Elfhome

6: WHELPING PENS

Tinker expected Jin to come with bodyguards. He was, after all, the tengu’s spiritual leader. He came alone, apparently trusting her to keep him safe. He glided down out of the summer sky on great black wings. With one easy backstroke, a muffled clap of glossy feathers, he landed on the far side of the train station’s parking lot. He stood there, bare-chested and panting, letting the sekasha grow used to his presence. His wings were solid illusions, called into existence by the spell tattooed on his back, real down to their vanes and quills and hooks. He dismissed them with a word, making them vanish back to the nothingness from which they came.

Tinker really had to figure out how they worked.

Jin had a white button-down shirt tied to his waist that he pulled on, buttoned, and tucked into his blue jeans like a priest donning his vestments. When he crossed the parking lot, he seemed nothing more than an Asian man out for a summer walk. He wasn’t even wearing fighting spurs on his birdlike feet; he wore a pair of tennis shoes. The only things that marked him as the spiritual leader of all the tengu was the air of calmness that he seemed to radiate and the dragon birthmark of the Chosen faintly showing under the fine linen of his shirt.

“Thank you for coming,” Tinker said as he bowed to her.

“You needed me, of course I would come.” Even though she had greeted him in English, he’d answered in fluent Elvish. “You’re our domi. It is our duty to serve as it yours to protect.”

It was weird having elf pledges coming out of a tengu’s mouth, but the tengu were safe only because they were her Beholden.

Jin tilted his head and then stepped closer to hug her. “Are you all right, domi?”

“No.” She had nearly lost Oilcan. If she had been a minute longer reaching the train station. If Oilcan hadn’t called her. If Thorne hadn’t been there to protect Oilcan. It had been so very, very close. “I’d say ‘give me time,’ but we don’t have it.”

“Was he hurt?” Jin asked after Tinker explained how Oilcan had discovered that Stone Clan children were arriving in Pittsburgh and being kidnapped at the train station by oni.

“He got a couple of impressive bruises. I had him take Merry to the hospice; she’d been fairly roughed up by the oni.” It had taken Tinker twenty minutes of bullying to get Oilcan to agree to stay at the hospice and wait for Tinker to find the children. After seeing Oilcan nearly killed, Tinker wanted him a safe distance from the fighting. He agreed only after Tinker had ruthlessly pointed out that the hospice staff were all Wind Clan elves and might not treat Merry without Oilcan there to force the healers into it.

As soon as he left, though, Thorne Scratch started to restlessly pace like a big cat in a cage. Sekasha apparently were calmer when they had someone to protect.

“It’s unlikely the children are still alive,” Jin said. “Lord Tomtom was very careful with you because he needed you well and functioning. Obviously the oni wanted the children for some reason, but still, they’re rarely careful with their prisoners.”

Tinker shivered and nodded. She had seen how the oni tortured their own; she didn’t want to think of the horrors that the missing children were suffering.

Jin crouched down beside the first oni prisoner and spoke at length in the coarse oni language.

After several minutes, Thorne Scratch growled with impatience. “What are you telling him? Your life story?”

“No.” Jin shook his head. “He knows he’s going to die. He knows that the elves don’t take oni prisoners. He also knows that the elves are too noble to torture prisoners.”

“I’ll show him noble,” Thorne growled.

“You don’t have enough experience in inflicting pain to impress him,” Jin said gently. “I’ve reminded him that we tengu have lived as slaves to the oni for a thousand years. We had every excruciating torture that our masters know inflicted on us. We tengu are known to be clever and quick to learn. I have reminded him that we tengu have a bone to pick, so to speak.”

The memory of sharp knives and white bone flashed through Tinker’s mind. She wrapped her arms tight around herself. “Gods, Jin, I know what oni do—”

“So does he,” Jin said. “You would give him a quick, clean death. It would be merciful compared being turned over to those who hold a thousand years of misery against his kind.” He spoke again to the oni, and this time the oni glanced at the other tied-up oni and started to talk. Jin listened intently, nodding.

