Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4) (7 page)

But in the time that she’d been here, she’d seen what the Trelking was capable of doing. The Nizashi. Adazi before them. Everything she’d seen of the other side of the Threshold had been far more powerful than us. We’d survived, but we’d been lucky each time.

“The Trelking?” she whispered.

I snorted. “You don’t have to say it like that. He’s not some sort of boogeyman who’s going to find you just because you’ve said his name.”

Devan’s head snapped around. “Actually, I think he might have some sort of connection to his name when spoken, but that might only be if it’s said on the other side. I know when someone uses my proper name.”

That sent chills through me. How often had I glibly mentioned the Trelking’s name? Probably more times than I could count. What if he was aware when I did? What if it somehow drew him in by the fact that I said his name?

Even if he couldn’t detect it when it was said on this side of the Threshold, I probably should be cautious. “Maybe from now on, we should just call him the Assking?”

“Why give him the title?” Devan asked. “Maybe just the Ass?”

“We should probably make it something we can say in polite conversation. TA for short?” I said.

Devan laughed.

Taylor looked from me to Devan. “You think it’s safe to joke about him like that?”

“Listen, if you don’t joke about him once in a while, it starts to eat at you,” I said. “Not simply his power. He’s plenty powerful, and there’s really nothing we’d be able to do if he had it in mind to take us and drag us back across the Threshold. We sort of came to grips with that. But he’s got other gifts, as well. One of them is this prescience that lets him sort of see into the future. Not quite like he knows what will happen—he’s more like a fortune teller than an actual sage—but enough that he knows what
might
happen, and he’s smart enough and powerful enough that he can steer things in the direction he wants them to go. So if we
don’t
joke about things, especially when it comes to him, we might just go a little crazy, you know what I’m saying?”

Taylor fell silent. I was glad. I didn’t really want to explain the Trelking anymore to her. It was bad enough living with the knowledge of what he could do, but trying to explain it was terrifying, sort of like when I’d start thinking seriously about what would happen when I died. I’m not much of a religious person—most who’ve spent any time on the other side of the Threshold don’t claim any true religion—and I’m enlightened enough to know that there are gods that actually exist, but the after? No one really knows what that’s like.

I glanced over at Devan. She had climbed the fence and straddled the top rail, staring over the city. After seeing her father, I guessed she needed some time to herself. “Did you see anything more from the pattern in the trees?” I asked Taylor.

“The trees pretty much stop when you get to the edge of the park. It looks like they once would have gone farther, but they were cut down to make room for houses.”

“Some of the houses around the park have been there a long time,” I said. “There’s not much that would have been cut down. Those trees are probably as old as some of the houses.”

We walked up the street and to the south side of the hill to look over. In the distance, I could see the lights ringing Agony, and it was clear that they formed a perfect circle around the statue, almost as if forming a ring of protection. I couldn’t make out the pattern in the trees, but the low wall running along Thistle Road kept the trees from sprawling out beyond the border of the park. Houses lined the other side of Thistle Road, most in solid brick with black roofs visible in the dark. Only a few had lights on in the windows. In my time back in Conlin, I hadn’t learned who lived along the street facing the park. It wouldn’t surprise me all that much to learn that shifters lived there.

Taylor looked to the east and then west, eyes squinted as if she could see through the dark. With her mods, I wasn’t sure if she could or not. “There’s more to the pattern, Oliver. I just need to figure out what it is.”

“We might not have that time,” I said. “If the Trelking”—Taylor shuddered slightly when I said his name—“wanted the compass, we need to figure out what it has to do with what he told me to find.”

“And what was that?”

“A shardstone box.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Shardstone?” She said the word almost as if she’d heard it before.

“Yeah. I’m not sure what it is, only that he wants it.” I paused to give her a chance to jump in if she knew anything, but she didn’t. “And now with the compass missing…”

Devan still straddled the fence, looking down over the city. She turned and smiled, as if sensing me watching. I needed to understand the connection between the compass and the shardstone box. And somehow, I had to find the box to keep the Trelking from pulling Devan back across the Threshold.

