Sorcerer's Luck (16 page)

“Do you want to just have lunch here?” Tor said.

“Yeah.” I paused to yawn. “If that's okay with you.”

“No, it's fine. I need to do some preparation, anyway.”

I found out that evening what he meant by preparation. Once the last of the sunset faded
away, we went downstairs. Tor had vacuumed out the room with the magic circle
and scattered a mixture of herbs around in the corners. The place smelled like
fruit as well as flowers, because he'd also put out a peeled and segmented
orange for the nisse, then tossed the peels into the herb mix. We went into the
room with the cabinets and drawers, where we both stripped off our clothes. He
handed me a clean white T-shirt to wear, one of his, which fit me like a draped
tunic. He put on a pair of loose white boxer shorts.

We returned to the magic circle. He sat me down outside of it against the western wall and
told me to stay there, then lit four thick candles on earthenware plates. He
walked clockwise around the circle and placed the candles, scented with
cinnamon, at each cardinal point. By then I felt half-drunk from the smell in
the room and wondered exactly what those scattered herbs were. Not marijuana—I
would have recognized that—but something powerful was scenting the air. Tor,
however, looked intensely focused and fully in command of himself.

He walked into the circle and took up his stance at the point where the arms of the cross
met. For a moment he stood in a relaxed pose with his arms hanging loosely at
his side while he looked off to the east. He drew a deep breath and seemed to
grow taller. He began to chant a long but simple string of vowels. It was a
good thing I knew what he was doing, or the sound might have driven me out of
the room and ruined his working. His normal voice deepened, slid lower in his
chest somehow, growled and hissed and vibrated the vowel sounds until they
sounded like nothing a human being could ever make. They came from deep within
him, from the root of his soul and his body both. I turned icy cold, felt the
hair rise on my neck and arms, felt my own breathing come in gasps to match
his.

As he chanted, he turned to face the different cardinal points, one-quarter turn at a
time, always moving clockwise. He returned to facing east, then made a
half-turn to look in my direction. When he fell silent, I felt as if he'd been
holding me by the throat but had suddenly let go. He never moved, simply stared
off to the west while the candles guttered and threw more shadows than light
around the big room. The scent of herbs strengthened in the warm night air.
Thinking, even remembering, became impossible. I'd always existed in this room,
in this ritual, in Tor's powerful grasp upon my soul.

He tossed his head and chanted again, on and on until I began to sway from side to side
with the rhythm of his chanting. He stopped, stood silently, then sat down on
the floor with a motion graceful enough for the dancer. He looked at me out of
the pools of shadow that had become his eyes.

“Maya,” he said. “Undress and come here.”

I knew what he wanted from me. I knew this ritual, not that I could have told him how I
knew. My father never would have talked about such things in front of me.

I got up, took off the T-shirt, and walked into the circle. He lay down, then arched his
back and pulled down the shorts. I knelt next to him and slid them off the rest
of the way. He was already erect. I straddled him and felt him enter me, but he
lay without moving his hips. I leaned forward to put the pressure on the part
of my body that counted. He raised his hands and cupped my breasts. I gasped at
the touch, but he never noticed. For a long time we stayed that way, silent,
still, while I felt the pleasure mounting inside me. I must have climaxed
several times, but he never moved. His eyes stayed wide open, staring at the
ceiling. The herb scent wrapped us around like the heat from a fire.

Someone watched us. I knew it, looked up toward the east, and saw a shadowy form, just
a patchwork of light and shadow at first. It became slightly more distinct,
like a figure seen in mist or clouds. I saw blue eyes gleaming through the
smoke-mask of its face.

“What do you see?” Tor whispered.

“A mask. Some kind of image of a face.”

The smoke began to coalesce into a likeness: the man I'd faced down in the mall.

“Nils,” I whispered.

The face turned solid, a real face attached to a ghostly pale body. The eyes glittered
with sheer hatred.

“You broke him,” the face said. “You ruined my captain and my friend.”

“Who?”

The face sneered. It began to speak in a language I didn't know, then stopped with a
choking, gasping sound.

