Point of Hopes (22 page)

She sounded a little breathless—from surprise, Rathe
guessed, which means you know about the second set of books, and
the printers at the fair, and maybe a few other things. He filed
the thought for future use, and climbed to join her.

Caiazzo’s workroom was at the end of the gallery,
looking across a side street and his neighbor’s garden to the river
and the crowding masts of the docks. The trader worked not at a
desk but at a kind of attenuated clerk’s counter that ran the
length of the front wall, broken only by the double windows that
reached almost to the ceiling. It was littered with papers, charts
and logs and ledgers scattered along its length. Caiazzo flipped
over one of the sheets just as the clerk paused in the open door,
and said, “Pointsman Rathe, sir.”

Caiazzo turned, smiling genially enough, but Rathe
had seen the frown fading from his eyes. “Hello, Rathe, come in and
stop intimidating my people, will you? All right, Biblis, thanks, I
should be safe enough. And it’s adjunct point, by the way.”

The clerk flushed, but made no comment, and slipped
out of the room, closing the door softly behind her.

“
Gods, Rathe, what did you say to
her?” Caiazzo held up a hand. “Not, of course, that you’re ever
anything but welcome here.”

Rathe shrugged, crossed the room to look at the
books in their case, came to rest within easy reach of the narrow
counter. “Didn’t have to say much, really. I suppose she was just
in awe of the system.” There was a manifest on the sun-warmed wood
beside him, and he tilted his head to look at it. With a faint
smile, Caiazzo reached across and turned it facedown.

“
Not feeling cooperative this
week?” Rathe asked. “That’s too bad. ’Cause things are turning
nasty out there, Hanse, and there’s some even betting on you being
involved.”

“
And here I was hoping you’d come
to offer me your services,” Caiazzo answered easily. The winter-sun
was just rising, and the doubled light leached the color from his
skin and dark eyes. “You owe me, Nico. That was a good man you
arrested. I still haven’t found a replacement for him.”

“
And I wonder why. Come on, Hanse,
it’s not that he called himself a duellist, though the laws frown
on that, it was his methods,” Rathe said with a boredom he didn’t
entirely feel. “Crying a fair fight’s bad enough, bare murder’s
something else. I did him a favor. Many more kills like that, and
his mind would have gone. It can in duellists, you
know.”

“
For a southriver rat, you know a
lot about a very high-class sport,” Caiazzo said.

“
Blood sports aren’t all that high
class. If I ever leave the points, you’ll be among the first to
know.” Rathe took his weight off the counter, and reached into his
jerkin, left-handed careful to keep his knife hand in view, and
produced the broadsheets Guillot had bought for him. He freed the
least offensive one and handed it across. “I want you to have a
look at this. Recognize the printer’s seal?”

Caiazzo gave him a glance from under lowered
eyebrows, but took the proffered paper. “Forged bond mark,” he said
turning the page from front to back. “A direct violation of the
law, pointsman, I’m shocked you’re reading something like
this.”

Rathe smiled sourly, and gestured for him to
continue. Caiazzo lifted an eyebrow, but went on reading. He
finished the brief text, and handed it back to Rathe. “Pretty good
stuff. Popular, you know. Very dramatic. Why?”

“
Lebrune tells me this Agere is
printing under your coin,” Rathe said.

Caiazzo shook his head sadly. “Some people get so
self-righteous when they recover their long-lost status, don’t
they? They need to cast blame wherever they can, see villainy where
there’s just…free enterprise. I’m told the license fees are
fearsome, these days.”

“
You’re denying it.”

“
Off the books, Nico?”

Rathe hesitated. He’d good information, useful
information, from Caiazzo before now, and always off the books, but
if Fourie was right, and Caiazzo was involved with the missing
children, he couldn’t afford to make any deals with him. But it
wasn’t Caiazzo’s style to meddle in something that didn’t turn a
tidy profit, and neither the children nor the politics was going to
bring anything but trouble to a long-distance trader. “All right,
Hanse. Off the books.” And your word against mine, if I have to, if
I find you are involved with these kids, he added silently.

