She had acquiesced to Boiyn’s demand that she take enhancements with her and had a pouch full of vials, each labeled with how it could be used to enhance her natural abilities. The only one that tempted her was the vial that would enhance her eyesight, pushing back the shadows so that she didn’t require the connection to her shadow magic.
She had taken a few other vials, though those had been more for defense, intending to use them if needed to poison her blade, or even to inject. There were ways to load syringes, and she could use those to infuse the poisons if it came to that. Carth hoped that it did not.
Approaching the city from this direction provided a far different view. Lights glimmered in the darkness and a haze hung over the city that seemed little more than low-lying clouds. There was a distant cacophony of sounds that drifted to her, a mixture of voices and music and movement. Smells assaulted her, different than the scent of the sea and the smell of the forest that she had known for the last few days.
She was troubled by what Rhain had said to her.
Even more troubling was that he wasn’t the Collector. She thought she had figured out Keyall, but if the Collector wasn’t him, then she had no idea who it might be.
And now she had placed herself against the Collector.
Could it be the Collector was someone she had already met? During her travels, she’d come across many people, and many of them had sought power much as it seemed the Collector had sought power. What was he after?
Then there was Rhain. Why had Talia succumbed to his charm?
Her behavior had the hallmarks of an abused spouse, wanting to stay with him despite the way that he treated her. It was the kind of relationship that Carth had saved others from, and the kind of behavior that sickened her, especially as she had seen just how much it had hurt. Could that be why Talia had been unwilling to take Carth up on her offer?
Maybe she was giving him too much credit. Maybe it really was a choice, much as Alayna suggested, using herself as an example. That was something Carth could understand. She had made many choices over the years, and not all of them were made for the right reasons, and not all of them had worked the way that she wished they could. Perhaps Talia thought that she had simply gone too far and that there was no way to escape his influence.
It was part of the reason that she had decided to venture back to the city, but there was another reason, too.
Carth made her way along the streets, listening to the sounds of people moving along them. Night had only just fallen and the people on the street still had much of the evening remaining, and there was a boisterous sense about the city. It was the same sense that she had noticed in many large cities, and in Keyall, there were many different peoples coming together, fewer than perhaps there once had been, especially since the Collector had begun scaring off merchants, but still she noticed dozens of different voices and different dialects, enough that she found herself smiling as she listened. Not once did she hear a language she didn’t recognize.
That surprised her. Wasn’t Keyall supposed to welcome travelers from the far west?
That was the reason the Collector had come here, wasn’t it?
As she had since coming to Keyall, Carth felt as if she were only glimpsing a portion of the playing surface. Could it be that was intentional? Could the Collector have kept knowledge from her intentionally so that she wouldn’t be able to make the movements necessary to place herself in a position to win?
The problem was that she wasn’t even certain what a winning move would look like in Keyall.
In other places she’d traveled, that hadn’t been the issue. Most of the time, she found violence that prompted her to act, people who sought her services, or if they didn’t, obvious insults that needed her attention. There was nothing like that here.
She made her way toward the plaza.
There was less activity around it tonight than there had been when Jenna had been captured and contained, but she suspected she would find the constables here.
The darkness around her left her troubled for the first time in a while. It wasn’t so much that the darkness itself bothered her; it was the fact that she had a growing understanding that her connection to the shadows was almost meaningless here. Not completely meaningless—there were some in the city that it might still be effective upon, but she was less and less certain who those were.
She was left here with questions without answers.
There was one place that she could go to find the answers, but after everything that she had done and that had taken place, she wasn’t certain that the constable would agree to share those answers with her.
Which meant that she had to take a different approach—a more violent one. It meant that she would have to accept the possibility that she might not be viewed as a welcome part of the city. So much of her time in other places had been spent as a savior of sorts, and in Keyall, for her to be effective and to help those she intended to help, she might have to play a different role, if only for a little while. It was one that made her uncomfortable, especially as she had seen others play it so well in the past. Could she be the villain that the constable thought her to be?
She wrapped the shadows around herself, suspecting that they made little difference to many here but thinking that she had to conceal herself somewhat. Even if there were some who could see through them, Carth was determined to hold the shadows and to see if doing so would allow her to find the constable.
She took to the rooftops. When she had done that before, she had moved more easily and hadn’t worried quite as much about the possibility that they would observe her. On the rooftops, she thought that she could stay low—and through that, hidden—not relying on her connection to the shadows quite as much as she would otherwise.
The only time that she needed to expose herself would be when she jumped to the next building. The houses were close enough together that she could run along the slate roofs, muting her passing with the shadows. The air was crisp and it carried with it a hint of the sea, but less than she thought it should this close to the water.
