“It does not look like art to me.” Pony reluctantly slung his gun onto his back and motioned to the others to stand down.
“Well,” Tinker admitted, “sometimes it doesn’t seem that much like art to me, either, but that’s what it is.”
She pointed out the motion sensor by the door; Pony had tripped it as he moved ahead of her. “That activates it, though, that’s new. I wonder…”
The big door rolled open, and Oilcan called, “Hey!” in greeting.
“Hey,” she said back. “What’s with Denial?”
“Just using him as a doorbell.” He eyed the guards with their hands still riding their weapons. “Can — can we leave them here? I don’t want them shooting anything by mistake.”
Considering what else he had in the way of art, Tinker didn’t blame him. She held up a hand to her sekasha. “Stay.”
The sekasha peered into the barn. The back door was rolled the full way open, flooding the cluttered floor with light. They didn’t look happy, but stayed put outside while Oilcan rolled the door shut.
“You really have to leave.” Tinker followed him through the clutter. From the looks of it, he’d been camping out here for the last few days. “This might be a total longshot, but its really dangerous here if I’m right. What did you do to your answering machine?”
Oilcan glanced down at the dissembled unit, the parts carefully arrayed on a blank canvas like a piece of art. “Ah, it got taken apart. What are you going to do with the dragon?”
She groaned as she hadn’t considered that far ahead. “Gods if I know! He’s the wizard of Oz.”
“And that means?”
“Riki — Riki wove this whole theory that sounded so right about the dragon being the wizard, but it just hit me — Riki lied and lied about so much. Yeah, so his reasons were good, but he has this history of twisting things to suit his goals.”
Thinking of Riki, she pulled the player out of her pocket. “Here. Riki says he’s sorry.”
As Oilcan stood looking at the player, the oni dragon snaked out of the shadows to stop beside Oilcan. Its eyes gleamed in the dimness, its mane flowing like a bundle of snakes.
“Yanananam mmmoooootaaaa summbaaaa radadada,” the dragon said with a deep breathy voice, the words rumbling against her skin like the purr of a big engine. “Aaaaah huuu ha.”
“Oh shit!” Tinker jerked back, fumbling for the pistol on her hip.
“It’s okay!” Oilcan held up his hands to ward off her action. “He won’t hurt you. He’s friendly.”
“Friendly?”
“Yeah, see?” Oilcan patted the huge head butting up against him. “He scared the shit out of me. But he talked — and — well — I listened.”
She backed up regardless, wanting distance between her and it. “You can understand it?”
“Actually — no.”
“Mmmananan pooooo kaaa.”
It was weird to watch such a huge thing speaking, but there was no mistaking the rumble of syllables and consonants for anything but language.
“So you have no idea what’s it’s saying.”
“No.” Oilcan shrugged with a sheepish grin. “Sorry. But come here, look at this.”
After the surprise of the dragon, Tinker wasn’t sure she wanted to see what else he had to show her. Oilcan walked down the stone steps to be what used to the milking stalls. The dragon glanced back and forth between her and Oilcan. Apparently realizing that they were all to follow Oilcan, it finally bounded after him. Despite its short legs, and ferret-like humping run, its gait remained fluid.
“We’ve been working at communicating,” Oilcan was saying. “We finally resorted to drawing. It’s been — educational.”
In the back was a little dragon nest complete with rumpled blankets, a barrel of drinking water, and a large dog dish of well chewed bones. Drawings covered the walls. She recognized Oilcan’s hand in the ones done in chalk. Scratched into the wall, the dragon’s pictures were fluid and elegant and incomprehensible.
“Educational? Really?” she asked after several minutes of trying to understand the alien pictograms.
“It’s just so different how he sees the world. Here,” he pointed out his map of Pittsburgh, with the two rivers converging to make the Ohio River, and the many skyscrapers and bridges. “After I drew this, he made this.”
Less stylistic than the other dragon drawings, it was a series of wavering lines, some lightly etched and others deeply gouged. She studied it for a moment, keenly aware of the huge monster shifting beside them. It seemed completely random, but she trusted Oilcan’s intelligence. If he said this meant something, it did. If the dragon recognized Oilcan’s Pittsburgh — was this how he saw the city? It was the deep pit on the North side, roughly at the location of Reinholds that triggered the recognition. “He’s drawn the ley lines.”
“Yes. I think it was the magic in the barrels that drew him here.” Oilcan pointed out a blank area of the wall. “And look at this.”
“At wh—?”
The dragon nosed her aside — jolting her heart into a fierce pounding — and raised a long, sharp claw to the wall. In a nerve-grating rasp, it lightly sketched a dot at the center of Turtle Creek and radial lines outward, carefully linking the radials up to existing ley lines. The dragon glanced up at her, making sure she was watching, and then flattened its great paw and smudged away the dot and lines, creating the same blank space.
“There’s no magic.” She whispered.
“Tooloo has always said the dragons can’t exist without magic.” Oilcan absently scratched the dragon’s jaw, getting a deep purr-like rumble from it.
“So as long as we keep him saturated in magic, he’s safe.”
“Yeah.”
Tinker thought of the barrels stacked in the tractor shed. They represent a huge pool of magic, but a leaky one, draining away. “He can’t stay here, then. I have no idea how long the magic will last from the barrels, but it’s an artificial environment. Sooner or later, it’s going to be drained.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Oilcan! This isn’t some stray dog. Look what I found, Grandpa, can I keep it? It didn’t work with the warg puppy.”
“This isn’t a warg, this is an intelligent being that can talk, and create art, and communicate. Look!” He pointed out set of small pictures. “It has a written language!”
“How do you know? That could be — be — anything!”
He gave her an annoyed look. “Did it or did it not just communicate something meaningful to you?”
She sighed. “Yes.”
The sekasha were just going to love this.
“What?” Stormsong asked for about the third time in the row when Tinker updated the sekasha on the current plan.
“We need to move the dragon to the scrap yard. It’s got a strong ley line running through it, so the dragon will stay sentient there. But the flatbed is a double clutch manual transmission, so if none of you can drive manual, then I’m going to have to —”
Stormsong caught her by the hand, dragged her to the side of the barn into the old apple orchard.
“Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing?” Tinker cried.
“What am I doing?” Stormsong snatched up an apple and flung it at Tinker. “What am I doing?”
The apple smacked the barn wall, blossoming into a flower of rotten sweetness unnervingly close to Tinker’s head.
“What fucking part of that don’t you understand?” Tinker shouted at her.
“You — are — too — trusting!” Stormsong flung apples to emphasize her words — one apple per word. They whizzed past Tinker so closely she felt their passage. “And — too — slow — at — putting — up — your — shields.”