Stone Dragon (The Painter Mage Book 5) Read online

  “Shit!”

  It was more power than I’d intended. I hadn’t expected that here, especially given the protections my father had placed over the diner. Devan grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

  Nik started to stretch, the little statue of him wobbling for a moment before continuing to lengthen. Color infused his arms and legs, no longer the same stone color he’d been since I’d first used the cylinder on him.

  I was tempted to shrink him again, but I waited.

  When he finished the animation process, he stood maybe a foot and a half tall. He held his arms out and studied them before looking up at me and shooting me a dark glare. “Really, Oliver? I think it was better when you left me in the miniaturized size. What is this, some kind of game you’re playing?”

  “Not a game,” I said. At least, not one where I had any idea what I was doing. I didn’t know why the energy I’d used would have been so much stronger than it should have. Always before when I’d used the crystal, I’d made certain to use only the weakest amount I could, afraid anything more would end up like this. Would he be able to escape?

  Nik made a quick trail around the circle. Now that I’d worked with him a few times, I knew what he was doing, and could even detect the pattern to the steps. There might even be something I could do to stop it if needed.

  I pointed the cylinder at him, ready for when he might try to get free.

  He stopped and looked over at me. “You think I’ll be able to do anything in this place? The Elder has it guarded.”

  “That didn’t stop you the last time.”

  A half-smile drew across his mouth. “The last time wasn’t quite what you thought. And I made a point of never crossing too far over the boundaries the Elder set.”

  If Nik couldn’t do anything, I could relax. Not entirely. I didn’t know how honest he was being with me. He might wait for me to lower my guard and then drop me with some stunning attack, sort of like he’d used on Kacey when I first thought to unshrink him.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “You’ve recovered enough to continue? This is a strange location for us to practice.”

  “Not practice. I need your help with something.” This was the risky part. Revealing to Nik there was a door into Arcanus meant that if he ever escaped, he might be able to travel from here into Arcanus. Or the reverse. But I needed what he might know. Nik might be able to see something I couldn’t.

  “Wasn’t that what I’ve been doing?”

  “This is different.” I pointed at the freezer door, waving a hand toward it.

  Nik turned and stared at it a moment before his eyes widened. Then the smile widened on his face. “Not only a door, is it?” he said. He glanced over his shoulder, taking in the kitchen, Devan, and Tom all in one quick glance, before turning back to face me. “The Elder had a few more tricks than I realized. He would have been a formidable man.”

  “Still is.” Reflex and habit made me say it. I wasn’t sure if my father was still alive. From what Jakes said, it was pretty likely he wasn’t. But I didn’t like hearing it from Nik.

  “Where does it go?” Nik asked.

  “Can you see how to open it?”

  Nik started forward, but my circle stopped him. He glanced at the ground, frowning as he did, before pulling his eyes up to stare at me. “You think that’s needed here?”

  “Don’t know. I seem to remember you knocking out a friend of mine. Then you tried blasting the metal box. So, yeah. I think that might be needed.”

  Nik grunted. “Not in this place.” He turned his attention back to the freezer. “There aren’t any obvious patterns, but there is the sense of power. For me to detect it tells me it must have a certain trigger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Nik’s eyes narrowed as he studied the door. “The Elder was—” he stopped himself and looked up at me with a slight smile to his face “—is a powerful painter, but painter magic can only go so far, even for an artist like the Elder. You’ve seen what I’ve learned from the Druist. There is a different type of power I’ve learned to tap into, a source distinct from that of painters. That’s what I’m picking up on now.”

  I wasn’t sure what he told me was entirely right. Nik might think the magi magic he’d learned from the Druist was different, but it felt as if it pulled from the same source as I did when I painted. Even the requirements to use it were similar, drawing on patterns and repetition, if not so formalized as the patterns you could produce on paper. What if the magi magic was the same as painter magic? What if the magi were nothing more than incredibly skilled painters?

  That was a thought and question for another time. For now, I agreed with Nik that I could sense the power coming from the freezer. And that it was different than anything I’d seen from my father before.

  “If you can sense the trigger, does that mean you can open it?” I asked.

  “I… I don’t know,” Nik admitted.

  It was the first time I’d seen real hesitancy from him, the first time where he reminded me of the friend I’d had on the other side of the Threshold. Nik and I had shared a bond then, something that seemed so broken now.

  “What can you tell me about it?”

  Nik stopped at the edge of my circle and reached toward the freezer. “There’s a signature here. And here. And here.” Each time, he pointed to a different section of the freezer. “All of them are the same. It’s likely they’re all part of whatever your father did, but he could have embedded the pattern so he would be the only one capable of opening it. That’s how the Druist would have done it.”

  I stepped away from Nik and studied the freezer, running my hand just over the surface. “Keep an eye on him for me, would you, Tom?” I asked. Nik looked at me, a hopeful expression in his eyes before I used the rod to shrink him again. I couldn’t risk him getting away while I was gone.

  Devan stood next to me, her face pressed close to the freezer, and inhaled softly. Her skin glowed slightly as she did. Nothing like when she was using real power, but enough I was attuned to it and saw what she did.

  “Sense anything?” I whispered.

