Sorcerer's Feud

  “Halvar’s journals are there, and then in the box there’s some notes about rituals in a different handwriting. Nils’ work, I bet. He was trying everything he could to drive the wolf away.”

  “And none of it worked.”

  “No, it sure didn’t.” He paused and glanced away, abruptly grim. “Well, he’s free of it now.”

  The red leather pouch of rune staves lay on the table where we’d left them, next to the neatly folded white cloth. For the reading Tor moved the family papers, one careful handful at a time, to the end of the long table. While Tor scrambled the staves on the cloth, I walked around to the far side of the table and sat on the high stool waiting for me. I avoided looking at the staves until Tor told me I could. He laid a clean piece of paper, dotted here and there with numbers, down in front of me.

  “You’ll be picking out nine staves,” he said, “but do it one at a time and put them face up on the number. Y’know, the first one on One, the next on Two, and like that.”

  For a moment I studied the odd-looking template. Five of the numbers lay in a straight vertical line but out of order: eight, six, one, seven, and nine. Four and three lay to the left of this line, and two and five to the right of it. I picked out a stave and laid it on One.

  “Mannaz, human things, in Midgard,” Tor said. “Appropriate.”

  Two was Othala, ancestral holdings, in Niflheim, the mistlands. The memory rose in my mind of telling Tor how thick fog and misty rain made my father and me feel more alive, as if we drew élan from the cold. I glanced up and saw Tor smiling, an odd little twist of his mouth.

  “That means something, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “Maybe. Go on.”

  “I’m not sure I want to.”

  He made a little snorting sound.

  “Oh okay,” I said and drew the third stave.

  “Kennaz in Muspelheim, torch in the land of fire,” Tor said. “This could turn out to be a strange reading.”

  It grew stranger as every stave I drew fell into an appropriate world: Thorn to Jötunheim, the Birchtree for Vanirheim, the home of the old fertility gods. The Sun fell in the land of the Light Elves and the Dice Cup of Fate in the home of the dwarves. Ánsuz, meaning a god, fell in Ásgaard, and finally, Ice, the cold at the end of everything, landed in the deathlands of Hel. Tor stared at the finished layout for a long time while the silence in the big room grew around us and the sunlight sprawled across the floor. When Tor finally spoke, I nearly yelped in surprise.

  “Okay,” he said, “this is not an ordinary reading. Forget the usual fortune telling shit.”

  “Well, what—“

  “It’s a message. From yourself to you. Niflheim, the world of mists. Your patrimony. Those discrepancies in your DNA that baffled the expert.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Really?” He was smiling at me, but his eyes stayed cold. “Look at where the runes fall. Every one of them lies where it should be, just as if this reading’s a map. It’s saying that we should take the positions, the world names, literally, not as some kind of metaphor. All of them except one. Othala in the land of mists. Your ancestry, your patrimony. Can’t you see it?”

  My hands started shaking. I clasped them together to make them stop. “Okay, yes, I do,” I said. “You think this reading’s telling me my father came from Niflheim. How? I mean, he was a human being. He and my mom had kids the usual way. He died of heart failure like a human being.”

  “He had a human body, sure. But his soul—”

  “Soul? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Maya, I don’t know. It’s a shit word, sure, over-used. Makes you think of angels and crap like that. But we’ve all got to have something that I guess we could call a soul. It’s got nothing to do with the gods or the idea of one god, either. It’s got to be some natural thing, because it’s what travels from life to life. It’s why you and I remember loving each other in Copenhagen. The human brains we’ve got now couldn’t remember, but some part of us does.”

  I started to speak. He held up one hand flat to stop me.

  “I don’t understand this,” he continued. “I don’t have any answers for how this happened. Okay? I’m not laying down the law about it.” He grinned at me, and his eyes lost their cold glare. “For a change.”

  I had to smile in return. My hands stopped shaking.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re saying that my father’s soul, whatever that is, belonged to some other part of the universe.”

