“What are you going to do?” Tom asked.
I felt Devan come up next to me. She reached into her bag and grabbed another of her figurines. This one had massive claws that crossed over its body and a strange, twisted nose pointing to the air. “Let me,” she said.
She set the figurine on the ground and whispered something softly to it. As she did, the little carving started to shake and twist and elongate, growing to fill the space between us and the door.
Tom took a step back and away from the figurine. “What is that?”
I tipped my head. “That’s my girl.” I slapped her lightly on her butt, and she turned to give me a grin. “How long will it give us?”
I didn’t know a whole lot about her figurines. Hell, I’d only learned that they were more than a distraction for her when Nik attacked. I’d seen what the troll guys could do, the way they had slowed him enough to buy us time. And with painting, sometimes that was all that it was about: getting time to make the painting changes needed to work the right patterns.
“Depends,” Devan said.
“On what?”
She nodded toward the door. “On what my brother brought with him.”
I palmed another charm, now holding two. One would create a circle of protection—always a good thing to have on hand when facing unknown magic—and the other would go boom. Also good to have on hand.
I stepped past Devan’s claw friend, eyeing Tom with a mischievous look as I did, and kicked at the door. It crashed open. The claw man skittered into the room. There really was no other way to describe the way that he moved.
Ducking low, I moved into the room after him holding my charms out from me, readied for whatever it was that we might come across.
There was nothing.
Not exactly nothing. A darkness moved, almost like a shadow, but then faded. Wind blew in through a hole in the wall, but otherwise, the room was empty. Claw man skittered over to the wall and stood there, arms outstretched as if to grab at it, and twisted his funny-looking head around, almost like he was sniffing.
I stood and peered around Tom’s private room. A desk took up most of the floor space. The chair had been tipped over and kicked against the wall. A few paintings hung on the wall, though they looked like actual art rather than some tagger trying his hand at making shapes. I studied one for a moment and realized that it had been painted by my father. There was his steady stroke and distinctive signature across the bottom. Interestingly, the painting was of Settler Hill and showed the compass in the foreground of the hill overlooking the city.
“Those were paintings he left me,” Tom started.
“What’s missing?” I asked Tom, pulling my eyes away from the painting. I’d need to study it more to understand why my father had painted it. There was always a why with the Elder. Could it be simple chance that Tom would have a painting of one of the things stolen from the city?
Tom searched across his desk. The computer stood untouched, the screen flickering slightly, but otherwise unharmed. The keyboard resting on the desk had been tipped upside down. A stack of paper was scattered around the desk, some torn as if hastily searched through. A large pad of paper angled against the desk, and I grabbed it, flipping through the pages. Tom must have used the pad to diagram patterns. There were series of potentially protective patterns made on the page. Would he have attempted to use these to keep the Rooster safe or did he have another purpose?
“What were you planning here, Tom?” I asked.
Tom glanced from me to Jakes who stood in the doorway behind us. “Nothing, Oliver. There is nothing here. I can’t get what I wanted to work.” He twisted toward the claw man and shook his head. “I would have planned nothing, but since you’ve returned, I’ve had no choice but to resume my studies. With the attacks growing more frequent to the point that someone was left dead at my restaurant—and one of the Nizashi at that!—I knew I needed to prepare. Who else is going to protect Conlin?”
“Maybe you could’ve tried checking with the shifters,” I said. “Seems to me that Jakes is plenty capable.” I knew what Tom was getting at, but I couldn’t be the one to provide the protection for the city. I wasn’t my father, and I never would be. I didn’t have his artistic talent. I didn’t have his other abilities—what I now knew to be magi abilities. Even if I managed to convince Nik to train me, I might never know enough to keep Conlin protected.
But I would keep Devan safe.
“You’ve seen that they have a different purpose here, Oliver. They aren’t meant to protect the city, only prevent crossings.”
“What were they after?” I asked Tom. “You had something of my father’s here, so what was it? It had to be enough to draw them here, knowing that we were here.” It was either a risky attack, or well planned, knowing that Tom would be distracted with us. Either way, I didn’t like it.
“Nothing that mattered,” Tom muttered. “It was something your father left for me to use. You would have no use for it.”
“What was it?” I demanded.
Tom sighed. “A way for me to learn. Pattern recognition. Your father knew I wasn’t skilled enough as a painter, but I have other talents. I can see patterns and can twist them.”
I thought of the stars linked on the outside of the door. They had certainly been twisted. “And?”
“It alters the patterns, changes the intent. Your father set a series of tasks for me, wanting me to evaluate certain patterns to see what they might do. It was his task for me, the way I could still serve the Elder.”
I didn’t need for Tom to explain to me why my father would ask him for such help. As a tagger, any power that he could push through the patterns wouldn’t be nearly as strong as what my father—a true artist—could manage. It would let him test the patterns without risking much. And information about what patterns were useful would be incredibly valuable to any painter.
“So you kept a log,” I said.