  “He’s right about the focus. There are three distinct areas. But more than that?” She shook her head. “I can’t say. The Elder was talented in masking his work. The fact that I can sense anything tells me he wanted it to be detected.”

  As I ran my hand above the surface, I felt the way the energy tingled on my skin. It left my hand vibrating, almost like a humming sensation that started in my arm and raced down to my fingertips. I made a point of going over the three areas where Nik had pointed out. Each of them felt the same, giving off the same steady vibration, but other places along the door also gave off some of the vibration sense. Not as strongly as those three, but they were there.

  I focused on the areas where I sensed the energy, listening to the way it buzzed beneath my hand, and creating the sense of a pattern out of it in my mind. There were the three bright areas, and to that, I added the other areas I sensed, the softer humming sensation that tingled through my fingers. Moving slowly, I varied the way I felt my way across the surface of the metal, slowly working in a steady spiral out from the center.

  “What is it, Ollie?”

  I opened my eyes, suddenly aware I’d closed them. I was standing on my toes, my arms stretched over my head, looking something like a lunatic as I reached around the door. I shot Devan a grin. “Nothing. Just feeling my way around.”

  “You found something, didn’t you?”

  I moved toward the center of the freezer door, letting the energy tingle across the tips of my fingers again as I did. The pattern started becoming clearer. Had I not spent so much time working through my father’s book, tracing and retracing the patterns he’d left for me, I might not have recognized what I felt. This wasn’t a simple pattern, but it wasn’t all that complex either. There was power to it, and a focus. A mix of several basic shapes, all with sharp angles: a series of triangles tipped on end around a cen
tral circle.

  Moving my hand toward the center of the circle, I took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure what would happen here, wasn’t even sure if I knew what I was doing, but it seemed my father had left me with something else that would help me find my way along if only I knew how to look. Maybe without working with Nik, I wouldn’t have learned enough. Or maybe I was always meant to open the door.

  Either way, I traced my fingers around the shape. The blue ink that still stained them clung to the metal, to my eyes shimmering slightly. With a surge of power, I pressed on the pattern.

  Light spiraled through the pattern and then burst away. As it did, the door opened with a soft click.

  7

  Devan grabbed my arm. “Ollie, we need to be careful going across here. We don’t know what your father did to hold this door open. We’re not even sure where it opens to.”

  The door stood slightly open. Not a simple silver doorway like the freezer, this was something different. It formed a simple rectangular shape, peaking near the top of the pattern. The outline of the door glowed with a soft light around the edges as if sunlight bled out from the other side. A faint ripple of breeze blew through it.

  I glanced back at Tom. He watched me with an interested expression. “The Elder used this door. I was never here when he traveled, but I know this brought him to Arcanus,” he said.

  Nik eyed the door eagerly. How long had it been since he’d been to Arcanus? Certainly longer than me, but the way he stared at the door told me he wanted to return, where I felt nothing but a queasy sense of unease about the prospect.

  Without giving him the chance to object, I pointed the cylinder at him and pushed a hint of power through the patterns. Light flashed from the end making it look something like a muzzle of a gun firing, and his eyes widened in surprise as the power of the pattern caught him, dragging him down into tiny Nik form again.

  I scooped him off the ground and tucked him into the bag. “He seemed a little too eager about going over there,” I said.

  “Can you blame him?” Tom asked. “Arcanus is the pinnacle for most painters, a place where they would go to prove themselves. I knew Nikolai when he was much younger, and he was always eager to prove himself.”

  That was news to me. I hadn’t realized Tom knew Nik. I hadn’t known Nik had been in Arcanus at one point. It made sense he had; most painters spent some time in Arcanus if only to learn the basics. When I’d known Nik, he had been little more than a tagger. Better trained than most who came out of Arcanus, but I always attributed that to the time under the Trelking’s employ. “He’s reached the point where he’s a bit more powerful than most of the painters there.”

  Tom smiled slightly. “As have you.”

  I doubted that. I might have talent with arcane patterns—the so-called unnatural patterns the Masters in Arcanus frowned upon painters using because they could be dangerous—but I had nothing like the talent I’d seen Taylor possess.

  “Whatever.” I turned to Devan. “Are you ready?”

  She proffered me a tight smile and bit her lip.

  “What is it?”

  “I… I’m not sure I should make the crossing.”

  That was a first. Usually, I had to slow Devan down. “They’re not going to attack you. Probably you’ll be more powerful than anyone there.”

  “The crossing was hard on me once.”

  “I don’t think this crosses the Threshold,” I said. “I suspect this only takes us to Arcanus, nowhere else.”

  Devan stared at the door, clearly not certain. “We can try. If we cross and I find it’s changed something…”

  “Yeah, then I’ll have to be ready to kick some ass. What else is new?” I faced Tom. “You’ll close it from this side?”

  “Like I did for your father,” he answered.

  “Will we be able to return?” I didn’t want to think about what would happen in Conlin were I not to return. The Wasdig was a pretty powerful creature, enough so I’m not sure there was anyone in the city able to stop it if it went on a rampage. I hadn’t done anything more than stun it. Even Jakes, I suspect, would have trouble with it.

