Sorcerer's Feud Read online

  SORCERER’S FEUD

  KATHARINE KERR

  Copyright © 2014 by Katharine Kerr

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events

  portrayed in this novel are either fictitious

  or are used fictitiously.

  Ebook formatting: Karen Lofstrom

  Cover design: Laila Parsi

  ELECTRONIC EDITION ISBN

  1111111111111111

  Sorcerer’s Feud originally published by Osel Press, June ?, 2014

  Book View Café edition, August ?, 2014

  Book View Café

  Dedication

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  Author’s Note

  These days, many readers depend on genre labels when they’re looking for something to read. Those who classify books—booksellers, librarians, and reviewers—have typed this book and its predecessor, SORCERER’S LUCK, as Urban Fantasy. Neither book, however, fits particularly well into that subgenre, which, like all subgenres, has rules of its own. The “Runemaster” books actually fall into the category of “occult novels” or perhaps, “fantasy noir.”

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Historical Note

  About Book View Café

  Chapter 1

  Late afternoon sun spilled across the living room carpet, a promise of warmth and fresh air. I turned off the hyperactive air conditioning in our second-story flat and opened the windows to let in the breeze. It carried with it the scent of our neighbor’s roses mingled with the dry grass of early fall. My laptop and a cup of coffee waited for me on the coffee table. I sat down on the leather couch and managed to control my shaking hands enough to boot up the laptop and hit the Internet. The coffee sloshed in my mug when I picked it up. I held it in both hands and tried a cautious sip.

  “Sweetheart?” Tor said. “What are you doing?”

  I set the coffee down and turned to look at him. He was standing just behind me and staring over my shoulder at the screen.

  “Hunting for news,” I said. “Like you probably knew already.”

  “Maya!” He walked around the couch and sat down next to me. “It’s been two weeks. The police have no idea that you—“

  “I know that. It’s not the police thing that bothers me. I just can’t forget what happened as easily as you can.”

  Tor sighed and turned sideways so he could look at me. I waited for him to go on, but he stayed silent and considered me with a little frown.

  Two weeks earlier, at the beginning of September, I’d killed a man by draining him of his élan vital, his life force, his chi—different names but the same mysterious energy. I have a disease that you could call vampirism, not that I’m undead like the vampires in the movies. I just can’t regenerate my élan like normal people do, so as a child I learned how to steal it from others, just a little bit here and there, not enough to harm anyone. But I used it to kill when Tor’s uncle, Nils Halvarsson, attacked me.

  “Look,” Tor said. “It was self-defense.”

  “I know, but—”

  “There isn’t any but. He put your brother in the hospital. He was trying to kill me. He would have killed you, too, if he’d dragged you off somewhere.” His voice dropped to a growl of rage. “And shit, who knows what he would have done to you first?”

  Revulsion rose in my throat with the taste of vomit. “I know all that! But I killed someone, Tor. After I swore to God and my father that I never would.”

  For a moment he blinked at me. “Okay,” he said at last. “Breaking an oath, that’s hard.”

  I felt like screaming at him, but anger only wastes élan. I’d learned that lesson, too, how to keep every shred of it inside. The guilt, though, lay beyond my control. At times it made me tremble. Tor said nothing further, just watched me surf the Net until curiosity got the better of him.

  “Find anything?” he said.

  “What about this? You’ve got a cousin you didn’t know you had, and he’s out here now, dealing with his dad’s death.”

  That revelation made Tor wince.

  “He totally looks like you,” I pointed at the photo on the webpage.

  Tor studied the image of another tall, lean guy with sandy brown hair and brown eyes. They shared the same strong jaw and broad hands.

  “Joel Halvarsson,” Tor said. “I guess his family decided against naming him the old way. He should be Nilsson, and Joel isn’t a Nordic name.”

  “You would think of that.” I tried to smile.

  Tor reached over, took my hand, and kissed my fingers before he went on. “Look, brooding about it is only going to make it worse.”

  “If I could stop, I would.” I let my voice trail away, because I’d spotted an important point in the web article. “I guess Joel’s not all torn up over this. Thank god for that!”

  The reporter quoted him as saying, “My father was an odd, distant man. I didn’t know him well at all. He divorced my mother when I was just a kid, and I only saw him a couple of times a year.” When the interviewer asked why he was handling his father’s estate, Joel answered, “I’m the oldest son.” Nothing more.

  “Oldest son, huh?” Tor said. “He must have brothers, then.”

  “Nils was married a couple of times at least. Maybe he had kids in each marriage.”

  “That’s a possibility, sure.”

  “Do you think Joel knows that his father was a vitki? Or that you are?”

  “I’m more interested in whether he’s a sorcerer himself. Run that video, will you? Maybe I can pick up something about him.”

  I clicked on the arrow in the video window. Joel and the reporter basically repeated the interchange in the text. Joel spoke crisply, a little fast, but you could tell that he’d planned out every word. He ended the interview with a firm statement, “I’ve got an appointment with my father’s lawyer in an hour. That’s all I’m gong to say at this time.” I stopped the video.

