Wolf Who Rules

Chapter 19: Snakes, Snails & Puppy-Dog Tails

Tinker kicked the blackened remains of the willow tree. It had died on the waterfront, leaving a burnt trail from the warehouse. Several buildings along its path had scorch marks where the burning tree had brushed up against them while staggering toward the river.

“Okay, let’s take it from the top. We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz.”

“Because?” Pony asked.

“Because — because — because — because.” Tinker didn’t know. Did she ever know?

“Because of the wonderful things he does,” Stormsong deadpanned.

Tinker glared at her. “In the dream, the yellow brick road led to the willow trees.” She gave the tree another kick. “Which threw apples at us. Esme told me to follow the fruit to find the wizard — which is the dragon.”

She followed the black path of soot and cinders back toward the warehouse. “Lain gave me one of the seeds, but I couldn’t figure out anything interesting with it. Most of the times it doesn’t even wriggle. So obviously fruit is something else. Whatever it is, it will lead us to the dragon. The dragon is the desired end product — not the fruit.”

“I am not sure it would be wise to face the dragon again.” Pony said. “We barely survived the last fight.”

“I know, I know, I know. Riki did say that it needs magic to become sentient, and once it used me to tap the spell stones, it —” She paused. “Wait. Riki said that the oni messed with the spell to trap the dragon. What if the ‘fruit’ is just magic?”

“In the movie,” Stormsong said. “The apples were gathered up by Dorothy, the scarecrow, and the tin man.”

“No, the tin man came in during the apple scene, Dorothy was picking—” Tinker stopped with sudden realization. “Oh, gods, Oilcan! He was hauling the overflow cans away — when was the last time anyone saw him?”

“The day we watched the movie,” Pony said. “Wednesday.”

Neither Oilcan or the flatbed had been at the junk yard on Friday. He had left two days of newspapers in the drive. Feeling sick, she fumbled with her phone, picking his number off her address book. His phone rang three times and dropped to voice mail. Trying not to panic, she called the scrap yard and then his apartment, getting only voice mail. Where had he taken the barrels? Had he said? No, just that he had to dump them. Where could he have taken them? They had gone through nearly a hundred barrels before she got the spell repaired — a massive pool of magic to dump haphazardly, but Pittsburgh had lots of big empty places. Still, the barrels and the steel filings represented a good bit of money once the magic leached out — so he would probably leave them on land that they owned. That left one place — the barn.

She dialed the land line to the barn. She expected his machine to pick up after three rings, but it continued ringing. She clung to the phone, whispering, “Oh, please answer.”

On the twelfth ring, the phone clattered off the hook, and Oilcan said breathlessly, “Yeah?”

“Oh thank gods, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. What’s wrong?”

She laughed, not even sure where to start on that question. “Did you take the barrels from Rienholds to the barn?”

“Yeah, they’re here.”

“Look, I think you’re in a lot of danger. I want you to leave the barn.”

“What’s going on, Tink?”

“It’s all rather complicated. I think my dreams are telling me to trap the dragon and do something with it.”

“Trap it?”

“Yeah, the barrels are the fruit.” That sounded sane! “Look, you’re in danger there. Just go home and let me deal with it.”

There was only silence from Oilcan.

“Are you okay?” Tinker asked again.

“I’m kind of in the middle of the something. You know — I don’t want to mess with the flow. Why don’t you come out and we’ll talk about what has gone down since Wednesday.”

Wednesday. Nathan died Wednesday. Did Oilcan know? If he didn’t, she didn’t want to tell him over the phone — not that she really wanted to tell him face to face, either.

“Okay, I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.”

Oilcan used a barn deep in the South Hills as a retreat. Just as she tinkered on machines, he played with art. It was a side of him that few people saw, as he seemed to think it revealed too much of his soul. Sometimes he welded bits and pieces taken from the scrap yard into mechanical ogres, other times he painted dark and abstract murals. Those he kept at his retreat and only friends got to see. She knew he kept journals with poetry that he never showed anyone, not even her. The only form of his art that he shared was music he composed, a fusion of traditional elfin music with snarling, angry human rock; that he didn’t perform but sold to local bands under the penname of Orphan.