“They were told to come to the train station every day, that there would be elves traveling alone. They were to grab them quietly and take them to a warren on the North Side. Humans think that it’s a dog kennel. There’s a greater blood called Yutakajodo who wanted them for a project.”

“Dog kennel? Shit, I know where that is.” Tinker even knew people who had bought dogs from the kennel. Big ugly mutt dogs. She thought of Chiyo and the warg and shuddered. “What project?”

Jin asked the oni questions, but it was obvious that no more information was forthcoming — much to the oni’s distress. “He doesn’t know. I didn’t expect him to. Greater bloods rarely explain themselves to the lesser bloods. All they knew was they were to keep the elves alive until Yutakajodo dealt with them.”

“How did you get him to talk so much?” Stormsong asked.

“I promised that the first to speak would earn a clean death. I pointed out that you needed only one of them to talk. I told him once you had the information that you wanted, you’d turn your focus to the missing elves.”

Jin had implied that the remaining oni would be left to the tengu.

“I’m not giving you them to torture,” Tinker said.

Jin gave Tinker a smile that came straight from his heart. “I know, and I’m glad. I want my people to make your nobility theirs. We’ve learned too much cruelty from the oni. It’s time to learn a new way.”

Tinker didn’t want to go after the children with just her Hand, not with the oni armed with automatic assault rifles that could chew through the sekasha’s protective spells. Her people needed someone that could fling tanks around and reduce cars to molten lava — not someone that could barely maintain one shield spell. Judging by the very faint tingling against her magic sense, though, Windwolf was someplace very far away, fighting the oni. She couldn’t wait for him to finish his battle and return to Poppymeadow’s. The oni were so elusive because they scattered anytime one of their number was captured. As soon as it became apparent that the oni in the van weren’t returning, the oni with the children would abandon their hideout, either taking the children or killing them.

“You need more than six sekasha to take out a warren,” Jin said. “I’ll call some of my warriors.”

“Thank you.” Tinker felt uneasy at the idea of leading her Hand and the tengu into danger. “I hate risking lives to save lives.”

He smiled at the worry. “This is our war, too. If the elves lose, we’ll fall under the oni’s control again.”

She supposed no one understood the dangers facing Pittsburgh better than the tengu.

Jin turned to face northeast and let out a crow call that resonated across her magic-sense like a spell being cast.

“What the hell was that?” Tinker asked.

“It’s a power of the Chosen to be able to call the Flock,” Jin said.

“You called the entire Flock?” Tinker said. “All twenty thousand?”

Jin laughed and shook his head. “I have warriors I know I can trust and are fluent in Elvish. I’ve called them.”

“So, it’s like calling out for Chinese? An order of Sum Yung Gai with wings?”

Jin laughed again.

Who else could she highjack into the effort? Remembering that Oilcan had mentioned a troop of royal marines, she sent Rainlily to track them down and then called Maynard.

“Durrack and Briggs are still clearing out the steel spinners,” Maynard said when she identified herself. “There’s a huge nest up in the air ducts.”

She frowned at the phone for a moment. Which air ducts, and why did Maynard think she cared? Maynard made it clear when he finished with “Until we have the steel spinners cleared out, the highway engineers can’t do safety checks on the tunnels.”

“No, I’m not calling about that. I need backup on the North Side. The oni are holding some elf children prisoner. I’m going in to rescue them.”

“Just you?”

She laughed at the question. “Just five-foot-tall me with the badly bruised right arm? No!”

“I’m at Shippensport with Windwolf, Prince True Flame, and both Stone Clan domana.” In other words, all the heavy hitters were tied up protecting the nuclear power plant.

“I’ll have my Hand — plus one — and some tengu — and some royal marines if Rainlily can find them between now and then.”

There was a moment of silence, and then, “I’ll send you backup.”

The royal marines turned out to be a small regiment that specialized in warg hunting. Her Hand claimed that they were a crack commando team, but they were like an unruly group of teenage boys, laughing and joking about the upcoming fight. She had the commanding officer repeat the information that “the tengu were allies and not to be shot at when they showed up” many, many times and loudly.

Maynard’s assault team of thirty men seemed more like the steely-eye soldiers she would expect out of “crack commandos.” They too were warned of the incoming tengu.

