Point of Hopes (5 page)

Rathe nodded, oddly touched by the offer. Besides,
this was the kind of fee that he didn’t refuse, the trade of favor
for favor within the law. “I’ll bear that in mind, Cassia, thanks.
But let’s see what I find out, first.”

“
Agreed,” LaSier said, and turned
away. She called over her shoulder, “See you at the
fair!”

“
You’d better hope not,” Rathe
answered, and started back toward Point of Hopes.

Monteia was waiting for him, the youngest of the
runners informed him as soon as he stepped through the courtyard
gate. The duty point, Ranazy, repeated the same message when he
opened the hall door, and in the same moment Monteia herself
appeared in the door of the chief point’s office.

“
Rathe. I need to talk to
you.”

Rathe suppressed a sigh—it was very like Monteia to
make one feel guilty even when one had been doing one’s duty—but
shrugged out of his jerkin, hanging it on the wall pegs as he
passed behind Ranazy’s desk. “And I need to talk to you, too,” he
said, and followed Monteia into the narrow room.

It was dark, the one narrow window looking onto the
rear yard’s shadiest corner, and crowded with the chief point’s
work table and a brace of battered chairs. The walls were lined
with shelves that held station’s daybooks and a once handsome set
of the city law books, as well as a stack of the slates everyone
used for notes and a selection of unlicensed broadsides stacked on
a lower shelf. The latest of those, Rathe saw, with some relief,
was over a moon-month old: hardly current business.

“
Have a seat,” Monteia said, and
waved vaguely at the chairs on the far side of her
table.

Rathe took the darker of the two—the other had been
salvaged from someone’s house, and mended, not reliably—and settled
himself.

“
I hear you had another runaway
today,” Monteia went on. She was a tall woman, with a face like a
mournful horse and dark brown eyes that looked almost black in the
dim light. Her clothes hung loose on her thin frame, utterly
unmemorable, if one didn’t see the truncheon that swung at her
belt.

Rathe nodded. “Only I don’t think it was a runaway.
The girl seemed happy in her work.”

“
Oh?” It was hard to tell,
sometimes, if Monteia was being skeptical, or merely tired.
Quickly, Rathe ran through the story, starting with the butcher’s
arrival, and ending with his visit to the ’Serry and the Quentiers’
missing boy. When he had finished, Monteia leaned back in her
chair, arms folded, long legs stretched out beneath the table.
Looking down, Rathe could see the tip of her shoe protruding from
beneath the table, could see, too, the string of cheap braid that
hid the mark where the hem had been lengthened for her. Monteia
might be chief point, but she was honest enough, in her way, and
had children and a household of her own to keep.

“
How many runaways is that so far
this season?” she asked, after a moment.

“
I could check the daybook to be
sure,” Rathe answered, “but I’m pretty sure we’ve had eight
reported. Nine if you count Herisse, but I want to treat that as an
abduction. And of course the Cordiere boy, but that’s not our
jurisdiction.” Monteia nodded.

“
Of the eight, then, two were
apprentices, both brewers, and the rest ordinary labor,” Rathe
continued. “That’s a lot for so early—the first of the Silklands
caravans are only just in, and the trading ships haven’t really
started yet.”

Monteia said, “We had the points’ dinner last
night.” Rathe blinked, unsure where this was leading—the chief
points of the twelve point stations that policed Astreiant dined
together once every solar month, ostensibly to exchange
information, but more to help establish the points’ legitimacy by
behaving like any other guild. The points were relatively new, at
least in their present form; it had been the queen’s grandmother
who’d given them the authority to enforce the laws, and not
everyone was happy with the new system.

Monteia smiled as though she’d guessed the thought,
showing her crooked teeth. “We’re not the only station to be seeing
too many runaways, too early. I went planning to ask a few discreet
questions, see what everybody else was doing this season, and, by
the gods, so was everyone else. So we did a little horse-trading,
and I got some useful information, I think.”

