Thunder cracks and booms.
He knows both men are dead.
He is blind in his right eye, as if it has stared at the sun.
Believes his sight will return, but isn’t sure.
110
In the yard, the hut has fallen.
The chicken’s legs scrabble ineffectually at the minotaur.
It grabs one, breaks it over its knee.
“Buttercup,” Andrew says.
It stops with the broken leg in its hands, like a woman interrupted in the business of dressing a hen for the oven.
“Get Anneke out safely. Bring her here.”
Now it peels part of the roof back.
Peers in.
Another flash.
Starting in the woods.
BANG!
The minotaur’s right shoulder explodes, the arm turning back into tree, rocks, car parts, raining down the steep driveway.
Buttercup falls on its huge ass, its weight causing the house to shudder.
It struggles to get to its feet, wanting to use the missing arm, falling heavily, getting back up to its knees.
The hut, too, tries to stand.
It manages.
Holds its broken leg up, hops to the tree line.
The minotaur is almost up.
BANG!
The shell catches it in the throat, blowing its head up and off.
The whole monstrosity turns back into cars and boulders, some of this airborne.
“Oh shit,” Andrew says.
He and Rudnick both drop, cover their heads with their hands.
The old Mustang, on fire, flips end over end, clips the top of the house off, exposing stars and sky and letting in cold air.
Debris rains down on them.
And snow.
Andrew looks back into the yard.
The T-34 tank grumbles out from behind a stand of maples, exhaust farting behind it.
“You okay?” Andrew says.
“Think so. You?”
“Yeah.”
Andrew finds the night-vision binoculars, looks at the tank.
Two figures ride its turret, shielded behind its round hatches.
A very dead man, grinning a skeletal smile.
And a woman wearing a Soviet general’s cap and wool coat.
His long-ago lover, Marina Yaganishna.
From that awful season in Russia.
From the witch’s hut.
Her smallest, most traumatized daughter.
The one who freed him.
She’s not here to help you now.
The turret swivels.
111
Michael Rudnick looks up into the sky through the new hole in the roof.
Parts of the roof burn, but these snuff themselves out quickly thanks to the fireproofing spells Andrew cornered the house with.
Michael has a very powerful spell bottled up, and thinks it’s time.
He fingers an oddly shaped piece of iron hanging around his neck by a leather thong.
He scans the sky, trying both to see and feel.
Feels several, mostly too small, one too big.
This has to be Goldilocks.
And he has to be fast.
And lucky.
Hears the tank fire again.
BAM!
Feels the house rock, start to sag, knows the living room was blown in, one load-bearing wall.
Interrupts the spell he was working on, now feels where the shell hit; he can’t help the lost furniture and electronics, but he opens his palms like a conductor, causes the blown-out bricks and wood to re-adhere—the house jolts and rights itself.
He sees a stuffed owl animate and fly out the window.
Good—Andrew’s up to something.
He glances at the other wizard, sees him fish a pill out of his shirt pocket, dry-swallow it.
He’s holding together.
Andrew has stronger magic than Michael—the minotaur was mostly him, mostly car-magic.
But weaker character.
They might win if Andrew doesn’t lose his shit.
The tank fires again, but Michael is ready for it: The house shudders, but the fragments from the shell don’t blow out two yards before the structure seems to inhale it all back in. Like an incendiary rose blooming and unblooming in the blink of an eye with an echo like rolling thunder. The fires started by the blast wink out in less than two seconds.
A woman swears viciously in Russian.
They know they can’t knock the house down.
Now they’ll shoot high.
At us.
If it hits the attic, we’re hamburger.
He looks at the sky again.
Snow falling, but no clouds.
Feels what he wants.
Exactly the one he wants, just the right size, as near as he can tell.
Oh, this will be dangerous.
This will be the hardest thing he’s ever done.
He did it once in the Arizona desert, but there weren’t houses nearby, precision wasn’t the issue.
He calls it.
• • •
Andrew sends the owl and pops a Klonopin.
Where is Sal? Is Sal okay?
