freeze season. The herders had arrived, bringing their goats down from the high pasture. A few hunters visited to rest; they were nomadic and they pleased themselves. Many were afternoon-drunk (drinking becomes moreish and you write off the day).
I sat on one of the benches by the low bar and ate bread with rancid butter and salted llama’s cheese. A row of freeze-dried rabbits hung tacked up by their ears behind the bar-Lascanne catches them by hand. I pushed my cup across the counter again; he slopped more whiskey into it with an exaggerated gesture. “It is snowing and drifting,” he said, as if that was news. “Want a pinnacle rabbit?”
“No, thanks.”
Lascanne was alone-drunk (everything seems vaguely amusing). I suppose I was slightly daytime-drunk (no matter how much you drink it doesn’t seem to have any effect).
The walls and most of the slate floor were covered with bright flat-woven kilims with warm red and indigo geometrical designs. A big hearth was on my right, its chimney shared with the distillery. A hunter lay on the furs beside it, very occasionally murmuring. She was drunk (dead-drunk); her sharp face rested on her folded hands. A family of four slept piled together nearby.
Three or four howffs were stacked against the wall. Howffs are tents of thin leather attached to rucksack frames. They could be rolled out and propped up by the frames to form triangular shelters. There was the ladder up to the Filigree Spider’s unfurnished second floor, where many people were lodging until the thaw season. Square, dark openings were the entrances of small passageways that led to other parts of the pueblo, again to escape heavy snows. The pub smelled of peat smoke and stew.
The door crashed open and two hunters struggled through man-handling a heavy bundle between them. At first I thought it was a rolled-up rug. The hunters, Leanne and Ciabhar, dropped the bundle in front of the hearth and turned it over. It was an unconscious body.
Leanne Shira saw me. She paused with one foot in the air before placing it down slowly. “Jant! Look what Ciabhar found…We would have left him but we thought you might be interested.” She darted over and bit me gently on the shoulder, for a kiss. I think she was working-drunk (just a light haze on your life that lasts for days). Her face was cold to the touch. I watched her sleek narrow body, hard muscle flowering under pale skin at every movement. Fast movement, a melting of potential, she was gracile but strong. Her rubbery sprinter’s midriff showed between her crop top and short black skirt. She had two pairs of snowshoes tied on her belt, one on each hip for herself and her lover.
“Bring some whiskey,” Ciabhar suggested.
“No alcohol!” I cried.
“Idiot! You’re supposed to give them hot water,” said Leanne.
“What about whiskey and water?”
Curious punters clustered around, making helpful suggestions: “Take his coat off.”
“Put him in a hot bath.”
“Or under the snow.”
“He looks weird; I don’t like it. I’m off.”
Now that they had accomplished dragging him in, their effort fell apart into the typical Rhydanne unit of organization-one. Ciabhar Dara stood back and stared. He was tall and so lithe I could see the muscle fibers through his tight skin and the hollows where they joined the bone. His black hair was wrapped in a ponytail. The nails on his long fingers came to hard points. His trousers were worn buckskin; bright ribbons crisscross bound his woven shirt’s loose sleeves close to his arms. A heavy three-stone bolas was wrapped around his waist-a bolas is the best weapon for mountain conditions, and Ciabhar was a very skilled and patient hunter. He blinked cat-eyes. “This man is really ill,” he said lucidly.
I pushed through. “Let me see.”
The handsome stranger’s skin was so waxen he looked like a statue carved from tallow. His lips and nail beds were blue; his breathing crackled. “Oh, god,” I said, feeling snow-wet hands and an ice-cold forehead. He was severely hypothermic, but the Rhydanne wouldn’t know that. Leanne flickered to my side and tried to pour hot water into his open, frost-blistered mouth.
“I watched him for ages,” Ciabhar said. “On the Turbary Track. Walking on, walking up, without crampons. He wasn’t a featherback so I left him in peace. He was searching around but he never saw me. At the top of Bealach Pass his pony lay down and died.”
Leanne gave him a look meaning “Breakfast is sorted.” She sped out, leaving the door open. She ran without pause over the bridge across Scree gorge that was just a single tightrope with two handrail cords, then lengthened her stride and disappeared, sliding, down the gritty path. She ran over the crystalline swathes of erosion between the naked rocks. Distant peaks looked as if ice had been poured down from their pointed summits and sharp boulders thrown sporadically up their slopes.
I said, “I can’t do anything for him here! Stupid! You should have descended. Downslope-toward Carniss.”
Ciabhar shrugged.
“It’s the
I thumbed open an eye, the iris brown, pupils dilated. The lids were dark and swollen. I handled him gently as I took his pulse, which was slow. He stopped making the effort to shiver, as there was no warmth to gain by shivering. His breathing rate was dropping back to normal-too exhausted to keep the rapid pace. He coughed once, dryly, and a bubbling noise began in his lungs as he breathed.
“We’re at eight thousand meters here. When did you last see a flatlander in the Spider?”
“They don’t come to the plateau,” Ciabhar mused.
“That’s because they can’t breathe! They can’t get sustenance from thin air; even I take days to acclimatize. And they freeze easily. Ciabhar, you know nothing. Help me carry him down to Tolastadh.”
I wrapped more rugs around the man’s jacket, and noticed a small ink-blue tattoo of Cobalt manor’s fishing bear on his wrist. “A sailor?”
“What?”
“He’s traveled a long way.”
As we hefted him his body convulsed once, froth ran from the corners of his mouth, and he died. Ciabhar dropped him, gave up cooperating and sloped away. Some more (cheery-drunk, boisterous-drunk, and totally pissed) hunters appeared and eagerly began stripping the corpse’s clothes but I chased them off.
I checked his pockets, finding a damp paper bag containing sugar-cake, a wet box of matches and a very damp and fragile white envelope. It wilted and started to disintegrate in my hands. I flipped it over, seeing a crimson seal. Behind me Lascanne dragged the body out, intending to drop it over the edge of Scree gorge. Outside in the mountains, the dead are left where they fall. No Rhydanne cares about the dead in Darkling, where the living have so much to contend with.
I went back to the bar and slapped the letter down on its stone slab. Chamois-fat candles guttered in their horn holders. The script read: “To be delivered to the hand of Comet Jant Shira. From Mist, Sailor and Captain of the Fleet. Send to the Filigree Spider, Scree. Please note-this envelope does NOT contain any money!!!”
“Oh, bugger!”
Just a few degrees colder, or another half hour out in the drifts, and Mist’s courier wouldn’t have reached me, and I wouldn’t be sitting here in a hot, weltering caravel.
I perched on the ladder between poop deck and half-deck, watching a severely freckled Serein do stretches below in the main area. In order to impress Mist, he had learned the names and actions of every part of the ship. He thrust his rapier through imaginary combatants who obviously didn’t stand a chance.
He took a break and trotted over, swinging the rapier. “Hello, Jant. You look a bit spaced out. What are you daydreaming about?”
“Darkling,” I said. “And Tern.”
“Don’t blame you. I’d miss her too.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Yeah. You’re very lucky. In fact one of my mates in the fyrd had her picture as a pinup. Just a tatty etching, of course, on the barracks wall. Tern is much, much more beautiful in real life. She’s stunning. I wish my mate knew