The warnings turned out to be a good thing, as the tengu looked dangerously feral when they showed up. They landed on the roofs of the buildings around the parking lot. Unlike Jin, they wore fighting spurs and war paint and not much else — it was like they’d pared clothing down to offset the weight of knives and guns. The lack of shirts really showed off the fact that flying was great for upper body strength. Jin’s nephew Riki Shoji was the first to arrive.

Riki winged down and landed beside his uncle. “You called.”

“The oni have taken some elfin children,” Jin said. “Domi needs us to help rescue them.”

Dismay and anger flashed over Riki’s face. Tinker thought for a moment that he was upset at her for asking tengu to save elves, but then he said, “Oh, domi, nothing will give us more pleasure than to kill these monsters, but the children are most likely dead already.”

Jin put a hand to his nephew’s shoulder. “A greater blood wants them alive.”

“Then there’s a chance,” Riki admitted.

“The greater blood is named Yutakajodo,” Tinker said. “Do you know him?”

Riki shook his head. “I only dealt with Tomwaritomo. The oni don’t play nice even with each other. Yutakajodo is a true greater blood and automatically outranked Lord Tomtom, but Lord Tomtom had clawed his way up from the lesser bloods, and he didn’t see it that way. If Lord Tomtom could have gotten the upper hand, he would have killed Yutakajodo long ago. Yutakajodo, though, was always three steps ahead of Lord Tomtom. True to form, Kajo killed all his tengu a few hours before you returned Jin to the Flock.”

“Kajo?”

“It’s oni for snake. Yutakajodo is the name of the most poisonous snake on Onihida.”

Fear skittered through Tinker as they drove across the city toward the dog kennel. Thanks to her elf regeneration abilities, the pain had been more bearable when she cast her shield to save Oilcan, but this wasn’t going to be a short skirmish. She thought of Prince True Flame leading the royal forces, his shields protecting all his people. She was going to have to do that, but she wasn’t sure she could withstand the pain for hours.

They stopped a mile from the base, and the tengu scouted ahead. The Rolls proved to have a small arsenal in its trunk. Thorne Scratch geared herself along with Tinker’s Hand. With ninja-like stealth, Riki suddenly appeared overhead and dropped down with a quiet rustle of feathers. Since her protection of the tengu was through Jin alone, she had asked him to stay behind and give command to Riki.

“This is not going to be easy.” Riki spread a map out on the hood of the Rolls.

“The warren is tucked between the river and this cliff. The oni know that they can’t run, so they’ll dig in and fight. The only way in is down this street”—Riki slid his finger along a road through several blocks of empty lots, void of any cover—“and through this reinforced gate. There’s netting over this area here, so my people can’t drop in and eliminate any guards quickly.”

The netting and reinforced gate were new additions. The one time she’d been down this street, years ago, the compound had looked and sounded like just a dog kennel.

“So we go straight in.” Tinker’s stomach was doing flip-flops at the thought, but if they went in fast and hard, the fight would be over quicker. “I’ll lead, and my Hand will take out the gate while I protect them.”

Pony pointed to various areas on the roof. “Put your people here with rifles. Use the cover to stay safe but protect the others as they follow domi in.”

Riki nodded his understanding. The marine commander took it for granted that the domana would lead the assault, but the EIA commando leader looked slightly alarmed that she would be first one into the fight.

“Get into positions,” Tinker ordered, ignoring him. Actions would speak louder than any words.

She spent the next few minutes bracing herself for what was about to follow. She was going to lead a hundred of her people into a fight to the death for the lives of seven children — and it was going to hurt like bitch in more ways than one.

“We’re ready, domi.” Pony took his place slightly behind her and unsheathed his ejae.

Tinker took a deep breath and set up resonance with the Spell Stones and quickly called her shields. Her right arm throbbed with dull, bearable pain. “Okay, let’s do this.”

She walked as quickly as she could straight up to the gate. The EIA commandos might have been dubious, but the oni knew trouble when they saw it coming. They unleashed a thunderstorm of gunfire onto her. At the gate, her Hand slashed through the tall steel door. When it crashed to the ground, the marines charged with a roar up the street, and there was no turning back.

