Sorcerer's Feud Page 20

  Tor’s aversion spells were working.

  What bothered Hu and his superiors the most was the lack of a provable cause of death. In their currently favored theory, an unknown woman had driven with Nils to the parking lot, where he’d assaulted her. She bit him and escaped, taking the car, and he then had a heart attack of some irregular type and died on his own. Hu felt frustrated that the medical examiners could find none of the usual traces fatal heart attacks leave in their victims’ bodies. If only Nils’ heart had displayed a burst aorta or some other damage, the police could just sign off and be done with it. Budget cuts had brought the Oakland police force to an all-time low. They had too many clear-cut murders clogging their caseload as it was.

  “This all looks promising,” Tor remarked when we’d finished. “Still worried?”

  “No, not about the police arresting me. I just hope they don’t come after you because they’ve got to arrest someone. If Nils had been a poor black guy, I don’t think I’d worry at all.”

  “But he was white and wealthy, and he’s got ex-wives back east who are probably pissed about losing their alimony. I bet Hu’s getting some pressure from somewhere.” Tor paused to gather up the papers. “I’ll shred these.”

  “Good idea. Y’know, there’s one more thing that bothers me. Nils grabbed me after we had dinner in the restaurant in that strip mall. You paid for our meal with a credit card. Hu talked to all kinds of people in the businesses there, looking for witnesses. But the restaurant staff couldn’t tell him anything.”

  Tor gave me a smug and sunny smile. Why did I bother to ask?

  “It’s just a real good thing you don’t have criminal tendencies,” I said.

  “My dad made sure of that. I’ve got some sense of honor, y’know.”

  I held my thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “Yeah. That much.”

  Tor laughed and headed downstairs to shred the papers. I picked up my sketchbook and began looking through it in the hopes that one of the images I’d recorded would expand itself into a memory. In case one did, I took a black Conté stick from my box of drawing supplies and got ready to trap the memory in the book. Through the heater vent I heard the whine and growl of the shredder. Eventually, it fell silent, and Tor began chanting again. The sound reminded me of my father, chanting late at night while I lay in bed and listened through the thin walls of our various apartments. I found it oddly soothing. I nestled a little further into the soft cushions of the leather sofa and drowsed.

  I came to myself with a convulsive shudder and realized that I’d done a drawing in a trance state. In the center of the page lay the outline of a cave bear like the ones I’d seen in my art history class—big broad head, long muzzle, and hunched, powerful shoulders as it prowled—on all fours. I also realized that Tor had stopped chanting. I could hear him coming up the stairs, in fact. He walked into the living room and gave me an odd look.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess. I kind of nodded off, but I drew something anyway.”

  He came over, glanced at the drawing, and swore under his breath.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing wrong, just weird. I was calling to the bear spirit. I could feel her coming closer, but she disappeared. Suddenly she vanished like something had frightened her. I think you almost caught her.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I know that, but she doesn’t. It’s a good thing you used black. She’s brown, and that might have pinned her to the page.”

  “Tor, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “None of this stuff does.” He grinned at me, then let the grin fade. “Did you plan on going into trance?”

  “No. It just happened.”

  “That’s not good. You should tell Liv about this.”

  “Don’t worry, I will for sure.”

  As things turned out, we had a lot more to tell Liv about than my brief trance. Tor had planned on doing a ritual that evening over the bear fetish he’d bought. He wanted to charge it with power, then link it to himself. He was hoping that doing so would attract the bear spirit to this substitute for a body. If she could contact our world through the fetish, she might leave his body alone during the full moons. Since I seemed to have some affinity for her, he asked me to come down and watch.

  “Not participate,” he said. “Just watch. You might see something I’m missing, some kind of flaw in the way I approach her.”

  “Okay. Should I bring my drawing materials?”

  “No, I think just observing would be best.”

