Dark the Night Descending (The Paderborn Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  DARK THE NIGHT DESCENDING

  Jennifer Bresnick

  Aenetlif Press

  Boston, MA

  MMXIV

  ISBN-13 978-0692283653

  Aenetlif Press

  Printed in the United States of America

  Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Bresnick

  All rights reserved. This book, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission from the author or publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  The lulling hiss of the tide creeping up the shore faded from the forefront of Arran’s hearing as he stood, motionless and unseeing, on the deck of the ship. It was dark and quiet behind his closed eyes as he focused all of his attention on the slight rocking of the wood under his heels.

  Was there the hint of a little sideways twist to the motion as the vessel bobbed fore and aft, up and down at anchor? It would be magnified a hundredfold in a cross-sea, turning the little vessel into a bucking, braying ass that would not mind its keepers if the wind hit just right. He smiled. He had always liked a girl with an iron will.

  “She’s got good bones,” Rickarde said, only the slightest hint of doubt creeping into his voice as the sharp shrieking of a circling gull brought Arran back to the task at hand. “Clean as a whistle and twice as fast,” he added when his customer didn’t seem convinced.

  “She’s a right rotter and you know it,” Arran replied, running his hand over the splintered beam of the ship’s rail. “How much?”

  “Three thousand.”

  “You could at least have the decency to look optimistic,” Arran scoffed. “I’ll give you one and a half.”

  “You expect me to feed my family on that?”

  “Feed them on these,” Arran said, shaking a termite from his hand and flicking it into the water.

  “Two thousand and you can have the sails, too,” Rickarde said. He grimaced as he moved away from the infested wood.

  “You were going to charge me extra?”

  “Think of my –”

  “I know, I know,” Arran cut over him, digging around for his wallet. “Your poor children. Good thing they’re all grown and married off already or I don’t know how you’d live with the anguish in their little faces.”

  “Shut up,” Rickarde grinned, and watched closely as Arran counted out gold from his purse before pocketing the coins. “You best come in for a cup or my Mollie will have my hide. Where you taking the old gal, anyway?”

  “Who? The boat or your wife?”

  “The boat. I’d give you the wife for free if it would get her out of my hair.”

  “Just up to Paderborn,” Arran said, sitting down in the kitchen. “Thought I’d see my Mum and take on a job or two.”

  “Don’t ask me to find you a crew,” Rickarde warned, putting a kettle onto the stove. “I have a reputation to protect.”

  “Then try selling something seaworthy.”

  “Try not sinking it,” he replied, the dark tea leaves perfuming the air as the scalding water bubbled gently in the cheap tin pot.

  “Doesn’t really work for me,” Arran said, rubbing the healing scar on the back of his neck. He hadn’t even seen the timber falling. He hadn’t seen much after that at all, since the spar had knocked him out cold, but he had been told that the vessel’s demise had been slow and wallowing as the longboats grimly pulled into the darkness away from the smoldering wreck.

  “How many is that, now?” asked Rickarde. “Three? I don’t know where you get the nerve to keep asking good men to risk their lives.”

  “Because I pay them. Besides, I’m only running across the bay back to Paderborn. It shouldn’t be too bad. What’s she called?”

  “Who?”

  “The tub of rusting bolts you just sold me.”

  “I don’t remember,” Rickarde said. “The paint’s all rubbed off. It was something stupid.”

  “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”

  “Pick a name. She’s yours now, for what good she’ll do you. The water has been quiet these past few weeks, but that could change in an hour.”

  “I know. How much is your brother going to charge me if I ask him to pretty her up?”

  Rickarde shrugged. “As much as he wants. You ain’t going nowhere without a visit to a shipyard, and he’s got the only one in town.”

  “That certainly seems fair,” Arran said, draining his cup. “I better make sure she can limp that far down the shore.”

  It wasn’t that bad, he tried to tell himself on the way back to the dock. The boat was in the water, and it wasn’t sinking. That was a good start.

  But he missed his old ship, he sighed as he slid down the ladder into the fetid and muck-covered hold. The Firedrake hadn’t been big or flashy or particularly fast, but she had served him well before her untimely end.

  The disaster had left him stranded in the little town of Cantrid for the past six months, which had been problematic. It wasn’t a very safe place, nor was it a happy one, and the lack of reliable communication with the city of Paderborn meant that it had taken him half a year to scrape together enough coin to purchase anything, even such a tragedy as the boat upon which he now stood.

  “Unbelievable,” he muttered to himself as he took out his knife and pushed it into one of the ship’s knees. The tip of the blade burrowed nearly an inch into the massive beam with almost no resistance from the soft, crumbling wood and mold. They would all need to be replaced. And the budding split in the mainmast needed fixing. Everything would need a proper clean, a real scrub down from top to bottom, too. And the sails that Rickarde had so generously included in the price were riddled with dry rot.

