The Necromancer's House (34 page)

Marina Yaganishna's ears are ringing and her general's cap lies in the snow. The tank is burning, illuminating the maple trunks and the light dusting of snow, vomiting gouts of oily black smoke skyward. A flash of misplaced nostalgia strikes her, but she shakes this off along with the snow on her back and shoulders.

Shooting now at the front of the house.

Pop pop-pop.

“Moroz,” she says.

He appears. Not a lovely, bearded boy anymore, but a man with snow-white hair and the bluish skin of the dead by freezing.

He has found a pair of red polyester track pants.

His bare feet are missing toes.

The Pac-Man shirt persists.

She looks into his white eyes, eyes that look cataracted but are not.

“He will kill the soldiers,” she says. “And then Misha will kill him. Or not. Either way, get into the house while he's doing it.”

Moroz nods, turns to go.

“Wait. Is there a well?”

Moroz tilts his head like a dog.

“A well?”

Moroz considers.

Yes. Shall I freeze it?

“No! Show me where it is.”

Moroz points.

She turns and walks that way, saying, without looking back.

“Make it colder.”

Andrew comes down the stairs with his shillelagh pointed before him.

“Buckler,” he says, and now a concave circle of slightly blurred and bluish air moves before him, the size of a large shield.

They're shooting through the door.

He crouches as he comes down, fitting himself behind the shield.

The shield sparks and hisses where bullets strike it, but this is different from the bullet-turning charm. He has to wield this. It has advantages, though. It stops more than bullets. Which is a good thing because one of them has thrown a grenade—the door blows in, spraying him with high-velocity oak splinters and just a few hooks of metal shrapnel. One of these clips his leg, which had been sticking out.

The buckler stops so much matter that it hisses like water in hot oil, smoke blurring his vision for an instant.

He takes three pennies from the pouch around his neck.

His hands trembling.

He wills them to stop.

One soldier shoots around the door while the burning, black skeleton and two other men charge through.

His shield lights up where bullets skid against it.

He squeezes himself as small as he can behind it.

Dragomirov!

Do you like jazz?

He throws the pennies.

Now all the trapped trumpet-sound comes out at once, blowing the skeleton apart and out the door, concussing one man up against the wall so hard he bites through his tongue, his back snaps, and he turns into a little burlap doll.

Andrew runs into the kitchen, pointing the walking stick behind him.

He shuts the door.

Follow, follow!

Ducks behind the island.

Looks back, making sure the side door behind him is locked and sound.

A boot kicks the other door down.

He pops up, projecting the unsolid shield half over the island, flicks a penny.

Sound erupts from it.

Not enough to kill, but it knocks the two men down and deafens the first, cracks the door frame, blows a still life of pears and a copper bowl off the wall.

(He liked that painting)

He swears.

A Russian swears.

The deafened man goes to his knees.

The other man stands, shoots, ineffectively.

Charges Andrew with bayonet.

A barrel-chested, hairy miner from the Caucasus, he stabs the shield and wrenches it aside.

This breaks the spell.

Fuck!

TO-RO-RO-RO-RO!

The Caucasian is winding up to bayonet Andrew's chest when Andrew opens his mouth very wide and vomits a half dozen tavern darts into the soldier's face at great velocity. Lethal velocity, in fact. Only the ends of the darts are visible, the one that went into the eye gone entirely, its point through the other side of his skull. The man jerks twice and falls, leaving only a darted doll with a smear of blood on the hardwood floor.

Fuckfuckfuck

The second man is coming, shaking his head but coming.

Worse; dead, smoldering, black Dragomirov lurches into view behind him.

Andrew turns and unbolts the side kitchen door.

The soldier and the revenant enter the kitchen.

Follow, follow!

The soldier begins to raise his gun.

No amulet, no shield.

“
Manganese!
” the magus yells.

His rolling drawers and several cabinets slam open.

The air blurs with flying metal.

Something wrenching and awful happens in Andrew's mouth.

He does something between spitting, sneezing, and retching.

