Elfhome

5: TRAIN SPOTTING

Even when Oilcan was young, he always knew his tiny cousin would eventually find something large enough to express her soul. He’d assumed that it would take the form of a sixty-foot-tall robot that she could ride around in, smashing cars underfoot like Godzilla. It was somewhat of a relief that she settled on a collection of warriors. She was better off with flesh and blood that loved her than a thousand tons of quasi-intelligent metal. Still, it was a little bit startling to open the door to her “shave and haircut” knock and be face-to-face with sekasha first thing in the morning.

Pony filled the doorway, right hand on his ejae, scanning the apartment behind Oilcan with eyes cold and hard. When no danger was found, the warrior abandoned the death mask and smiled bashfully, revealing his gentle spirit. “Good morning, cousin.”

“Hi, Pony.” Oilcan had learned the drill well enough that he stepped sideways without being nudged. Pony and Stormsong brushed past him to search for spear traps and hidden ninjas. Oilcan lived in a three-bedroom loft in a high-rise apartment building on Mount Washington. It always seemed ridiculously huge until Tinker visited; even before she picked up her elves, she overflowed the condo. With the sekasha, however, the space became claustrophobic.

Tinker was on Stormsong’s heels. She poked Oilcan in the ribs. “You have a female move in with you, and I have to hear about it from Ginger Wine?”

“I was busy!” Oilcan said.

“Obviously,” Tinker said.

Cloudwalker grinned in greeting, handed Oilcan a basket smelling of breakfast, and closed the door. Because his condo could only handle so many warriors comfortably, the rest of Tinker’s Hand would stand guard in the hall, frightening his neighbors to either side.

A slight squeak from Merry reminded Oilcan that his new roommate was terrified of sekasha. Pony had moved into the bedrooms, accidentally herding Merry out of her room. The little female scurried into the hall and careened off Stormsong with another frightened squeak.

“Is that her?” Tinker’s surprise made Oilcan realize that she was expecting someone older.

“Yes.” Oilcan sighed as Merry took cover behind him. “Merry, this is my cousin, Beloved Tinker of Wind, her First, Galloping Storm Horse on Wind and her Second, Singing Storm Wind. They brought breakfast.”

Merry made little meeping sounds.

“Gods, finally, someone smaller than me!” Tinker drifted back, giving Merry space, but was studying the little female intently.

“For about a decade.” Stormsong took up guard against sliding-glass doors out onto his balcony, which was the farthest point from Merry that the room would allow. “How old are you? Sixty winters?”

Merry pressed closer to Oilcan under the scrutiny of all the adults. “I’m seventy.”

“Oh — geez.” Oilcan barely kept from swearing. Seventy meant Merry was only about thirteen. No wonder she was so small.

“If she’s only seventy,” Oilcan said quietly in English, “shouldn’t we send her home?”

Stormsong shook her head. “She probably can’t go back if she severed ties.”

Pony was frowning as he struggled to follow the conversation. The young warrior had been studying English but wasn’t fluent. He understood enough to add in Elvish, “Between seventy and their majority, a child is allowed to sever ties with their parents’ household to make new alliances. At seventy, I chose to join Brother Wolf here in Westernlands.”

Pony’s mother was a sekasha beholden to Windwolf’s father, Longwind. If Oilcan understood correctly, Pony normally would have been part of Longwind’s household for the rest of his life.

“You’re sekasha.” Stormsong pointed out that the normal rules didn’t apply to Pony. “And you went with blessings. Wolf is your blade brother, and he’d just been named viceroy of the Westernlands, bringing honor to the clan. He needed support from the clan to keep his position. Most households see a child leaving as a betrayal.”

Oilcan sighed as he remembered Merry’s conversation with Thorne Scratch. “She severed ties.”

Merry rested her forehead against the middle of Oilcan’s back and said, “My mother — she — she called me a liar.”

Lying was an unforgiveable sin to elves. To call someone a liar was to deal the ultimate insult. Oilcan wanted to tell her that everything would be fine, but they were empty words against the weight of the insult.

