Wen Spencer - Wolf Who Rules

Art wasn't something that Tinker had patience for. She liked computer logic of true or false, knowing if something worked or didn't with a flip of a switch or a turn of a key. She could help Oilcan animate his ogres, but she could never see why the sculpture had to take a certain form, or move in a certain way, or make a certain sound. She couldn't perceive what made one piece "right" despite how many times Oilcan tried to explain it.

It was mid-morning when they drove up the driveway lined with wild lilac bushes. The flatbed was parked in the apple orchard, its bed littered with fallen apples. Across the road, the magic gleamed purple in the shadows of the tractor shed, stuffed full with the barrels.

Tinker had debated bringing two Hands with her. She wanted a small army between her and the dragon, but in the end, she decided that if Oilcan was fine, that most likely she was wrong about the barrels. Certainly, it was a stretch in logic to get from the black willow to the barn.

"Not that there's any real logic involved in this," she complained as she parked the Rolls away from both apples and magic. It had been easier to drive than constantly interrupt her thoughts to give directions. "It would be simpler to believe that the oni drove me stark raving mad than all this dream hocus pocus."

"You are not mad." Pony got out, taking point.

"My mother would have not directed us to 'follow the yellow brick road' if you were only mad." Stormsong kept close to Tinker as they headed for the large barn doors.

Denial, the most misshapen of Oilcan's animated ogres, lurched out of the lilacs. It moaned out its low recording of "nooo, nooo, nooo," as it wrung its crooked arms around its deformed head.

Instantly her guard had all weapons out and leveled at the mechanical sculpture.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Tinker cried. "Don't shoot it!"

"What is it, domi?" Pony kept his machine gun trained on it.

"It's a sculpture," she said.

Denial folded back down, stretching out a third hand stretched to grasp in their direction. The guards backed up, unnerved by the thing as its recording changed to a wordless keening.

"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."