Point of Hopes (46 page)

“
I don’t print those,” Agere said
without inflection. “I’m selling them for someone else.”

That was the usual excuse, and Rathe’s lips thinned.
“Oh, Agere, couldn’t you say something I hadn’t heard a hundred
times already?”

“
I didn’t print it,” Agere snapped.
“Is it a fee you’re after? Then have the decency to say
so.”

Rathe regarded her a moment longer. She had been
right about one thing, he had no jurisdiction here. To make the
point stand he would have to fetch someone from Fairs’ Point to
make the arrest, and by the time he’d done that, Agere would simply
have disposed of the offending broadsheet. He said, “No fee for a
warning, Agere. Caiazzo’s not fond of politics—yeah, I know you
print under his coin—and there’s not a fee high enough to buy me
off when I can watch Caiazzo drop you. And then we will score you
without that counterfeit license to protect you. Have a good fair,
printer.”

He walked away, aware of the printer’s eyes burning
into him, her anger only just leashed. He turned the next corner,
blindly, found himself in the leathersellers’s quarter, and
stopped, surprised that his hands were shaking. It was one thing to
listen to the rumors, the insults, to have it told to him, but to
see it in print, in the broadsheets that were the lifeblood of
Astreiant…the plain black-and-white of the type was somehow more
threatening that any spoken accusation. Words disappeared as soon
as they were spoken, but the letters on paper stayed to haunt a
man.

He found Claes at the Fairs’ Point station, as he’d
expected presiding over the ordinary chaos of the main room with a
tankard in one hand and his truncheon in the other. Rathe
sidestepped a drunken carter, bloody-nosed and furious, and lifted
his hand to get Claes’s attention.

“
Can it wait?” the chief point
called back. “We’ve a pack of fools here who started their drinking
with the first sunrise.”

“
It’s important,” Rathe said and
waited.

Claes swore. “It had better be. You, Gasquet, take
over here, sort them down into the cells—and I’ll take it very ill
if you let them kill each other before they’ve had a chance to
sober up.” He gestured for Rathe to precede him into the station’s
counting room, and shut the heavy door behind them. Rathe blinked
in the sudden quiet, and Claes said, “So. What in Tyrseis’s name is
so important?”

“
Monteia said you were worried
about these hedge-astrologers,” Rathe said. “The freelances. I’ve
talked to the kin of our missing children. One of them, the
butcher’s girl, she got a charm from them a few days before she
disappeared, and at least three of the others probably consulted
them. The others may or may not have talked to them, but I can’t
prove they didn’t.”

Claes was silent for a long moment. “That’s thin,
Rathe. Very thin.”

“
It’s more than we’ve had before,”
Rathe answered, and the chief point sighed.

“
True. But that was nothing at
all.”

Rathe swallowed hard, banking down his irritation.
“Look,

I know it’s not much. But four of our kids who
probably talked to them—one definitely, and she got a charm from
him, which I’m taking to the university to see what the magists
make of it—gods, Claes, we can’t afford to ignore it.”

“
And I don’t intend to ignore it,”
Claes answered. “I don’t trust them, I don’t know what they’re
doing here, and they don’t charge nearly enough not to want
something besides their fees. But I can’t act on just this, and you
know it.”

Rathe nodded. “I know. But I did think, the sooner
you knew about it, the sooner you—and all of us—could start
checking on the other kids, see how many of them talked to these
astrologers before they disappeared.”

Claes grinned. “And you’re right, certainly—and,
yes, this was important, I’ll give you that. But I’d like more to
go on, Rathe, that’s all.” He waved a hand in dismissal, and Rathe
opened the workroom door.

“
I’m working on it,” he said, and
made his way back out into the streets of the fair.

Claes was right, of course. It wasn’t much to go on,
and Rathe felt his mood plummet as rapidly as it had improved. And
that, he knew, was as unreasonable as his earlier optimism. The
connection with the astrologers was still the most solid—the
only—link they had between the child-thefts; he couldn’t afford to
ignore it, or to build too much on it, at least not yet.

