Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

You can’t begin to guess my game.

She thinks it is time.

She moves to the side of the boat, wiggles come hither with her finger.

He leans down.

Tickles her nose with his beard.

She giggles.

Stars behind him now.

The planet faintly red, must be Mars.

The moon past half full.

He puts his lips to hers.

Cold.

Colder than hers.

She withdraws, looking at him.

“Who are you?” she says. “You do seem familiar.”

“I am your lover,” he says.

“You’re not Nikolai. You’re not the boy I jumped for.”

“No. I am your new lover.”

“Are you dead?” she says.

“Very much alive.”

“Your name?”

“Moroz.”

Frost?

He shows her his index finger.

Looks at her with great significance and solemnity as he slips his finger into the water.

As if consummating their marriage.

Taking her hymen.

It stings, but not down there.

Her skin stings with cold where the water has frozen in a block around her.

She is the core of a small iceberg.

She cannot move.

She begins to speak, but he puts his finger to his lips.

“Shhhhhh,” he says, and a gentle snow falls, as fine as ice shavings, only over them, coming from no cloud.

Mars still glinting above him.

The pelican takes flight nearby; she hears it but cannot turn her head.

It lands on the boat with the man, its feet squeaking on the wet wood.

Still has the fish in its mouth, now spits it out.

Not a fish.

It lands with a metallic clunk .

A knife.

The stars all seem to blur at once, and then, when they become sharp again, the pelican is a woman.

Naked.

Holding the knife.

Pretty, with a mole.

Like old nobility.

She levels the knife at the rusalka’s eyes so the point seems to disappear. Nadia senses this is not a normal knife.

“No, it is not a normal knife,” the woman says.

She knew my thoughts!

“And such simple thoughts. What a shame that such a crude thing as yourself could kill my Misha. Do you remember doing that? The man in the cabin?”

Nodding is difficult, but the rusalka nods.

“Good,” she says. “Tonight will pay for half.”

She draws the edge of the knife across Nadia’s cheeks and nose, cutting her. Her blood is thick, barely runs, as if it can’t remember how to.

It hurts.

When did I last feel pain?

She gasps.

How did she cut me?

“I told you, rusalka. This is no ordinary knife. It is the Knife of St. Olga of Kiev. It drinks magic. It turns fantastical creatures ordinary. It has turned a basilisk into a snake, a cockatrice into a chicken, and a vampire into an effeminate man who did not enjoy the sun. You,” she says, licking the knife, “are already becoming a young girl again. So you may have the pleasure of dying a second death.”

Nadia remembers her first death. The rocks looming up at her, the breeze on her tear-wet cheeks, pressure and a smell like pumpernickel when she hit. The sensation of everything emptying and wrecking like a basket of spilled eggs. It seems closer than it did, more vivid.

“No, you will not be so lucky as to break your neck. And you will not freeze. Freezing is easy. You will die exactly like my Misha died. Drowning. There are far worse things than drowning, but this seems just. You will go to hell more wet than cold.”

So saying, she waves her hand over the water as if over a pot of soup, says, “Warm her heart and bones” in medieval Russian. The ice around her relents, turns slushy, dissolves.

Her lungs fill with fresh air, they need air again.

She slips under the water, sputtering.

She is not a strong swimmer now.

Manages to break the surface of the water.

Hears pieces of what the woman says.

She is not talking to Nadia anymore.

“… will not rob you of your revenge… down to the ship… where she put you. Do it… be free.”

Nadia goes under.

When she comes up, a pelican has taken flight.

She hears its wings.

Something brushes against her foot.

A lamprey?

How harmless they were before, but now she has living blood again.

For a moment.

I’m miles from shore.

A boat full of dead men lies under me.

I put them there in a dream I had.

A long, long dream.

The boy in the rowboat is rowing away, humming a song.

“Wait!” she says. “Please.”

The oars dip, the humming recedes.

She kicks desperately.

Her human eyes can’t see in this darkness, even with the lamp of the moon.

She is alone.

She is already beginning to tire.

At that moment a strong hand grabs her foot.

The girl stole a big gulp of air before Misha yanked her down.

But now he is losing his grip on her—it is hard for him to make himself real enough to touch things, but he has been working on it. He has longed for the moment he might do this, grab the unnatural thing and break her. Even as he practiced picking up rocks or moving seaweed, he knew it would never be so. The rusalka was so strong she could dissolve him and the three other ghosts in the wreck just by looking at them crossly, scatter them like schools of small fish.

But this is not a rusalka anymore.

He feels no anger now.

It was very good for him to berate the wizard.

It felt just, he has just grievances.

But to let this girl drown?

He looks into her frightened eyes, sees no recognition, only the eyes of a young woman afraid to die.

Afraid of him.

How young she is.

Twenty-one?

She should be at university, kissing a boy, not dying over a boat full of corpses.

How horrible he must look to her, as horrible as the others look to him. The Canadian who has been here since 1960 has no lower jaw, gestures frantically to make himself understood. The rock-and-roll singer from 1989 has the long hair in the back and short on top that people now call a mullet; it has stayed doggedly attached to his wormy skull, still platinum blond with dark roots. His SUNY Oswego sweatshirt flutters like a ragged flag when he swims, tiny fish in his wake.

It is dark but Misha glows just enough for the girl to see his eyes.

His hand fades out and she kicks to the surface, coughs, tries to yell help but only sputters lake water.

She will die.

And what then?

Turn back into the thing she was?

He does not think so.

Become a ghost, like them?

He shudders.

Nothing is quite so perverse and lonely as a ghost condemned to haunt a lake.

She slips under again.

He can almost hear his Baba upbraiding him for weakness.

Let her die! The bitch killed you. This death is too merciful for her.

He remembers her at his window near the Volga.

The crone his mama pretended not to see.

The woman from the forest he was not allowed to look at.

She only spoke to him through the curtain, just a shape.

Your father is coming. Do you think he wants to see what a weak son he has? Do you know what fathers do to weak sons? That boy who bullies you, I was going to hang him from a tree, but that will not teach you. Your father would tell you to punch him, but that is not enough. You bite his nose, Misha. Not off, they will commit you if you bite it off. But bite it hard enough to scar him. If you punch him, he will work up his courage and hit you again. Or come back with friends. But if you bite his nose, you will surprise him, hurt him, make him afraid of you because he will never know what you might do. He will look at the ground when you pass.