Dark the Night Descending (The Paderborn Chronicles Book 1)

by Jennifer Bresnick

  Faidal brought him to a tavern, where he handed Arran some coins and told him to buy them drinks. Instead of following him to the bar, the neneckt slid onto the end of a long bench at a table in the corner, where he was greeted with silent nods by its residents.

  “Whatever’s good,” he said to the barman, whose silvery eyes gave him away without much effort. He didn’t know what neneckt drank. He imagined it might be something salty.

  The barman filled up two tall, thin mugs from a tap under the counter and pushed them across without a smile. Arran dropped the coins on the bar, not caring that he was probably paying him too much. It wasn’t his money.

  Faidal was speaking to his neighbors in a language Arran had never heard before. It was harsh and rather squeaky, relying on clicks and some sort of howling hiccough to get the point across. It sounded like whale song, if the whales had a sore throat and a bad temper, and he found that it hurt his ears a little bit if he tried to pay any closer attention to the incomprehensible noises.

  Instead, he turned his focus to the drink, with hardly more satisfactory results. It was salty. It was also bitter and astringent, with something of juniper berries in it, and Arran almost spit it back into the mug before a lingering aftertaste of oranges and woody rosemary bloomed on his tongue and changed his entire perception of the brew, making him take a curious second sip, and then a third.

  “This is disgusting,” he whispered to Faidal during a pause in the conversation.

  “Yes. You like it?”

  “It’s not bad. What are we talking about?”

  “How to keep our mouths shut,” Faidal said meaningfully. “Drink and don’t talk.”

  Arran was happy enough to oblige. Despite being hard to get used to, the liquor was actually making him feel rather nice. Alcohol usually rendered him gloomy and somewhat sharp with his neighbors, which is why he didn’t get invited out much, but whatever was in his cup was producing a warm and affable sensation that made the unintelligible conversation seem more or less irrelevant anyway.

  “I’m going to get another,” he said eventually, a little louder than was strictly necessary.

  “You can have mine,” Faidal said, pulling him back down to the bench with little protest and sliding the mug in front of him.

  Arran picked it up immediately and took a swallow, hardly able to help himself. “What is it?” he asked out loud.

  “Will you stop? I’m busy.”

  Arran fell silent again, determined to keep his thoughts to himself. They were growing increasingly fuzzy as he neared the bottom of the second cup, and he wondered if it would be rude to put his head down and close his eyes for a bit. He was still so tired.

  “Come on,” Faidal said some time later, startling him out of a daze. “Time to go.”

  “What?”

  “Time to go,” Faidal said louder. “Let’s get you somewhere to lie down. Should have known you wouldn’t be able to hold your drink.”

  “It’s not normal,” he said, blinking to try to clear his head as he followed Faidal unsteadily from the tavern into the sunlight. “I’ve never had anything like it.”

  “That’s because it’s ychauyad,” the neneckt told him as if he was a bit of an idiot. “We don’t normally let your kind have it.”

  “Oh. Thank you, then. I suppose.”

  “Don’t thank me. You’ll have a hell of a head on you tomorrow. Like being kicked by a mule.”

  “Then why did you let me have it?”

  “Everyone needs their entertainment.”

  “You’re a cruel bastard.”

  “Yes. Up we go,” he said, pushing Arran in front of him towards a set of narrow wooden stairs that led to a door on the side of a square brick building.

  “Why?”

  “This is Mikkal’s house. He’ll have room for us. That’s what I was talking about.”

  “Oh. All right,” Arran replied, gazing at the stairs for a moment as he tried to figure out how to will his legs to move up them. Faidal pushed past him and started up on his own, leaving Arran to follow slowly, gripping the banister tightly to avoid overbalancing.

  He laughed to himself in triumph – to his bemused horror it sounded almost like a giggle – as he successfully navigated the difficult obstacle and reached the landing, but tried to grow serious again as Faidal pulled on a bell cord next to the door. It would not do to make such a shameful impression on his new host. He wondered what kind of impression his host had decided to make on him.

  The door was open and he was through it before he had stopped imagining all the different shapes a neneckt face could take. Could they be other than human, too? Could they disguise themselves as fish? As rocks? As birds?

  The thought was compelling as it took on a life of its own in his mind. He would enjoy being a bird. An albatross, even though they were unlucky. He was unlucky anyway. The least the gods could do would be to allow him to fly.

  “…Arran,” he heard Faidal say, stating his name clearly in the middle of the swooping wails of his own language. He tried to come back to the present, and saw an ordinary looking man in front of him, gazing at him with a resigned expression, as if Arran was a toddling child who had just spit up all over himself and needed to be cleaned.

  “Come on back, if you will,” Mikkal said.

  The next thing Arran knew, he was falling into bed. The mattress was strangely firm, though it shifted under his elbow as he propped himself up to wonder at it. It felt like it was stuffed with sand. It wasn’t at all unpleasant – it reminded him of quiet nights in little towns, lying on the shoreline and staring up at the brilliant ribbon of stars that arced above him, breathlessly defying the Siheldi as he dared them to interrupt his leisure and the melodious churning of the sea.