How would she find him?
There was one possibility, but it involved her using herself as bait.
If she did, she would potentially be captured. But then, if she were captured, she didn’t think that the constable would harm her. She believed that her first read of him was still accurate. He was rigid in his morals, and that rigidity mattered to him. Were he more pliant, perhaps he would have allowed the Collector to have gained a greater foothold in the city. For now, he had managed to create a barrier to the Collector’s presence. In time, that would fade, especially if this Collector was as powerful as Carth was beginning to suspect.
She saw one of the constables patrolling on the street below and jumped down behind him, landing with shadow-muted feet. She waited, curious whether her shadows would work to obscure her from him, but he didn’t seem to notice. She cleared her throat, briefly releasing the shadows wrapped around her.
The man spun and immediately reached for his sword.
At least one question was answered. She still didn’t understand how he could see through the shadows, but it seemed as if she were still able to mute her passing using them.
Carth unsheathed, knocking his sword from his hand in a swift blow.
His eyes widened. “You think I need my magic to stop you?” she asked with a sneer. She would play the part that he believed of her, at least until the constable appeared. The constable had already made his mind up about her, so it was unlikely to matter whether he believed that she had attacked his man or not.
“What you want with me?” he asked. “There are others patrolling. If you think that you will get away with attacking one of us, the others will come, and—”
Carth slipped forward, raising her hand in the barest of threats. “I fully intend for others to come. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have drawn you out.”
“What do you want with me?” he asked.
“Want? Wh
at I want is for you to send word to your commander. What I want is for him to stand before me and provide answers. That is what I want. Do you think that you can assist me with this, or do I need to find another?” She raised her sword threateningly. She didn’t enjoy playing this part, but she also knew that it was the easiest—and most likely—way to get the answers she wanted.
“I don’t know where to find him.”
“Ah. Then perhaps you are of no use to me. A shame, really. Were you to be somewhat useful, you might have been allowed to live.”
“I might be able to find him, but it will take some time.”
“You think I don’t have time? I have nothing but time, especially since I intend to control all of Keyall.” Carth had debated what she would say that would get the constable’s attention the most, and figured that would offend him enough that he would at least come himself, rather than attempting to send one of his men in his stead. “I will be waiting near the ruins along the edge of the city. Make certain that he comes.”
The man bobbed his head in a nod and then he scurried off, racing away.
Carth drew upon the shadows and jumped, reaching the nearest rooftop. From here, she could track the movement of the constable as he went after his commander. She needed to know where to find him in the future, wanting to know that if she truly needed to reach him without making an overt threat, she could do so.
She saw him slip into a building, and then he disappeared. She waited, thinking that he might reappear, but he didn’t. That building shouldn’t be anything of significance, Carth thought. Maybe it was meant to obscure his passing. Maybe it was connected to another building. Maybe it was truly a constables’ base.
She crouched along the roof, watching and waiting. As she did, she pressed out with her connection to the S’al. The shadows were ineffective for her here. Could the connection to the flame be much better?
She also listened. If she could hear anything that sounded off, she wouldn’t need to rely upon her magical connection.
Carth lost track of time. It was difficult to know how long she’d been here, and she started to question whether she had made a mistake in leaving the constable to go and find the commander. What if he had only reported to the commander and hadn’t shared the rest with him? If that were the case, would they even bother trying to come for her?
Carth heard a subtle scraping sound on the rooftop behind her and spun.
The commander crouched near the edge of the roof. His sword was unsheathed, and he froze the moment that he saw Carth.
“There is a rumor that you attacked one of my men.”
“It wasn’t a rumor,” Carth said. “I did attack one of your men.”
“You’ve decided that you are no longer going to conceal the fact that you are actively working against us? Now that you have broken your woman free from the stockade, you would continue your attacks?”
“You and I both know that you were never going to release Jenna. I had thought it was because you were working on behalf of the Collector, but I’ve begun to think that is not the case.”
The constable frowned. “Why would you think that I worked for the Collector?”
“Because I believed that the Collector was Alistan Rhain.”
The constable looked at her for a long moment. “And you no longer do?”
“Tell me, constable, what has been taking place with the Collector?”
The constable stood and sheathed his sword. Carth smiled inwardly. She had no intention of attacking him, and he must have begun to understand that. At least, he wasn’t making an attempt to attack her. She didn’t want to fight and only wanted information from him.
“You had no intention of fighting my man.”
“I needed to get you here.”
