Point of Hopes p-1

by Melissa Scott

  “Which it isn’t?”

  “Which it isn’t, at least not as far as I or Monteia can see,” Rathe said. “Anything new here?”

  Claes shook his head. “Not a thing. I’ve been keeping a watch on the caravaners, of course, but there aren’t that many in yet—more coming in every day, of course, but the stalls aren’t more than half filled. And we’re watching the ship-captains.” He shook his head again, mouth twisting into a bitter smile. “I’ve a pair of twins missing, I thought sure we’d find them on the docks—they’re river-mad, the pair of them, but they’ve got Phoebe in the Seabull’s house.”

  “Not good for travel by water,” Rathe said, and Claes nodded.

  “So you can understand they wouldn’t find a riverman willing to take them on as apprentices. But then Jaggi—Jagir, his name is, he’s one of our juniors, bright, too—he tells me the Silklanders don’t read that configuration the same way, so I thought sure we’d found them.” He sighed. “But my people have been up and down the docks and not a sign of them. No one remembers them, and you’d think someone would, a pair of identical redheaded thirteen-year-olds.”

  “Paid not to remember?” Rathe asked, without much hope.

  “By whom? Besides, there are too many people on the docks. Someone would have noticed.”

  Rathe nodded. Redhaired twins would surely be noticed. “I’ll have our people ask along the Factors’ Walk and the Rivermarket, just in case, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  “Nor will I,” Claes answered, sourly, then said, “but I would take it kindly, Rathe. Thanks. It’s just—we’ve got these printers, and then the bloody astrologers to deal with on top of it all.”

  “And about those astrologers,” Rathe began grimly. Claes lifted a hand.

  “Freelances, no temple, no training, and they’re infesting the grounds like a pack of black gargoyles,” he said. “The arbiters say they’re all right, but the Three Nations are getting mutinous. And that’s all we need, student riots, to round out a really exciting fair.”

  Rathe nodded his agreement, and the boy Guillot appeared from between a different pair of stalls, a sheaf of papers in his hand. “Sir? Were these the ones you wanted?”

  Rathe took the smeared pages from him, flipped quickly through them. Agere was a better printer than Lebrune, but she’d obviously worked in haste. The images—woodcuts, from the look of them, easily made and as easily burned, eliminating evidence—lay crooked on the page, and here and there a letter sat askew, or had been put in upside down. The message, however, was clear enough: the stars said the queen should name her heir, and the clear implication was that she should name Palatine Marselion. “These are the ones.”

  “They’ve all got a bond mark,” Guillot said.

  “Forged,” Rathe said. “Look closer.”

  The boy did as he was told, and grinned suddenly. Rathe smiled back—it took a certain sense of humor to replace the wand of justice carried by the hooded Sofia at the center of the seal with Tyrseis’s double-headed jester’s stick—and looked at Claes. “As I said, we’ll split the point with you, but it doesn’t seem the best time to be playing politics.”

  Claes nodded. “Leave Agere to me, Rathe. You catch your sellers, and we’ll be ready.”

  “Thanks,” Rathe answered, and turned away. Neither man mentioned Caiazzo: proving his involvement, that it was his coin that paid for ink and paper, would require either a stroke of luck or a major mistake on Caiazzo’s part, and that was more than anyone dared hope for at this point.

  Caiazzo lived in a low, sprawling house in the river district of Customs Point, a new-style house, not one of the old half-fortresses. Rathe ignored the discreet alley that led to the trades’ entrance and instead climbed the three broad steps that led to the main door. They were freshly washed, too, he noticed, as he let the striker fall, not just swept. But then, Caiazzo was a great believer in matching his surroundings. Rathe let his gaze run the length of the street, surveying the other houses that stood there. Caiazzo’s was exactly as well kept as the rest, his brickwork as neatly pointed, the glass in his windows no better— and no worse—than his neighbors. Strictly, geographically speaking, Customs Point was southriver, and more established merchants, even the ones who had been born here, would never dream of having their houses there. These were homes of the up-and-coming, people whose fortunes were still precarious, who still feared going back to reckoning their wealth in silver rather than gold. Caiazzo was better off than that, but he made his own rules, and he chose to live at the heart of his business, a bare five minutes’ walk from the wharves at Point of Sorrows. Which made a good deal of sense, Rathe thought, given how much of that business depends on the ability to slip goods and coin discreetly between one place and another. Caiazzo was southriver born and bred, and he hadn’t forsaken his heritage; some of his business methods were pure southriver, the sort honed and polished to perfection in the Court of the Thirty-two Knives. Not that Caiazzo was just any court thug, Rathe added silently, and kicked a piece of mud off the freshly washed stone.

  The door opened at last to reveal a young woman in a clerk’s dun suit. She looked at him inquisitively, a little dubiously, and said, “Can I help you?” She bit off the honorific, seeing the jerkin, and then her eyes widened as she saw the pointsman’s truncheon in his belt. Rathe hid a grin. Caiazzo’s people were mostly as southriver as himself; a northriver clerk, from a family of unbroken, unblemished history of service, would have a very different attitude toward any pointsman who presumed to knock at the front door.

  “Would you tell Caiazzo that Rathe, from Point of Hopes, is here to speak with him?”

  “Yes, that is…” She paused, and started over. “I’ll see if he’s in.”

  “Ah, now, we’re not going to play that game, are we? Just tell him—tell him he’ll be happier seeing me than not.” Rathe let the smile fade from his face.

  The clerk hesitated, then stepped back grudgingly to allow Rathe into the tiled hall. “Wait here,” she said, and disappeared through a side door. Rathe settled himself to wait.

  It was only a few minutes before the clerk was back, emerging onto the gallery at the top of the main staircase. “If you’ll come up,” she said, “he says he can see you now.”

  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 than 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 in just 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 bein
g 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 longdistance 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 starchange,” 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, how ever 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.