Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4) (14 page)

A
fter 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 and 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.

The only one I could think of who would want to remove the masking of the compass would be the Druist Mage. Could he also want the log that Tom had kept? Possibly, if he thought it would lead him somewhere, especially if he thought it would lead to the shardstone box.

“Can we use something like Taylor suggests? Something non-traditional?” I asked Devan, still troubled.

“Depends on what you mean by non-traditional,” she said.

“I mean, can any of your little friends help? We could use Nik…”

Devan’s eyes narrowed. “There’s something that might work,” Devan said, “but we’d have to know what it was we were looking for. It would have to be attuned to it.”

I glanced at the picture. “Something like that?”

“Might work. I don’t know.”

At some point, we were going to have to talk about what her figurines could do. There might come a time when we needed them for more than straight bashing, and it seemed like that time was now. I know that Devan didn’t like the idea of using her magic for anything violent—part of the reason I suspected she used the figurines to do the dirty work for her—but with what we were inevitably going to face, we wouldn’t be given the chance to handle things calmly and with nicer magic all the time.

Taylor stopped and looked at the pictures lying on the desk. “These are done by the Elder!”

“Yeah, good old dad did these. We took them from Tom when we went out a hole in his wall. It seemed like the safest play.”

She studied the pictures more quickly than I had managed, moving from the compass and Settler Hill, to the picture of Agony, before pausing and staring at the one of the forested scenery. “This one is different from the others,” she said. “But they all have the same angle to the light.”

“Huh?” I focused on the light first. “I’ll be damned.” As Taylor said, the lighting in all three of the paintings appeared to come from the same angle. It slanted down from the left, giving odd shadows to the compass and to the trees through the last picture, but it was Agony that caught my attention the most. The light didn’t come from the direction indicated on the picture. A small detail, but that was my father. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

“Where is this one?” Taylor asked. “It looks like the park, but the pattern isn’t there and the water in the top corner doesn’t fit with the geography. I’d say it’s on the north side of town, but there aren’t the same number of trees there and they grow in a different configuration from what he’s drawn here. More like this.”

She set the painting down and pulled her pad closer and sketched out a quick drawing that included trees and the stream. It looked much like where the Trelking had come through the doorway, only it was at a different point in the river.

She caught me looking at her. “What?”

“You were able to draw that from memory?” I asked.

Devan covered her mouth and laughed. I turned and shot her a look. “Hey, you’re the one who’s been saying she’s the artist. I don’t know that I’ve ever been around an artist before. I thought you were talented, Ollie, but it seems like Taylor is way more skilled than I realized.”

“What is it?” Taylor asked.

I tapped the painting of what the forested area
had
looked like. Now it was grown, matured, and changed, both by nature and possibly by intent. Either way, what existed in the park north of town was different from what we saw in my father’s painting.

“You thinking what I am?” I asked Devan.

“Doubtful.”

“What is it?” Taylor asked.

I tapped the canvas again. “This is pretty much the location the Trelking used to cross. We know they can’t go back through the doorway we destroyed near the barn, so what if this is how they intend to get back?”

“We still don’t have the shardstone box,” Devan said.

“About that,” Taylor began. Devan and I both looked at her, and she pulled one of my father’s coded journals out from behind her back. “When you mentioned shardstone, I thought I’d seen something like that before. It didn’t make sense when I’d tried translating it before, so I thought I’d been wrong. Then when I detected the attack on the storage shed…”

I didn’t need her to finish. She thought she could stop whoever came, and maybe find the shardstone first.

“Wait,” I began. “You found something about shardstone?”

“I think so. There’s this passage,” she started, setting the book on the table in front of us, “it mentions something called soulstones.” Taylor glanced up and shrugged. “I thought that might be wrong, too.”

Soulstones. That had been what Devan had described. They were supposed to be the heart of fallen gods. “You said your father has them,” I said to Devan.

She nodded. “He does. They’re supposed to be powerful, but he’s never done anything with them.”

Taylor tapped the book. “That’s because he can’t, not without the shardstone. It controls the soulstones. It’s complicated.”

That was the focus Nik mentioned. And here Taylor had found out about it.

“I don’t think this is the Elder’s,” she went on. “The writing is different, like most of the others. He might have collected the journals, but I doubt they were his.”

I sighed. “At least we now know why he wants the shardstone. If it controls the soulstones…”

“He’ll be even more powerful,” Devan said.

“Must be why my father kept it here,” I realized. “The compass shielded it—”

“And when it was gone,
my
father came for it.”

“Pretty much,” I said. “So far, whoever else is after it hasn’t been able to find it. And we haven’t had any idea of where to look.”

“But you do now?” Taylor asked.

I stared at the picture of Agony, wondering why my father had painted everything with such precision,
except for
the base of the sculpture.

I glanced over to Devan. We had to go by my hunch. “Think you can track them before they reach it?”

“We’d better try. I’m getting tired of nearly dying in that park.”

W
e stood
outside the house near the garage. The door to the garage was open, letting light spill out from inside. Devan crouched on the ground in front of her figurine, this one looking something like a slender fox, but more snakelike. With a whispered word, she released it and stood, backing away quickly.

“We can’t get too close to this one,” she cautioned, putting her arm out to keep us back.

As I watched, the fox stretched like the other figurines had done and quickly pulled into a larger size, but still not
that
large. Then it slithered away, disappearing into the growing darkness. It rustled through the grass, sounding something like the wind blowing through the trees. A faint shimmer followed it.

