Stone Dragon (The Painter Mage Book 5)

by D. K. Holmberg

  Hard shook his head. “Like I said. We don’t know the original intent of the table, only what it signifies now.” He nudged me forward, away from the table. “Come on. That was not the reason you were brought here.”

  I followed Hard as he moved past the table and stopped before a simple wooden shelf. Various items were stacked on the shelf, including the plain white ceramic bowl that had once been in my father’s room. Placed neatly next to it was a stack of papers written in my father’s handwriting. There was a single statue, much like those in the shed back in Conlin, though this was nothing like the strange and grotesque creatures he hid there. This statue was shaped like a man holding a long staff, the torso long and lean. If it had horns, there was a part of it that would remind me of the Wasdig.

  As I stared at the shelf, I realized there was nothing simple about it. Like the table I still wanted to return to, patterns were etched into it. These were different, raised off the surface of the shelf, and stained darker than the surrounding wood. I moved to trace my fingers across them when Hard caught my wrist.

  “You won’t be able to reach them,” he said. He pushed his hand at the shelf and was met with resistance, like some sort of invisible wall blocked him from reaching the items on the shelf. Then he pressed a surge of power into the patterns—only of one particular shelf—and there was a flash of light before the barrier fell, letting Hard reach past it and pull the ceramic bowl off the shelf. As soon as he pulled his hand back, the barrier went back into place. It went up with a shimmer that I felt as much as saw.

  Hard handed me the bowl. “This was your father’s. We found it in his room shortly after he disappeared.”

  “When did the protection on the door appear?” I asked.

  Hard’s eyes narrowed. “After that. We were only able to enter the one time.”

  I wondered about that. With my father, there were reasons for everything, including why he would have protections that would appear after the door had opened once. Had he expected the Masters to plunder his room, or had there been some other explanation? I already knew what he had intended for me to have. Could there have been other things he’d intended for me?

  I ran my fingers around the edge of the bowl. This had been in our home for as long as I could remember, but when he brought me to Arcanus, he’d brought the bowl with him. That told me it was important. The lip had a crack I remembered. The faded lettering on the inside of the bowl looked no different than before, only now I could make out the hint of a pattern in the lettering. This was what Taylor claimed helped discover the secret to opening the door.

  I turned the bowl over and looked at the underside. There had been paint here, once, but now it was faded, leaving little more than a crackling appearance to the surface. “I’m keeping this,” I said.

  “It is the Elder’s work. It belongs here. We don’t have much else of his.”

  I snorted. “You should come to Conlin. I have a whole garage coated with his patterns. The house too.” Hard wouldn’t believe anything about the shed or some of the other things that were scattered about Conlin, things like the Rooster, a whole diner my father had a hand in ensuring would be safe for other magical beings. “But I need this. And these,” I said, reaching for the papers on the shelf.

  I’d seen how Hard had triggered the pattern. There was a trick to it, but it wasn’t complicated, simply needing to activate the right shelf. The barrier shimmered as my hand slipped past it and I grabbed the stack of pages off the shelf and pulled them away.

  Hard tried grabbing at them, but I turned from him and quickly rolled the pages up and stuffed them into my pocket. “These are mine, too. If there’s anything on them I don’t need, I’ll make sure to get them back to you. For now, you’re just going to have to deal with the fact that my father wanted me to have these pages and this bowl.”

  “That was not the reason I brought you here, Escher. You could examine them here, but not remove them. We have nothing of the Elder’s here. Nothing that marks the legacy he left for us.”

  I pointed toward the little statue. “You have that.”

  Hard frowned as he studied the miniature statue. “That? It’s nothing more than a trinket. I’m surprised anyone even placed it here. I thought we’d left it in his room.”

  “You’d be surprised at just how difficult those are to make,” I said, but then hesitated. If the Masters had left it there and now it was here, there would need to be a reason. Had someone taken it, thinking the Elder would want it on the shelf along with his others?

  Then there was the question of why he’d brought it to Arcanus rather than leaving it in the shed in Conlin. The other statues were there, the others imprisoned in the little form only the crystal ball could free. I didn’t know why my father would have brought this one to Arcanus. Until I did, I figured it was safest to leave it here. The other statues all were supposed to be dangerous. This one likely was as well.

  “Is there anything else here that might help?” I asked.

  I looked around the crystal room. The table still tried to draw my attention, but it managed it less and less the longer I was here. There was another shelf on the next well. There were books stacked on it that looked older than many of the books in the library.

  “Wait, you’ve got your own collection here?” I asked as I approached the shelves.

  Hard raced around me and stood in front of the books. “No. Not this, Escher. You’re not one of the Masters.”

  I leaned to the side to try and see around him, but he continued to obstruct me. “Come on, Hard. I’m already here. Besides, didn’t you say you would do what was needed to help the Protariat?”

  “That doesn’t include giving up secrets that aren’t meant to be shared.”

  That piqued my interest. He could have said pretty much anything else, and I might not have been intrigued, but secrets? Arcanus had enough secrets as it was, most of them useless. Not to the Masters, though. They thought everything they did was incredibly important. Hell, they thought training the next generation of painters was important. From what I’d seen, they did little but hide away in their mountain home.

