Harbinger

15: SNAKE HUNT

“Even if I wanted to join Usagi’s household, I couldn’t,” Bare Snow whispered in Law’s ear. “Do you think that’s Kajo?”

Law felt like she’d spent the morning crawling through a minefield. Usagi had asked them to join her commune. The discussion with Bare Snow on whether or not they would accept the offer had been filled with a lot of abrupt starts and stops as Law tried to detect and disarm emotional bombs. This one stopped her cold: why couldn’t Bare Snow do it?

Law knew all the reasons she herself wasn’t in love with the idea, but she thought that Bare Snow was overjoyed at the offer. Perhaps the weird hiccups in the conversation weren’t Law’s reservations fighting the logic of it all. They were speaking Elvish, so it wasn’t Bare Snow making a mistake with English. Was Law’s understanding of Elvish at fault? Law considered the statement. No, the word that Bare Snow used definitely meant “couldn’t.”

If Bare Snow was agreeing with her, could Law tell Usagi “thanks, but no thanks”? Should she ignore all the good reasons just because Bare Snow gave her a quick out? Certainly the proposal was a mixed bag of good and bad.

It was easier to focus on Bare Snow’s question about the small masked figure in the valley below.

Law clicked her tongue softly in an elf version of a shrug. “If Yumiko was right about the mask: maybe.”

The woods east of Pittsburgh were crawling with oni. In theory there should be elves too, hunting said oni, but the two obviously weren’t colliding in the virgin ironwood forest.

“Should I kill him?” Bare Snow stripped off her camouflage T-shirt without waiting for an answer. In the dim light, her pale spell tattoo was too faint to pick out against her creamy white skin. The female didn’t seem to own a bra. Did elves not have such things? It always made Law question what she had been told about undergarments.

“It’s not worth the risk,” Law whispered. Focus, woman, focus! Law studied the valley encampment. The oni were breaking camp, taking down a dozen large green Coleman tents. “There’s a hundred or more warriors down there and we don’t even know for sure if that’s him.”

Yumiko only had a drawing of a mask and a vague description of the secret overlord of the oni forces. The person in charge of the encampment in the valley below seemed to fit the bill. He looked like he was only five and a half feet tall. His fearsome mask was lacquered red with black accents. The long fangs, scowling eyes, and sharp horns were gilded with gold leaf. A flowing mane of white horsehair hid even his natural hair color. It looked exactly like the drawing that Yumiko had shown Law.

There was one small problem.

A second oni wearing a nearly identical mask came out of the last tent. It was slightly shorter than the first one but only by two or three inches. They wore matching outfits of elaborate black silk robes with red highlights. Law couldn’t tell which of them was “in charge” even though it was clear that they were the ranking officers of the encampment. Both gestured and pointed and were obeyed by the lesser blood oni.

“Oh, great.” Law scanned the camp. Even if there was only one possible Kajo, she and Bare Snow wouldn’t have survived taking on all the oni in the valley. The warriors were armed with assault rifles and rocket launchers. There were a dozen wargs, muzzled and chained. They were outnumbered and outgunned.

Bare Snow might be able to evade the warriors but not the wargs. Worse, Law wasn’t sure where they were exactly. She normally hunted in the South Hills, near where she’d grown up. East of Pittsburgh, she needed a compass and map to stay on track. The tengu’s holy spaceship in Turtle Creek changed that somewhat. It was a mile-high exclamation point covered with magical dragon runes. It was impossible to miss, even at three miles away.

She believed that they were near Churchill. She would need to take out her map to check but she didn’t want to take her eyes off the oni or Bare Snow.

“It’s possible that neither one of them are Kajo,” Law said to make sure Bare Snow didn’t try a suicide run. She repeated it in Elvish to be sure that the female understood. “Yumiko said that all the tengu familiar with Kajo were killed. She’s working off secondhand reports. It’s possible that Kajo was playing some kind of shell game with the tengu.”

“Shell game?”

Law winced. She’d used the Elvish word for walnut shell as that was what her grandfather used when he taught the game to Law. She’d seen variations of it using bent playing cards. Did elves have playing cards? Law was fairly sure playing three-card monte with the elves was a good way to get killed. Elves hated liars. “It’s a trick to fool people. You pretend to hide something under a walnut shell — like a pea — but secretly you put the pea someplace else. It’s like the game of hide-and-seek that you play with the Bunny children, but instead of actually hiding, the kids left the house while you were counting to one hundred.”

