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

  “That I really do know,” he mumbled, but she didn’t hear him.

  “You were supposed to be lucky,” Elspeth said, a mournful accusation that made the new mark on his arm start to smolder. “You were born in that caul for a reason, your grandmother always said. A blessing from the gods. A good omen. She believed it until the day she died, but even she didn’t know where that hellspawn pendant came from.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He died for it because he thought you would be special,” she continued, a tear rolling down her cheek as her eyes unfocused and she slipped into that familiar, achingly faraway world. “He cursed himself to hell for you. He let them take his life. He didn’t fight them. You know what the gods think about that. And now you’ve lost it,” she continued, wiping her eyes. “Now you’ve failed.”

  The word hit him hard. It always had. “Failed?”

  “They needed his life,” she whispered. “They needed his blood to bring it here. He gave it to them because he had no choice. We didn’t have a choice.”

  “Gave it to whom?” he asked, feeling suddenly cold. “The Siheldi? You traded with the Siheldi?”

  She nodded. “They needed to get rid of it. They were afraid. You wouldn’t think they could be, but they were. It’s special, Arran. Special like you.”

  “It’s a bit of paper. You told me that’s all it was.”

  “It’s not,” she countered, raising her voice. “Not just. The iron hid it from the rest of them, but there’s something else. You must find it. You can’t let them have it. It will be the end for us, God help us. God help all of us.”

  Arran would have thought she had finally lost the last of her mind if it wasn’t for his encounter with the eallawif earlier that day. Everything was coming into some sort of sickening focus, and it was making his stomach turn.

  Two objects tied to the Siheldi. Two objects sought by the neneckt. Were the sea spirits and the ghosts of the night about to go to war? Were they working together to rid the land of men? He was sure it couldn’t just be a coincidence, and whatever it meant could not be all that good for him and the rest of his fearful and helpless race.

  “What else is it, Mum?” he asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, shaking a little as she silently cried. “I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me. They just left me there. They left me there alone.”

  “They left us together,” he said, but she wasn’t listening to him. “I’ll get it back, all right? I have to. Everything will be fine. I promise.”

  She was so upset that he stood up and walked around the table to give her a hug, a gesture neither of them had made towards the other since Arran had been old enough to dress himself.

  He had always had the impression that she simply had trouble remembering that she should want to be affectionate. She had trouble remembering a lot of things, including the proper care of her lodgers, which had left Arran with a list of chores longer than his little arms and a raw place in his heart he had stubbornly tried to plaster over again and again.

  He had left for the sea as soon as possible, telling her that he could earn more money elsewhere to support her, and he had done so with as little thought about his upbringing as possible. It didn’t take him long to learn that he wasn’t alone: few children could ever boast of happy homes, and those who grew up in poverty, abuse, and squalor rarely felt it necessary to reopen wounds that would bring little help to them during the constant, overwhelming struggle to find enough to eat or raise their own children in some semblance of safety and comfort.

  It was a lesson he had soon taken to heart. He never made mention of the rift between him and his mother, not even when asked. Especially not when asked. Elspeth herself had no conception of the depth of his turbulent feelings, and during their brief reunions, he treated her with all the respect and warmth a son was obligated to show to his parent. He had tried to forget the gloom and looming sorrow, but he had never been completely able to leave the stain of her deep fear of death behind him, and he carried it with him in the hidden corners of his mind no matter how far away he traveled.

  It felt strange to be holding her, to be trying to give her a comfort unfamiliar to them both, and he would be lying if he said it kindled any greater amity towards a woman who he now knew had been deceiving him to some degree his entire life.

  That wasn’t the part that really mattered, though, he thought as she clung to him tightly, sobbing into his shoulder. She had lied to protect herself. There was no shame in that. He had done the same thing plenty of times, to shield himself from her well-meaning but painfully awkward intrusion into his affairs. She cared too little and far too late, and it hurt. It hurt, but it worked to lie. There was no shame in that at all.

  “I’ll get it back,” he said again. “I’ll fix it. I’ll fix everything. I promise.”

  ***

  “Do you have the gemstone, Mistress?” Cederick asked, keeping his head down to avoid looking into the eallawif’s face. Bartolo had told him that just laying eyes on her could kill him, and he didn’t want to die just yet. Besides, there wasn’t enough light to see a thing. They didn’t like candles, Bartolo had said. He had had to go in the dark.

  “I do,” the eallawif said, a shiver of frightened pleasure running down Cederick’s spine. Her voice was like honey, if honey could make him forget his wife and his children, his mission and his master in favor of abandoning himself to her ministrations in such a forsaken, cheerless place.

  “May I have it, Mistress?”

  The eallawif drew a small container from the bodice of her gown and held it out to him. It was cold when he took it. She had no warmth of flesh or spirit to impart to it. “Tell your master that our bargain is fulfilled.”

  Cederick bowed low. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, maintaining the posture as he backed carefully out of the room, only turning around when he nearly tripped over a little step he had told himself to remember on the way in.

