The Dreamer's Curse (Book 2) Read online

  “I did,” he responded, smile growing, chest puffing out a little with pride.

  “But you swore you wouldn’t use it at all until it became self-navigating!” she protested. Master had built it a good three years ago, intending to make a vehicle that would travel without conscious direction from its owner and could go anywhere on land. Travelling on land had been the easiest part of the design. It was the without human control that had stumped him for the past three years.

  “I had a breakthrough last fall,” Master admitted. “All I had to do was create a trainable map that would be inscribed into the vehicle itself. So I drove to every major city in Kindin and Windamere, letting the route record itself, and then all I had to do was add some necessary safety precautions to the design.” He rubbed at his chin and grimaced. “Incantation is still hideously complex, though.”

  She didn’t even want to try and imagine it. It hurt her head just thinking about it. “There’s no way that Chastain was on your map, though!”

  “Well, no, but Winfield is. And it’s only a few hours from Winfield to here. I slept on the way to Winfield, and when I got to the city, I drove it myself from there on. Worked beautifully.” Blinking at her, he offered ingeniously, “Want one?”

  “Master, don’t ask stupid questions. Of course I want a vehicle I don’t have to drive!”

  He patted her on the shoulder and laughed, the sound rich and deep. “I’ll teach you how to make your own after this job is finished, then.”

  “Yes, please, let’s not handle two impossible jobs at once,” she responded, only half-joking. “For now, breakfast? And we’ll try and catch you up as we eat.”

  He nodded in agreement and gestured for her to take the lead, which she did. As she made her way through the hallway, something moved in the bag at her waist and a distant sounding male voice said something that was so muffled she couldn’t make it out. Eyebrow quirked—who would try to contact her at this hour of the morning?—she reached in and pulled her Caller free. “Yes?”

  The Caller formed into the features of Pierpoint, arms crossed over his chest in a clear gesture of forced patience. “Sevana. Did it occur to you at any point that we would like an update?”

  Actually…no, it hadn’t.

  Master leaned around her shoulder and greeted Pierpoint with a cordial, “Hello, Pierpoint.”

  “Well hello, Tashjian!” Pierpoint seemed both surprised and pleased. “I’m glad to see you in Chastain, but is the problem truly that serious that she had to call for your help?”

  “Serious isn’t the word I’d use,” Master refuted with a slight shake of the head. “It’s more complicated than anything.”

  “How so?”

  Sevana, in the interest of getting food into her stomach, decided to sum it up in short sentences. “The artifact is annoying, upsetting, and downright evil, but it’s not destructive. It is, in fact, doing what it was designed to do—transport people. So there’s no need to be worried about it destroying half the countryside.” Pierpoint let out a breath of relief over that, looking as if a hundred-pound weight had just fallen from his shoulders. “It is, however, thwarting our best efforts in shutting it off. We tried getting past its basic shield yesterday and have the bruises to show for our efforts.”

  “Hence why it’s now considered evil and you called in your master for help,” Pierpoint summed up wryly. “I think I see the full picture. Is there anything that you need? Any help that we can send your way?”

  “You can warn Aren that he’s going to pay for Master’s fees,” Sevana said with a heartless smile.

  “That I’ll do. Anything else?”

  “At this point, we don’t know,” Master admitted. “I only just arrived and neither Sevana nor Sarsen has been able to fill me in yet. We’ll get back to you once we have a better idea of how to approach the problem.”

  “Well enough. I’ll pass along what you’ve told me for now. Oh, and Sevana—Morgan is very upset with you about that note you left behind. He said it was depressingly short on details and that he’s quite cross with you right now.”

  “He’ll live.” She shoved the Caller back into her bag and continued toward the dining room.

  “Sevana,” Master scolded.

  Without turning to see his expression, she responded calmly, “I told him what he needed to know. He’s just being a worrywart.”

  From behind her there came a long, drawn-out sigh.

  Sarsen, obviously anticipating them, had already ordered breakfast and it sat on the table like a lure, tempting the hungry with enticing smells. He’d even ordered a plate for Hinun, which sat on the floor at his feet. The wolf went directly there and started inhaling food. Sevana gave nothing more than a hello grunt to Sarsen before sitting down at the table and eating everything in sight.

  Master had more manners, exchanging cordial words as he and Sarsen tucked in. Or he tried to, at least. She and Sarsen had both taken potions and applied poultices yesterday that helped them to heal faster—they wouldn’t be moving at all today if they hadn’t. But the side effect of accelerated healing was extreme hunger. Master spoke of things that didn’t require a response and let them consume to their heart’s content.

  After two plates, Sevana felt deliciously stuffed to the gills and finally relaxed back into the wooden chair with a sigh of satisfaction. Looking about, she belatedly noticed that the room had the usual hustle and bustle of the morning with people coming and going for breakfast as they started their day. Something about the way they kept glancing at her table, and the lower pitch in conversation, caught her attention. Oh? “Are they talking about us?”

  “All sorts of rumors are flying about what happened yesterday,” Sarsen informed her, still eating although at a much slower rate. He actually seemed to chew now instead of just inhaling. “I’ve had several people come by and ask if it was safe to go near the fountain.”

