“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.”
Sker’ret was up on his hind legs, or some of them, carefully inserting a couple of claws into a cupboard door. “I’ll be glad to help you,” he said. “What’s in here? Is this where you keep the food?”
He pulled the cupboard door open—literally. It came off its hinges, and Sker’ret put his head end into the cupboard, holding the door off to one side as he rummaged around. “What are all these bright-colored things?” he said, taking out packages and jars and cans, holding them up, and staring at them with many stalked eyes.
“Uh, yeah, those are all kinds of food. It’s just that, you want to watch out for the ones in the glass—”
Crash! went two of the jars that Sker’ret was holding in his claws. It became increasingly apparent that Sker’ret did not know his own strength. The shower of broken glass, various kinds of canning juices, and things like asparagus and peas and peaches in a jar, was shortly joined by more leakage from cans that Sker’ret was holding with his other claws. Roshaun and Filif looked on this, fascinated, but neither saying anything. “Oh, I’m sorry, these are very fragile, aren’t they?” Sker’ret said. “Were those supposed to do that?”
“Not exactly,” Dairine said, hoping against hope that she could stop this catastrophe before it got much further along, and get it cleaned up before her dad got home. “Why don’t you let me take care of that, and I’ll just—
Crash! “Oh no,” Sker’ret said, “I am sorry about that.” Several more jars and bottles fell down and either smashed on the counter or bounced off the floor; a few glass jars bounced and then smashed when they came down the second time. Both Filif and Roshaun crowded carefully back out of the way, and looked at Dairine to see what she would do. Dairine let out a long breath, and started carefully across the wet, glass-crunchy floor toward the basement steps, where a mop and broom were kept.
His claws clutched full of the remains of various cans and bottles, Sker’ret looked after Dairine with a number of its eyes. “Where are you going?” he said.
“Well,” Dairine said, “I could do a wizardry, but sometimes a mop makes more sense…”
“What’s a mop?” Filif said.
“It’s a thing we use to clean up the floor if something wet’s gotten on it—”
“To clean it up?” Sker’ret said, sounding shocked. “But we haven’t had anything yet—”
Dairine opened her mouth to say something, and then completely forgot what, as Sker’ret began to eat.
He ate the glass. He ate the cans. He ate the asparagus, and the peas, and the canned tomatoes, and every other foodstuff that had fallen on the floor. He slurped up every bit of liquid. And when he was done, he looked around him, and with his foreclaws, he picked up the torn-off cupboard door, which he had carefully set aside while dealing with the canned goods.