“
Yes, I’ve loaned Franteijn Agere
the coin she needs. She’s sound, hires decent readers, they cast
their own horoscopes and stay strictly away from political matters.
Agere prints to the popular interest, and that’s it.”

“
Politics are a popular interest
these days, with the star-change,” Rathe said. He found the second
paper, and handed it across, shaking his head. “Stays strictly away
from the political? I bought this off her an hour ago. I’d say you
need to do some housecleaning, if you can’t keep a printer in
line.”

Caiazzo’s lips tightened as he skimmed the paper. “I
appreciate your concern, pointsman, but I assure you it’s quite
unnecessary.”

Rathe sighed. “It would be very bad timing—I would
take it personally—if any of Agere’s astrologers, or Agere, for
that matter, were to disappear just now.”

“
Don’t tell me my business, Rathe.”
Caiazzo took a deep breath, handed the paper back. “I’m not a fool,
however many of my people are. So. Why are you really here?
Unauthorized printers aren’t your line at all, Adjunct Point,
especially when there’s something more important troubling the
city. Unless you’ve fatally annoyed your superiors at last?” He
sounded vaguely hopeful.

Rathe shook his head. “Not so far. But, as you say,
there are more important things on my mind than unlicensed printers
and politically minded astrologers. And since you—loan money—to
more than one of them, I thought I’d warn you, it could go hard if
you don’t control them better.”

“
Warning me, Nico? Not your habit
at all. You’d love to catch me dead to rights and score a point or
two off me.”

“
Wouldn’t I just,” Rathe agreed.
“But I’m more interested in finding out who’s stealing these
children, and putting a stop to it. And to tell you something I
probably oughtn’t, I don’t think you’re involved in that.” He fixed
his eyes on Caiazzo’s face, watching for any shift, any flicker of
expression that might give the trader away. “Of course, if I find
you are, it’ll just go that much harder for you. Keep your
astrologers and printers in line, Hanse. Or they’ll go down for a
lot more than the usual two months.”

“
Oh, come on, Rathe. On what
charges?”

“
Incitement to riot. Petty treason.
Possibly great treason, if this one”—he held up Agere’s sheet
touting the Palatine Marselion’s candidacy—“is any example. I could
name a few others, if I were pressed, and the judiciary will hear
all counts. Just a friendly warning, say.”

Caiazzo blinked once, and Rathe knew the warning had
been heard. The trader sighed, and turned away from the window.
“Why would I be involved with stealing children, Nico? There’s no
profit in it, not like this.”

“
I don’t know that you are,” Rathe
answered. “I’ve no reason to think you are. But you didn’t use to
dabble in politics, either.”

Caiazzo laughed, a short, harsh sound. “I still
don’t. That”—he nodded to the broadsheet still in Rathe’s
hand—“will be dealt with. Politics aren’t my business, and well you
know it. And as for these kids…people of mine, their kin anyway,
have lost children. There’s no sense in it, Nico, and that’s not a
game I’d play.”

Slowly, Rathe nodded. “I know that. So keep an eye
on your astrologers and printers, Hanse. I don’t want to be dragged
off real business to deal with them—and if I do, I’ll look a lot
closer at your businesses than I necessarily want to.”

“
I’ll bear that in mind,” Caiazzo
said, after a moment, and this time Rathe believed him.

The clerk let him out—the side door, this time—and
Rathe made his way upstream along the Sier, trying to decide what
to do next. By rights, he should go back to Point of Hopes, but at
the moment that felt unbearably useless, and instead he made his
way along the eastern docks, telling himself he was keeping his
eyes open for a pair of redheads. There was one other errand he
still needed to do—two, he added if he counted going to the
theaters in Point of Dreams, but that could wait until he had a
chance to talk to the actors who lived in the attic of his own
lodgings. They, and Gavi Jhirassi in particular, knew all the
gossip in Point of Dreams; if Foucquet’s wayward apprentice had run
away to the theaters, one of them would know. He made a face then,
heedless of the crowd of laborers busy alongside a battered-looking
caravel. That left his errand to the university, and he was hardly
eager to ask these particular questions there. But Monteia had told
him she wanted horoscopes cast for the children missing from Point
of Hopes, and they both knew what the other step should be.

