She’d seen the slight shifting of the light before and wondered if there was anything she could do when he came. Would she be able to reach for the shadows then? The change was brief, and so quick that she’d have to be ready for it, but if she could—if she could somehow find a way to grab for the shadows in that moment when Ras entered the cell, she might be able to hold on to them and get enough strength to get free.
A test. It was something she would have to attempt later, but she’d have to know when he came. She didn’t know if it did the same when he left, but she didn’t think so.
“You continue to play,” he said. He studied the board as Carth had left it, still set up following her defeat when she had played as him.
“What else is there to do?” she asked.
“At a recent visit, I think you decided that you would attack me.”
“That was a mistake.”
He almost smiled. “What made you come to that decision?”
“When I didn’t beat you. You never answered my question.”
“I never agreed to answer your questions.”
“What were you doing there that night? If it wasn’t for the girl, what brought you out?”
His eyes twitched, barely the slightest movement, but Carth knew it was a question he didn’t want to answer. “I have many reasons for traveling at night.”
“Is that where you go when you leave me alone? Do you go out and attack young girls?”
She added the last mostly to see what reaction she could get from him. She no longer really believed that he had been leading the attack on that girl, but if she could goad him into slipping, she would take the opportunity to do so.
“Those girls are safe from me,” he said, a little more heat to the words than he usually spoke with.
What was it about the attack that bothered him like it did? He hadn’t seemed too upset about attacking Carth, so it wasn’t the fact that a girl had been harmed. There had to be something about it, though, that bothered him.
She studied him a moment, debating whether to push again or to let it drop. Seeing the way his eyes twitched every time she mentioned the girls, she decided she should let it drop. Pushing him on it ran the risk of actually angering him. She didn’t think she could beat him, not without her abilities and maybe not even with them. Escaping required her to outthink him somehow.
“I was trying to help her,” Carth said, changing directions quickly. She would see how he responded to the change in topic. “That was why I left my ship.”
There was no evidence for surprise when she admitted coming off the ship. Either he had expected that, or he had known. Maybe he had even anticipated that she would react the way she had to the scream. She still didn’t know if she’d somehow been drawn off the ship.
“You did not come for the sport of the fight?”
He asked it as a question, but it seemed that he already knew the answer.
“There’s no sport in a fight like that.”
“One where you are more powerful than the other?”
She nodded.
“Yet you attacked, knowing you were stronger than them.”
“I attacked because I wanted to save that girl from them. I heard what they planned to do with her. They did the same in Nyaesh, and I wasn’t about to let them use her like that.”
She had revealed more than she’d intended, but if she managed to keep him talking, it would be worth it. Ras rarely talked about anything other than Tsatsun, or when he did, she didn’t know what he intended when he shared. There had to be a purpose. With him, there was almost always some purpose to what he shared.
“What did you see in Nyaesh?” Ras asked. He’d rarely engaged her in real conversation, preferring to torment her with the cold and the light. Carth didn’t know what it meant that he chose to speak to her this time.
“What part? Where my parents were killed or how the Hjan attacked in the city or how the A’ras could barely defend themselves, let alone consider stopping the Hjan?”
His face twisted with real emotion, his jaw clenching. “They have reached the north,” he said in a whisper.
“If you mean the Hjan, then yes. They don’t seem to have any difficulty moving from place to place when they flicker.”
He tipped his head and studied her. “Flicker?”
She shrugged. “That’s what it looks like when they attack. They sort of flicker. I don’t know what it means.”
“They call it traveling. Others with a natural form of their ability call it sliding.”
“Natural?”
“The men you know as the Hjan, I have known by other names. They desire power and seek to use it to gain more power.”
“Like you?” Carth hesitated saying it, but she needed to continue to press him, especially if she intended to get more information from him. This seemed a topic that he was passionate about, though she was passionate about it as well. She needed to find some way to stop the Hjan from attacking in Nyaesh. That had been the entire purpose of her coming with Jhon to wherever he intended to bring her. Not to Odian, though she had now been here for far longer than she had ever expected, but someplace where she could obtain more training, and she could come to know what it was she could do to help.
“Perhaps like me,” Ras said. “What do you even know about me, shadow born? You know that I can confine you with the light, and you know that I can slow you with the cold, but have you ever worked out how I knew those things? Have you ever questioned how it was that I found you?”
Carth swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. “Every day.”
Ras tipped his head. “Good. You should wonder.”
He turned and started to leave. Carth reached for him before catching herself. She didn’t want it to look like an attack. She didn’t want to attack. All she wanted was information. The more she learned, the easier it might be for her to figure out a way to escape.
“What else do you know about them?” she asked when Ras paused.
He took a deep breath. “The Hjan are formidable, even for me, shadow born. I would not advise chasing after them.”