  He was defying more than the night spirits now, he admonished himself as he yawned and lay back, squirming his shoulder blades into the yielding surface to make himself more comfortable. He never thought there would be a day when the Siheldi were the least of his troubles…but then again, he never thought he’d find himself hunting counterfeit iron with a neneckt by his side and an eallawif breathing down the back of his neck. He didn’t know which was worse, but he did know that neither of them was good.

  Not good like the – like the whatever he had called it, he smiled as he recalled the taste of the drink that was making him so sleepy. It was really quite something. It could only be some kind of magic.

  His dreams were a great deal much less magical. In fact, they were terrifying. He thought he knew a thing or two about nightmares, but whatever the ychauyad had done to his head made his dreams seem intensely, inescapably more vivid. He spent the night desperately running through a thick and tangled forest, trying to evade something he couldn’t quite see as it chased him through the ancient trees, crashing and screeching with a fury that shook his heart and lingered long, long after he awoke.

  The unpleasant aftereffects became physical, too, once he opened his eyes, surprised to find that the hideous beast had not killed him. Just as Faidal had promised, he felt like he had been run over by an oxcart, which had then turned around and trundled over him again for good measure. The sandy bed that had seemed so comfortable was now a prison from which he had to fight his way clear just to sit up and nurse his migraine.

  “No,” he moaned when someone tapped on the door, pressing his hands to his temples as the sound echoed through the bones of his skull. “No, no, no.”

  Faidal opened the door anyway. “You need water,” he said, holding out a large, full glass.

  “You did this to me,” Arran moaned, taking the cup and trying not to spill it as his hands shook. “I hate you.”

  “If you think this is bad, wait until you see what I’ve got in store for you today.”

  “Whatever it is, you can forget it. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Not even to redeem yourself with Godefroy and the Guild?”

  Arran glared at him. “Does that require moving? Because I’m not really
interested in that sort of thing.”

  “Drink the water,” Faidal suggested. “It’ll help.”

  “There’s something in this,” Arran said, noticing a gritty powder as he took a sip.

  “Medicine.”

  “I need to stop letting you do things to me.”

  “Not just yet, I hope. There’s breakfast if you want it,” he added over his shoulder as he left the room.

  Arran drained the glass and lay back down as soon as he was alone. At the moment, he equated breakfast with some sort of horrible torture. He’d rather just sleep until whatever Faidal had given him took hold.

  He dozed off again for a while, dipping into dreams that made him feel like he was at sea, rocking gently in the water as he took a swim, the shadow of his ship looming darkly above him. It was infinitely more calming than his previous experience, and he woke up again with the taste of salt in his mouth and the slightly unnerving sensation that he was still mostly submerged.

  “Anything left?” he asked as he poked his head into the kitchen, where Faidal and Mikkal were sitting at an empty table, a dirty jam knife the only indication that there had been a meal.

  “There’s some bread,” Mikkal said.

  “That’s probably all I can handle. I didn’t have a chance to thank you for your hospitality last night, sir,” he added as Mikkal stood and turned towards a shelf. “It’s very kind of you to let us stay.”

  “Mikkal is a cousin,” Faidal explained when the man grunted and gave Arran a nod. “He’s practically forced to.”

  “I’m still much obliged,” Arran replied, taking a tentative bite of the bread. The salty taste in his mouth didn’t go away even when he bit into the sweet blackberry spread, which made for a very odd experience as he chewed and forced himself to swallow. “So where are we off to?” he asked Faidal, putting the slice down and pushing the plate away a little.

  “Tiaraku’s grounds.”

  “What?”

  “The big building that you probably didn’t notice we walked past as we came here.”

  Arran had a vague recollection of something large that took a long time to leave behind, but he had been concentrating on walking in a straight line without falling into the unfenced pools that seemed to be everywhere. “That sounds…not good.”

  “It’s good if you want to find out who framed you. It’ll be easy,” he continued when Arran didn’t seem convinced. “Fire doesn’t burn under water, so we know the forges have to be on land. We can comb every inch of the island first, or we can concentrate on where Tiaraku is likely to keep his secrets.”

  “And what will you do if you find the forges? The Guild won’t believe you.”

  “They will if I show them.”

  “Show who?”

  “Megrithe Prinsthorpe.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She’s here,” Faidal said. “She arrived a few days ago. Mikkal saw her come in. Once we find what we’re looking for, we can tell her the truth behind it. She’ll have to get off your scent then, won’t she?”

  Arran looked at Mikkal, who nodded. “Pretty lady. For a land slug, at least,” he said.

  “Land slug?”

  “Ignore him,” said Faidal, waving dismissively. “We have to get going.”

  Arran toyed with some crumbs left on the table as he thought. The fact that Megrithe had followed them was not surprising, but the idea of making her listen to what sounded like nothing more than a far-fetched attempt to save his neck would not be simple. She may have no credentials on Niheba, but she probably did have men with cudgels who didn’t much understand big words like ‘jurisdiction’.

  But what choice did he have, really? He needed Faidal to be happy so that the neneckt would help him with his pendant. He also really did need Megrithe to leave him alone. There seemed no other way to accomplish both.

