Sorcerer's Luck

by Katharine Kerr

  I didn’t trust my voice and just nodded to show I agreed. I looked away for distraction and noticed someone ambling down the sidewalk just outside. A man, tall, slender, sandy hair, he looked so familiar that I thought for a moment that I was seeing Torvald the runemaster. This man, however, appeared a lot older, in his fifties, I guessed. When he glanced my way, I saw that his eyes were blue, not brown, and gray streaked his hair.

  Not the runemaster, then. He caught me looking at him, stopped, and stared. I could have sworn he thought he recognized me, but I’d never seen him before. When he realized that I was returning the stare, he pretended to read the menu taped to the glass. He kept glancing my way with a surreptitious flick of his gaze as if he were considering making a pass at me. I concentrated on the sandwich. Cynthia noticed.

  “You know that guy?” she said.

  “No, and I don’t want him looking me over, either.”

  She turned in her chair to summon the waiter, a beefy muscle guy, not all that tall, but not short, either. When he strolled over, the man on the sidewalk walked off—fast.

  “Not good,” Cynthia said to me. To the waiter she said, “What’s for dessert today?”

  We lingered in the cafe for over an hour, just to give the older man a chance to get long gone. When we did leave, Cynthia and Brittany walked with me to my car.

  The incident made me think about Torvald Thorlaksson. Did he know this man who looked so much like him? On the one hand, I was afraid to call him and ask. On the other, I wanted to know. And of course, there was his offer of a job.

  That week I got more bad news in the mail, a letter from the landlord announcing that in September, he was raising the rent by the legal limit. The rent control law did allow for inflation. Two per cent may not sound like much of a raise, but on my budget, it meant disaster. I shed a few tears, then pulled myself together. I could try for more hours at the burger job, or I could downgrade my phone plan to a cheaper level. The phone plan was my one indulgence, but that’s what it was, an indulgence. I could live without it.

  I was tired of living without stuff. Especially when I had a chance at a second job.

  Still, it took me three more days to work up the nerve to say Torvald’s name aloud.

  I might not have done it even then if it wasn’t for the stink. On Friday I got the chance to fill in for another worker at the burger joint. I loved the extra money and the second meal, but I got home just before midnight. I tossed my purse and jacket onto the chair and realized that I stank from the smoky grill, the spatterings of a hundred burgers, and worst of all, the grease from the french fries. All I wanted to do was lie down and sleep. I absolutely had to get plenty of sleep, because I couldn’t risk exhausting myself. Getting sick would have been a total disaster, for all kinds of reasons. But that stink!

  My shower was a big tin box, designed for outdoor use but installed inside by the miserly landlord. The hot water ran out fast. I had just enough time for a soap-down, quick shampoo, and rinse, no long luxurious showers for me. I dried off and put on clean jeans and a tee shirt, but the grease smell lingered in the air from the dirty clothes lying on the floor. Just one more school year till you graduate, I reminded myself. You can do it. You can endure.

  But the thought of a job that didn’t smell of grease—I nearly cried. Instead, I took the business card out of the zipper pocket in my backpack, cleared my throat, and said, “Torvald Thorlaksson” three times without a pause.

  He’d show up in the morning, I figured. Instead, about ten minutes later he knocked on the door. This time I took off the chain and let him in. He was wearing new dark jeans and a clean white shirt under a leather jacket, a patchwork of different browns.

  “Hi,” I said. What else do you say to a sorcerer?

  He smiled and stood looking around my studio. Finally he sighed. “You really need this job. We’re even now, by the way. You called me ‘sir’, but then you said my name three times and summoned me. How did you know to do that?”

  “Fairy tales. My mom was big on that kind of stuff when I was little. She read aloud to us a lot.”

  “Smart woman, your mom. Call me Tor, by the way. Torvald sounds too foreign for the States.”

  “Okay. I take it you’re from Sweden or somewhere like that.”

  “Iceland originally. And Norway. I’ve got ties to both places, but my family came here when I was four. I’m a citizen. I even pay taxes.”