“They killed my parents,” she said softly.
Ras nodded. “They have killed many like yourself. They fear what they do not understand, and they do not understand the way Ih can use the shadows. It is one thing they have never managed to mimic, and if they cannot understand it, they prefer to eliminate it rather than needing to fear it.”
“They destroyed Ih-lash.”
Ras shrugged. “There are things in this world I do not fully know. I am not as connected as many, so it is possible they did. Some would have survived, and they would continue to resist, but there is only so much one can do when it comes to the Hjan.”
“They can be defeated,” Carth said. “I stopped them.”
“Did you, shadow born? Did you stop them or did you only delay them?” He sat in front of her and started setting up the Tsatsun board, his practiced hand placing the pieces quickly. “What is your move when compared to their willingness to play the game?”
He pushed the Night forward. It was a strong player, one of the strongest in the game, and rarely would it make sense to move it as the first play. He spun the board and made a series of moves, all the time arranging the lesser pieces around the Night.
“You might be able to take out these,” he said, letting the Night attack, knocking over three of the horses of the other side, but leaving four still remaining. The Night could only attack so many times before it was clear that it would be taken out of the game. “But what happens when even such a strong piece as yourself gets overwhelmed? Lesser pieces can overcome stronger ones, especially when working together.”
The Night was taken. Carth studied the board, realizing how many of the other pieces remained. She’d been so focused on the battle with the Night that she’d neglected how the other pieces were being played. Not only did that side of the board miss the Night, but it missed other key pieces as well. The tower was gone,
as was one of the pyramids. The side was weakened.
Ras finished the game out, and it ended about as expected once the Night was removed from play. There were no other pieces that would counter the mistake of playing the Night too early.
“You’re saying the Hjan will only come into Nyaesh again?”
Ras shrugged. “Nyaesh. Chonah. Bhavs. Althin. Other places in the north. All of them are possible.”
He named all the places she’d named as her home. Carth wasn’t surprised. “They have already shown a willingness to attack in Ih-lash.”
“Because they feared Ih-lash, shadow born. What else do they fear in the north?”
“The A’ras,” she answered.
“Do you think they really fear the A’ras?”
She almost said yes, but realized that wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true, or they wouldn’t have worked so openly within Nyaesh. There was only so much the A’ras magic could do when faced with the power that the Hjan had demonstrated.
“Then who?”
Even as she asked, she knew the answer: the Reshian. They had abilities with the shadows, enough that they could oppose the Hjan. They might not be able to defeat them as easily as Carth, but they already knew the threat, and were involved.
“You see the problem, do you not, shadow born? The Hjan use artificial means to create power that must be born in others. Think on that; they are able to offer power to someone. How powerful do you think that could be to the right person?”
She didn’t have to think too hard to realize how powerful that would be. Even with the abilities she possessed, she could understand the draw of trying to gain more, especially if it meant keeping those she cared about safe. Wasn’t that the point of power?
“That’s how they can overpower the north?”
Ras nodded. “You might have slowed them, shadow born, but you did not defeat them. There will be others, and they will come with enough strength that one person will not be able to stop them.”
She thought about those she had left behind. Friends she had cared about, both within the A’ras and those without any ability to protect themselves. Had she made it worse by slowing the Hjan? Had she only risked drawing greater attention to them?
If that were the case, then there might not be anything she could do that would keep them safe. They would be lost. She looked down at the Tsatsun board and envisioned the Hjan returning; she could imagine them attacking in greater force, this time with only the A’ras there to try and slow them. Before, there had been the Reshian, but they were weakened as well. That had been the point of the Hjan getting the A’ras to side with them, to face the Reshian, so that there would be less of a real threat to the power of the Hjan. And it had almost worked. In some ways, it had worked, especially if she viewed the moves as something of a long game of Tsatsun, a game of strategy that the Hjan had figured out a way to win without too much risk to themselves.
Ras stood and started toward the edge of the cell. Carth felt colder than she had in some time, a sensation that likely had little to do with the actual temperature in the room.
“How can we defeat them?” she asked.
“We?” Ras said.
She looked up from the board. “You dislike them as well. I can see that from your face. Help me to find a way to defeat them so that they don’t destroy any more of the north.”
His face showed no emotion, though it rarely did.
Ras paused near the light, and Carth almost forgot to focus on whether there would be shifting shadows when he left, the same as it seemed there were when he entered.
“You cannot defeat them with strength, shadow born, not when they have the ability to continue to create numbers.”
“How, then?”
He nodded toward the board. “You play Tsatsun.”
When he left, she didn’t notice any change in the shadows.
11
Another few days passed, and during that time Ras never returned. Carth kept herself busy by playing Tsatsun by herself, at first playing from different perspectives the same as she had done before, but eventually getting tired of that. Not because it wasn’t challenging, but because the more she played as Ras, the more she began to see that his perspective allowed the greatest chance of success. The only time she had any luck against him was when she played it as a melding of all the other perspectives she could imagine.