Art wasn’t something that Tinker had patience for. She liked computer logic of true or false, knowing if something worked or didn’t with a flip of a switch or a turn of a key. She could help Oilcan animate his ogres, but she could never see why the sculpture had to take a certain form, or move in a certain way, or make a certain sound. She couldn’t perceive what made one piece “right” despite how many times Oilcan tried to explain it.

It was mid-morning when they drove up the driveway lined with wild lilac bushes. The flatbed was parked in the apple orchard, its bed littered with fallen apples. Across the road, the magic gleamed purple in the shadows of the tractor shed, stuffed full with the barrels.

Tinker had debated bringing two Hands with her. She wanted a small army between her and the dragon, but in the end, she decided that if Oilcan was fine, that most likely she was wrong about the barrels. Certainly, it was a stretch in logic to get from the black willow to the barn.

“Not that there’s any real logic involved in this,” she complained as she parked the Rolls away from both apples and magic. It had been easier to drive than constantly interrupt her thoughts to give directions. “It would be simpler to believe that the oni drove me stark raving mad than all this dream hocus pocus.”

“You are not mad.” Pony got out, taking point.

“My mother would have not directed us to ‘follow the yellow brick road’ if you were only mad.” Stormsong kept close to Tinker as they headed for the large barn doors.

Denial, the most misshapen of Oilcan’s animated ogres, lurched out of the lilacs. It moaned out its low recording of “nooo, nooo, nooo,” as it wrung its crooked arms around its deformed head.

Instantly her guard had all weapons out and leveled at the mechanical sculpture.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Tinker cried. “Don’t shoot it!”

“What is it, domi?” Pony kept his machine gun trained on it.

“It’s a sculpture,” she said.

Denial folded back down, stretching out a third hand stretched to grasp in their direction. The guards backed up, unnerved by the thing as its recording changed to a wordless keening.

“It does not look like art to me.” Pony reluctantly slung his gun onto his back and motioned to the others to stand down.

“Well,” Tinker admitted, “sometimes it doesn’t seem that much like art to me, either, but that’s what it is.”

She pointed out the motion sensor by the door; Pony had tripped it as he moved ahead of her. “That activates it, though, that’s new. I wonder…”

The big door rolled open, and Oilcan called, “Hey!” in greeting.

“Hey,” she said back. “What’s with Denial?”

“Just using him as a doorbell.” He eyed the guards with their hands still riding their weapons. “Can — can we leave them here? I don’t want them shooting anything by mistake.”

Considering what else he had in the way of art, Tinker didn’t blame him. She held up a hand to her sekasha. “Stay.”

The sekasha peered into the barn. The back door was rolled the full way open, flooding the cluttered floor with light. They didn’t look happy, but stayed put outside while Oilcan rolled the door shut.

“You really have to leave.” Tinker followed him through the clutter. From the looks of it, he’d been camping out here for the last few days. “This might be a total longshot, but its really dangerous here if I’m right. What did you do to your answering machine?”

Oilcan glanced down at the dissembled unit, the parts carefully arrayed on a blank canvas like a piece of art. “Ah, it got taken apart. What are you going to do with the dragon?”

She groaned as she hadn’t considered that far ahead. “Gods if I know! He’s the wizard of Oz.”

“And that means?”

“Riki — Riki wove this whole theory that sounded so right about the dragon being the wizard, but it just hit me — Riki lied and lied about so much. Yeah, so his reasons were good, but he has this history of twisting things to suit his goals.”

Thinking of Riki, she pulled the player out of her pocket. “Here. Riki says he’s sorry.”

As Oilcan stood looking at the player, the oni dragon snaked out of the shadows to stop beside Oilcan. Its eyes gleamed in the dimness, its mane flowing like a bundle of snakes.

“Yanananam mmmoooootaaaa summbaaaa radadada,” the dragon said with a deep breathy voice, the words rumbling against her skin like the purr of a big engine. “Aaaaah huuu ha.”

“Oh shit!” Tinker jerked back, fumbling for the pistol on her hip.

“It’s okay!” Oilcan held up his hands to ward off her action. “He won’t hurt you. He’s friendly.”

