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, the lock cracked open, but otherwise it was all slightly anticlimactic.
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 sunlit table. The spells scrolled down the left side of tissue-thin papers 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 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 of 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 had been gray for 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?
Lain seemed willing to totally ignore their fight and everything that followed. “I said the saplings that I observed were non-ambulatory. After I was able to study the mature black willow, I realized that the level of magic altered the plant’s activity level. This bed is on a ley line.”
A weak ley line meandered through the back corner of Lain’s greenhouse. When Tinker was growing up, it was the corner where her radio-controlled cars would suddenly run amuck. As a domana, she could now sense the flow of magic as a slight trickle of power over her toes, like she was standing in a shallow stream of warm water.
While Tinker could understand how magic could influence the saplings’ movements, she wasn’t sure about accelerated growth. When she last saw Lain, she had been culling seedpods. “Did you grow these from seeds?”
“No, I transplanted them from a very magic-weak area to test my theory.”
Tinker leaned down to catch one. She wanted to have a closer look at their feet. “I didn’t think plants could move so fast.”
“Careful.” Lain blocked Tinker’s outstretched hand with the tip of her crutch just as Pony caught Tinker by the shoulder and pulled her backward.
“They bite,” Lain said in English as Pony murmured in Elvish, “Domi, they can bite.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Tinker’s shadow seemed to have attracted the saplings’ attention; they gathered against the wall in front of her and scrambled wildly at the smooth surface. It was creepy and funny at the same time.
“When the saplings are en masse like this, they act like a school of piranha.” Lain seemed inordinately pleased at that. She was probably wallowing in the joy of alien biology. Lain had thought her career as xenobiologist ended with the shuttle explosion that crippled her; Earth’s space agencies only tapped the most physically fit for extraterrestrial missions. When Pittsburgh had been accidentally transported to Elfhome, though, Lain had gained a second chance to study life on another planet. “They tore a large groundhog apart in a matter of minutes and swallowed even the bones whole.”
The rust-colored splashes on the nursery walls took on ominous meaning. “You fed them a live groundhog?”
“Not intentionally. The stupid thing burrowed into the nursery.” Lain pointed out a mound of disturbed dirt near one corner. “So far, when Earth’s flora and fauna meet Elfhome’s, Elfhome’s come out the winner. Magic seems to raise the whole ‘survival of the fittest’ to a higher level. Just consider the elves themselves. They’re taller, stronger, and immortal. If we could use magic to bioengineer—”
“You can study how magic changes plants.” Stormsong was the only one of Tinker’s sekasha fluent in English, thus the only one following the conversation. “But you must not try to use what you learn. That type of magic is forbidden.”
“Forbidden?” Lain looked pointedly toward Tinker, who had been human up to a few months ago and was now undeniably elf.
“There are exceptions, but they are few and strictly controlled,” Stormsong said. “Nature did not make us this way. The Skin Clan enslaved us and treated us like animals. They bred us for desired traits and slaughtered any infant that didn’t meet their standards.”
“Yeah, spell-working — bioengineering using magic — is a major no-no.” Tinker waved a warning to Lain to back off the subject. The Skin Clan had set out to create the perfect beings in the sekasha to act as their bodyguards. While they wildly succeeded, the perfection worked against them. The sekasha were morally horrified by their makers and wiped them out.
“For a long time, spell-working was completely forbidden,” Tinker explained. “That’s the importance of Tempered Steel, the sekasha monk that they make such a big to-do over during the Harvest Faire.” While she was growing up, the story competed with the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving; every Harvest Faire featured a cute little puppet show and an odd fixation on keva beans. Only after becoming an elf did she realize all the little nuances of the story that she’d missed. “Wheat blight was creating a massive famine until Tempered Steel successfully argued for special allowances for spell-working.”
What she didn’t realize as a child was the fact that despite the domana-caste being “the lords” of the elves, it was the sekasha that had the final say in all matters. Tempered Steel hadn’t gone to the elf king but to the sekasha monasteries of all the clans to argue his case. Being sekasha, his argument had been backed by serious sword skills. In the puppet show, he would defeat the monastery’s champion before uttering his famous line of “Evil lies in the heart of elves, not in magic.” In the end, it was the sekasha that decided that spell-working would be allowed and created the guidelines.