The first part of the complex was a wide roadway with small buildings to either side, which at one time housed security guards and office workers.

“We’ll keep them pinned. Search the side buildings,” Pony ordered the commandos and marines. He sheathed his ejae and unslung the bow from his back and nocked a spell arrow. The rest of the sekasha followed his lead.

The spell arrows screamed away. The sound of their flight triggered the spell inscribed on their shafts. The arrows flashed to laser-intense light and punched through the ranks of oni. Pony led the others slowly forward as they carefully picked out targets for their arrows, trusting Tinker to keep them safe. Tinker gritted her teeth against the pain throbbing in her arm and followed in their wake.

With Tinker pushing her shield forward, the oni had no choice but to retreat. The other fighting units fanned out to search the smaller buildings. Tinker tried to ignore the gunfire behind her to stay focused on maintaining her spells. She hated that she couldn’t protect all her people. Until they found the children, she couldn’t even use her one attack spell.

The narrow street ended at a loading dock with a dozen bays facing the road. All the doors were closed, the oni retreating in through a man-sized side door on the far right.

“Hold here.” Pony stopped short of the loading dock. “Advise me, domi. What would lie behind those large doors?”

“It’s a warehouse,” Tinker said. “All those doors, including the small one, will lead to the same large room. If we hit the leftmost door, we can clear the room left to right.”

Of course, there was the slight matter of getting onto the nearly five-foot-tall loading dock. The stairs were barricaded. It had posed no problem to the tall oni, but she wouldn’t be able to use her hands to climb.

Pony backed up, slinging the bow across his back. “Cloud, assist domi.”

The sekasha charged forward and leapt up onto the loading dock.

“Assist? What do you mean by—” Tinker yelped in surprise as Cloudwalker lifted her up and deposited her onto the loading dock. Somehow she managed to keep her shields up. “Oh for the love of God, I wish people would stop doing that to me.”

“Forgiveness.” Cloudwalker vaulted up beside her.

Her Hand and Thorne Scratch slashed through the bay door like it was tissue paper.

Apparently when you bred for animal size, strength, and brutality, you lost housekeeping somewhere along the way. The football field — sized room looked like someone had backed garbage trucks up to the loading dock and dumped the contents into the warehouse. Oni warriors had a weakness for Twinkies and Milk-bones, judging by the multitude of the empty boxes. There were walkways kicked through the litter. There were odd little semi-cleared areas — containing only filthy blankets, chewed pillows, and worn clothes. Oni of all shapes and sizes were bolting for more fortified positions.

The tengu came winging down and cut through the netting stretched across the street.

“Find anything?” Tinker called to Riki as he landed on the dock.

“No sign of the kids yet.” Riki shifted so he was still protected by her shield and shot at a small oni that was struggling to reposition a tripod-mounted machine gun. “Most of the outbuildings were lightly guarded dog kennels and pigsties.”

“This whole place looks like a pigsty.” Tinker picked her way slowly through the garbage. The pain made it hard to keep her footing while maintaining her shield. She was losing track of the fight around her. “What’s the deal with this mess?”

“This is a sleeping nest.” Riki watched her nervously. “I’ve never seen one this disgusting before.”

“If the kids are tied up somewhere in here, they’ll be difficult to spot,” Tinker said.

“Gods forbid.” Riki fired off more shots. “The only reason they’d be in here is the greater blood had no more use of them.”

The other teams came spilling into the sleeping nest. They spread out, weaving through the litter, looking for oni. Tinker started toward the only visible door on the warehouse’s back wall. A dozen steps forward and she nearly tripped over a small body half hidden in an avalanche of trash.

She recoiled with fear, seeing only a snarling face. Riki shot it twice before either of them realized it was already dead.

“What is it?” Tinker asked. The creature was smaller than any oni she had seen before. It had a piglike snout, sharp tusks, and was covered with coarse hair. It was wearing only a loincloth and a bandolier filled with fat shells for the grenade launcher lying beside it.

