The Painter Mage: Books 1-3

by D. K. Holmberg

  All sharp lines and odd angles, the way it had been sculpted made it difficult to recreate on paper. Taylor’s copy had been the closest I’d seen. Even Devan struggled, determined instead to make a charm out of Agony. That charm had an interesting effect, creating a blast zone of nearly two hundred feet. Given what I’d learned of Conlin, how there was other magical power in the city, I had to wonder what purpose the sculpture served.

  “Do you always come here so late?”

  I spun. Kacey from the Rooster sat on one of the concrete benches, eyes intently studying Agony. “Kacey?”

  She nodded. Her hair was shoulder length and straight, framing soft features and gentle eyes. She turned away from Agony and looked at me. “I’d never seen you around the Rooster so much before.”

  I laughed darkly. “Yeah? I never realized what it was before.”

  “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  “I keep hearing that,” I said.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “Who?”

  She stared at the sculpture. “Your father.”

  I noticed that she didn’t call him the Elder, not like everyone else around here I’d met. Sure, he was the Elder, but that didn’t mean I needed it thrown in my face. I might never reach his level of ability, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t think so,” she said.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Kacey stood and began to make a slow circle around Agony, stopping near the pool to sit along the edge. She trailed a finger in the water slowly. “Folks starting to talk,” she said. “When you returned but he didn’t, folks began to think that he’s not coming back.”

  “Haven’t you heard?” I asked. “In Arcanus, they think he’s dead.”

  I probably shouldn’t have assumed she knew about Arcanus. That opened me up to more questions if I was wrong, but I had a feeling that Kacey knew about what happened at the Rooster. Why else would she be allowed to work there?

  She nodded. “That’s what they said, isn’t it?”

  I moved to a spot near the edge of the plaza and faced Kacey. “Why are you here, Kacey? Come to study Agony at night? That can be dangerous, you know.”

  That was how we’d lost the older Jakes. Partly, it was Taylor’s fault, but there was a deeper part of me that blamed my father. If he knew about the hunters, and knew how they reached this world, what was he doing placing a gateway here in the first place with a way to summon it? Didn’t that simply invite trouble? Especially when there was someone like Taylor who wanted to reach the other side.

  “The night has always been dangerous for some,” she said.

  “Not for you?”

  I began to wonder what abilities Kacey might have. She could be a painter, though if that were the case, why would she have stayed working at a place like the Rooster? There was another possibility, one that was a little less likely. Could Kacey have some other ability I didn’t know about? Was she one of those who’d come to the Rooster for the peace Jakes mentioned? If she was, I wondered if Devan had known.

  “Not tonight,” she said.

  “Why is that?”

  She turned to me and smiled. “Because you’re here.”

  “I think you have a higher regard for my abilities than most.”

  Kacey stood. “Really? Because the way I hear it, you saved an entire pack by yourself.”

  “That’s not quite the way it went down. And I nearly died doing it.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  Kacey started back around the water. She moved with a casual grace, and I suddenly understood.

  “You’re one of the pack.”

  Kacey paused long enough for me to know that I was right. “Tell Jakes I don’t need someone watching over me,” I said.

  Kacey turned. “You can tell him yourself.”

  “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  She laughed. It sounded deeper and huskier than I would have expected, hinting at her shifter form. The only shifters I’d seen looked like wolves, though that didn’t mean they had to. From what I understood of the ability, they could just as easily take on the form of fox or coyotes or cats.

  “I came to listen for the Elder,” she answered.

  “You won’t find him here. Nothing here but his leftovers.”

  Kacey smiled, showing a flash of teeth as she did. “If you listen well enough, you can hear the echoes of his passing and learn from him.”

  “Or you might nearly destroy yourself not knowing what he knew.”

  She shrugged. “Or that.”

  “If you’re not here to follow me, why did he send someone after me when I left the city?”

  “There wasn’t anyone.”

  “Trust me. There was.”

  Her face darkened, and she tipped her head back to sniff at the air. Her nose elongated slightly, forming her animal shape, before returning to human form.

  “I smell nothing.”

  I laughed. “And you’d smell something out at the old barn?”

  “Yes.”

  The confidence in her tone told me that arguing with her would do me no good. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter, anyway, does it? I don’t know what the hell this guy wants and your buddy Jakes isn’t about to tell me.”

  “There are reasons for what he does.”

  “I’m sure there are. He thinks he’s following my father’s instructions, or his father’s instructions, only it’s been at least a decade since my father was here.” I wasn’t completely certain of that, but given the way the house had appeared when Devan and I returned made it likely. “Does that mean he intends to follow whatever the Elder told him until he shows up again?”

  If he shows up. I didn’t believe he was gone for good, not like they did in Arcanus, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t abandoned Conlin the way he’d abandoned me. Was it my fault I didn’t have his ability to paint? As much as I’d love to call myself an artist, I was a tagger, forever a disappointment to the Elder.

  “Sam will follow the instructions until he’s asked not to,” Kacey said.