  But he had to acknowledge that the little ship did have a fine frame to work with. He wouldn’t be wasting his time if she was anything but a corker with clean lines and a sharp bow. There were good spars and good wrights to be had from Rickarde’s brother, even if they were exorbitantly priced for his captive customers. With a little spit and polish, she would spin like a top if he asked her. She would have to. If she didn’t, he’d be dead long before he could be disappointed.

  Disappointment came to him anyway as the shipwright tugged at his beard and shook his head, consulting with a foreman who couldn’t seem to keep the wolfish grin off his face as the list of repairs kept growing longer.

  There wasn’t even a penny left in Arran’s wallet when the pair of them had finished. He had hoped to have a little left over to help pay for provisions, but he would need to dip into the last of his savings if he ever wanted to leave the village for more lucrative and exciting shores.

  But it was still cheaper to pay for the work than it was to snatch a beauty off the market, where a boat that survived six months on the haunted seas was hailed as too lucky to ever abandon. He had almost gotten there with the Firedrake. He had almost gotten a lot of things before the Siheldi took them away.

  “It’ll be three weeks at least,” the foreman told him, spitting a wad of tobacco juice onto the floor of the office as the yard clerk wrote up a receipt. “The freedom walk is in a fortnight, so you ain’t losing much time.”

  “I can get a cr
ew,” Arran said defensively. “I don’t need to stink up the place with prisoners who couldn’t buy their way out of the cells before their time.”

  “Right,” the foreman smirked, shifting the enormous glob of crushed leaves and spittle from one cheek to the other. “I’ll see you there then, yeah?”

  “Probably,” Arran muttered.

  “What do you want me to call her?” the shipwright said as Arran folded the parchment and stuffed it into the pocket of his coat.

  “Surprise me. I’ll be at the club if you need anything. Except more money.”

  The foreman laughed and waved him off, leaving Arran to pace alone into town. There wasn’t much of Cantrid, but what there was had seen better days. It had been a popular fair weather retreat about a century ago, and still boasted a large square fronted by row houses that had, at one time, been quite elegant in their way. But the intervening years had decayed them into a blocked up, knocked out warren for the poor, who had staked their claim on the dwellings as quickly as rats multiplied in a sewer.

  A gentleman’s club still held court at one end of the main boulevard, maintaining the last shreds of its dignity under the latest in a long line of proprietors named Whitstone. Anyone who fancied himself of any importance was a member, spending a few evenings every month in the smoking room, seeing and being seen. The venerable meetinghouse had turned into an unofficial marketplace, where trade was discussed and bargains sealed over clam soup and passable brandy.

  Arran knew perfectly well that he could find a crew to sail his new vessel on any street corner. Prisoners were freed monthly from the debtor’s gaol, as the shipwright had mentioned, and others could always be culled from the constantly replenished ranks of disillusioned apprentices, runaways, or hard men of the sea living out hard luck on land.

  But cargo and high-paying passengers were much more difficult to find. In Cantrid, they had to be finessed from the tight grip of Whitstone’s preeminent patron: a merchant called Roydin Balard.

  “Can I buy an old friend a drink, sir?” Arran said brightly, making his best bow when he found his quarry in his usual chair, tucked into the corner of the room where he could observe his fellows without being disturbed by them.

  “Oh, God. Not you,” Roydin groaned when he saw who was addressing him. “Get out.”

  “Don’t be like that, sir,” Arran said, sitting down uninvited across from the portly, balding fellow. He didn’t look like a very shrewd businessman, with the frayed slippers he wore everywhere and his ancient, greasy coats, but Arran had been left puzzled and penniless more than once after a so-called negotiation with Roydin, and this time he wasn’t going to be put on the back foot.

  “You owe me six thousand pounds for that damned catastrophe last year,” the merchant told him.

  “I don’t believe I do, sir. Your insuring company paid you.”

  “Yes, and now I have to give them an extra two hundred a month because they think I’m an extraordinary risk. That’s your fault, Swinn.”

  “Well. Maybe. But I’ve got me a new ship, and she’s as fast as the angels. I just need a bit of something to break her in.”

  “Like the five hundred bolts of fine satin that are now sitting on the sea floor because of you?”

  “Exactly like that, sir.”

  “Keep your dreaming. You’re not getting another farthing out of me.”

  “Please? Anything you’ve got. Rice. Pigs. Your least favorite child. Anything.”

  Roydin looked at him carefully, tilting his head. “You’re begging me?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Well, I can’t say that’s not pleasing. But it’s not going to work. You can stand to take a trip across the bay without a full hold. Try cheating someone in Paderborn out of their money. There has to be at least one natural-born idiot there you haven’t disappointed yet.”

  “Come see the new boat next week, when she’s had a proper scrub,” Arran coaxed. “I’ll show you what she can do. I promise you’ll be satisfied.”

  “I already am. I get to keep my gold.”

  “But –”

  “Goodbye, Swinn,” Roydin said firmly.

  “Thank you for your time, sir,” said Arran as he stood and bowed again. “Maybe we can work together in the future.”

  “Don’t count on it,” the merchant said.

