Invisibility aside, her siblings apparently hadn’t gotten what they were after. “What was in the box — and what are nactka?”
“There were twelve magical devices inside.” Jin took out what looked like a Fabergé egg done on a bowling-ball-size scale. “They are called a nactka. This is the one that your sisters took from the box. The twins could not take the other eleven that day and when they realized how important the contents were, it was too late. The box was gone.”
“What is it?” Tinker pointed at the oddly decorated egg.
“The term is oni; it means ‘trap.’ They were developed on Onihida. These, however, seem as if they were crafted on Elfhome; their esthetics are very elvish. Joy was inside this one.”
“Little Miss Pocket Dragon?” Tinker eyed the egg-like container. Yes, Joy would have to be quite small to fit inside it. “You think there’s eleven more baby dragons inside the other traps?”
“We do not know for sure what are in the other eleven devices but we know that your ancestor referred to the nactka as ‘fully loaded.’ It seems likely that they hold dragons.”
Yes, twelve baby dragons and six siblings warranted an immediate visit in the middle of the night. And perhaps more house insurance.
Tinker was positive, though, that the Dufae Codex said nothing about weird magical egg traps. “Are you sure that what the twins have is the same thing I’m calling the Dufae Codex?”
Jin frowned. “I hadn’t considered…there wasn’t time to verify that. We can determine it later.”
“Okay. Assuming the spell-locked box at the museum was the one that Dufae stole from Iron Mace — where did Iron Mace get twelve baby dragons?”
“I don’t know,” Jin said. “I will try to get the information from Joy. She…She…I’m told that she is quite…difficult to work with. You should be aware that the spell the oni used to transform my people — all of my people in a single transformation — was done using Providence’s body. It was a test run of an even greater spell they had developed that required his soul as well as his body. It is why he asked us to kill him.”
“Oh.” Tinker felt like someone had punched her. Eleven possible world-changing spells all locked into one deadly box. “Stormsong, are you sure the box that we took from the whelping pens wasn’t it?”
“No, the box at the museum was smaller.” She measured it out with her hands. “Such boxes are common in the Easternlands. We traded with humans on Earth for centuries. I thought a traveling merchant must have lost it.”
“This is a picture of the actual box.” Jin pulled a slickie from his bag and flipped the pages until he found the desired picture.
Everyone leaned over the digital magazine to eye the gleaming photo. The box was roughly the size of a footlocker with the locking spell along its top edge. On Earth, the lid would have been sealed at a molecular level. The twins shouldn’t have been able to open it to take anything out — nor could anyone else.
“I believe,” Cloudwalker said slowly, “that I’ve seen this box here in Pittsburgh. Or, at least, pieces of it.”
Everyone stared at him in surprise.
“You have?” Pony asked the question that Tinker couldn’t form.
“While you and domi were being held captive by the oni, a fight broke out in the house of history.” Cloudwalker pointed toward the direction of the Carnegie Museum. Elves didn’t have museums so they didn’t have a word for them; it seemed to be a weird side effect of being immortal. “The humans that killed the river monsters in the…the…the…I don’t remember the word for it. The big round place down by the river. The middle is flat. There are many seats. Thousands of seats.”
“The stadium?” Stormsong prompted while Pony continued to look confused. “The thing that looks like an amphitheater but without a stage?”
“Yes. That. The humans with the big…” Cloudwalker struggled with another English word that didn’t have a direct Elvish equivalent. “Ca — ca — cannon?”
“Cannon?” Tinker shouted. “What river monsters? What were river monsters doing in the stadium? Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”
Cloudwalker spread his hands helplessly. “Because the monsters were already long dead before we could talk with you again?”
“Because there were so many other things to tell you?” Stormsong said.
“Because this is the first that I’ve heard about it?” Pony said. “What river monsters?”
“Massive carp that could walk on land and throw lightning!” Little Egret threw his arms wide open in an attempt to demonstrate either the large size or the throwing of lightning. Tinker wasn’t sure which.
“What? Carp? Like fish?” Tinker asked.
“Yes!” all the sekasha except Pony said.
“Very big fish,” Stormsong added. “Malice-sized.”
“That could throw lightning and walk on land,” Little Egret repeated.
It was oddly comforting to know that she wasn’t responsible for all the weirdness that hit Pittsburgh that summer. Tinker had lost track of how the river monsters related to her six siblings. “What does this have to do with…” What were they talking about? Her sisters being invisible on Earth? No. “The missing box with the baby dragons?”
“The people that killed the river monsters found the box at the house of history,” Cloudwalker said.
“Hal Rogers,” Stormsong supplied a name.
“Who? Wait! Hal Rogers as in Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden? That Hal Rogers? He’s a dangerous maniac! The police all hate him. He sets people on fire!”
“He’s got a new show,” Stormsong said. “Monsters in Our Midst. He’s been very aggressive at educating Pittsburghers about the dangers they’re facing at the hands of the oni. The people who wear blue hats are his fans. Hal’s Heroes.”
Tinker wanted to ask about the hats but didn’t want to derail the conversation even more. Now that Stormsong mentioned it, she realized that she’d been seeing a ton of people out on the streets wearing the same blue hat. “So PB&G was at the museum?”
The conversation screeched to a halt as all of the elves were confused by the initials.
“Yes,” Cloudwalker said once it was clear that they were all discussing the same thing. “I had been delivering a message from the queen, so I arrived just after the fighting broke out.”
Tinker locked down on a confused “What fighting?” because she didn’t want to change the subject again. Obviously, there was much she missed during the summer while being kidnapped by oni and falling off the planet. “You saw this box?”
“Pieces of it. There is a wood shop in the basement of the house of history. We found parts of a spell-locked box that had been cut open. I thought it was odd but the entire building is filled with odd things. They have life-sized dolls that look like humans being attacked by lions. Why would they have that?”
“Stay on target! Stay on target!” Tinker pointed at the fancy egg-thing that Jin claimed to hold the baby dragons. “There was nothing that looked like that?”
“I did not see anything that looked like that,” Cloudwalker said.
Which was a very careful way to say that the eggs could have been at the museum but Cloudwalker didn’t see them. At least the location made sense; Sparrow must have had the New York museum ship the box to its Elfhome counterpart. It would have allowed Sparrow to keep the sekasha with her ignorant of the box’s existence even as she orchestrated its shipment.
“Why would they need to cut the box open?” Tinker had taken days to carefully pick the lock on the box they found at the whelping pens because it was booby-trapped. Cutting that box open would have set off an explosion, destroying the contents and part of Poppymeadows’ enclave. “If it was Iron Mace’s box that Unbounded Brilliance stole, wouldn’t the Skin Clan know the key word to open it?”