  At sunset we went downstairs to the ritual room. Tor put on his usual shabby blue hoodie, but instead of the white shorts, he word a pair of red sweatpants, the color that the lore associated with vitkar. I put on my ritual shirt while he scattered handfuls of dry grass from our back yard, laced with blueberries he’d bought at the supermarket, around the edge of the crossed circle.

  “They say cave bears lived on mostly plant material,” Tor said. “So I thought I’d try these.”

  He lit four candles, but he placed them well away from the scatters of dry grass. Finally he brought out the bear fetish and placed it at the point where the arms of the cross met. He knelt behind it and gazed off to the north for a moment, then rose with a nod of his head. I sat down outside at the west, cross-legged to make sure that none of me touched the circle. He turned to face the east. We were ready to begin.

  Tor raised his arms above his head in the rune of Elhaz and took a deep breath. Before he could chant a single word I felt a presence enter the room from the north. Tor turned to face her as the bear spirit manifested. She appeared as no more than a trace of shimmering silver mist in the air, an outline much like the one I’d drawn, but I could see the articulation of her shoulders and hips as she crawled forward. Very faintly, like a sigh on a distant wind, she whimpered and stopped moving.

  Tor spoke in a soothing murmur of what sounded to me like Old Norse. She crawled forward again and laid the tip of her nose on the fetish. Slowly, a bare inch at a time, Tor lowered his arms. Her silvery form began to solidify into wisps that formed a cloud-image of a bear’s head and a more substantial braid of mist along her spine. Slowly again, as slowly as he could manage, Tor knelt to look into the pools of shadow that marked where eyes should have been.

  For a long time they communed while the candles burned down and gave me a way to keep track of time. Fifteen minutes, I estimated, then another fifteen—neither Tor nor the bear moved, neither made a sound. My right leg began to cramp. I ignored it for as long as I could, but the pain turned into a sharp fang, biting deep in my leg. Very slowly I moved my hand, keeping my arm close to my body, until I could reach the cramp and rub it. I heard the tiny sound of fingers on flesh.

  So did the bear. She whipped her silvery head around and noticed me for the first time. With a howl of terror she vanished.

  “Shit,” Tor said. “It’s you she’s frightened of, not just your imaging power, I mean, but you.”

  “I’m sorry. I had to move.” I stretched out my leg and rubbed it hard to ease the pain. “Sitting like that—“

  “It’s okay. I’ve learned something really important.” He stood up and stretched his back. “I’m kind of cramped myself. Y’know, she came here to warn me about something.”

  “Me, probably.”

  “No, though she couldn’t tell me what the threat was. But she wants to be my fylgja. I can tell that. She just doesn’t want you to hurt her.”

  “If she stops trying to take you over every month, I’ll be glad to make peace.” I got to my feet—slowly, because my leg still felt sore.

  “Okay, I’ll tell her that, next time she appears. But that warning. She showed me ice, snow sliding over rocks. Your wraiths, maybe.”

  “If she thinks I’m a snow wraith, no wonder she’s afraid of me. I might force her to hibernate.”

  “Very true.” He smiled at me. “You’re catching on to all this, Maya.”

/>   So much for my attempt to lighten the mood with a little joke.

  Tor closed down the ritual space before we changed into our ordinary clothes. When we went upstairs, I wrote Liv a long email while he cooked dinner. I had no idea when she’d read it, of course, but it turned out that she’d received a different kind of message. We were still in bed the next morning when the wolf howls of Tor’s ringtone woke us. He sat up and grabbed the phone. I glanced at the clock on the end table: just six a.m.

  “It’s Liv,” Tor said and switched into Icelandic for a couple of exchanges. He returned to English. “You need to hear this, Maya. Liv had one hell of a dream last night. When she got up, she drove into town and picked up your email. Let me put the phone on speaker.”

  I sat close to him so I could hear both sides of the conversation, though hers was hard to make out at moments.

  “You two are generating so much power between you,” she said, “that you’re getting phenomena. This is dangerous.”

