Shadow Cross (The Shadow Accords Book 5)

by D. K. Holmberg

  Carth swore under her breath. That hadn’t been her intent. Blood pooled around her hand where the knife had penetrated, and he stopped moving.

  She withdrew her blade and wiped it on his shirt. That had not been the plan. As she sheathed her knives, she looked around, searching for the other man and the woman he’d carried off. She saw no sign of them.

  She swore again, this time anger coursing through her.

  She brought her hand up to her shoulder, checking to see how injured she was. The skin had already started to knit back together, the power of the magic sealing it once more. It still amazed her how quickly and easily that power could be used to heal her injuries. It amazed her that she had such magic that could repair her, restore her when injuries like that occurred. She could even heal herself from mild poisonings, though she didn’t dare risk that too extensively, not knowing how the magic would work if she were to encounter something more significant.

  Answers.

  Carth thought about what she knew and tried to think through what she’d observed. Dara was missing, as was Guya. She had just seen a woman taken in the street—twice, she reminded herself—and she’d overheard conversations within the tavern of similar activities.

  There had to be a connection.

  But what was it?

  Maybe Lindy was having better luck than she was. Carth hoped that was the case. If not, she didn’t like to think about what would be required to find her. In a place like Asador, a place with ships coming in and out of the port and a place she knew to be home to slavery, she feared what might be taking place.

  Answers.

  She needed them, and she thought she knew how to find them, but it might involve taking a harder edge than she was accustomed to.

  For her friend, wouldn’t she do that?

  9

  The inside of the Spotted Lion was dingy, and run-down. It was situated in the center of the row of taverns lining the docks. A simple wooden sign hung from chains, consisting of nothing more than a few letters burned into a board.

  Carth had observed the tavern for a long time before choosing to enter. It had the look of the kind of place that she thought might provide answers. Those taverns had a distinct appearance about them, one that she had grown comfortable with during her years. Few women would be as comfortable as she was entering the tavern like that, especially alone, but few women were Carth.

  There was a ribald air to the tavern. A minstrel played a stringed instrument in one corner, and a dozen people danced around him, some singing and some shouting, but mostly they simply danced. There was no real coordination to their movement, and she smiled to herself as she watched, thinking of discovering something like that in Nyaesh. She would not, she knew. The taverns there were places for eating, and gambling, but rarely for dancing, not like this place seemed to be.

  Those other activities took place here as well. At several tables, she saw men dicing, and at another—one in a corner—four men sat hunched over a table with a game board situated across it, moving stones along the surface. It reminded her of Tsatsun, but it was not the same. Would it be similar enough for her to pick up the gameplay quickly?

  These were the kind of men she needed to find, the kind of men she thought she would get answers from. They were the kind who would have access to the underground.

  Others moved through the tavern as well. Much like where she’d met Julie, there were three different women who made their rounds, carrying platters laden with ale or trays of food. The smells coming off the food made her mouth water, and Carth didn’t know if that was a sign of her hunger, or whether it reflected the quality of the food. Probably the former. The meat had a grayish appearance to it, and the vegetables were all overdone.

  One of the serving women—a rounder woman with wide hips and a plentiful bosom—cast a strange glance at her as she entered. Carth shrugged and turned her attention to the game board in the far corner.

  Dicing was a game of chance, one she had played often enough in other taverns in other cities, but with her abilities, she could overwhelm the chance and could force things in her favor.

  Where would she get the most useful information? That was of the utmost importance to her now. She wanted to hear gossip, but she also wanted to hear what else might be taking place, so that she could understand where to make her next move. Each step needed to bring her closer to information about what had happened to Guya and Dara.

  Carth probably should have done this from the very beginning. It was a tavern like this—perhaps not quite so filthy and run-down—where she had first convinced Guya of her skills. That had been after she’d rescued him, dragging him back to shore after he’d been betrayed by his first mate. That had been the start of them working together, and Carth learning how to sail, finding comfort in moving from port to port. As she’d never really had much of a home in the first place, traveling on board the ship seemed natural to her.

  For gambling, dicing would have been the easier of the two. But Carth didn’t want to gamble. She didn’t need the coin. Her coin purse was heavy enough the way it was. What she needed was information, and that was something men more deeply into the drink could provide.

  She surveyed the tables with men dicing before settling on one. There were two younger men, and a third slightly older, sitting there.

  Carth grabbed a chair, pulled it up to the table, and rested her elbows. The men all glanced at her. “This isn’t a place for women,” the older man said.

  She scooped the dice from the table and shook them, rolling them with enough energy so that Watcher’s Eyes came up, both an unlucky hand and a lucky one. She shrugged and flipped a coin that she’d palmed onto the table.

  “Then why are you here?” she asked with a smile.

  The man sputtered, but his friends both laughed, one of them covering his mouth with his hand as he did.