He made his way back through the fair by a different
route, avoiding the printers and the crowds that always filled the
leathersellers’ district, and found himself among the smaller
booths, where the smaller merchants venturer sold their mix of
goods directly. It was crowded here, too—most of the stalls carried
less expensive items, trinkets, small packets of spices, silk
thread, Chadroni ribbons, beads, the coarse southern glassware,
that even an apprentice could afford—but this year there were few
enough of them in evidence. There were few children in
general—occasionally a northriver child escorted not just by the
usual nurse, but also by an armed man or woman of the household;
more often a plain-dressed girl or boy hurrying on some errand
unable to give more than a wistful glance at the gaudy displays—and
Rathe was suddenly angry again. This was no way for a child to see
the fair, and, especially for the older ones, the ones who worked
for their keep, their mistresses’ fears were depriving them of one
of the few long holidays in the working year. Not that anyone could
afford to let their apprentices and the like have the full three
weeks of the fair completely free, of course, but most employers
tolerated a certain relaxation of standards over the course of the
fair. He himself, when he had been a runner, could remember getting
two or three days off—days to explore and spend one’s carefully
hoarded demmings on strange foods and goods from the kingdoms
beyond Chenedolle—and vying for errands that would send him near
the fairgrounds. But this year, it looked as though the average
apprentice was getting none of that.

Without consciously meaning to, his roundabout
course had brought into the center of the fairground where the
cookstalls were set up. The air was heavy with the smell of
Silklands spices, almost drowning the heavy scent of mutton stew
and the constant tang of hot, much-used oil. He threaded his way
past a gang of Leaguers, carters by their clothes, who were
monopolizing the stall of a cheerful-looking brewer, and dodged
another stall where a woman in a Silklands headscarf twirled
skewers of vegetables over a long brazier. Half a dozen children,
the first large group he’d seen, were clustered around a woman
selling fried noodles, and another pair was standing gravely in
front of a candyseller, choosing from among figures shaped like
zodiacal beasts. He checked for a moment, torn between admiration
and fear, and then made himself walk on. Heat radiated from the
open fires and he was glad to reach the edge of the cooking areas.
So, by the look of things, were most people: the spaces between the
stalls were wider here, and people stood in groups of twos and
threes, talking and eating. Rathe glanced around instinctively,
looking for any sign of the astrologers, and to his surprise
recognized a slim, dark-haired woman who stood in the shade of one
of the awnings, nibbling on a fried pastry. Cassia LaSier usually
preferred to work later in the day, when the pickings were
richer—and at the moment she seemed to be concentrating on her
meal, one hand cupped to catch anything that fell from the fragile
shell—but she might also enjoy the challenge of the noon-time
crowd. Rathe turned toward her, and she looked up sharply, her
mouth curving into a wry smile.

“
Working the fairground, Rathe? I
wouldn’t’ve thought it was your patch.”

Rathe shook his head. “It’s not. I had some errands
here.”

“
Well, that’s a relief for honest
working people,” LaSier answered, and swallowed the last of her
pastry.

“
Oh, are you working?”

“
Not if you are,” she retorted, and
Rathe allowed himself a grin.

“
Not the fair, anyway.”

“
The children?” LaSier’s eyes were
suddenly alert. “No luck, then, still?”

“
Maybe,” Rathe answered, and shook
his head at the sudden eagerness in the woman’s face. “But we’re
still having horoscopes done for the missing kids, which should
tell you how ‘maybe’ it is.”

“
Damn.” LaSier licked grease from
her fingers, wiped them discreetly on the hem of her skirt. “Are
all the stations doing it?”

“
From what Monteia says, yes.
Why?”

“
We didn’t make a formal complaint
to Sighs, of course, so I suppose I can’t complain. Still, it’d be
nice if Gavaret had the same chance of being found as the
others.”

It would, and it would be more than nice, Rathe
thought, it would be the only fair thing to do. The Cordiere child
might grow into a serious nuisance to the points, but he certainly
had the right to live that long. He said, “He’s as entitled as
anyone, but he’d have to know his stars pretty closely for it to be
much help.”