“But — I thought children were so precious,” Tinker murmured in English. “They really won’t take her back?”

“It’s complicated,” Stormsong said. “It’s the head of household’s decision to take her back, not her parents’. If her sama is old enough to have lived through the worst of the Skin Clan’s reign — which they’re probably are — then they would see any shift in alliance as treasonous to the entire clan. The punishment used to be stoning.”

Tinker eyed Merry with pity and then gave Oilcan a wry grin. “Congratulations. You’re a dad.”

And that was why he loved his cousin so much. The fact that Merry was an elf and part of the Stone Clan didn’t enter into Tinker’s equations; she saw simply a child in need.

“There’s a double missing, too.” Oilcan told them about Rustle of Leaves. “I went to the train station and talked to the elves there. They confirmed that he arrived, but he was Stone Clan, so they ignored him. I have the NSA, the EIA, and the police looking for him, but they keep harping about how the kid is close to a hundred years old.”

Stormsong growled in anger.

“Even Maynard?” Tinker asked.

Oilcan shook his head. “I didn’t talk to Maynard himself. I didn’t realize the kid was missing until after dinner. I talked to someone on the night shift. I wanted to go out looking for the kid myself, but I had Merry to think of.”

“I’ll call Maynard,” Tinker said. “And I’ll get the Wyverns looking—”

“Let us deal with the Wyverns,” Pony said.

“Fine.” Tinker tapped on Oilcan’s chest. “You don’t go out alone looking for him. There’s oni and shit everywhere. And Merry does not count as backup. You call me or you take someone that can kick ass with you.”

“I won’t,” Oilcan promised, knowing that once he did, he would have to keep his promise.

As usual, the condo seemed huge after Tinker and her Hand left. Oilcan distracted himself from the sudden quiet by investigating the baskets of food that Tinker had brought from Poppymeadow’s. Apparently the enclave had decided Oilcan was in danger of starving to death. Considering the state of his pantry, they weren’t that far from wrong. He better spend some time laying in food before things got really sparse.

It seemed wrong, though, to be going through the normal motions of living when there was a child missing. He’d promised Tinker not to look mostly because he couldn’t even start to imagine where to search. So much time had passed since Rustle of Leaves had left the train station. The male could have reached any point in the city within a day. How far had he gotten? The train station lay in the triangle formed by the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. The male could have only gone less than a mile in three directions without having to cross a river. What kind of directions did Windchime give to Moser’s place? Did they include “If you come to a river, turn around quickly”? The river’s edge was a dangerous place. That section of the Allegheny was thick with jump fish.

He had a sudden and awful vision of a pile of travel sacks sitting next to the water. Maybe he should check the river’s edge.

“Beloved Tinker of Wind is nothing like I expected.” Merry broke the silence. “She’s so. . so. . so much like the sky.”

Oilcan laughed. “The sky?”

“She’s the only thing that Summer Court is talking about — the Wind Clan’s new domi this and the new domi that. We hounded Chiming of Metal to tell us about her. He said he didn’t know any words that would truly describe her, and anything short of the proper words would be a betrayal to his domi.”

Poor Windchime. He was probably the only person in the Easternlands that had ever met Tinker. When Windchime had left, Tinker was a human hoverbike racer who occasionally acted as a roadie for Naekanain. During the summer, a chance encounter with Windwolf had catapulted her to the status of domi of the Westernlands.

“Chiming of Metal played this song and said it captured her essence.” Merry hummed a tune that Oilcan recognized. He had written the song for Tinker but had never told anyone that it was about her. He’d called it “Godzilla of Pittsburgh.” Apparently Windchime had recognized Tinker in the oversized melody.

“When he played me the song, all I could imagine was the sky. How it’s big and unlimited, and sometimes it takes your breath away when you watch it, but you can’t hold it and make it yours. You can only watch and be amazed.”

“Yeah, that’s her,” Oilcan said.

“Do you think she’ll find Rustle of Leaves?”

“If anyone can, she will,” Oilcan said.

