The bridge was the Westinghouse Bridge, which meant the oni base was the old Westinghouse Electric Airbrake plant. By blind luck she had gone in the right direction, because the Rim cut through just feet north of the plant. The erratic path of the Monongahela River and the Rim effectively isolated this small slice of Pittsburgh. The elfin forest deeply encroached on the area, slowly whittling it down. Last she'd heard, something had killed and eaten the last human inhabitants; now she wondered how much the oni had had to do with that.
No matter; now she knew where she was, she knew where to go for help. She sold scrap to the converted USX steel mill just downriver. The mini mill operated twenty-four hours a day, melting down old steel to reforge it to slabs which were sent upriver via barge to the rolling mill at Dravosburg. It was less than three miles. Unfortunately, most of the steelworkers now lived across the river, where miles of transplanted Pittsburgh buffered them from Elfhome wilderness, but there were plenty of bars.
Sticking to the water's edge would be slow, and considering the black willows and jumpfishes, far from safe. She decided to take a risk and follow the street.
She heard the car engine and saw the headlights running on the power lines overhead moments before the car swept into view. She had ducked back into the shadows, and then recognized the car. It was one of Windwolf's Rolls-Royces.
"Hey!" she cried, stepping into the light. "Stop!"
The car squealed to a stop and the driver's door flung open. Surprisingly, it was Sparrow who got out. The female was in mourning black, with her pale hair simply braided. It was the most unadorned that Tinker had ever seen her. "Tinker? What are you doing here?"
"Escaping!" Tinker laughed, crossing to touch the marvelous, beautiful car. "Is Windwolf with you? Pony?"
"It's in the middle of night," Sparrow said. "They were searching the river for the last two days. I believe they're sleeping now. How did you get away?"
"With this!" Tinker proudly held out her homemade stun baton.
"That tiny thing?" Sparrow held out her hand. "What is it?"
Without thinking, Tinker handed the weapon to Sparrow. "It's a stun baton. You just press against someone, hit the trigger and the person is stunned."
"Like this?" Sparrow pointed the baton toward her, thumb on the trigger.
"Careful." Tinker reached to take it back.
Sparrow pressed the tip into Tinker's outreached hand.
The pain was instant and intense, and she started to fall as all her muscles spasmed.
Sparrow caught her. "Ah, yes, how clever of you. I must tell Tomtom to keep a closer eye on you."
By the time she recovered, Sparrow had her bound and inside the car.
"Are you mad? Why are you working with them?"
"Sometimes the best tool is a very big stick."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"I'm using the oni to fix what is wrong," Sparrow said. "I'm going to take things back to the way they should be."
"How should they be?"
"If you repeat a lie long enough it doesn't become a truth, but everyone will act like it has. I'm sure you've been told how evil the Skin Clan was and how the domana nobly dispatched them. The truth is that the Skin Clan took our race from one step above apes and made them one step below gods. As we were when the Skin Clan toppled, we still are. Under the domana we're stagnating. It's time to go back to the old ways."
"How could you do this to your honor?"
Sparrow gave a slight laugh. "Honor is nothing but convenient ropes that the domana use to bind the lower castes helpless. They are slave lords with invisible chains."
"How can you say that? They made you one of them."
"They've made a mockery of the dau. I should have undergone the same transformation as you, to be wholly domana, but that would have weakened their power base. So they call me domana, and expect the lower castes to bow to me, but everyone knows the truth. I'm no more domana than I was at birth."
"You're going to destroy your people because the lower castes never groveled to you? The domana are evil because they wouldn't make you one of them?"
Sparrow stopped the car to look down at her. "I can kill you. Doing this now is convenient, but if it proves too annoying, I can easily wait another hundred years for my chance. And so can the oni."
Tinker shrank away from the cold, impartial stare, barely able to breathe.
"Good." Sparrow started the car. "You really must start thinking like an elf. Look at the long-term future."
Like she had one.
Tinker found no comfort that Sparrow, after several minutes of silence, felt the need to justify her actions with, "My case only illustrated the hypocrisy of the domana; even when they lift up one of the lower castes, they still suppress us."
15: Whipping Boy
The back door of the Rolls opened and an oni warrior, face painted for war, gazed down at her—bound hand and foot—as Sparrow murmured something in the Oni tongue. The warrior grunted, took out a whistle, and blew a single long note that jumped from shrill to inaudible. Somewhere close by, small dogs broke into excited barking.
Sparrow said something about Tomawaritomo, and the warrior pointed off into the darkness. She walked away without looking back.
The warrior reached into the Rolls with huge gnarled hands and lifted Tinker out, passing her like a hissing kitten to another guard. Oni warriors were emerging out of the night, faces painted and heavily armed. Apparently her escape had been noticed, and the oni had been on the hunt, now called back by the silent whistle.
Without the kitsune's deception, the airbrake plant was a collection of massive, old buildings, heavy with the sense of otherworldliness where men did the works of gods and sneered at the concept of magic. Yet rising up in the moonlight beyond the great buildings was the wild primal forest of Elfhome, and all around Tinker, smelling like wet dogs, were the brutish oni warriors.
Tinker was carried into one of the mile-long buildings. The first section was a garage, holding a host of hoverbikes and cars; Riki's motorcycle sat to one side, as singular as the tengu. The second section was a kennel, filled with steel cages. Many of the cages held yapping little pug dogs. In one cage was a muzzled warg, its glowing eyes lighting its corner with icy rage, its bulk filling the cage.
Beyond was empty warehouse. A shallow, narrow channel cut down the center of the vast room; oily water flowed in the cement drain. On one side was the bare skeleton of a freight elevator. There was something disturbingly familiar about the space. They passed a dark stain of old blood on the floor, and there, in the dust on the floor, were her bootprints and Riki's footprints, where he had held her still and made her watch the deboning that first morning. This was the true appearance of the courtyard garden with the gazebo.
At the far end, they caught up with Sparrow. The elf female was coming to a stop beside an oni male. Riki knelt on the ground in front of the male, head bowed until his forehead nearly touched the dusty floor. To one side, the wizened-dwarf torturer sharpened his boning knives.
"I caught her before she could do harm," Sparrow was saying to the oni. The guard dropped Tinker onto the ground, knocking the breath out of her. "Really, Lord Tomawaritomo, I had hoped you could contain her more than three days."