Point of Dreams a-2

by Melissa Scott

  “He should not have spoken to anyone concerned with this matter,” Gausaron snapped. “No one at all.”

  “Adjunct Point Rathe came to me this morning to say that he had stumbled across evidence that Adjunct Point Voillemin had failed to fully follow–evidence that came to him in the course of other cases, and which, at this moment, seems to suggest misadventure rather than murder–and to ask me to take further action. Rathe is my senior adjunct, it is his right and duty to oversee the actions of the other pointswomen and ‑men under my authority.” Trijn glared at the regents, moderated her tone with an effort. “It is my considered opinion that he has behaved properly in this matter, and my very grave concern that Adjunct Point Voillemin has not. You yourselves would dismiss any clerk caught doing what he’s done.”

  That was a home truth, Rathe thought, seeing heads nod almost involuntarily along the line of regents.

  Gausaron frowned. “Adjunct Point Rathe acted against our express orders–”

  “To do his duty,” Trijn countered. “And he has put the matter in my hands. Isn’t that right, Adjunct Point?”

  “Yes, Chief,” Rathe said, his mouth suddenly dry. I’ve been manipulated just as neatly as the regents. I just hope I can trust her to carry through. But Trijn understood the issues, he told himself, understood why it might still be murder, would still be murder unless the plants had somehow also bound the dead man’s ghost. She wouldn’t let it go to appease a complaint that might never have happened.

  Gausaron sat back in her chair, her face without expression. “Very well, Chief Point, we will accept your explanation. But if this comes before us again, we will recommend to the Surintendant of Points that he look to his stations with a more careful eye.”

  Trijn’s gaze flickered at that, but she managed a court‑deep curtsy, her skirts almost puddling on the floor. Rathe bowed, knowing better than to copy her irony, and followed her from the room.

  She did not speak again until they reached the main hall, where the cold air seeped in from the main doors to turn the floors to ice. Rathe held the smaller winter‑door open for her, and she swept past him into the sunlight of the open square. She stopped there, squinting against the sudden brightness, and shook her head.

  “She’s going to go to Fourie, and expect him to listen to that?”

  “He might not have a choice,” Rathe answered. Of course, with Fourie, he might advance Trijn to chief at Temple Point just to infuriate the regents: one could never predict how the surintendant might react.

  “Fourie always has a choice,” Trijn answered. “That’s how he’s gotten as far as he has.” She took a breath. “I’ve backed you this far, Nico, and I expect you to help me now. Find me this formula, this recipe for a posy, and I’ll see it gets to the proper authorities at the university. I’m well aware it may still be murder, I won’t let myself be talked out of it to convenience the sister–if she even exists.”

  “And Voillemin?” Rathe asked.

  “Leave him to me.” Trijn gave a grim smile. “I will keep my eye on him, and on his handling of this matter–I’ll have him reporting to me on the hour like an apprentice, if I have to. But if the regents decide they have reason to summon you again, I may not be able to protect you.”

  Rathe nodded. He’d been lucky to get away with this much, he knew, knew, too, that he would do it again. “I’ll be careful,” he said, and Trijn’s eyes narrowed as though she would comment on the ambiguity.

  “See that you are,” she said after a moment, and lifted her hand to summon a hovering low‑flyer.

  They made it back to Point of Dreams in less than record time, and Rathe resettled himself in his workroom to retrieve Leussi’s copy of the Alphabet of Desire. It looked like most of the others, a simple octavo volume with a formula in verse on the recto and a woodcut of the finished posy on the facing page. The woodcuts were better than most of the editions he’d seen, however, good enough that he could actually recognize most of the plants in the illustrations, and he paged slowly through it, looking for the bright spikes of the trumpet flowers. They appeared in perhaps a third of the woodcuts, he saw–in fact, the corms predominated, perhaps because they could be forced in all seasons–but finally he found the page for which he was looking. The posy was labeled “for Concord” and he made a face at the irony. If a posy intended to bring peace had somehow killed… Poor Leussi, he thought, and poor Holles. He reached for a scrap of paper, began copying out the formula while he thought out what he would say. He would send it to b’Estorr, he decided–well, he’d ask Trijn to send it to b’Estorr, but there was no reason he couldn’t write the query himself. Trijn would give him that much leeway. He finished copying the formula, added a quick note asking b’Estorr either to analyze it himself or to recommend a magist who could, and took the sheets along to Trijn’s office. She scanned them without comment, but nodded, scrawling her own name below his, and added the station’s seal.

