Elfhome (Tinker) by Spencer Wen

Author:Spencer, Wen [Spencer, Wen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2012-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

19: FOR THE WIN

Tommy and his cousins stormed the garage of Team Providence first. The building was completely empty of everything, even dust.

“We just not let them race!” Syn said as Bingo sniffed around the room, trying to find a scent.

Bingo shook his head. “They waited until the Post Gazette listed the teams. We provided the list after the teams all paid the entrance fee. The elves would see that as a contractual promise—”

“Fuck the elves.” Tommy snarled. “Okay, so to hit all of us at once, there had to be at least twenty of them. Were any of them part of Team Providence?”

His cousins shook their heads.

“Thirty tengu. We only need one. One little bird to sing.”

* * *

The tengu had at one time been humans who lost their way onto Onihida through natural gateways. Gathered into one mountain tribe, they were conquered by an oni greater blood, who merged the survivors with the crows feeding on the dead. Typical oni stupidity—use what was at hand and not worry about the consequences. Thus the tengu were clever with languages, were attracted to bright and shiny things, and tended to flock together against their enemies. Like Tommy, the tengu had thrown in with the elves during the last battle and won their limited freedom.

The Four and Twenty was the tengu bar in town. On a Friday night, it was crowded with tengu. Wading into it would have been an invitation for a full-out war, with a good possibility that the tengu they wanted was not even in the crowd.

Tommy didn’t have his father’s talent. Lord Tomtom’s ability to pass an army invisibly through a crowd was the reason his father had been chosen to oversee the invasion of Elfhome. Tommy couldn’t completely mask a moving object from multiple watchers. With stage props, dark lighting, and concentration, though, he could pass as someone else in a crowded space.

He tore up one of his T-shirts to match the backless style favored by the tengu. With matte black paint, they painted a close approximation to the spell that was tattooed onto the back of every tengu. His black hair needed no work, but he wore a hat pulled low, to cover the fact his nose wasn’t a large hooked beak.

He startled Bingo at the door on his way out.

“Tommy?” Bingo sniffed a few times to verify his scent. “Why Riki?”

“He has some influence, so I’m going to use it. Besides, I can nail him cold.” They had worked with Riki during the summer, serving as a go-between as Riki spied for the oni. In the confusion following Lord Tomtom’s death, Riki managed to free his baby cousin and break free of the oni. Ironically, it had given Tommy the courage to rebel.

“How are you going to know he’s not in the Four and Twenty already?”

“You’re going to sniff around the outside first. Still remember his scent?”

“Yeah, I can do that.”

* * *

Four and Twenty was in the Strip District, giving Tommy reason to suspect that the tengu village was north of Pittsburgh.

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