The Necromancer's House by Christopher Buehlman Read Free Book Online

is possible, but the language in
Of the Soul
warns that stuffing two souls in one body is draining to both: The original host might succeed in pushing you out and into death’s embrace; if not, the presence of multiple souls in one body attracts “other beings,”
    Sign off, Ichthus70
    whose company might be undesirable. Permanent occupation is, of course, murder.
    And yet, one might use this to live indefinitely, practicing a sort of biological alchemy, transmuting the lead of aging and sick bodies into the gold of healthy, young ones. One might live on in beauty and strength for centuries.
    Andrew strongly suspects some are doing this now.
    He often muses that if he were to walk into a room full of those who actually run the world, the
invisibles
that heads of state and oil barons take
their
marching orders from, it would look like the audition room for a TV soap opera: They would all be lovely; they would all look twenty-five to forty, and whether this was accomplished by the witchcraft of science or the science of witchcraft would be even money. Those who trade in magic value money less than others, true, because they can always manufacture, steal, win, or conjure it as needed; most really powerful conjurers regard those who hoard money as nothing but glorified squirrels saving for a winter they will never live to see. But when you stack enough zeroes behind an integer, enough, say, to bribe a prime minister or buy a vast old-growth forest, even a sorcerer won’t ignore it; a handful of people may well be buying their way into extended youth.
    â€œBut not eternal youth,” Andrew says at half voice.
    Nothing is forever.
    A memory makes him almost smile, and he shakes it off, turning his mind to the problem of the tether.
    Now Salvador walks into the room and pours Gerolsteiner water from a clay pitcher (one of Anneke’s) into Andrew’s glass, hoping to receive another command, but resigning himself to being ignored—his master has inclined his head to study, and, although the days are past when the dry man with the dog’s heart has to clear two empty wine bottles from the table and cork a third before pulling his sodden master to bed by the heels, it will be nearly dawn before the magus shuts his book.

15
    â€œGet that
pinché
thing away from me,” Chancho says.
    Ten A.M. , time for training.
    Chancho has taken the morning off from the North Star Garage, which is his prerogative since he owns it. Todd, Rick, and Gonzo, his three employees who vary so much in height they could be a totem pole, will handle things at a slower pace in his absence, but they will still get the work done well, and God help them if they fart around and charge for the farting-around time. Chancho wants his customers to tell all their friends how cheap repairs are at North Star, how fast the work gets done, how polite the mechanics are. Gonzo, six and a half feet tall but so thin he looks like he stepped out of an El Greco, handles the counter and the phone—he wears his hair long and has a shitty goatee he used to wear a rubber band around
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    Why the f do you wear that thing in your beard?
    You can say
fuck
to me, I won’t be offended.
    I don’t say
fuck
no more.
    You just did.
    Why do you wear it?
    I dunno.
    Then stop. I won’t make you cut the beard, even though it makes you look like a pimp, but that rubber band got to go. Put it around some money.
    I don’t have any.
    That’s because you put it in the
pinché
bank. Banks are full of robbers. Put rubber bands around that shit and bury it.
    Why is it okay to say
shit
but not
fuck
?
    . . .
    I need to think about this.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    but Gonzo has a voice like wildflower honey pouring winter-slow from a jar, and eyes like Paul Newman.
    Everybody likes Gonzo.
    The people of Cayuga County are still a little on the xenophobic side, and the Mexican invasion is only just