Shadow Cross (The Shadow Accords Book 5)

by D. K. Holmberg

  “Eric, it’s only chance.”

  The third gambler—Eric—shrugged. “Maybe that’s all it is. Or maybe, there’s something else. Remember what Terran said. He wanted to find those with potential. And seems to me that a woman who can win at dicing”—he glanced between the two men—“and often, might have something special to her.”

  “Aw, Eric. Let’s not bring Terran into this.”

  “If you didn’t want to bring him into it, then you shouldn’t have spent so much time dicing with her.”

  They started off down the street, and Carth let them go. There was no need for her to follow them now.

  She had a name.

  11

  The tavern was much nicer than the Spotted Lion. The music was upbeat, but not so loud as to be overbearing. She tapped her foot as she sat inside the tavern, waiting for the woman she anticipated to appear.

  Lindy sat across from her, chewing on her lip, her hands clenched beneath the table. Carth didn’t need to use her abilities to know that Lindy’s agitation came from a lack of information that she discovered. She had searched and come up empty. That troubled Lindy as much as it troubled Carth.

  “What if she’s not here tonight?” Lindy finally said, breaking the silence between them.

  “She’ll be here.”

  She wanted to find Julie, feeling a hint of connection to her, nothing else. She trusted Julie, and trusted that she might learn something from the woman, that she might have answers for her.

  With a sigh, Carth surveyed the tavern. She pressed out with her connection to the shadows and added to that a hint of the flame, wanting only to see what she might detect. And maybe there would be nothing. Maybe Julie would be hidden from her, but if she had answers, they would have a place to start looking.

  The door to the kitchen opened, and Julie popped out. She carried two trays, one on each hand, and navigated through the tavern with a confident air to her. As she approached, she noted Carth, and her face clouded slightly. She made an effort to turn away, weaving as if to move back toward the kitchen, to get away from Carth, but Carth leapt from her seat and blocked Julie from disappearing.

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “I don’t need any trouble here,” Julie said.

  Carth looked around the tavern. It wasn’t particularly busy tonight, and she couldn’t see anyone who might be watching, but what would trouble Julie?

  “Trouble?”

  “I’ve heard about you. You bring trouble with you.”

  Julie had heard? That bothered her. “Just a word. That’s it.”

  The woman let out a frustrated sigh. “Why did you need to come back here?”

  “I didn’t need to. I chose to. Be thankful of that.” Carth guided her back to the table where Lindy waited. Lindy stood and allowed Julie to take a seat, which the woman did reluctantly. She stacked the trays on top of each other and folded her hands on top of them.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know who Terran is.”

  The corners of Julie’s mouth twitched. It was subtle, but it was enough that Carth realized the woman recognized the name. “You know who he is. I can see it.”

  Julie controlled her breathing. “Even if I did, it will do me no good to tell you what I know. All that will happen is others getting hurt.”

  “Why? What is it that you fear from him?”

  She shook her head slightly. “Fear? I fear the same as any woman in the city fears.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Attracting his attention.”

  “Well, I might have attracted his attention. Tell me why I should be concerned.”

  Julie glanced from Carth to Lindy. Her fingers twisted as they rested on the two trays. “Like I said, I don’t need any trouble here. Let me continue to do my job, and continue to work. I don’t need Terran to come into the tavern looking for me. That’s the kind of attention I’ve avoided. Don’t bring me into whatever it is you intend to do in the city.”

  Carth fixed her with a hard-eyed stare. “What I intend to do in the city is find my friends. It seems that there is more taking place than what you or anyone else would tell me. From the moment I first get off the ship, I’m practically attacked, and now you tell me that you’re terrified of some nameless man.”

  “Not nameless. You have his name. You shouldn’t, but you do. I would suggest that you choose not to say it—at least not too loud. Doing so will only attract his attention. As I said, I don’t want that kind of trouble here.”

  Julie started to stand, and Carth grabbed for her wrist and pulled her close, forcing her to bend down and look at Carth and meet her gaze. “Who is he? Why are you so scared of him?”

  Julie cast her gaze around the tavern before turning her attention back to Carth.

  “I can help. I’m not completely helpless,” Carth said. “Tell me who he is, and I will do everything I can to ensure that he doesn’t harm you.”

  Julie laughed bitterly. “Do you really think I care so much about myself? I’m not worried about him coming after me. Well, maybe I am a little. But I’m concerned that he’ll come here, and take others I care about away from me.” Her eyes drifted before settling on a woman near the far corner.

  Things started to come together for Carth. There was singer from the first night, the one she had been unable to help. There was the other woman grabbed on the street when Carth had nearly died. And there was the fact that Dara was missing.

  She doubted they had anything to do with Guya, but the fact that all these women were missing—and the way Julie seemed terrified of this man finding her—told her that she must have somehow discovered the slavers’ ring.

  She had known there was one in Asador. Guya had shared that much with her. But where did they take these women? And how did they get them out of the city without anyone else noticing?