  After seeing what happened yesterday, she supposed she didn’t blame their caution. “What did you tell them?”

  “To avoid it for now. I don’t think it’ll cause anyone injury—after all, they interacted with it for months without ill effect—but we’re going to be working in that area for the next few days. We’ll need plenty of space around us as we try things.”

  Master nodded in satisfaction. “Good. You’re right, we don’t want to be tripping over anyone while working. Now, sweetling, you’ve more or less told me the basics but I need more than that. Start from the beginning and leave nothing out.”

  She did just that, the routine of explaining the complexity of the problem and the solutions she had tried so ingrained in her that it felt like an odd sort of homecoming. She’d been reporting and explaining to this man for nearly a decade. To see his patience, his sharp attention trained on her, felt wonderfully familiar and reassuring.

  When she’d finished, he sat there for several seconds, just pondering, before he spoke slowly. “There are several questions I have that are in want of answers. You said Jacen believed that this gadgick was in fact designed to transport not just people, but objects? Then why hasn’t it been doing so?”

  “There’s some other feature, some piece of the gadgick’s design that we’re missing,” she admitted frankly. “They must have had a way of signaling what inanimate objects needed to be transported. I’m just not sure of how they did it.”

  “I’d like to get an answer to this riddle. I have a feeling it would help us if we knew more of how this thing worked.” Master sat back and looked up blindly at the ceiling, mind clearly whirling at high speeds. “I’d also like to know what the original site looked like. You said they’ve been harvesting stones from the ruins for generations, correct? But all of this trouble only started up in the past several months. So it had to have been recent that the right stone, or element, was moved. Surely there’s someone here that would be able to describe to us what the ruins originally looked like six months ago.”

  A good thought that she hadn’t tracked down. She’
d been so busy trying to find a magical solution to the problem that she hadn’t thought to ask some of the more obvious solutions. “I’ll ask Decker. He might not know, but I’m sure he can tell us who would.”

  “Please do so.” He rubbed at his chin, making a rasping sound against the stubble. “After what happened to the two of you yesterday, I don’t believe that doing another frontal attack against the gadgick is the right approach. Trying to overwhelm power with more power would no doubt work, but it would take considerable manpower and some rather dangerous elemental combinations to pull it off. Not that I blame either of you for trying it—I certainly would have in your shoes.”

  “It would, after all, be the easiest solution,” Sarsen sighed. “If it had worked, that is. So, you think we should do an indirect approach. How?”

  “Robbing it of its power source.” Master finally dropped his eyes to give them a wry smile and shrug of the shoulders. “But that begs the question, which one? There are several elements powering the gadgick right now. Which one would be the safest to remove from the equation? Or the easiest? Is there an easy one to choose? I can’t know at this point without a better grasp of how exactly the gadgick works.”

  Sevana frowned as she followed along with his train of thought. “I would think the water element would be the easiest to remove.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Master admitted. “But how to do so is the question. Is this something we can achieve by dismantling the water fountain itself? Or do we need to go even farther away from it so as to not set the shield off?”

  All very good questions. She wished she had an answer. “Let me track down Decker and get some answers as to where this thing was. Surely that will help us figure at least part of it out.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Sarsen muttered under his breath.

  “I also want something else explained.” Master braced his forearms against the table and leaned forward slightly. “You said that Jacen believed this gadgick was made for non-magical people to use to transport themselves long distance. Correct? And that he also said it was made to transport luggage and things of that sort as well.”

  She had a feeling he was leading up to something but simply nodded confirmation and let him continue.

  “Now, your working theory at the moment is that the reason why it is transporting people in their sleep is because that is the only time they picture an image in their head of where to go. Is that right? But there’s something that doesn’t connect with this idea.”

  Sevana’s brows drew together. He’d lost her. “What doesn’t?”

  “The rules of travel magic.” He raised a hand to stop them from objecting. “Hear me out. No matter how amazing the old magic is, and how incomprehensible most of it is to us, there are certain fundamental rules that are inescapable. One is that in order to transport both people and objects, it would take more than just a mental picture of where to go. It would take a command, an insignia, something to move a group of people and their luggage all at once. Also, it troubles me that this only happens in sleep. People wish aloud to go to different places all the time. Why wait until the user is sleeping? Why the delay? I can’t imagine that this was an intended feature.”

  “It didn’t make a lot of sense to me either,” Sarsen admitted. “No offense to Jacen.”

  “Even he admitted that he wasn’t sure why it worked that way,” Sevana added thoughtfully. “It was just the only theory that made any kind of sense that we could think of. So you think something else is at play here?”

  “I think the original design has been badly knocked askew somehow.” Master’s tone grew more ruminative. “Although I’m not sure how. But I’m very hesitant to do anything else until we have more information. Just knowing where the gadgick originally rested and what the area looked like around it will tell us a great deal, I think. If I can just answer one of the questions I’ve posed, it’ll allow us to make some logical deductions from there and perhaps we can think of a different line of attack.”