“Friendly?”

“Yeah, see?” Oilcan patted the huge head butting up against him. “He scared the shit out of me. But he talked — and — well — I listened.”

She backed up regardless, wanting distance between her and it. “You can understand it?”

“Actually — no.”

“Mmmananan pooooo kaaa.”

It was weird to watch such a huge thing speaking, but there was no mistaking the rumble of syllables and consonants for anything but language.

“So you have no idea what’s it’s saying.”

“No.” Oilcan shrugged with a sheepish grin. “Sorry. But come here, look at this.”

After the surprise of the dragon, Tinker wasn’t sure she wanted to see what else he had to show her. Oilcan walked down the stone steps to be what used to the milking stalls. The dragon glanced back and forth between her and Oilcan. Apparently realizing that they were all to follow Oilcan, it finally bounded after him. Despite its short legs, and ferret-like humping run, its gait remained fluid.

“We’ve been working at communicating,” Oilcan was saying. “We finally resorted to drawing. It’s been — educational.”

In the back was a little dragon nest complete with rumpled blankets, a barrel of drinking water, and a large dog dish of well chewed bones. Drawings covered the walls. She recognized Oilcan’s hand in the ones done in chalk. Scratched into the wall, the dragon’s pictures were fluid and elegant and incomprehensible.

“Educational? Really?” she asked after several minutes of trying to understand the alien pictograms.

“It’s just so different how he sees the world. Here,” he pointed out his map of Pittsburgh, with the two rivers converging to make the Ohio River, and the many skyscrapers and bridges. “After I drew this, he made this.”

Less stylistic than the other dragon drawings, it was a series of wavering lines, some lightly etched and others deeply gouged. She studied it for a moment, keenly aware of the huge monster shifting beside them. It seemed completely random, but she trusted Oilcan’s intelligence. If he said this meant something, it did. If the dragon recognized Oilcan’s Pittsburgh — was this how he saw the city? It was the deep pit on the North side, roughly at the location of Reinholds that triggered the recognition. “He’s drawn the ley lines.”

“Yes. I think it was the magic in the barrels that drew him here.” Oilcan pointed out a blank area of the wall. “And look at this.”

“At wh—?”

The dragon nosed her aside — jolting her heart into a fierce pounding — and raised a long, sharp claw to the wall. In a nerve-grating rasp, it lightly sketched a dot at the center of Turtle Creek and radial lines outward, carefully linking the radials up to existing ley lines. The dragon glanced up at her, making sure she was watching, and then flattened its great paw and smudged away the dot and lines, creating the same blank space.

“There’s no magic.” She whispered.

“Tooloo has always said the dragons can’t exist without magic.” Oilcan absently scratched the dragon’s jaw, getting a deep purr-like rumble from it.

“So as long as we keep him saturated in magic, he’s safe.”

“Yeah.”

Tinker thought of the barrels stacked in the tractor shed. They represent a huge pool of magic, but a leaky one, draining away. “He can’t stay here, then. I have no idea how long the magic will last from the barrels, but it’s an artificial environment. Sooner or later, it’s going to be drained.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Oilcan! This isn’t some stray dog. Look what I found, Grandpa, can I keep it? It didn’t work with the warg puppy.”

“This isn’t a warg, this is an intelligent being that can talk, and create art, and communicate. Look!” He pointed out set of small pictures. “It has a written language!”

“How do you know? That could be — be — anything!”

He gave her an annoyed look. “Did it or did it not just communicate something meaningful to you?”

She sighed. “Yes.”

The sekasha were just going to love this.

“What?” Stormsong asked for about the third time in the row when Tinker updated the sekasha on the current plan.

“We need to move the dragon to the scrap yard. It’s got a strong ley line running through it, so the dragon will stay sentient there. But the flatbed is a double clutch manual transmission, so if none of you can drive manual, then I’m going to have to —”

Stormsong caught her by the hand, dragged her to the side of the barn into the old apple orchard.

“Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing?” Tinker cried.

“What am I doing?” Stormsong snatched up an apple and flung it at Tinker. “What am I doing?”