  He tried not to keep his hand on his pocket as he crossed the murky border between the abandoned quarter and the occupied homes of the hopelessly poor. There was little to mark the boundary other than the presence of more rats and more muffled sobbing behind shuttered windows, but as the city came alive, so did the risk that he might be robbed of his precious cargo.

  Bartolo had told him to call it a gemstone, but Cederick wasn’t fool enough to believe that’s what it was. Despite the general opinion of him as a dullard, he knew which way the wind was blowing, and he knew that Bartolo was lying when he pressed his lips together in just such a manner.

  If it wasn’t a gemstone, then it was something more exciting, and he wanted to know what. Desperately. He had never seen a gem big enough to warrant such a large container – he had never really seen a gem at all, really, except for the sparkly paste he bought his wife on her birthday from the cloth merchant, ensconced in a locked display as if it truly was worth more than the beach sand used to make the bubbles of glass. Would it hurt to take a peek? Just a little one?

  Cederick ducked behind a row of shops and unbuttoned his pocket. The brass container was warm now, after sitting near his skin, and it made a sloshing noise as he turned it over to get to the cap. He popped it off and peered inside, catching the gleam of water in the darkness. Instead of upending it onto the ground, he stuck his finger down the tube and swished it around, feeling for whatever was inside.

  His fingertip made contact with the hard bit of rock, and he smiled as he tried to crook the digit to pull it out and examine it. But the brass tube really was very warm. It was hot, in fact, and when a spark like a miniature bolt of lightning leapt to his wet finger, he yelped in pain and dropped the container, spilling water as it bounced and rolled on the hard cobbles.

  Cederick cursed as he stuck the finger in his mouth and tasted blood. There was an angry purplish burn mark on it, and his hand was red and raw where it had come in contact with the metal.

  He hurriedly picked up th
e container, wrapping the edge of his cuff around his fingers until the brass cooled to a manageable temperature, and shook it again to make sure that the hard thing was still inside. It was difficult to tell from the sound it made, but there was nothing visible on the ground, so he didn’t think much of it.

  “Stupid filth,” he hissed as he pulled a grubby kerchief from his pocket and wrapped the object up as best he could before he put it away again, hurrying towards his destination with no further pause. “Stupid bloody, magical filth.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Arran had rarely spent a worse night, tossing about, wakeful and watchful, in his childhood bed. His distraught mother hadn’t wanted him to leave, and he had reluctantly allowed her to have her way. Even though it had been days since the pendant had left his possession, the constant activity and anxiety involved in trying to prevent the Tortoise from sinking out from under him had suppressed much fear about the Siheldi.

  But now that he was on dry land, lying with his hands behind his head as the waning moon crept slowly across the slit of a window, there was nothing else to occupy his thoughts besides his bad fortune and what might be lurking behind the starlight.

  He felt naked without the only thing that had comforted him since he was old enough to be afraid. At the same time, the revelation that his erstwhile protection against the Siheldi had originated from them, somehow, was jarring.

  The thought couldn’t find a place to settle without barging its way into the forefront of his mind. He had always thought of his father as a victim of happenstance; a well-intentioned but unlucky fellow. Not someone who had dealings with the Siheldi and made sacrifices for the favors of demons.

  His mother’s words kept running through his mind. He didn’t fight them. You know what the gods think about that. He did, of course. Everyone did. The priests in their churches, with emblems of red iron secure around their necks, had always told the peasantry it was their duty to fight. Not against their betters, of course, or their elders, or the poverty and disease that rifled through their children’s cradles and stole their breath with tainted milk and poisoned blood and soft, supple lead for cutting teeth.

  Those were simply the trials of life to be borne with the aid of the gods’ grace before the eventual, inevitable, fitting end. It was ungratefulness to challenge the plans of the unknowable deities – a churlish rejection of the charity of heaven.

  No, the only sanctioned fight was the one they had no hope of winning. Fearing the Siheldi was natural, and nearly all men became paralyzed with terror in the presence of one. But giving up to the demons without a struggle – giving up to any demons, including the ones who dwelled within one’s own mind – was the greatest imaginable sin.

  Killing one’s self on purpose was an easy thing to avoid, for most people, and so gave them a sense of triumph on a daily basis. Even the poorest paupers could die rich in blessings if they adhered to that one simple principle, and so they strived for nothing. They desired nothing. They took no action. They lived and died firm in their abhorrence of any disappointments big enough to make them contemplate ending it all.

  Their passions were channeled in the most harmless of directions without them even knowing it. Even if they could understand, they would not have done anything about it. Protest against the powers that controlled them might lead to the need for self-sacrifice, and such a willing death would simply lead them to hell.

  Even the gossiping neighbors never stressed Elspeth’s brush with suicide, for fear of being tainted by the very notion. His mother herself had never spoken of it, and Arran had only learned of it by accident, at the hands of a drunken barber with a mean streak and a wagging tongue.

  At the time, it had crushed him. He could not fathom that she had fallen so far. He had never told her that he was aware of her actions, or asked her why, but had instead spent many quiet, lonely nights struggling to come to terms with how she could feel so low as to lose all sight of her duties to her own helpless blood. It had plagued him as a child, but as his experience of the world’s disappointments widened, he now thought he understood how easy it was to succumb to the pull of utter, engulfing despair.