Tom nodded. “A log based on your father’s patterns. I couldn’t recreate them, so I had a system in place to document which ones I’d tried and which ones worked.”
Something like that could allow a painter, albeit a powerful one, to alter even my father’s work. “Dangerous,” I whispered. “And the log?”
“Missing.”
“But they weren’t what was held in the box in the storage unit.”
Tom shook his head. “No. That was some leftover items of your father’s. Nothing significant. Mostly clothes, some books, other things that don’t have much use.”
Frustration surged through me. Tom wasn’t telling me everything, and I didn’t know why. I understood that he worked with my father, that he served my father in a way that I might not ever understand, but he needed to share with us what he knew so that we could keep the attacks from repeating. Already, Taylor had been hurt trying to see what they were after. What was next? Me? Devan?
Not if I could have anything to do with it.
I stepped in front of him. I wasn’t really a large guy, nothing like Jakes, but I’d been around enough danger in my days that I wasn’t easily cowed and knew how to exude power even if I didn’t use it. I used everything in my stable of tricks as I forced Tom to look up at me.
“Everything of my father’s has some purpose. You should know that.”
And so should I, I remembered.
I went to the wall and grabbed the paintings hanging there, ignoring Tom’s protests. I stacked the frames on top of each other and carried them over to the gap in the wall, stopping in front of the claw man. “Can you do something about this?” I asked Devan.
She stepped over to him and breathed out a word I couldn’t hear. The claw man shivered and shook and began to shrink back into the small size he’d been before he’d appeared. What tricks did he do that she needed? I suspected that each of the figurines had different uses. The trolls she’d used against Nik had been more about brute strength, taking whatever they needed to slow him down, to prevent him from hurting the rest of
us. It had bought me the time I’d needed to stop him.
Once the figurine returned to its tiny size, she picked him up and placed him back into her bag. I stepped outside through the hole in the wall. “You might want to patch this up, Tom.”
I started forward when Jakes’s voice made me pause. “What are you going to do, Morris?”
Without glancing back, I answered. “Can’t risk what they might do with what they’ve taken,” I said. “Or what they might take. You make sure no doorways open until we’re ready. Even the ones you don’t know about. I’ll take care of what’s already here.”
Devan caught up to me at the truck and climbed in. I put the pictures between us on the seat, glancing at them to make certain they weren’t damaged, and then started Big Red with a turn of the key.
As I backed out of the parking lot, part of me expected Jakes or even Tom to come running after us, but neither of them did. I didn’t think I would have stopped even if they had.
“Where are we going?” Devan asked.
I shook my head. “Back to the house to start with. We need to understand more about the compass, and then we need to see what we can do to stop your brother.”
“You don’t think they were the same thefts.”
“I had, but now I’m not certain.”
“Why?”
“There’s something that’s been bothering me since we went to the storage unit. We sensed your brother, right?” Devan nodded. “But there was painter power there, too. Unless your brother suddenly became a painter, in which case there wouldn’t be any reason for painter power there. He’s got enough magic he wouldn’t need to use painting. After we found her, I thought it might have been Taylor, but what if it wasn’t?”
“You’re thinking about what went missing from Tom’s place?”
We turned down my street. The evening grew long, and the wind kicked up from out of the west, buffeting the truck. “Whatever else might have been taken, the log would have been the most valuable.” I glanced over as I explained. “If you’ve got someone with the ability to modify patterns, especially patterns laid out by an artist like the Elder, then the log of the effective changes would be valuable, but only to another painter.”
“What if the Druist sent someone else?”
“We’ve seen Adazi, and then Nik. Who else could he send?”
“We don’t know anything about the Druist’s buddies,” she said. “Maybe he’s got a whole fleet of painters.”
I sighed. I could think of all sorts of reasons the compass would be useful to both the Druist and the Trelking. “What if both have crossed?” I asked.
“Then their war has already spilled over, Ollie,” she said.
And without my father, who will stop them?
15
After checking on Taylor—she still rested quietly on the sofa in the living room, her eyes closed while she lay in the middle of the healing pattern I’d placed around her—I led Devan to the basement, making a point of sealing the door closed behind us. Normally, I wouldn’t worry about that, but until we knew what else they might be after, I didn’t want to make it too easy to reach us.
There wasn’t much in the basement. The desk had been cleared off. The journals, most written in what I suspected was code or a different language and none of which had any meaning to me, were kept neat and tidy on bookshelves, pulled slightly away from the walls so that any moisture that might seep through wouldn’t damage the pages. There was a simple wooden chair that matched the desk. Devan had long ago brought down a chair from the kitchen, a high-backed thing with a lime-green vinyl-covered seat and back.
“Tell me what you think you’re going to do with the pictures you stole from Tom.” Devan dropped onto her chair, the top of the seat back nearly over her head.
I set the pictures on the desk, spacing them out. “I didn’t steal them. He was there, so it can’t really be stealing. Besides, we had the sheriff there with us, and he didn’t stop me.”
