Sorcerer's Luck (4 page)

“No. My father's dead.”

“Jeez, I'm sorry.”

“So am I.” He shrugged. “He had adult-onset leukemia. They can cure it in kids, but he
waited too long to see a doctor.”

“That's really too bad. I've heard that there isn't much they can do for adults anyway.”

“That's what he tried to tell me.” Tor smiled, if you could call that faint, bitter
twitch of his lips a smile. “They did a bone marrow transplant. My sister was a
perfect match. It helped for a while, but.”

He didn't need to finish the sentence. I nodded to show I'd understood.

“He died just about two years ago,” Tor went on. “It's weird, but when I was bitten by
the varg, the werewolf—I told you about that, didn't I?”

“Yeah, you sure did.”

“Okay. It was on the anniversary of Dad's death. I went hiking just because I wanted
silence, and the woods around me. It was a comfort, because I kept remembering
how he looked those last couple of weeks before he died. Skin and bones.
Drugged.”

His eyes filled with tears. He wiped them off on his sleeve.

“I am so sorry,” I said. “That's really sad. You two must have been really close.”

“Yeah. He homeschooled me until I went to college.” He took a deep breath to steady his
voice before he continued. “But as far as I know, anyway, the rest of my
family's all back in Iceland. My mother lives with my sister and her family on
the family property.”

“I wondered because I saw someone who looked like you the other day, except he was like in
his fifties. And he had blue eyes.” I tried to call up the memory, but the image
I had was oddly fuzzy and vague—odd, that is, because I was taking a class on
how to form precise images of a person.

“Huh. I do have a couple of cousins who might have come to California, but they're not
that old.” Tor frowned, thinking. “I'll email my sister. She might know, but
it'll take her a while to answer. They live in the middle of nowhere. No cell
phone, nothing. A couple of times a week she goes into town to shop and pick up
her mail, and when she has the time, she drops by an Internet cafe that has a
broadband connection.”

“Good grief!” I said. “They're really isolated, then.”

“Yeah. It's probably just as well.”

I waited for him to explain. Instead he gave me a vague smile and asked if I minded him
putting capers in the salad. I took the hint and changed the subject.

“If you're doing the cooking,” I said, “why don't you let me clean up afterwards? I mean,
you're paying me enough to be here. I could do something.”

“Okay, if you want to do the dishes.” He pointed with the knife blade. “There's the
dishwasher, and there's the switch for the garbage disposal. The soap's under
the sink.”

That evening the moon went officially dark, and I learned why Tor had decided to hire an
anti-illusionist. After dinner I was loading the dishwasher, and Tor was in the
living room, when I heard him swear and call my name. I grabbed a dish towel
and wiped my hands as I hurried around the breakfast bar to join him.

Tor was sitting on the leather couch, an open book beside him, and pointing to a large
parchment scroll that seemed to be hanging just above the coffee table. Aside
from the way it floated in mid-air, I could have sworn it was a real, solid
piece of ancient parchment, yellowing and splitting along the edges. Lines of
scribbles vaguely like cursive writing marched down the center. I stared
open-mouthed. Oh my god, I thought, he's not crazy after all! Unless I am, too.

“Weird, isn't it?” Tor said. “You see now why I wanted to hire you?”

“I sure do.”

When I tossed the dish towel onto the coffee table, the scroll stayed motionless,
indifferent to the movement of the air. I grabbed the sketchbook and a stick of
rust Conté and sat down next to Tor to draw. I kept my eyes fixed on the scroll
and let my hand do what it wanted. As soon as I finished, the scroll
disappeared with a loud popping sound, as if it were a balloon stuck by a pin.

“Huh,” Tor said. “They didn't do that before.”

When I looked at the paper, I saw no trace of the scroll. I'd drawn a line of six
runes arranged inside a narrow rectangle, three marks, then a blank space, then
three more. I tore off the sheet and handed the drawing to Tor.

“Whoever this is,” he said, “he's really pissed at me.”

