, the next world in harmony with this one, and eliminated them. To our horror, we soon realized that we were too late. All we had done was seal the evil on Onihida.”

It sounded like her theory was right. “So the greater bloods are elves?”

“This evil has had many names across many worlds. We did not witness the start of their rise. We do not know from whence they came nor what they were at the birth. They still seek what they have always sought — to become gods. They want what we have by natural right. They grow more and more powerful, piece by stolen piece.”

Sparrow had claimed that the Skin Clan had been one step below gods. She had claimed that the elves were stagnating. She had wanted to go back to the old ways, so the elves could once again “advance.”

“Long I have watched over my tengu,” Riki/Providence said. “It is my shame that I am the cause of their misery — for the evil came searching for me and caught my body and laid siege to my mind. I asked of the tengu to commit the ultimate of blasphemy, to slay their own god to free me from my captors. As punishment for that deed, they were merged with crows and yet left bound to earth.”

“But the greater bloods were here first, on Elfhome, as elves?”

Providence nodded his great head. “They gave your father’s people our intelligence. They gave your mother’s people our sight. They gave the warriors at your back our morality.”

“Eons have come to a balance point on this moment, like great rocks pressing on fractures of the Earth. The time is at hand for pressure to cause a shift and all the worlds to be rewritten — not only this world, but all the worlds in harmony with it.”

That didn’t sound good. “What’s going to happen?”

Providence gazed down at her with gleaming eyes. “All is at hand for the evil to achieve their goal.”