The hill at the center of town had some significance to the city. Way back when Conlin was first founded, the earliest settlers had placed their homes atop the hill, giving them the wide view of the once-forested valley below. The river ran in the distance, though it had never been wide or swift enough for anything larger than a kayak or raft to travel on it. They had left a monument atop the hill, now called Settler Hill—yeah, real creative folk in Conlin—that memorialized that time. The monument was nothing more than a pedestal with a round metal compass pointing toward the north and a plaque laid into the ground beneath it. The compass had been there so long that I had never thought to look into it.
We started up Washington, a slowly winding road that led up the south side of Settler Hill. The truck rumbled, the lights swinging out and over the roofs of the town before pointing back at the hill. I hadn’t been to the top of Settler Hill since I was a kid. Since returning, there hadn’t been any reason to come up here.
I looked over at Taylor. “You climbed this?”
When she nodded, I could only shake my head. Climbing the hill, and then she still had energy to make it all the way to the Rooster. Mods like that couldn’t be all bad.
Devan nudged me, as if knowing what I was thinking.
As we reached the top, I pulled the truck to a stop in the small lot marking the overlook. A few houses still perched atop the hill, but mostly it was cleared, left as a scenic viewpoint with the marker for the city. I climbed out of the truck and stopped, peering out across the rooftops. The lights in the scattered windows took on something like a pattern, though nothing with enough regularity that it would create any sort of power. From here, I suspected you could see most of the city and knew why Taylor had come up here.
“You wanted to see if there was a larger pattern, didn’t you?” I said.
“I did. I thought I could figure out the rest of the pattern from here, but there’s nothing that I can see,” she said.
That didn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t a greater pattern laid over the city by my father, but it sure made it much less likely. If Taylor couldn’t see it, then it wasn’t like I would suddenly manage to find a pattern that an artist—and not simply and artist, but someone practically an Arcanus Master—had not seen.
Taylor pointed toward a small slab of concrete near the ridge overlooking the city. A wooden fence kept people from attempting to climb down the other side, though plenty had been known to try. It wasn’t that Settler Hill was all that technical of a climb, but the north face was plenty sheer. A few had tumbled down it and broken bones over the years. I don’t know if anyone has ever died as a result, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
The slab was empty. It should not be.
“Ollie?” Devan asked.
I looked over and nodded. “Sorry. Just having childhood flashbacks. I haven’t been here since I was a kid. We’d come up here, sometimes riding bikes, sometimes with my parents back when my mother was alive, and sit next to the compass and look out over the city.” I made my way toward the fence and pushed on it. It wobbled slightly. Had it done that when I was a kid? It seemed larger then, too, but so much seemed bigger when you were younger. The house we lived in had always seemed plenty big when I was a kid. Now that I saw some of the manses people put up, it was barely more than a trailer home. “Sometimes I’d even come sit by the fence, my legs tucked beneath the lower slats and my arms curled over it, and stare out at the city. My mother always loved the view from here.”
Taylor stood near where the compass should have been. “It was here the first time I came up here when exploring the town,” she said. “After I heard you leave the house, I decided to see what else I could find in the pattern. This was the only location I could think of to get the view I needed.”
“Can’t fly yet?” I asked.
Devan gave me a sharp look and shook her head.
I studied the empty slab. The bolts that had once secured the pedestal to the concrete looked to have been sheered off, cut down at the base. There shouldn’t have been any way for the bolts to be accessed with the compass in place. Whatever had gotten through there had either been something like a laser or, more likely—and much worse—some sort of powerful magical creature had managed to remove them.
I dropped to my knees and ran a finger over the severed bolts. Six of them, placed in a circle, had been cut straight across. These weren’t just any bolts; they were each nearly an inch across. “What did this?” I asked Devan without looking up. “And can you tell why he’d want it?” The Trelking had to have been after the compass—I suspected that was his real reason for coming to Conlin tonight—but why? Why bother asking me to find some shardstone box, if what he was really after was the compass?
