“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 change 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.”