“
But he did,” LaSier said, and
corrected herself. “He does. And they were good for our line of
work, let me tell you—who’d want an apprentice who was born to be
hanged, right?” She shook her head in regret. “No, Gavaret knows
his nativity, and he revels in it.”

“
Do you know it?” Rathe
asked.

LaSier gave him a sidelong glance. “Thought you said
you weren’t working.”

“
Thought I said yes, on the
children.” Rathe sighed. “I can take it for you, off the books,
though why I’d want your apprentice found is beyond me.”

“
And a damn dull world it would be
without us,” LaSier answered. “He was born on Midsummer Eve
fourteen years ago, in Dhenin. He crowned at midnight, his mother
told him, and was born at the half-hour stroke.”

Rathe made the note in his tablets. Midsummer was a
major day; any half-competent astrologer—anyone who owned an
ephemeris, for that matter—could calculate the full nativity from
what LaSier had told him. “Born under Tyrseis,” he said aloud, “and
the Gargoyle. How appropriate.”

LaSier grinned. “And not born to hang.”

“
We don’t hang pickpockets,
Cassia,” Rathe said.

“
I know.” She looked down, brushed
a few crumbs from her bodice. “Well, good luck, Nico. You’ll need
it.”

“
Thanks. I’ll let you know if we
find anything.”

“
Oh, yes. Good luck with that,
too,” she answered, and turned away. Rathe watched her go, the slim
figure with its waterfall of black hair soon lost in the crowd. It
was rare enough for one of the ’Serry’s inhabitants to wish any
pointsman well, and he was grateful for the gesture. He glanced
again at the notation in his tablets—one more reason to visit
b’Estorr—and replaced them in his pocket. Gavaret Cordiere was a
child like thousands other southriver, and like so many of them, he
would find his livelihood in the ’Serry or the Court, maybe lodge
with the points more than once, maybe live to old age, or more
likely die at the hand of a rival or the wrong victim. Except that
Gavaret Cordiere knew his nativity, and those stars marked him as
appropriate for an apprenticeship with the Quentiers, a step up in
the world, by the ’Serry’s reckoning, at any rate. Rathe had never
quite realized before just how similar their family business was to
the more conventional guilds. He shrugged to himself. It made
sense, in any business: why take on anyone born to fail at this
line of work? Though, of course, a person’s desire didn’t always
run in tandem with their stars, and the stars didn’t guarantee,
they merely indicated…. Those were the phrases one learned in dame
school, and he shook them away.

A flutter of black caught his eye, and he looked
sideways to see a figure in dark robes moving slowly across the
central space, occasionally nodding to a passerby. Rathe tensed,
ready to call for assistance, then hesitated. The robes might be
black, might mark one of the astrologers, but they might also be
dark grey, and the man just another university student adding to a
limited income. He started after the man, but a whistle sounded
shrill and imperious, and he stopped abruptly as a trash wagon
rumbled past, cutting off his view of the stranger and bathing him
in its sour stench. He dodged around it, nose wrinkling, but the
man was nowhere to be seen. He swore under his breath, scanning the
crowd a final time, then turned toward the bright blue pennants
that marked the tents where the Temple of Astree was acting as
arbiter of the fair. Maybe the arbiters will listen, he thought,
even if Claes can’t act. At the very least, they should be
warned.

The other temples had set up their booths around
Astree’s tents, some under Areton’s shield for changing money, some
offering horoscopes, a few, like the Demeans, offering
certification of foreign goods. This part of the fair was the
busiest yet, and Rathe had to work his way through a solid crowd
before he could reach the arbiters’ tents. Their flaps were drawn
closed though muffled voices leaked through the heavy cloth, and a
tall woman whose coat bore the wheel-and-web badge of Astree was
shaking her head at a pair of women who carried a basket. The two
women stalked away, obviously angry, and the first woman looked at
Rathe. “Can I help you, pointsman? As you can see,
we’re—occupied—at the moment….”

“
It’s not business,” Rathe said,
“or not that kind of business. But I’d like to speak to a senior
arbiter, if one’s free.”