  “The talent’s skipped him,” Tor said. “I’m pretty sure of it, anyway. That’s a relief.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m hoping he won’t carry on his father’s feud with me. Joel’s going to send us something. What he sends should tell me what’s going on with him.”

  “What? When did he say that?”

  Tor grinned at me. Sorcery. I don’t know why I bothered to ask.

  For the rest of the evening, I managed to put the killing out of my mind, but it caught up with me again. I’d been sleeping badly ever since it happened, and that night I kept waking up from pieces of bad dreams. I finally dragged myself out of bed at eight in the morning. I set up the laptop on the breakfast bar that separated our living room from the kitchen. While I ate some yogurt, I surfed for news.

  Tor came yawning into the kitchen a few minutes later.

  “You look tired,” he said. “Do you need élan?”

  “Yeah, maybe that will help.”

  “Help what? You’re not still beating yourself up over Nils, are you?” Tor caught my hand between both of his. “Sweetheart,” he said, “you really didn’t have any choice.”
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  I wanted to believe it, for his sake as well as mine. “Okay. You’ll have to help me forget it.”

  “I’ll do everything I can. You should know that by now.”

  I leaned over and kissed him. “I do know. I love you.”

  “I love you too.” He took another kiss. “That’s better. You—”

  The front door, downstairs at street level, buzzed as loudly as a snarling animal. The laptop screen flashed and switched automatically to the security system. I saw a grayscale shot of a FedEx man with one of their cardboard document envelopes tucked under one arm.

  “I’ll go get it,” Tor said.

  The documents in the envelope turned out be from Joel Halvarsson. Tor read through the cover letter, then handed it to me while he looked over some legal size papers. The letter was addressed to Torvald E. Thorlaksson, Tor’s full name.

  “In a recent codicil to his will my father requested that you receive a box of various notebooks and papers, which are, as far as I can tell, written in Icelandic. I have no idea what they are, but the instructions implied that you’re capable of reading them. The docs accompanying this letter list them. He also wanted you to have a portrait of our mutual grandfather, Halvar Svansson. I’ve deposited this material at the lawyer’s office, where you can sign for it. His address and phone number is on the copies of the legal listings. You’ll need to show a picture ID. There’s been an incident. Yours, Joel Halvarsson.”

  “Cold,” I said.

  “He probably didn’t know I existed until he read the will.” Tor laid the papers down on the breakfast bar. “What do you say to a cousin you’ve never met?”

  “And what do you think means by incident?”

  “No idea!” He shrugged. “Nils hated me. Why’s he leaving me family papers?”

  “Do you think they’re poisoned?”

  “No.” He grinned at me. “Cursed, more like it. I’ll do a banishing over the box before I bring it into the house, don’t worry.”

  “Can’t we just burn it?”

  “I’m too curious.” He tapped the list with one finger. “Some of these papers come from Grandfather Halvar. His journals. A magical record. I’ve got to see them.”

  I felt dread, an icy cold twist in the pit of my stomach. “It’s dangerous. Something’s wrong with the stuff at the lawyer’s. I can feel it.”

  “Of course there is! I’m not arguing with you. I’m going to exorcise it. Don’t worry, Maya! I won’t bring it inside till I’ve worked it over. Look, could Nils ever beat me? With magic, I mean.”

  “No. That’s why he got violent.”

  “Okay. I know a little about the runes, don’t I?”

  A little! The rituals I’d seen him work and the power he could summon! More than a little, for sure.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s just that everything scares me these days.”

  “I know. Let me feed you. You’ll feel better.”

  I fell in love with Tor before I realized he could help me with my disease. Although he couldn’t cure it, he could keep me from dying by gathering élan from the natural world and transferring it to me. We stood in a patch of sunlight beside an open window. Tor stared out at the tree-covered hillside behind the house for a couple of minutes, then stretched out his hands in my direction. I began to tremble in anticipation. I could feel the élan gathering, quivering in the air like the scent of roses and honey. I reached for it and felt it flow over me, into my blood, into my deepest self. I gasped, breathed it in, and nearly sobbed in relief.

  “How’s that?” Tor said.

  “Better.” I smiled at him. “You’re right, yeah. I’m not frightened anymore.”

  “Good. It’s a miracle that you survived all those years on your own.”

  “My dad fed me when I was little. I didn’t realize it till I was older, but he kept me alive. And we always lived where it was foggy, too, out in the Richmond district in the city, mostly.”

  “That didn’t make it worse?”

  “No. It should’ve, I guess, but both of us felt a lot better when it was cold and wet. It was like the fog, especially the seriously thick ones, gave us élan.”

  “It should have been the other way around. Cold tires most people out.”

  “That’s what my mother always said, too. But both of us loved swimming and fog and the water. That’s why I take so many showers, I guess.”

  Tor considered me with an odd expression on his face, mostly curious, but a little—not exactly frightened—apprehensive, maybe. He seemed to be about to say more, then gave me a bland smile. “I better get dressed,” he said. “I want to go down and cast the runes before I go out.”