  “I’ll see this is sent,” she said. “Now, what about the theatre murders?”

  “Still waiting for Fanier’s report,” Rathe answered, and retreated to his workroom.

  The runner arrived a little after noon, not the deadhouse runner he’d been expecting, but a skinny boy on the edge of apprenticehood, his hair cut short except for the one long lovelock that aped the consorts of the bannerdames of The Drowned Island. Even if he hadn’t been wearing a badge identifying him as belonging to Point of Knives, the hair would have betrayed him, and Rathe eyed him without favor. No one among the points liked the idea that the inhabitants of the Court of the Thirty‑two Knives might take new pride in their disreputable past.

  “Well?”

  “Sorry, sir, but the chief–Head Point Mirremay thought you should be informed.”

  The boy held out a folded scrap of paper–torn from an old broadsheet, Rathe saw, unfolding it, and he flattened it deliberately on his table before he scanned the flamboyant penmanship. Flamboyant and hard to read, he amended, squinting at letters scrawled with a pen that definitely needed mending, and looked up at the boy. “And?”

  The boy seemed used to the question–as well he might be, if he had to deliver writings like this one on a daily basis, Rathe thought. He shifted his feet, hands clasped behind his back in a loose‑jointed parody of a soldier’s stance, and said, “Please, Adjunct Point, the– Head Point Mirremay says you might be interested in this complaint of Master Aconin’s.”

  Rathe glanced at the note again. With that broad hint, he could make out the gist of the note, which was that Chresta Aconin had come to Point of Knives less than an hour ago with the complaint of a theft from his rooms. Someone–he couldn’t make out the name– had been dispatched to document the complaint, and what she had found had sent her pelting back to Mirremay. And Mirremay had sent for him. He looked back at the boy. “Tell me about it.”

  The boy didn’t seem to need much encouragement, but then, runners rarely did. He bounced forward on his toes, then seemed to remember where he was, clasping his hands behind his back again. “Please, Adjunct Point, they say it was a mess, the worst anyone’s ever seen. Everything spoiled, and all his papers burned, and his coats cut up, and–” He stopped abruptly, as though remembering his dignity. “And the chief says she’d take it kindly if you’d lend a hand, seeing as you’re already dealing with the theatres.”

  “Does she think they’re connected?” Rathe asked, but he was already on his feet, reaching for his coat.

  “He’s the playwright.” The boy shrugged. “And the chief says she’d swear he knows what’s going on, but he says he doesn’t. And he doesn’t want you called in, I heard him arguing about it.”

  Sofia forgive me, but that would probably make me go even if I didn’t already think it was important. Rathe shrugged on his jerkin, grateful for the extra layer, and slipped his truncheon into his belt. “All right, my boy, let’s get on with it.”

  Point of Knives was exactly as he remembered it, a blocky, foursquare building that had onc
e been an armory. It had been rebuilt since then, and the neighborhood’s clock perched awkwardly in an afterthought of a gable, but it still turned windowless walls to the street on three sides. The windows that faced the open market Square were little more than slits along the second floor. Dark and cheerless for any pointsman who lodged there, Rathe thought, with sympathy, and noisy, with the clock gears ticking and grinding overhead night and day. I’ll lay money Mirremay lodges elsewhere.

  The doorway was thick and defensible, with old firing points hastily boarded over to keep out the chill, but it opened into a surprisingly pleasant day room smelling of herbs and only incidentally of dinner. There were a dozen mage‑lights spaced along the walls, supplemented in this cold weather by a hanging chandelier, and a pair of runners kicked their heels on a bench by the stove, each one at an end to make room for the dice and counters spread between them. A pointsman in a cracked jerkin was polishing his truncheon by the enormous empty fireplace, and a woman in last summer’s fashionable brimless cap looked up at their approach.