Tor spoke one word.

The face started to speak, then choked and spat. Tor never moved or spoke again, but he
smiled, the icy, deadly smile of a warrior who raises a sword against an enemy.
I heard a scream of sheer terror. The figure disappeared.

“He's gone,” I whispered.

“Good.”

He raised his hands to my shoulders and pulled me down. I bent at the waist and lay
against his chest. He began to move and released his sexual tension. I wouldn't
call it pleasure, just a release, because his fixed warrior's smile never
changed. Élan swept over me as he dispersed the life force he'd summoned to
work the ritual. I gobbled it shamelessly, fed on the élan he was tossing away
like garbage. My mind cleared, and I could think again thanks to the flood of
raw energy. I felt the ecstasy of feeding, so different from sexual ecstasy and
so glorious. We lay still, just briefly, until he smiled normally and patted my
back. I rolled off him.

“Sorry,” Tor said. “I should have brought some kleenex down. Hand me those shorts, will you?”

The ritual mood broke—deliberately shattered on his part, I figured. I handed him the
shorts. He sat up, wiped himself, handed me the sticky cloth so I could so I
could clean up, too. He got up and turned on the floor lamp in the corner, then
walked around the circle counter-clockwise and pinched the candles out.

“Was that really Nils?” I said.

“Who else? You know what? He's crazy, completely over the edge. Do you remember when I did
that reading with the nine runestaves? And I told you I was missing something?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“That's one of the things I was missing. That he's nuts.”

“That makes him more dangerous, doesn't it?”

“I don't know yet.” Tor frowned and looked away. “It might just make him sloppy. In the
way he works, I mean.”

He sounded as if he doubted it. I wondered if Nils had seen me the way I could see him. I
shuddered when I remembered the eyes shining through the face made of smoke.

“Who do you think he meant, when he told me I ruined someone?”

“Björn, probably. I think I know who Nils was, the second at the duel. The guy who lied
to me. The first mate on the whaling ship.”

I felt as if the normal world around us had just cracked open. Through the crack I could
catch a glimpse of the past, see a man with mutton-chop whiskers saluting another
man with a glass of liquor. The crack healed itself. The sight disappeared.

“How can he blame me?” I said. “And for what? The affair, I guess. Björn won the duel.”

“If anyone was broken, it was you,” Tor said. “I told you. Nils is one damaged guy. Crazy.
Let's get dressed. I've got to vacuum up the herbs. I don't want the nisse
eating them. He could get sick.”

“Uh, what are they?”

“Marjoram, dried lavender, laurel leaves, and dittany of Crete.”

“Isn't that dittany stuff dangerous?”

“Poisonous, yeah. That's why I don't want the nisse eating it.”

But it was, or so I hoped anyway, okay for us to breathe its scent. I went upstairs to
shower away the smell of the herbs that lingered in my hair and on my skin. I'd
just finished when a fully dressed Tor came back up and joined me in my
bedroom. I could smell cinnamon wafting around him with the last traces of the
jettisoned élan. When I breathed in both, the room seemed to grow larger.

“Everything cleaned up?” I said.

He nodded and wandered over to look at the decoupage on the writing desk. I put on my
jeans and joined him there. The green lion and the shrimp had disappeared. In
their place stood a hermaphrodite: half-man, half-woman, joined down the
middle, but with two heads, each wearing a crown. They stared out at us blankly
with thin little lines for mouths. Tiny red lions made up the decorative circle
around it or them, whatever you'd call that figure. Tor frowned and laid a
forefinger on one of the lions.

“Is something wrong?” I said. “You looked worried.”

“These lions should be something else.” He took his hand back and looked at me. “We
might have revved things up a little high. Released too much power, I mean.
I've never done this before, used sex like we did. You've got real talent for
sorcery, Maya, but still, I'm kind of surprised it worked.”

I had to steady my voice out of fear of those words,
talent for sorcery
. “Well,
it did work. That's good, right?”

