Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) Read Online Free Page A

it.
    “Interesting,” I said.
    “Can you read it?”
    It was in Romansh, a Swiss language that came with multiple dialects.  This was, I believe, the Sutsilvan dialect, but Vallader wasn’t out of the question.
    Regardless of the dialect, they’re Romance languages, and I can read and speak pretty much all of them with only a little effort.  Not because I’m especially gifted, I just have a lot of time to practice everything.  Plus, languages have root tongues—Latin, in this case.  Once you know your way around the root you can navigate most of the descendants, especially if you update yourself from time to time.  I do, mostly because it’s easier to get food and shelter and women if I’m fluent in the local language.
    “I can,” I said.  “But I wasn’t supposed to be able to, was I?”
    “No.  And I don’t believe you.  Tell me what it says.”
    I was about to do just that, but then a thought came to me.  “ You don’t know what it says, do you?”
    “It was handed over by a man I was told to never speak to again, to be delivered to a man I never met before.”
    “And who are you, Anna, to be entrusted with such a vague and yet specific undertaking?”
    “I am… nobody important.  I can get in and out of certain places because of my…”
    “…your charms.”
    “Yes.  That makes me valuable to certain people.  But I’ve never had to deal with a letter such as this, and I’ve never had to worry about a vampire.”
    “It wasn’t a vampire.”
    “So you’ve said.”
    “Was this letter unsealed when it was handed to you?”
    “It was.  I assume the language it was written in provided its own safeguards.”
    “Or the one who gave it didn’t want to put his seal on it.”
    “He was not the sort of man to have a crest of his own.”
    “No… I imagine he wasn’t.”  I was skimming the letter while talking, when I should have been giving it my full attention.  The problem was, I didn’t follow much of the text because it involved people I didn’t know, doing things I didn’t understand.
    I have basically stayed out of politics since the invention of politics.  Part of the problem is that political concerns are generally local and extremely time-specific, and I am very much about the long-term.  Learning all there is to know about a regional political reality is somewhat like learning a new language, except the knowledge isn’t useful for longer than a generation, which makes it just about useless to me.
    I did take a special interest in the post-script on the letter, however.
    “Are you certain you’d never seen the killer before?”
    “Of course not.  Unlike you, I don’t collect vampire friends.”
    “I just thought I’d ask.  It’s possible he saved your life.”
    “By not killing me as well?”
    “No, that isn’t what I mean.  It seems the last part of this message instructs the recipient to kill the messenger if this letter is delivered unsealed.”
    She went a little pale.  “That’s a precaution.  In the event I read it before delivery.”
    “Obviously, if you could read the language you would have known to reseal it, so that doesn’t make sense.  This was so the man who was to murder you would feel no guilt in doing so.  The fact that according to the sender the letter was supposed to have been sealed, would have absolved the recipient of guilt and put the responsibility for your death on your own shoulders.  It might have been your body in that garden instead of his.  Well, pretending for the moment that his body was lying in the garden still.”
    “It would have been his body, only by my hand,” she said.
    “Yes, you’re probably right.”
    Her eyes darted around the room.  “We should find a private place, Christoph, so you can read the rest of that letter to me and I can find out what information I was meant to die for.”
    “You’re right.  I might be the only one in this Heuriger who can read Romansh, but ironically, I might be