  “Yeah, just that, and he passed it on to you. His genetics gave you something that changed the body you have, when you were growing in the womb. Think of the piece of code as a magnet, kind of, that drew your soul to it. Whatever the affinity is, it’s got to be seated in some recessive part of the DNA. Your brother got the dominant human coding. You weren’t so lucky. Neither was your dad. Somehow or other what we’re calling his soul got trapped in the wrong world. I wonder if he even knew it?”

  “I think he did.” Memories began to fall into place. “I bet that’s why he studied magic so—so obsessively. He was searching for something, and he was desperate to find it. I knew that. I thought it was about our disease, and yeah, in a way it was. But I bet there was something more to it than that.”

  “So do I.” Tor’s voice turned soft, gentle. “Can you remember anything he said about it?”

  “When he was in the hospital and really sick, y’know?” This memory brought tears to my eyes, but I forced the words out. “When he was dying, he told me, don’t mourn, I’m just going back. Back where? I said. I don’t know, he said, but home. It was hard for him to talk, but then he said, it’s a long long way away. He might have told me more, but my stepmother said he was hallucinating and chased me out of the room.”

  “The bitch!”

  “Well, she was jealous of us, me and Roman, I mean, and the way he still loved us after the divorce.”

  “Real generous of her! Can you remember anything else?”

  I shook my head no. “I’m exhausted. Not now. Please?”

  “Sure. Sweetheart, I’m sorry.”

  Tor strode around the end of the table and held out his arms. I got down from the stool and let him hold me. I could feel the élan flowing around me and breathed deep. Strength, his strength as well as the strength of the life force itself, soothed me.

  “Feel better?” he said.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “We can talk more later.” He let me go.No rush.”

  Tor began picking up the staves and putting them back into the leather pouch. I wandered over to the sliding glass door that looked out onto our pathetic back yard—ratty grass, one Japanese maple that needed pruning. To one side lay a hunk of old concrete, left over from someone’s attempt to put in a patio. I could remember a lot about my father, all our good times and the bad as well, lying in bed as a child and listening to him and my mother fighting in furious whispers. They never wanted Roman and me to hear what they said to each other in those fights, so I only perceived the sound of rage and frustration. I lacked the words carrying its meaning. Maybe it would have been better if I’d understood them. I don’t know.

  But none of those memories told me anything more about my heritage, my patrimony, as Tor called it, the strange place my dad came from, the place that marked us deep in our genes. The Mistland, Niflheim, a chunk of old mythology, not a real place, how could it be real? Symbolic, that’s all, a symbol, a marker of some meaning beyond conscious functioning, an archetype, maybe, powerful but not really real. It didn’t belong in the same world as DNA and science and ordinary human beings.

  But did I?

  “Maya?” Tor said. “You okay?”

  “Not really.” I turned around and face him.

  “It’s a lot to think about.”

  “Yeah. Sure is.”

  “I can give you a book on how to meditate on themes like these. Well, if you want.”

  At least he wasn’t pushing on me. I started to agr
ee, but I remembered Harper, telling me to dig deep for my senior project. I felt a rush of energy like a fountain bursting upwards into the air.

  “Thanks but no thanks,” I said. “I’ll paint it. That’s what I’ve always done. Whenever I had a problem or something awful I had to face, I used to draw for hours. That’s what I’ll do with this, turn it into art and see what it looks like.”

  “Great! That’s always best, do it your own way.” He paused for a sheepish grin. “But you won’t mind, will you, if I do a little research?”

  I laughed. “No,” I said. “I won’t mind.”

  When he held out his hand, I walked over and clasped it. He smiled again and kissed me on the forehead, nothing sexy, but warm and sweet all the same. We started toward the staircase to go upstairs, but something caught my attention, a welcome distraction. Leaning against the lectern in the walk-in closet area was a large rectangular object, about three feet by four, muffled in a green baize zippered bag.

  “What’s that?” I stopped and pointed.

  “The portrait from Nils. We should take a look at it, I guess. See if it’s scratched or anything like that.”