  Tor owned our house up in the hills, the Piedmont area of Oakland. Downstairs was his workshop, as he called it, and we lived upstairs in his beautiful flat, the classiest place I’d ever lived in my life. He came from money, and the hardwood floors, the Persian rugs, the leather furniture and Tiffany lamps showed it. For an art student like me, the luxury meant a lot more than money. Some of the art objects he owned were so beautiful that they soothed my fears better than any tranks could have.

  That morning I got a sketch pad and some oil pastels and calmed myself further. From the time I was four years old and got my first box of crayons, I learned to bury all sorts of anxieties by concentrating on drawing. I built up my own little worlds, clumsy at first, then with more skill as I grew older. I drew fiercely, compulsively, whenever my parents fought or money was tight, and of course, when I had my bouts of the mysterious illness that dogged me all through childhood. A rare form of anemia, my family called it, a necessary lie.

  These days, however, I needed to be careful when I drew. I’d had a few occurrences of my subconscious mind taking control of my hand to portray things that I never meant to draw. I concentrated on the view out of the west window, a distant prospect of San Francisco touched with morning fog and kept my mind firmly focused on the color and proportion of something real. I’d just finished when Tor came back upstairs. He was carrying an old shoebox. He sat down next to me on the sofa and put the box on the coffee table, then glanced at my drawing.

  “That’s really cool,” he said. “Pretty.”

  “Yeah, too pretty. I’m out of touch with all the modern trends. I should’ve been an Impressionist. Art critics just laugh at stuff like this.”

  “Their loss.”

  “I’d like to think so. Fat chance they’ll ever see it that way. What’s in the box?”

  “The gold plaque. I brought it up to see if you could use your talent. Y’know, to dispel an illusion covering it. Or see if one existed. We never tried that, not in any formal way.”

  Tor took off the lid of the shoebox and laid it on the coffee table, then peeled off a thick layer of cotton batting to reveal a pure gold square about six inches on a side and an inch thick. At each corner someone had drilled a small hole to allow the plaque to be sewn onto some sort of backing—my guess was leather horse harness, just because of the weight of the thing. It would have torn free of a tunic or distorted a heavy cloak. On the front, engraved runes ran around the edge while an equal-armed cross in a circle sat in the middle. On the back, a spiral of runes pretty much covered the surface. The language was so ancient that Tor could decipher neither inscription.

  “I’m betting that something in Halvar’s papers will help me,” Tor said. “That’s one reason why I’ve got to have them.”

  I tore off my drawing of the distant city, laid it on the coffee table out of the way, then rummaged through my box of pastels till I found a black stick. I opened the sketch book to a new page and stared at the gold ornament, not the paper, while I drew. My hand obligingly made a gestural drawing of the ornament. I started to fill in the runes at one corner, but Tor stopped me.

  “That looks just like the gold square.” He sounded disappointed. “Nothing’s changing.”

  “Then there isn’t any illusion on it.”

  “Yeah. Well, at least we know.” He stood
up. “I’ll put it back in the safe.”

  “It’s worth a lot of money, all that gold.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not just that. Nils wanted it. It’s one of the things that made him hate me. Started the feud off, in a way.” His eyes had gone slack in a way I’d come to recognize, when he was seeing some intangible thing. “And someone else still wants it. Real badly. Maybe Joel. Maybe the rime jötnar.” His eyes returned to a normal focus. “I’m going to cast the staves before I go.”

  I went downstairs to watch him do the reading. The entrance to the lower flat led into the library room, a space just under the living room upstairs. Like the living room, it had a fireplace and a couple of leather chairs and floorlamps, but the shelves holding Tor’s amazing collection of books, most of them about magic, took up the rest of the space. To the right was the master suite, but instead of a bedroom, Tor had turned it into his workshop. Near the draped floor-to-ceiling windows, two barstools, the kind with backs, sat on either side of a tall wooden table like you’d find in a science lab in a high school.

  I perched on one of the barstools. Tor spread a white linen cloth on the table, then brought out a red leather pouch of staves—thin oblongs of wood, about one inch by and inch and a half, each carved with a red-painted rune. He poured them onto the cloth, then looked away while I turned them all face-down and mixed them up. Once I finished, he stood considering the spread for a couple of minutes. I heard a high-pitched squeak, sort of like an oversized hamster, in the library room and turned around to look. I saw nothing.

  “Just the nisse,” Tor said. “He comes and goes.”

  The house spirit squeaked again and made a rustling noise among the books.

  “Hey!” Tor called out.

  The noise stopped.

  Tor started with a quick reading with only three runes. He held his hand out flat over the spread, then pounced on one rune. He picked it up and flipped it over: Fehu.

  “Gold,” he said. “That’s the past circumstance.” He drew another. “Thurisaz in the present. Someone’s directing some kind of force at us or at the gold.” He picked up the last stave, the rune indicating what might happen in the future. “Hagalaz. With Thurisaz right there, I’d say there’s trouble coming.” He stared at the trio for a moment, then drew two more runes and laid them down by Hagalaz to modify it. Naudhiz and then Wunjo inverted—necessity and sorrow. “Yeah, a lot of trouble coming.”