  “How do you describe your job on the IRS forms?”

  “Sorcerer. No one’s ever asked me about it. They must think I’m a stage magician, a guy who does tricks in night clubs.” He shrugged the matter away.

  We were still standing by the door. My legs ached from working so late, but the apartment had only one chair. I refused to sit on the bed myself, and I didn’t want him to sit on it, either. Even without the magic spell, he was a good-looking guy. I refused to give either of us ideas.

  “This place of yours is dismal,” he said. “Let’s go to mine. It isn’t far from here.”

  A pass, I figured, on his part. I had a reasonable response. “I’m so tired I don’t even want to walk to my car. I had to park six blocks away.”

  “You won’t have to walk far. Just down to the corner. It’s a crossroad, y’know.”

  “You’ll bring me back when we’re done discussing the job?”

  “I’ll bring you back whenever you ask. No more forcing anything on you, Maya.” He looked down and shuffled his feet like a guilty child. “I still feel bad about that.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.” He looked up. “On my art and upon the runes.”

  He spoke quietly, but I felt a cold chill, as if I’d heard his words echo inside an enormous cavern.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me get my hoodie.”

  I lived just off Telegraph near the border with Berkeley, not a good neighborhood, especially for a girl on her own, but cheap. Tor and I walked east toward the cross street where he’d vanished before. At the corner a gaggle of dope dealers were leaning against the wall of the liquor store and passing around a bottle of wine. As we approached them, I heard the dopers swear in shock, so I assumed they saw us vanish. The next minute Tor and I were walking on a tree-lined street with the dealers and the traffic left far behind.

  I glanced around and saw big houses set back from the street, surrounded by trees and gardens. I recognized the neighborhood as the fancy section of the Oakland hills. We stood high enough that when I looked downhill, I could just pick out the tree-shrouded campus of my college a couple of miles below. We’d ended up facing north, as far as I could tell, but our fast trip up had wrecked my sense of direction. In front of us I saw a white building. Behind it, the hill continued its rise.

  “Here we are.” Tor said.

  The white two-story house, blocky and squared off despite its peaked roof and chimneys, sat behind a short green lawn. The front garden consisted of one Japanese maple stuck in the middle of the grass. A side driveway led to a ramshackle garage. With its white stucco walls and red-tiled roof, the building looked older than the others houses nearby, which tended toward split-level sprawl, redwood decks, and very arty plantings.

  Tor took a smartphone out of his pocket. As we crossed the lawn on a flagstone path, I noticed a large sign in a lower window that displayed the name of a home security company. He turned his back on me, did something with the phone, then put it away. He took a key ring out of another pocket and unlocked one of the two front doors. Over the lintel hung a wooden plaque carved with strange, spiky letters—runes, I figured.

  “The bottom floor’s my work space,” Tor said. “The top flat’s where I live.”

  It was a lovely flat, too, with hardwood floors and walls painted in rich colors. He led me into a room with big windows: one on the east wall that looked down to the college and Oakland beyond, sparkling with lights, and a window to the west with a view of the Bay and the Bay Bridge, wisped with fog and glowing from the strings o
f lights along the cables. After my dark basement I felt as if I were floating in mid-air.

  On the floor lay a modern Persian rug in pomegranate red and white with black accents. He’d painted one wall in the same red; the rest were white. I gawked at the leather sofa and two leather armchairs with matching hassocks, a couple of real Tiffany floor lamps, built-in bookcases, and a fireplace finished in natural stone. Here and there in glassed-in niches on the bookcase stood antique Chinese vases. I also spotted a solid jade carved mountain scene that stood about 14 inches high.

  I was tired enough to be rude. “God, you must have money!”

  “Yeah.” He sounded sorry about it. “Investments. Family money. Here, sit down.” He waved at a leather chair. “Do you want a drink?”

  “No, I’d pass out.”

  I sat in the chair nearest the door, just in case. He took off his jacket, tossed it onto the sofa, then sat down next to it.

