Home Improvement: Undead Edition

by Harris, Charlaine

  I brushed some stray cobwebs out of my hair, offering the pixie a respectful nod. “It’s good to be back on the ground.” I didn’t know for sure that the prohibition against giving thanks applied to pixies, but I was trying to be polite, and that meant I wasn’t going to risk it.

  “Now what?” muttered May.

  “I’ll let you know when I figure it out,” I replied. The pixie glared at me. “Sorry! Sorry. We don’t negotiate with pixies very often.”

  He unfolded his arms, chattering rapidly at me.

  I sighed. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand you.”

  The pixie repeated himself, more slowly. He was clearly making an effort to be understood.

  “None of us speak . . . uh, pixie,” I said. “How about this? I’ll try to guess what you’re asking for, and you’ll let me know when I get it right. Is that okay?”

  The pixie nodded.

  “Good enough. I, uh . . . Do you want us to leave?” The pixie didn’t react. “Do you want us to let you leave?” The pixie scowled.

  “Ask him if he wants to know how you’re going to keep your promise,” said Quentin.

  I turned to blink at him. “Good call.” Looking back to the pixie, I asked, “Is that what you want?”

  The pixie nodded again, more vigorously. The motion of the swarm slowed, all their eyes focusing in on me at once. This was clearly important to them . . . and really, I couldn’t blame them. It’s hard for people that small to find places where they can let their guard down—and the longer I spoke to the pixies, the easier it became to think of them as people. I didn’t understand a word he said, but he understood me, and in Faerie, that’s better than you sometimes get.

  “I’m supposed to be in charge here,” I said, slowly. “That means this knowe is mine. I have my own people to protect, and they need to be here if they’re going to receive that protection. Another promise. If you’ll let me claim this place, I will do my best to give you the same protection that I give to them. No one will hurt you here. No one who comes here will be allowed to hurt you. Not on my watch.” The bogies chittered. “That means all of you, as long as you can extend the same courtesy to my subjects. You don’t attack them, and they won’t attack you.”

  The pixie dipped a little lower in the air, glow brightening. Then, abruptly, he turned and zipped out of the room, leaving me staring dumbly at the spot where he’d been.

  “Either you just messed up bad, or . . . actually, I don’t got an or,” said Danny. “Should we be running?”

  “I’m considering it,” I said. “Give it a minute.”

  The four of us stepped closer together as the seconds ticked by, the majority of the pixies still circling. May was indestructible and Danny was tough as a rock; Quentin and I didn’t share those advantages. If the pixies and the bogies decided to attack in earnest, we were going to have problems.

  I was getting ready to suggest we start moving when the pixie returned, clutching a chunk of rose quartz the size of a duck’s egg to his chest. He flew to a stop in front of me, holding out the rock. It glistened, gleaming from within and putting out a silent sound that somehow managed to serve the purpose of a spell’s magical signature. It was the knowe. He was trying to hand me the knowe.

  There was only one response to that offering. “Okay,” I said, and took it.

  Goldengreen shuddered around us again, the motion still feeling very much like a dog trying to shake off a flea. May yelped, staggering backward into Danny, who caught her casually and held her in place with one massive hand. I barely noticed. I was too busy trying to sort through the sensations that were crashing through me, flowing first through the stone, and then—in a moment of transition that was barely a transition at all—through the entire knowe.

  Goldengreen was one of the first knowes opened in San Francisco. Evening didn’t open it. A red-haired woman I didn’t recognize did the opening . . . working in tandem with a blonde woman I did recognize. Amandine. My mother. No wonder the Queen was willing to give the knowe to me. She knew it would talk to me, even if it wouldn’t take me. Fae law says that changelings can’t inherit, but a knowe knows the bloodline that pried it open in the first place. The realization only had a moment to register. Then the shape of the knowe as a whole was slamming into me, sending me to my knees. The stone rolled free of my hand. The images flashing through my head didn’t stop.