She knelt next to me. Without touching anything, I felt her magic begin to build as a freezing chill that washed over the medallion I wore. Whatever she did drew plenty of power. “I don’t know,” she said. “There was something here, but I can’t tell you what it was. It’s like it’s masking from me.”
“Other than shifters, do you know anything that can do that?”
Devan looked at me, her face close enough that I could smell the slight mint on her breath. Any other time and I’d find it kind of fun to be up here with her, nothing but the stars overhead and the lights of the city below. Tonight—and with whatever her father had planned—I wanted nothing more than to get my ass someplace safe. Out here, unprotected, wasn’t it.
“Ollie, there are plenty of things that can hide their power after it’s been used. I’ve seen you do it, so don’t make it sound like it can’t be done.”
“If I did it, there would be some sort of residue from the pattern.”
“You’ve hidden that before, too. Remember what you did when you were still working with Nik?”
I smiled as I thought about it, remembering a time when Nik and I had still been friends. That had been a pretty little piece of painting. My kind of painting wasn’t like what you’d see hanging in galleries or on the walls of museums. When I managed an effective painting, the only thing I really wanted to achieve was for the power I pulled through the patterns to do exactly what I wanted. Most of the time these days, it did. When I first started learning how to paint, that wasn’t the case. Paintings went sideways sometimes. It was easy for the pattern to fail, or worse, for the painter to get hurt. It was why new painters only worked in pencil. It wasn’t until after I left Arcanus that I’d taken to using inks. When working for the Trelking, I wasn’t given a choice. It was ink or nothing. If a painting went sideways, there were much more serious consequences, so you learned to be very careful.
“I remember. I wanted to make it so your father wouldn’t know it was me. We’d layered so many patterns around the palace that any one of them could have been the reason Nik got free. It was easier to claim ignorance.”
“He still knew,” Devan said.
With the Trelking, I suspected he would always know. “He still knew.”
I ran my fingers around the cut off ends of the bolts again. They were smooth, and cut flat with the cement. I grabbed a pinch of powdered ink—this time brown, making the choice to stay away from red and black—and made a single circle around where the compass had rested. With another pinch of ink, I drew a perfect triangle, anchoring around the circle. With an infusion of my power into the circle, I split my focus and sent the rest into the triangle. The combination created something akin to a summoning, a way for me to detect if there was anything else magical that we might have missed. It wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as what Devan did, but it could pick up on a different signature than she could manage.
The power pressed out through the painting and then disappeared. I’d picked up on nothing. That didn’t mean there wasn’t anything here, only that I couldn’t detect it.
“I tried something similar,” Taylor said.
I cocked my head and turned toward her. “What did you find?”
“Nothing. It’s like somethi
ng tore it from the base,” she said.
I stood. A cool breeze came across the top of Settler Hill, blowing across me. I wasn’t wearing anything warmer than I’d worn all day. Basically jeans and a T-shirt. I missed my jacket, the one with all the pockets for storing ink and charms. Tonight, it would have been nice just to keep me warm.
“Did the compass look like something of the Elder’s?” I asked Taylor. It had been too long since I’d come up here. I didn’t think that it was his, but I hadn’t known my father had such a hand in so many things throughout Conlin. I wouldn’t be surprised if the compass was his, too, in which case, I could understand why the Trelking would want it.
“Not the Elder. There was a certain…artistry,” she said, almost puzzling over the word, “to the compass, but nothing about it screamed to me that the Elder had placed it here.”
“Then why did he want it?” I asked Devan.
“Who?” Taylor asked, placing herself between Devan and me.
I figured Devan would give her about the count of five before she pushed her away. She surprised me and turned away from her and went to the fence to look over the city.
“What did I say?” Taylor asked.
“Her father came for a visit tonight,” I said.
Taylor hadn’t heard of the Trelking before coming to Conlin. She might have worked with Nik, but I don’t think he’d let on about the Trelking or about what he ran from. Hell, he’d hidden everything about what he’d learned from the Druist Mage close to the vest, making it seem like the only thing he knew anything about was modding, giving Taylor a reason to work with him before he’d sent her out searching for my father.
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.
7
Daylight 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.
Stolen Compass (The Painter Mage Book 4) Page 7