“What will happen to the others?”

“Others?”

“They said Earth Son needed clan members to build our presence in the Westernlands. Most people wouldn’t dream of coming so far into the wilderness, but Earth Son was going to sponsor anyone that made their way to Pittsburgh. It was a chance in a lifetime for anyone that wanted to set up their own enclave.”

“I don’t know,” Oilcan said. “That will be up to the Stone Clan.”

Thorne Scratch had said that Jewel Tear couldn’t take in any more people, and that Forest Moss couldn’t be trusted. What did the Stone Clan think was going to happen to the people they were sending to Pittsburgh? Were they actually just dropping them into the city and hoping they would survive?

“Come on,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“To the train station.”

Oilcan always loved watching the train coming into the station. The big diesel train rumbled up to the buffers with a growl that could be felt the whole way into his bones. The brakes hissed and cars lurched to a stop. For a moment, he was back in Boston, holding his mother’s hand, waiting to go on some special adventure. Down to the harbor to watch the tall ships unfurl their bright sails. To Boston Commons to feed the mallards gliding beside the swan boats. Out to the windswept bay islands to fly kites. Anywhere his father wasn’t drinking himself into a murderous rage.

Sometimes, his mother talked about getting on the train and just keeping on going. She kept their immigration papers for Elfhome in the zippered compartment of her purse, just in case they would ever need to flee to another world to be safe. Their ancestor had come from Elfhome, once upon a time, and they could always run back. They were both fluent in Elvish; it had been handed down through the family for generations. They used it as their secret language as they tiptoed around his drunken father. She’d get work translating, and they’d live with the grandfather he’d never met.

But they always went back home. Despite all his father’s weaknesses, she loved him, and that love killed her. Only after she was dead did Oilcan take the train to Elfhome.

And it was Merry holding his hand tightly. “It makes the most marvelous sounds.” She was nearly vibrating in place with her excitement over all the sights and sounds of the city. Her hands twitched as if she wanted to translate it all to music on her olianuni.

Laedin-caste royal marines in scarlet uniforms spilled out of the passenger cars like schoolkids on a field trip. They pointed up through the glass ceiling at the buildings that towered over Pittsburgh. They pointed out onto the street, where a hoverbike was passing a slow-moving van. They pointed at him.

“It’s a human. Look, Blaze, your first human.”

The soldiers gathered around Oilcan, creating a tall wall of red, to study him closely. In amazed exclamations, innocent of any contempt, they made comments on his short hair, his rounded eyes and ears, his T-shirt and blue jeans, and his obvious lack of any weapons. Perhaps because of their schoolchildren-like exuberance, Merry showed no signs of being afraid of the laedin-caste warriors.

“I thought they would all have guns.” A female lifted her shoulder to indicate the rifle slung over it. The rifles were fairly standard issue, not the magic-insulated ones that the sekasha carried.

“Are you sure it’s not an oni?” asked a male that seemed barely out of his doubles. “They said that the oni are disguising themselves as humans.”

“He is not an oni!” Merry gave the young soldier a slight shove, which made all the soldiers laugh and push the soldier themselves.

“Oni are tall, Blaze,” one of the officers stated. “And they tend to smell of vinegar.”

“I didn’t realize humans were so small,” Blaze said.

“Forgiveness, I’m considered fairly short for a human male,” Oilcan said in High Elvish. He didn’t want the incoming troops to think all tall humans were oni. He raised a hand over his head to indicate several inches taller. “Most human males are taller. Some are as tall as you are.”

“I’m still growing,” Blaze snarled in Low Elvish.

The young elf male got smacked in the back of his head by his officer.

“You speak the high tongue very well, child.” The officer gave Oilcan a slight bow that begged forgiveness.

Oilcan ignored the mistake about his maturity. He knew from experience that his height misled elves, but his true age would only reinforce the impression. “Thank you. Were there any Stone Clan on the train?”

There was a rattle of a drum toward the back of the train.