  “First off,” he said, “I went to the county fair to find you because of my rune staves. I cast them a couple of times. They told me that someone who could see through illusions was working in the middle of crowds. When I saw your name, I figured it had to be you. You do know what Maya means, don’t you?”

  “Illusion, yeah. My mother was raised by hippies. The name is supposed to make me remember to seek enlightenment.”

  “Oh.” He considered this for a minute. “That’s not a bad idea, I guess, assuming you want your daughter to seek enlightenment.”

  “She did, yeah. She’s doing it herself. She’s a Buddhist nun now.”

  “So I bet the L stands for Lila. The play of illusion.”

  I nodded yes and stifled a yawn.

  “Anyway,” he went on. “Here’s the deal. I can offer you one of two jobs. Part-time means you spend three days a month here to spot the illusions and then three more for another—well, I’ll get to that. Full time is full time, and I’d prefer that, but you could keep on going to school and everything. What would count is your being here in the evenings. Part-time, a hundred dollars a day. Full-time: room and board and five hundred a month.”

  In three days I could earn what the burger job paid me a month. I could laugh at the rent increase and keep my phone. With six days, I could start paying off my credit cards. I nearly salivated. He leaned forward and clasped his hands, all sincerity.

  “I’ve got a spare room. Part-time, you could spend nights there. Full-time, you could live in it instead of that dump. You could get cholera from that bathroom set-up.”

  “I’ve often thought that, yeah.”

  “And this flat is pretty close to your school.”

  “There’s got to be a catch. This is all too good to be true.”

  “There’s always a catch.” His smile turned thin-lipped and bitter. “Or in this case, two of them. I need you to see through illusions because weird things keep showing up around here.”

  “Huh? What kind of weird things?”

  “Rose bushes in the middle of the floor.” He held up one hand and began counting them off on his fingers. “Figures made out of mist. Big pottery jars with lids. Scrolls with strange writing on them. Small dragons.”

  “Dragons, huh?” I decided that he was crazy and I’d better humor him. “That could be dangerous.”

  “They all could be dangerous, or maybe not. They could just be a sign that things are going wrong, magically wrong, I mean, with my work. I hope not, but it could be. Look, you saw through my illusion when you went to draw me. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So if you were here, and the dragons started appearing, you could draw them and maybe get a fix on what they really are.”

  The logic floored me: air-tight and totally nuts.

  “Er ah well,” I said. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Tor sighed and looked mournful. “You think I’m bats, and you don’t want the job. I understand.”

  My first impulse: damn right I don’t. I went with the second impulse. “Not so fast! You said you’d only need me part-time for a few days a month. Why?”

  “These things only show up when the moon’s dark.”

  “Yeah? I guess they’re not made of moonbeams, then. When the moon’s full, do they turn into wolves?”

  “No. I—” He caught himself and gave me the foolish nerd smile. “Not exactly.”

  “Ah come on! Do you really think you turn into a wolf?”

  “No. I turn into a bear.”

  “You turn into a bear on full moon nights? You mean, like a werewolf, but it’s a bear?”

  “Yes. It’s called a bjarki.” His smile vanished. “Think of it as an old Norse tradition. Well, maybe an old Norse curse. I’m a shape-changer.”

  He spoke so calmly, so quietly, that I was tempted to believe him. Only tempted, not convinced. The only real bears I’d ever seen lived in the zoo, fat, clumsy-looking creatures. I couldn’t imagine this tall, lean maniac turning into one.

  “That’s the second catch,” I said.

  “Yeah, fraid so.” He sighed. “The full moon nights? Your job would be locking me in my room when I change into the bear form. Just to make sure I don’t get carried away and go out and hurt someone.”

  “Have you ever hurt someone?”

  “No. Sometimes the temptation—” He shuddered, and his eyes turned dark. “But I’ve always managed to fight it off. Month after month after month. It would be great to be locked in and not have to worry about giving in. Y’know?”

  “I can see that, yeah.”

  “Uh, do you want to go home now? You must think I’m some weird rich guy who’d be in an asylum if he didn’t have money. Diagnosed with delusions.”