“What are they? Evil runes?”

“Not in themselves. There's no such thing as an evil rune.” He paused for a smile. “They're
basically letters, you know, and you can spell all sorts of things with the
same set of letters. Live is evil spelled backwards—you must have heard that
kind of dumb joke.”

“Yeah, I have. So this spells out something not nice.”

“Not a real word, but a message anyway.” He pointed to the rectangle I'd drawn. “This is
called a tine or a stave. Normally you'd inscribe your talisman or curse on a
little piece of wood.” He pointed to each rune in turn. “Hail, Ice, Need. The
blank space could represent a concept called Wyrd. Some runesters use a blank
that way, anyway. Then we have Water reversed, Cart reversed, Thorn reversed.
It's a runescript that's meant to bring me bad luck.”

Someone laughed. I looked up to see a misty figure drifting back and forth in front of
the fireplace. I began to draw what appeared to be a very thin male ghost
dressed like a Viking warrior. What ended up on the sheet of paper, however,
was a pair of staring eyes. As soon as I showed the sketch to Tor, the
apparition disappeared.

“This could get really creepy really fast,” I said.

“It did last month, yeah. That's why I decided to look for some help. You, as it turned
out. Huh. When you reveal what they actually are, they disappear.”

“Maybe it means they won't work if you know what they are.”

“That would be good. Probably too good to be true, though.”

Several more sets of runes appeared that evening. First one of the large pottery jars,
shaped like a Roman amphora, appeared in the middle of the kitchen when Tor
went to pour himself a glass of mineral water. My sketch revealed another tine
and the same six runes that had appeared on the earlier scroll.

“I don't get this,” I told him. “What does this person want to accomplish by doing this?
He could just, y'know, text you if he's got a message for you.”

“You can't text runes!”

“So the runes are what's important?”

“I'd guess. He wants to scare me, I suppose, or just put the harmful runescript into my
house.” Tor shook his head and held out his hands palm-up. “I don't understand
it at all.”

Which was not reassuring.

A little later, I went to use the bathroom and discovered a rose bush growing out of the
bathtub. I ran into my bedroom and grabbed a small sketch pad to capture what
turned out to be a different phenomenon altogether. This time I drew a
withered, deformed plant, some species I didn't recognize. Instead of roses,
the attached blooms were giant ears. When I finished what I'd gone in there
for, I brought the drawing back to Tor.

“It's kind of like deadly nightshade,” he said. “When I was a teen-ager I studied herbal
magics, and you learn what to avoid if you find it.”

“I didn't think stuff like that grew around here.”

“It doesn't, not naturally, but you never know what someone might plant in a
garden. Plants escape, you know, or their seeds and shoots do, I should say.
Look at all the scotch broom in California.”

“I'd rather not. I'm allergic to it.”

“So are most people. That's what I mean. You never know what's volunteered out in the
hills. I guess this apparition was a threat, saying he wants to poison me. I
don't get the ears, though. They look stuck on. Not a real part of the plant.”

“Yeah, an afterthought, sort of.”

We spent a jittery evening, waiting and watching, but no more illusions appeared. Since
I'd had a long day, what with my class, I felt too tired to risk staying up all
night. Around two in the morning I took the pad and Conté and went to my room
to go to bed. When I glanced at the writing desk, I saw that the green lion
motif had vanished.

In its place stood the Greek god Hermes, holding up his snake-wound staff. The pink
shrimp had swum away, and white crows had flown in to form the outer circle. I
grabbed the sketch pad and drew the images, which stayed exactly the same as
they looked on the desk. No illusions these—under the umpteen coats of varnish
the paper images had managed to change their form and coloration.

I lifted the lid but found the same sun in the middle of the same zodiac and the same
yellow fish. I did notice, however, that the sign of Leo shone with a gold leaf
background, brighter than all the rest. I had the awful feeling that when the
sun moved into Virgo, the desk would highlight that sign instead. Tor's sister
must have had as much magical power as he did. I wondered about their mother.
Was she a sorcerer, as well? A family like that, no wonder they lived out in
the countryside, away from other people.