The apple smacked the barn wall, blossoming into a flower of rotten sweetness unnervingly close to Tinker’s head.

“What fucking part of that don’t you understand?” Tinker shouted at her.

“You — are — too — trusting!” Stormsong flung apples to emphasize her words — one apple per word. They whizzed past Tinker so closely she felt their passage. “And — too — slow — at — putting — up — your — shields.”

There was now a halo of spattered fruit outlining Tinker.

“I get the point! I get the point!” Tinker called up her shield. “See, shield! Happy?”

“Happy?” Stormsong snorted, picked an apple from the tree instead of the ground, and polished it against her black jeans until it gleamed with promise. “Here!” She tossed the apple in a lazy arc toward Tinker.

Tinker moved her hands to catch the apple and her shield vanished.

“You’re — too— trusting!”

The first apple hit Tinker in the shoulder in a painful splatter. The second and third were intercepted mid-air by other apples so that they exploded in front of her, spraying her with apple bits.

“Stop it.” Pony had another apple ready. Part of Tinker was impressed that he could knock apples out of the air — the other part wanted to know where the hell he was for the first volley. “She is the domi. She leads us.”

“She’s going to get herself killed!” Stormsong growled.

“What she says is true,” Pony said. “The dragon can not stay here. The truck is the only vehicle that will carry it. She and Oilcan are the only ones that know how to drive it — and he will be focused on keeping the creature calm. The fewer people we involve in moving the beast, the less likely the oni will learn that we have it.”

“How can you support this plan?”

“The domana’s self-centered creativity is why we chose to obey them. We need their drive. Trust her, she will make it work.”

“Or die trying.” Stormsong muttered. “This is insanity.”

“Is it? We have the scarecrow.” Pony pointed at Tinker and then tapped his chest. “The lion. The tin man.” He pointed at Oilcan’s metal sculpture. “And the apple trees.” He held up the apple in his hand. “And the apples being thrown at the scarecrow.”

Stormsong’s eyes went wide.

“There, see!” Tinker cried. “It’s crazy with a purpose.”

“And that is supposed to make me feel better?” Stormsong snarled. “What are you going to do with dragon now that you found him?”

Tinker held up her finger, indicating they were to wait, and pulled out her datapad. “Give me a few minutes. I’ve been keeping notes on the dreams. Off hand, I don’t remember anything. Wait — how about this — Esme said ‘he knows the paths, the twisted way, the garden path. You have to talk to him. He’ll tell you the way.’”

“The way? To where.”

“Obviously where I need to go.”

It was like having a very large, hyper-active five year old in her workshop. The dragon flowed in and out of the various rooms of the trailer, carrying on a running commentary in its rumbling voice, as it examined everything with its massive but manipulative paws. After rescuing her scanner, their radio base, and antique CD player, Tinker realized what happened to Oilcan’s answering machine and started to fear.

“Okay, okay, I think first thing in communicating would be — to — get a record of what it’s saying.” She snatched her camera from the dragon before he could dissemble it. She flipped out her tripod, snapped the camera to it, and caught Cloudwalker by the hand and dragged him to the camera. “Here, keep the dragon — the dragon’s image — in this little window.” Great, she was actually dealing with two groups of technology-challenged people. “And we’ll build a dictionary of his words.”

“I was trying to do that.” Oilcan distracted the dragon from her computer systems with a flashlight. “But usually it’s hard to tell where one word starts and another ends.”

“…mmmenananannaaaaaaapoooookaaaammmammamamyyyyyyaaanananammmmoooo….” The dragon rumbled while clicking the flashlight on and off, and then dissembled it and sniffed at the batteries.

“Yeah, I can hear that.” Tinker had microphones planted in the offices so she could trigger her computers without a headset. “Sparks, are you active?”

“Yes, boss.” Her office AI answered.

“Filter audio pick up into separate voice prints and put it up on the workshop screen.”

“Okay, boss.”

As she hoped Impatience’s ramblings easily divided out. “Sparks, record this track.” She tapped the bass rumbles of the dragon’s voice. “Convert to phonetics and indicate all pauses and breaks.”

