Patterns in the Dark (Dragon Blood Book 4) (8 page)

She pushed her hand through her short hair, probably tearing a few pieces out. Tolemek shifted beside her on the bed.

“Sorry,” she mumbled again, realizing she had been silent for a while. “I didn’t mean to make light. I’m just—I don’t know if I’m ready… I mean, I like you, Tolemek. More than like. You’re very…” Seven gods, she was mangling this. Why hadn’t he warned her first, so she could rehearse something?

“Never mind. I shouldn’t have brought it up.” Tolemek stood up, and her hand fell away. He took a couple of paces and stopped, facing the door, his chin to his chest.

Cas swallowed, knowing she had hurt him by not having the right words, by not saying his words back to him. But she did not want to lie or utter something she did not fully mean.

“Cas?” He lifted his head, but continued to face the door instead of her. “If you have to choose between going with Zirkander to find the dragon and going with me to find Tylie…” He finally turned back toward her, his dark eyes intent. “Which will you choose?”

She held back a grimace. It had occurred to her that this question might come up over the course of this mission, and she didn’t want to have to make that choice. “I don’t understand,” she said, more to buy time to think than because she didn’t. “Don’t we still believe that your sister and the dragon are in the same place?”

“I hope they are. I’m not certain of it, especially after talking to the port master. I thought I would ask around more tomorrow, see if anyone recognizes her.”

“The colonel wants to leave tomorrow.”

Tolemek’s jaw tightened. She shouldn’t have mentioned Zirkander.

“But I think your answers are going to be where this dragon is,” Cas hurried to add. “Why the Cofah took your sister and how she ties in with the creature. It makes sense to stick with the, uh, the others. Besides, we might need your help. If there’s another big Cofah research facility…”

“We.” Tolemek gazed at her, as if she had inadvertently given her answer, and it did not sit well with him.

She didn’t know what else to say. She was on the clock, not out here on some personal quest. It wasn’t about picking Zirkander over him. Her duty was to follow her superior officer. That was it. If she ran off on some side trip with Tolemek, she would be absent without leave. She would be risking her career. Maybe he
did
expect her to choose him over her career.

“It won’t take us
that
long to get there and look around,” Cas said, afraid Tolemek truly thought he needed to go off on his own and search elsewhere. “It’s less than forty miles from here to the base of the mountain. Granted, if there’s not a path, that’ll be slow going, but I can’t imagine it taking more than three days each way. We’ll be back in a week. You’ll either have your answers, or you’ll have more of a clue as to where to go to find them. To find her.”

“Yes, of course.” Tolemek turned back toward the door. “If we’re leaving tomorrow, I better go back out tonight and ask around.” He touched his vest pocket, where he kept the pictures of the flowers and one of his sister, as well.

Cas stood. “Do you want me to go with you?”

“No. Stay here. Get some rest. The bath you’ve been wanting.” He gave her a quick smile over his shoulder before opening the door. It didn’t reach his eyes.

“I’ve been wanting that bath for you, too, you know,” she called after him.

He lifted a hand in parting, then was gone.

“Men,” Cas grumbled, then wished she had turned that same question on Tolemek. If the situation demanded it, would he choose her over his sister? No, she was glad she hadn’t asked. She didn’t want to get angry and say something she would regret. She would find the washroom, clean up, then go back out again and see what that dirigible was doing here. The number of pirate ships in port didn’t suggest this would be a popular tourist area.

* * *

Finding the washroom proved more difficult than Cas expected. She had to go back downstairs, then push past sweaty natives mingling with sweaty pirates of various ethnicities, most shouting at each other in broken Cofah. She found a hallway and started checking doors. None of them had pictures or words or even graffiti that might have identified the contents. The second door she opened revealed a man peeing in a hole in the ground. He smiled over his shoulder at her, too drunk to be embarrassed, at least she hoped that was the explanation for why most of the stream was splashing off the tiles. Grimacing, Cas backed out, deciding to try the rest of the doors before resigning herself to the men’s latrine.

The next door held a storage room full of casks of rum, but behind the fourth, she found Sardelle. She was standing with her chin in her hand, considering a hole similar to the one the drunk man had been defiling.

“Sorry,” Cas said when she looked up. “There don’t seem to be locks. I’ll wait.”