When I got into bed, I spent a restless few minutes wondering if I could possibly go to
sleep. At any minute some weird object might materialize in the bedroom. My
long day, however, caught up with me, and I drifted off. When I woke, the
drapes glowed from the perfectly natural sunlight behind them. I checked the
time on my phone: 10:30. I got up and dressed.

In the kitchen Tor was making coffee cake with almonds and raisins. He poured me
coffee, added a lot of milk, and handed the mug to me without my asking. He put
the pan of batter into the oven, then sat down next to me at the breakfast bar.

“Did you see anything more last night?” he said.

“Yeah, the decoupage on your sister's desk changed.”

“It does that. It's an alchemical barometer.”

“A what?”

“The symbols tell you what's going on in the house. Psychically, that is. It
displays images from old alchemical texts. The ones appropriate to the energy
flow.”

I stared. I was afraid to ask him how.

“But last
night,” Tor went on. “What did it show you?”

“Hermes with his snake staff.”

“Okay. That means the illusions came from a powerful sorcerer.” He snorted. “We knew that
already. The barometer's real literal-minded sometimes.”

This statement made as much sense as everything else that had happened: not much.

“Anyway,” Tor continued, “I didn't see any more illusions, either. I'm really surprised.
Last month the damn things paraded back and forth all night.”

“Do you think they might have showed up downstairs?”

“I doubt it. Before I started dinner last night, I set a lot of heavy wards. I can't set
them up here, unfortunately, not and expect either of us to be able to think
straight.”

The way he was smiling at me made me uneasy. Did he suspect that I had a secret? Maybe
only people who had strange powers and stranger secrets could be affected by
wards.

 “Do wards have that effect on everyone?” I said.

“Oh yeah, or else why set them? A really powerful sorcerer could banish them, but most
people would feel confused and uncomfortable. They wouldn't know why.”

So I'd only been paranoid about it.

Tor yawned. “Speaking of confusion, I should take a nap. I stayed up till five. Once it was
light, he couldn't send any more. Major illusions like that, they're too
delicate to stand the sunlight and the—well, I guess we could call them the
daytime energies. I don't suppose you care about the technical details.”

Thanks to that word, energies, I did care. “This is interesting,” I said. “You mean like
sunlight?”

“That, too. The world's full of different kinds of energy. Some of them everyone knows
about: light, electricity, x-rays, forces like that. But some are hidden. Those
are the ones sorcery depends on. You learn to manipulate the hidden energies
and use them.”

“Is it hard to learn?” Hope flared. “Does it take a long time?”

“Years. My father started teaching me when I was four.”

“That early?”

“Well, only fifteen minutes a day at first. By the time I was ten, it was up to six hours a
day. Studying. Practicing. It's like becoming a concert pianist. You've got to
start real young, and you've got to work your ass off.”

Hope faded. I'd probably die before I could learn how to save my life. “Your father was
another sorcerer, huh?”

“No, not really. He didn't have much talent for it. He drank too much, aquavit, mostly,
because he was so frustrated.” He paused for a heavy sigh. “It probably had
something to do with his getting leukemia, all that drinking.”

“That's really sad.”

“It was, yeah. His father, my Grandfather Halvar, was always disappointed in him. Still,
my father knew how to teach. Those who can't do, teach. Dad used to say that a
lot.” Tor smiled faintly, then let the smile fade. “I don't understand it.
Usually the oldest son inherits the family talent, but my dad didn't.”

“You're the oldest?”

“Yeah, there's just me and my sister.” He paused to yawn again. “I don't know where
she gets her talent from. It's pretty strange stuff, what she can do.”

Judging from the decoupage on the writing desk, I could agree with that. Their family
magic differed widely and wildly from the system my father had studied.

“I've really got to go get some sleep,” Tor said. “I set the timer on the oven. You
can take that out when you hear the bell go off.”

“Won't you want some of it?”