Above the Snowline Read Online Free

no answer; the Messenger was rarely seen before ten o’clock in the morning, when he leaves his tower with his girl of the previous night and goes in search of breakfast.
     
    On the other hand, he is keen to be accessible and usually leaves his door unlocked. That was well known. I pushed down the catch and swung it wide. ‘Jant?’
     
    He wasn’t in this half of the circular room, but bedclothes were rustling on the other side of the velvet curtain drawn across it. I stepped through the doorway and waited for a reply. ‘Jant? Jant ?’
     
    ‘Just a minute!’ came from behind the curtain.
     
    This is the fastest person in the world and it is always ‘just a minute’ with him. The room was half in impenetrable gloom but a little light leaked in from the shutters, and with the odour of stale coffee, the air was quite a fug. I picked my way across the semicircular study to the window, between a trio of smeared wine glasses on the floor, plates sticky with the remains of what seemed to be cherry gateau, big curled feathers from the tops of someone’s wings, and a pair of women’s shoes with pointed toes, kicked off in a hurry. I opened the shutters. One of them was broken, and as I propped it wide I thought, it’s extraordinary. Jant does look very much like her. Broader, of course; but she could be his sister. Watch me shock him out of bed.
     
    ‘Jant!’ I called. ‘There’s a Rhydanne in the Castle!’
     
    The bedclothes crinkled with increased asperity, then with a jingle of brass rings on the rail the curtain twitched apart in the middle and Jant’s face appeared, looking somewhat hungover. ‘What?’
     
    ‘A Rhydanne!’
     
    ‘Where?’
     
    ‘Down by Carillon.’
     
    He blinked in surprise. I continued, satisfied, ‘Called Shira. Standing by Serein’s fishpond. So I thought I should—’
     
    Jant interrupted me, ‘He’s called Shira?’
     
    I smiled and something in my smile informed him he should alter the question.
     
    ‘ She’s called Shira?’
     
    ‘Yes. That much I understood.’
     
    He poked his upper body through and drew the drapes about his waist, so I was no longer speaking to a disembodied head but also to a hairless torso. ‘Is she speaking Scree?’
     
    ‘I assume so. You can speak it, surely?’
     
    ‘Well, it’s been a long time but . . . yes, yes, of course . . .’
     
    ‘Well, come on then! If she harpoons any of Serein’s prize koi, he’ll run her through.’
     
    ‘Ha! Serein and his bloody fish.’
     
    ‘You and your bloody women.’
     
    Jant shrugged, withdrew behind the curtains and tweaked them into place. A few seconds later he slipped through and descended the three steps to the lower half of the room, buttoning his shirt cuffs.
     
    ‘She’s standing on the wall of the pond,’ I said, ‘with a spear - some kind of harpoon - watching the carp.’ I raised my arm and struck the pose. ‘I was going to the hall when I saw her. A grounds-man tried to talk to her as well, but he couldn’t. I mean, she talks but we couldn’t fathom a word she said. It’s all V’s and K’s.’
     
    ‘Bh’s and Ich’s.’
     
    ‘Exactly!’
     
    He picked a corset from the back of the chair, gathered its dangling laces, scooped up the shoes and disappeared behind the curtain.
     
    Typical, I thought. Apart from the clutter on the floor, his room was cluttered on every wall, the top of his desk and dresser, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if the clutter had extended across the ceiling as well. The desk was covered in coach route maps, folded in zigzag fashion, and other necessities of his job: pens, paper, a walnut box of seals and stubs of sealing wax - crimson for the Castle’s correspondence, black for his own.
     
    On his travels he had collected such a vast miscellany of articles that his room resembled the den of an undiscerning buccaneer. There was a little cup and saucer with gold rims compulsively lifted from the Rachiswater Royal Café. There