Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

Hears something coming from the master bedroom.

The bathtub?

He looks at the door handle, but it looks blurry.

Manages to stand, but it’s hard.

An old-fashioned telephone rings in Andrew’s bedroom; he hears the sound of a door bursting open below.

I have to get in there.

Half of his body just isn’t taking orders.

And his head.

Christ, his head.

The telephone rings again.

Someone smashes the phone.

Below, another trumpet-scream that shakes the house.

An iron candleholder in the shape of a woman’s open hand falls from the wall, leaving a hole bisecting a savage crack in the plaster.

My head!

The myth of Athena’s birth occurs to him, and he thinks himself well capable of pushing an armored woman out of his temple.

Shooting.

Andrew!

Michael Rudnick stands up just in time to see the bedroom door handle turn.

The door opens on a woman in military gear.

Athena?

No.

Baba’s daughter.

She pulls a belt like a dead snake from around her neck.

She is as surprised as he is, braces herself to receive or cast a spell.

Michael Rudnick is a warlock to be reckoned with, and she knows it.

Not everyone can crank a blistering-fast meteor out of the sky and smash a tank with it.

And nobody can do it without paying a price.

Michael tries to say the word to make the sconce fly up and brain her, but when he speaks a garbled sound comes out.

They both understand at once.

Stroke.

I’ve had a stroke.

And not a small one.

I’m a dead man.

She smiles.

Not unkindly.

Pulls him firmly to the bathroom.

She works against his weak side.

He can’t fight her.

An awkward moment as she negotiates the ailing magus through the bathroom door, the saber on her belt tangling them up. He tries to claw at her face with his good hand, but she is stronger.

She would like to take her time and experience this, look into his eyes as it happens to him; this is a rare thing.

But the Thief.

She will settle things with the Thief.

She has Michael against the tub now.

She says the name of a place, pushes the old man down into the tub.

He hears the name of the place.

He doesn’t want to go there.

It’s warm there, and it smells like trees and plants in flower.

He falls.

Looking at her all the way down.

What happens next isn’t very gratifying.

No climactic collision of shapeshifting witch and wizard.

It just happens.

An older man with long white hair and a bomber jacket walks out into the yard, steering for the woods, looking for the hut with the broken leg.

A tank burns.

Bloody dolls, pieces of car, strange rocks litter the snow.

He wants to find the woman he loves.

The new witch.

He sees the hut, lying lopsided, leaning against a tree.

Out of gas.

A bearded madman looks out the window at him, holding a lens up to one eye.

This distracts him.

The magus doesn’t see her until it’s too late.

Coming at him from his blinded right side.

The witch.

Grinning at him.

Unkindly.

Showing her teeth.

Coming at him with the saber upraised.

He has something in his pocket that might or might not stop her heart, but it’s too late to pull it out.

He vomits his last mouthful of darts at her.

But she has hardened her skin and they bend their points or shatter altogether.

The blade still comes.

He knows that saber.

It’s the one he used on her mother.

On her.

He understands in a flash.

Marina never showed her teeth when she smiled.

The smile is her mother’s smile.

Self-satisfied, superior, predatory.

A wolf’s snarl.

This is Baba Yaga.

She has taken her own daughter’s body.

As she always does.

As she always has.

His lover is long dead.

But her body is still strong.

The saber flashes in the streetlamp’s glow.

Strangely suburban light to fall on a cavalry saber.

Coming down at his neck.

He remembers his shillelagh.

Sketches the gesture of raising it.

Too late.

It hurts.

Then it doesn’t.

“She decapitated you. On the second stroke. The first was rather… messy. Happily, there wasn’t a great deal of time between them. She’s quite fast. Must be all the kettlebells.”

Andrew is sitting in his library

With what body?

speaking with an old British actor, perhaps Sir Alec Guinness, perhaps Sir Laurence Olivier, maybe even Sir Ian McKellen. It seems to morph between them. It sits in a leather chair. Legs crossed at the knee. It wears a yellow carnation and exquisite saddle-brown oxfords.

Argyle socks at the ankles.

Ichabod.

What now?

“Oh, you’ll like this. This will be most gratifying. Get into this egg.”

So saying, the old thespian smiles and holds up a large, brown hen’s egg.

Why?

“First of all, because you haven’t any alternative, have you? None you’d enjoy, at least. Secondly, because it will have a delightful resonance. An echo, if you will. She murdered you with the same saber you tried to destroy her with. Now I shall teach you a trick perfected by one of her compatriots. What the generation behind yours calls a frenemy . Of course, these usually become enemies. I sense you preparing to ask who Baba Yaga’s frenemy was, so save your strength. A fellow named Koschey. He used to hide his death far away from his body so you couldn’t properly kill him. He used to hide it in an egg. You’re a sort of echo of him, you know. Of Koschey. You have the same birthday, the same way of walking. Even the same slight tilt to your eyes, his a soupçon of Tartar, yours Shawnee. An echo is a very important thing; symmetry and repetition are the very knees of science and magic and creation. Creation is binary.”

He summoned you, too.

“Yes, he did. Most effectively. He bade me destroy a certain witch for him. The problem was, she commanded me not to harm her. Most effectively. You’ll understand the distress that caused me, being bound in contradictory directions. Unfulfilled commands don’t sit well with my sort. Perhaps it’s the closest thing we feel to guilt. In either event…”

You knew. About all of this. And you used me. To finish things with her.

“Quite so. Have I vexed you? On second thought, I withdraw the question as immaterial. It doesn’t matter if I have vexed you.”

The distinguished old actor strikes a match, lights a pipe.

Ichabod. Go help Anneke.

“I’m afraid I don’t take orders from you anymore.”

Why not?

It looks at him as if at a disappointing student.

“Because you’re dead.”

The entity smiles a winning smile.

“Now get into the egg or I take you to hell.”

The woman who used to be Marina Yaganishna stands in the library of the necromancer’s house. She hasn’t really been Marina since 1983, of course, when she cast the soul from her betraying daughter and began to live as her. The daughter who freed the Thief. The pretty but weak one with the mole. Baba took her body from her and made that body strong.

Now the ancient witch looks at the library in which the Thief had kept the books he stole from her.

The Book of Sorrows.

Love Spells of the Magyars.

On Becoming Invisible.

On the Mutability of the Soul and How Best to Survive Death.