  “What does the city council do about this?”

  Julie face clouded. “There’s not enough money to purchase the kind of protection we need.”

  “Is that how the city works?” Carth asked.

  “That’s how every city works.”

  Carth glanced to Lindy, who nodded. “Not the ones where I am.”

  Julie grunted. “What do you think you can do? Do you really think you can stop him? That you can break up the chain of women being dragged from the city?”

  Carth nodded. “I do. As I said, I’m not entirely helpless.”

  “Then may the gods watch over you. I’ll pray for you when you’re dragged someplace south like Eban or Cort. Not that that will do any good.”

  Carth sighed. This was not a woman who would help. This was a woman who was scared, which was something that Carth had experience with. She hated that places like this existed everywhere. What she’d seen in the north had been bad enough. Now she was dealing with something very similar here in these lands.

  It frustrated her. More than that, it angered her. She wasn’t entirely helpless. She would do what she needed to do to get help to Dara.

  “Help me,” she said to Julie.

  Julie looked around before focusing on her. “I don’t know how to find Terran, but I know a man who might.”

  “If you know that much, why can’t you stop him?”

  “Because those who have tried either have not returned or have died.”

  “They’re not the same?”

  Julie pulled her arm away. “They’re not the same. Sometimes death is better.”

  12

  Carth crouched along the side of the street, the shadows wrapped around her. She envisioned Lindy doing something similar not far from her but couldn’t see her. There was the subtle work of Lindy’s shadows, the faint effect of their swirling, bending to conceal her, but nothing more than that.

  They needed to find this Terran, as he seemed like the only person who might have answers about what had happened to Guya. She suspected that what had happened to Guya and what had happened to Dara were related. She didn�
�t know quite how, and that was what she was determined to understand.

  As the hooded man emerged from the tavern, she trailed him, flowing with the shadows. Julie had said this man worked with Terran, and she would follow him until she had the answers she needed.

  He hurried away from the tavern, occasionally casting his eyes up and down the street, and when he did, she sank deeper into the shadows so that his gaze swept past her.

  At first, he seemed to go toward the docks once more, and Carth wondered if perhaps she had missed something along the docks, if maybe there was another ship there that had abducted the others. As he neared the water, he turned, taking a different path than what Carth had expected. Now he veered north, heading along a different street, one that took him into the smaller and quieter sections of the city.

  Here, there were rows of homes, the roofs not quite as peaked as they were near the center of the city, most of them in various states of disrepair. At this hour, not many people moved. The man in the hooded cloak hurried through the streets, and Carth began to feel hope that she might be able to find her friends, but the farther the man went, the less certain she became.

  He didn’t stop as the houses began to space out even more. He didn’t stop when the terrain transitioned into nothing but hard rock. He continued north, taking a narrow trail leading toward rock leading over the edge of a cliff leading to the sea, hurrying forward quickly. Either he had some way of seeing in the dark or he had been here often enough that he didn’t need light.

  Carth had to slow to make her way through here, weaving around the rocks as cautiously as she could, afraid of stumbling and falling. She heard the distant crashing of waves, and the air grew thick with the scent of the sea, that of salt and something else that she thought might be more imagined than real.

  She saw no one else moving along this way.

  Carth circled around a particularly large rock, and when she popped up, there was no sign of the cloaked man.

  She eased back on her connection to the shadows. How had she missed something? Where had he gone?

  He couldn’t have simply disappeared. Were he able to flicker—travel, as the Hjan called it—she would have expected him to have done it by now. And she was attuned to that flickering, and could feel it as a nausea in the pit of her stomach when it occurred. There had been no such sensation.

  She continued to make a slow circle, looking for evidence of where he might have gone, but still she saw nothing. Somehow, he had disappeared.

  But where? There wasn’t any place he could have gone here. There was nothing but rock and the sea.

  Swearing under her breath, she knew it was time to return to the city.

  As she turned, she noticed a shifting of darkness, a sign of motion. Carth readied shadows and flame but was too slow. Something heavy struck the back of her head and Carth crumpled.

  When Carth awoke, her head throbbed.

  She reached for the shadows immediately. She could touch them.

  What of the flame?

  As she reached for it, it burned through her. The flame was not kept from her either.

  Her hands were bound together with thick coils of rope, and her legs were similarly tied. The heavy cloak she’d taken to wearing had been removed, and her knives taken from her, but she still had her mother’s ring.

  At least she was dressed, if only in her underclothes.

  Carth looked around and saw a small, compact man with flat blue eyes almost the color of ice staring at her. His hair was shorn close to his scalp, and he had a long thin nose that flared as he breathed. His lips were parted slightly, as if in a frown or a snarl.

  “Why did you follow my man?”

  Carth sat up and scanned the room. It was all of simple stone. A single lantern sat on the floor in the corner, casting a flickering orange light. She tested the ropes and found they were tied to her tightly. With her connection to the flame, she suspected she could escape, but this was an opportunity more than it was anything else. If these were the same men responsible for Dara’s disappearance, she would find out.