  Amandine didn’t stay with the knowe. She helped the red-haired woman open it, and then she left, leaving Goldengreen to grow under a single custodianship. The redhead left, replaced by an unfamiliar Daoine Sidhe who was replaced, in turn, by Evening Winterrose. Her arrival signaled the descent of the knowe. It was thriving before she came, filled with people and with life. All that ended after Evening, and the knowe fell into a long twilight that ended only when she died and it was sealed away, forbidden to Faerie.

  And then the pixies came, and the bogies, and made the knowe their home. It liked them. It liked that it was needed, that it was wanted. For the first time in over a hundred years, Goldengreen had something to protect. That was why it was fighting us. It wanted its inhabitants to be safe.

  I bit my lip, hard enough to draw blood. It was a moment’s work to raise my hand and wipe the blood away, touching it to the floor. The pressure of the memories decreased, even as I felt my connection to the knowe grow stronger. “I promise,” I whispered. “I am not Evening. I promise.”

  There was a momentary pause, as if the knowe were holding its breath. Then two things happened at the same time: The images stopped coming.

  And the lights came on.

  “THAT WAS A nice trick,” said May, sitting next to me on the edge of the broken fountain in the main courtyard. Danny leaned against the wall, while Quentin sat to my other side. It was a comfortable moment, even with all the cleaning that we knew was waiting just ahead.

  The pixies swarmed around us, picking up bits of broken cobblestone and whisking away cobwebs with quick sweeps of their wings. The bogies were nowhere in evidence; probably lurking in the shadows, waiting for someone they could jump out at and terrify. They were going to be waiting for a long time. After the day I’d had, my threshold for terror was very, very high.

  At least the lights that were burning now were powered by magic, and not captive pixies. The pixie-power lights must have been purely decorative. Which didn’t make them any less horrible, but meant we weren’t going to be forced to deal with installing a new lighting system while we were doing everything else.

  “It worked, didn’t it?” I asked. I could still feel Goldengreen at the back of my head, but it was fading quickly. The knowe was willing to talk to me, even willing to tolerate me—that didn’t mean that it was mine. The Queen had given me these lands. The lands themselves were still reserving judgment.

  “Next time, risk somebody else’s neck,” suggested Danny amiably. “Like, I dunno, the Queen’s. Bring her next time.”

  “Yeah, there’s a real life-extender.” I snorted, leaning over to ruffle Quentin’s hair. “Besides, now we have a built-in workforce to get all the crap down from the ceilings.”

  “You’re going to make us clean, aren’t you?” asked Danny.

  “And repair, and replace, and probably paint.” I stood. “Now that we have the doors open, let’s go beg the local nobles to lend us all their Hobs and Bannicks.”

  “I’ll go for beer and pizza,” said May.

  “I’ll drive her,” said Danny.

  Quentin sighed. “I’ll get a mop.”

  “Good call,” I said, and grinned before I started for the nearest exit. The bogies slipped out of the shadows, joining the pixies as they followed me all the way to the door, wings buzzing and legs tapping against the floor. Reclaiming Goldengreen was going to take a lot of work, and a lot of favors from the local hearth-fae community, but it was going to be worth it. Changelings and pixies have at least one thing in common: it’s rare that we have places where we’re safe. Goldengreen was an opportunity to chang
e that.

  With all the time I’ve spent feeling like I was on the outside, looking in, it was going to be nice to finally have a place I could say, with absolute conviction, was my home. The giant horror movie spiders, well . . .

  Those were just a bonus.

  The Path

  S. J. ROZAN

  “The Trent Museum,” I sighed to my friend, the Spirit of the South Mountain, “refuses to return my head.”

  “You are wearing your head.” If mountain spirits can be said to have a weakness, it is this penchant for stating the obvious. “Furthermore, you are a ghost. Even if you desire a second head for reasons you have not explained, the head you speak of, if it has gone off somewhere from which it must be returned, is clearly corporeal. Were it to be returned, you would have no ability to use it.” They also tend to expound at length on any topic before them.