“How will we know where it’s going?” Taylor asked.

I had to admit I was impressed with how quickly she was accepting the strangeness of Devan’s magic and the fact that the figurine had come to life. She hadn’t even questioned our need to keep the Trelking and the Druist from keeping the compass. Or the concern about the shardstone and what releasing it might mean. I still didn’t know whether to trust Taylor, and maybe we never would, but I wouldn’t deny ourselves her expertise. I was a big enough man to know when I didn’t know something, and to be able to admit when I needed help.

“I’ll know,” Devan said. “You ready with Nik?”

Devan pointed a thumb toward Big Red and we all hopped in. Devan squeezed into the middle, and I offered her a smile and a wink, but she only shook her head at me. The truck turned over slowly—more slowly than before—and hiccupped as I backed it out of the garage before stalling.

“Uh, Devan?”

“I’m on it,” she grumbled, throwing an elbow into my stomach as she crawled over me. She popped open the hood of the truck and there came the sound of metal bending. Devan didn’t have any tools on her, so I suspected she did it by hand. “Damn it!” she shouted.

I got out of the truck and made my way around to where she stood on her toes peering into the engine. I wasn’t much of a mechanic, so I didn’t really know what I was looking at, but Devan made an attempt at bending two twisted metal arms together. “What happened?”

She turned to catch me with one eye. “Something that
shouldn’t
have happened. I placed enchantments on this thing to keep it running smoothly. There shouldn’t be anything that
could
have happened.”

“Unless it’s magical,” I said.

“Yeah, but I would have sensed anything strong enough to do it. And the truck was fine when we left the Rooster. What’s different?”

We hadn’t checked on little Nik since returning from the Rooster, and here I’d planned on using him to help us find the Druist’s friend that had been sent. “There wouldn’t be anything he could have done…”

With the way Devan had sealed the box, there shouldn’t have been anything that Nik could have done to get free, but he was the Druist Mage’s apprentice, so maybe we continued to underestimate him. I picked up the box and shook it slightly. It sounded empty.

With a quick swirl of ink, I made a circle on the floor of the garage and set the box inside it. “Devan, can you open this for me?”

She arched a brow at me. “Are you sure you want to do that?”

Taylor watched me, her lips pursed and making a sour expression on her face.

“Don’t know that we have a choice,” I said.

Devan touched the rim of the box, running her finger around the top. As she did, it unsealed.

“Same time?” I asked.

She flipped the lid of the box, and I infused my circle with power, sending enough through it to hold Nik in place if he were to come jumping out of the box. It wasn’t necessary. The box was indeed empty.

I sank to the floor and stared out into the night. “Well, looks like things just got a little more interesting,” I said.

“What was in that?” Taylor asked, her gaze moving from Devan to me before dropping down and studying the box. “Wait, you didn’t… oh. You must have. Oliver, you know how dangerous he was the last time.”

I looked up at her. “Yeah, I know. Now we’ve got a miniature mage running around Conlin to go along with whatever the Trelking intends.”

At least I still had my father’s cylinder.

I tapped my pocket to make sure it was still where I’d stuck it. Thankfully, it was. I stood from the cold cement ground and went to the edge of the garage and stared into the night. Would a summoning pattern work? Would anything work on something as small as Nik?

Devan stood next to me and grabbed onto my arm. “Ollie?”

I shook my head. “I should have put Nik back into stasis. It was stupid not to. I saw how powerful he was, even in his miniature size.” Strong enough to knock out a shifter. Probably strong enough to take me out.

“He’s still small?” Taylor asked.

“Yeah. But he took down Kacey even when small. Had Devan not made this little box for him, he might have been able to get away from me, too.”

“But his power is reduced?” Taylor pressed.

I turned to her. “Reduced, but he’s still plenty powerful. Nik knows about the shardstone now, and if he finds it first—or the person who’s after it—I wouldn’t put it past him to manage to get unshrunk. Then we’re really fucked.” And then we’d have two for the Druist, and one for the Trelking, and little old us in the middle.

“He’s small. He won’t move too fast,” Devan said. “There might be something that we can do—”

“He’s modded,” Taylor interrupted. “So he’ll move faster than you think.”

I hadn’t really kept that in mind when I was working with him. It explained why he’d managed to trudge through the grasses so quickly. Hell, he’d probably been moving faster than I realized all the time. Speed might actually have helped free him.

“How did he get out?” I asked.

Devan went and grabbed the box, turning it over as she studied it. “He shouldn’t have managed to get free. The top was sealed.”

“Unless he kept you from sealing it from the inside,” Taylor suggested. She ran her finger around the edge of the box and nodded.

Devan tossed the box back down to the ground. “That little shit. When I get ahold of him again, I’m going to make sure that he can’t escape.”

“Your fox thingy still out there hunting?” I asked.

“You know it is,” Devan said.

Actually, I didn’t. When she used whatever magic she did to animate the figurines, I couldn’t tell. Her magic didn’t trip the medallion like it normally did when she used it. Maybe it really didn’t take that much power for her to use them, or maybe it was a different kind of power.

“Make him follow Nik.” Beyond that, I was only beginning to suspect what we’d find. I didn’t like what I was coming up with. How much damage could a mage apprentice, a rogue painter, and the Trelking’s son do?