  “All right,” he said, dusting off his fingers before he stood up. “And then Burlera.”

  “And then Burlera,” Faidal nodded. “I promise.”

  ***

  Megrithe did not have the right shoes for what she was about to do. The heels on her boots were certainly fashionable, but they were somewhat unhelpful when it came to climbing fences. She had already inched along the thin stone border of one of the ornamental ponds, little wider than her toes, and had nearly fallen after catching a loose bit of stone and wobbling furiously, clinging to the bars of the gate that ran along the pool to help prevent a prematurely soggy ending to her quest.

  Bregette’s information had been very helpful indeed. Her father was an overseer, of the kind who only saw things through the windows of his office. His ironworks were eminently respectable, and he had taken pride in giving his daughter’s new friend a tour of his kingdom that afternoon.

  But after bidding goodbye to Bregette and pleading a personal errand, Megrithe had hung around the loading gate long enough to see that for every five or six carts headed down to the port to load their cargo onto ships bound for Paderborn, there was a small, one-horse sledge that took a different route, its contents covered and tightly tied down.

  The sledge had led her towards a back entrance to Tiaraku’s palace, where neneckt who looked like poorly formed lumps of clay had unloaded the crates in silence, ignoring the hooded driver as they hurried the goods inside and locked the gate firmly behind them. Though nightfall had cut short her plans to investigate further, she had woken herself up at the crack of dawn the next day.

  It could certainly all be part of the neneckt king’s legitimate business, she thought as she stared up at the fence, topped with spikes curved outward to prevent trespassers, but she had come too far to hope that it was. Her blood was racing just like it did every time she latched on to the scent of wrongdoing, and she had learned to trust her instincts a little bit more every time they led her to success.

  “All or nothing,” she muttered to herself as she gripped the fence’s uprights and hoisted herself as high as she could, trying to dig her toes into the narrow space between the crossbars. She had always been slim, strong, and inclined towards athleticism, as long as it didn’t involve getting too dirty, and she had discreetly kept up the active habits of her childhood as an unanticipated weapon against men who expected her to succumb to the vapors after a particularly long set of stairs.

  But she wasn’t perfect, and she almost slipped after placing her foot too high. The heel of her shoe, which she had just cursed as useless, ended up saving her from a fall into the water, catching itself right where it belonged and giving her a secure purchase to bring her other foot up to hold her.

  After that, it was easy enough to reach the top of the blockade, and she smirked in triumph as she wriggled between the spiked crooks, which were not designed to keep out someone as small as she was. They wouldn’t do much good against neneckt, either, she thought as she dropped down to the other side, dusting rust and grime off her hands. They would pose no trouble at all for someone who could make itself into any shape it desired.

  The climb had helped her avoid the necessity of navigating the public places, and put her right in the center of what looked like any ordinary industrious yard intended to support the workings of a great house.

  She didn’t really know who lived in the palace, now that she thought about it. Did Tiaraku have a family that dwelt among the land folk? Were they like Alarice and Bregette with their slavish admiration and devotion to human fashion? Likely not, considering he was the ruler of all the sea people. They must have their own standards of culture and deportment, despite the fact that they lived unseen under the waves. It was an interesting notion, but it couldn’t concern her at present. She probably didn’t have long before she was discovered, and she would have to move quickly.

  The rising sun gave her a plausible reason to pick up an abandoned paper parasol that had been leaning against a doorframe, and she opened the shade to hide her face as she looked around the complex. In contrast to the main house itself, the kitchens, farriers, c
oopers, and storehouses were clustered low and plain, and there didn’t seem anywhere for a massive counterfeiting operation to conceal itself.

  “Excuse me,” she said eventually to a passing neneckt that looked more or less human. “I’m trying to find the smithies.”

  The stranger barely gave her a second glance. “That way, miss,” he said, pointing behind him. “Follow the smoke.”

  “Smoke?”

  “Over the stables,” he told her, gesturing vaguely before continuing on his way.

  “Thank you,” she called after him, and kept walking. The stables were easy enough to find by smell alone, and when she approached them, she did see a vague haze of smoke rising from a long line of squat buildings beyond.

  There wasn’t nearly enough to prove her assumption correct, however, and she felt disappointment rise in her gullet as she saw one of Bregette’s father’s carts outside a largish shed. The structure was open on one side and contained two blacksmiths at work. There was nothing else to see besides the products of their labor. The smoke was coming from their one small forge, and seemed to have no other source.

  It wasn’t until she risked moving a little bit closer that her hope started to rise again. In addition to the usual tools and kitchenware, nails, latches for doors and windows, piles of horseshoes, and coils of flexible banding for barrels that cluttered a normal blacksmith’s domain, there were a few buckets, hidden behind the anvil, full of smaller things: bracelets and charms, flat coins stamped with religious symbols, and bits of twisted wire that could be hung on necklaces. There was a pail full of cooled, spattered droplets, which were a popular item to sell to those who only had a pittance to spend. She even saw a shelf full of finer work, with frames for miniature paintings of loved ones that the aristocracy often kept in their pockets, and delicate rings with empty settings for precious stones.