Dark the Night Descending (The Paderborn Chronicles Book 1)

by Jennifer Bresnick

  She wasn’t there, of course. She was a neneckt, and she was gone. As he raised his head, gasping for air and shivering like a graveyard, his hand closed on her empty dress, the fabric stained with salt and blood, but devoid of flesh.

  He cursed at length and dropped the gown, swimming his way out of the broken chamber and hauling himself up the ladder the best he could as a sudden cloud of exhaustion descended with all the force of the unstoppable gale that had so quickly ruined him.

  His side was throbbing; his head felt like a swollen sore, and something wasn’t working right in his knee. But there would still be hours upon hours of work to do if he wanted to see daylight, and he forced himself upright and staggered onto the deck to survey the damage.

  There was much to survey, and much to repair, but the wind and rain had abated, and the tossing surf had calmed a little with the going of its mistress, the only small mercy on a night that could still see him slip under the sea.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Durville snapped when he saw him, dripping wet and covered in blood.

  “I need a fothering sail,” Arran said, feeling the large gash on his forehead. “A big one, and quickly. And a pump to the storeroom. And the carpenter. And three longboats to larboard to haul us up enough to get to the breach. Shift everything you can get your hands on to help them.”

  Durville knew better than to delay that particular series of orders for any reason, and didn’t bother saying anything else before turning to his task.

  “You –” Arran called, pointing to the nearest man. “Go to my cabin and get me a dry coat. No, wait,” he said as the man saluted and made to leave. “Is anyone hurt?”

  “A few knocked heads, sir, and a broken leg,” the sailor replied. “Naught too ‘orrible.”

  “All right,” he nodded, and the man left. Arran turned to look at the settling ocean, which was much closer than he could have liked as the ship began to ride lower and lower. “God damn it,” he muttered, then cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “Get me those boats!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The morning sun was streaming brightly through a bank of filmy clouds as the Tortoise and its exhausted crew limped into the busy harbor of Paderborn. They had been pumping the hold constantly for days on end, pushing and pulling the stiff metal crank over and under, over and under just to keep the ship hovering glumly above the water as it slogged through the bay on its jury-rigged mizzen, a series of comically undersized spars lashed together and draped with whatever spare scraps of canvas weren’t tied like a bandage around the wound in the hull.

  It was horrible, Arran thought dejectedly as he scratched at the long scab on his brow, the red skin raw and itchy since he refused to wear a great glob of plaster on it any longer.

  The King’s Fleet was in, all shiny bright paint and starched sails, flags flying and twenty brass bells sounding exactly in unison upon the hour as the Tortoise trudged past. They were laughing at him, of course, and he scowled as he turned away to stare aimlessly to the side, keeping his eyes anywhere but on the well-trained sailors pointing and snickering from their lofty royal perch.

  “Bring her in slow, please,” he said to Durville as they approached their berth, the ignoble corner of the dockyard set aside for ships in need of repair but too poor to be able to pay for them any time soon. “We have enough to be embarrassed about without smashing ourselves to pieces.”

  “Again,” Durville muttered as he stumped away.

  Arran tugged his collar up to hide his face as a passing fishing boat started hallooing at them, each man aboard taking his turn to hurl an insult before they all dissolved into laughter.

  “Leave them be,” he called grudgingly as one of his own men decided to return the favor. It wouldn’t help to attract the attention of the whole harbor by starting a row.

  Almost before the ship had even kissed up against the jetty, Arran was hurrying along the dock, weaving past the curious shipwrights who had come out to stare at what was likely to be their most lucrative job of the month. Durville had the purse, and he could take care of it. He didn’t particularly want to endure more snide remarks from the repairmen, and there were other things he needed to do.

  Nestled firmly in his pocket was the object he had taken off of Elargwyd: a small brass cylinder with a screw-off lid. He hadn’t dared open it yet. He was dying to know what was inside, but there was no such thing as privacy at sea, even for the captain. Besides which, he had been too busy taking his turn at the pumps, desperately trying to stay at least a few inches ahead of the flood.

  The crates of false iron had been carefully packed up again, and he had sworn the tired carpenter to secrecy when he asked the man to copy the broken boxes exactly. Even Arran could hardly tell the difference when it was done, and he hoped that whoever had been sent to collect the cargo didn’t notice either.

  The city of Paderborn wasn’t much safer when it came to prying eyes, but there was one place he was fairly certain he would be out of harm’s way. He would be spied upon, of course, but he had much less to fear from this captor’s curiosity than from an emissary of the neneckt seeking revenge for the death of his traitorous passenger.

  “Mum? Hello? Are you there?” Arran called as he knocked on the door for the third time.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he heard her say, muffled and dull from inside. “Why are you always so impatient?” she asked as she undid the lock, the last words much louder than the first as she flung the door open.

  “Sorry, Mum,” he said, leaning over to give her a kiss on the cheek. “I didn’t know if you could hear me.”

  “Come inside, boy. Don’t let all the flies in.”

  “What happened to the coat rack?” he asked as he was about to drop his jacket into the thin air, only noticing the pegs weren’t there anymore just before he let go.