  I reached out toward the shelf, but Hard pushed on my arm.

  “No,” he said. “You asked about the bowl, and I’m not arguing with you about taking it from here. I’m even willing to let you have the papers. But nothing else, Escher. This is not your place.”

  I wanted to glance back at the table, to make a point to Hard I had been able to trigger the patterns there, so I must have some capacity to understand the items in this room, but decided against it. I would start with the bowl and the papers. There was more here than I could get through in the time I had remaining anyway. Besides, I still hadn’t even gone through what he might have in his rooms. And then I could hit the library, but I doubted I’d find anything there I could use.

  And all in time to discover something that would help me figure out what I was expected to do at the Zdrn. If I failed, then what would happen?

  There was another option, but it was one I didn’t want to take, one I didn’t think Devan would even let me try to take. It involved crossing the Threshold, or at the least opening a crossing and summoning the Trelking. Neither was appealing. And I wasn’t convinced I’d be able to summon him anyway.

  “Fine,” I said. “Then I’m heading back to his rooms. I’d appreciate privacy.”

  Hard glared at me and then led me from the room.

  The energy on the door still held, sealing the room off from anyone else trying to enter. I powered the pattern and opened the door, passing inside to quickly close it behind me. Devan sat on a bench, holding a pair of her figurines in her hand and glanced up at me as I entered.

  “Damn, Ollie. That took long enough. I thought you might have decided to leave me here.”

  I looked for the dryad but didn’t see the creature anywhere. “Where’d it go?”

  “It’s hiding from you. It thinks you’re angry.”

  I laughed a
nd took a seat on the trunk on the other side of the room. “Well, I might have been when it first tried attacking me, but I think I’m pretty much over it now. Why don’t you have it come out?”

  Devan breathed out a word I couldn’t hear, probably a comment to the hiding dryad or maybe even a command to one of her figurines. Nothing happened. She shrugged and turned to look at me. “What did you find?”

  “Only that Taylor lied to us a bit more than we knew. Hard isn’t dead. Ash was her father. And her sister now knows what happened.”

  At least some of it. I’m not sure she was capable of understanding everything that happened. In time, I didn’t doubt she’d become formidable. She was Ash’s daughter. Taylor had shown incredible skill too. Lacey likely would have some talent as well. She must if Mac was teaching her.

  “Are you surprised?” Devan asked.

  “What, that she lied or that Hard is alive?”

  Devan smiled. “Probably the first. From what you’ve told me about him, you didn’t feel too bad he’d gone missing.”

  “No one deserves to get stuck on the other side of the Threshold unprepared,” I said.

  “You were unprepared.”

  “Not completely. I had you.”

  I stood and started looking around the room. There had to be something here besides what the Masters had taken from here. My father had placed protections for a reason. Hell, the dryad served as an additional layer of protection. For the wrong person, the damn thing might have destroyed whoever came in here. Dangerous. I couldn’t believe my father would do that. Or maybe I could believe it. He had that mysterious streak to him.

  The walls of his room were bare. Patches of lighter color, marks where soot or smoke had stained the surrounding wall, told me that things had once hung on the stone. The desk was empty. I wouldn’t doubt the bowl and the papers had once been stacked there. Now a layer of dust covered it. I turned to the trunk and paused before lifting the lid. There was a part of me that expected it to be locked, another test from the Elder, but it opened easily. A large wool blanket was inside, the blue fabric faded and the visible edges of it starting to fray. I scooped the blanket out and found it softer than expected. There was nothing else in the trunk.

  Then I went to the dresser. Each drawer was empty. There was nothing there, nothing that would help me understand what I would be expected to do. Nothing that would help me understand what my father had been. I had hoped maybe there might be something here that would give me a hint as to what reason every magical being I encountered knew of him, feared and respected him. Instead, all we had found was the dryad.

  “There’s nothing here,” I said.

  Devan nodded at the blanket. “You have that.”

  “It’s a bit… worn.”

  “And it’ll be warm. Plus it was your father’s, so it’s likely to be valuable.”

  It probably was more than just a blanket. “What do you think it does? Some kind of invisibility cloak?” I wrapped it around me but didn’t feel particularly invisible. “Maybe it does some other cool tricks?”

  Devan stood and grabbed the blanket from me, folding it neatly and stuffing it into the trunk. She breathed out a word, and the dryad scurried out of underneath the dresser, somehow fitting into a spot I would have guessed would have been too small for it, and then climbed into the trunk. Devan closed the top of the trunk and shut him inside.

  “You’ve been watching too many movies since you’ve been back,” Devan said to me. “I think I’m going to get rid of your TV.”

  “Like you haven’t watched the same ones.”

  “My choices are better. You like all the weird shit.”

  I laughed, thinking of some of the movie choices Devan had made over the months since we’d returned. “Fine. We get through the next couple of days, and you get to choose the movie.”

  She grinned at me. “Even if you don’t like it?”