“No, no. I believe it’s a communal lavatory and washroom. There’s a second hole, you see.” Sardelle stepped back, extending a hand. There wasn’t any sort of divider for privacy. At this point, Cas was glad she wasn’t supposed to pee out the door and into the alley from her room. Men might be able to handle such feats, but it sounded messy to her.

“Not quite up to the standards of the Iskandian capital.” Not that Cas cared. She had peed in more uncomfortable places during her army training. “Did you say washroom?”

“Apparently. There’s a hose, and that bucket has a sponge in it. I was just debating if one put the water down here when one was done or…” Sardelle sighed and lowered her hand. “It’s not that I haven’t roughed it in the past, but I was hoping for a warm bath after nearly being annihilated by that volcano.”

“It’s warm out. We could go dip ourselves in the bay.” Cas was mostly joking—she hadn’t planned to take anyone with her to spy on the dirigible—but Sardelle’s brows rose thoughtfully.

“That might be more hygienic.”

“I don’t know. I’m guessing the sewer dumps out over there somewhere.” If there
was
a sewer. For all Cas knew, the holes in the ground might simply drain into a pit in the alley.

“You didn’t see the sponge, did you?”

Cas peered into the bucket and made a face. “When you said communal, you did mean communal, didn’t you? And, uhm, used.”

Sardelle smiled. “Let’s check out the bay. I’m curious about that dirigible.”

“You
are
? I mean, I was going to investigate it myself, because I’m concerned trouble may be following us, but I thought you and the colonel might, ah…” Cas rocked her hand, deciding to keep the gesture vague instead of employing one of the cruder ones to suggest coitus.

“He’s having his beer with his father. I thought I should let them bond. Besides, I don’t think Moe is that enthused about me.”

“Because you saved our lives and our fliers?”

“Because I knocked him unconscious and he woke five thousand feet up in the sky.”

“Ah.” Cas pushed open the door. “To the bay then.”

After she retrieved her pistol and rifle—Sardelle already had her sword belted around her waist, having perhaps had an inkling of how scary the washroom experience might be—they pushed their way back through the crowd. They passed the wooden lanes stretched out for the disk-pushing game and noticed Zirkander and Moe were standing at a small, high table, one lacking chairs. Zirkander wore a goofy sun hat that kept his face in the shadows while sipping from a mug of beer. A second one rested in front of his father, who was trying to read something in his journal by the light of a candle. Sardelle walked over to the table, rested a hand on Zirkander’s shoulder for a moment, said something in his ear, then kissed him on the cheek.

After Cas’s uncomfortable discussion with Tolemek, she couldn’t help but envy their ease.
Sardelle
probably hadn’t hesitated to proclaim her love.

Zirkander clasped her hand, then turned the gesture into a farewell salute. Despite her earlier words, Moe didn’t glower at Sardelle. He didn’t seem to notice her at all. Cas wondered if he was noticing his son.

“I have a theory as to why Ridge became such a daring hero,” Sardelle said with a wink when she returned to Cas’s side and they were heading for the door.

Cas glanced back at Moe. “To try and impress his dad?”

“Or maybe just in the hope of being noticed.”

It was strange to think of Zirkander that way. Like Duck had said, he was the big hero in the hangar. To imagine him as a reckless boy craving his father’s approval was indeed odd.

Relief flowed into Cas when she stepped outside. Even though the city was alive with raucous crowds and noisy from the drums and zithers flowing out of pubs along with the howls of animals in the jungle, it felt peaceful after the smoky, loud interior of the building. She felt better as soon as the night air wrapped around her. The humid, sticky air clung to their bodies, but the heat was not as intense as it had been earlier.

“Ridge promised me he would also bathe in the bay later,” Sardelle said as they walked down the main street toward the beach. Several men lounging on porches or leaning against street posts eyed them as they passed, but Cas had her rifle, and Sardelle had her sword, and nobody approached. “Sitting behind him and then Lieutenant Duck on the way here was… an olfactory experience.”

“I suppose it’s worse in the back.” Cas wondered if Tolemek had been noticing her own odor. She doubted she could attribute that to his reason for leaving to scout.

“I don’t think your engineers were thinking of comfort when they designed those fliers.”

“No, fighting off pirates and Cofah mostly, I imagine.”