  Since she had spent the whole of yesterday with her thoughts circling each other like a dog chasing its tail, she didn’t have any objections to more information. Pushing back from the table with a slight scrape of her chair, she waved for the other two to follow her. “In that case, let’s go find Decker.”

  Decker hadn’t the faintest idea, as he never hunted in that area, but he took them to Krause, who in turn took them to Hube. Hube, as it happened, was the village carpenter. He sat in his cluttered, dusty shop, carving on a long beam of wood, and listened to their request. Then he sat back on a nearby barstool, absently brushing wood shavings from his shirt and beard, dark eyes crinkled up at the corners in silent amusement.

  “Do I ‘member how the stones were laid out? I took it apart brick by brick and then rebuilt it meself. Of course I ‘member!”

  Sevana felt like raising her eyes to the heavens in a heartfelt prayer of thanks. “Then can you describe it to us?”

  “I’ll do you one better.” He stood and twisted about, reaching for a slightly dingy pad of paper lying nearby, and grabbed a pencil that had seen sharper days. With rough, steady strokes, he sketched out in bold lines the layout. “This here, this is where the fountain’s topper was,” he explained even as he kept drawing, his eyes never leaving the paper.

  “Wait, the topper?” Master pointed out the narrow window of the shop to where the fountain sat, several blocks away. “Do you mean to tell me that a part of that fountain was carried intact from the ruins?”

  “Sure was.” Hube nodded in confirmation, pausing long enough to respond directly. “That decorative lookin’ piece on top is straight from the ruins. All I did was clean it up a bit and cart it over. Now, all the stones that make up the fountain are from the platform.”

  “Platform?” Sevana prompted impatiently.

  Hube went back to his drawing. “Don’t know what else to call it. Never could figure out what it was for. A large stretch of stones made up a raised platform, stretching about the length and breadth of the courtyard, I’d say. Most of the stones have been picked up and carted off, they being the easiest ones to get to, see. And they were pretty. I used ‘em to build quite a few things in the village—houses, streets, walls, and the like.” He tapped the center of the platform area he had marked off. “But the top of the fountain, it sat right smack in the middle. Had a canal of sorts running toward it from either end, splitting the area straight through. Probably carried water to it at one point, but the spring that fed it was well dried up by the time we came along.”

  “Pretty?” Sarsen asked with a slightly baffled frown.

  Sevana shared the confusion. The stones looked to be of excellent cut, no mistake, but she hadn’t seen much of a difference between the ones used for the fountain and the ones used everywhere else.

  Hube nodded. “Used ‘em to tile the inside of the fountain with, and you have to know what you’re lookin’ for ‘cause of the water distorting things, but the stones had a really pretty design carved into ‘em. Most people have at least one in their homes, above the fireplace or the doorway or some such. A decorative piece, you could call it.”

  Sevana’s eyes closed in fatalistic understanding as the pieces started to click. “I don’t even have to look to know.”

  “Neither do I,” Master agreed, blowing out a breath.

  Hube blinked at them, head cocked in question, obviously not following.

  “The pretty designs on those stones weren’t designs at all,” Sarsen explained patiently. Although from the expression on his face, it looked like he wanted to find some hard surface and start banging his head against it. “They were, in fact, magical incantations that gave the artifact power and direction.”

  Hube’s eyes bulged, nearly falling out of his head.

  “I’d bet direction more than power,” Master added. “Finally, finally this is starting to make sense. How did the gadgick know who and what to transport? Everything on top of that platform, of course. The canal
that connected to the fountain supplied it with water so that it had all the power it needed. By removing the stones, and using it to build all over this village, it has turned this entire place into a platform. Putting the fountain back in the center and supplying it with water was the final piece. It had everything it needed to function again.”

  “It also explains why the destinations are so random, and why it’s transporting only a person at a time and no objects.” Sevana felt torn between elation at getting some true answers and frustration that the answer had been right in front of her this whole time. She just hadn’t known enough to know what questions to ask. “I’d bet that part of the incantation inscribed in those stones also gave it instructions. With the stones literally scattered everywhere, with no rhyme or reason to it, the gadgick must be getting some very confusing and mixed-up signals.”

  “I’m amazed it’s actually working as well as it is,” Sarsen agreed. “Although we’re still missing something—I mean, it’s only transporting people. If the stones are throughout the village, shouldn’t things be disappearing as well? Or—” he cut himself off as all three of them exchanged understanding looks. “The water.”

  “The water,” Master agreed. “I’d lay good odds that the water plays into this somehow. I’m just not quite sure how. Direct contact?”

  “It would have to be.” Sevana chewed at a thumbnail before adding, almost to herself, “Or it could be the reflected light…no, I suppose not. It wouldn’t explain why the stones outside haven’t had some sort of effect.”

  Hube looked between them with a wildly panicked expression. “W-wait, did I cause all this?”

  Master laid a comforting hand on his shoulder, expression and voice gentle. “Master Hube, you could not have known what those stones were. Or what they were intended to do. Indeed, it’s taken four Artifactors to figure it out! And even now there are parts of this puzzle we haven’t worked through completely.”