  I smiled. “Who said we’d be watching the movie?”

  She punched me in the side and reached the trunk, lifting it easily off the ground. I didn’t know how heavy it was, but for Devan, it didn’t matter. The Te’alan were fast and strong. It would have to be incredibly heavy for her to struggle with it.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded and started toward the door.

  “What did you find? I mean, besides Taylor lying to you and that Hard still lives.”

  “I’ve got the ceramic bowl of my father’s and some pages he’d kept. I thought we should stop in the library, but now I’m not so sure. I don’t know how long we’ve been here, but it’s probably been half the day. We need to get back to Conlin and see if we can’t find anything that might help.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  I touched the bowl, now stuffed into the bag slung over my shoulder, then my pocket where I’d kept the pages taken from Hard. “Mostly because I’m not convinced. What if this was a diversion and we were never meant to find anything useful here?”

  Devan glanced back at me. “Nik didn’t send us here. Tom did.”

  “After what we’d heard from Nik.”

  I thought about little Nik and what he was after. Escape, mostly, but he also served the Druist Mage. So anything he could do to delay me learning what I needed to survive the Zdrn would likely help both of those aims.

  “Yeah, when we get back, we’re going to have a little heart to heart with Nik.”

  11

  When we reached the library in Arcanus, I found Lacey waiting for me sitting in one of the dozens of plush recliners facing each other in pairs. The fire crackling in the hearth put out a soft warmth. I glanced around, but the library was still empty. That had been uncommon when I’d been Arcanus, but then again, that had been a decade ago.

  “You scare everyone else away?” I asked her.

  Lacey glanced at me and then Devan, her eyes lingering on the trunk the longest. She touched her hair, running her fingers through it. I couldn’t get over the fact that had she blue streaks running through her hair, she would have been the spitting image of her sister, only a younger version.

  “Hard’s orders.”

  I grinned. “Didn’t want me corrupting any young painter minds, did he?”

  Lacey shrugged.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Mac,” she said. Then, “You’re leaving already?”

  “Already? We never intended to stay as long as we did. I thought we could sneak in and I could grab what I wanted.”

  Lacey gave me a disbelieving look so much like her sister. “You thought you could sneak into Arcanus without raising some kind of alarm? I’ve seen that you’re talented, but that’s not the most well thought out plan.”

  Devan barked out a laugh. “Now her I like.”

  “Hey! We’re working with a bit of a time crunch here. And now we need to get back to Conlin. So why don’t you go tell Mac and the others to seal the door behind me after we’re through—”

  Lacey shook her head. “They’re already there. Well, Mac and Shiza are. The others think they’re being foolish.”

  “What do you mean they’re already there?”

  Lacey pointed toward the door at the back of the library. You couldn’t see it from where we were; the stacks of shelves blocked the path. “Here. They’re waiting for you. I think they want to see what you intend to do.”

  I glanced over at Devan and grunted. “What I intend to do is leave. And if they get in the way…”

  “They’re not going to get in the way. I think they want to know what you’re going to do.”

  I studied her a moment. “Them, or you?”

  Lacey turned away from my gaze.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about your dad.”

  She looked up at me from beneath hair that had fallen across her face. “Are you? I seem to remember hearing he was the reason you were expelled.”

  “Yeah, well expulsion was probably the right thing for me. After all, without it, I’d have been stuck here, mindless wor
king through patterns I had no interest in learning, and maybe no talent to learn. At least where I went, I had instructors willing to teach.”

  I actually meant what I said. It sort of surprised me.

  “And anyway, if your father got pulled across the Threshold, it can be a strange place. I don’t wish that on anyone who’s not prepared.”

  “You survived.”

  “Yeah. And I had help.”

  Lacey looked over to Devan. The shine of optimism in her eyes was painful to see. “Do you think he could have gotten help?”

  “It’s possible,” Devan said.

  I was thankful she did. We didn’t need to upset Lacey any more than necessary. “Hey, we’re going to get going. It was nice meeting you and good luck with your studies and all that.”

  “You’ll tell Taylor…”

  “If I see her again, I’ll let her know you’re worried,” I said.

  Lacey nodded and then moved aside to let us pass.

  When we had disappeared between the stacks of shelves, Devan glanced back in the direction of Lacey. “You don’t want to tell her? She deserves to know.”

  “Tell her what? That her sister might have been killed by one of the hunters, or that I have her shrunk down into a little statue in the hope we can discover some way to save her? I’m not thinking she’d take either of those too well.”

  “It’s better than not knowing. You should understand that, Ollie,” Devan said gently.

  “Not knowing gives you hope, Devan. After what happened with my mother, hope is better than that.”

  We can out from between the stacks of shelves to see Mac and Shiza standing on either side of the door. Shiza was focused on the door, running her hands around it, as if looking for a weakness. Mac stood watching her.

  When we stepped toward them, Mac turned. His eyes dipped to the trunk and then to Devan as she carried it easily, and then he nodded.

  Shiza didn’t turn toward us. “You can open this, Escher Morris?” she asked.