Point of Hopes (2 page)

“
Maseigne?” The man who peered
around the edge of the door tipped his head to one side like one of
the fat gargoyles that infested the manor’s upper stories. “I hope
everything’s all right—she, that so-called magist, is hardly a
cultured person. Hardly someone one would choose to handle such a
delicate business—” He saw the landame’s eyebrows lift at that, and
added, “If one had had other options, of course. I thank my stars
I’ve been able to offer some assistance there.”

“
And I’m grateful,” the landame
said, with only the slightest hesitation. She placed the box back
into the cabinet, set the estate’s charter back against it, then
closed the double door and re-locked it.

The man straightened his head. He had discarded his
usual robe for the duration of the magist’s visit, wore a slightly
out-of-fashion suit, his linen fussily gathered at neck and
sleeves, cravat fastened in a style too young for his sixty years.
“I take it all went well, maseigne? She had no suspicions?”

“
I don’t think so.” The landame
shook her head, her lip curling. “No, I’m sure not. All she wanted
was the money.”

The old man nodded, his ready smile answering her
contempt. “Good. Excellent, maseigne, and I understand she’s
leaving tomorrow?”

“
Yes.”

“
Better still,” the man said, and
rubbed his hands together. “And she said nothing? No mention of the
clocks, or the—well, of your investments?”

The things she had sold to finance his work, he
meant, and she knew it perfectly well. A faint frown crossed her
brow, but she said only, “No, nothing. As I said.”

“
Of course, maseigne, forgive my
concern. But things are delicately balanced just now, and I
wouldn’t want to take any unnecessary chances—”

“
No,” the landame said firmly. “No
more do I. But she said nothing.” Fleetingly, she remembered the
way the other woman had looked around the outer room, the way her
eyes had run over the silver and the wax candles and the blown
glass, but shook the memory away. The magist had seen only the
proper signs of wealth and standing; there was nothing to make her
suspicious.

“
Even about the clocks?” the man
continued. He saw the landame’s frown deepen to a scowl, and spread
his hands, ducking his head in apology. “Forgive me, maseigne, but
she is a magist, and that is the one thing that might rouse her
suspicions. And we cannot afford that, not yet.”

“
She said nothing,” the landame
said, again. “And I didn’t see any indication that she’d noticed
anything.” In spite of herself, her eyes strayed to the empty spot
on the shelf, imperfectly filled by a statue of a young man with a
bunch of grapes, where her own case-clock had once stood. “My
people aren’t exactly pleased by that, you know. The clock in
Anedelle is too far away, they tell me, they can barely hear the
chime unless the wind’s in the right quarter—”

The man held up his hand, and the landame checked
herself. “Maseigne, I know. But it is necessary, I give you my word
on it. To have clocks in the house now would—well, it would offer
too many chances of revealing our plans ahead of time, and that
would never do.”

The landame sighed. She was no magist, knew no more
of those arts than most people—less, if the truth were told; her
education had been neglected, and in her less proud moments, she
admitted it. If he said he couldn’t work while there were clocks in
the house, well, she would have to rely on him. “Very well,” she
said, but the man heard the doubt in her voice.

“
Maseigne, what can I do to
convince you? I only want what you want, the accession of a proper
queen to the throne of Chenedolle, and an end to the erosion of
noble privilege. And I assure you, if the clocks—and very, fine
clocks they were, too, which is part of the problem—if they had
stayed in the manor, our plan would be betrayed as soon as I begin
the first operations. They cannot remain—and none can be brought
back into the household, not by anyone, maseigne. Otherwise, I
cannot offer you my services.”

His tone was as deferential as always, eager, even,
but the landame heard the veiled threat beneath his fawning. “Very
well, I said. There will be no clocks in the house.”

“
Thank you, maseigne, I knew you
would understand.” The man bowed deeply, folding his hands in front
of him as though he still wore his magist’s robes. “I think, then,
that I can promise you every success.”

“
I trust so,” the landame said,
grimly.

“
I assure you, maseigne,” the man
answered. “The time is propitious. I cannot fail.”

