Sorcerer's Luck

by Katharine Kerr

  “I didn’t, no. Thanks. I really mean it, thanks so much.”

  “And he promised to call me every day and tell me if he’s going to the session. I made him promise not to lie. He just has to tell me yes or no.”

  “And if he says no?”

  “I won’t cook him dinner on Saturday. It’s like a big dog treat, really. When they sit, they get a treat. They don’t, no treat.”

  “Wow. It sounds so simple.”

  “It won’t be. This could take a couple of years, getting him clean. But I gotta try. I mean, he like served our country, didn’t he? And there’s something . . .” She paused for a long moment.

  “Something what?” I said.

  “You’ll only laugh at me.”

  “I won’t. Promise.”

  “Don’t tell Cynthia, but I think he’s got psychic vibes.”

  As promised, I didn’t laugh. I did sigh.

  “See?” Brittany said. “I told you wouldn’t believe me. But okay. Besides that, he’s totally cute.”

  “Cute and dangerous. Brittany, please be careful, okay?”

  “I will. I’ve never been bitten yet, y’know, not even by the pit bulls.”

  After I hung up, it occurred to me that I’d spoken the truth: I really didn’t need the money back, thanks to my job with Tor. Having a friend step in to help with Roman eased my mind as well. I mentioned that to Cynthia.

  “Good,” she said. “By the way, you don’t look as tired today as you usually do.”

  “Thanks. I’ve been thinking about school. I’ll only take nine units in the fall so I can work more without running myself down. I don’t absolutely have to graduate in four years. I could take an extra quarter.”

  “That’s more loan debt, though, isn’t it? I mean, I think you’re right to cut back. It’s just that everything costs so much these days.”

  “Yeah, and the landlord just raised the rent on me.”

  “For that hole? God, he’s got his nerve! You know, if you ever have to move, you can come stay with me and Jim for a couple of days while you find somewhere else.”

  “Thanks. I really appreciate the offer. With luck though I’ll have the new place before I have to get out of that one. It really is a hole. You’re right.”

  When I returned to my apartment, the lingering smell of chlorine and mildew brought back memories of Tor’s flat and the Burne-Jones bedroom. I sat down on my one chair and tried to reason with myself. The pros: nice place, good money, not pay rent means quit burger job, start paying off credit cards. The cons: sorcery, bjarki, more sorcery, illusionist who might attack again. I wasn’t sure which category Tor himself fell in, pro or con. It depended, I supposed, on whether he was in bear form or just himself. From the restrained way he’d shaken my hand at the end of our encounters, it looked like he was willing to keep our relationship on a business footing.

  “Tor,” I said aloud. “Torvald Thorlaksson.”

  I waited for half an hour, but he never called. I decided to stop kidding myself and called him.

  “Good to hear from you.” He sounded so pleased that I could imagine his smile, dimple and all.

  “Is the offer of that full-time job still open?” I said.

  “Sure. You could take it anytime.”

  “How about before my August rent’s due? That’s on Friday.”

  “How about today? I can help you pack.”

  “I don’t have enough stuff to need help. I’ll see you in a little while.”

  As soon as I got off the phone with Tor, I called my landlord to tell him he could have his slum hole back. The stuff I owned fit into one suitcase and two cardboard cartons. Most of my art supplies lived in a locker at school. I drove over to Tor’s place and parked in front of the house. In the early afternoon light I could see the hillside behind it more clearly. At first glance it looked like a forest, but I could pick out a roof here and a redwood deck there. The pieces added up to two more houses with heavy plantings around them.

  Tor came out and helped me carry everything upstairs. I stowed the suitcase and cartons in my new bedroom, then rejoined him in the kitchen. He gave me keys and also set up my smartphone for the security system so I could get in if he happened to be gone.

  “Just make sure you arm the system again once you get upstairs,” he said. “I’ll show you how.”

  “Thanks. You’ve got some awfully nice things. I can see why you’re worried about security. Those Chinese vases!”

  “They’re not tourist items, no.”

