Sorcerer's Feud

by Katharine Kerr

  Tor had me turn the runes over and mix them up again, then chose one more rune: Thurisaz again.

  “I thought maybe the jötnar were after the gold plaque,” Tor said. “I might have been right.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll do a longer reading later.”

  While Tor went to the lawyer’s office, I had lunch with my two closest friends. Cynthia, with her solid build and brown hair, pulled back in a scrunchie, and blonde slender Brittany with her boyish jeans and tee shirts, looked like opposites. Cynthia was a couple of years older than me and Brit, too—a late-blooming art rebel, she called herself. Didn’t matter. We all had a lot in common. The three of us went to our favorite place, a café in downtown Oakland that was right across the street from the park surrounding Lake Merritt. We got our usual table in the front window with its view of trees.

  Since we’d just started our last year at a local art college, we needed to come up with ideas for our senior projects, the most important requirement for graduation. Cynthia, who was taking the computer animation curriculum, would make a short film. Brittany’s strengths lay in fiber arts. She was planning a series of small versions of fiber modules—combinations of weaving, macramé, and needlework—designed to add warmth and human scale to various public spaces in the San Francisco Bay Area. Me—well, I didn’t have any ideas yet.

  “I kind of put it off,” I said. “Since I’m only going half-time this semester.”

  “What’s that doing to your loans?” Cynthia said.

  “I didn’t take any. I feel weird about it, but Tor insisted that I let him bankroll me.”

  “You’re complaining?” Brittany wrinkled her nose at me. “Maya, after the way you’ve been pushing yourself—for years, really—you need the rest. I’m happy for you.”

  “Me, too,” Cynthia said. “There were times when you’d get those dark circles under your eyes and practically down to your neck, and I was worried you were going to die on us right then and there.”

  “I kind of worried, myself.”

  “So okay,” Brit said. “You’re only taking the six units?”

  I nodded yes because I’d just bitten into my sandwich.

  “So you’ve only got the project seminar.”

  “Yeah.” I swallowed the bite. “Everyone in Fine Arts is talking about installations. TVs stacked up with weird film loops, or plaster corpses, or junk like that Cremaster guy in New York is doing. I don’t want to do anything like that.”

  “So don’t,” Cynthia said. “You want to paint, paint.”

  “I also want to graduate with good grades.”

  “Yeah,” Brittany said, “but Harper’s your advisor, right? I bet she’ll sign off on the right kind of painting project.”

  “Maybe, but what’s the right kind?”

  “Something large.” Cynthia laid the remains of her hamburger down on her plate and reached for a paper napkin. “And socially significant but absurdist, too.”

  “A mural.” I felt the beginnings of an idea start moving deep in my mind. “If I can find someone to let me use their wall. I bet I could. Murals are big in San Francisco.”

  “They sure are,” Cynthia said. “But does that make them too mainstream?”

  “Yeah, maybe so. Harper’s not going approve anything mainstream. Or wait, I could do panels. And they could like fit onto a freeway overpass or somewhere you wouldn’t expect to see a mural.”

  “There you go,” Brittany said. “But you couldn’t actually put them on the freeway. You can get arrested for that. They’re a traffic hazard, CalTrans says.”

  “Makes sense,” Cynthia put in. “You want drivers watching the road, not staring at the art works.”

  “For sure.” I remembered a couple of incidents from past years, when the authorities had pulled down American flags and political slogans. “How about a model to show how they’d look? Or, wait! A Photoshop mock-up. That would be kind of Post-modern.”

  “That’s what I’m going to do for my installations.” Brittany paused for a sip of coffee. “Unless one of the malls actually wants to buy one and let me set it up full size.” Her voice turned sarcastic. “Ha! Like they ever would!”

  The waiter arrived to clear plates and rattle off a list of desserts.

  “Chocolate mousse for me,” Britanny said.

  Cynthia looked mournful. “I’d better not. Thighs.”

  “Ah come on!” I said. “We’ve got something to celebrate.”

