Диана Дуэйн - Wizard's Holiday

“Uh—” Dairine paused. She’d translated the English word into the Speech a little loosely, but it struck her as a good idea, on second thought, not to get into the minutiae of floristry any more clearly right now…especially since the image suddenly rose before her mind of what her dad actually did with the flowers in his shop. Yeah, my dad takes the corpses of things that grow in the ground and then arranges them in tasteful designs. She could just hear herself telling Filif that.

“He does landscaping, too,” she said hurriedly, having to search around a little for the closest word the Speech had for that. There were several possibilities, but she didn’t think the word for terraforming was going to be appropriate here, so she selected a word that implied a smaller scale of operations.

“Oh, an architect,” Filif said. “That’s a good thing to do for people!”

“Yes…” Dairine said, wishing she’d had a little more time to think about the implications of having a sentient vegetable in the house. Well, I was the one who couldn’t wait to have them here, she thought. Now they’re here, and I’m just going to have to deal with it.

“Come on in,” Dairine said, “and we’ll get you guys settled. Does anyone want some dinner?”

“Dinner?” Filif said.

“Things to eat,” Dairine said, as they walked toward the house. “Dinner is the name of the meal we eat, starting around this time of day.”

“Definitely!” Sker’ret said. “What have you got?”

“All kinds of things,” Dairine said. “We’ll see if we can’t find you something that will suit your tastes…not to mention your physiologies. This—” she said, indicating the kitchen—is where we do our cooking,” Dairine said. Roshaun simply looked around again with that uninterested, downhis-nose expression, but Filif and Sker’ret turned all around, staring at everything in fascination. “Cooking?” Filif said.

“What’s that?”

“What do you eat that needs to be cooked?” Sker’ret said.

“I can see this is going to take some explaining,” Dairine said. “It’s partly a physiology thing for my people, and partly cultural. But, look, before we get into that, you’re going to want to set up your personal worldgates and your pup tents. The pup tents…” She thought about that for a moment. “Sometimes, this time of year, the weather can be unpredictable. Probably it’s going to be more convenient for you if you put the pup tents down in the basement.”

“Where’s that?” Sker’ret said.

“Down the stairs here,” Dairine said. “Right by where we came in. See that door? That’s the one. Down there—”

Dairine led the way down the stairs. Sker’ret flowed down them past her; Dairine looked over her shoulder to see how Filif was managing. She couldn’t see what his roots were doing through the decency field, but he seemed to be having no trouble negotiating the stairs. “Is this okay for you?” Dairine said.

Filif made a little hissing noise that Dairine realized was a chuckle. “I go up and down cliffs all the time at home,” he said. “This is a lot less trouble. What’s this place for? What’s down here?”

“Uh,” Dairine said, and then was tempted to laugh. “Nearly everything.”

It was true enough. Dairine couldn’t remember when the basement had last been cleaned out. The washing machine and clothes dryer were down here, and so was the furnace for the house’s central heating. Both of those were off on the left side of the stairs, toward the front of the house. But the rest of the basement … it was a farrago of old lawn furniture, indoor furniture that had been demoted to the basement and never thrown out, a decrepit bicycle or two, cardboard boxes full of old clothes and paperback books that were meant to go to the local thrift store, an old broken chest freezer, in which Dairine’s mom had once at tempted to raise earthworms…

Dairine found herself wondering whether she should bother being embarrassed about the mess, since at least one of her guests seemed to have no idea what a basement was for. She glanced at Roshaun, who was now looking around with an expression that was more difficult to read.

“A storage area,” Roshaun said.

It was the first thing he’d said that hadn’t instantly sounded obnoxious. “Sort of,” Dairine said. “Though it’s gotten a little…cluttered.”

“Has it?” Roshaun said. “I wouldn’t be an expert in clutter.”

Dairine sighed. “I wish I weren’t,” she said. “Anyway”—she indicated the bare cinder-block wall that was the south wall of the basement—”since you need a matter substrate to deploy your gates on, that should do. And you can leave the pup-tent accesses down here as well.”

For a few moments, they were all busy getting out the prepackaged wizardries. Sker’ret appeared to reach into one of the front segments of his body to pull out the two little tangles of light that Dairine knew they would all be carrying. Roshaun reached into an interior pocket of his ornate over-robe for his own pup-tent access, hanging it on the air and turning away from it, unconcerned. Filif, though, didn’t do anything that Dairine could see…but a moment later, his pup-tent access was hanging

in the air next to Roshaun’s, and from a single branch, which he’d pushed out a little past the main bulk of his greenery, there depended a little strip of darkness.

Dairine watched as he flung it at the concrete wall. There the darkness clung and ran down the wall, the black patch widening as it went. After a few seconds there was a roughly triangular-shaped patch of darkness in the concrete wall, the size of Filif’s body. Light fell into that darkness and was completely absorbed.

Sker’ret was doing the same with his own customized worldgate. He reared up with it held in his front mandibles and plastered it against the gray cement of the wall. That darkness, too, ran down to create a lower, more archlike shape, black as a cutout piece of night. Standing in front of it, Sker’ret thrust a front claw into it; the claw vanished up to the second joint.

Roshaun turned away, heading back up the steps. “Aren’t you going to set up your gate?” Dairine said.

“It can wait awhile,” Roshaun said. “I’m in no hurry.”

He was halfway up the stairs already, glinting golden in silhouette from the sunlight still coming in through the screen door. Dairine raised her eyebrows, and said to the other two, “Come on, and I’ll give you the grand tour of the house.”

“There’s more?” Filif said, sounding surprised.

“Sure,” Dairine said. “I’ll show you.”

By the time she and the other two were up the stairs, Roshaun had already opened the oven door, and was looking in. “If this is a food preparation area,” he said, “it can’t be meant to service very many people.”

“It’s not,” Dairine said. “There are only three of us here.”

“I know about that,” Sker’ret said. “There’s you, and your sire, and your sister.” He said both the relationship words as if they were strange new alien concepts.

Yes, Dairine thought. And if you knew it, why doesn’t Roshaun know it? “That’s right,” Dairine said.

Roshaun closed the oven door and looked around him, still with that faintly fancier-than-thou attitude, but also with a slight air of confusion. “Even so,” he said, looking into the dining room as if he expected to see something there and didn’t see it, “surely you don’t prepare your food yourselves?”

“Uh, sure we do,” Dairine said. Did I miss something about this guy’s profile? she thought. I should go back and have another look, because he’s really behaving strangely… “My sister’s better at it that I am, but I should be able to manage something.”