“Why would the children do that?”

“I’m explaining this badly.” Law considered while she watched the tents being packed away. “Kajo always wore a mask when dealing with the tengu. He was hiding something. It might have been that the person under the mask changed; there could have been several fake ‘Kajos’ to serve as decoys. The tengu might have never met the real Kajo.”

“Ah, yes, to foil assassination attempts by the tengu since he didn’t trust them.”

“Something like that.” Law ducked down to think.

Kajo wasn’t the target; the magical genetic bombs were. So far, she hadn’t seen the eleven bowling-ball-sized eggs but there were many pieces of luggage large enough to fit one. The oni seemed as if they planned to head west after leaving the clearing. That would take them in the direction of Oakland. If the real Kajo was playing a true shell game, it was possible he was hiding within the city, passing as human.

“If these two aren’t Kajo,” Law said, “then they might be going to meet up with him.”

“We should follow them!” Bare Snow bounced in a very distracting way.

“Put your shirt on,” Law said. “They look like they’re gearing up for a hike.”

Law considered the hunt before them. Staying ahead of the oni would be dangerous as they could walk into any hidden war camp that the two “Kajos” were heading to. Trailing behind, though, would mean they might lose the oni if Kajo had vehicles waiting someplace.

Should she call Alton?

No, not yet. It would get the tengu involved. Yumiko implied Kajo had some magical ability that let him dance around the elves, but it might be simply an old-fashioned, well-placed mole. Sparrow had been the second highest Wind Clan leader and a Skin Clan lackey. Any one of the tengu might be a turncoat. Kajo hadn’t been that hard to find. There were twenty thousand tengu in Pittsburgh; why hadn’t one of them spotted him?

Law had stolen a rail car from the Charleroi train depot to give chase after the oni-filled train. She’d crashed the vehicle at Station Square, leaving her with no way to get back to her Dodge Power Wagon, still parked at the depot. It seemed logical to ask Usagi to give her and Bare Snow a lift to Charleroi so they could get back the Dodge and her pet Elfhome porcupine, Brisbane.

Usagi had used the child-free drive to propose the merger of households. She’d been very compelling. Bare Snow was technically still a child at ninety-four years old; she would be approximately seventeen if she were human. The half-elf children were maturing slowly; they might not be adults for decades to come. Law and all the Bunnies were human, which meant that they could vanish out of the lives of the children before they were full grown, especially with the war raging around them. It forced Law to realize that if she got herself killed, Bare Snow would be totally alone. The children already called Bare Snow “Big Sister.” Law loved all the Bunnies dearly — but she wasn’t sure if she could stand living with them.

After Usagi drove away, Law scouted around for Brisbane. She found him tucked up in a big spruce tree near the river, happily eating bark.

He was “her pet” in that he normally cooperated in her ownership of him. There was no forcing something that was a third her size and came loaded with thirty thousand foot-long barbed spikes.

Law was trying to talk him out of a tree when she spotted a herd of elk on the opposite bank of the Monongahela River. The big animals rarely came that near to the jumpfish-infested waters. They would only venture that close to a bank if they were trying to avoid something even more dangerous. Law guessed that it meant that a large number of oni might be pushing the elk in front of them.

“Okay, just stay up there,” Law said to Brisbane, who seemed to be ignoring her. “I’ll be back later.” (Being that porcupines lived most of their life in trees, she was fairly sure he wouldn’t move until she produced apples or something to lure him down.)

Law drove across the river via the Rankin Bridge, hid her Dodge in an empty warehouse, and then on foot, backtracked the herd to this ridge. Three hours after her meeting with Alton, she had eyes on Kajo.

Why hadn’t anyone else found him?

Was it because Kajo guessed that none of the tengu would expect him so close to the city? Yumiko had refused to give Law any more guidance than the drawing. She seemed to think that any suggestion from her would unduly influence Law. Certainly, Law hadn’t even seriously considered where Kajo might be hiding; she was just trying to retrieve her Dodge.

Law decided that they’d follow the oni to see where they were going. If they reached the city, she would call for backup.