  “And I’ll do what I can to save Devan.”

  Kacey froze, turning slowly around to face me. “That’s what this is about for you?”

  “You don’t know?”

  She shook her head. “I thought she was in her shop working. She hadn’t been in the diner in a few days, but I didn’t know.” Kacey’s eyes were wide and dark. Light from the lanterns caught them. “She can’t be gone.”

  I wondered if Devan had known about Tom and not shared. Likely she did. But she didn’t know about the shifters in town, so maybe she didn’t know about Kacey. Shifter magic was hidden from Devan. That was how Jakes nearly got past us when Taylor first showed up. As far as I knew, it was the only type of magic that was hidden from her.

  If that was the case, how had Adazi gotten to her?

  A memory of the shifter I’d seen out at the old barn combined in my mind with the way Adazi had jumped. Taylor had convinced me that he’d only been a painter, but what if he had been more than that?

  “Are there shifters who can use painter magic?” I asked Kacey.

  She frowned at the change in topic. “There’s no need. Wait… Why do you ask?”

  “Would it be possible? If you painted a pattern, could you power it the same way that I do?”

  Kacey shifted into a sleek wolf form and back in the blink of an eye. In that moment, she appeared before me, standing only a step away, the top of her head at my nose. She smelled of musk and fresh grass; it was not unpleasant.

  “What need would we have for such powers, Oliver?”

  I thought about what I’d seen Adazi do, the way he’d moved. Maybe Taylor was right and everything he’d done was nothing more than a painter’s trick, but I couldn’t shake the idea that there was more to him. And if Adazi was a shifter and he could use painter magic, how powerful would he be?

  More than
me. That was all I had to know.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” I glanced up at Agony and took a deep breath. “I’ll be seeing you, Kacey.”

  “Oliver?” she asked, stopping me at the edge of the plaza.

  I turned and waited.

  “What did happen with the Elder?”

  I sighed. “No one really knows. We were in Arcanus, and he simply disappeared.”

  “They think he’s dead?”

  “My father took risks other artists didn’t. The masters think he took one too many, even for the Elder.”

  “And you don’t?”

  I thought of the items I’d found in my room after he disappeared. They belonged to him, of that I was certain. The book was the easiest to understand. Now that I’d seen how he intended it used, I understood why he’d left it for me. Without the book, there was no way to summon the gate. The others I understood less well. The strange gold key that was too large for any lock I’d ever seen in real life, and the blank sheet of ancient vellum. After everything I’d been through on the other side of the Threshold, I still managed to hang onto them. Eventually, I might even begin to understand why he’d left them for me.

  “No. I don’t.”

  I turned and left her standing next to Agony as I made my way back home.

  * * *

  The basement light seemed unreasonably bright after my time outside in the darkness. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust and another moment to realize that Taylor had used a single painted mark to increase the intensity of the bulb, spilling light throughout the basement and pushing back the shadows that usually clung to the walls like cobwebs.

  “Where have you been?” Taylor asked, looking up at me as I came down the stairs.

  “Oh, only realizing that Conlin is a hotbed of magical power and that my father seemingly controlled the whole place.”

  Taylor shifted a stack of journals off her lap and pushed up to her knees, stretching as she did. I tried my damndest not to notice the way her breasts pressed out as she did and turned away as a flush came to my cheeks.

  “What do you mean it’s a hotbed?”

  “Well, the owner of the Rooster is at least a tagger. Probably learned from my father,” I said, deciding then it must have been true. If that was the case, why had my father been so reluctant to train me? Did I show even less ability than Tom? “A shifter works the counter. And the gods only know who else was there tonight when I stopped by.”

  “Why did you go back there?”

  I told her about the barn and the symbols on the sign leading into town. “I’m not sure what they’re for, but they’re a protection of some kind.”

  “Can you draw them?” she asked.

  Those I thought I could draw. They weren’t complex, simply a few crossing lines and a single arcane pattern, but one that I’d used enough times that I could draw it with my eyes closed. I grabbed a sheet of paper and pencil and quickly reproduced the symbols.

  Taylor frowned, studying them. “These don’t really have much inherent power behind them.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. Try it yourself.”

  I hesitated pushing power into anything my father had made without really knowing what I was doing, but it couldn’t hurt doing it with patterns made with paper and pencil, could it?

  Taking a deep breath, I pressed what I could into the pattern. There was a surge in response, just enough to let me know the pattern worked, and a faint smell of smoke. But nothing else. Even a circle drawn on the page in pencil would have generated more of a response.

  “Well, damn,” I said. “Why even bother putting them there?” And why did they have much the same shape as the patterns I’d seen on the orb? I couldn’t know for certain, not now that Jakes had taken the sheet from me, but there was no doubting the similarities.

  “Unless they serve as a kind of mark, sort of like Adazi’s,” she said.

  “No. Adazi’s mark has power.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Trust me. I made the mistake of trying to power his pattern. I don’t have any idea how he tolerates it unless the pattern itself is attuned to him.”