“Oni.” Riki reloaded his rifle. “Lesser blood. Very lesser.”

She kicked it for scaring her. “How did this even get to Elfhome? Did the oni put it in a dog crate to get it halfway across Earth and through EIA checkpoints?”

“It was born here.” Riki stripped off the bandolier and picked up the grenade launcher. “This is a whelping pen. The Greater Bloods brought females that could pass as human to Elfhome via Chinese visas. The father of that thing was probably one of the wild boars locked up outside.”

She’d been so focused on getting through the trash while keeping up her shields that she hadn’t thought about why the oni would have animals kenneled in the middle of the city. She shuddered. “For what logical reason would you mate a female to a wild boar?”

Riki passed the piglet’s weapon and ammo to one of his warriors. “These hybrids reach maturity faster than humans. Think of Chiyo. Her pregnancy will run less than two months, not the nine months of a human. Within a decade, her puppies would be ready to breed.”

Tinker flinched at Riki using the word “puppies” for Chiyo’s children, but she’d seen the mating: the warg father had been pure animal. Chiyo already had fox ears and a tail — how human could her offspring possibly be?

“This is why the oni are hiding instead of fighting,” Riki said. “They’re immortal like the elves — they can afford to play the waiting game. The longer they wait, the stronger they become. Within a few decades, they’ll easily outnumber the elves in this area. In thirty or forty years, they could have several million of their kind in Pittsburgh.”

“Millions?” Tinker scoffed. “Even with a generation a decade, do they really have the numbers to hit that mark?”

“Do you think that the humans will be left out of their plans forever?” Riki asked. “There are sixty thousand humans in Pittsburgh, but with the exception of these EIA soldiers, they’re sitting on the sidelines, watching. The Greater Bloods know that if the humans took up arms, it could tip the scales in the elves’ favor, so they’re leaving the humans alone. When the time is right — maybe as long as a decade from now — they’ll kill all the men and turn all the women into breeders.”

Tinker stared at him in horror. “You can’t be serious.”

“This is a war to the bitter end,” Riki said. “The only ones that don’t know this are the humans. If the elves lose, then the humans will end up like the tengu.” He lifted his foot and flexed his birdlike toes. “Remember, we were once human.”

She knew the oni well enough to recognize the truth in what he was saying, but she didn’t want to believe it. “So — we’re going to find oni children in here?”

“That is one of the oni children.” Riki pointed at the dead tusked oni. “It’s about nine years old. Don’t worry — all the other oni ‘children’ will do their damnedest to kill us, too.”

She had just reached the door when a shout went up from the other corner of the sleeping nest. One of the marines waved and flashed a series hand signals that Tinker didn’t recognize.

“Domi, no.” Pony blocked her from moving closer to the discovery. “You do not need to see this.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“The oni killed one of the children,” he said. “A female.”

Tinker wavered, not wanting to see the dead female but feeling like she should force herself to look. She looked down at her arm. The only thing she’d done the entire fight was keep it locked in one position. It hurt so bad she felt like crying. “I feel so useless.”

Stormsong breathed out a laugh. “If you were useless, there would not be nearly a hundred warriors in this filthy hole. We would still be trying to beat the information out of the oni and failing.”

Pony hugged her. “Beloved, there is nothing you can do for this child. Focus on the ones that might be still alive.”

Beyond the back door was a maze of halls and small rooms. Tinker pushed the oni down the hallways with her shield and the sekasha. The other teams fanned out behind her, searching the rooms. Reports came back of weapon lockers, food caches, another animal kennel, and a “breeding room” that she so did not want to see. Arguments started to flare up as the tengu looted anything valuable.

“Damn thieving crows,” the marine commander muttered to her at one point, apparently unaware that they were her Beholden.

Shouts in Elvish dragged Tinker back a dozen feet, where Riki was blocking the door to a large outdoor courtyard. Wood smoke drifted in through the open door, scented with roasting meat. Smoke and heat rolled up from crude fire pits of cinder block, rebar, and corrugated metal. Clear of burnable trash, the courtyard was strewn with broken pallets, split wood, full logs, and well-gnawed bones.