Impatience stuffed the batteries back into the casing, screwed on the lid and tried the switch. When the flashlight didn’t light, the dragon took it back apart and eyed the pieces carefully. Apparently it had spotted the “this way up” diagram stamped on the plastic as it eyed the batteries closely, repacked them into the casing and turned it on. This time it was rewarded with a beam of light. “Huuhuuhuuhuuhuuhuuhuuhuuhuuhuu.”

One word down.

“Okay.” Tinker pulled up the recordings she had made of Turtle Creek and directed them to her largest monitor. “Since I don’t have a clue how I’m suppose to help my mother, let’s see what he has to say about my biggest problem: the Ghostlands.”

The great Westinghouse Bridge had fallen. The Ghostlands had lapped up against the center most support column and toppled it. Two of its four great arching spans now lay in ruins on the valley floor, slowly leeching to blue. The remaining two spans would soon follow.

Wolf gazed down at the ruin, trying to not to let dismay overtake him. “There’s nothing you can do?”

Jewel Tears glared at the valley as if it personally defied her. “Not in time. At the rate it’s expanding, it will involve the main river shortly.”

She meant the Monongahela River, which flowed past the mouth of the Turtle Creek.

“The creek froze solid,” Wolf said. “You don’t think river will freeze?”

“If I understand this correctly, the worlds are mirror images.” Jewel pointed out at the river. “Where there is a river here, there is one on Onihida?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t predict what will happen when the force of the river meets this, but what I fear is that the oni can make use of it. As they are now, the Ghostlands are a deathtrap. The forces are funneling downward, like the pit of ant lion. The river might allow the oni to pass unchecked through the Ghostlands.”

“How soon?”

“Only a few more days.” She turned away from the Ghostlands and him. “Something has to be done. They say your domi can work miracles. Since this is her fault, it would be good for her to fix her mistake.”

Yes, he needed to talk to Tinker. He had faith that once she was given opportunity to study the situation, she would find a solution. He brought a second Hand just so he could have one of the sekasha “baby” along to operate the walkie-talkie.

“Find out where domi is,” Wolf said to Wraith and turned back to Jewel Tears. “I want Stone Clan to keep their distance from my domi. After what happened with the black willow, I do not trust any of you near her.”

Jewel Tears looked away, giving a slight huff of indignation but didn’t deny the implication that they meant Tinker harm.

Wraith came back with unease clear on his face. Wolf bowed his leave taking and headed for his Rolls.

“What is it?” Wolf asked Wraith once they were out of the Stone Clan’s hearing.

“Domi is at the scrap yard. The dragon is there.”

Wolf’s heart leap at the news. “She’s fighting the dragon?”

“No. Apparently, she’s — talking — to it.”

“No, I’m not talking to it.” Tinker said with much disgust in her voice. She smelled of apples, butter and sugar, and her face had mysterious streaks of color paste on it — but otherwise she looked unharmed. “It’s giving me math lessons — and I think my head is going to explode.”

“Math lessons?” There were times he wondered if his English wasn’t as strong as he thought it was.

His domi’s workshop was normally ordered chaos, but it now looked like a storm front had passed through it. The digital wall boards were covered with elaborate designs and fluid pictures. Print outs were tacked to bare walls, extending the boards to each side and up onto the ceiling. A television cycled through pictures of the Ghostlands. Machines either half built, or partially dissembled covered all the table surfaces and the floor was littered with magazines, engine parts, and chewed tires.

The only sign of the dragon itself was its long tail sticking out from behind the worktable, thumping against the floor with a force that shook the entire trailer.

“I think its math.” Tinker tugged at her hair as if she wanted to tear it out. “Whoever said math is the universal language should be hunted down and shot. Or maybe they thought that sentient creatures wouldn’t have the attention span of a gnat.”

“So you’re safe with it?”

Tinker glanced toward Stormsong instead of the dragon for some reason. “I — don’t know. It seems playful as a puppy, but it has sharp teeth — lots of them — in a big mouth.”