  “It got in the way. You can put that on the bannister.”

  “All right,” he said uncertainly. The coat rack had been a fixture of the house ever since he could remember. She had always told him his father had made it for her.

  “Hungry?”

  “Not really,” he replied, slumping down at the kitchen table. “I don’t know, maybe a little. Sure, if there’s anything good.”

  Elspeth nodded. “What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked as she turned to a covered cake platter and lifted the top. “Not that I’m not happy to see you,” she added after a bit too long of a pause.

  “Repairs,” he said, craning to see what the serving dish held. He didn’t always get on with his mother in every particular, but she usually had some good pastry in. “And some other things. Work. You know.”

  She nodded again as she put a large slice of carrot cake in front of him, watching as he took a bite. “You look a little rough,” she said, noticing his bruises for the first time. “What happened?”

  “We got caught in a storm coming from Cantrid,” he said with his mouth full. “It took us almost a week and a half to make a four-day trip. I can’t even feel my arms anymore from pumping so much,” he continued, but a quick glance at her face showed him exactly what he had expected: she had stopped listening after the first sentence, and was staring not quite directly at him, her lips moving slightly as some internal conversation played out in her head. “And there were bats,” he added. “Big, purple ones with spots. I think one of them bit me.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Are you staying here tonight?” she asked as if nothing had happened. “I’ll have to freshen up your room. It’s been a year since you were here last,” she said, slightly admonishingly.

  “I know. Sorry. I can’t stay the night, but I’ll try to make it back for supper.”

  “That would nice. If you can spare me the time.”

  “Yes, Mum. Of course. I’m just going to go upstairs for a minute, all right?”

  Elspeth shrugged as he picked the last crumb of cake from his plate, then bounded
up the stairs two at a time before shutting himself in the room that hadn’t changed very much at all since he was a boy.

  It was spare and unpainted, little bigger than a matchbox. The original chamber had been divided again and again with false partitions to accommodate paying lodgers, the space getting smaller as more paying customers were required to ensure there was enough food to support his growing bones. His father’s early death had left them with no other choice but to turn the tiny dwelling into a boarding house, taking in transient sailors, single working men who couldn’t fend for themselves, and sometimes a similarly destitute widow or two, cramming them into bunks for a shilling a week and an extra penny per meal.

  It was a good living, as far as those things went, and as a child, Arran had always loved the excitement of constant newcomers with fresh stories to tell. But his mother’s knees had long since demanded her retirement from the accompanying heavy housework, and Arran had labored hard to store up enough coin to support her through her later years without the need to cater to tenants. Despite the swinging of his fortunes, he had accomplished much for someone still so young.

  It was, in his mind, his greatest achievement, even if he wasn’t always entirely certain that the effort involved in such a feat was properly appreciated. He had kept his little room, with its rickety wooden bed and carefully drawn list of famous highwaymen tacked onto the wall, as a sort of prize.

  As a boy, he had meticulously drawn a neat black line through each of the names of the captured or dead, savoring the solemn ritual like his mother savored the blessings of the priests at the end of a church service. Every entry represented an adventurous daydream that stubbornly clung to him even after long hours of cleaning the floors, washing linens, or peeling vegetables for the communal stew pot he dutifully stirred for an hour before supper.

  It was with that same unquenchable, childlike eagerness that he shut the door firmly and scrunched himself up on the bed, far too small now for his grown-up frame, staring at the mysterious container in his hands.

  Now that he had the opportunity, he wasn’t really sure he wanted to open it after all. It might be cursed somehow. The thought made him feel a little silly, but based on what he had witnessed of Elargwyd’s abilities, maybe it wasn’t such a far-fetched idea.

  What if the neneckt would know if someone had opened the container? What if it called to them, bringing a troop of determined soldiers breaking down his mother’s door? What if it was filled with acid that would shoot out to burn the face off the nosy thief, or there was a nest of tiny spiders that would swarm up his arm and sting him to death with their agonizing venom?

  “Stop it,” he said out loud, shaking his head at his foolishness. He was letting his imagination run away with him.

  Arran took a deep breath and twisted. The cap popped off easily, and a few drops of something liquid sloshed out onto his hand with the motion, making him yelp.

  “It’s just water,” he said a moment later, when his flesh hadn’t yet melted off his bones. “It’s only water,” he said again, disappointed, as he peered into the tube. There was nothing else inside.

  He got up and walked over to the washbasin, dumping everything out and watching the stream of clear liquid just to make sure. When it was almost empty, the water shimmered a little, and an odd, flat divot appeared for just half a second before he heard something like a coin ringing on the porcelain.

  Puzzled, he stared at the bottom of the bowl, where there was nothing but a thin puddle. He pushed his finger into the water and swirled it around, meeting no resistance until he bumped into something relatively small and hard, yet completely invisible. He scooped it out and put it in his palm, holding his hand up to the light to try to catch a glimpse of what it could be.

  As the water dripped off his skin, he reached for a cloth and patted the object dry, which allowed him to see it a little more clearly. It was a gemstone, of sorts: almost entirely flat, round, and faceted along the edges of its main smooth face.