“What’s wrong?” Tinker asked.

“My people will search this area,” Riki said.

“Why yours?” the marine commander demanded. “Why can’t mine do it?”

Riki looked to Tinker for appeal. “It’s the kitchen. The oni eat — the oni consider children a delicacy. It would be kinder, if they butchered one of the children, for us to recover the body.”

The looks on elves’ face were enough for Tinker to say, “Yes, do it.”

Deep in the maze, the constant pain of maintaining her shields caught up with her. One moment she was on her feet, and then she was in Pony’s arms, face pressed against the strong column on his neck. Fear jolted through her as she realized she had dropped her shields. Luckily, all the oni in the immediate area seemed dead.

“You need to rest, domi.”

She swore. “We don’t have time for this.”

“We need to let our rear guard to catch up with us. We’re spread too thin.”

Only then did she realize that there were only a handful of the royal marines with them. The rest were scattered somewhere behind them. She couldn’t argue with his logic. With the marines covering their retreat, he carried her back to a smaller room they’d already passed. The room had been so obviously void of both oni and children that they had only given it a quick scan. He settled on a tufted leather bench so she could rest in his arms, safe within his shields.

“We’re going to need to be deloused after this,” Tinker grumbled, frustrated by her weakness. Bad enough to be wading through the trash; sitting down was making her skin crawl. She eyed the bench suspiciously and realized that it was surprisingly clean. In fact, now that she looked closely, they weren’t surrounded by the normal oni filth. The litter here was entirely different; it was expensive, luxury clutter. There was good solid ironwood furniture buried under heaps of furs, bags of United States bills and Elfhome coins, and cascades of jewelry. The floor was scrubbed clean, covered with oriental rugs, and then stacked high with weavings, paintings, and electronics. If anything, the room looked like a warehouse of loot.

“Huh, what is this? A treasure room?”

“I am not certain, domi.”

The tengu were going to be overjoyed, probably much to the annoyance of the elves and the humans. Much as she hated the thought, she should assign someone the job of cataloging the loot so it could be divided among the three groups. Perhaps the EIA could send an accountant over.

The shadows stirred and suddenly moved.

Pony jerked to his feet, moving back even as the others surged forward, swords ready.

“Put me down! Put me down!” Tinker squirmed out of his hold. She had her hand to her mouth when she recognized the lean body that snaked through the wall. “Impatience!”

“Yanananam Tinker.” The oni dragon seemed large in the room, but after fighting his near cousin, Malice, Tinker knew he was actually quite small. Still, ten feet of scaled, muscled body was nothing to sneeze at.

“Can we trust him?” Pony was between her and the dragon, ready for an attack. They had fought the little dragon once when Impatience was “unconscious” and lost horribly. The only reason they weren’t all killed was that Impatience had come to his senses before he actually did lasting harm.

“He’s talking, so he’s sentient.” Tinker still backed up as Impatience came bounding through the clutter toward them. She would have thought, though, that Impatience would have stayed far away from the oni. What was he doing at the oni whelping pens?

“Radadada aaaaah huuu ha—” Impatience leapt back suddenly. His mane rose, triggering his impenetrable shield moments before Maynard’s commandos spilled into the room.

“Hold! Hold!” Tinker shouted even as her Hand shifted to protect her from possible attack from both the dragon and the commandos.

“Tinker radadada pooookaaa aaaaah huuuuu Yutakajodo haaaaa ramaaaaanan.”

What in the world was Impatience trying to tell her?

“You!” She pointed at the nearest commando. “Do you have a phone?”

“Yes.” He handed it over.

“Hello?” Jin answered on the first ring.

“It’s Tinker. Here, listen to this.”

She held out the phone to Impatience.

“Naadaaan pookuu.” He reached out with his great five-clawed paw and plucked the phone out of her hand.

“No! No, don’t take it apart! God damn, how can someone that’s so smart be so stupid?” Tinker grabbed his paw and pried the phone free. “Talk! Talk!”

“Yanananan?” Jin’s tiny voice came over the phone.