“Fall in!” the officer shouted, and the troops dutifully shuffled into formation. “No, child, there were no Stone Clan with us.”

The drum rattled again, and they marched out, shouting excitedly and pointing at the new wonders of the human city.

Until the war broke out, the trains had been run by Americans, mostly by necessity since the freight cars would roll directly off Earth onto Elfhome and back during Shutdown. The tight schedules, the hundreds of freight cars that needed to be linked into one long train, and the necessity to match up rails to the exact inch meant humans well familiar with technology ran the system while elves worked in apprentice-like positions.

Oni had infiltrated most of the human organizations in Pittsburgh, and the train was no exception. In the name of security, the elves had taken over the rail lines.

The station didn’t have a ticket booth, since tickets weren’t required to ride the train. It did have a staff of three elves in Wind Clan blue who looked seriously overworked.

Oilcan bowed to the eldest looking of the three. “Forgiveness, but can you tell me if any of the Stone Clan arrived in the last few weeks?”

The elf male shot a look at Merry and pursed his lips as if he’d tasted something sour. “It is not my duty to pay attention to the comings and goings of the Stone Clan.”

Oilcan locked down on his anger. All this bigotry was starting to really make him mad. “Just yes or no, did any other Stone Clan get off the train?”

“I don’t have to answer you, human.”

A black-tattooed arm suddenly flashed past Oilcan’s head with the speed of a striking snake. Thorne Scratch caught the male elf by the collar and slammed him hard up against the wall. “Yes,” Thorne Scratch rasped in her rough, scratchy voice. “You do have to answer him.”

Merry squeaked and backpedaled from the female sekasha.

“Holy one!” The elf cried, eyes going wide with fear.

“Answer him,” Thorne snapped.

“Yes! Yes, some Stone Clan arrived. They got off the train and left the station.”

“How many? When?” Thorne said.

“I don’t know,” the elf said. “One every few days for the last three weeks. Six or seven total.”

“Which was it?” Thorne snapped. “Six or seven?”

“I’m not sure. Let me think. There were the two olianuni players. The taunrotiki came first and a taunlitiki came just yesterday.” He meant Rustle of Leaves and Merry. “There were three taunrotiki. One nivasa with his soup pots all clanging and two other — I don’t know what they were. There were two — no — three taunlitiki before the olianuni player yesterday. One was in court fashion; I think she was a seamstress. One had the hands of a potter — she was the first to arrive. I’m not sure what the smallest taunlitiki was.”

Oilcan felt sick. The Wind Clan male was using the gender words for children instead of adults.

“They were all children?” Thorne cried.

“They looked young,” the male said. “Either doubles or just hit their triple.”

“And you let them walk out into a war zone?” Thorne said.

“They were Stone Clan,” the male said it as if it explained and forgave everything.

“No!” Oilcan cried as Thorne pulled her sword. “Holy one! Please don’t! You will only make things worse. Please.”

“He as good as gave those children to the oni,” Thorne growled.

“Killing him will only turn the others against the Stone Clan more,” Oilcan said. “This is for Wolf Who Rules. As viceroy, the protection of all the elves in Westernlands is his duty, not just those of the Wind Clan. Let him punish his own.”

She glared at him for a long minute before sheathing her ejae.

Oilcan turned to the nearest elf, making him step backward when Oilcan pointed at him and said, “You.”

“Me, domana?”

“Yes, you.” Oilcan ignored Thorne’s bitter laugh. “Do you know how to use a phone?”

“Yes, domana.”

Oilcan took out the tablet he kept for making lists, tore off a sheet of paper, and wrote his phone number on it. “This is my phone number. Every day, without fail, watch for Stone Clan getting off the train. If any get off, ask them to wait here at the station and call me.”

It was a poor temporary fix. Hopefully either news of Earth Son’s death would stop the masses from traveling to Pittsburgh, or another Stone Clan domana would arrive that could sponsor the incoming. The damage, however, was already done. Seven children had disappeared into the city.

“Are you out looking?” Tinker cried when he told her about the other missing children. By the sound of it, she was still in the Rolls. “You promised not to!”