  Tor carried the bag to the table in the main room. He took the portrait out and propped it up on one of the barstools. Against a dark background, a middle-aged man sat in a red velvet chair and stared unsmiling straight out at the viewer. He had silvery gray hair and eyebrows, but otherwise he resembled Tor, or I should say, Tor resembled him—same strong jaw and broad hands, same brown eyes, but Halvar’s were narrowed slightly as if he disliked the world he saw in front of him.

  “It’s just like the other two,” I said. “It was totally strange of him, to have all these identical portraits made. Especially since he didn’t let the artist sign them.”

  “He was a strange man. That’s another reason I wanted his papers. I’ve always wondered what made Halvar tick. But if you’re curious about the artist, I found his name in one of the notebooks.”

  “I’d like to know, yeah.”

  “I’ll find it again. Let me just get rid of this.”

  Tor slid the portrait back into its bag, zipped it up, and put it into the long drawer that held the other two portraits. “Halvar’s coffin,” he said. “That’s what I call it.”

  “Where was he actually buried?”

  “In Iceland. They shipped him home after the police autopsy. I’m not sure of where, exactly. I don’t give a damn, either.”

  Tor rummaged through one of the notebooks on the high table, found the entry, and wrote out an English version for me on a scrap of paper. “Final payment to Florian Windrup for four portraits. June 19, 1992.”

  “Four?”

  “Liv has the other one, back in Iceland.”

  “Florian Windrup? That’s quite a name! I wonder if he made it up to sound artistic.”

  “Could be, though Florian’s a common enough German name. Kind of old-fashioned, maybe. Grandfather found him in New York City.” Tor pointed to an entry in the journal. “Here’s the second note that mentions Windrup’s name, about a week later. ‘Matter settled’ is all it says.”

  “That’s enough information to narrow my search.”

  “Good. Go on up if you want. I just remembered a book that might have some information we can use. It’s in the library somewhere.”

  While he hunted for the book, I returned to the living room and my laptop. All the data together, Florian Windrup artist NYC, turned up exactly one person, a young portraitist, and some totally grim information about him. I’d just finished that search when Tor came upstairs, carrying a book. When he laid it on the coffee table, I noticed that the title was in a Scandinavian language—I wasn’t sure which one. He walked over to the breakfast bar, where his laptop was sitting, and booted it up while I did another quick search on Windrup. I found nothing more.

  “Hey, Joel answered my email.” Tor stared at his screen for a long minute, then looked up. “When he got home from work tonight, his apartment had been torn apart. Burgled—except they left his TV, the laptop, and some cash he had in his dresser drawer.”

  “Some burglary!”

  “Yeah. He thinks they were after the papers, because, like he says, what else? Y’know, I think I’ll just go put them in the safe. Right now.”

  “Wait a minute, okay? I found that artist your grandfather hired. He was murdered in Brooklyn on June 26, 1992. It looked like a mugging. They never caught the killer.”

  “Oh shit.” Tor whispered the words. “One week after the final payment, huh?”

  “I have this creepy feeling it’s not a coincidence.”

  “So do I.” His mouth twisted in disgust. “Matter settled. Yeah, I just bet it was.”

  “Your grandfather, would he really have someone killed?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past the old bastard.”

  “But why? He gave the portraits away. It wasn’t like he wanted them kept secret.”

  “That’s a real good question. Florian must have done something or known something that dear old Grandad didn’t want spread around. Unless it’s just coincidence. Windrup might have flashed some money around, since he’d just gotten paid. Attracted the wrong kind of attention.”

  “You really think so?”

  “No, because I knew Halvar. If he had a reason to want to this guy dead, he would have arranged it. Huh, I wonder if it’s got some connection to his own murder?”

  “It sounds like he knew some really creepy people.”

  Tor grinned at me. “Including Nils, yeah.”

  “I don’t suppose Nils loved his father. Considering how much he resented all the rest of the family.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone loved Halvar by then. He’d turned into a real nasty son of a bitch. Even when he was young, he was a lot like me. Ruthless. A barbarian at heart.”

  “You keep saying that about yourself. I don’t see it.”