D
aylight left
everything looking washed out. The sky was gray and overcast, fitting the mood I was in. There hadn’t been much time for sleep. We’d gotten back to the house after midnight, and by the time I fell asleep on the mattress lying on the floor of the bedroom, Devan tucked under my arm, there had only been a few hours remaining before morning. The lack of curtains let the morning sunlight—what there was of it—stream through, and I rolled away from its glare. Devan was already up.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. This was her father we were dealing with this time, and with his promise to share what he knew of
my
father, I hadn’t expected Devan to do anything other than try her hardest to help me figure out what the Trelking might know. I imagined her working in the shop, making more of her tiny figurines that she used to create the Devan army, or maybe refilling my charms and making a few new ones.

Instead, I found her sitting in the kitchen on one of the old chairs. She stared at a cup of coffee steaming in front of her. She had her hair pinned back so it didn’t fall into her face, and her skin had a soft sheen, almost as if she glowed, though I didn’t feel anything from the medallion. The T-shirt she wore today was a mashup of colors, almost like it wanted to be a tie-dye but failed. She looked up when I came into the kitchen.

“Hey, Ollie. Did I wake you?”

“Only because you weren’t there,” I said. I rinsed a cup in the sink and then filled it with hot water. I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but I didn’t mind a cup of black tea in the morning. Anything to give me a jump-start to the day. “You okay?”

I knew she wasn’t. Devan wasn’t the type to sit and drink coffee and stare at her hands. She had to be busy, always tinkering with something. Had we not discovered the shop the way it was, we’d probably have needed to create our own. Before crossing the Threshold, Devan had spent time working with her father’s smiths and engineers, all seemingly to understand the organization of his rule. I wondered if she’d had something in mind before we left, whether she’d known what we would encounter before we even made the crossing, or whether her magic had simply changed so much with the crossing that this was her outlet. She didn’t tell me, either way.

“I’ve been trying to think about what he wants,” she admitted. “We know he wouldn’t have crossed if he didn’t want something important.”

“You don’t think the shardstone box is important?” I asked.

Devan shrugged and looked over at me. Her eyes looked hollowed out this morning, as if she hadn’t slept a bit last night. As tired as I had been, and as deeply as I slept, I didn’t know whether she had or not.

“It’s probably important if he gave it to the Elder to store,” Devan said.

“Are we certain that he did?”

“That’s not the kind of thing he’d deceive you about.”

Deceive, not lie. The Te’alan were big on not lying, but that didn’t mean they were exactly truthful, either. The Trelking could have told me the truth, but it would be
his
version of the truth. Not that I couldn’t learn something from his version of the truth, but it wasn’t going to be the same as what I might view as important.

“Then there’s the bit about him taking the compass,” I said.

“He was with us, Ollie, so we know he wasn’t the one to take it.”

“No, but I’d bet he knew it was happening. That’s why he left the doorway open as long as he did, but why? What’s the compass to him?”

“That’s what bothers me. Jakes said nothing came across. Wouldn’t he know?”

I didn’t know how the shifter power worked. Jakes had certainly seemed attuned to the doorway opening when we’d run into him in his yard. That had been the reason he’d shifted and bolted off, streaking away to see what had triggered the doorway to open. For him to not recognize something else crossing over seemed unlikely.

“Well, shit,” I muttered.

“What is it?”

“The doorway. What if your father held it open for a different reason? We were thinking it was because he let something make the crossing, but that would mean that whoever or whatever crossed would have needed to sneak past three shifters. I’m not sure even your father could manage that. Doesn’t mean your father couldn’t use it for a different reason.”

“You think it might have been a diversion?”

It seemed as likely an explanation as any that we had. The shifters would have been focused on the doorway the Trelking held open, but what if another doorway had been opened, if only briefly enough for something to pass through? With the shifters attention so focused on keeping the doorway with the Trelking under control, would they even have known that another had opened?

