*
The house told the assistant about the Vegagerdin representative’s surprise visit long before he actually arrived. The representative’s ride had a very specific call sign, and it told all the intersections and buses when it would be passing moments before it actually passed. Not that there was much need for such a device in their tiny town, but the ride was a special-edition model for municipal and other government use, and the national budget algorithm had found it as a way of filling a gap while in “use it or lose it” mode. The same model was also available in Los Angeles, Bogotá, Seoul, and Mumbai. Their little community was by far the smallest to ever see such a thing: a jagged gray structure invisible to sonar or LIDAR, sharp and dark as the blades of black kyanite Sigrid used to cut etheric cords still knotted in her aura after a particularly bad dream.
It trundled up to Sigrid’s cottage on big, chunky wheels. It had very good manners and alerted the assistant as soon as the representative had shut its door to leave. This allowed the assistant to open the door just as the representative had reached it.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the assistant said. “Welcome.”
“Oh.” The representative’s fist was raised to knock. It opened and closed twice before he hastily dropped the fist to his side. The assistant performed a basic scan: the representative was small for a man of his age, and his BMI would give him problems later. He did not dress like the people the assistant interacted with regularly. His clothes were more expensive than they should have been; when the assistant matched them against online catalogues, he noticed that they had no real lifesaving properties of warmth or dryness. The man obviously did most of his work in the city. “Hello. How—” His mouth snapped shut. This interaction seemed to be rather difficult for him. It was up to the assistant to make him feel more comfortable.
“We are having a lovely day,” the assistant said. “Thank you very much for asking. Will you come in?”
“Oh. Yes. I will. Thank you.”
The assistant opened the door a little farther and welcomed the representative inside. The chicken-foot door hanger, sent all the way from Texas in the United States, scratched softly at the wood as it closed. The representative squinted at it for a moment before abruptly directing his gaze to the floor.
“I will bring Sigrid,” the assistant said.
The representative said nothing. He’d fixed his attention on the ram’s skull over the fireplace.
“This is about the elfstone, isn’t it?” Sigrid asked, when the assistant fetched her.
“Hello. My name is Brynjar Jonsson, and I’m with the Road and Coastal Administration—”
“I know who you represent,” Sigrid told Mr. Jonsson. “Is this about the elfstone? The one that’s causing you so much trouble?”
“Perhaps your guest would like some tea,” the assistant said, and Mr. Jonsson shot him a look of such pure gratitude that the assistant took a moment to upload it to the general database.
When he returned from the kitchen with a tray, Mr. Jonsson sat perched on the best couch, the one Sigrid had swathed in a bearskin from a disciple in Canada. He sat well away from the fur, although his eye kept catching it and he seemed unable to look away from it entirely. He took the tea eagerly, turning it around and around in its saucer, fussing with the milk and sugar, getting it just right. Not for the first time, the assistant wondered what tea tasted like. Sigrid made the blend herself.
“Did you drive here?” she asked.
“What? Yes. I mean, no. Sort of.” Mr. Jonsson laughed ruefully. “It’s outside. The ride. It drove me here. I wasn’t sure, with the roads, so I thought I should take something more specialized, but actually—”
“Good,” Sigrid said. “Drink your tea.”
She did not tell him about the damiana in it. And since it wasn’t a scheduled substance, the assistant wasn’t legally compelled to either. They shared a rare glance at each other. Sigrid looked away first. His eyes could hold a focus indefinitely. Hers were organic, and very old.
“The elfstone,” Sigrid said.
Mr. Jonsson coughed. “Yes. Well. You seem to have heard about the trouble we’ve been having, building the road for the new resort.”
“I heard you lost someone on the road crew,” she said. “I heard your bulldozer flattened him like p?nnuk?kur.”
Mr. Jonsson blanched. “Well, there was an accident, yes. The bulldozer was meant to be autonomous, and it acted up. You know how these things can be.” He cast a quick glance at the assistant. “No offense.”
“But that wasn’t the first incident, was it?” Sigrid asked.
Mr. Jonsson drank more of his tea. His pupils began to dilate. Color returned to his face. “No. Not as such. Although none have been so serious, until now. Just, you know, rainstorms. Windstorms. Hail. People falling ill, permits getting lost, money not coming through. The same little problems as with any project, just . . .”
“Just more of them.” Sigrid made no effort to disguise the smug tone of her voice. “I warned your office, you know. I did.”
“We—I—understand that. That is why we—I—have come to you. We know about your talent. And the fact that you’ve done this before. Spoken with the elves, I mean, ahead of major development projects. We thought perhaps you might go to the site and parlay on our behalf—”
“I will do no such thing,” Sigrid said. “That stone is home to many generations of elves. I cannot ask them to leave.”
Mr. Jonsson’s eyes made a movement that Sigrid’s eyes didn’t catch: a barely restrained eye roll. Suddenly the assistant had to reevaluate the man’s affect. He was not nervous about offending Sigrid or incurring her spiritual wrath, but rather nervous about his behavior being reported to his superiors. He resented this part of his job. His aversion to the animal hides and skulls and spheres of obsidian and labradorite was not fear, it was contempt.
“Your tea is getting cold, Mr. Jonsson,” the assistant said. Mr. Jonsson drank more of it. The assistant wondered if Sigrid had added mushrooms to this particular blend. It would be inconvenient if the man from the Road and Coastal Administration had a bad hallucination in their living room; the assistant might need to call an ambulance, and that would really disrupt their plans for the afternoon. It was Bingo Day at the community center, after all. And Sigrid had such a streak of good luck going.
“If you could just, I don’t know, ask them what they want,” Mr. Jonsson said. “We have to move the stone either way. So if you could just, you know. Ask them if they want an ocean view, or access to public transit, or something like that.”
And then Jonsson made a terrible mistake: he winked.