Elfhome

“Ah! Look!” She locked the spell again and put another paper in place. “Two, nine, five, one, four, one, point.” She held out the still blank paper. “Nothing!” She put it in place again. “Three.” The first glyph appeared. “It only reacts to the correct phoneme when it’s spoken in correct order. Each glyph as it’s unlocked gives off a minuscule amount of magic in order to activate the next section of the spell. The paper transcribes the glyph — Oh, I think I know how they build the distance voices.” She frowned at the paper. “But how do they make the paper?”

“That is a Stone Clan secret,” Windwolf said.

“Figures.” The mad scientist suggested other secrets that the Stone Clan might have. “Do they have distant voices here in Pittsburgh?”

“I assume they do but at this moment, I don’t know. I can ask Ginger Wine. She will know.”

Tinker considered that possibility that Earth Son had dealt directly with Yutakajodo and frowned as the logic went neatly circular. “Oh that’s ugly.”

“What is?” Windwolf asked.

“What if the reason Earth Son offered to sponsor anyone that could get to Pittsburgh was to guarantee a steady stream of elves that no one would miss?”

Windwolf’s face went cold. “Earth Son was sacrificing his own people?”

“These kids started arriving weeks ago. Earth Son died last week. Why didn’t he make arrangements for his people to get safely to Ginger Wine’s? Pittsburgh is a strange and dangerous place. He didn’t talk to you about it. He couldn’t have told True Flame, because the Wyverns didn’t know anything. He didn’t even tell his own Hand.”

Windwolf started to pace. “It is dangerous to assume it was him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s safely dead. There is still Forest Moss to consider. He may or may not be mad and he was held prisoner by the oni, and then conveniently escaped, leading them back to Earth. He was the one that opened the door.”

#

Deeming the woodshed already half-ruined, they moved the chest to it for her attempt to unlock it. Elvish had thirty-eight phonemes, so she rigged her datapad to speak each and then check to see there had been a reaction in the paper. After that it was simply reprogramming one of her hacking programs to use Elvish phonemes instead of numbers and the English alphabet. She set up a remote camera and watched from a safe distance. Even using her datapad, it took the entire morning to pick through the lock. Windwolf slept for two hours and left again.

Shortly after lunch, lock cracked open but otherwise it was all slightly anti-climactic.

They slid the lid off and a pair of laedin guards took it off someplace. Pony checked the chest for bombs and poisonous snakes and midget ninjas.

Tinker frowned at the contents. There were stacks of used spell papers. “Great, more puzzles to work out.”

She lifted them out and carried them to the dining room to spread out on the one bright table. The spells scrolled down the left side of tissue-thin paper with such identical precision that they had to have been printed. She lifted two up to the light, aligning the edges of the paper, to check. The spells started and ended in the same exact points. “These were printed on a printer.” Smeared across the page were odd blurs of color. “They look like DNA scans.”

“D-N-A?” Pony asked.

“It’s — it’s stuff I don’t know much about.” She admitted. “Well, my grandfather said when dealing with things outside of your field, go to an expert.”

14: Monster Popsicles

“I thought you said that black willow saplings were non-ambulatory,” Tinker grumbled. The one-foot tall seedlings were zipping around Lain’s high walled nursery bed like mice on crack. They were cute in a very ugly way. Their trunks thickened into a wrinkled old man “face” and then their branches splayed out like a head of mad hair. They looked like little miniature Albert Einsteins racing blindly about the box.

It was a lot easier to focus on the saplings than how badly she missed the ordered serenity of Lain’s house. Her earliest memories were filled with the smell of fresh dirt and bruised greens.

Tinker studied Lain out the corner of her eye. Lain was a head taller than Tinker ever hoped to be with strong shoulders and arms from decades of relying on her crutches to move around. Her eyes were a pale blue-gray and her hair been gray as long as Tinker could remember. Tinker could see nothing of herself in her aunt. It was like her father’s side of the family had won every chromosomal flip of the coin; Tinker was dusky skinned, dark haired and dark eyed, small nosed and chesty. Not that it was all that surprising. The Skin Clan apparently had made sure that the genes that they wanted were extremely dominant.

How much different would her life been if she’d looked more like Lain? Would she have guessed then that Lain was her aunt?