“I think we need to check the other doorways that we know of.”

Now that we’d seen the one last night, I knew of three others, but only two that might be accessible. The third was still buried in the park.

“Do we get our friend up?” Devan asked.

I leaned around the doorway leading toward the living room. Taylor lay on the sofa, sleeping quietly. A pile of my father’s old books, mostly the ones written in some sort of code, lay all around her. They were about the only thing I felt comfortable letting Taylor access. If anyone could decode them, she’d be the one. “Nah, let her sleep. I’d like her help when we go back to the hill, though. We need to see it in the daylight.”

We snuck out of the house, Devan moving more quietly, and stopped in the garage long enough for me to load up on charms and ink. The truck rumbled to life, probably loud enough to wake Taylor, and we backed out of the garage and started out of town.

The last time I’d gone this way had been when Adazi attacked. The barn—or what had once been the barn—had been one of the doorways I knew about. Now that the barn itself it had fallen, I didn’t know if the doorway could still be opened, but it didn’t hurt to check.

We cautiously approached the area where the remains of the barn were scattered. No one had been out to clear the debris yet. I didn’t know whose land the barn was on, but Jakes hadn’t seemed terribly concerned that someone would be sad about the fact that it had fallen. It had been in pretty rough shape already.

The east wall still sort of stood. A pile of broken wood propped it up, angled so that it wouldn’t fall in like the rest of the barn. You could almost make out the angle of the roof as it sloped toward the ground. Shingles spilled around it, black mixing with the faded red from the barn sides. Some were burned, leaving an acrid scent from the magic used.

I patted the steering wheel as we stopped. “Big Red barely survived the last time she was out here.”

Devan popped her door open. “She’s not the only one, Ollie.”

I climbed out of the truck and started making a circle around the outside of the barn. As I went, I trailed a thin band of green ink with me. Devan went the other way. From the cold medallion, I knew that she was doing something with her magic. It was comforting to me just knowing that she was there.

I didn’t see anything during my search around the barn that would make me think something else had been through here recently. The fallen remnants of the barn were strewn all over, but no differently than they had been when Adazi had fallen. I sealed my circle and infused it, not really expecting anything.

As the power flowed through the circle, I listened to the way it reverberated against my pattern. There was the sense of distant and residual power, and I could tell the way that Adazi had used his mark, the way that he’d pulled power through here. That was a distinct sense.

There was another sense, and more recent. It was difficult to detect, but clear enough to know that the doorway had opened a few days ago.

I trampled through some of the debris and made a looping arcane pattern around where the doorway would be. With a surge of power, I listened. The doorway bowed, starting to open, then exploded with a burst of light and energy that knocked me on my ass.

“Shit,” I whispered, dusting myself off and standing.

Devan had climbed up the remaining wall and sat nearly at the top, balancing easily there. She didn’t seem bothered by the fact that I’d nearly killed myself. Again. “What is it?”

“Something came through,” I said, “but it wasn’t when your father was here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Whatever it was came days ago.” Long enough to make me wonder if her father had hidden something else that crossed over. Maybe I’d been wrong about the reason he held the doorway open.

“Like when the compass could have gone missing?”

I hadn’t thought of that, but now that she said it, it made sense. Just because we discovered it missing the night he’d crossed over didn’t mean it hadn’t been taken before that. “Why would your father care about the compass?” I asked. Even if he really wanted the shardstone box he sought, the fact that he’d crossed
after
the compass would have gone missing was too much of a coincidence. That meant the Trelking noticed—and cared about—its absence, but why?

“There’s another question we don’t have an answer to,” Devan said. “How could it have been stolen
before
my father crossed and I didn’t sense it?”

I didn’t have an answer to that. Or to why Jakes wouldn’t have been alerted to the doorway opening and something else coming across. Unless he had, and didn’t say anything, but that didn’t make any sense.