Wolf shifted sideways until he could see around the table. Tinker’s nagarou, Oilcan, and the dragon stared at a television screen while they manipulated something in their hands. On the television screen, a small human female in a skimpy red dress fought a tall muscle bound creature with energetic kicks and punches. The fight ended abruptly with the words WINNER flashing on the screen and the female bouncing around cheerfully. Oilcan groaned and slumped to one side.

“He — he learns fast.” Tinker shook her head. “I’ve never met anyone that intimidated me with their intellect before — but I always thought that the person that did would be more —”

“Human?”

Tinker waved her hand, as if trying to sift out a better word, and then nodded. “I suppose that would work. The language is a huge barrier to understanding what’s he’s trying to explain to me.”

“Have you learned anything useful?”

“This was educational.” Tinker caught Wolf’s arm and pulled him to the kitchen. On the counter was an odd sculpture. A rainbow of creamy paste whirled upwards like a tornado with paper plates dividing the various colors. It was supported by a silvery aluminum plate, which had been balanced on a base of soda cans.

The paste was the source of the color streaks on Tinker’s face, and the smell of butter and sugar. Wolf smeared some off her face. “And this is…?”

“Frosting. Long story. Doesn’t matter anymore. This,” Tinker pointed to the structure. “I think this is a model of the Ghostlands. Look he’s sculptured the frosting into a Roy G. Biv spectrum and at each color shift there’s a universe marker — the paper plates. Well — at least I think that’s what they are.”

Tinker took out a camera from her dress pocket, and flipped up the screen. “I filmed it all.” She played a minute of the dragon building the sculpture, rumbling in a low steady tone. “What we need is someone that speaks dragon. But, until then —” she folded the camera back up and stuffed it into her dress pocket. “This is what I think it’s trying to tell me. Look, can you see down into the middle of this? He made a big production of dropping a lug nut down into there, and did a lot of pointing and talking. He took it out and dropped it a couple of times. And then the math started. I think— he’s trying — maybe — to say that my gate is still active.”

“Can you stop the Ghostlands from expanding?”

“If I can figure out a way to remove my gate, yes, I think it might close the Ghostlands completely. What I think is happening is this.” She dragged him to the whiteboard.

Tinker swept her hand across dragon writing and the English words ‘save: yes no’ appeared. She touched the ‘yes’ and the board went white. Drawing a straight horizon line, she turned to him. “This is Turtle Creek before the chaos started. According to Stormsong, when you originally surveyed this area a hundred years ago, there was a fiutana here,” she added a large purple oval under the line. “Now Lord Tomtom talked about protective spells that the oni had cloaking their compound, so I think this is why the oni were based here — which almost might indicate where their other camps are and why you can’t find them.”

Yes, that would explain much. “If the other springs in the area are cloaked, then we know that the oni are using them. Look for what is missing instead of what is there.”

“Huh? Oh, yes, that would work. Now, my gate was here.” She drew in a black circle above the line, and then added a second black circle at the bottom of the board. “And that’s the gate in orbit. I set up a resonance between then.” The resonance was represented by a wavy line connecting the two black circles that ran through the heart of the purple spring oval. “I think what Impatience is telling me is that along this line, a discontinuity emerged, which immediately affected the land under my gate.”

She turned and typed on a keyboard. The television which had been cycling pictures of Turtle Creek stopped on a blur of blue. “This is thermal readings of the discontinuity. It’s hard to see, but this area here.” She tapped a circle at the heart of the screen. “That’s the same size and shape as my gate, lying on its side.”

Tinker turned back to the white board, and drew a series of black circles stacked inside the pool of purple. “See, as it sinks, the area affected by the gate would expand.” She stepped back from the board, gazing at it. “I’m not a hundred percent sure this is an accurate model, but it explains why the effect is growing.”

“Even though the gate in orbit was destroyed?”

“Each gate was designed to operate independently.”

“So if we remove the gate, the discontinuity will heal?”

Tinker sighed. “I don’t know. If I’m right, and we can get the gate out, it will at least stop the Ghostlands from growing.”

Wolf considered what Jewel Tears claimed about the current forces working in the valley. “That would be good enough for now. We need to do something quickly.”

“Well, I’m not getting anything done here.” She picked up various items and slipped them into her pocket. “I can get to work on the retrieval now.”