They sat in the car, its cooling engine ticking loudly in the silence.
Tinker stared at the Open sign in window of the store’s front door. Tooloo kept random hours as she worked both her store and her farm alone. She was religious about flipping the sign to Closed when she wasn’t in the building. It was swaying slightly. Even as Tinker watched, the sign came to a stop.
If Tooloo knew that Tinker was coming with five sekasha in tow, she wasn’t hiding. She had closed up her store to keep out other customers until Tinker arrived, and then flipped the sign as if to welcome her in. Maybe. Assuming that Tooloo was that good at seeing the future.
“Domi?” Pony spoke for all the sekasha who were all looking at her.
Was it worth getting out? Tinker had a ton of questions for Tooloo but would the female answer any of them? Was this a futile exercise? Or was the “Open” sign an indication that Tooloo was finally willing to talk?
Tinker wasn’t going to find out sitting in the car.
The bell above the door jangled as Pony went through ahead of Tinker.
Tooloo’s always seemed impossibly big on the inside. It wasn’t readily apparent from the outside but the female had built a hodgepodge of additions that also served to connect her store to nearby abandoned buildings. It had overhead lights but Tooloo rarely turned them on, preferring the sunlight that streamed through the glass block windows. Display shelves and clothing racks and antique furniture created an endless dim maze filled with junk that Tooloo had collected over decades, if not centuries.
Cloudwalker, Rainlily, and Little Egret spread out to search for hidden assassins, leaving Stormsong and Pony to guard over Tinker.
“Wood sprites,” Tooloo called from the big room in the back of the store that served as her living quarters. “They never have much common sense but they never lack for courage.”
Wood sprites! Tinker growled, pushing Pony aside to charge in the direction of the voice. Damn the old elf. The female had called her “wood sprite” all her life without explaining what it truly meant. Tooloo had known full well that Forge was still alive and grieving over his lost son, unaware that he had great-great-great-great-grandchildren.
Tinker paused at the threshold into the back room. The polished cherrywood planks glimmered with magic. She’d forgotten about the ley line running through Tooloo’s home. It had been invisible to her until she became a domana. She’d had nothing to compare it with when she had visited Tooloo just days after her transformation into an elf. Now that she had more experience with sensing magic, she realized that the old elf had camped on a fiutana. It wasn’t as powerful as the one at Reinhold’s, but it beat everything else that Tinker had seen in the last few months.
Tooloo was sitting in one of her two wing-backed chairs. Her big rooster, Box, stood in the other. Between them was a small chess table with pieces arrayed across the board. For all the world, it was like Tinker was interrupting an game. She knew, though, that Tooloo disliked chess with a passion and that none of the chickens were normally allowed in the house, not even Box. The female had staged the scene — but what was it supposed to mean? Tinker couldn’t guess. That dealing with Tinker was like playing chess with a chicken?
Box pecked at crumbs that had been sprinkled on the chess table to ensure his participation in the tableau.
Tinker clamped down on the questions that wanted to pour out of her. She might get only one real answer out of Tooloo, so it needed to be the right one. “Do you have—” No, no, Tooloo could claim to have the copy and then refuse to give it to her. “I need the digital copy of the Dufae Codex that you gave to Esme.”
“You have all you need,” Tooloo said. “I’ve made sure of that. You’re just wasting time, running around like a headless chicken. The hours are ticking down to minutes.”
“No, I don’t!” Tinker shouted, losing hold of the anger she’d been struggling to keep in. “Grandpa edited my copy. I didn’t know anything about the box or the nactka or the baby dragons or what the oni plan to do with them. I know that you know that I know that you know…” Tinker got lost in her sentence. “I haven’t known anything from the start and you’ve known that I haven’t all along.”
“You never listened when I warned you in the past.” Tooloo gave Box a little push toward the open door. “Shoo! I’m done with you for now.”
“Bok caw!” Box resisted to peck up two more crumbs and then turned his head sideways to eye the tabletop closely.
“You’re wasting time here,” Tooloo repeated, although it was difficult to tell if she was talking to Box or Tinker. Perhaps she was addressing them both. “I know you’re clever; you can figure this out without me showing you how the pieces are arrayed in this deadly game and reminding you how they move.”
She was definitely talking to Tinker.
Tinker chased the rooster off the chair and sat down. She eyed the chessboard warily. All the games she had ever played with Tooloo had ended in tears of frustration. Not because Tinker was bad at the game — she beat any other adult she ever played — but because Tooloo would “cheat” by having all the pieces — Tinker’s and her own — take on human personalities. Pawns would desert the game out of fear. Queens would fall in love with knights and run off with them. Bishops would assassinate their own kings. Chaos would reign.
Tooloo wasn’t some random crazy old elf but the most powerful oracle ever born to the elves. She had spent centuries carefully carrying out some kind of detailed plot. She had carefully set up this display. Why? What did it mean? Did it mean anything at all?
The board was turned so that Tinker seemed to be assigned black, and thus the second to move. The pieces weren’t all chessmen. At a casual glance, it would seem that Tooloo had just substituted random things for missing pieces. Tinker’s king was a miniature bottle of Heinz ketchup. A Superman mini-action-figure stood in for one of her bishops. Her rooks were miniature chicken figurines. All of Tinker’s pawns were Minnie and Mickey Mouse statues. Tooloo’s queen, one of her bishops, and four of her pawns were plastic monkeys in a variety of cute poses.
The pieces were arranged in the classic Queen’s Gambit, with white moving one of its monkey pawns to D4. Black mirrored the move, blocking any further advance. White continued the classic opening with a second monkey to C4, which black had captured. The arrangement of the pieces on the chessboard would seem like just random noise except Esme had called her half brothers “Flying Monkeys Four and Five.” Wouldn’t that make Chloe “Flying Monkey Six”? Who were all the other monkeys? Could the Heinz bottle be Pittsburgh itself? Were the Disney mice supposed to be her little sisters? And why all the chickens? Were all the changed pieces some kind of silent code that Tinker should already know?
“Bok caw!” Box complained, staring up at Tinker from the floor.
“I don’t understand,” Tinker said. “You may think you’ve told me everything but-but-but I don’t always listen!”
Tooloo laughed bitterly at the truth of the statement.