Tor shrugged as if he wasn't sure. “I've been thinking. You know, maybe I never
should have asked you to—well, uh, join in. I'm sorry. I ran up against his
defenses and couldn't break through, and when I'm working, hell, I can't think
of anything else. I'll do whatever I need to. So I invoked you, and maybe I
shouldn't have.”

He'd grab any weapon he could find, even me, was my take on the matter. “I could have
told you no,” I said. “But I don't know if I ever want to do it again.”

“I hope I won't need to ask you. I scared the hell out of him, and he didn't have a
partner to help him out. I bet he leaves us alone for a while. I only wish I
could scare him off once and for all.”

We spent all day Saturday at home while Tor worked his minor sorceries downstairs. He
came up late in the afternoon and told me that he'd been casting the
runestaves.

“Look, we know that Nils hates me,” Tor said. “Probably because he was left out of the
will. We know he's gone off the deep end. But that's not reason enough to do
what he's doing.”

“Hatred makes people act like real dorks.”

“Yeah, but he's studied the runes. He's a vitki. He should know better.” Tor smiled
briefly. “Dorks yell at people and turn into trolls online. They don't use
magical energy to attack their enemies. They don't blame them for things that
happened in past lives. They usually don't try to run them off the road. Nils
has played car games twice now.”

“You've got a point.”

“He wants something from me. It's not you, and I'll thank Tyr for that. I don't think
it's the rune set I was so worried about. It can't be cash, because he must
have money of his own. So what is it? I keep getting Fehu and Othala showing up
in the staves when I cast them. Family something, family wealth.”

“Well, you don't have any cattle.” I'd been reading about the basic rune meanings. “And
the only land you own is this house. What does that leave? Gold?”

Tor's eyes got very wide. “The ornament! That's the only gold I've got, and it's got runes
all over it. I've always thought they must spell out an incantation. Huh. You
might have answered the question. You've got talent, all right.”

I arranged a fake smile. After a moment he shrugged and went back downstairs.

When evening fell, we went on guard. I was dreading more illusions, not because I
feared them, but because I hated the thought that I had the talent to dispel
them. But although we stayed up half the night on watch against the waning
moon, Nils never sent a single illusion our way.

Sunday was the day when everything changed.

Working the Friday ritual and then our broken sleep on Saturday had left Tor so spent that
I did the grocery shopping that Sunday. Although he was reluctant to let me
leave the house, I pointed out that in broad daylight in a crowded parking lot
and supermarket, I'd be perfectly safe. “Besides,” I told him, “if you're this
tired, I bet Uncle Nils is worse off.”

He grinned at that and agreed.

Shoppers crowded the supermarket. Every time someone got too close to me, I reminded
myself that I no longer needed to steal their élan. The relief was so profound
that at moments I teared up, just because I was no longer afraid. I wasn't
going to run down and die. I wouldn't feel my heart knocking desperately in my
chest. Best of all, I was no longer a thief. That tempting slob of a teenage
boy, the rude woman and her obnoxious kids—they were safe from me, and I was
safe from myself.

When I returned home, I drove the car into the garage, took out the two bags of
groceries, then locked up. As I was carrying the bags to the side door,
however, someone came walking down the driveway to meet me. He must have been
seven feet tall or nearly so, a gangly thin kid wearing a Minnesota
Timberwolves jersey and a pair of jeans that showed a lot of ankle, an attempt
to disguise him as a basketball player, I assumed. His irises were a gray so
light that the eyeball seemed almost uniformly white. His hair was dead-white,
as were his eyebrows and the hair on his pale arms, but close up I saw the
smooth, unlined face and soft jaw of a young teen-ager.

I immediately thought he might be an illusion, Nils' masterpiece, maybe, even
though the sun was shining.

“Hello, this is the sorcerer's house, is it not? You are the sorcerer's woman, yes?” His English sounded like a parody of a Wisconsin Swedish accent. “I have the note. You will take it in to him, yes? The runes above the door, they keep me out.”

With a flourish he held out a square envelope of expensive cream laid paper. On the back I saw a lump of gold-colored sealing wax with a rune stamped into it.