  “Oh yeah? What?”

  “Tor asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”

  Brittany cheered, and Cynthia pumped a fist in the air.

  “Chocolate mousse all round,” I said, “and more coffee.”

  The waiter grinned and hurried off.

  “So okay,” Brittany said. “When?”

  “I don’t know yet. I want to wait until I get my project going, really going, I mean, like maybe almost done. And in the spring I’ll have to take a full load of units, too. I don’t want anything to get in the way of graduating.”

  “Smart.” Cynthia gave me a firm nod. “Jim and I had the simplest wedding we could come up with, but our relatives made it a huge distraction and upheaval anyway.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but that was the fight over synagogue versus church, wasn’t it?”

  “Mostly, and you won’t have to worry about that, at least. My family, good grief! You’d think they were all rabbis instead of a bunch of businessmen.”

  “Is Tor going to get you a ring?” Brittany said.

  “Yes, but I don’t want some big diamond or anything elaborate. I don’t want him spending thousands on it. You guys know what he’s like, throwing money around.”

  They nodded their agreement.

  “I just hope this doesn’t make me a bigamist,” I went on. “Me and Tor and the bear spirit.”

  Cynthia laughed and nearly choked on her coffee, but Brittany wrinkled her nose at me. “Maya, how can you joke about it?”

  “It’s that or cry.”

  My friends shared Tor’s secret. Once a month, at the full moon, he became possessed by the spirit of a bear and became, for that few days, and in a really strange way, a bjarki, a shape-changer.

  We’d just finished our dessert when I got a text from Tor. He and his friend Billy were driving out to Stinson Beach to “do something” about the box of papers. I took that as meaning that Nils had cursed the collection after he’d packed it. Late in the afternoon, once we’d both gotten home, Tor confirmed my guess.

  “I’ll give Nils credit,” Tor told me. “He’s thorough. The curse spells didn’t amount to much. I didn’t have any trouble dispelling them. But there were a lot of them. On every lousy piece of paper in the box. And the box itself.”

  “Why go to the beach?”

  “I could draw on the sea’s power for the dispelling. The ocean has its own kind of élan.”

  “In that letter, your cousin said something about bringing an ID. Did you find out why?”

  “Sure did. The lawyer himself came out of the inner sanctum to tell me. Someone called him asking about Nils’ property, but the guy refused to identify himself. He had an odd accent, like maybe English was his second language.”

  “What did the lawyer do?”

  “Told him politely where to get off, but he pressed the point. He was interested, the guy said, in Nils’ literary remains. Tried to imply that he was a journalist from some Wisconsin newspaper who wanted to write an article about Nils. Called him a literary figure. The lawyer knew better.”

  “That’s creepy.”

  “Most things Nils touched are. Look, when I read the staves, Fehu keeps coming up. Wealth, land, gold. I wonder if someone wants the papers to see if they’ll lead him to the gold plaque. Can’t be Joel, if I’m right. He could have kept the stuff, and I’d have never known the difference.”

  I glanced around the living room. “Where are the papers?”

  “Downstairs. With another lousy portrait of my grandfather. Nils got one, j
ust like everyone else in the family. Now he’s dumped it on me. A last insult.” He thought for a moment. “Y’know, I’d like to get a good look at Joel. Maybe I can arrange something.”

  “Tor! You don’t even know this guy. You can’t use a summon spell on him. It’s just so rude.”

  “Nothing serious, nothing dangerous. If he’s got any talent for sorcery, he’ll brush it right off, and then I’ll know what I need to, anyway. What are you going to do?”

  “Work on my laptop. I’ve decided to start keeping a journal.”

  “Good idea.” He grinned at me. “Especially with your talents.”

  “Oh, just go away will you?”

  With one last grin he headed off downstairs.