  “Return from the other side was never meant to be difficult,” Tom said.

  “How so?”

  Tom shook his head. “As I said, I never crossed. You’ll understand when you reach the other side.”

  That alleviated one of my concerns. I didn’t like the idea of crossing the doorway and not having an easy way back. If it was as difficult to work out as this side, then it might be too hard for me to figure out quickly. And I didn’t want the idea of the Wasdig wandering in Conlin, possibly stomping around and maybe destroying the city.

  But what if it wasn’t as easy as Tom claimed? What if the door didn’t open like he said? Too many questions without answers.

  There was only one way to find out. I had to cross. I touched the outside of the door. The energy running through it still tingled along my fingertips, but it was different than before. “Ready?” I asked Devan. When she nodded, I pulled the door open and stepped across.

  There was a sense of motion. Wind blew on my face. The air smelled musty and damp as if I’d just passed into a dank underground tunnel. And pressure. My ears popped from it, and I worked my jaw, trying to clear it. There was no light, so I wasn’t sure where the sense of light bleeding from around the edge of the door came from.

  Then the motion stopped. The air was cooler and damp. Water dripped from someplace, a steady plop sound. There was a distant light, but everything near me was black.

  Devan’s magic flared, and her skin glowed softly. As it did, I saw we were in a long hall. Dark stone rose on either side of me, stretching high overhead, looking something like a tunnel. The light from Devan’s skin glinted off metal about a dozen paces from me. I caught the outline of a pattern and took her hand, pulling her toward it to see what it was.

  Another door.

  This was clearly different than the one I’d just come through. The patterns were deeply embossed onto the door, a mixture of the usual patterns and a few arcane. There was no sense of power from it, nothing like what had radiated from the door at the Rooster. I traced my fingers around the patterns on the door. A small sigil in the corner indicated which patterns would need to be prioritized. Surprisingly, most were arcane patterns. It would take someone able to split their focus to activate the door. That, or several powerful painters capable of using the arcane patterns.

  Another door caught my attention from a little farther down the hall. The pattern on it was similar, though there were some differences when compared to what I’d found on the first. More arcane patterns, for one. And no sigil marking how to open it.

  “What is this?” Devan asked.

  I shook my head. I’d seen it before, but the drawing hadn’t done it justice. Probably because as skilled as Taylor might have been, there were limits to what could be reproduced. Sometimes seeing a thing in person was needed.

  “This is the hall of doors,” I whispered.

  I knew where we were, just not how we got here. From what Taylor had told me, once they managed to trigger the single door at the back of the library in Arcanus, it had opened here. This was where Hard had disappeared. And my father had known about this. He had his own private entrance. But why? What would the Elder need to use this for?

  “I think I didn’t know a damn thing about my father,” I said.

  “When we see mine next we can ask him.”

  I arched my brow at her, and she shrugged.

  “How do we get out of here?” she asked. “Where’s the entrance to Arcanus?”

  I strained to see through the darkness, staring down the hall. One of the doors would have been the one Taylor managed to open, the one Hard had opened as well. And one of these would have been the door he’d disappeared behind. But where did they lead?

  “It’s one of these,” I said.

  “Ollie, there are over a dozen doors here. How do you know which one?”

>   I didn’t. “I don’t know… Wait. They sealed it from the other side, blocking themselves in. We need to find the door we can’t open.” That was what Taylor had said about the door. They had managed to get it open from the library side and reached the hall of doors, but after Hard had disappeared, they had grown nervous and sealed it off.

  I made my way along the row of doors. At first, I thought they were set into the walls, as if the stone of the tunnel were in had grown around them, or like the tunnel had been carved around the doorway, but that wasn’t exactly true. The doors were all set away from the wall with a gap of a few inches. Not enough for anything to squeeze behind. They were freestanding too, nothing holding them in place other than whatever patterns had been used to keep them here.

  Each one was different than the others. Some were made of dark wood, slick with a coating of oil, leaving the patterns across their surface gleaming. Others were metal, much like the one I’d come through. Still, others actually looked to be made of stone. Those were toward the end of the hall and made of an aged, gray stone with such complex patterns carved into it that I could barely see how to reproduce them.

  “These are too old,” I said, mostly to myself.

  I turned and made my way back along the line of the doors, finally stopping in front of one where the surface appeared scorched. The patterns on this side were familiar. There was a large equilateral triangle situated in the center of the door. At each point, there was another shape. One had a spiraling shape, one a crescent moon, and one a series of ovals. Around each of these were additional patterns, and around them were more. Each pattern became progressively smaller, making the entire door like some sort of complex painting. I recognized the series around the crescent moon.

  “This one?” Devan asked.

  I nodded. The door to Arcanus was made of metal. That much I knew. “I’ve seen the door before,” I started, pointing toward the shapes I recognized. “It was at the back of the library in Arcanus, a door supposedly none had ever opened. Hard obsessed about it, copying patterns others couldn’t even begin to create, focused so much on trying to cross the door to see what might be hiding on the other side. Most thought the Elder should have a similar focus, but my father had never seemed interested in the doorway. Apparently, because he could already open it.”