Rathe nodded. He could imagine the scene, the long
table and the polished paneling of a high-priced inn’s best room,
candles on the table to supplement the winter-sun’s diminished
light. The chief points would all be in their best, a round dozen
men and women—six of each at the moment, all with Sofia, Astree, or
Phoebe, the Pillars of Justice, strong in their nativity—sitting in
order of precedence, from Temple Point at the head of the table to
Fairs’ Point at the foot. He had met all of them at one time or
another, as Monteia’s senior adjunct, but really only knew Dechaix
of Point of Dreams and Astarac of Point of Sighs, the jurisdictions
that bordered Point of Hopes, at all well. And Guillen Claes of
Fairs’ Point, he added, with an inward smile. Claes was a solid
pointsman, had come up through the ranks, and took no nonsense from
anyone, for all that he had the unenviable job of handling the
busiest and most junior point station in the city. Most of the
southriver points got to know Claes well over the course of their
careers, as the professional criminals who lived southriver,
pickpockets like the Quentiers and horse-thieves and footpads and
the rest, tended to do their business in Fairs’ Point.

“
Everyone’s got an unusual number
of runaways this year,” Monteia said. “What’s more to the point,
there are as many, or nearly so, missing from City Point as there
are from Fairs’ Point.”

Rathe looked up sharply at that. City Point was one
of the old districts, second in precedence only to Temple Point
itself; children born in City Point were among the least likely to
be lured away by the romance of the long-distance traders—or, if
they were, they had mothers who could afford to apprentice them
properly. Fairs’ Point children, on the other hand, had not only
the proximity of New Fair and Little Fair to tempt them, but good
cause to want to better themselves.

Monteia nodded. “Aize Lissinain, she’s chief at City
Point since the beginning of Lepidas, was asking if we’d had any
increase in the brothel traffic.”

“
Trust northriver to think of
that,” Rathe said, sourly.

“
She was also asking Huyser how the
workhouses were doing,” Monteia went on, and Rathe made a face that
stopped short of apology. Huyser was chief of Manufactory Point; as
the name implied, most of the city’s workhouses and manufactories
lay in his district, and there were always complaints about the way
the merchant-makers treated their day-workers. It was a good
question—as was the one about the brothels, he admitted—so maybe
Lissinain would be better than her predecessor.

“
What did Huyser say?” he asked. “I
was thinking that myself. Children are cheap.”

“
But I wouldn’t want them working
with machinery,” Monteia answered. “Too much chance of them
breaking something. Anyway, Huyser said he was having as much of a
problem with runaways as anyone, though not from the manufactories
proper. He hadn’t heard of any of the makers letting workers go, or
hiring new, for that matter, but he said he’d look into it.” She
smiled, wry this time. “And Hearts and Dreams and I said we’d take
a look round the brothels, just to be sure.”

Rathe nodded again. “It’s a reasonable precaution.
We might even find one or two of them, at that.”

“
Mmm.” Monteia didn’t sound
particularly hopeful, either, and Rathe sighed.

“
Does anyone know just how many
children have gone missing?”

“
Temple’s asked us each to compile
a list for her, children missing and found, to be cross-checked by
her people just in case we’ve found some of them and don’t know it,
and then circulated around the points for general use.” She made a
face. “I can’t say I’m particularly happy with the idea,
myself—Temple’s always looking for an excuse to stick her fingers
in the rest of us’s business—but I think she’s probably right, this
time.”

“
It could help,” Rathe said. “As
long as everyone gets listed. Did she say just the missing, or all
the runaways?”

“
Anyone reported missing,” Monteia
answered. She grimaced. “I know, you’re thinking the same thing I
am, some of them won’t list everyone—it’s embarrassing, gods, I’m
embarrassed myself. But it’s a start.”

“
Agreed,” Rathe said. “But then
what?”

Monteia shook her head. “I wish I knew. This isn’t
right, Nico. It feels…I don’t know, all wrong somehow. Kids
disappear, sure, but not like this, not from everywhere. I was
junior adjunct here when Rancon Paynor raped those girls, took them
right off their own streets at twilight—it was spring then, right
at the end of Limax, the suns were setting together. I remember
what it felt like, and it wasn’t like this.”