It was, they all agreed later, a fair measure of
Rathe’s luck that he was the one on duty when the butcher came to
report his missing apprentice. It was past noon, a hot day, toward
the middle of the Sedeion and the start of the Gargoyle Moon, and
the winter-sun was just rising, throwing its second, paler shadows
across the well-scrubbed floor of Point of Hopes. Rathe stared
moodily at the patterns thrown by the barred windows, and debated
adding another handful of herbs to the stove. The fire was banked
to the minimum necessary to warm the pointsmen’s food but the heat
rolled out from it in waves, bringing with it the scent of a
hundred boiled dinners. Jans Ranazy, the other pointsman officially
on this watch, had decided to pay for a meal at the nearest tavern
rather than stand the heat another minute, and Rathe could hardly
blame him. He wrinkled his nose as a particularly fragrant wave
struck him—the sharp sweet scent of starfire warring with the dank
smell of cabbages—but decided that anything more would only make it
worse.

He sighed and turned his attention to the station
daybook that lay open on the heavy work table in front of him,
skimming through the neat listing of the previous day’s
occurrences. Nothing much, or at least nothing out of the ordinary:
this was the fair season, coming up on the great Midsummer Fair
itself, and there were the usual complaints of false weight and
measure, and of tainted or misrepresented goods. And, of course,
the runaways. There were always runaways in the rising summer, when
the winter-sun shone until midnight, and the roads were clear and
open and crowded enough with other travelers to present at least
the illusion of safety. And the Silklanders and Leaguers were
hiring all through the summer fairs, looking for unskilled hands to
man their boats and their caravans, and everyone knew of the
merchants—maybe half a dozen over three generations, men and women
with shops in the Mercandry now, and gold in their strongboxes,
people who counted their wealth in great crowns—who’d begun their
careers running off to sea or to the highways.

Rathe sighed again, and flipped back through the
book, checking the list. Eight runaways reported so far, two
apprentices—both with the brewers, no surprises there; the work was
hard and their particular master notoriously strict—and the rest
laborers from the neighborhoods around Point of Hopes, Point of
Knives, Docks’ Point, even Coper’s Point to the south. Most of them
had worked for their own kin, which might explain a lot—but still,
Rathe thought, they’re starting early this year. It lacked a week
of Midsummer; usually the largest number took off during the
Midsummer Fair itself.

A bell sounded from the gate that led into the
stable yard, and then another from above the main door, which lay
open to the yard. Rathe looked up, and the room went dark as a
shape briefly filled the doorway. The man stepped inside, and stood
for a moment blinking as his eyes adjusted to the light. He was
big, tall, and heavy-bellied beneath a workingman’s half-coat, but
the material was good, as was the shirt beneath it, and as he
turned, Rathe saw the badge of a guildmaster in the big man’s
cap.

“
Help you, master?” he asked, and
the big man turned, still blinking in the relative
darkness.

“
Pointsman?” He took a few steps
toward the table. “I’m here to report a missing
apprentice.”

Rathe nodded, repressing his automatic response, and
kicked a stool away from the table. “Have a seat, master, and tell
me all about it.”

The big man sat down cautiously. Up close, he looked
even bigger, with a jowled, heat-reddened face and lines that could
mean temper or self-importance bracketing his mouth and creasing
his forehead. Rathe looked him over dispassionately, ready to
dismiss this as another case of an apprentice seizing the chance to
get out of an unsatisfactory contract, when he saw the emblem on
the badge pinned to the man’s close-fitting cap. Toncarle, son of
Metenere, strode crude but unmistakable across the silver oval,
knives upheld: the man was a butcher, and that changed everything.
The Butchers’ Guild wasn’t the richest guild in Astreiant, but it
was affiliated with the Herbalists and the scholar-priests of
Metenere, and that meant its apprentices learned more than just
their craft. An apprentice would have to be a fool—or badly
mistreated—to leave that place.

The big man had seen the change of expression, faint
as it was, and a wry smile crossed his face. “Ay, I’m with the
Butchers, pointsman. Bonfais Mailet.”