  His false smile faded as Arran left the smoking room, taking a moment to collect himself in the empty lobby. He could not argue that the Firedrake’s demise had left Roydin’s valuable cargo sunken in the deep waters to be claimed by the bottom-dwellers and the crabs. It had been a bad blow for both of them, but more had perished than just their reputations.

  Three men had died that night, claimed by the Siheldi during a prolonged and brutal attack. Although it was universally accepted that no one could predict the timing or location of such an assault, Arran had still been feeling responsible ever since the longboat’s slinking entrance into Cantrid’s harbor half a year ago.

  The surviving crew had all scattered by now, as sailors were wont to do, leaving Arran alone with his debts and his half-hearted scheming to rebuild a career that was primarily based on avoiding the constant and capricious threat of disaster.

  And now Roydin’s stubbornness would be throwing his new plans into jeopardy. It wasn’t fair, really. Plenty of captains had a string of bad luck much longer than Arran’s. It was the nature of the business, and there was nothing anyone could do about it besides keep trying. He had thought Roydin would understand that.

  Besides, a trip across the Bay of Burlera was not considered a particularly arduous journey. The body of water that separated the Paderborn peninsula from the rest of Rhior-Adril’s sweeping coastline was more than five hundred miles wide, but it was constantly patrolled and filled with traffic, including the swift cutters of the King’s fleet, which were armed with defenses few private vessels could afford.

  Huge lanterns, religiously tended, lined the shore every few miles to keep the trade routes safely illuminated, for what good the soft light could do. It wasn’t much. The Siheldi were very nearly invincible, and preyed gleefully on the busy traders. The Bay was a prime hunting ground for the troubled spirits, which stalked the wayward and unlucky on the long, moonless nights, bringing with them an invisible and incurable lunacy that had driven more men to their deaths than all the sicknesses and wars of the great continent combined.

  They were a menace as old as history, shrouded deeply in myth. Some said the Siheldi were the remnants of the unquiet dead, doomed to roam the blackness, half hollow and full of spite until the world’s end. Others called them devils, and believed they had been sent by Kashni, the dark and traitorous god, to punish the living wicked for their sins.

  Arran didn’t know where they came from, and he didn’t particularly care. There was no way to understand them. There were few ways to repel them. And that meant that even though he hated them with everything he had, he also depended on them to keep him in business. It was an irony he had explored at great length during those frequent times when his fortunes and his spirits sank low. He had always been successful in his quest to stay alive, but the same couldn’t be said for more than a few of the poor sods who took his coin and accepted his promises of competence and safety in return.

  “Excuse me, sir?” someone said behind him, tapping him on the shoulder and startling him out of his thoughts.

  He turned to see a well-dressed woman, which was surprising, considering the porters on the door to Whitstone’s were quite adamant about keeping anyone of the female persuasion out of the male sanctuary. But it wasn’t a woman, he realized a moment later. Well, not really.

  “Can I help you…ma’am?”

  “I certainly hope so. Are you Arran Swinn?”

  “Depends who’s asking.”

  The stranger smiled. “Someone who would like to give you some money.”

  “In that case, yes. Yes, I am.”

  “I have heard that you are headed to Paderborn s
oon.”

  Arran hesitated a little. “I’m afraid I won’t be taking passengers, if that’s what you’re after,” he said eventually.

  “No? Not even for two hundred pounds?”

  “Not if they’re – if they’re of your persuasion. I apologize, but you know how it is.”

  The stranger’s smile stiffened. “I’m not sure I do, sir.”

  He didn’t really know where to begin. “You’re a – well, you’re…you know. Please don’t make me say it.”

  “I assure you that whatever I am, it does not change the value of my money, Mister Swinn,” she said coolly. “I mean you no harm. May I book passage on your voyage or not?”

  Arran tried to look anywhere but the stranger’s face. It was a good face, he had to admit. A very close approximation of a normal, fairly attractive woman. Her skin might look a little too moist, and there was nothing to be done about her eyes, but if Arran had passed her on the street, he wouldn’t have given her a second glance. That was the problem with neneckt, though. They could look so normal.

  “Two hundred and fifty. Up front,” he decided. “And your bound word of honor.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the woman said, her face lighting up again. “Neither of those things will be a problem.”

  “We’re not setting out for another three weeks.”

  “I understand. But no one else appears to be leaving sooner.”

  Arran nodded. “May I have a name for the register, ma’am?”

  “Elargwyd,” she replied. “Unless you’d prefer my real one.”

  “No, thank you,” he said hastily. “That will do.”

  “Very well. I understand your ship is being repaired. I would appreciate an advisory when you are closer to being ready to depart,” she said, handing him a slip of paper with her address.

  “Certainly, ma’am. And I’d be happy to send a porter to collect your luggage, as well.”

  “Perhaps you ought to find one first, Mister Swinn,” Elargwyd said, curtsying slightly before she turned to walk away. She knew very well that it would be no simple task to secure a porter – or anyone else – willing to sail with a neneckt on board. Their fearsome reputation may not always be warranted, but a strong distaste was deeply ingrained in the lore of seagoing men, and would narrow his already limited choices.