“
No,” Rathe said, and they sat in
silence for a moment. He remembered the Paynor case, too, though he
always counted the year by the lunar calendar, remembered it as the
middle of the Flower Moon. There had been the victims, for one
thing, the girls themselves; they’d disappeared for a day, two, but
appeared again—and we were just lucky they weren’t bodies, he added
to himself. People had been afraid. The women and girls had
traveled in groups for weeks, even after it became clear that
Paynor had disappeared, but it had been clear that something had
happened. Not like this, when they couldn’t even put a name to what
was happening. “I suppose no one’s found any bodies,” he said
aloud, and surprised a short, humorless laugh from the chief
point.

“
Not so far. Though if they went in
the Sier…the river doesn’t give up its dead easily.”

“
But why?” Rathe shook his head
again. “One madman, another Paynor, making his kills, yeah, I could
believe it, but not with so many kids gone from so many districts.
One man alone couldn’t do it.”

“
Or woman, I suppose,” Monteia
said, “if her stars were bad.”

“
But not one person alone,” Rathe
repeated.

Monteia sighed. “We don’t know enough yet, Nico, we
can’t even say that for certain.” She straightened, drawing her
feet back under the desk. “I want you to draw up the report—get in
a scrivener to do fair copies, I don’t want to waste any more of
your time than I have to, but get it done by tomorrow. We’ll know
better where we stand once the compilation comes in.”

“
All right.” Rathe stood up,
recognizing his dismissal. “With your permission, boss, I’ll make a
few inquiries northriver, just in case the Quentiers’ boy ended up
in the cells there.”

“
Go ahead,” Monteia said. “That’d
be all we need, to get the ’Serry really roused against
us.”

“
People are going to talk,” Rathe
said.

“
They’re already talking,” Monteia
answered. “At least, northriver they are. Oh, when you go back to
the butcher’s, get the girl’s nativity from him.”

Rathe stopped in the doorway, looked back at her.
“You’re going to go to the university?”

“
Do you have any other
leads?”

“
No.” Rathe sighed. “No, I don’t.”
Usually, a judicial horoscope was the last resort, something to be
tried when all other possibilities had been exhausted; even the
best astrologers could only offer possibilities, not certainties,
when asked to do a forensic reading.

“
And I’m going to talk to the
necromancers, too, see if any ghosts have turned up. You’ve a
friend in their college, don’t you?”

Rathe winced at the thought—bad enough to be a
necromancer, constantly surrounded by the spirits of the untimely
dead, worse still if it were children’s ghosts—but nodded. “Istre
b’Estorr, his name is. He’s very good.”

Monteia nodded. “I’ve got a nasty feeling about this
one, Nico,” she said, her voice almost too soft to be heard.

“
So do I,” Rathe answered, and
stepped back into the main room to collect the station’s daybooks
and begin the list of missing children.

The last muster was nearly over. Philip Eslingen eyed
the lines at the rickety tables set up by the regimental
paymasters, making sure his own troopers got their proper measure,
and mentally tallied his own wages. His pay, a single royal crown,
rested in his money bag beneath his shirt, a soft weight against
his heart; he was carrying letters on the temples of Areton that
totaled nearly four pillars, his share of the one raiding party:
enough for a common man to live for a year, if he were frugal. It
should certainly last him until spring, when the new campaigns
began—unless, of course, someone reputable was hiring. Whatever he
did, it would mean taking a lower place than the one he’d had.

His eyes strayed to the temporary platform, empty
now, but bright with banners and heavy patterned carpets, where the
Queen of Chenedolle had stood to receive the salute of Coindarel’s
Dragons and to release them from her service. Even from his place
at the front with the rest of the regiment’s officers, Eslingen had
been able to see little more of her than her elegant suit of
clothes, bright and stiff as the little dolls that stood before the
royal judges in the outlying provinces, visible symbols of the
royal authority. The dolls were faceless, for safety’s sake; for
all Eslingen had been able to see, the queen herself might have
been as faceless, her features completely hidden by the brim of a
hat banded with the royal circlet. He had watched her when he
could, fascinated—he had never seen the Queen of Chenedolle—but she
had barely seemed real. Only once, as he brought his half of the
company to a perfect halt, had he seen her move, and then she had
leaned sideways to talk to the Mareschale de Mourel who was her
leman and acknowledged favorite, a gloved hand lifted to her
shadowed face, as though to hide—a smile? A frown? It was
impossible even to guess.