“Ridge said he and his father were waiting to meet with someone who knows a guide who might take us to the mountain,” Sardelle said. “The first people Moe tried laughed and walked the other way.”

“Oh? I hadn’t heard about that.”

“Apparently, the Cofah have been through here, hiring guides, and those guides never came back, so nobody’s eager to take the risk.” Sardelle lowered her voice. “There are some stories about things going on out in the jungle.”

“I heard about the cannibals.”

“That’s always been going on—I remember those stories from three hundred years ago.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Not this island, but others nearby. I used to work on a naval ship.”

Cas realized she knew very little about Sardelle. Even though they had spent some time together now, it had always been with the men around, and Cas hadn’t naturally been drawn to her, being put off by the sorcery. Even if it had come in handy numerous times now, she had a hard time not seeing Sardelle as something strange, something not quite human. And if she was honest with herself, it bothered her that Sardelle was with Zirkander, too, that
she
was the one who got to call him Ridge. Cas had long since gotten past the idea of having a romantic relationship with Zirkander, but she couldn’t help but feel that she had known him much longer than Sardelle and that
she
ought to be the one on a first-name basis with him. It was petty, and she knew it, and she was trying to bury that resentment, or at least not let herself act on it in any way, but she did wonder if Tolemek sensed how much Zirkander meant to her and if that was why he had asked that question. She couldn’t help it if she had known him for years and that he had been a mentor and, yes, a friend to her—first-name basis notwithstanding—since long before Tolemek had been in her life. But maybe she could make it clearer that
Tolemek
was the one she wanted to go to bed with and that he was the one she imagined being a bigger part of her future. Yes, and why couldn’t she have told him that when he had brought up love?

She sighed.

“Everything all right with Tolemek?” Sardelle asked as they turned onto the sandy street paralleling the waterfront.

“You’re not reading my mind, are you?” Cas asked in jest, though she wondered. Tolemek had said something about telepaths being able to do that and had also mentioned that the sword poked into his head now and then.

“No. You just seem glum, lost in thought. I hope nothing’s wrong. This mission has been trying so far.”

“Yes,” Cas murmured. “No, Tolemek’s fine. He’s looking for information on his sister. The port master hadn’t seen her.”

“Ah.”

That “ah” sounded too knowing for Cas’s tastes. Time to put thoughts of romance aside.

The moon was higher in the sky now, shining a silvery beam onto the calm bay and onto the side of the dirigible too. Cas stopped, her back to a wall, to study it more closely. Lights burned behind the windows in the cabin, but the craft was too far out in the bay to make out people or anything inside.

“That’s odd,” she said. “They’re anchored out there, but they’re closer to that ridge on the other side of the bay than the docks. Nobody will be able to come to town. Do you think they’re waiting, making sure they’re out of range of the pirates? Maybe they’re here to pick someone up?”

Sardelle had joined her against the wall, but she didn’t respond. She merely gazed thoughtfully at the dirigible.

“…went this way,” a man whispered nearby, from around the corner of the street Cas and Sardelle had turned off. “Two women. No men.”

“…get them for us?”

Not likely. Cas lifted her rifle, her finger finding the trigger. Four shaggy-haired men lumbered around the corner and looked up and down the beach. Cas judged their distance. She could fire up to six rounds in fairly rapid succession, but she did need to pull the lever to chamber the next bullet between the shots. She ought to be able to hit three men before the fourth reached them. Sardelle would have to deal with the last one. It made Cas twitch to realize she would have to rely on someone else, but Sardelle could handle herself in a fight.

The men hadn’t yet looked toward the shadows along the wall. A hand came to rest on Cas’s forearm.

Her first instinct was to shake it off, but Sardelle leaned close and whispered, “They won’t see us.”

As if to make a joke of her words, the men turned toward Cas and Sardelle, walking straight down the packed sand street. Cas’s finger tightened on the trigger, but she hesitated. She had no idea what passed for the law on this island, but she had already shot a pirate in the hand. Granted, that had been self-defense, but there hadn’t been anything but pirate witnesses, and his buddy might lie. She couldn’t preemptively shoot people, as much as she wanted to. The men weren’t looking at her, anyway. Their gazes and pointing fingers were toward the end of the beach rather than Cas’s spot on the wall.