  I would have thought exactly that except for three things. When I’d drawn his face, I’d seen the torment in his eyes. When I’d called his name, he’d appeared. And we’d walked from my studio to his flat in a couple of minutes. I was actually seeing the magic that my father had so longed to have, even if the magician did think he turned into a bear now and then.

  “Can I ask you something before we go?” I said. “Like, how did you become a buh—whatever?”

  “Buh-yark-ee. I was bitten about a year ago. I was hiking on Mount Tam and saw this creature following me. I thought it was just a lost dog, so I didn’t run. It attacked me.” He sighed. “It was a wolf, a lycanthrope. I didn’t know those were real.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “A transmission spell, like the one I never should have used on you. I was terrified, so I shared my terror with him. He ran off howling.”

  “That’s really clever.”

  “Thanks. Sorcery has its practical aspects.”

  “But if the creature was a wolf, why do you turn into a bjarki?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is I never made the change before I was bitten, and afterwards I did. What else could have caused it?”

  He might have been crazy, or he might have brushed up against some dark and evil thing. Like in the folk tales, I thought, things like me. His eyes told me that either way, his torment was real.

  “So anyway,” he went on, “I had to have a series of rabies shots. Shit, those hurt!” He shook himself as if remembering. “But it turned out that rabies was the least of my problems.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” I went on to the next question. “You say you can’t see illusions, but you’re wearing one, aren’t you? The one I saw through when I drew you.”

  “Yeah, I can cast minor ones, but I’m just learning. Casting an illusion on yourself is the first step when you’re studying the subject.”

  “These jars and things. Are you sure they’re not just something you’ve created by accident? Images from your dreams, maybe?”

  “They can’t be, because I can’t dispel them. I can dispel the one on me. Like I said, that’s Step One. But these must be what my books call major illusions. They last for hours, they’re detailed, and I can’t make a dent in them.”

  “What’s weird is that makes sense.”
r />   He didn’t bother to smile, just watched me with sad eyes, sure that I was going to do the sane thing and turn down the job. So was I.

  Before I told him so, I tried to see him as he really was without drawing him first. The nerdy guy in front of me changed to the face I’d caught in my drawing: young, certainly, and good-looking, but his dark eyes narrowed with despair and old grief, and he’d clamped his lips to hold back sorrow. The pain touched me at a deep level, like a guitar when you pluck one string and the others vibrate in sympathy. I had a secret of my own, not that I was ready to tell him about it.

  “When it comes time to lock you in the room,” I said, “would you give me trouble about it?”

  “No.” He held up one hand like a Boy Scout. “I promise you that. I set up the master suite months ago. It’s got a bathroom in it. I even have a little refrigerator with a pedal you step on to open it, so I can feed myself. Uh, you’re not a vegan, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t work in a burger joint if I was.”

  “Right. The problem I have with the suite is staying in it. The bjarki wants to run, you see. He’s desperate to get out and go back to the forest. In three days I could wake up and find myself a long way from home. Y’know?”

  “You couldn’t just—well—travel the way we got here tonight? Get home that way?”

  “Not if I didn’t know where I was starting from. It’s always the beginning of the action that counts in sorcery. That’s the crucial point for everything you do.”

  “Oh.” It occurred to me that believing you were a bear could be just as dangerous as actually turning into one. “So there you’d be, with no way to get back.”

  “And with no clothes, either. No ID. Nothing.”

  “Oh jeez.” I refused to let myself wonder what he’d look like naked—pretty good, I suspected.

  “I thought about locking the door from the inside. He doesn’t have opposable thumbs, so he couldn’t undo the locks. Then I thought, what if the building caught on fire, or there was an earthquake?”

  “I can see why you’re afraid of being trapped.”

  He heard the sympathy in my voice and began to look hopeful. “Uh, would you like to see the room that would be your room? I mean, if you were crazy enough to take the job. Which you aren’t.” He stood up. “It’s just down this hall. Way on the opposite side of the flat from mine.”