  So many weird events had happened, too many to keep clear in my mind. I felt in a dim, half-blind way that a pattern lay under them all. There had been a fad some years back for computer generated images made up of dots and squiggles and blobs. At first you could only see messy rows of repeated motifs, but if you let your eyes go out of focus in just the right way, three dimensional forms would suddenly appear. The patterns confused your brain so much that the pictures became stereoptic without a mechanical viewer. My life felt like one of those paintings, and I hadn’t yet learned how to see the hidden depths.

  I opened a new file on my laptop and started writing down everything I could remember, starting from the day I met Tor. It took hours.

  The afternoon turned so hot in the parching East Bay autumn that the air conditioning had trouble keeping up. Rather than cook, we went to our favorite Indian restaurant up in Berkeley and got our usual table in a back corner, near a window that looked out onto a tangle of plants and raspberry canes that had once been a garden. We were still studying the menu when I happened to look in the direction of the door. For a moment I thought Tor stood there at the same time as he was sitting across from me. Had he doubled himself like the vitkar in the old sagas? I caught my breath with a little gasp. Tor looked up and turned in his chair to see what I was staring at.

  “There’s Joel,” he said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He looks like me, doesn’t he? A logical assumption, Watson. There can’t be more than two of us.”

  “Very funny!”

  Tor stood up and waved to the guy, who took one step toward him, stared for a moment, then shrugged and strolled over.

  “Tor, no! I don’t want to have dinner with—” I stopped myself. I couldn’t say it, ‘with the son of the man I killed’, not there in public.

  I’d spoken too late, anyway. Joel Halvarsson arrived at our table. I’d expected him to dress in expensive clothes like his father’s, but he was wearing a pair of jeans and a striped cotton shirt and carrying a beaten-up sweatshirt, an outfit that made him look right at home in Berkeley. Tor got up and held out his hand. Joel smiled—briefly—and shook it— also briefly.

  “Kind of a funny way to meet your cousin,” Joel said. “But when I came in and saw you, I figured I could at least say hello.”

  “Sure,” Tor said. “Have a seat! This is my fianceè, Maya Cantescu.”

  Joel nodded my way with a pleasant smile, then took the chair next to Tor and opposite me. Seeing them together made me aware of small differences. Tor was a little taller, and Joel lacked the cute dimple Tor had at one corner of his mouth. Still, Grandfather Halvar’s descendants had strong genes. I decided that I needed to pretend to be shy. I don’t think I volunteered more than two sentences during the entire meal.

  At first neither of the two men talked much. We all ordered, and when the food came, Tor and Joel mostly ate. I picked at a curried vegetable dhosa. Guilt does bad things to your appetite. But after the guys had finished an Indian beer apiece, they did chat, mostly about baseball—the Oakland A’s and on Joel’s part, the Yankees. Tor ordered a second beer for both of them and a mango lhassi for me. The last thing I needed was to muddle my mind with alcohol. Joel leaned back in his chair and considered Tor over the rim of his glass.

  “Could you read the stuff in that box?” Joel said.

  “Oh yeah. My college major was Germanic languages. The papers are in Icelandic, all right, most of them. Some are in Old Norse. A few are in German.”

  “Okay. You could have fooled me.” Joel shrugged to underscore the point, then hesitated. “I was wondering if you ever knew my dad.”

  I went tense. Tor had sworn a vow to the runes to never lie about himself.

  “Not to say knew him,” Tor said. “I saw him a couple of times, but he didn’t want anything to do with my side of the family.”

  Which was all true enough. Just barely enough.

  “Yeah, that was one of the things he did tell me.” Joel frowned into his beer. “He was a pretty odd customer, my old man.”

  “I got that impression.”

  “My mother thinks he was mentally ill,” Joel went on. “Neurotic, she called it. I’d say she was being kind. Y’know, he told me once he was a werewolf. Can you believe it? Of all the weird delusions to have!”

  Out of sheer nerves I giggled, just a little before I choked it back, because Nils had told him the truth. Joel grinned at me. “Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “I had the same reaction.”

  “It sounds like a delusion, all right,” Tor said. “When I looked at some of those papers, I got the impression your dad thought he was a sorcerer.”

