Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

Nadia has a boyfriend, Chancho’s handsome, beard-rubber-banding employee, Gonzo. Not as smart as Nadia, but really handsome.

Voice like molasses.

She met him while bartending at the Raven on Bridge Street in Oswego.

She is not luminous, but Anneke is teaching her magic anyway, hoping she’s got the brains and persistence to plod her way into magic.

It is slow, slow going.

“Anyway, maybe herbs and shit are this one’s bag. She’s not getting the stone and rock thing at all.”

“I hate the rock spells. I feel like a rooster pecking at a pearl,” Nadia says.

Then she brightens, sits upright.

“We have to go to the summer gardens!” she says, wide-eyed. “There is a statue there. Krylov, the writer for children. My father used to read me fables under his statue, using animals’ voices! ‘The Cat and the Cook’!”

This is the most animated either of them has seen her in Russia.

This is why they came.

“I remember,” she says.

Then she takes both of their hands, looks at each of them in turn.

Although she occupies the same shell, she is unrecognizable as the monster that drowned Mikhail Dragomirov and so many others.

She’s a warm-blooded young woman, little more than a girl.

When she speaks they don’t know if she means them or St. Petersburg.

It could be them.

They have become an odd sort of family.

An odd sort of coven.

Nadia cries when she says it.

“I’m home.”

I hope my agent, Michelle Brower, isn’t getting tired of my sincere thanks, but she earns them again and again with her advocacy, positivity, and good counsel. I am also grateful to Sean Daily at Hotchkiss and Associates for fielding endless naïve questions about the film and television industry, and to Tom Colgan, editor and friend, for his faith in me. His assistant, Amanda Ng, is so competent, professional, and effective as to be almost invisible; but I conjure her to thank her here. Naomi Kashinsky and her father, Alan, were invaluable to my Russian research, as was Ambassador Robert Patterson, who was in Moscow around the time our protagonist would have visited that city on his way to a very poor foreign travel experience indeed. Captain K. R. Kollman, USMM, was in the right place at the right time to assist me with questions about Coast Guard procedure. Steve Townsend was my chief Enon resource. My good friend Eric Brown, poet, father, musician, and the unofficial Mayor of Yellow Springs, Ohio, makes a cameo here; thanks to him, as well as to Dino for use of his bathroom. Cookie and Gene Schoonmaker-Franczec shared their Sterling, New York, home and stories with me; Cookie’s studio served as the model for Anneke’s, but I’m pretty sure all similarities between them end there. Thanks to readers/listeners/supporters Kelly Cochran Davis, Patrick Johnson, Dan Fox, Ciara Carinci, Angela Valdes, Cyrus Rua, and Elona Dunn, but especially to Jennifer Schlitt and Noelle Burk, whose early enthusiasm for this story affected its trajectory in all the best ways.

A special thank-you to director Gary Izzo, who has been quietly pursuing comedic and artistic excellence in the woods of Cayuga County, New York, for more than thirty years now; had he not first cast me as a Bless the Mark player at the Sterling Renaissance Festival in 1992 (and many times since), I never would have come to the beautiful hills, cliffs, and farmland that compose West Central New York, I never would have joined the strange and wonderful tribe that gave me so many enduring friendships, and you would not be holding this book.

Finally, thanks to the Burly Minstrel, Jim Hancock, whose ready guitar and mellow voice provided the soundtrack to a great many heartbreakingly beautiful sunsets on the very same McIntyre Bluffs that figure in this story.

I am blessed in my associations.

THOSE ACROSS THE RIVER

BETWEEN TWO FIRES

THE NECROMANCER’S HOUSE

Published by the Penguin Group

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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

Copyright © 2013 by Christopher Buehlman.

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-62589-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buehlman, Christopher.

The Necromancer’s house / Christopher Buehlman. — First Edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-425-25665-7 (hardcover)

1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Witches—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3603.U3395N43 2013

813'.6—dc23

2013011502

FIRST EDITION: October 2013

Cover illustration © Richard Tuschman. Cover background wallpaper © Dedyukhin Dmitry / Shutterstock; abstract texture © Alexey Kashin / Shutterstock; border © iStockphoto/Thinkstock; lace trim © antipathique.

Cover design by Judith Lagerman.

Title page photo © alptraum/iStockphoto.

Endpaper design by Tiffany Estreicher. Endpaper images © Dagny Willis / Flickr / Getty Images; © Andrea1971/Shutterstock.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.