Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

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.