Impatience cocked his head and then gave a dragon laugh of “Huuhuuhuuhuuhuu.”

“Tinker radadada pookaa,” Jin said.

Impatience launched into a long discussion and then, after a minute, stopped and looked expectantly at Tinker.

Tinker put the phone back to her ear. “What did he say?”

“There is a box near you. It holds something that belongs to the Greater Blood Yutakajodo. You alone should take possession of it, but do so carefully.”

“Why carefully?” Tinker asked.

“I’m not certain,” Jin said. “He’s speaking very quickly and seems to be using. . slang?”

“Dragon slang?”

“Yes. Maybe. I’m getting the impression that the box might harm you if you’re not careful.”

Tinker eyed the collection of boxes piled high about the room. “How do I ask him which box?”

“Huunaaaaahaaaa.”

Tinker carefully repeated the word.

At the far end of the room, under a pile of furs, there was a large ironwood chest. The thick lid was spell-locked.

Once Tinker focused on it intently, she realized the chest buzzed against her magic sense with contained power. It felt much like getting too close to a hornet’s nest. There had to be an active spell inlaid on the back of the lid. Logically, keying open the locking spell would deactivate the hidden spell. Most likely if the lid was forced, then the active spell would trigger some kind of trap. The question was, what kind of trap? A simple alarm? Or something more deadly? She spent time playing with spell-locks. She thought she might be able to pick the lock, but it might be her ego talking. She wasn’t sure how much she actually knew about magic compared to the elves themselves. .

She blinked at the lock. “This is elf magic.”

Pony and Stormsong eyed the lock and nodded in confirmation.

“Transmuting wood and metal are Stone Clan magic,” Pony murmured, glancing to Thorne Scratch. “They create such chests for other clans at a steep price. The owner chooses the key when it’s made.”

It seemed unlikely that the oni would have stolen it and not tried to open it. Unblemished as it was, it seemed more likely that the elf that owned it worked with the oni.

“Could it be Sparrow’s?” Tinker asked.

Stormsong clicked her tongue in an elfin shrug. “She took advantage of the fact that none of us sekasha liked her to keep her activities hidden. I was with her most, but I don’t remember her having a chest like this.”

They would have to deal with the chest later; they needed to find the missing children. She assigned Little Egret, a half dozen of the marines, and one of the tengu the chore of getting the chest to Poppymeadow’s, and then pushed deeper into the whelping pens.

She was losing hope of finding any of the children alive. They reached the back of the maze to find another large courtyard with pits dug into hard-packed dirt. The holes were filled with garbage, urine, and feces.

“Are these their latrines?” Tinker asked. The holes seemed too big for latrines but too small for anything else.

“They’re holding pens,” one of the tengu said.

“Oh gods,” Tinker whispered as something stirred in the nearest hole and started to whimper. “Get them out!”

One of the Fire Clan marines slid down into the hole and lifted the whimpering child out. It was a male, small in comparison to the laedin-caste marine. He started to keen inconsolably once he realized he’d been rescued and was safe to finally react to his torture.

“This one needs a healer!” a female marine shouted as a limp male body was passed up from the second pit to the waiting adults. His left arm had been broken so many times it barely seemed like an arm. One of the marines produced a healing spell on a strip of paper and pressed it to the child’s barely moving chest.

“Here’s another one!” an EIA commando called from a pit near the back.

A tiny naked female was lifted, wide-eyed and desperately squirming, by the humans. She saw Tinker and lunged toward her, arms outstretched.

“It’s all right!” Tinker cried even as Thorne Scratch caught hold of Pony’s sword hand. “It’s fine! She’s just scared.”

The tiny female was a patchwork of bruises ranging from violet to sickening green to pale yellow. She wrapped arms tight around Tinker and wouldn’t let go.

“She probably thinks you’re Stone Clan domana,” Stormsong murmured in English, nodding toward Thorne Scratch, who had grown angry and silent.

“Quiee,” the little female said. “Quiee. Quiee.”

“What is she saying?” Tinker asked Stormsong.

Stormsong listened to a moment and then said with great uncertainty. “Quiee?”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s what baby ducks say,” Pony said.