The sound of a weird, metallic collision just precedes the rifle shot,

SCRAAANG-BANG!

both painfully and loud in the closed space, but the shot goes high, smashing bowls in a cabinet.

The big miner comes apart, ruined utterly, ruined past description.

The kitchen is an abattoir.

Every knife, fork, cleaver, spoon, pan, pot, and other loose piece of metal in the kitchen shot at the two intruders as if from a cannon. Even a couple of door hinges. Even a faucet handle and a drain sieve.

Andrew tastes blood.

Three of his teeth lost their fillings, but one tooth, top left, preferred to detach from the gum, shot at the things also, tearing his lip on the way out.

There is no time even to spit.

Once-Dragomirov is still coming, still smoking from the tank fire, untroubled by the flea-market-table's worth of implements and fixtures skewering him.

An eight-inch kitchen knife (J. A. Henckels, the flagship of Andrew's cutlery drawer) has wedged in its mouth like a gossip's bit. The wiry remains of a whisk and a mangled colander have married themselves to the architecture of Dragomirov's spine. A paring knife juts rakishly from its skull. A pot removed most of its teeth and a cast-iron skillet relieved it of an arm, but the teeth are mustering again and the arm is already wobbling in the fruit bowl, preparing to reattach itself.

The dead man comes on.

An accident saves the wizard.

Otherwise Andrew would not have gotten the door open.

But he does.

Dragomirov slips on the soggy burlap doll the wrecked soldier morphed into.

Grabs a fistful of Andrew's hair on the way down.

Andrew hits it with his shillelagh.

The magic in it makes it strike twice as hard as the wielder swings it. It busts the dead man's jaw, frees the Henckel.

Andrew grabs this with his free hand.

Cuts the hair held by the skeletal fist.

Opens the door.

Snow flies in.

He runs out the door, blood-spattered, cane and kitchen knife ready.

The skeleton shakes itself like a dog, shedding metalware.

Already re-forming.

Andrew might have run, but he turns now to face it, where it stands silhouetted in the doorway like a Balinese puppet.

Follow.

It takes a decisive step toward Andrew.

“That is not the way you came in, sir,” Andrew pants.

This is my house, and you must exit the same way you entered.

The corpse falls, keeps falling, as if through a hole in the earth.

But there is no hole.

And there is no corpse.

Not here.

The attic.

Snow falling in.

Tracks in the snow from where Michael Rudnick left his post by the front window.

More about him in a moment.

The terrarium with the tiny model of the necromancer's house shivers.

The side door, the kitchen door, opens.

A very small, charred skeletal figure falls from the door.

Falls on the mound of earth beneath the house.

 • • • 

Misha Dragomirov's reanimated corpse stands, with difficulty.

Where did the Thief go?

His lover's daughter woke him, told him to avenge his son.

He cranes his head up, a pair of kitchen scissors falling from his neck.

Is that the house up there?

Something moves near Dragomirov.

Coming across the loose soil.

The size of a dog, a big dog, but not a dog.

The light is poor, but it's reddish.

Something moves over its head.

Antennae?

An insect.

An ant.

A big, big ant.

Something inside Dragomirov's shell is almost afraid.

I am dead, big fucking ant, you cannot kill me!

The ant doesn't seem to understand this.

It bites at him with its mandibles; it is very strong but so is he.

He digs his feet into the soil as best he can, laughing a raspy laugh, holding the mandibles like a bully stopping a boy on his bike.

It arches its abdomen; it wants to sting him.

But it can't!

This is almost fun.

Then he sees the next one.

 • • • 

The imported fire ant.

Solenopsis invicta.

Common to the American South, accidentally brought up in the 1920s on fruit boats from its native South America, it doesn't like cold. But this nest is doing all right in its climate-controlled attic terrarium, periodically fed crickets and moths and chanted over by a magus.