“I’m at the train station, not the river’s edge,” Oilcan said. “And I have Thorne Scratch here with me — she qualifies as someone who can kick ass.”

There was a long silence, to the point he thought the connection had died, and then Tinker said in English, “Be careful with Thorne Scratch. Just because I sleep in the nest of dragons, doesn’t make them less dangerous.”

He sighed. “I know. She nearly killed the elves that work at the station because they let the kids wander off to be kidnapped. I told her that Windwolf would do something about it. He’s the viceroy.”

“Windwolf, hell. I’m coming down and kicking butt myself,” Tinker promised.

He suspected Windwolf would have been gentler than Tinker.

Thorne was studying him with a look of mild annoyance, as if it bothered her to not understand him. “Why do you care about these children?”

“I was ten years old when my mother was killed. Humans don’t have clans. My only kin lived here on Elfhome. Since news could only be passed during Shutdown, it was weeks before they learned of my mother’s death, and then my grandfather needed to wait for the next Shutdown to come get me. I was alone on Earth for nearly three months, in the care of strangers, not knowing if anyone was coming for me.”

“So you understand what these doubles are facing by leaving everything behind and coming here.”

He nodded. “My grandfather was too wrapped up in his own grief at first to really take care of me. My baby cousin, Beloved Tinker of Wind, was only six.” Oilcan measured off how tall Tinker was at the time. “But she understood that she was all I had. By day she taught me what I needed to know to be safe and at night she let me grieve without judgment.”

Something that could have been envy flickered across her face before being banished. “You were kin. Why does she care for these children who are not her blood and not her clan?”

“Because that’s the way she is,” Oilcan said. “She cares about people. When she was basically the same age as Merry—” He was going to use Merry as a demonstration of size for when Tinker fought a saurus to save Windwolf’s life. The little female, though, was nowhere in sight. “Where’s Merry?”

Thorne scanned the room and then clicked her tongue in an elfin shrug. “I think I scared her away.”

That was entirely possible. Merry probably retreated to the safety of the pickup. Still, with all the kids going missing, it worried him to have her out of his sight. He walked to the entrance to check his pickup. Merry wasn’t in the cab.

“Merry?” he called.

The area was amazingly empty for an entire troop of marines having just unloaded from the train. Neither the soldiers nor Merry were in sight. The only thing moving was a dark van that was just pulling away from the curb.

He realized suddenly that he’d seen the van half a dozen times since arriving at the station, always slowly trolling past. “Merry!”

Five running steps and he caught the van and jerked open its back door. There were four big men crouched in the back. They looked up as the door opened, surprised but unafraid. They had Merry pinned to the floor, a hand clamped over her mouth.

“No!” he growled and scrambled into the moving van. He needed to stop the van; he needed to get to the driver.

He ducked a backhanded blow from the nearest male, jerked sideways from a grab, caught the driver’s head by the hair and slammed it into the steering wheel. The van jumped forward and bucked as the horn blared loud in protest. Oilcan grabbed the spindle and jerked the van into park. It shuddered to a halt, throwing him hard against the dashboard. It was an old van, and keys dangled in the ignition.

He reached for the keys, but hands caught him from behind and flung him through the front window. Merry was screaming as he hit the pavement in front of the van. He heard the unmistakable clacking of a shell being chambered in a pump-action shotgun.

He looked up into the barrel of the gun as it fired.

The pellets rained to the ground inches from Thorne Scratch as she stood over him, her sekasha shields protecting them both. “Idiot! You’re not a domana!”

The van’s rear lights flashed, indicating that the driver was shifting back into drive.

“Cut the wheels!” Oilcan pointed at the van’s front tire.

Thorne caught Oilcan by the collar and spun like a matador before an enraged bull. The front bumper just missed Oilcan. She struck with her ejae as the van roared past, driving the blade through the driver’s door and cutting a long gash down the side. The van careened as it leapt forward, jumped the curb, and slammed into the streetlamp on the corner. The horn stuck on, blaring loudly.