She turned to playing from a different point of view, this time trying to mimic how the Hjan had attacked in Nyaesh. She tried putting herself in the mindset of whoever controlled them—and for some reason she always imagined him as someone like Felyn, even though she knew he had died long ago.
Playing that way, with that technique, still felt not quite right. Was it the strategy she used or was it her limited ability to imagine how the Hjan attacked? She didn’t think it was the latter. Once she settled into a point of view, she was able to remain there, holding on to it so that she truly felt like she was that person. This was something else.
Carth sat back from the board, trying to think about what she was missing. The air in the cell felt slightly warmer than it had, and the light not quite as bright as it had seemed. It must be that she was getting accustomed to the temperature in the time she’d spent trapped. She’d given up worrying about whether that meant she would lose her connection to her abilities as well. She didn’t think so, but until she escaped—if she escaped—she would never know the answer.
As she stared at the board, she realized it wasn’t the perspective she forced herself into that was lacking, it was the scope of the strategy she attempted. She hadn’t been thinking grand enough.
She reset the board and started again. Was that the first time she hadn’t played out the game in its entirety? It didn’t matter. Before, she had been trying to understand the nuances of the game, but maybe there were no nuances she could learn without having another actual player. What she needed was to use what she did understand and see what it told her about the Hjan.
Maybe it was nothing more than a mental exercise that wouldn’t help her at all, but she still wanted to try. If she could see what the Hjan might be attempting in the north, she could find a way to counter it, couldn’t she? Wasn’t that the point of Tsatsun? There were stronger and weaker pieces, but that wasn’t always what mattered. Sometimes it was how they were moved around the board that mattered more than the individual pieces.
As she played it this way, she started to see a different pattern. Not only did she play as the Hjan, she tried to think of the strategy they would use while attacking the entirety of the north, thinking of the other side of the game board as the north.
The moves were different now. It wasn’t so much about attacking and countering; it was the Hjan attempting to secure more than the Stone—they wanted all of the north. That meant either clearing the entire game board or neutralizing each of the pieces.
And from what she knew, there were two defensive parts—the Reshian as the remnants of Ih-lash, and the A’ras. Once they were neutralized, the board was surprisingly open.
There came a flicker.
Carth almost reached for the shadows, but what purpose would there be? She wasn’t fast enough to do so, even if she could reach them.
Ras stepped into the cell, the light parting for him as he did. Today he wore a dark brown cloak with a hood rolled down his neck. A hint of a bruise had formed along his arm, but it was barely more than a slight yellowish discoloration. He studied the board, the corners of his eyes twitching slightly.
“That is an interesting technique,” he said, noting the side of the board she’d played as the Hjan.
“It’s not a technique.”
“No? Then what would you call it?”
“A strategy? I’m trying to determine why the Hjan attacked the way they did.”
“And you think Tsatsun will reveal that to you?”
“Isn’t that what you suggested?”
“I suggested one could learn to counter them by pra
cticing strategy.”
“How is that different?”
“You believe you can get deep enough into the mind of the Hjan to defeat them?”
Carth stared at the board. Wasn’t that what she had done? Playing as the Hjan had given her more insight into the way they might play, enough that she thought she could counter them—at least while playing on a game board. Playing in real life would be something quite different.
“Yes.”
Ras almost smiled. She could see that the corners of his mouth wanted to twitch, but he didn’t.
He sat and started setting up the board again. When finished, he waved a hand to her and said, “Why don’t we play again? You can show me if you’ve learned anything.”
“You want me to play as the Hjan?”
He shook his head. “I want you to play however you want. The Hjan, yourself, whatever you think will win the game. Isn’t that the point?”
She hadn’t played Ras—actually played Ras rather than imagining playing him—in quite a few days. Most of the time, she’d spent imagining how he would play, without really knowing how he might react.
Had she learned anything? Was it possible that she could outplay him using this technique of imagining herself as him? What if she played as Ras?
She imagined herself as him, and how he would react. It was easier now that she had played that way several times already. She settled into the role, becoming him. She moved the first piece, thinking about how he would play at first, wanting more information. It was similar to the way he had fought her the night they had met.
Ras countered. Carth made another move, this one a little bit more aggressive, determined to get more information from him through her move.
Back and forth they went. With each move she made, he adjusted, forcing her to adjust in return. She realized she wasn’t playing quite like him anymore. She was playing like a combination of all the people whose mindsets she had managed to get inside of. She used moves that her father, or Invar, or her mother would make, mixing those with moves like what she envisioned of Ras.
Shadow Born (The Shadow Accords Book 3) Page 7