  “It is not, literally, my head,” I clarified. “I speak only out of a sense of attachment, a spiritual obstacle of which I daily struggle to rid myself, now no less than when I lived. The hermit monk Tuo Mo, my most recent incarnation, who died one hundred and three years ago as you might remember—”

  South Mountain Spirit shrugged. Flocks of birds arose squawking from his trees, to settle once again when the tremor subsided. “Time has a different meaning to me,” he said.

  “Yes, of course.” I watched a last edgy bird circle, finally fluttering onto a branch. “In any case, the body of Tuo Mo has returned to dust long since; and that dust (including, of course, the dust that had been the head) has reentered the cycle of existence. The head I mention is that of the Buddha statue in my cave.”

  “Ah, yes. One of the many carved from the sandstone cliff by monks such as yourself? I have always wondered, actually, why Cliff Spirit permitted that.”

  “From reverence for the Buddha, I would imagine.”

  “You have never asked him?”

  “He’s rather forbidding, not approachable like yourself.”

  “And you, even as a ghost, retain the timidity of the little monk you once were.” Sunlight bathed his slopes and a light breeze rustled the trees thereon.

  “I’m glad I provide you with amusement,” I said, attempting a grand air of dignity. The trees danced even more merrily. “But yes.” I deflated. “It is as you say: here in the spirit realm I retain all the flaws I had in my last life as a man. It is quite disheartening.”

  “Never mind about that,” said my friend, who, craggy and precipitous though he may sometimes be, is often also gentle. “We were discussing your head.”

  “The statue’s head,” I said, only too happy to turn away from consideration of my own flaws. “Yes. Well, the cave in which I lived as a hermit monk contains a large carving of the Buddha, created by monks seven centuries ago. From it, shortly before I died, an expedition from the Trent Museum, in New York City, America, removed the head.”

  “Did they? For what reason?” Though once familiar with these events, South Mountain Spirit nevertheless required some prompting of his memory. Spirits of Place are universally better at being remembered than at remembering.

  “Do you not recall their arrival?” I inquired.

  “Vaguely, I do. A loud and unpleasant bunch, with growling vehicles, clanging pots, and boisterous voices, building smoky fires larger than they needed. They came to your caves from the north, however, and did not approach any closer than my foothills, so I did not consider them of consequence. Over the course of millions of years, you understand, one sees so many things.”

  “Yes, I imagine.”

  “In fact, a similar group has arrived at your caves now, I believe? Sometime in the last decade, if I am not mistaken . . .” Mists gathering, he drifted into reverie.

  “Six months ago. You are correct.”

  The mists thinned, stretching apart. “They are different, however, I think. More respectful, surely?”

  “Yes. They have come for another purpose. They are here to restore the caves.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “To make things as they were.”

  “Why would one want things as they were? Or expect them to be so?” My friend gave me an uncomprehending look. Fog, thicker than the mists of a moment since, began to gather at his brow. He is the spirit of an ever-changing mountain, whose trees grow, leaf, and fall, whose waterfalls break rocks from boulders and, washing them into streams, alter their courses. I knew at once this was a concept he would never grasp.

  “It is a notion of men,” I said, an explanation I have often used in conversations since entering the spirit realm. At first I had been astonished to hear myself, not because the phrase is incorrect, but because conversation itself was an activity I, as a man, had hardly been capable of; and explanation or correction, never. Spirits, I have found to my surprise, are much less terrifying than men.

  “Ah, I see,” said South Mountain Spirit, the fog lifting. Humans, with their dissatisfactions, rushings-about, and simultaneous attempts to change some things and prevent others from changing, are inexplicable to most Spirits of Place. Thus South Mountain Spirit accepted this pronouncement, if not as the elucidation he sought, then as the explanation for why such elucidation was not forthcoming. “In any case,” he said, “we were not discussing this new expedition of men. Our subject, as I have had to remind you once already, was the Buddha head.” Spirits of Place, as they are tied to very specific objects of the physical world, can on occasion be doctrinaire.