“
Nicolas Rathe. Adjunct point,”
Rathe answered automatically. He should have known, or guessed, he
thought. They weren’t far from the Street of Knives, and that was
named for the dozen or so butcher’s halls that dominated the
neighborhood. “You said you were missing an apprentice, Master
Mailet?”

Mailet nodded. “Her name’s Herisse Robion. She’s
been my prentice for two years now.”

“
That makes her, what, twelve,
thirteen?” Rathe asked, scribbling the name into the daybook.
“Herisse—that’s a Chadroni name, isn’t it?”

“
Twelve,” Mailet answered. “And
yes, the name’s Chadroni, but she’s city-born and bred. I think her
mother’s kin were from the north, but that’s a long time
back.”

“
So she wouldn’t have been running
to them?” Rathe asked, and added the age.

“
I doubt it.” Mailet leaned forward
planting both elbows on the table. A faint smell rose from his
clothes, not unpleasant, but naggingly familiar. Rathe frowned
slightly, trying to place it, and then remembered: fresh-cut
peppers and summer gourds, the cool green tang of the sliced flesh.
It was harvest time for those crops, and butchers all across the
city would be carving them for the magists to preserve. He shook
the thought away, and drew a sheet of paper from the writing
box.

“
Tell me what happened.”

“
She’s gone.” Mailet spread his
hands. “She was there last night at bedtime, or so Sabadie—that’s
my journeyman, one of them, anyway, the one in charge of the
girl-prentices—so Sabadie swears to me. And then this morning, when
they went to the benches, I saw hers was empty. The other girls
admitted she wasn’t at breakfast, and her bed was made before they
were up, but Herisse was always an early riser, so none of them
said anything, to me or to Sabadie. But when she wasn’t at her
bench, well…I came to you.”

Rathe eyed him warily, wondering how best to phrase
his question. “She’s only been gone a few hours,” he began at last,
“not even a full day. Are—is it possible she went out to meet
someone, and somehow was delayed?”

Mailet nodded. “And I think she’s hurt, or otherwise
in trouble. My wife and I, after we got the prentices to work, we
went up and searched her things. All her clothes are there, and her
books. She wasn’t planning to be gone so long, of that I’m certain.
She knows the work we had to do today, she wouldn’t have missed it
without sending us word if she could.”

Rathe nodded back, impressed in spite of himself.
Even if Mailet were as choleric as he looked, a place in the
Butchers’ Guild—an apprenticeship that taught you reading and
ciphering and the use of an almanac, and set you on the road to a
prosperous mastership—wasn’t to be given up because of a little
temper. “Had she friends outside your house?” he asked, and set the
paper aside. “Or family, maybe?” He pushed himself up out of his
chair and Mailet copied him, his movements oddly helpless for such
a big man.

“
An aunt paid her fees,” Mailet
said, “but I heard she was dead this past winter. The rest of
them—well, I’d call them useless, and Herisse didn’t seem
particularly fond of them.”

Rathe crossed to the wall where his jerkin hung with
the rest of the station’s equipment, and shrugged himself into the
stiff leather. His truncheon hung beneath it, and he belted it into
place, running his thumb idly over the crowned tower at its top.
“Do you know where they live?”

“
Point of Sighs, somewhere,” Mailet
answered. “Sabadie might know, or one of the girls.”

“
I’ll ask them, then,” Rathe said.
“Gaucelm!”

There was a little pause, and then the younger of
the station’s two apprentices appeared in the doorway. “Master
Nico?”

“
Is Asheri about, or is it just
you?”

“
She’s by the stable.”

Asheri was one of half a dozen neighborhood
children, now growing into gawky adolescence, who ran errands for
the point station. “I’m off with Master Mailet here, about a
missing apprentice—not a runaway, it looks like. I’m sending Asheri
for Ranazy, you’ll man the station until he gets here.”

Gaucelm’s eyes widened—he was young still, and
hadn’t stood a nightwatch, much less handled the day shift
alone—but he managed a creditably off-hand nod. “Yes, Master
Nico.”