  “Yeah,” Tor said. “I kind of know that.”

  “Look, brother of mine, get off your high horse! This is important.”

  They squabbled for a while in a way that reminded me of how Roman and I used to snarl at each other. I suspect they enjoyed it. We did.

  “Be that as it may,” Liv said eventually, “Maya can’t go on slipping into trance at the drop of a hat. Why aren’t you teaching her how to control it?”

  “I’m going to. It just happened yesterday—”

  “No, it happened before, over the picture of that German guy. Maya, are you there?”

  “Yes.” I leaned close to the phone. “You’re right.”

  Tor muttered something in Icelandic that sounded nasty. She ignored it.

  “Trouble is coming,” Liv said. “In the dream a bear appeared to tell me that. A huge thing, like one of those Paleolithic creatures. Does that image—”

  “The bear?” Tor snapped. “Very important, yes.”

  “And then I saw a woman made of snow. She told me that Maya needed to hear from me.”

  “True so far, yeah.”

  “Tor, this doesn’t involve the jötnar, does it?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Damn good thing I drove into town! Thank god the roads are still open! I’m thinking I should come visit you.”

  “I can handle it on my own.”

  They lapsed into Icelandic again, and this time the squabbling sounded serious. Finally Tor shrugged and spoke in English.

  “If you really want to come, then come,” he said. “Besides, everything must have moved indoors by now. The kids are probably driving you nuts. Don’t bring them, please.”

  The time of year had arrived when in the far north the sun barely rose all day.

  “I won’t,” Liv said. “It’ll do their father good to deal with them. It depends on when I can get a flight, and if it can take off. We’ve had snow already, of course.”

  More squabbling, genial this time, until they finally signed off. Tor laid the phone back down, then turned to me. “Never tell my sister this,” Tor said, “but I’m glad she’s on the way. I’m beginning to think we could use some reinforcements.”

  That scared me.

  Tor made coffee, but as soon as he’d drunk a cup, he took a refill downstairs so he could study the runes staves. I ate a piece of toast with my coffee, thought of eating more, and decided against it. I wandered into the living room and looked at the Chinese vases and the jade mountain on the bookshelf. The jade glowed from within; the carved trees seemed to tremble in a wind. The flowers on the vases seemed to float against the perfect white porcelain. When I looked away, I saw everything abnormally clearly in the morning light, the colors vivid, the details so sharply defined that even the soft cushions of the furniture appeared carved from stone.

  Power, Liv said. Too much power. I felt it flowing all around me.

  I needed to calm down. I took deep breaths, then decided that a nice soothing shower would help. As soon as I turned the water on, the sound of it, water rushing like rain, beating against the wall, broke through a barrier in my mind. I felt peculiarly light, as if I could leap into the air and float on the sun beams coming in the bathroom window. I knew, suddenly and completely, what had eluded me for so long. I turned the water off and ran back into the living room to write and draw the memories of that long-ago life before the tide went out, and they drained away.

  My mother and I lived on a little island way out in a stretch of boggy land in the place they call East Anglia now, but we had no name for the land, my mother and I. We owned a hut and a little leather boat and some knives and fire flints. We ate fish, eels, and water birds along with watercress and green herbs. She taught me how to make my way through the bogs and creeks without being sucked under by the mud. I knew the ways long before I learned to speak, not that I ever learned to speak well.

  Now and then, men came into our watery world to catch eels. We hid from them. When I asked her why, she said, “The priests will kill you if they catch us.” She refused to tell me more.

  One cold spring she caught a fever and lay gasping for air on her bed of rushes. I made a fire and cooked a broth of water bird. As I fed her, she talked between sips, a few words at time.

  “Your father. You have a father.”

  “All things do. The birds and the salmon.”

  She smiled at me. “He’s not an ordinary man.”

  “Not an eel hunter?’

  “Not that, and not like them at all.”

