Jane swore as she realized he was right; they’d painted themselves into a corner.
“Pft!” Hal waved the concern aside. “We save the tengu for last and bury it in misinformation. Who could blame us for getting it wrong?”
“No, no, if we can’t do the truth, we’re not doing it.” Jane said. “We have three weeks to dig up dirt on other more important things like this Lord Tomtom and Kajo and the Eyes.”
Yumiko shook her head. “You won’t be able to find out anything about them. The only people who know about them are those loyal to them and the tengu. The oni will know that you’ve somehow won the tengu’s trust and are too dangerous to live.”
“We have three weeks. We’ll keep our ears open. All of us.” She pointed at Geoffrey and Alton. “You two talk often to elves. We need sources to get the real truth of what is going on. Windwolf requested royal troops. When will they show up? How many are coming? What does it mean for humans? Will the Wind Clan stay in control or will that change?”
“How do elves fit in as beasts?” Guy asked. “Isn’t the point of Monsters in Our Midst to cover monsters?”
Jane glared at her littlest brother. Her family had to stop being right all the time.
“Airships,” Nigel said. “The royal troops have to come to Pittsburgh somehow. They will need to travel either by airship or train. No one has ever done an in depth story on the gossamers. Presumably they’ve been bioengineered like the namazu. How do they fly? What do they eat? Where did they come from? How long do they live?”
Jane pointed her finger at Nigel. “Perfect! We should write this down. We can also cover the train. Maybe we could even get special permission to ride to the East Coast. No one has video of the elf holdings at the other end of the line. Three hundred miles of wilderness that no one goes out into and then the port that no one has ever seen.” Jane pointed at Marc. “What’s happening with the EIA?”
Marc looked confused. “All the networks have already covered Maynard asking Earth for more troops.”
“That’s brilliant!” Nigel cried. “We could interview the oni that the EIA have imprisoned! It would be wonderful for Chased by Monsters too! A whole third race that no one on Earth has ever seen before.”
Jane paused to take notes. Maybe they hadn’t painted themselves into a corner.
An hour later, they’d talked through two months of shows. By then both the EIA reinforcements and the royal troops would have arrived, hopefully bringing new stories with them. Lemon-Lime wasn’t mentioned again. Sprinkled all through the notes were nuggets of information that Joey, Boo and Yumiko added but couldn’t be used.
“Second show should be the disguised oni,” Jane said. “And how harmless the … what was the spell called?”
“Biatau,” Alton said.
“No, that means any spell written on a piece of paper.” Geoffrey said. “What I’m using on the river qualifies as a biatau.”
“Whatever,” Jane said. “Close enough for Pittsburgh use. People here give directions via landmarks that aren’t there anymore. We should let our viewers know that the biatau that the elves are using to find oni are harmless to people.”
Joey was curled up on her lap, making writing notes difficult. He yawned deeply.
“It is time for us to go,” Yumiko said.
The tengu female carried Joey out to their car. The boy was nearly asleep, head on her shoulder. He cracked open his eyes, waved sleepily, and closed his eyes again.
Taggart waited until the engine had faded into the distance before saying, “Nigel, what else haven’t you told us about Lemon-Lime?”
“This will take a while. Let us put a kettle on.”
Jane didn’t want alcohol fueling the conversation with Hal and her little brothers present. After the last twenty-four hours, though, she really wished she could opt for something stronger than tea. Too many secrets. Too many unknown angles. Too many lives on the line.
She would have liked to shoo away her family but she couldn’t order her mother around. Once her mother dug in her heels, Jane wouldn’t be able to budge her brothers. Jane did warn them all to keep the following conversation secret.
“I’m very sorry, lad,” Nigel said to Taggart. “I’m sorry that I didn’t trust you with this. I was hoping that Lemon-Lime merely let their imagination run wild. Certainly their videos seemed to indicate that they were prone to flights of fancy, until all the shards of truth fell into place. It makes me wonder about Queen Soulful Ember’s mental state.”
“I need to see these videos sometime.” Jane said.
“Yes, you must!” Nigel said. “They’re brilliant. I have them all on my tablet. I can show them to you!”
“What else haven’t you told us?” Taggart said calmly.
“Here, this is easier to show you.” Nigel took out his tablet computer. For a moment, Jane thought Nigel was going to show them the cartoons, as he turned on her biggest screen television and linked his tablet to it. “Sometime ago, an anthropologist returning from Elfhome came upon a startling discovery. Many of the museums on Earth had in their collections artwork created by elves. These items weren’t recently added pieces but mothballed antiquities whose original was unknown. The initial piece was a vase given to Thomas Jefferson after he finished Monticello in 1809. The anthropologist set up a crowd- sourced program that had curators around the world rechecking their inventories to find similar works. Hundreds were found, all of clearly elfin design. Many were ancient but none were later than the mid-1700s. Knowing now that the elves had traveled between Elfhome and Earth for thousands of years and that they stopped doing so at the start of the Oni War, the reason for the age of the items become clear.”
Nigel was cycling through pages copied from the American Museum of Natural History’s website. “I’m not sure if this was a fully human organized endeavor or if it was the oni trying to find something they’d lost. However it started, the end result was this.” Nigel stopped on a large block of wood with spell runes around the upper edge.
“A spell locked box!” Geoffrey shouted with surprise and excitement. He leapt up to eye it closely. “Can you make it bigger? I want to see the lock.”
“A what?” Jane couldn’t see anything that looked like a lock or a lid on the block of wood.
“It’s a box that is locked with a spell,” Geoffrey said. “I can’t make them. Not even my teacher knows how to make them. The box itself is simple; it’s basically a hollow piece of ironwood. It’s the locking spell that’s insanely difficult. Somehow they embed a verbal code phrase into the lock. It’s kind of like ‘open sesame’ of the old fairy tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. If you say the correct words, the locking spell triggers a secondary loop that seals or unseals the binding on the lid. They’re the ultimate cool thing to do with ironwood but no one in the Westernlands can make them. The only one I’ve seen is the safe at the enclave and it’s heavily guarded. I can’t believe elves would take one to Earth; you can only get them open with magic.”
“The museum didn’t know what it was,” Nigel said. “They have it listed simply as a decorated block of wood. Lemon-Lime claimed it belonged to an elf that had been trapped on Earth and later was killed in the insanity of the French Revolution. As I said, I couldn’t be sure what they told me was truth and what was flights of fancy. The important part of this box is what’s inside.” Nigel flicked to a picture of an odd, elaborately decorated egg. “Lemon-Lime believes that it contains eleven of these devices that imprison little dragons like the cake-eating darling. The problem is that the museum returned the box to the elves via Sparrow.”