Free Sorcerer's Luck by Katharine Kerr Page B

part. A sorcerer’s
sense of humor was bound to be more than a little weird.
    Before I left the campus I went to the Admin office and changed my address. I felt oddly
solemn as I filled out the form, as if I’d made a crucial, momentous decision.
I reminded myself that I could switch back to part-time at Tor’s and find
another place to live any time I wanted.
    That afternoon, Tor and I worked out our routine around meals. He never ate
breakfast, but he insisted on stocking up on breakfast things for me. He would
do the shopping and cooking, and I’d clean up afterwards. I felt guilty at
first. With the money he was paying me, I thought I should be doing more, but I
was an awful cook, and he was a good one. He also had a housekeeping service
come in twice a month to take care of the real cleaning. I began to feel like I
was starting not a job but a vacation.
    Tor also made a point of showing me both flats. No secrets, he told me, not like in
those fairy tales. I knew the ones he meant, where the girl always opens the
Forbidden Thing and suffers for it.
    â€œThere’s nothing here I need to keep secret,” Tor said. “You know the worst already.”
    He grinned at me, and I had to smile in return. That dimple at the corner of his mouth!
    I’d already seen the library room downstairs, the place where you entered the flat. In
daylight I noticed a washer and dryer set up in the adjoining kitchen. The rest
of it pretty much followed the plan of the upper one, except of course for the
chunk cut out for the upper flat’s entrance and staircase. Beyond the library
to the left as you came in was the smaller bedroom and bathroom, both echoing
empty, though at the very end of the hall I spotted a closed door—a closet
maybe—that I hadn’t seen upstairs.
    Off to the right of the library was the master suite. Instead of a bedroom set, though,
the big room held a pair of wooden stools and a tall but narrow wooden table
that reminded me of the chemistry lab in my old high school. Tor opened the
cream-colored drapes over the window to let in some light. In the middle of the
room lay a black carpet painted with a white circle, about nine feet across, in
the center. Inside the circle an equal-armed cross cut it into four quarters.
Where each line of the cross touched the circle, a red letter marked one of the
cardinal directions.
    â€œYou can step on that,” Tor said. “It’s not active at the moment.”
    He led me across the room to a feature that didn’t match the upstairs, a huge closet that
lacked windows. I figured that someone had built it by taking space out of the
master bedroom itself. One wall held a solid rank of wooden drawers, most of
them shallow, like you’d find in the storerooms of an old-fashioned museum to
hold trays of antique jewelry or prints.
    â€œThe guy who owned it before me put those in,” Tor said. “I don’t know why.”
    â€œYou own this building?”
    â€œYeah. I need to, with the stuff I do.”
    Two luxury flats in the Oakland hills—his family must have had money, all right, heaps of
it. I wasn’t surprised when I noticed, on the opposite wall, a door to a
combination safe.
    â€œWant to see my secret treasures?” He was grinning at me.
    â€œSure.”
    I politely looked away while he worked the combination. One treasure turned out to be an
old-fashioned oak display case, about two feet on a side. Tor laid it down on a
wooden lectern in front of the storage unit. Against a background of yellowing
linen, dimpled like an egg carton, it held a set of wooden disks, each about
the size of a quarter. The wood looked ancient, dark and rubbed smooth by the
touch of many years and even more hands. Each disk was engraved with a spiky,
geometric mark, a letter of an ancient writing system.
    â€œThose are runes,” I said. “I’ve seen pictures of them in books on graphic design. It’s
the