The shelling is getting to him.
Two direct hits on the house.
They won’t survive a third.
Killing the tank is on Andrew.
His nerves are frazzled.
Everything is happening at once.
Marina is atop the tank, pointing at the attic.
The gun elevates.
Andrew says “Get down!” to Michael, who appears to be stargazing.
Michael keeps looking up, his mouth moving.
What the fuck is he doing?
Hurry, owl.
Andrew drops to the floor, covers his head, puts his eyesight in the owl.
• • •
Now he sees the yard, the tank.
The bird flies toward it, slowly, struggling to carry the vase.
The tank is going to fire.
I could look at the attic, watch myself die.
No, fly faster, fucking owl.
FASTER!
• • •
Then he sees it.
With his owl eyes.
It comes from the constellation of Cassiopeia. It tumbles slowly at first, seems to turn, then hurtles at great speed, fiery, smoking, almost too fast to see.
Throwing mad shadows.
It’s big, big enough to make it through the atmosphere.
Because it’s real, many see it.
It gets wished on by no less than four thousand people.
Let my mother’s surgery go well.
Let me get into Yale.
Keep my love safe in Kabul.
Please please please let Stargate listen to my demo.
Make him ask me to marry him.
Please don’t let this be malignant.
I wish for Stephanie Daley to kiss me back with tongue.
OH PLEASE CRUSH THE FUCK OUT OF THAT TANK!
(that one’s Andrew)
The witch atop the tank turns, sees the meteor coming, spreads a hand at it. Manages to split it so it falls not in one television-sized hunk, but in several the size of footballs and baseballs. Manages to slow them so they don’t vaporize the tank.
She’s awfully strong.
But she can’t stop it.
Them.
One piece hits the turret, stuns the dead gunner, the Soviet driver made from a plastic model-man.
Knocks the witch off.
Another piece knocks the left track and two roller wheels off the T-34.
One misses, fells a sma
ll tree.
The noise is ungodly.
The meteor doesn’t destroy the tank, but it does beat the holy hell out of it.
It does buy some time.
For the owl.
• • •
The huge horned owl wings toward the tank, clutching the vase in its talons. It barely makes it there; the vase is heavy and its talons aren’t made for carrying such things. It drops the vase whole, hears it pop, turns so Andrew can use its eyes to see the yellow glass stones the vase held glittering all over the hull.
Up in the attic, Andrew shouts the word.
“Bhastrika!”
WHUMP!
A fireball the size of a pasha’s tent mushrooms up over the tank, lighting parts of the woods on fire, lighting the owl on fire, illuminating the snow that has begun to collect in the yard.
Andrew comes back to himself, shakes the arm he thought was a wing on fire, collects himself, looks out the window with Michael.
The fire’s glow on the snow makes him think of Christmas lights, and then the thought goes as quickly as it came.
This is one fucked-up Christmas.
A blackened skeleton is crawling out of a burning tank in his front yard.
A blackened skeleton on fire.
Coming toward the house.
The remaining three Soviet soldiers forming up behind it.
Rushing the house!
Michael, still stunned from calling the meteor, braces himself against the wall, points down the attic ladder.
Andrew goes down to meet the attack.
112
Marina Yaganishna’s ears are ringing and her general’s cap lies in the snow. The tank is burning, illuminating the maple trunks and the light dusting of snow, vomiting gouts of oily black smoke skyward. A flash of misplaced nostalgia strikes her, but she shakes this off along with the snow on her back and shoulders.
Shooting now at the front of the house.
Pop pop-pop.
“Moroz,” she says.
He appears. Not a lovely, bearded boy anymore, but a man with snow-white hair and the bluish skin of the dead by freezing.
He has found a pair of red polyester track pants.
His bare feet are missing toes.
The Pac-Man shirt persists.
She looks into his white eyes, eyes that look cataracted but are not.
“He will kill the soldiers,” she says. “And then Misha will kill him. Or not. Either way, get into the house while he’s doing it.”
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.”
113
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.
114
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 Necromancer's House Page 32