  “Who’s upset about Nils’ death, you or me?” Tor smiled, just faintly. “Don’t let the way I love you make you blind.”

  I felt ice slide a warning down my back.

  “Let me go put those papers in the safe.” Tor’s voice was perfectly calm, perfectly ordinary. “I’ll be right back.”

  As I listened to the sound of his footsteps, clattering down the stairs, I was wondering which one of us was less than human, me or Tor.

  I turned off the laptop and set it down next to my sketchbook. A box of pastels lay on the coffee table where I’d left it. I was just leaning forward to pick them up when a sound shattered the air—a crack like lightning, or a gunshot, clean and sharp, and so loud that I screamed before I could stop myself. I heard Tor pounding up the stairs and yelling my name.

  “I’m all right!” My voice swooped up way too high.

  Tor burst into the living room and ran over to me. He caught my shaking hand and helped me stand up, then slipped his arm around me.

  “What the hell was that?” He glanced around and swore under his breath. He let me go and hurried over to the sandstone fireplace. I followed more slowly. I gasped and felt like swearing myself.

  One of the largest slabs of decorative stone, roughly three feet high and a couple of feet across, had split down the middle, a long deep crack still plumed with a trace of dust in the air.

  “Poltergeist,” Tor said. “The dead vitki just said hello.”

  Chapter 5

  Tor spent the rest of that day carving protective runes into every lintel of every door in the upper flat, every frame of every window, and for good measure the mantel of the fireplace. He finished the living room first and told me to stay there, then did the rest of the flat. I sat huddled on the couch with my sketchbook and watched him work, when I could see him, and just listened to his voice intoning spell after spell when he was out of my range of vision. First he’d intone a galdr, then use his rune knife to carve a protective formula. Chips of paint and wood pattered down like snow and fell on his shoulders and arms. He’d irritably shake them away.
br />   Once he’d carved all the lines of runes, he brought an old mayonnaise jar of paint and a fine brush up from downstairs. While he painted each carved rune with red ochre, he sang another spell.

  Just after sunset I heard him washing his hands in the bathroom. When he came striding into the living room, I noticed that he was holding his left hand out a little ways from his body. He had a couple of Band-aids in his right.

  “You put blood in that stain?” I said.

  “Yeah, just a little.” He sat down next to me on the couch and proffered the bandaids. “Could you put these on it for me?”

  “It” turned out to be the cut, about half an inch long, on the back of his left arm at the wrist. He’d reopened the old scar from the ritual battle with Nils. I took off the paper coverings and covered up the wound with the gauze pads.

  “I thought of using blood straight up,” Tor continued, “but it would have taken too much.”

  “That’s for sure. I’m glad you saw that.”

  “I’m going to need my strength.” He smiled and patted my hand. “I’ve got to eat something. I’ll make us some dinner, and then I’m going to put wards downstairs. I wish I could use them up here, but it would drive both of us nuts, feeling them.”

  “Will the runes work the same kind of spell?”

  “Yeah. Maybe not as well, though. We’ll have to see.” He stood up. “But if not, there’s other stuff I can do. Don’t worry.” He headed for the kitchen.

  Don’t worry. I felt like throwing something at his retreating back. Instead I picked up my sketchbook and rummaged through the old wooden box full of pastels and Conté and charcoal sticks. The sight of them, my tools as an artist, calmed me. I took out a black Conté stick—the color seemed appropriate—and began scribbling circles just to soothe my nerves. In the mess of lines and smudges forms began to appear. I turned the page and let the images come to me.

  In the foreground, snow lay heaped up against a wall of some sort. Beyond, I saw low buildings, a wharf, water, wide wide water, an ocean, a tiny harbor, on an island. I remembered the island, but I couldn’t place where it lay. In the north, obviously, I thought as I added fine lines to define the heaps of snow. I messed up the snow drifts on the wharf, or so I thought at first. They looked dirty, as if I’d overworked them, until I realized that the drifts were dusted with soot. Someone burned coal in the cabin nearby. At the end of the wharf a woman was standing, dressed in long skirts and a heavy cloak.