  “You’ve got all kinds of cool stuff. I’m kind of surprised you’d trust me like this. I mean, we just met.”

  He gave me the strangest smile. I couldn’t tell if he was amused or saddened by what I’d just said. “Oh yeah,” he said eventually. “But I’ve got ways of checking a person out. I know I can trust you.”

  “Ways? You mean with sorcery, I guess.”

  “Yeah. You’re not offended, are you?”

  I considered. “No,” I said. “It’s a lot easier than having to supply references.”

  I was expecting him to laugh or at least smile, but he just nodded, as if he agreed.

  “What else do you need to know?” he went on. “There’s the garage. I don’t have a car any more, so you might as well use it.”

  “You don’t have a car? How do you get around—uh, sorry, never mind.”

  “Sorcery’s a lot more ecologically sound than burning fossil fuels. It’s too bad that not everyone can do it.”

  “Yeah, for sure. And speaking of burning things, I’ve got to get ready for work.”

  Quitting the burger job gave me my next big thrill. I went to work as usual, but as soon as I arrived, I told the manager I was leaving. I offered to stay on for a couple of days while they found someone else, but the manager had a file of students who wanted the job. No problem, he said. At the end of my shift, I was free of deep-fried grease at last. The night manager, a decent guy in his way, wished me luck with my new job.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Is there any way I can get my last check early?”

  “They all ask that.” He sighed and shrugged. “I’ll hit up the boss for it. Don’t hold your breath.”

  When I got back to the flat, Tor insisted I sit down and rest. I let myself sink into one of the leather chairs in the living room while he bustled around in the kitchen. He came out again with brandy in proper glass snifters.

  “Just something to celebrate with,” he said. “Celebrate you getting out of that apartment, I mean.”

  “Thanks. And I’ve quit the burger job, too. So that’s something else to celebrate.”

  He saluted me with his glass. I had a sip of the brandy—very good, probably old, I figured, and expensive. I turned a little in my chair to look out at the view through the western window. Fog had crept in over San Francisco, though Yerba Buena Island and the East Bay were still clear. The lights of the distant city made the fog glow, shot here and there with streaks of color. In our companionable mood I came close to telling him the truth about my disease. Close, but not close enough—what if he threw me out? Rooming with vampires doesn’t fit most people’s definition of gracious living.

  “You know something?” Tor said. “It’s good to have you here.”

  “It’s good to be here.”

  It was only a polite thing to say, but it gave me the oddest sensation—that I’d spoken something more true than I could know. For a brief moment I felt as if I’d been struggling to accomplish some task for a really long time, for years and years, even. I’d finally finished it. Or maybe I’d lost something, years and years ago, that I’d finally found again. None of it made sense. I put the sensation down to the brandy.

  Later, when I went to my room, I looked at the decoupage on the writing desk. The green lion had returned to eat the sun, but around him the circles of shrimp and caterpillars had vanished. In their place flew butterflies.

  Chapter 4

  I slept so well in the Burne-Jones bedroom tha
t I got to school late the next morning. During class, I had trouble concentrating on our current model, a man with an interesting but difficult asymmetric face. He had pale skin and thinning blond hair that he wore long and straggly. Trying to keep the textures of skin and hair separate drove me nuts, especially since part of my mind kept wondering how I was going to tell my friends about my new job. Cynthia noticed how distracted I was. When the model took his mid-morning break, she came over to my easel.

  “Is something wrong?” she said.

  “No, actually. Things are looking up. I quit the burger joint.”

  “That’s great!” Cynthia grinned at me. “New job, huh?”

  Brittany had drifted over to join us. “Sweet!” she said. “It couldn’t have been good for you, breathing all that meat grease. And eating there, too.” She shuddered with high drama. “Dead chemical food!”

  “I’m glad to be out of there, yeah.”

  “Well, what’s the new job?” Cynthia said.

  I realized that the truth, or at least, part of it, could transform itself into the lie I needed. “Taking care of a shape-changer. Someone who turns into an animal now and then. Like in the folk tales, y’know?”