The first worker finds a strange, burnt bug it can't quite get its jaws around or arch its abdomen up to envenom. Their struggles move soil, of course, so the others come. Several hundred others. They don't know what laughter is, so the sound the bug makes as they swarm it means nothing to them. They don't understand Russian, or insults, let alone Russian insults, so what it says about their mothers (not knowing they all have one mother, nor that her promiscuous egg-laying allows little time for the activities he suggests she enjoys) goes unappreciated. The venom has little effect on it, but they find themselves well able to rip it apart. Its pieces try to lurch away from them; they've never experienced that before, but eventually they get all of it down to the late-stage larvae who manage to digest it.

Not much meat on it.

In fact, “Not much meat on me, bastards!” is the last thing it says.

Just the head and a section of spine.

Then that is broken up, too.

And the magic in it sputters and dies.

Moroz goes to the west side of the house, where the two big windows of the family room overlook the woods.

The windows the Thief first saw him from.

Now another face peers at him through one of these.

An old man.

The stone warlock.

Powerful, but less so than the Thief.

He is not permitted to kill the Thief—that honor is for the witch—but this man is fair game.

Let's see how strong you are!

Moroz walks up to the window, knowing how hideous he looks.

The old man just watches him.

Frost has formed on the windowpane.

Moroz writes on this with his finger.

ARE YOU READY

Before he can write the rest, the old man puts a toothpick in his mouth—a toothpick!—and walks away from him. Just walks to the window on the other side of the fireplace.

Moroz becomes one with the snow from which he is made and appears in front of the other window.

TO FREEZE TO DEATH?

he writes, but even as he dots the question mark, the old wizard disappears. Moroz senses something behind him, re-forms himself facing backward. The American boy-host he inhabited dies a little more every time he abuses the body like this, but his work here is nearly done.

It is not the old wizard that he sees.

Now he sees a little stop-motion figure popular in the Soviet Union.

A fuzzy little figure with large ears, supposedly an undocumented tropical forest creature fond of oranges.

How many times had he watched children's television through the window and seen this little thing?

What was its name?

 • • • 

“Cheburashka!” it says in a childish voice, in Russian, eating an orange. “You made it very, very cold,” it says sadly, lowering its head. “But can you really freeze me to death?”

Moroz grins, and the stand of trees behind Cheburashka grows icicles. A squirrel tries to run from its knothole den and cracks as it freezes solid, falls from its branch.

“Very sad,” Cheburashka says. “But that was just a squirrel. You should try harder if you want to be my friend. Do you?” It offers Moroz its stop-motion orange.

Something about this strikes Moroz as familiar, but he never knows which memories are his and which are the street-boy's.

Moroz breathes in.

Breathes out hard.

Frost, snow, and ice shavings blow from his mouth.

The trees get so cold they grow brittle.

Branches fall.

Animals crack and die.

“I guess we can't be friends,” the little creature says sadly, dropping its orange. Now it produces a pipe, lights it with a finger. “This belongs to a crocodile. Gena.
He
is my friend, even if you are not.”

Moroz can't freeze the beast.

But perhaps he can rend it.

First he must stop making the blizzard.

Cheburashka draws on his pipe, which glows an animated glow.

Moroz tries to shut his mouth and stop blowing frost but finds that he can't.

His mouth is stuck open.

The little creature is drawing snow out of him!

As Cheburashka breathes in, the essence of Moroz begins to jet out.

He vomits snow, so much snow that he blankets the side yard.

Still the creature smokes, tittering just a little, quite cheerful.

Streetlights flicker on Willow Fork Road.

The snow falls and falls.

Moroz shudders, almost empty.

No longer blue.

His hair black again.

Mostly boy now, but enough of Moroz remains to hear.

Cheburashka points the stem of its pipe at him, cocking an eyebrow.

Its voice is different now.

It is Stalin's voice.

“You and I are alike in that we both respect our boundaries. You can't harm the wizard. I can't harm the witch. But nobody said a thing about you.”

Moroz recognizes it now.

They have met before.

Moroz says its true name.

Cheburashka draws one more puff from the pipe.

Exhales.

The pipe glows bright and hot in the moppet's mouth.

The shadow of a thrashing squid on the snow behind him.

Moroz is no more.