  “Where am I? Where did you take me?”

  The man pulled out a long, curved knife and set it on his lap. Carth’s gaze flicked to the knife, noting the unique style. She hadn’t seen any fashioned quite like that before, and she could see value in its deadly form.

  “Why did you follow my man?”

  Did the man even know who he had captured? Did he know that she could escape, or that even if she could not, she could harm him? Unlikely. If had he known, they would have killed her and never have brought her in.

  “A friend of mine is missing. I wanted to see what happened to her.”

  “You’re not from Asador, are you?”

  Carth considered whether to be honest with him, or to conceal where she’d come from. She didn’t know enough about the lands in the south to effectively fabricate her story, but she suspected that were she to admit coming from the northern lands, if they did have Dara and Guya, she would reveal herself sooner than she intended. As in so many things, it felt much like playing a game, playing the right move, but needing to determine her strategy.

  “I’m not from Asador. I’m from Balcath,” Carth said, thinking of a distant enough island that wouldn’t be too far off the coast of Asador. At least she had visited Balcath and knew she could provide enough details of it were she questioned. It would potentially explain her fair complexion, perhaps even the darkness of her eyes compared to most she saw around here.

  The man swept the knife across his legs in a way that she suspected was meant to be threatening. Carth let her attention be drawn to the knife, knowing that he would expect that of her. When she looked up to his face, he smiled.

  “Who’s your friend?” he asked with twisted expression.

  “She came from Balcath like me. She’s not well. We brought her here for healing.” Most of that was true enough, and would provide enough details that if they did have Dara.

  She would find her.

  The slight tension in the corners of his eyes told her that he recognized the description, as vague as it had been.

  “She’s a lovely one,” the man said. “A shame for her, really, especially as she caught Terran’s eye.”

  Carth had known the name, but this confirmed it. It was disappointing that this man wasn’t Terran. “Why would Terran take her?”

  “I think you’d be better served not worrying about your friend. She’s been added to the collection, and you have been added to mine.”

  Carth decided it was time to get real information from him.

  With a surge of A’ras flame through the ring on her finger, she sent heat through the rope bindings around her wrists, and they burned off in a flash. She did the same with the ones around her ankles.

  Gliding with the shadows, she leapt, flipping over her captor, grabbing his knife as she did and quickly bringing it to his throat. He tensed beneath her grip.

  “I think it’s time we have some answers.”

  She checked him for additional weapons but found none. Up this close to him, all she could smell was his stench, and he disgusted her. This was a man who thought to collect women.

  She threw him across the room, where he collided with the cot and stumbled onto it. He looked over to her with a wide-eyed gaze, meeting her eyes rather than looking to the knife she clutched in her hand. It was a strange sort of weapon, one that she only now noticed had spikes along the hilt that pierced her skin.

  She felt a surging, steady sort of burn through her, slowly working from her fingers up into her arm.

  She had made a mistake.

  Carth slumped to her knees, pain surging through her arms. She reached for the power of the S’al, trying to draw on the strength of the flame, which had healed her before.

  Pain made her focus difficult.

  She sent it coursing through her, but she didn’t have the necessary strength to use it in a way that would overwhelm the poisoning from the knife.


  She looked up, noted the man staring at her, nothing more than simple curiosity on his face. She’d mistaken his casual interrogation for some sort of incompetence. He might not have any magical power, but he had not been unprepared.

  As the poison worked up her arm and into her chest, burning as it did, she reached for the shadows, trying to draw them around her, to give her one last burst of strength, but even they failed her.

  The man stood, the grin parting his lips as it had before, and he nodded to himself. “I think you will make an excellent addition to my collection.”

  Carth sank to the ground, unable to say anything more.

  13

  When Carth awoke, she was trapped. She reached for her connection to the shadows, and then attempted towards the S’al, but failed with both. Her mind had a fog over it, and she struggled to bring her thoughts into focus. She remembered the poisoning, but not much else.

  Could she move at all?

  She rolled onto her side. That movement required all the strength she could muster. Carth wiggled her fingers, then her arms, bending her wrists and her arms, testing her shoulders and neck, before moving onto her lower half. All parts seemed to work.

  Though they worked, she felt weakened. It was as if her strength had been leached away from her. Her connection to her magic had been taken from her, and not the way it had been when Ras had abducted her.

  Had this been the first time she had been powerless, she might have reacted with panic. Instead, she took stock of herself.

  Carth noted narrow slats with light leaking through. There was a sense of movement, a steady swaying sort of movement, unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. She lay on the floor of some sort of closed wagon.

  There were others in there with her, all girls of various ages. Few of them bothered to look in her direction. Those who did didn’t let their gaze linger for too long.

  Carth sat slowly, assessing those she was with. She saw no bindings. She realized she had none herself. A few of the women had a glassy-eyed sort of stare, one where they fixed their eyes ahead blankly, almost as if intoxicated.