  They both burst out laughing. “Oh come on, Maya!” Cynthia said. “What is it really?”

  “That’s it, really. This guy turns into a bear when the moon’s full, and he’s paying me to lock him into his room so he doesn’t go out and hurt anyone.” I kept my expression as serious as I could. “I get room and board, so I’m living there. Kind of an au pair for a were-bear.”

  “I get it now!” Cynthia was grinning at me. “You’ve moved in with some guy. You’ve been holding out on us about him.”

  “No, this is strictly a business arrangement.”

  “Oh yeah sure!” Brittany said. “Is he cute?”

  “For a bear he’s not bad. His name’s Torvald, but I call him Tor. His family’s from Iceland.”

  “That’s probably why he’s a shape-changer.” Cynthia seemed to find my supposed joke worth elaborating. “The lonely glacial island and Viking settlers and all that amazing history.”

  “And the volcanoes.” Brittany was speaking in dead seriousness. “Volcanoes are always centers of spiritual power. There’s prana in them. Or something like that. They release it, anyway.”

  Although Cynthia rolled her eyes, I wondered if for a change Brittany was making sense. I’d seen National Geographic TV shows about volcanoes, and you could sense how powerful and strange and terrifying they were just from the footage. In person they must have inspired genuine awe. I could believe they did release some kind of sorcerous energy.

  “Actually,” I said, “he’s a shape-changer because he got bitten by one over in Marin. There aren’t any volcanoes over there.”

  “Just some totally weird people, huh?” Cynthia said. “Do we get to meet Tor?”

  “I don’t see why not. But it’ll have to be when the moon isn’t full.”

  They both laughed, and I grinned, but all I was doing was speaking the truth. You get good at weaseling when you’ve got a disease like mine. Their laughter made me realize something else, that the idea of a good-looking guy like Tor turning into a bear was too funny to be true. I thought of all those bears in movies for kids, the big, clumsy, furry clowns, or the sluggish critters I’d seen at the zoo. On the TV docs I’d seen some dangerous wild bears, fierce as tigers, and they could move really fast when they wanted to, but still! It can’t be true, I told myself. It’s just some kind of a joke on his part. A sorcerer’s sense of humor was bound to be more than a little weird.

  Before I left the campus I went to the Admin office and changed my address. I felt oddly solemn as I filled out the form, as if I’d made a crucial, momentous decision. I reminded myself that I could switch back to part-time at Tor’s and find another place to live any time I wanted.

  That afternoon, Tor and I worked out our routine around meals. He never ate breakfast, but he insisted on stocking up on breakfast things for me. He would do the shopping and cooking, and I’d clean up afterwards. I felt guilty at first. With the money he was paying me, I thought I should be doing more, but I was an awful cook, and he was a good one. He also had a housekeeping service come in twice a month to take care of the real cleaning. I began to feel like I was starting not a job but a vacation.

  Tor also made a point of showing me both flats. No secrets, he told me, not like in those fairy tales. I knew the ones he meant, where the girl always opens the Forbidden Thing and suffers for it.

  “There’s nothing here I need to keep secret,” Tor said. “You know the worst already.”

  He grinned at me, and I had to smile in return. That dimple at the corner of his mouth!

  I’d already seen the library room downstairs, the place where you entered the flat. In daylight I noticed a washer and dryer set up in the adjoining kitchen. The rest of it pretty much followed the plan of the upper one, except of course for the chunk cut out for the upper flat’s entrance and staircase. Beyond the library to the left as you came in was the smaller bedroom and bathroom, both echoing empty, though at the very end of the hall I spotted a closed door—a closet maybe—that I hadn’t seen upstairs.

  Off to the right of the library was the master suite. Instead of a bedroom set, though, the big room held a pair of wooden stools and a tall but narrow wooden table that reminded me of the chemistry lab in my old high school. Tor opened the cream-colored drapes over the window to let in some light. In the middle of the room lay a black carpet painted with a white circle, about nine feet across, in the center. Inside the circle an equal-armed cross cut it into four quarters. Where each line of the cross touched the circle, a red letter marked one of the cardinal directions.