  “That, too.” Joel hesitated, then spoke quickly, like a confession. “He drank a lot, y’know. One night, the last time I saw him, he was talking about your father. I guess they hated each other.”

  “My father never mentioned yours,” Tor said. “So I’ve got no idea if he hated Nils or not.”

  Joel stared into his glass at the last bit of beer, swirled it around a little, then shrugged and drank it off. “Ah crap,” he said at last. “Dad’s dead, and this can’t harm him. But that night, I had a couple of drinks, but he was hitting the scotch pretty hard, and he told me he’d murdered your father by sending him some kind of curse. I sobered up real fast, let me tell you. I couldn’t believe he’d talk like that. I mean, bullshit to the max! But the worse part was what it told me about him, that he’d hate someone so much.”

  Tor turned very still. The expression on his face revealed nothing, an absolute blank, but I knew him. I could feel the fury just under the surface. Joel, fortunately, only saw the blank look.

  “Yeah, it’s nuts,” Joel said. “I know that, okay?”

  “Okay.” Tor managed to smile. “Too bad. Must be hard to have a father with problems like that.”

  “My stepfather is a pretty decent guy. He came through for me. I’ve been luckier than a lot of my friends.”

  “Good. I saw that interview you gave the news station. If you’re the eldest son, you must have brothers.”

  “Half-brother, just one. And a half-sister. They live up in Connecticut with their mom, Dad’s second wife, or she was for a few years. I stay in touch with the family.”

  “You live back east, then?”

  “In New York City. My mom lives near there. She and my stepfather have a house in the Hamptons.”

  So they had serious money. It seemed to follow Halvar’s descendants around. Joel glanced at his watch. “Which reminds me. I’ve got a red-eye flight to catch.” He reached for his back pocket. “Let me pick up the check.”

  “Hell, no,” Tor said. “I’ll cover it. Good to meet you.”

  A few pleasantries, and Joel got up and left. Neither of us said anything until we saw him leave the restaurant. I let out a long sigh of relief.

  “That was awful,” I said.

  “Why?” Tor poured the last of his beer into his glass. “He seemed okay. He’s got a little bit of the family talent, not much, but otherwise he’s a decent guy.”

  “Tor!”

  “I know, sweetheart. Sorry.” He finished the beer in one long swallow. “But it’s no wonder I felt I had to meet him. The rune staves said he had something important to tell me. �
� He set the empty glass down and wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve before he continued. “Now we know about my father’s death.”

  “Liv was right. Nils killed him.”

  “Yeah.” Tor’s voice sank to something close to a growl. “Stop feeling so fucking guilty, will you?”

  “I’ll try. But sitting here and looking at Joel, and knowing what I did—”

  “Yeah. I really am sorry.” He leaned across the table and caught my hand. “Let’s go home.”

  Taking a life, after you’ve been raised to honor Buddhism and to value compassion above all other virtues, is not so easy to dismiss. I could add Thorlak’s murder to Nils’ list of crimes, sure, but I had no right to set myself up as judge and executioner.

  Chapter 2

  As soon as we got home that evening, I set up my laptop on the breakfast bar and went hunting for news. Even though Tor told me to quit it, he hung around to see what I found. On the web page of a local news station I found an update of the investigation into Nils’ death. A forensics expert had been called in to analyze fluids from the bite mark on the corpse’s arm and the skin around it. Most of the stuff came from Nils, his blood and lymph. In the expert’s opinion the antibodies present showed that Nils had been exposed to some previously unknown version of rabies.

  “Huh!” Tor said. “You were right about that virus.”

  “If it really is the one that causes the lycanthropy, anyway. We don’t know that.”

  “What else would it be?”

  In the video the reporter continued talking.

  “Saliva recovered from the wound and the surrounding contusion did not display a normal human genotype. Even though the bite mark fit the pattern of a human set of teeth, the recovered DNA differed significantly from that of all catalogued human types. Such a striking abnormality may allow the police to trace the person’s ethnic background. If so, the investigative team has a valuable lead.”