We stared at the barn for a moment and then got back into the truck. On the way back into town, I stopped at the welcome sign on Highway 16. Like the other one, there was evidence that my father had helped place the sign, though this sign didn’t have the same brickwork that the other one did. There was a series of patterns behind the letters that you would only see if you got out and looked for them. As I studied them again, I realized that the patterns I’d detected before made up another pattern, this one larger and like the sign on the other end of town, anchored to the ground.

“How many welcome signs are there leading into Conlin?” Devan asked.

“I don’t know. Probably one on each of the major roads leading into town. But I can’t really figure out what he’s trying to do here.”

“What does this one do?” Devan asked.

She had powerful magic, but the patterns and painter magic weren’t things she knew about in the same way that I did. She could learn them, though. In the time I’d known Devan, she’d shown me that she could master patterns more quickly than I could, but there wasn’t any power bonus in it for her the way there was for me. With my patterns, they augmented what I could draw, the way I could focus. Without the patterns, there wasn’t much I could pull on my own. With Devan, she didn’t need patterns to focus. Her magic came as naturally as breathing. The Te’alan, like so many other creatures on the other side of the Threshold, basically
were
magic.

“Protection,” I started, and Devan gave me a sour look, telling me I was being an idiot. “And this one,” I said, motioning to the pattern I’d missed before, “anchors this to the city. I don’t really know why he bothered.”

“You don’t think they’re active?”

There are ways to power a pattern and leave it powered, but these didn’t seem to be that way. I couldn’t tell what he had done here, and I didn’t want to attempt to use them without knowing their intent. It could do something as simple as light the sign, or it could lead to something bad happening around Conlin. With my father, nothing would really surprise me.

“Not active,” I said.

We circled the sign, studying it for evidence of another pattern, but I saw nothing else.

Devan and I got back into the truck and started back toward town. “The other crossing would be harder to use,” she said.

I looked over at her. “Why?”

“It has to be triggered from this side. That’s how you got over the first time.”

We’d returned using the barn crossing, which was why we’d gone out there first. I hadn’t known that the other crossing had to be triggered from this side. “You think your father has someone on this side who would help?”

“It’s possible,” Devan said. “But this side of the Threshold doesn’t really appeal to him. There’s no power here.” I gave her a sharp look and she shrugged. “Sorry, but it’s true. The painters here don’t even care what they can do. They don’t bother to learn the more powerful patterns. I think the only painter my father ever really respected was the Elder. Well, and then you, but he felt he had a hand in shaping you.”

There wasn’t any denying the role her father had in my training. “I need to know how well your father and mine knew each other,” I said. “If we’re going to find this box, then we’ll need to know that. And we need to know if the other crossing was used, but we don’t have time to keep driving around like this.” I slapped the wheel of the truck, frustrated. The Trelking hadn’t given us a firm deadline, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. He wasn’t the sort of person to wait. If we failed to find the shardstone box, would he send someone else? More of the Nizashi?

“Let me go check out the crossing,” Devan said. “You need to go and talk to Tom.”

I didn’t like the idea of separating, not with the likelihood that someone or something working for her father was out there in the city, but I had to trust that she could detect them if they got too close. Besides, we had only the next two days before the Trelking planned to return. We needed to get our asses moving if we were going to figure out what was going on before he got back.

“Fine. But promise me you’ll be careful,” I said to her as I pulled to the curb.

“Ollie… How many times have I saved you?”

“On the other side. On this side, you’re more at risk.” I still didn’t know why that should be, but there was no question that it was true. Oh, Devan had saved me when I tried using the Death Pattern on myself, but other than that, she’d needed far more help than was usual for her. Maybe that was the biggest reason I was so uncomfortable with her on her own.

She punched me hard enough for me to wince. “You’re an idiot.”

She jumped out of the truck and took off running, racing off with something like sprinter’s speed. Devan wouldn’t get tired moving at that pace, and I’d seen her go even faster when she needed to. She disappeared around the corner, looking like someone out for a quick jog, except for the fact that she ran in faded jeans and thick-soled boots.