  “Good, you found him. Thank you for coming, Adjunct Point, the chief will be glad to see you.”

  “It sounded–intriguing,” Rathe said, and the man in the cracked jerkin looked up quickly.

  “That’s one word for it–”

  “If you’ll come with me?” the woman interrupted smoothly, and Rathe allowed himself a quick glance over his shoulder as he followed her. The pointsman’s head was down over his truncheon, and Rathe wondered what he would have said.

  Mirremay’s workroom was on the second floor, almost at the head of the narrow stairs. It wasn’t at all as he had suspected it would be like, was, instead, a comfortable room, dominated by one of the narrow windows, and Rathe cocked his head, trying to hear the dull tick of the clock through the ceiling. Mirremay herself leaned one hip on the edge of her worktable, frowning at Aconin in the visitor’s chair. She was a short, round woman, with a heart‑shaped face and knowing amber eyes, and Rathe hid a frown, remembering too late what gossip said of her. Mirremay had been the name of one of the thirty‑two knives, and before that of a bannerdame; in joining the points, Mirremay had been re‑creating a family fiefdom here on the edges of the Court. Perhaps that was the reason that the surintendant had been so reluctant to advance Point of Knives to the status of a full station: no one wanted to make a Mirremay chief point of anything, least of all Point of Knives.

  “Thanks for coming, Rathe,” she said, and Rathe nodded, grateful that she’d decided to let him avoid the awkward question of her rank.

  “I’m grateful you sent for me.”

  “Well, I’m not.” That was Aconin, still lounging in the visitor’s chair. A decorative pose, Rathe thought, but the playwright couldn’t hide the tension in his muscles. “Honestly, Mirremay, this isn’t worth his time. It’s just another theft, that’s all.”

  “And what, then, is missing?” Mirremay asked, mildly enough, but Aconin frowned.

  “How can I tell that, when you won’t let me look?”

  Rathe lifted an eyebrow, and Mirremay smiled. “Oh, yes, that’s what we have here, just another housebreaking in the Court. Except that Master Aconin can’t tell me what was stolen.”

  “I have valuables,” Aconin said. “The place was such a mess that I couldn’t tell if they were there or not.”

  “Still, it seems odd that so many things should be happening to the people involved in this thrice‑damned masque,” Mirremay said. “And I say it’s Dreams’s problem as much as mine.”

  She gave Rathe a challenging look, and the other spread his hands, automatic suspicion rising in him. No chief point, and she was that in stature if not in name, gave away cases, unless they were likely to cause more trouble than they were worth. “I couldn’t take it out of your hands, Mirremay, not without Trijn’s approval, but I am glad you called me.”

  Mirremay smiled again. “Wait till you see the rooms before you say that. And, speaking of it–”

  “Mirremay–” Aconin began, and the round woman held up her hand.

  “Don’t bother. He’s coming with us.”

  Aconin subsided at that, straightening his wig as he rose, and Mirremay reached for her own full coat. “Let’s go.”

  Aconin lived on the edges of the Court–even he hadn’t dared to move into the rookery at the center, the decayed mansion, now broken up into a hundred or more one‑room flats, where the thirty‑two knives had held their macabre reign. The pointsman Rathe had seen in the day room–Sentalen, his name was–tapped at a lower door and, when it opened a crack, spoke briefly to someone hidden in the shadows. Then she vanished again, the edge of a dark blue skirt whisking back out of sight, and Sentalen turned to Mirremay.

  “Same as before, Chief. No one’s been in or out–she says.”

  Aconin rolled his eyes, but Mirremay smiled, and started up the outside stairs. It would be a nasty climb at midwinter, Rathe thought, stepping carefully, and wondered why the playwright chose to live in this neighborhood. Probably to keep his enemies at bay, he thought, and glanced over his shoulder to see Aconin hesitating at the bottom of the stairs. That was unlike him–to give him his due, Aconin never feared the results of his attacks–and in the same instant, the playwright started after them, so quickly that Rathe wondered if he’d imagined the hesitation. But it had been real, he decided, seeing the tension in Aconin’s body, in the tightness of his hands on the narrow rail. Mirremay was right, this was no ordinary theft.