  It was about the size of a fifty pence piece, and might well be a diamond, he thought, turning it to catch the sun filtering in through the curtains. If it was, it was worth a lot more than whatever Elargwyd had spent while trying to smuggle it onto his ship. But diamonds didn’t disappear in plain water.

  “Like a neneckt,” he mused, pouring a bit over his hand again and watching as the stone vanished. Was it enchanted? But if it was so easy to disguise, why the elaborate ruse of hiding it in the counterfeit? It didn’t make sense.

  Arran carefully collected the water and poured it all back into the tube again, dropping the gem inside and screwing the top back on as firmly as he could. He would not get any answers simply from staring at it, and the longer he stayed upstairs, the more likely it was that his mother would come in and see what he was doing.

  He would have to stash it somewhere. If it was worth all the trouble the neneckt had gone to already, it was worth more than his life, for certain. Hiding it somewhere secure would give him options – or at least it would give him time.

  “I have to go,” he called into the kitchen as he clattered down the stairs and grabbed his coat from the railing, running out the door before his mother could even reply. “I’ll be back.”

  The only problem was where to put it. He knew Paderborn fairly well, and it was full of secret nooks and crannies where ne’er-do-wells could squirrel away their forbidden goods. But he also knew that the desperate poor who combed the city streets and dug down into the gutters for anything worth selling or eating would leave no stone unturned in their fight for survival. There were few places free from scrabbling fingers and keen eyes, and few people to trust with such an unusual item.

  There were the banks, of course, which offered lockboxes at a reasonable price. But despite the earnest assurances of discretion, he knew that there was more than one key to the strong room, and he knew that not everyone entrusted with the responsibility had entirely honest intentions. There was excellent money to be made from selling forgotten valuables, pilfered in the name of cleaning up after a lack of payment or a deceased patron, and it didn’t always take a confirmed death to start the keepers snooping around inside.

  No, this was more important than a stack of musty old bonds or an heirloom ring. He might not know exactly what he was carrying, but he was absolutely certain that whomever Elargwyd’s associates were, they wouldn’t rest until they got the item back into their possession. Not a soul could know where the object was going to be hidden, and that meant he had to go to someone without one.

  Paderborn was built much like Cantrid, low and half-buried. The houses of the rich stood tall and lonely, secure in the knowledge of their iron frames as they towered over the hovels of the middling masses. Only the homes of the helplessly poverty-stricken matched their height. The tenements rose out of necessity three or four stories into the air, haphazard and teeming, naked to the night and haunted by fear, rarely visited by anyone who didn’t have to be there.

  After a stop at the market to purchase some essentials, Arran made his way southward from the center of town. The outskirts of the city rambled far beyond the useless, ancient walls that had long since been colonized and overrun. In the midst of the thick sprawl, in neighborhoods with sad and shifting names like Rat Town and Sorrow’s Walk, there was little light, even in the daytime. The skeletons of ravaged buildings rose with crooked bones from the sandy earth, too thin to cultivate anything but a few scrawny potatoes and a great deal of despair.

  The beggars eagerly approached him until they saw what he was carrying. Despite the fact that the pail of rich cream and three loaves of bread could feed their hungry children for a week, they backed away with their heads bowed, muttering wards of protection for themselves for even having laid eyes upon him.

  It wasn’t exactly a boost for his confidence. He had met an eallawif before, during his adventurous youth when the warnings of his elders were nothing but a challenge, but he had never asked it for anything.

&nbs
p; The eallawif were a frightening breed, much like all the unnatural creatures that shared the earth with upright men. They were uncommon and elusive, although unlike the capricious neneckt and the downright wicked Siheldi, most people believed they were only truly malevolent if they were disappointed.

  Arran practically tiptoed through the slums until he reached a long-abandoned district, decaying and ravaged by fire. After sundown, the streets would be impossible to walk, echoing with the chilling cries of the conquering spirits. Daylight hardly made it any better. The Siheldi couldn’t even harm a child while the land baked under the sun, and they may be pale and feeble in the dirty light that filtered through the charred structures and broken roof tiles, but that didn’t mean he was alone, and it didn’t mean they weren’t watching him.

  He could hear the eallawif’s music from a quarter of a mile away. The thin and silvery tune was deeply alluring, floating like a sweet scent on the scant breeze as it wove over the deserted cobbles. Arran stopped to listen – he tried to stop, but his feet kept moving him onward. He didn’t fight the gentle, insistent pull. Its source was where he wanted to be.

  Her lair was hidden inside an unstable maze of derelict apartments, more than half-way underground. The stone walls that used to support the roof were steady enough, but the rotting beams that crossed overhead at precarious angles were making him nervous as he carefully maneuvered around broken furniture and the moldering remains of lives that had never had much hope of ending happily anyway.

  Still, the song beckoned him onward, and he was determined to follow it. Neither the dust nor the distrust of the loose and creaking floorboards deterred him, and eventually he was standing in front of a door of sorts: a curtain cobbled together from bits of wood tied into long, knocking strings with pieces of rags. The singing suddenly stopped.

  “Mistress, I implore thee. May I enter?” Arran called, his voice only shaking a little as he waited for a reply.