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 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.