  At the top of the stairs, Mirremay paused, looked over her shoulder, and Sentalen handed up an old‑fashioned iron key. Rathe shook his head. Whoever had broken into the playwright’s room had broken the locks already–kicked it in, he guessed, from the way the frame had splintered. Mirremay worked the lock, her shoulders bunching with the effort, and the door fell open under her touch. It had been the lock itself that had been holding it, and only barely, the iron striker wedged awkwardly back into place. Mirremay caught the door as it swung on twisted hinges, then stepped back to let Rathe join her on the landing.

  The runner’s description hadn’t done it justice. Aconin’s single well‑lit room had been a pleasant enough place, but it would take days of effort just to make it habitable again. Clothes lay strewn across the floor, linings ripped out muddy, sleeves torn away, the press itself kicked in, so that the painted panel hung in splinters, and there were footprints visible on some of the better fabrics, as though whoever had done this had deliberately wiped his boots on the best the playwright owned. Both windows had been broken, the glass punched out into the street below, and the mirror–a large one, in an expensive frame–had been smashed against the bedpost, so that the torn bedclothes were strewn with broken glass. Paint pots and perfume bottles, a good dozen of them, had been emptied onto the bed as well, the containers trampled into the floorboards, and the room smelled of musk and sweetgrass. A larger paint pot, or maybe an inkwell, had been thrown to smash against the far wall, leaving a fan of black across the whitewash. One chair had been overturned and broken; the other stood forlorn beside the table, where a spray of flowers stood in an untouched vase, wilting a little, as though the destruction had shocked them. Beyond the table, the door of the stove lay open, a drift of half‑burned paper scattered across the hearth, and Rathe crossed to that, knelt to examine what was left of the writing. Some of it looked familiar, scenes from the Alphabet, and he glanced over his shoulder, to see Aconin framed in the doorway.

  “Was it like this when you found it, or did you pull it out?”

  “I pulled it out,” Aconin said. Beneath the remnants of his paint, he looked very pale. “They’d overfilled it, the damper shut down, so it was just smoldering.”

  “Lucky,” Mirremay murmured. She had come a little farther into the room, careful not to step on spilled paint or torn clothing, stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the damage with a disapproving air. She wore her skirts short, well above her ankle, and her stockings were expensively clocked.

  Ra
the nodded, turning the papers over. Aconin used the crabbed university script, all abbreviations, harder to follow even than Mirremay’s scrawl, but from the crossed‑out lines and words, and the notes scribbled in the margins, these had to be rough drafts of Aconin’s work. “This was personal,” he said, and set the papers carefully back where he’d found them.

  “I’d’ve said business,” Mirremay said.

  Rathe glanced at her as he pushed himself to his feet, brushing the ash off his fingers, and the head point met the look guilelessly. “Burning these papers, Aconin’s work, surely that’s a personal thing.”

  “I told you,” Aconin said wearily. “None of my enemies would do something like this.”

  “I thought better of your enemies,” Rathe said, and to his surprise, Aconin managed a short laugh.

  “So did I.”

  Rathe took a deep breath, willing himself to remember that this was a point, that he had a job to do no matter how he felt about Aconin. “Aconin. Less than a week ago, someone took a shot at you– did you think Philip wouldn’t tell me, when he was there? And now this. Who have you offended this time?”

  “I wish I knew.” Aconin spread his painted hands, a gesture that should have dripped sincerity. “As far as I know, this was theft, at least an attempt at it. I won’t know that until you let me see what’s missing.”

  “Not that much,” Mirremay said. She reached out with one pointed shoe, lifted the torn collar of a lavender coat. An enameled medallion tumbled free, not expensive, but certainly salable; she kicked the coat a little harder, exposing a scattering of gilt embroidery at the skirt. “Now, I grant you, that wasn’t worth much, and it might have taken too much time to cut that gold thread free, but those buttons would fetch a few demmings, and that’s just one stroke of the knife. And there’s not a thief in this city who’d smash a pretty clock like that one, not with the fences paying two or three pillars for a piece like that.”