Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

“Did you touch my foot?”

“Just playing little piggies.”

“I don’t like that.”

“It seemed the gentlest way to wake you.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“Is that a command?”

“Yes. Are you going to insist on protocol?”

“Not this time. It seems a modest enough request. Note to myself: no touching Master Andrew’s sleeping piggies. Check. Anything else?”

Andrew sits up, gathering the sheet around him.

“Tell me why you’re here.”

“What, here?” it says, and now the Katzenjammer Kid is sitting in bed next to Andrew, hands on lap, looking like a child who wants to be read a story. It gives off cold like a ham just out of the freezer. It has chosen to be heavy—it depresses the bed.

Andrew forces himself not to recoil.

“Go back to the chair and remain there until I dismiss you.”

It blinks its big cartoon eyes twice.

Andrew draws a breath to begin the formal command, but Ichabod winks out and winks back in on the leather chair, sitting lotus-style.

“Well?”

“Well what?” it says in an incongruously masculine bass.

“Tell me why you’re here.”

“Can’t I just visit? I get lonely in my lair. There’s not a great deal to do there.”

“Then go back where you came from.”

“And miss the rest of your life? I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Andrew sighs anxiously.

It speaks again, using its fallback voice, petulant intellectual.

“I’m worried about you, Captain. Master. Master Andrew Commander.”

“Tell me why.”

“You know why.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s time.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Only because you don’t want to know. But you need to know.”

“Just say what you have to say and go.”

“You might have let me destroy your rusalka. When I offered.”

“I don’t want her destroyed.”

“But now it’s too late.”

“For what?”

“That Russian she drowned was an extraordinary specimen.”

“Fucking tell me.”

At Andrew’s flash of anger, the cartoon child flushes red as though someone had poured blood into it and begins to flicker.

Becomes a writhing squid for a split second, then reverts to Katzenjammer Kid.

“Some people see God’s hand in coincidence. Are you one of these?”

Andrew seethes.

“Just…”

It cuts him off.

“Ask your rusalka for the dog’s collar.”

“Why?”

“You will want to research its owner.”

“There are two kinds of users,” Andrew tells Anneke. “Plodders and intuitives. Also called disciples and heirs.”

Anneke is walking a penny around in the palm of her hand. Moving small objects is almost always how it starts; Andrew has told her she has to find something she can move and move it three times a day for at least ten minutes.

She favors the penny.

They are sitting in her inside studio, the one she uses when the weather won’t allow work al fresco. Today, through the sliding glass door, it rains in indecisive spits and sputters, bedewing the greenery outside, greenery all the more dazzling when overtopped by gray.

All manner of pottery in various stages of completion crowds Anneke’s little workshop; ten whitish-gray mugs rest upside down on a board over a plastic tub of clay. Cedar Heights clay, to be exact, its yellow letters emblazoned on a stack of red sacks upon which a clay-bedabbed tower of DVD cases leans, as if eager to consummate, toward the DVD player and television on high. Everything leans and balances in here. Everything is smeared, dabbed, or stippled with clay, white or red.

Her remote controls, one for TV, one for DVD player, have been wrapped in plastic, likewise clay-smudged and fingerprinted.

More inverted mugs, and a smattering of coffee cups and saucers, congregate on a card table, along with a tall vase topped by a precarious-looking round wooden board. A quarantaine of rosettes dries atop this board, the same rosettes that, when fitted with brass pins and painted Tudor red, will adorn the vests and doublets of the acting cast of the Renaissance festival to distinguish them from unpaid costumed enthusiasts. That is to say, when a drunken Landsknecht in rather convincing armor barfs on your lady fair, the lack of said rosette upon his breast will mark this as an unsanctioned event and indemnify both the festival and the troupe of professional improvisers that animate its lanes.

“Which kind am I?” she says.

Meaning plodder or intuitive.

“A bit of both, like me,” he says. “But more intuitive, I think.”

Her brow wrinkles, and although she doesn’t look away from the exercise in her palm, it’s clear she wants more explanation.

“An intuitive just does it, doesn’t need as many implements, can do small things almost immediately. Like what you’re doing. An intuitive is more luminous, must in fact be luminous from the start.”

“And a planner?”

“Plodder.”

“Plodder.”

“They hate that word. And some of them are a bit contemptful and jealous toward intuitives.”

“Sounds like you’re a bit contemptful of them. Plodder is an ugly word. What do they call themselves?”

“ Disciples is the preferred term when they differentiate, but they don’t differentiate the same way. They see themselves as disciplined and those who don’t spend their lives bent over books as lazy. Thing is, they’re all geniuses. The plodders. To come at magic without luminosity, you have to be smart enough to work for Apple or IBM or crack codes for the CIA, and a few of them do. Their books are much more complex, more like rocket science; more glyphs and formulas, though one of them would say formulae . They think their way into belief, crack the code of magic and understanding with brainpower. They aren’t all luminous at the start, but they get there; they make a fire with sticks where naturals already have a fire. But the payoff is that they can do really big, astounding things. Think of it as learning a language with books and tapes versus being born in that country. Nonluminous plodders are like non-native speakers. But English was Nabokov’s second language, and he wrote Lolita . Or was it his third language? He spoke French, too.”

“Nabokov, huh? Was that a jab?”

“At who?”

She raises an eyebrow, keeps moving the shard.

“Oh, right.”

I forgot you’re a sex offender.

“Not consciously.”

Anneke is officially a witch, albeit a novice. The first time she jiggled that penny, Andrew felt the small tingle of magic waking up. She collapsed and sobbed afterward, but that was not unusual. He had a similarly emotive reaction the first time he spun a pop top. The first spell is usually some light levitation. Small magic, admittedly, a mustard seed from which some build mountains.

He leans forward just a little so the black iron conical stove behind her appears to top her head like a witch’s hat. Sandalwood incense leaks smoke behind her. He leans the other way so it appears to come from her nose.

“What are you doing?” she says, her concentration split, Abraham Lincoln dead again on dull copper in her hand.

“Sorry. Nothing.”

She tosses the penny into a broken mug full of coins, lights a cigarette, gives him one. He totters the lighter out of her hand, levitates it into his.

“Show-off. Can you light it?”

“It’s a more precise motion, takes more strength.”

“Yes, but can you?”

“Burns more gas.”

She squints her eyes at him.

“Magic burns fuel. Continuous spells burn fuel continuously. Spikes in magic use can disrupt those spells. Think of an outlet, energy surges.”