  Carth had been around taverns often enough to know that there was a certain measure of insult needed to handle men like this. Coming up with the right thing to say to him wasn’t difficult. In fact, it was entertaining.

  “The game is closed,” the man said.

  Carth tapped on her coin, drawing attention to it. “Closed? That’s unfortunate. I thought you might want to show this poor woman how to gamble.”

  The man sitting across from Carth took the dice off the table and shook them, rolling them out. He rolled a five and a six, a healthy hand, one that was difficult to beat, especially if they were playing based on total roll. Not all played the game that way, and Carth wasn’t certain which set of rules they followed. She suspected that dicing was different here, and from the time that she had diced with Guya—at least, for Guya—she had discovered there were different rules for the different types of dicing in different locales.

  The man reached for her coin, and Carth slapped her hand on top of it. “We haven’t agreed to anything.”

  “I thought—”

  Carth shrugged. “You thought, but first we agree to the game, then you can try to take my money.”

  The two younger men who had been dicing before she’d arrived glanced at each other, and then the one nearest her shrugged his shoulders. “What does it matter? We can take her money the same as we could take anyone else’s.”

  Carth smiled to herself. That was exactly the kind of attitude she wanted from them. If they believed that they could take her money so easily, she could sit back and let them.

  “We dice like men,” the older of the two said to her.

  Carth slipped her hand into her pocket and grabbed a few of the coins in her coin purse. She shook them in her hand. “Really? Then perhaps you should prove it, and stop talking like women.”

  She grabbed the dice and shook them in her hand. “What’s the game?” She continued to shake the dice, curious about what they might prefer.

  “Highs,” the man nearest to her said.

  “Out of how many?” Carth asked.

  The two men glanced at each other before shr
ugging to each other. “Three?” the nearest one to her asked.

  The other man nodded. “Three is probably safest.”

  Carth only shrugged. She shook the dice and spun them across the table. In a game like this where the highest hand won, she made no effort to augment her role. Doing so would only draw suspicion on the first hand. Instead, she let them roll without influencing them.

  The dice came up with a four and two fives. It was a good roll, but not one that would draw attention. With the roll like that, she could sit back knowing that she would likely lose her coin, but less concerned about that than having an opportunity to sit back and listen, observe what these men might say while dicing.

  The other younger man grabbed the dice, shook them, and spilled them onto the table. He came up with two threes and a six.

  The other man grabbed the dice from him, chuckling to himself. “A shame, but looks like I’ll be taking your coin.”

  He shook the dice, and when he spilled them on the table, came up with a three, five, and a six. He let out a satisfied holler and reached for the coins. Carth didn’t make a face and simply slipped another coin onto the table, pushing it to join theirs.

  The man who’d won grabbed the coins, and shook them again, making a satisfied face as he did. “Twins or higher.”

  “Do you really want to risk that? You’ve seen how many doubles I’ve rolled,” the other man said.

  “You? You barely rolled any. Last one doesn’t count, since you lost the hand.”

  “It counts. Don’t make me reach across the table and grab what’s mine.”

  The other man grinned and spilled his dice across the table. They clattered before coming to a stop. There were no pairs. He swore softly to himself while the other man grabbed the dice and scooped them up. “Not such a bad roll now, would it be?”

  He shook them and came up with a pair of twos. Carth glanced at the two men, debating. Was now the right time to push it? Would she draw too much attention by rolling a hand that would beat a pair of twos?

  The better question was whether she cared.

  She did, but maybe these weren’t the kind of men who would discuss matters within the city while dicing. They seemed more content to joust with one another, and not at all concerned about anything else.

  Maybe dicing with them wasn’t the right play.

  She still thought they were the right men to get her what she wanted so that she could learn about the underground in the city and find a way to access it, but maybe it wasn’t exactly the way she had initially intended. Carth rolled, pushing the dice so that two fours came up. She smiled and shrugged as she reached for the coins.

  The older man grabbed her hand and tried to pull it back, but she pressed a bit of shadows through it, resisting.

  His jaw clenched with the effort he exerted in trying to move her hand. “The hand’s not won.”

  Carth kept her hands on the coin, knowing this kind of man. She’d seen men like him before. “No? Seems to me that three of us were dicing, and three of us rolled. It seems to me that my fours were higher than his twos. Unless you understand numbers in a different way than I do, I think that makes mine the winning hand.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to toss yet.”

  The other two men glanced at each other, but neither spoke.

  Carth kept her grip on the coins and simply shrugged. “Throw your coin in, and let’s see what you toss.” He glared at her, but Carth ignored it until he set a coin on the table. When he did, she removed her hand and waited for him to pick up the dice. He did so, but with a certain reluctance.

  Carth smiled to herself. This was the kind of man who sought to control the flow of the game, which meant this was the man who ran the other two.

  He shook the dice, and they clattered across the table, coming to a stop slowly. Carth gave one of the dice a little push. It was enough to send it teetering, toppling so that the pair that he might have rolled were unsettled.