  “You can step on that,” Tor said. “It’s not active at the moment.”

  He led me across the room to a feature that didn’t match the upstairs, a huge closet that lacked windows. I figured that someone had built it by taking space out of the master bedroom itself. One wall held a solid rank of wooden drawers, most of them shallow, like you’d find in the storerooms of an old-fashioned museum to hold trays of antique jewelry or prints.

  “The guy who owned it before me put those in,” Tor said. “I don’t know why.”

  “You own this building?”

  “Yeah. I need to, with the stuff I do.”

  Two luxury flats in the Oakland hills—his family must have had money, all right, heaps of it. I wasn’t surprised when I noticed, on the opposite wall, a door to a combination safe.

  “Want to see my secret treasures?” He was grinning at me.

  “Sure.”

  I politely looked away while he worked the combination. One treasure turned out to be an old-fashioned oak display case, about two feet on a side. Tor laid it down on a wooden lectern in front of the storage unit. Against a background of yellowing linen, dimpled like an egg carton, it held a set of wooden disks, each about the size of a quarter. The wood looked ancient, dark and rubbed smooth by the touch of many years and even more hands. Each disk was engraved with a spiky, geometric mark, a letter of an ancient writing system.

  “Those are runes,” I said. “I’ve seen pictures of them in books on graphic design. It’s the older alphabet, right?”

  “The elder futhark, yes. This is a set that’s come down in the family for close to six hundred years. I don’t take them out, of course. They’d probably crumble if I tried.”

  “I hope that mount’s archival material.”

  “It is, yeah. I had it checked just last year over in San Francisco. Even shut up like this, they have power.” Tor ran one finger down the glass. His voice dropped to a near-whisper. “I can feel it even when they’re in the safe. They fuel my work.”

  Without thinking I started to touch the side of the case. I felt an odd emanation, as if touching it would give me an electric shock. I drew my hand back fast. Tor tipped his head a little to one side and considered me.

  “It’s oka
y,” he said. “There’s nothing special about the case. It’s something my father got at a garage sale. I think it originally held dead insects.”

  “I didn’t want to be rude or anything. It was just my inner child coming out, I guess.”

  “Just so long as you don’t want to put them in your mouth.”

  We shared a laugh. As he was putting the display case away, I noticed the only other object in the safe: a shoebox.

  “What’s that?” I said. “Or am I being nosey?”

  “No, not at all. I wanted to show you everything.”

  He brought out the shoebox and opened it to reveal layers of cotton batting. He lifted those to one side and pulled out a flat golden square, inscribed with runes, big enough to cover the palm of his hand, and Tor had big hands. When he gave it me, it weighed heavy—solid gold. I whistled under my breath.

  “I keep it in the safe because of the gold,” he said. “I wouldn’t want anyone stealing it to melt it down. They couldn’t sell an item like this on the open market.”

  “Yeah, for sure! How old is it?”

  “The experts think it dates from the last century before Christ.”

  I whistled again. “Where’s it from originally?”

  “The best guess is Gotland. That’s an island off the coast of Sweden. My father had the gold analyzed, and it came from Eastern Europe, from mines on one of the ancient Gothic trade routes.”

  I examined the plaque more carefully. It had a hole at each corner, probably so it could be sewn onto a backing—I guessed horse harness, something leather, at any rate, because cloth would have ripped from the weight. The runic inscription ran around the edge. In the center sat a quartered circle like the one painted on the carpet—not a rune, but a very ancient and practically universal sign. On the back more runes formed a spiral.

  “What does it say?”

  “No one’s really sure. It’s most likely some kind of magical formula. Practically all the runes that have ever been found carved on objects are. The language must be some form of proto-Gothic, very old and real obscure. I made a rubbing of both sides. I’ve got it upstairs somewhere, and one of these days I’ll work on it.” He paused for a smile. “But it’s got something to do with the Rime Jötnar, the frost giants. Ever heard of them?”