  “Am I a bird, then?”

  “No, no. He looks like a man.” Her mouth worked as she fought for words. “His eyes will tell you.”

  I stared. The words made no sense to me, because eyes cannot speak, and in that life, metaphor lay beyond me.

  She sighed and laid a cold hand on my arm. “Such big eyes, and him so pale.”

  “I understand now.”

  “Snow. Magic. Try to find him.”

  She gasped once more and died. I put down the bowl of broth and howled with grief, on and on for some long while. I covered her with our scraps of blankets and spent the night shivering beside her.

  In the morning I took our knives and what food there was and put them in the boat. I paddled to the solid ground and set off on foot to do what she’d asked. I don’t know how old I was, but something under twelve years of age, a skinny scrap of a girl, filthy and smelly from the bog until the first hard rain came and washed me clean. I thought I’d catch the fever from the rain and die, but it spared me.

  I don’t remember how long I traveled or how I survived. I do remember my first sight of the sea, the dark water stretching toward sunrise and the foam, white on the pebbled beach. I sat down on a clump of coarse grass and stared at the sea for most of a morning. While I watched, ships came with striped sails and dragon’s heads on the prows—not that I knew any of those words then. I only learned what to call the ships later, after the men in iron shirts seized me, after we sailed back across the sea to their homeland, where I became a farm thrall. What the work was like I do not know. The memories of an ordinary way of life have faded after so long a time.

  I do remember the burning of the farmstead, although I’ve lost the knowledge of why the enemies came to burn it. When the howling men broke down the gate, I ran without thinking into the stable. I heard the fighting and the screams of women. I smelled the smoke of the burning longhouse. Four enemies came into the stable to take out the cows and horses before they set fire there as well. One man, red faced and snarling, saw me and strode over to seize me, but I grabbed a two-pronged hayfork and thrust it deep into his groin. He screamed and staggered and fell. His blood ran between his legs like red piss.

  He raised himself on one elbow and moaned, whimpered, begged the others for aid. The leader looked at the wound and shrugged. No one helped him.

  “Die like a man, you coward!” one warrior snarled.

  The bleeding man fell back and began to weep. Two men turned away. The lead
er walked over to me. I set my back against the wall and raised the pitchfork. He was tall, heavy-set and laden with chain mail, twice my size easily, reeking with sweat and the smell of fresh blood. He pointed his sword at me.

  “What’s your name, girl?”

  I hissed. I could not speak well at the best of times, and all that came out then was a hiss like that of a huge cat.

  “Let her go,” he said to his fellows. “She’s cursed.”

  They nodded and returned to leading out the cows and the plow horses. I slipped out of the back door of the stable and left the farmstead before the looters saw me go. I took the pitchfork with me.

  I don’t remember anything else, not even how I died. I think the man who spared me was Tor, or, I mean, the man whose soul later became Tor. In my heart I know that my soul became tangled with those of the wraiths for the very first time in that life, because that mysterious father had to be a wight, one of the snow creatures, who had somehow seduced my mother. No doubt the priest in her village thought he was a demon and I was a demon child. The village priests in those days were almost as ignorant as the folk they served.

  Did I ever find my father? No, not then, not for a thousand years, but as I lay down to die on that mountain in Austria, he found me. When my soul left Mia’s body, he was there to greet me. In my grief and confusion, I chose to be his daughter again. Eventually, in San Francisco, his human form supplied the body for my soul to indwell, but his soul somehow influenced our DNA and left it twisted.

  Was it a good choice on my part? No, but I made it freely, and I’ll live it out.

  Chapter 11

  Joel Halvarsson arrived in the Bay Area on the second Wednesday in November, but official business kept him so busy that we didn’t see him till Saturday, the last day of his trip. Tor arranged to meet him at the Indian restaurant at seven o’clock.

  “You can always have a bad cold,” Tor told me. “I’ll make your excuses for you when I see him.”