  “There aren’t patterns like that.”

  “Really? Like there aren’t colors you’re more attuned to? Don’t you have a few favorite patterns that you use in your art more often than others?”

  “No,” she said.

  “A color?” I have always been more drawn to black than any other color.

  She frowned. “Every color is different, but I’m not really drawn to one more than another.

  I stared at her, my eyes catching on her hair streaked with blue before turning away, annoyed. As an artist, maybe she wasn’t. “Well, taggers do have a few patterns they favor. And maybe that’s where Adazi learned.”

  My patterns were simple but powerful. I couldn’t do the fine work someone like Taylor could manage, but with the right pattern and the right color, I could make things go boom as well as almost anyone.

  I glanced down and saw the stack of journals spread across the floor. A few were folded open, as if Taylor intended to mark the page. “Did you find anything?”

  “I’m not sure anymore. None of what’s written in those journals makes any sense.”

  “Right, because they’re not in English.”

  “That’s what I thought at first, too, but the more I studied them, the more patterns began to jump out at me. It’s like they’re in code, only we need some sort of key.”

  My first thought was the massive gold key, but that was taking her need for a key far too literally. “Or it’s simply written in another language.”

  Taylor shrugged. “I’ve studied languages. It’s not one that I recognize.”

  “What do you mean you’ve ‘studied languages’?”

  Taylor tapped the top of the desk. “You’ve seen the Arcanus library. Not everything in there is written in English. In order to understand some of those books, you’ve got to study other languages. And languages are nothing but patterns.”

  I hadn’t spent enough time in Arcanus to really know what hid within the stacks, but her comment on languages made a certain sort of sense. “So you don’t recognize this writing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not just written in some language that has no pattern you’ve seen before.”

  Taylor grabbed one of the journals from the floor and flopped it onto the desk, pointing to the page. “Look at the way it’s pieced together,” she suggested, “and tell me you think this could mean anything.”

  I studied the writing, this time really trying to read it. It felt like my brain got all twisted as I tried. Even the characters on the page didn’t really make sense. But they repeated, sometimes within a single word. Other times, characters wouldn’t reappear until far down the page. Maybe Taylor was right.

  “Unless the person writing this journal was repeating himself, some of what’s written here can’t make sense.”

  I didn’t know whether to be impressed or annoyed that Taylor had discovered something in my father’s shelves of books that I had missed. If I was honest with myself, it was probably a bit of both.

  “This doesn’t matter. Without a way to decode them, they’re useless,” Taylor said. “Worse, I think each of them has a different key. This one,” she said, holding up one of the journals, “seems to have a different pattern to it than this one.” She tapped one of the journals lying on the floor with her foot. “Only a few seem to share any sense of regularity.”

  I took a seat on the chair behind the desk and rested on my elbows. Around the room, rows of books lined the shelves, but it was the books I couldn’t read that I cared about the most. So far, it was the only thing I’d found that had the potential to explain what Adazi might want.

  “We’ll get her back,” Taylor said.

  I didn’t look over at her. I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to do it. “Like we’ve gotten Hard back? Or Ash?”

  She seemed to react more to Ash than to Hard
. I wondered why. “That’s different. He’s been gone for…for a long time now.”

  And, if he went across the Threshold to someplace outside the Trelking’s realm, he was likely dead. At least I knew Adazi wouldn’t kill Devan. She was far more valuable alive than dead.

  But there had to be a way to find what Adazi wanted. Jakes wouldn’t share what he knew, but there was no question that he did know what it was. Why should that be? My father wouldn’t have known Jakes all that well, not Sam Jakes, but I’d now heard from a few people that he had been close to Jakes’s father.

  I sat up. “Ah, damn,” I whispered.

  “What is it?”

  I looked over at her. She sat crouched on the floor again, one of the journals resting on her lap, the pages opened as she ran her finger along, following the pattern. In enough time, I wouldn’t put it past her to translate everything in those journals. Taylor had a determination that few artists I’d met ever had.

  “I think I know where else to look.”

  “You don’t sound too excited about it.”

  I took a deep breath. “Because I’m not.” I stood and paced around the desk. “I’ve struggled trying to find answers about what Adazi wanted. He was convinced I would know where it was, but I’ve only been in Conlin a few months. Hell, I didn’t even know the shifters existed here until you showed up.”

  “Yeah, about that…”

  “No. I think I needed to know. Without you, I would never have known the patterns in my father’s book were tied to the sculptures in the park.”

  “You would have figured that out in time.”

  I wasn’t as convinced. “Doesn’t matter now. And if my father’s book had some purpose here in Conlin, then the other things he left me might be useful here, as well.”

  She set the journals carefully on the floor next to her. “Other things? You mean the Elder left you with more than his book?”

  “That’s why I never believed he was gone. The masters—well, mostly Hard—never wanted to listen. They thought there were plenty of reasons my father would have left the book and key and the paper in my room, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t there the day before he disappeared.”

  Taylor remained motionless. “What paper? Do you think it might have the key to translating these?”