Barley picked up a white square plate. “There’s thirty sets of this. I like the simplicity of it but I do wish it had a little more decoration — a band of gold or blue or something to offset the stark white. It will work for now. China never lasts more than a hundred years at an enclave no matter how careful you are with it. Thirty is too few but it is a start.”
“There are some Wind Clan potters here in town,” Guy said. “They make good quality dishes. They normally sell to five-star restaurants on Earth.”
“Five-star?” Barley echoed the English words planted squarely in the otherwise all-Elvish sentence.
“It means that they’re…” Guy glanced to Oilcan for help with his Elvish.
“Of the highest quality,” Oilcan said. “They’re very refined.”
“The potters can make you something to your exact specification.” Guy took out his phone and paged through photos he had stored. “I know when I open up my own restaurant, I’ll have to make do with whatever I can afford but I would love to have my own line of dishes. Something like these.”
He held out his phone showing a picture of a bold, black, square plate with a crescent design along one rim that looked almost like golden brown bark.
“That’s beautiful,” Oilcan said.
“Oh, I have never seen such wonderful plates!” Barley said. “Are they expensive?”
Guy shrugged. “I found the photo on Earth’s internet late at night during Shutdown. Startup happened before I could figure out how much they cost. I kept a picture for reference.”
“They look expensive,” Barley said.
“Something to dream on,” Guy said. “My mom says that to get anywhere, you need to know what direction to head. This picture is a road sign.”
Oilcan wished he had a picture of his future. Lately he seemed to be roaring down a pitch-black road without any signs.
15: SNAKE HUNT
“Even if I wanted to join Usagi’s household, I couldn’t,” Bare Snow whispered in Law’s ear. “Do you think that’s Kajo?”
Law felt like she’d spent the morning crawling through a minefield. Usagi had asked them to join her commune. The discussion with Bare Snow on whether or not they would accept the offer had been filled with a lot of abrupt starts and stops as Law tried to detect and disarm emotional bombs. This one stopped her cold: why couldn’t Bare Snow do it?
Law knew all the reasons she herself wasn’t in love with the idea, but she thought that Bare Snow was overjoyed at the offer. Perhaps the weird hiccups in the conversation weren’t Law’s reservations fighting the logic of it all. They were speaking Elvish, so it wasn’t Bare Snow making a mistake with English. Was Law’s understanding of Elvish at fault? Law considered the statement. No, the word that Bare Snow used definitely meant “couldn’t.”
If Bare Snow was agreeing with her, could Law tell Usagi “thanks, but no thanks”? Should she ignore all the good reasons just because Bare Snow gave her a quick out? Certainly the proposal was a mixed bag of good and bad.
It was easier to focus on Bare Snow’s question about the small masked figure in the valley below.
Law clicked her tongue softly in an elf version of a shrug. “If Yumiko was right about the mask: maybe.”
The woods east of Pittsburgh were crawling with oni. In theory there should be elves too, hunting said oni, but the two obviously weren’t colliding in the virgin ironwood forest.
“Should I kill him?” Bare Snow stripped off her camouflage T-shirt without waiting for an answer. In the dim light, her pale spell tattoo was too faint to pick out against her creamy white skin. The female didn’t seem to own a bra. Did elves not have such things? It always made Law question what she had been told about undergarments.
“It’s not worth the risk,” Law whispered. Focus, woman, focus! Law studied the valley encampment. The oni were breaking camp, taking down a dozen large green Coleman tents. “There’s a hundred or more warriors down there and we don’t even know for sure if that’s him.”
Yumiko only had a drawing of a mask and a vague description of the secret overlord of the oni forces. The person in charge of the encampment in the valley below seemed to fit the bill. He looked like he was only five and a half feet tall. His fearsome mask was lacquered red with black accents. The long fangs, scowling eyes, and sharp horns were gilded with gold leaf. A flowing mane of white horsehair hid even his natural hair color. It looked exactly like the drawing that Yumiko had shown Law.
There was one small problem.
A second oni wearing a nearly identical mask came out of the last tent. It was slightly shorter than the first one but only by two or three inches. They wore matching outfits of elaborate black silk robes with red highlights. Law couldn’t tell which of them was “in charge” even though it was clear that they were the ranking officers of the encampment. Both gestured and pointed and were obeyed by the lesser blood oni.
“Oh, great.” Law scanned the camp. Even if there was only one possible Kajo, she and Bare Snow wouldn’t have survived taking on all the oni in the valley. The warriors were armed with assault rifles and rocket launchers. There were a dozen wargs, muzzled and chained. They were outnumbered and outgunned.
Bare Snow might be able to evade the warriors but not the wargs. Worse, Law wasn’t sure where they were exactly. She normally hunted in the South Hills, near where she’d grown up. East of Pittsburgh, she needed a compass and map to stay on track. The tengu’s holy spaceship in Turtle Creek changed that somewhat. It was a mile-high exclamation point covered with magical dragon runes. It was impossible to miss, even at three miles away.
She believed that they were near Churchill. She would need to take out her map to check but she didn’t want to take her eyes off the oni or Bare Snow.
“It’s possible that neither one of them are Kajo,” Law said to make sure Bare Snow didn’t try a suicide run. She repeated it in Elvish to be sure that the female understood. “Yumiko said that all the tengu familiar with Kajo were killed. She’s working off secondhand reports. It’s possible that Kajo was playing some kind of shell game with the tengu.”
“Shell game?”
Law winced. She’d used the Elvish word for walnut shell as that was what her grandfather used when he taught the game to Law. She’d seen variations of it using bent playing cards. Did elves have playing cards? Law was fairly sure playing three-card monte with the elves was a good way to get killed. Elves hated liars. “It’s a trick to fool people. You pretend to hide something under a walnut shell — like a pea — but secretly you put the pea someplace else. It’s like the game of hide-and-seek that you play with the Bunny children, but instead of actually hiding, the kids left the house while you were counting to one hundred.”
“Why would the children do that?”
“I’m explaining this badly.” Law considered while she watched the tents being packed away. “Kajo always wore a mask when dealing with the tengu. He was hiding something. It might have been that the person under the mask changed; there could have been several fake ‘Kajos’ to serve as decoys. The tengu might have never met the real Kajo.”
“Ah, yes, to foil assassination attempts by the tengu since he didn’t trust them.”
“Something like that.” Law ducked down to think.