There was nothing to do but wait for the oni to move.

It left her time to think. All she could think about, though, was Usagi’s proposal.

“Why can’t you?” Law whispered to Bare Snow. “Why can’t you be part of Usagi Sensei’s household?”

Bare Snow looked at her with surprise in her eyes. “My family has a death sentence on it. After Howling’s assassination, the sekasha hunted down everyone in my grandfather’s household and killed all that they could find.”

“But they’re all dead now,” Law said.

“I’m still alive.”

“You weren’t even alive when Howling was killed. Your mother lived on a deserted island for years in hiding before she even met your father.”

“It does not matter. We were wrong. We were Beholden to Howling; we betrayed him and our clan when we believed the worse of him. We nearly destroyed all hope of peace. If the Clan War was still waging when the oni first attacked, we would have fallen to the Skin Clan. My family deserved the punishment that the sekasha dealt out.”

“You had nothing to do with it.”

“My mother trained me; she wanted me to seek revenge on those that wronged my family.”

“That’s the Skin Clan!”

“As far as the sekasha know, we acted alone. To them, the domana would be my natural target.”

Law sputtered in the face of Bare Snow’s calm acceptance. “No one knows who you are. You were born after your mother went into hiding. There are no Water Clan in Pittsburgh; they don’t have Spell Stones for their domana to tap. How would anyone even know?”

“If someone asked me the name of my mother, I would have to tell them the truth. It is much too dangerous for the Bunnies.”

Law wanted to argue the point but she wasn’t even sure that she could stand being a permanent part of the Bunny household. She enjoyed the controlled chaos of the commune but only because she could escape the moment she got overwhelmed.

“The oni are moving,” Bare Snow whispered, ending the discussion.

They followed the oni cross the Rim into Pittsburgh proper. All around them were abandoned houses and shops. The oni went slower, keeping to the cover of the trees rather than using the weed-choked city streets.

Law wondered if she was doing the right thing. This could quickly escalate out of her control. What if the oni planned to stage an attack on Oakland? The Pittsburghers were still recovering from the attack on Oktoberfest. Many of the royal marines were taking care of their dead, far to the north. Others were scattered all over the South Side, looking for any stray oni troops who survived the train derailment. Prince True Flame was deep in the forest to the east, looking for the oni camps that Tommy Chang had rescued Jewel Tears from. There was no large Elvish force in Oakland.

The oni hit the tangled knot of the Edgewood exit on I-376 and stopped.

Law crouched behind the brick rubble of a collapsed garage. She made sure that Bare Snow was safely beside her before taking out her binoculars.

The taller of the two Kajos seemed to be the ultimate head of the group. He split the oni into two groups. He sent a handful north along the Rim with all of their gear. He kept the rest of his heavily armed escort with him and the second Kajo and turned west.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Law whispered. If the two Kajo continued in the same direction, they would head into Frick Park. The area around Nine Mile Run was extremely marshy. Over the years, it had filled with black willows. Any sane person avoided it at all costs. Yet it put the oni just a few miles from the elf enclave’s back door. “Don’t go west. Don’t go west.”

The taller Kajo led his group toward the Braddock Trail, which led through the heart of Frick Park.

Law didn’t know what Kajo planned but she didn’t want to follow the oni into Frick Park. Black willows hunted via vibration on the ground; they could feel even something as light as a two-pound rabbit at a hundred paces. The oni could find a safe path through the park, but that would leave only unsafe ground for her and Bare Snow. Guns and knives and even machetes were useless against the giant man-eating trees.

Maybe Kajo didn’t know about the black willows.

There was an odd high-pitched whistle.

It sounded again.

Bare Snow hissed and crouched lower.

“What is that?” Law whispered.

“It’s a monster call!” Bare Snow whispered. “They’re directing all monsters to head toward the sun.”

Toward the sun? It was past noon. The sun was in the west. That would lead all monsters in the area toward Oakland. There was a distant loud creak of wood followed by a hollow thud: the unmistakable noise of a black willow stirring to life.

“Oh, shit.” Law pulled out her phone. This officially had become larger than what she and Bare Snow could handle. She’d call Alton, drop it in his lap, and go after Kajo’s gear. Maybe the bombs were with his equipment.