  He had flirted with it himself, at times, when the path ahead seemed as grim and bleak as the one he had already traveled. And he had seen men who only wished for death keep on living. They drowned themselves in drink or violence, or hoped to lose themselves in the sea. There was no good in extending life that was only lived to hurt others, and yet the thought of even such cold and savage souls yielding to death of their own devising still made Arran squirm with discomfort. Despite his coolness towards the churches, he had never succeeded in leaving behind the long-hammered notion, not even many years after his spirit had given up its faith, leeched away by the confusion of heavy-handed paradoxes.

  The hopelessness of reconciling these conflicting lessons, focused so sharply by his mother and the secrets he could never forget he knew, brought his thoughts to bear on Elargwyd. He was sure he had killed the neneckt woman. He knew he would not escape the punishment of the gods or of man for the deed, which sat sickeningly on top of his stomach like an anchor, but he had done it. He had seen her body give up – but neneckt were more than just their bodies, and now the idea that she wasn’t really dead was haunting him.

  The eallawif had smiled somewhat unhelpfully when he asked if the pendant was on the ocean floor, and he didn’t know what that really meant. But he could only act upon what he did know. The Bay of Burlera was the last place he had seen the charm, so that was the first place where he would look.

  He would need to find some money to pay for the repairs to the Tortoise, he told himself as he yawned and tried to get more comfortable on the stiff mattress. He would need money to hire someone to take him out into the Bay, as well. And more if he wanted to keep that captain quiet. And to pay a neneckt to search the ocean floor. And to keep it quiet, too. He would need a lot of money.

  On that discouraging thought, he finally drifted off to sleep. It wasn’t good sleep. It was disturbed and broken, as shallow as a nervous creature stalked by a hunting beast, but it was better than nothing. Almost.

  “What the bloody hell do you want?” he shouted in a dry, strangled voice when someone knocked on his door early the next morning before his brain caught up with his mouth and he remembered he was in his pious mother’s care. “I mean…what is it?”

  “There’s a boy here for you,” Elspeth said, ignoring his swearing but not seeming all too pleased about it. He had never been very good at being pleasant before breakfast, and she had long since resigned herself to it. “He says he’s from the ship.”

  “I’m coming. Just a minute.”

  “Something about your cargo,” she added as he was hopping around trying to put on a boot, and he almost fell over as he doubled his haste. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” he called, putting out his hand to steady the wardrobe so it wouldn’t topple after being bumped. “I’ll just be a moment.”

  Durville’s son was sitting in the kitchen, happily devouring a big slice of the carrot cake, his little legs swinging in time with his chewing. Arran felt a strange stab of jealousy as he watched the boy with his treat. His mother had never let him eat cake for breakfast.

  “What’s the news, lad?” he said, quickly putting such nonsense aside. He was a grown man, for God’s sake.

  “Papa says to come when you can, sir. There’s a man wanting to take the bad things.”

  “There are no bad things,” Arran said, looking around to see if there was any pastry left for him. “They’re just crates. Mum, can I have something to eat? I’ll have to get back to work.”

  Elspeth nodded and turned to the stove, dishing out a bowl of plain oat porridge and handing it to him. The boy snickered at Arran’s face as he sat down and glumly stuck a spoon into the grayish, quivering mass.

  He managed to choke down a few bites, but abandoned the attempt when the child had scraped his plate clean. He wasn’t that hu
ngry, after all, and there wasn’t any time to waste.

  “I’ll see you again when I can,” he said to his mother as she embraced him, spontaneously adding a kiss on the cheek. “You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

  Arran got a little lost in his thoughts as he followed the lad down to the water. He was not feeling entirely present, and his exhausted mind was begging him for a real rest, somewhere safe and quiet. It wasn’t going to get what it wanted, he told it stubbornly. And neither was he, he realized as he caught sight of who had come for the crates.

  They weren’t Roydin’s men, and they certainly didn’t have a thousand pounds in gold to pour into his hand. They were city constables, swarming over every inch of the ship, and they had already opened one of the boxes in full sight of everyone.

  “Oh, shit,” Arran hissed, stopping in his tracks as the boy skipped on ahead, not realizing that his captain wasn’t following anymore. “Oh, God. I’m a dead man.”

  He wasn’t sure what he should do. Run, most of his brain urged, but the small portion of his mind devoted to common sense shouted the rest of it down.

  His name was on the register and on the deed, and his face was known by every man aboard. He might hide for a while, but if the Guild of Miners caught wind of the enormous cache of counterfeit now irrevocably linked to him, there was no corner dark enough to keep him from their wrath.

  He would have to feign ignorance, and hope that the remaining crew was smart enough to realize it was in everyone’s interest to pretend the contents of the crates were a mystery until the moment the lawmen lifted the lid.

  “Can I help you, gentlemen?” he asked as he stepped on deck, letting his eyes go wide at the sight of the dull red metal strewn around him.

  “Mister Swinn?” one of them asked, looking at a piece of paper in his hand and glancing up at Arran’s face again.