“I don’t think Jakes was really up for stopping much at that point.”
I shrugged. “Whatever. This one,” I said, tapping the picture that was painted of Settler Hill, “was done by my father. The others might have been, too. I don’t know yet. But they might give me a clue to the shardstone box. That ties this all together, don’t you think?”
Though different, each had a similar brush stroke. The one I’d placed in the middle, was painted with deep blues and reds in sweeping colors. It wasn’t so much the colors that caught my eye, but what the drawing depicted. Painted with more detail than anything I’d ever seen, it depicted the sculpture at the heart of Conlin Park, the one that seemed to have the most magical draw but somehow also the least amount of magic within it: Agony of the Chase.
To me, the sculpture always looked like a demon-shaped man, and the drawing of my father’s did nothing to change that. The face was long and drawn, matching what I saw when staring at the sculpture in the park. Uncomfortable angles shifted all over the sculpture, giving what I would consider something of an arcane feel to the sculpture itself, almost as if the arcane patterns had some extra dimensionality to them. The horns—or hair, depending on your view—were twisted to the side. Eyes were wide and open. I didn’t need a signature to know that my father had drawn this picture. There probably wasn’t another artist alive who could capture the spirit of Agony so clearly.
Every detail was immaculately played out, everything but the base of the sculpture, almost as if the perspective gained by looking so closely at Agony forced the eye up and away. It was a small detail, but from what I’d learned of my father over the years, there were no small details. Everything mattered to him.
I looked at the remaining painting that I’d taken. It was a landscape, drawn of a wooded area with the hint of water along the top left of the picture. The trees were drawn with amazing detail, capturing the fading light that filtered through the branches. A single owl perched on a branch, looking down toward the ground. This painting was also definitely done by my father.
“Does anything stand out?” Devan asked.
“Look at this one,” I said, pointing to the picture of Settler Hill with the compass. “Is there anything we can learn from it?”
Devan pulled the painting off the desk and tilted it so that the light shone on the canvas from different angles. She bit her lip as she studied it, twisting her head from side to side, almost as if looking at some sort of 3D art. “Well, your father was quite skilled at capturing the details,” she started. “I wish I would have seen the compass before it was taken. There seems to be something here that I could work with.”
I wondered if Devan could recreate the compass. It might not do the same thing as what the original did, especially if the original basically shielded people like the Trelking from being able to see or influence much on this side of the Threshold, so if it couldn’t do that, did it even make sense for her to take the time to try?
“We just need to see if there’s anything there that will help us find it,” I said. “My father might not have intended it for this purpose, but when he painted these, he would have made sure all the details he needed were there.”
Devan looked over the painting to catch my eyes. “There’s incredible detail here, Ollie. You might not be able to see it, but he’s included everything that he must have seen when he was drawing this.”
I leaned over her shoulder and studied it, trying to ignore the scent of whatever mint shampoo she’d taken to using or how soft her hair was. The compass drew my attention the most. As Devan said, the level of detail my father had included was pretty incredible, to the point where I could see the rivets in the metal and how each one caught the fading light of the day in the same way.
It had been years since I had seen the compass, but it looked just like I remembered. It was a large spherical shape, but made using thin steel bands to create the sphere in an open weave. The compass needle was suspended in the center of the sphere, pointing over the hillside a
nd toward the north. This perched atop a metal pedestal that was bolted to the cement slab on the ground. My father had even included enough detail to clearly make out the bolts that I’d seen sheered clean off the ground.
“Anything here jumping out at you?” I asked Devan.
“Only that it’s not there now.”
I snorted and studied the picture a little longer. If nothing else, I’d like to find the compass and return it to where it belonged atop Settler Hill. If the compass really did mask magical power, then there was incredible value in keeping it there.
“Is there any way for us to be able to detect it?” I asked. I tried thinking through the different patterns I knew, but nothing really came to mind. Besides, the compass might resist them all, anyway, if it was as powerful as Tom suggested.
“Not through anything traditional.”
I looked up and saw Taylor standing at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes were wide and tired, but she looked better than when we’d last seen her. “You should still be resting.”
“I want to help you with this. Whatever is happening here is important.” She looked from Devan to me. “Whatever attacked me was very powerful.”
“Yeah? And did you know what it was that hit you?”
“Painter magic, but with strength I haven’t seen before.”
And here I thought Taylor had been the painter I sensed at the U-Stor. So Brand hadn’t attacked her, and there was another painter, which meant someone with the Druist was already on this side.
Shit.
I stared at the pictures in front of me. If this wasn’t about the Trelking coming across to ensure that I reached the shardstone box, then it was about someone else trying to get there first. And what did all these things have in common? Not my father. For the first time since I’d been in Conlin, at least it wasn’t my father who seemed to drive this attack, but it might be his fault that they had risked the attack. When there had been the threat of the Elder, at least the magic had remained on the other side of the Threshold.
Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4) Page 15