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.
It arches its abdomen; it wants to sting him.
But it can’t!
This is almost fun.
Then he sees the next one.
• • •
The imported fire ant.
Solenopsis invicta.
Common to the American South, accidentally brought up in the 1920s on fruit boats from its native South America, it doesn’t like cold. But this nest is doing all right in its climate-controlled attic terrarium, periodically fed crickets and moths and chanted over by a magus.
The first worker finds a strange, burnt bug it can’t quite get its jaws around or arch its abdomen up to envenom. Their struggles move soil, of course, so the others come. Several hundred others. They don’t know what laughter is, so the sound the bug makes as they swarm it means nothing to them. They don’t understand Russian, or insults, let alone Russian insults, so what it says about their mothers (not knowing they all have one mother, nor that her promiscuous egg-laying allows little time for the activities he suggests she enjoys) goes unappreciated. The venom has little effect on it, but they find themselves well able to rip it apart. Its pieces try to lurch away from them; they’ve never experienced that before, but eventually they get all of it down to the late-stage larvae who manage to digest it.
Not much meat on it.
In fact, “Not much meat on me, bastards!” is the last thing it says.
Just the head and a section of spine.
Then that is broken up, too.
And the magic in it sputters and dies.
115
Moroz goes to the west side of the house, where the two big windows of the family room overlook the woods.
The windows the Thief first saw him from.
Now another face peers at him through one of these.
An old man.
The stone warlock.
Powerful, but less so than the Thief.
He is not permitted to kill the Thief—that honor is for the witch—but this man is fair game.
Let’s see how strong you are!
Moroz walks up to the window, knowing how hideous he looks.
The old man just watches him.
Frost has formed on the windowpane.
Moroz writes on this with his finger.
ARE YOU READY
Before he can write the rest, the old man puts a toothpick in his mouth—a toothpick!—and walks away from him. Just walks to the window on the other side of the fireplace.
Moroz becomes one with the snow from which he is made and appears in front of the other window.
TO FREEZE TO DEATH?
he writes, but even as he dots the question mark, the old wizard disappears. Moroz senses something behind him, re-forms himself facing backward. The American boy-host he inhabited dies a little more every time he abuses the body like this, but his work here is nearly done.
It is not the old wizard that he sees.
Now he sees a little stop-motion figure popular in the Soviet Union.
A fuzzy little figure with large ears, supposedly an undocumented tropical forest creature fond of oranges.
How many times had he watched children’s television through the window and seen this little thing?
What was its name?
• • •
“Cheburashka!” it says in a childish voice, in Russian, eating an orange. “You made it very, very cold,” it says sadly, lowering its head. “But can you really freeze me to death?”
Moroz grins, and the stand of trees behind Cheburashka grows icicles. A squirrel tries to run from its knothole den and cracks as it freezes solid, falls from its branch.
“Very sad,” Cheburashka says. “But that was just a squirrel. You should try harder if you want to be my friend. Do you?” It offers Moroz its stop-motion orange.
Something about this strikes Moroz as familiar, but he never knows which memories are his and which are the street-boy’s.
Moroz breathes in.
Breathes out hard.
Frost, snow, and ice shavings blow from his mouth.
The trees get so cold they grow brittle.
Branches fall.
Animals crack and die.
“I guess we can’t be friends,” the little creature says sadly, dropping its orange. Now it produces a pipe, lights it with a finger. “This belongs to a crocodile. Gena. He is my friend, even if you are not.”
Moroz can’t freeze the beast.
But perhaps he can rend it.
First he must stop making the blizzard.
Cheburashka draws on his pipe, which glows an animated glow.
Moroz tries to shut his mouth and stop blowing frost but finds that he can’t.
His mouth is stuck open.
The little creature is drawing snow out of him!
As Cheburashka breathes in, the essence of Moroz begins to jet out.
He vomits snow, so much snow that he blankets the side yard.
Still the creature smokes, tittering just a little, quite cheerful.
Streetlights flicker on Willow Fork Road.
The snow falls and falls.
Moroz shudders, almost empty.
No longer blue.
His hair black again.
Mostly boy now, but enough of Moroz remains to hear.
Cheburashka points the stem of its pipe at him, cocking an eyebrow.
Its voice is different now.
It is Stalin’s voice.
“You and I are alike in that we both respect our boundaries. You can’t harm the wizard. I can’t harm the witch. But nobody said a thing about you.”
Moroz recognizes it now.
They have met before.
Moroz says its true name.
Cheburashka draws one more puff from the pipe.
Exhales.
The pipe glows bright and hot in the moppet’s mouth.
The shadow of a thrashing squid on the snow behind him.
Moroz is no more.
116
The caveman wakes up under his overpass.
He had a dream about a woman.
She gave him twenty dollars.
(Lying under the brick he uses to smash cans)
She took away his tinnitus.
(It’s still gone)
And then?
Blurry.
But at the end, the Heat Miser character from the Christmas special carried him like a bride.
Carried him from some hellish North Pole, where the elves had button eyes and bloody mouths.
But he’s in Syracuse now.
At the end of summer.
A warm night.
It’s ten minutes ago.
He knows that somehow.
The Heat Miser gets to play with time.
Because he’s the Heat Miser.
It’s ten minutes ago, but no different than any other time, as far as he can tell.
He’s still a caveman.
Cars and trucks rush above him as they always have, as they always will.
Bled-out urban sky above the overpass.
; He is sick of the city.
He wishes he were somewhere where he could watch the stars.
He sees one, though.
A falling star, quite bright.
He wishes on it.
My name is Victor.
117
Michael Rudnick collects himself at the window.
Nausea hit him seconds after he tugged the meteor down.
No time for this.
Get your shit together, Rudnick.
Hears the fight downstairs, feels the building rock as the Russian grenade blows the front door in.
He needs to get downstairs, even though the meteor strike took everything out of him.
It was a big spell, maybe too big.
He’s out of gas, doesn’t feel capable of levitating a grain of sand.
Rifle fire cracks loudly just downstairs.
Andrew.
He’s alone.
More concussions downstairs, a sound like Gabriel’s trumpet blaring.
Quite suddenly his head feels like it has a horseshoe in it.
He moves through the snowy attic, makes his way to the ladder.
The first step is all right, but then he can’t make his right arm or leg work so well, and he half slides, half falls down to the hardwood hall floor.
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.
118
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.
119
“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.”
120
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.
She found her hand, too, the withered Hand of Glory that takes life.
It was in the Thief’s jacket pocket, as if it were a wallet or a bunch of keys!
He respected nothing. This is an American disease.
And now he lies in the melting snow with a coat of ravens barking over him, fighting over his eyes.
The police will come soon, she knows, but they will be easy to charm away; she is good at charming, almost as good as a vampire.
The Necromancer's House Page 33