  “Indeed,” I agreed. “Well, apparently the Emperor of China”—again, the fog began to gather, so I reminded him—“at the time, our secular ruler.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course. Is he no longer?”

  “The Emperor died long ago. Long in human terms, I mean. We are now ruled by”—I knitted my brow, as I do not fully comprehend the meaning of this myself—“the government.”

  “Ah.” Seeing my confusion, South Mountain Spirit said, “Another notion of men?”

  “Precisely.”

  Essentially uninterested in men, he did not request further illumination, but waited for me to continue my tale.

  “The Emperor,” I said, “had, it seems, given permission for the expedition from the Trent Museum, in New York City, America, to remove from our caves whatever items they cared to carry off. This exalted art, the Emperor explained, would be better looked after—and would more strongly redound to the glory of China—in a museum in America than on the walls of a cave in the desert.”

  South Mountain Spirit considered that. “What is a museum?”

  “As far as I understand, though my appreciation of these concepts is poor, it is a building in which people place beautiful things.”

  “For what reason?”

  “To look at, I believe.”

  “As in the case of monks’ caves and temples, as aids to meditation?”

  “I do not believe so, though I can offer no other explanation.”

  “Personally,” he said, as gusts of wind came up and tossed the branches on his slopes, “I have never understood the need for any of it.” A family of deer, startled by the sudden breeze, bounded across a brook. “Are not my forests and rivers beauty enough? The layers of red rock on North Mountain, the pale sands of the desert?” The winds eased. “I apologize. You are here to tell a story. Pray go on. The Emperor, you were saying, permitted the removal of many objects, including this head with which you are now concerned.”

  I shrugged, which had little effect on the wildlife. “Possibly Explorer Trent and his expedition left behind some indication of their gratitude in the Emperor’s coffers; who am I to know? In any case, our monastery, which seven hundred years ago had housed a thousand monks—”

  “I remember those days! You do not, I believe?”

  “No.” It is unlikely I was there in that incarnation. In any case, as with all ghosts, the only incarnation I remember, of the hundreds (or, in the case of one as hapless as I, no doubt thousands) I have lived through, is the most recent.

&nb
sp; “Such chanting,” South Mountain Spirit said joyously, the sun glittering off his watercourses. “Drumming, and bells, and dancing, bright prayer flags snapping in the wind! Some monks made the journey as far as myself, to perform rites and hang prayer flags from tree to tree across my valleys. You used to do that, when Tuo Mo lived. By then you were the only one.”

  “Yes.” I smiled, remembering the three days’ walk from my hermit cave to South Mountain, sandals slapping the desert trail, prayer flags rolled in my monk’s bundle. “It seemed the proper thing to do, though it was a difficult journey. It is easier to visit with you now that I am incorporeal.”

  South Mountain Spirit, who has always been incorporeal but who cannot, of course, leave South Mountain, was here faced with yet another concept he did not understand. He began to brood. I have learned not to approach him when thick clouds are gathering, so I waited. As usual, his mood changed rapidly. “Continue,” he instructed after a few minutes, his brow clearing. “I am interested.”

  “I’m gratified to hear it,” I told him. “As I say, the monastery had once been large and bustling; but by the time I came to live there, it was greatly reduced in size, and when the expedition arrived, we were eight small monks. We chanted and prayed while they chopped and pried. Attachment to the things of this world, our abbot daily reminded us, is one of the chief impediments on the spiritual path. We watched them remove our statues and altar cloths, and tried to think of it as a blessing, an opportunity to practice detachment.”

  “Were you successful?”

  “Those who were spiritually mature did succeed, to varying degrees. In fact I hear our abbot went on to become a bodhisattva. But I, sadly, was not far enough along the path to be able to use this lesson. I was unable to rid myself of a strong attachment to these objects, and a powerful desire to see them remain. This attachment created in me a great sense of loss when the objects were taken away. None more so than the Buddha head.”