“That works, too,” Oilcan said.

The back door was flung open and the males inside leveled machine guns at them. Thorne growled a curse and shifted in front of Oilcan as bullets chewed a path toward them. The first handful pinged off her shield, but then Thorne grunted as one plowed through her weakened defenses and hit her.

“Thorne!” Oilcan shouted.

The air around them suddenly changed, and the gunfire muted oddly as bullets ricocheted harmlessly to either side.

Pony pulled Oilcan up and back, eyes cold with fury. Oilcan blinked at him in surprise and relief. The Wind Clan sekasha ignored the oni, though, to square off to Thorne Scratch. “Peace?”

“We have peace until we agree to war.” Thorne gave a slight bow.

Pony matched the bow. “Peace it is until we agree otherwise.”

“Do we have to do this now?” Tinker was trembling with effort, right hand outstretched, finger cocked into odd positions. She was maintaining the shield that was protecting them. She must have raced to the train station after Oilcan called her.

“Yes,” both Pony and Thorne Scratch said. The rest of Tinker’s Hand nodded silently in agreement.

“Are you hurt?” Tinker asked Oilcan.

Oilcan shook his head. “They have Merry.”

“We will get her back.” Pony unsheathed his ejae.

“Don’t kill them!” Oilcan cried, getting a surprised look from all the sekasha. “We need to find out where they took the other children.”

Pony sheathed his ejae and pulled out two knives. “We’ll take them prisoner. Ready, domi?”

“Yeah, fine, whatever,” Tinker growled.

In one fast and violent motion, the sekasha attacked. Tinker had shifted forward, maintaining her shield spell to protect her Hand as they dove into the back of the van. Merry screamed as Thorne slammed into the oni holding her, knives flashing. Oilcan’s heart hammered in his chest at the sound. Rainlily grabbed Merry and jerked her back, out of the fray. She was drenched with blood, and her yellow tunic hung in tatters. Oilcan tried to move toward her, and only then realized Cloudwalker had hold of him and was shielding him from stray bullets.

Just as suddenly as it started, it was over. The sekasha had the disguised oni pinned and bound. They used a spell to reveal the oni’s true appearance.

“It is not her blood, cousin.” Rainlily rocked Merry as the little female clung sobbing to her.

Oilcan breathed out relief. When Thorne slashed through the driver’s door, he realized, she had cut the driver in half, spraying the inside of the van with his blood. The smell hung thick in the hot air.

“Where are the other children?” Thorne kicked the oni that been holding Merry. “Where did you take them? Are they still alive?”

Oilcan repeated the question in English, and then tried the little Mandarin that he knew. The oni gazed up at him blankly. “I don’t think they speak anything but Oni.”

Judging by the looks on the faces of the sekasha, none of them spoke Oni.

“I’ll call Jin.” Tinker rubbed her arm, grimacing in pain. “The tengu will be able to talk to them.”

Tinker’s Rolls-Royce sat abandoned twenty feet down Liberty Avenue, all doors open and engine still running. As Tinker climbed into the Rolls to find her cell phone, Thorne staggered to the low planter in the center of the street and sat down. Blood streamed down Thorne’s arm from a slice in her shoulder.

Oilcan got the first-aid kit from his truck and bound the wound. “You’ll have to have the hospice staff look at this.”

“After we find the children,” Thorne said.

Oilcan nodded and then hugged her carefully. “Thank you. I couldn’t have stopped them. They would have just driven away with Merry, and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything to save her.”

She hugged him tightly, burying her face into his shoulder. There was something desperate in her hold, like he was the only safe handhold in a flood. She breathed deep, with only the dampness of his shirt to tell him that she was crying.

“Idiot,” she growled after several minutes. “You don’t have shields. You don’t have a weapon. Next time, just stay out of my way and let me deal with it.”

He opened his mouth to say that he sincerely hoped there wouldn’t be a next time, but then, that would mean there would be no reason for her to stay close. “Okay, next time I’ll stay out of your way.”