“Ducks say quack,” Tinker said.

“Adult ducks say quack,” Pony said. “Baby ducks say quiee.”

The little female nodded solemnly. “Quiee.”

“We’re going to have to make sure she’s not with child,” Stormsong murmured in English.

“She’s just a baby!” Tinker protested. She didn’t think elves could get pregnant until they were out of their doubles.

“If she’s over fifty, she can get pregnant,” Stormsong said gently. “Just like an eleven-year-old human girl could if raped.”

Searching other pits, they found a female hiding in a mound of garbage, armed with an animal leg bone. As they were convincing the female to give up her grisly club for one of the commando’s nightsticks, Riki slipped in beside Tinker. His wings and war paint were gone, and he seemed nearly human.

“I don’t want to frighten the children,” Riki said quietly in English. “If any of my people knew about this and didn’t report it, I’ll wring their necks.”

“What did you find?” Tinker asked.

“There were two children in the kitchen,” Riki said. “One had already been butchered down to roast.”

Tinker clamped down on a whimper and tightened her hold on the little female in her arms. Seven children subjected to this merely because they weren’t Wind Clan? “Someone is going to pay.”

Two Hands of Wyverns and a swarm of royal laedin-caste marines arrived to secure the area, apparently sent by Prince True Flame, via Maynard. After making sure that the children would be delivered to the hospice and properly treated by the Wind Clan healers, Tinker headed for the train station. Thorne Scratch was reluctant to leave the children, but once she understood Tinker’s mission, she agreed to help.

Tinker held her cold fury close as they drove back to the train station in the Rolls, the smell of the pits clinging to her dress. She stalked into the building, wishing for the thousandth time that day that she could fling tanks around with a word and a gesture.

The handful of elves that ran the station came to a halt of the sight of her and the sekasha.

“Which one did my cousin talk to?” Tinker growled.

“This one.” Thorne Scratch pointed out one of the male Wind Clan elves.

The male flinched back as Tinker bore down on him.

“You saw children get off the train and you did nothing to help them?” Tinker asked.

“Domi, they were not of my clan.” He said it as if it were a reasonable answer.

“They were children! You knew they were children — didn’t you?”

“Yes, domi,” the male said quietly, apparently still missing the point.

“You know that we’re at war with the oni. That the oni will kill and torture anyone they find unprotected.”

The light finally went on; it lit up a sign that read She’s Angry About Something. He started to look worried. “Yes, domi.”

“And you just let them go?”

If she weren’t so angry it would almost funny to watch him realize that telling the truth was going to screw him over, and yet, as an elf, he was unable to lie. “Domi—I–I—I did not care what happened to them.”

The last person that gotten her this angry, she’d beaten with a crowbar. She clenched her hands tight on the desire to beat the elf to a pulp. “Get out.”

“Domi?” The male glanced at the various doors, unsure which direction she wanted him to go.

“Go home, pack your bags, and get out of Pittsburgh,” Tinker snapped. “I won’t have you in the Westernlands. I don’t want your kind — so blind in your petty hate that you bring down poison on a child that you don’t even know.”

“Domi! Please. My household is here.”

“I don’t care!” She thrust her hand in the direction of the whelping pens and the ironwood forest beyond it. “Be glad that I don’t stake you out in the forest for whatever finds you! Be glad I don’t let you be raped by the oni, beaten senseless, and then eaten! Be glad that I have more morals than you!”

The elf had gone completely ashen. “Yes, domi.”

“Get out! Now!” Tinker shouted.

He bowed and fled.

She turned toward the other Wind Clan elves that were standing, listening, mouths open. “If anyone allows harm to come to another child — be it human or Stone Clan or tengu — I don’t care what it is — if anyone allows harm to come to another child, I’ll see them gone!”

She was still shaking in anger as she stormed out of the train station. It wasn’t until she reached the Rolls that she realized that she just assumed she had the power to kick an elf out of Westernlands.

“I can do that — can’t I?” she asked Pony. “I can tell him to go?”

“Yes, domi, you can, and considering we are at war with the oni, it was wise that you made an example of him.”