“Here? Why this place?” he asked, surveying the streetscape below them. From here, there were a few intact buildings, but for the most part, they were destroyed, left as nothing more than ruins. Carth found it interesting that the people of Keyall had allowed these buildings to remain rather than cleaning them up and building overtop them. They seemed to be in the heart of the city. On either side of the ruins, the city stretched along the ridgeline, going from taverns on one side to shops on the other. In the middle were these ruins.
“Because it’s easy enough to find,” Carth said. “And you wouldn’t have been able to conceal yourself from me quite as easily as you could if you were going through the city.”
The constable smiled at her. “I imagine you don’t know anything about why this place holds meaning to my people.”
“Nothing.” She would have to ask Boiyn. She suspected he would know, and if he didn’t, maybe Linsay would.
The constable took a seat across from her. He seemed more at ease than he had been yet. “We have managed to prevent the Collector from gaining much of a foothold in Keyall. That’s part of the reason we are so… what’s the word you used? Rigid.”
“You’ve managed to prevent the Collector from invading Keyall? But what of the ships?”
“You saw part of his influence. We have held him off. For now. I am well aware that we might not be able to prevent his access for long. Eventually, he will come to our shores, and he will do to us what he has done in other places.”
“And what is that?”
“You asked me once about the status of trade in Keyall.”
“I did.”
“The status of trade in Keyall is limited. We have been effectively sealed off from other ports. The Collector has used his influence not only to prevent other merchants from reaching us but to actively attack those that try.”
“And the smugglers?”
The constable’s face tightened in a frown. “Yes. That is a different issue. They have attempted to create a workaround, to bypass the impact of the Collector. We do not support their efforts.”
“Which is why they’re working outside the city?”
He nodded once.
“And what about Alistan Rhain?”
“He is a merchant, and one who has gained much wealth here. Through his wealth, he has taken on a certain level of leadership.”
“Which is why he sits on the tribunal,” Carth said, finally beginning to understand. What she didn’t understand was the purpose of the talisman and why it was missing. If he was law-abiding, and if he truly did work on behalf of the tribunal, then it didn’t make sense that he would have attempted to steal it.
Carth thought back to what she knew and what she had observed from the shop owner. She’d had a prospective buyer. Could that have been Alistan Rhain? And what of Talia? What role did she have?
The connections troubled Carth. There had to be something to Talia and her connection to the Collector. But what, exactly?
“Why does the Collector want to gain access to Keyall?” she asked the constable.
“Who’s to say? In other places, he has gone after power.”
Carth thought of the rumor of the Elder Stone. She wasn’t certain there was anything to it, despite what Boiyn might claim, but what if the Collector believed it? Could that be reason enough to come to Keyall, searching for power that might exist?
“And what power do you have in Keyall?”
The constable stared at her. “We have the power of our people. How is that any different than where you came from, Carthenne Rel?”
She smiled, if only because what he said was true. How was it any different?
“I take it you’re not in favor of the smugglers.”
“I understand why others might be, but only because they think they must in order to continue trading as they are accustomed to.”
“You don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Eventually, the Collector will either gain a presence here or he will tire of his attempts. We are not incapable of defending ourselves, and we have plans in place to ensure that trade is reestablished.”
“What sort of plans?”
“The sort of plans that don’t involve some f
oreigner coming in to make a mess of what we might be able to accomplish.”
Carth stared at him. “And what do you think that you might be able to do?” she asked. “From what I’ve heard, it sounds as if there is more than a little uncertainty about what the Collector might be after. If you are that uncertain, how do you anticipate stopping him?”
“What makes you think that we intend to stop him?”
“Then you will allow him to be even more powerful?”
“No. What we intend is to ensure that trade routes remain open.”
“That’s the reason for the ships hidden in the cave.” She had thought that they worked for the Collector, but if that wasn’t the case, and if Alistan Rhain wasn’t anything other than a merchant, then why else would they need so many ships? She hadn’t been able to answer that—yet.
“How is it that you know of those?”
“I followed one of your men.” She hadn’t known they were the constables before now, but it fit with everything that she’d seen. The immunity to her magic was something of Keyall—not the Collector.
He had started to frown when an explosion of light lit the night.
It came from along the coast, far enough away that Carth could tell that it wouldn’t impact the city, but near enough that it was almost within the port.
Not within the port. Farther along the coast on that.
“I think you had better check on your fleet, constable.”
He frowned. “What did you do?”
She shook her head. “I did nothing, but that explosion came from someplace nearby, near enough that it could have come from your hidden fleet.”
The constable studied her for a long moment before clenching his jaw and scrambling along the roof to jump down and disappear into the night. Carth would have followed, but following would have made it impossible for her to find out what had taken place, and she desperately wanted to reach it before the constable and his men did.
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Shadow Hunted (The Collector Chronicles Book 1) Page 19