The university trained necromancers, as well as
every other school of magist, and no pointsman was foolish enough
to deny the utility of a necromancer’s talent. It was just…. Rathe
allowed himself a sour smile, seeing the double light glinting off
the Sier where it curled around the piers that held the Manufactory
Bridge. It was just that none of them wanted to ask, for fear that
someone would tell them the children were indeed dead. And that was
foolishness, superstition, not reason, he told himself fiercely.
There wasn’t a necromancer in Astreiant who didn’t know perfectly
well what was going on, who wouldn’t come to the points the instant
he touched a child’s ghost. Even the rawest student knew that much,
or at worst would know to go to his teachers, so the absence of
reported ghosts could be considered a good sign. At least Istre
b’Estorr was a friend as well as a colleague.

He crossed the Sier at the Manufactory Bridge,
through the courtyard of Point of Graves that lay astride the
approach to the bridge itself. The gallows at the center of the
square was empty, and as always, a few of the Point of Graves
runners were sitting on its steps, daring each other to investigate
the trap. Rathe passed them without a second glance, aware that the
hangman’s woman was watching them from the steps of her house, and
went on through the massive gatehouse to the bridge.

b’Estorr, like most scholars, lived in University
Point, on the grounds of the university itself. He’d come to
Chenedolle as a student—necromancy was viewed with deep suspicion
in his native Chadron, not least because the kings of Chadron had
an unfortunate habit of dying untimely, and rarely by their own
hands—and had returned only briefly to serve the old king, who had
held a more liberal vision of his talents. Unfortunately, that
vision had not extended to his own nobles, and the old Fre had,
like so many of his ancestors, been assassinated. b’Estorr had
escaped back to Chenedolle, and the sanctuary of the university. He
rarely referred to his time at the Chadroni court, but Rathe,
surveying the peace of the college yard, broken only by clusters of
gargoyles and junior students in full gowns of almost the same
slate grey, couldn’t help wondering if b’Estorr missed the power he
must have had. To be a mere master, his assistance to the points
the only break in that routine, must be something of a
diminishment.

The Corporation had long ago realized that there was
little point in holding students to their normal routine during the
week of the Midsummer Fair, and the same truce seemed to hold for
the week before. Inquiring at the porter’s gate, Rathe was told
that b’Estorr was in his rooms, not at class as he’d expected, but
he made his way back across the yard without complaint. b’Estorr’s
rooms, one of the tower lodgings reserved for senior masters, were
more congenial than the cold stone classrooms, with their tiers of
wooden benches and the master’s lectern at the bottom of that
slope, like a cross between a bear pit and the public stage. He
showed his slate to the crone of a porter who guarded b’Estorr’s
building, and the woman nodded and unlatched the lower half of her
door. Rathe climbed the winding stair to the first floor, knocked
hard, knowing b’Estorr’s habits.

As he’d expected, it was a few moments before the
necromancer opened his door. He was a tall man, unusually fair for
a Chadroni, with straw blond hair and dark blue eyes, and at the
moment his fair brows were drawn into a faint puzzled frown. That
eased into a smile as he saw Rathe, and he pulled the door open
wide.

“
Nico. Come in.”

Rathe stepped into the sunlit space, and, as always,
felt a faint prickling at the base of his neck, as though the air
were cooler than it should be. Ghosts were b’Estorr’s constant
companions as well as his strongest tools; even the least sensitive
couldn’t help but be at least vaguely aware of their drifting
presence. And then he saw a trio of small bones lying on a sheet of
parchment on the polished wood of the worktable, and drew a quick
breath, trying to swallow his panic. b’Estorr saw where he was
looking, and refolded the paper over them.

“
Not what you’re
thinking.”

“
Not my business, then,” Rathe
said, and knew he sounded edgy.

“
Not the business I think you’ve
come to me about,” b’Estorr answered. “Unless you’re interested in
historical murders? These are old, it’s been a generation or two at
least since they wore flesh.”

“
When I have the time,” Rathe
answered. “When children aren’t disappearing from
Astreiant.”