Jin started to dance forward again, faster, but still in the odd stuttering poses. This time the poses made more sense. Each could have been a photograph of Impatience as the little dragon moved without the fluidity of life.
Tinker realized she had covered her mouth in horror and her hand was still pressed tight to her mouth. For one horrific moment, she thought that the skin might belong to Impatience, but the color was wrong: a deep gold instead of blood red. This was Providence? Or at least the skin of the tengu’s guardian spirit? What had happened to him? What kind of monster skinned a massively intelligent being? And why in hell had the tengu brought his skin to her? The elves’ insistence on burning their dead seemed suddenly sane and pure.
Jin the dragon danced in a wide circle around Tinker and her Hand. The big drum throbbed like a massive heartbeat against her skin as the flutes shrieked. The dragon head dipped and rose and turned in a parody of Impatience’s curious investigation of his surroundings. Empty eyes took in the night sky, the rooftops crowded with silent tengu, the honor guard kneeling on the ground, the little lantern bearers. Louder and faster the music rushed toward a climax.
A wind suddenly blasted through the trees, and Tinker felt magic surge up as Jin suddenly froze and the music instantly stopped.
The dragon head had been turned away from her.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose as it slowly turned to look at her with gleaming eyes. The mane that had laid down Jin’s back rose, crackling with power.
“Tinker haenanan.” The voice was too deep, too gravelly, too loud to be Jin’s. “Manamana daaaaa sobadadada.”
“Princess Tinker,” Riki murmured in Elvish from his bowed position. “Our great guardian Providence greets you.”
This was entirely too creepy.
“You never told me that he was dead,” Tinker whispered in English.
Riki winced and gave a slight warning shake of his head. Providence, apparently, could understand English fine; the dragon laughed. Its breath blasted warm over her, smelling like wind after a rainstorm. His words rolled over her, seemingly unending. Jin had told her once that dragons were long-winded and indirect and trying to hurry them was considered impolite.
“It is the folly of youth,” Riki translated even as Providence spoke. “Ignorant of great pain and death, the young believe that they are above harm. We moved through the worlds, following our whims, believing nothing could hurt us. But we were wrong. Like all things, it was only a matter of time.
“I was not the first to fall. The earliest ones were caught fast by their bodies, their minds free to seek out help. They bore stories of a growing evil, covetous of our powers, which sought to take them for themselves. This evil rendered down our helpless brothers, tearing them asunder and gifting their slaves with tattered pieces of our souls.
“Still, we did not understand our danger. We simply put this world under edict and left it to its own fate. We felt it was not our place to act, as it was not the world we were born to. But then the evil branched out to Earth, like a growing cancer, and this time we attempted to check its spread. We searched out bridges to Onihida, the next world in harmony with this one, and eliminated them. To our horror, we soon realized that we were too late. All we had done was seal the evil on Onihida.”
It sounded like her theory was right. “So the greater bloods are elves?”
“This evil has had many names across many worlds. We did not witness the start of their rise. We do not know from whence they came nor what they were at the birth. They still seek what they have always sought — to become gods. They want what we have by natural right. They grow more and more powerful, piece by stolen piece.”
Sparrow had claimed that the Skin Clan had been one step below gods. She had claimed that the elves were stagnating. She had wanted to go back to the old ways, so the elves could once again “advance.”
“Long I have watched over my tengu,” Riki/Providence said. “It is my shame that I am the cause of their misery — for the evil came searching for me and caught my body and laid siege to my mind. I asked of the tengu to commit the ultimate of blasphemy, to slay their own god to free me from my captors. As punishment for that deed, they were merged with crows and yet left bound to earth.”
“But the greater bloods were here first, on Elfhome, as elves?”
Providence nodded his great head. “They gave your father’s people our intelligence. They gave your mother’s people our sight. They gave the warriors at your back our morality.”
“Eons have come to a balance point on this moment, like great rocks pressing on fractures of the Earth. The time is at hand for pressure to cause a shift and all the worlds to be rewritten — not only this world, but all the worlds in harmony with it.”
That didn’t sound good. “What’s going to happen?”
Providence gazed down at her with gleaming eyes. “All is at hand for the evil to achieve their goal.”
27: ON TRACK
Tommy was starting to think he was wrong. With Spot tucked behind him on his hoverbike, he’d followed the railroad tracks out for mind-numbing hours. Beyond the Rim, the tracks were the only sign of civilization. They cut through a virgin forest of towering ironwood trees. On either side of the iron rails were spell lights to keep down the ambient level of magic that would otherwise snare and tangle on the metal. Beyond the graveled embankments, he could pick out wards on stone posts, to keep everything from black willows to rabbits from wandering onto the tracks. Still, every few miles there was a massive skeleton of a saurus that had managed to blunder into the path of the train anyhow. For the first time, the massive axe-like nose on the Elfhome engines made sense to Tommy.
There wasn’t, however, a single sign of the oni.
Hoverbikes had amazing gas mileage since half their power came from magic. He’d filled his tank and strapped on a extra can behind Spot, but he was nearing the point where he would have to turn around or not be able to get his hoverbike all the way back to Pittsburgh.
Spot beat on his shoulder and pointed behind them.
Tommy skidded to a stop and looked back, the hoverbike rumbling loudly in the forest silence. They were running alongside a shallow river, the train tracks cut into the shoulder of a hill above the flood plain.
“Here?”
Spot didn’t answer, but his nose was working, trying to catch whatever elusive scent had made him stop Tommy.
Tommy turned the hoverbike around and slowly made his way back toward Pittsburgh, eyeing the landscape closely. The oni had been careful, but years of use had left small, indelible marks on the landscape. He hadn’t noticed them at fifty miles per hour, but at a crawl he could pick them out. The rocky embankment was bare of vegetation all the way down to the river’s edge. On the far side of the shallow water, there was a break in the brush, too wide to be a deer trail.
Tommy pulled up against the cliff, just in case a train came through, and shut down his hoverbike to conserve gas. The forest quiet pressed in on them.
Spot swung down off the hoverbike and pressed nose to soil.
“Is it the same group?” Tommy checked his pistol to make sure it was loaded, not that a dozen shots would help much if they were jumped by an entire platoon.
On hands and knees, Spot crisscrossed the embankment sniffing and then nodded.
“Do they still have the elf female?”
Spot nodded again.
“Is the kitsune with them?”
Spot shook his head, making his long ears flap.