“What’s shogi?”
“It’s a stupidly complicated game. You’ve got eight different types of pieces that all move differently. Most of the pieces can get promoted and that changes how they can be played. I always lost. I was getting better. Kajo said he didn’t like playing against the Eyes because he always had to lose. While we played, we’d talk about his favorite books.”
Jane had been avoiding this talk because she hadn’t wanted to hear how Kajo sexually assaulted her baby sister. Their daily routine sounded fairly innocuous. There were so many questions she pushed down. She didn’t want Boo to relive the bad. She didn’t really want to hear the answer and not be able to immediately kill Kajo.
What was a safe question? One that Boo could answer? Had to lose. Did that mean he lost on purpose? Boo probably didn’t know the answer to that either.
“What kind of books?” Jane asked to keep the flow going.
“Where the Wild Things Are. Treasure Island. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Phantom Tollbooth. Redwall.”
“Those were his favorite books?” They were all children’s books written in English. It was a weird choice for an oni.
“Kajo grew up on Earth. His people had been trapped there for thousands of years. They knew from the beginning that they needed to move slowly when they invaded Elfhome. Stay hidden. They couldn’t take on all the elves; not with how powerful the domana are. Windwolf proved that during the first Startup when he kicked the Americans’ asses. Every time we moved, it would be dark enough to cloak us but not so late to make people wonder why we were out in the streets. Any house we used was emptied of everything, scrubbed clean, and then burned to the ground. We only stayed in the city when tracks in the snow would betray our movements. For most of the year, we lived deep in the forest.”
Jane nodded, her mind racing. She could see why Boo thought her information was useless. Kajo had been good at covering his movements. Boo had been transformed into a tengu in the spring and given into the care of an underling at Sandcastle. Kajo probably changed camps immediately afterward, nullifying any secrets that Boo had about his current location.
The important fact was that Kajo didn’t stay with the main oni force. He and Boo always lived in a small separate encampment. A couple floors of a hotel. A house. It meant that if the larger camps were found, Kajo remained hidden. It also meant that he probably wasn’t at the camps that Prince True Flame, Windwolf, and the Harbingers were attacking. Law most likely had spotted Kajo, possibly with Boo’s replacement.
It was autumn. If Kajo kept to his pattern, his camp was still hidden deep in the forest. He probably wouldn’t be able to move back into the city for winter. Things had changed. Humans were now aware that the oni existed. Jane’s family had spent the last two months organizing Pittsburghers into a secret militia scattered throughout the city. The oni couldn’t move about as easily as when Pittsburgh was routinely flooded with off-worlders. The humans who had been previously unaware of the danger would be alarmed if strangers suddenly moved into or even through their neighborhood. There would be dangerous questions raised.
“Tell me about the forest camps,” Jane said.
“What about them?”
“Were they north, south, east, or west of Pittsburgh? How far from the Rim were they? How many oni were there? Anything you can tell me is useful.”
Boo looked doubtful. “I know that the main camps were in the east so that they could use the train or the Monongahela River to transport bulk goods beyond the Rim. We normally camped in the west or the south. Our camps would almost always have these stones with spells chiseled into them that were anchored into a strong ley line or a magical spring. They created illusions of an empty forest. People could walk into our camp and not see the buildings or tents or even our guards. It made it a little wonky, though, trying to find the outhouse. There was one time we drove all the way down I-79 to I-70 and then across to the Rim to outside where Wheeling used to be — or at least still is, kind of. Anyhow, we took barges downriver from there to where a small river they called the Muskingum joined the Ohio. It was my favorite camp. They didn’t set up a cloaking spell because we were so far away from Pittsburgh. They could tuck the barges up the Muskingum, out of view of anyone using the Ohio. The ironwoods screened the camp. Kajo had them make us this really big compound that had a stream, and a garden, and a swing and even a treehouse. I felt sad when we left because they always dismantled any camp we set up. I liked the treehouse.”
“How many oni were at that compound?” Jane asked.
Boo cringed, shrugging. “I was never allowed out of our private area.”
“I’m guessing about a hundred,” Jane said to test a theory. “Just to ballpark it.”
Boo made a face. “I suppose it would have been around a hundred warriors when we were in the forest. Kajo always had a full guard while we were out where a pack of saurus might be. They’re not spell-worked, so there’s no controlling them with a monster call. When we were in the city, we would have little more than a dozen people, counting me. Most of them were greater bloods like Kajo. There would always be one of the Eyes with us, usually Danni, but sometimes Adele or Felicie. Kajo did most of his work while we were in the forest, so we would make camp in March and strike it in late October.”
“So the only time that the tengu came to where you might have seen them was in the forest?” Jane said.
Boo nodded. “I don’t think they ever saw me but I’d catch glimpses of them as they flew in and took off.”
Pieces were fitting together; Jane didn’t like the picture that was forming. Kajo kept separate from the main force, sometimes putting as much as a hundred miles between them and himself. He kept hidden at all times, leaving his camp only to oversee something that couldn’t be trusted to an underling. Law had reported seeing Kajo with about a hundred oni breaking camp and heading toward the river. Yumiko said that the male used smoke and mirror tactics. Combining the two, the black willows had to be a distraction. But for whom? Most of the elves were in the east, fighting what they saw as the main oni force. The only human who spotted Kajo was Law. The female forager had been outnumbered a hundred to one. If Kajo had been aware of Law, he could have killed her easily. Jane wouldn’t have been called in if the black willows hadn’t been roaming where they shouldn’t be. The same for the EIA. That left just the tengu.
“My people are spread thin,” Yumiko had said. “So I called in the guardians of the Dahe Hao.”
Was that Kajo’s real goal? To distract the tengu from the Dahe Hao? What would Kajo want with a spaceship? Or was it something other than the ship that he was after? Jane and her team had filmed in Turtle Creek shortly after Tinker escaped from the oni camp that been located inside the old Westinghouse Air Brake factory. It had been a careful tightrope walk of explaining the inexplicable condition of the valley to their viewers without letting out any of the information that the tengu had told Jane. Yumiko had mentioned a cloaking spell, saying it might be the source of the odd freezing blue haze filling the area. It wasn’t until Boo talked about not being able to find the outhouse because of an illusion cast on Kajo’s camps that Jane fully realized the implications. To keep the illusion constantly running and covering the entire mile length of the old Westinghouse Air Brake building would have required a great deal of power.
To cast a spell that was able to transform an entire species of people into another would also need a great deal of power.
Was Kajo looking for a place to use the contents of the box?