  She wasn’t above playing the same sort of games with him that he attempted to play with her. She wasn’t above doing it to draw attention to him.

  When the dice stopped moving altogether, he glared at them, as if expecting them to move again.

  Carth felt a hint of pressure on the dice but it was subtle, and she thought it imagined.

  Could he have some ability that would allow him to control the dice?

  That opened up different possibilities, and raised more questions.

  Had she overplayed her hand? If he did possess some ability, it was possible he would pick up on her influence, but she got the sense from him that this was not a man who was aware of any sort of subtlety.

  Carth grabbed the coins and slipped them into her pocket.

  “Maybe next time you’ll dice like a man as well,” she said.

  The other two men both grinned. “I like her,” the nearest man said.

  “Fine, you keep dicing with her. Lose all the money you want.”

  He eyed Carth in a way that made her think that he recognized what she had done.

  He wouldn’t have picked up on that, would he?

  The man stood and disappeared into the crowd near the back of the tavern.

  Carth watched him go, debating how much to push. Had she already pushed too hard?

  It was possible that she had, especially as he had seemed the one in charge. Then again, she wanted to irritate the man in charge so that she could discover what role he might have.

  “Is that it? One hand?” one of the men asked.

  Carth turned her attention to him and smiled widely. “Only if you want to keep your money.”

  10

  Outside the tavern, Carth hesitated, remaining in the shadows. She’d taken quite a bit of money from the two men, even more when it became apparent that neither of them seemed willing to talk about anything going on in the city. Remaining here seemed a waste. What she needed was to find answers, and she apparently wouldn’t find it from either of these two men.

  But… she thought that she could draw them out. She could annoy them, and in doing so, she could see whether they could be baited into sharing more information, but what else could she do?

  Carth waited, hoping that one or both of the men would appear outside the tavern, and would reveal something that she might have missed before. Maybe they would talk between themselves, and she could see what more they knew, though from the conversation they had—one that seemed mostly about which women in the tavern they most wanted to bed—she wondered whether they knew anything useful at all.

  She felt movement behind her and started to turn when she heard voices. The two men were intoxicated, all the ale they had drunk while playing with her had having gone to their heads, and they staggered along the street. Every so often, they would bounce off each other before somehow managing to right themselves and then continue onward.

  Where was the third man?

  Carth suspected she would see him, but he had not emerged from the tavern. Then again, she might have already missed him when he’d come out.

  Did she follow, or should she wait, looking to see where the third man, the one who had to have been their leader, had gone?

  The men neared the end of the street, and she hesitated to wait too much longer.

  She didn’t know why, but she felt compelled to follow these two. Maybe it was only a familiarity. Maybe she could coax one—or both—into talking, and sharing what they might know about the underground within Asador. Or maybe it was simply the fact that she’d overheard enough from them that it made her question whether they knew more.

  Pushing off with the shadows, she jumped and managed to leap past several of the buildings and into the distance, far enough that she could hurry along in the shadows and follow the men from enough of a distance that they wouldn’t know that she was there.

  As she approached, she could hear them still talking about the waitresses from the tavern. Did they have to be so disgusting talking about the women that way? Why w
as it that so many of the men in taverns believed that they could treat women as if they were nothing more than something to grope?

  Not all were like that. Guya was respectable, and he had been angered by the slavers, something she had appreciated about him. Then again, not all men could be like Guya.

  She needed to find him. If anyone could help her navigate the underground throughout Asador, it would be him. Maybe she needed to stop focusing on trying to find Dara and trying to understand what else was taking place within the city, and instead she should work on seeing what had happened to Guya, and where he’d gone.

  That was a question she could ask.

  Carth hurried through the darkness, keeping the shadows wrapped around her, and as she approached the two men, she slowed. She readied herself to step out of the shadows when another figure approached, reaching them from within the alleys.

  “Where is she?”

  It was the man from the tavern, the third gambler.

  Carth cloaked herself, wanting to avoid him realizing that she was there, and that she was watching.

  “She left. She took our money, and she—”

  The man slapped him, cutting him off. The sound rang in the night, a sharp crack that stood out from the other sounds of the night. “She took your money and you let her go? Didn’t you wonder why she was there?”

  The two men glanced at each other. “Why was she there?” one of the men said. Carth couldn’t tell which it was from here, not that it mattered. To her, both men were basically one and the same.

  “How many women did you see in that tavern?” the third gambler asked. “Doesn’t strike you as odd that she was there, that she came to a place where no others were willing to go?”

  One of the men shrugged. “Does it matter? She came in and wanted to dice. Anyone’s allowed that.”

  “Not there. And I think there was something more than chance about the way she won.”

  The men both laughed. “There’s only chance when it comes to dicing.”

  “Chance? It sounds like she won more hands than chance would allow. Why do you think that is?”