If she got out of this, she had to smack Tooloo a good one. Obviously when the half-elf taught her Elvish, any approximate English word would work, to hell with confusion that other meanings of the English word might cause.
"Domi, you swore not only on your honor but on the honor of your house. For an elf, there is no stronger oath."
Yeah, that was why she used it. She wanted to scream. What an irrational mess. "I'm not really an elf! I'm a human with funny ears. I didn't know what Windwolf intended with the spell. I'm not even sure why Windwolf made me this way. If you love someone, don't you take them as they are?"
"Domi, I am young for an elf, but I am over a hundred. I grew up in a large city in the Easternlands. Many elves live there, but in a hundred years, one meets most of them. And in all that time, I have never met anyone like you. Not a single person, having met you, has questioned Windwolf's desire to prolong your life. You blaze like a star. You don't seem to see that, but then you surround yourself with people nearly as bright as yourself. You raise people up to your heights. Even if Windwolf did not love you, he would not want to see your brilliance put out."
She burned in embarrassment. "Me? Blaze?"
"From your wit to your confidence to your compassion, you are an amazing person."
"Windwolf barely knew me when he proposed."
"After living so many years, if you're wise, you learn your own heart. You know when you meet someone that 'this person I can be friends with, or 'this person I can build a friendship with—it will be difficult work—but it may be very sound, or 'this person I will never be friends with. There are times, though, where it seems like magic; you look at a person and your soul opens up and recognizes a true love. Windwolf looked at you and believed you are one he could live forever with. And in some ways, I am the same."
She looked at him. "What?"
He dropped to one knee and took her hand. "Domi, do you think I would pledge my life to you, be willing to die for you, if I did not in some way, love you?"
"You love me?" she repeated, stunned.
"You are my domi. And in all ways, you have proved the worth of my decision. You have protected me, as I have protected you. A holding is like a marriage, where trust runs deep. And in only a few days, I knew that to be beholden to you would be a good thing."
That threw her into a whirlwind of emotions, but the door opened behind Pony, saving her from discovering what dangerous thing might arise from that chaos. A gale force of alarm blasted through her, scouring away everything else.
There was an entire squad of oni warriors with Riki to escort her and Pony back to the workshop. Ironwood timbers sat stacked just inside the side door, which was padlocked shut again. A crew of humans sat waiting. They were Asians in blue jeans, T-shirts, and work boots.
Tinker checked in confusion. "Who are they?"
"They're the carpenters to make the frame out of the ironwood," Riki explained. "I thought since you designed the framework yesterday, that you'd want to get started on building it. We've got a tight deadline."
"Wait, isn't this like your ultra-secret hideout? What the fuck are they doing here? Did you kidnap them all? Are you going to kill them when they're done?"
Riki blinked and glanced again at the carpenters. "Oh, no, they're not humans. They're oni permanently disguised as humans, sort of like how the yap dogs were those big monster things. We had to immigrate them into Pittsburgh under Chinese visas."
Tinker thought of the sprawling Chinatown on the Northside. "Oh shit, don't tell me all the Chinese are oni."
"Okay." Riki walked away.
She was growing sure that Riki had told her one truth—a gate had only recently opened from Earth to Onihida. Too many little things were pointing at it: the throwaway comments about Earth-born oni, the carpenter's obvious awkwardness with the most basic of power tools, the famine-obsessed cook, the brown rice which turned out to be a luxury item not served to the carpenters, to their dismay. The list grew the entire morning. When she believed she was on Onihida, she hadn't paid attention—that she was no longer on Elfhome had been proof enough for her. Now she couldn't stop wondering about it.
She had delegated building the framework to Riki so she could concentrate on limiting the veil effect and making it the primary function of the new gate. Her biggest fear was she'd only swap the dimensional side effect with the jump capabilities of the gate and accidentally send Pittsburgh to Alpha Centauri. An hour of running models reassured her that if she did, it would be a very small chunk, most likely only the oni compound itself. Small loss there.
Her mind, however, kept trotting back to the oni's door to Onihida. Riki had said it was in an inconvenient spot; obviously it was located outside of the U.S., or the Chinese visas wouldn't be needed. Certainly, if the two doors were on opposite sides of the planet, it could be called inconvenient.
She jerked to a halt. Luckily only Pony noticed.
"What is it?"
"I think I know where their stupid door is," she murmured, wheeling her chair away from the drafting table to her desktop screen and calling up a world map. "I just can't believe no one's noticed before now."
Like all the information on the gate, she had the location where the gate was in geosynchronous orbit over the Earth's equator. She found the point and zoomed in. "It's so simple. Pittsburgh is on Elfhome because the gate projects the veil effect down through the Earth, where the magnetic core bends it, kind of like a prism bends light, thus hitting Pittsburgh on the other side of the planet."
Only partially under the gate was a tiny island surrounded by ocean. She laughed. "Of all the dumb luck, a few more feet and their gate would have been totally in open water."
Pony peered at the island for several minutes before saying, "I don't understand. How can this open to Onihida, and this," he pointed to the other side of the world, "open to Elfhome?"
"That's the simple part. The Earth core is acting as a lens."
"Pardon?"
She closed the incriminating map and opened a scratch file. "Look, here's Earth with the core in the center. This side is the China Sea, and the other side, up here, is Pittsburgh. The gate orbits over the sea. The veil effect comes down a cylindrical shape, but the core acts like a lens. That means the veil is 'flipped. " Seeing Pony's blank look, "You see things because light comes down and reflects off it. So if you have a tree, the light comes from the sun, hits the trees, and reflects to your eye."
He nodded. "Yes, I know this."
"But if you hold a glass lens up between you and the tree, the light is bent by the lens. The top of the tree is bent to the bottom, and the bottom is bent to the top, so the image is flipped."
Pony pointed to the tree. "Onihida." And tapped the upside-down image. "Elfhome."
"Yes. That simple. For twenty years, every Shutdown and Startup, that tropical island has been going to Onihida and back, and no one has noticed."
"Or noticed and the oni killed them."
"Yes, that too."
Pony pointed then to the gate in orbit. "Whatever you do—build the oni a gate or not—means little while that exists. That is the true prison door hanging open."
The carpenters tried to quit after dinner, but she tracked Riki down in the ocean of sawdust with shoals of massive timbers and littered with the flotsam of cut ends.
"Tell them that they can't leave," she said.
"They've been working for like ten hours."
"They can work until they drop," Tinker growled. "Tell them to get back to work."
"They're tired."