Point of Hopes (11 page)

There were no chopping blocks on the street today,
or apprentices showing off for the servant girls, though the
shutters were down and he could see customers within. He paused
outside the doorway to let a matron pass, a covered basket tucked
under her arm, then stepped into the shop. The journeyman Grosejl
was working behind the counter, along with a boy apprentice. She
looked up sharply at his approach, hope warring with fear in her
pale face, and Rathe shook his head. “No word,” he said and she
gave a visible sigh.

“
Enas, finish what you’re doing and
run tell Master Mailet that the pointsman’s here.” She forced a
smile, painfully too bright, to Rathe’s eyes, and passed a neatly
wrapped package across the countertop. “There you are, Marritgen,
that’ll be a spider and a half.”

The woman—she had the look of a householder, gravely
dressed—fumbled beneath her apron and finally produced a handful of
demmings. She counted out five of them, Grosejl watching narrowly,
and slid them across the countertop. Grosejl took them, gave a
little half bow.

“
Thanks, Marritgen. Metenere go
with you.”

The woman muttered something in answer, and slipped
out through the door. The other customers had vanished, too, and
Grosejl made a face.

“
They’ll be back,” Rathe said. He
was used to the effect he had on even honest folk, but the
journeyman shook her head.

“
It’s a sad thing, pointsman, when
they’re half blaming us for Herisse vanishing. There’s regular
customers who won’t come near us, like it was a disease, or
something.”

There was nothing Rathe could say to that, and
Grosejl seemed to realize it, looked away. “I’m sorry. There’s
still nothing?”

“
Nothing of use,” Rathe answered,
as gently as he could. “We’re still looking.”

“
No body, though,” she said, with
an attempt at a smile, and Mailet spoke from the
doorway.

“
That just means they haven’t found
it. Well, pointsman, what do you want this time?”

“
I need some more information from
you,” Rathe said, and took a tight hold of his temper. “And for
what it’s worth, which is quite a lot, in actual fact, we don’t
have ghosts, either. Which means they’re probably not
dead.”

“
They?” Grosejl said.

Mailet grunted. “Hadn’t you heard, girl? We’re not
the only ones suffering. There’re children missing all over this
city.” He looked at Rathe without particular fondness. “Come on
back, if you want to talk. My records are within.”

“
Thanks,” Rathe said and followed
him through the narrow door into the main part of the hall. This
time, Mailet led him into the counting room, tucked in between the
main workroom and the stairs that led to the living quarters on the
upper floors. It was a comfortable, well-lit space, with
diamond-paned windows that gave onto the narrow garden—not much of
a garden, Rathe thought, just a few kitchen herbs and a
ragged-looking stand of save-all, but then, a dozen apprentices
would tend to beat down all but the most determinedly defended
plants. There were candles as thick as a woman’s ankle on sturdy
tripod dishes, unlit now but ready for the failing light, and an
abacus and a counting board lay on the main table. A ledger was
propped on the slanting lectern, and there were more books, heavy
plain-bound account books and ledgers, locked in the cabinet beside
the door.

“
You said you wanted information,”
Mailet said and lowered himself with a grunt into the chair behind
the table. An embroidered pillow, incongruously bright, lay against
the chair’s back, and the butcher adjusted it with an absent
grimace, tucking it into the hollow of his spine. A bad back, Rathe
guessed an occupational hazard leaning over the chopping blocks all
day.

“
That’s right,” he said aloud. “My
chief wants to know if you have Herisse’s nativity in your
records.”

Mailet’s head lifted, more than ever like a baited
bull. Rathe met his gaze squarely, and saw the master swallow his
temper with a visible effort. “I have it,” he said at last. “I take
it this means you don’t have the faintest idea what’s
happened.”

“
I’ve found two people who might
have seen her,” Rathe said and took tight hold of his own temper in
his turn. “But their stories don’t match, and I don’t have a way to
test who’s mistaken.” .

“
Or lying.”

“
Or lying,” Rathe agreed. “But I
don’t have reason to think that yet, either. We’re not giving up,
though.”

“
Well, I have some news for you,”
Mailet said. “Some oddness that’s come to my ears. My neighbor
Follet brought me the word yesterday, I’ve been trying to decide
what to do with it. But since you’re here…” He shook himself, went
on more briskly. “Follet knows Herisse is missing—everyone does, we
passed the word through the guild—and he told me one of his
journeymen was out drinking the other night, at the Old Brown Dog.
Do you know the place?”

Rathe nodded. “I know it.”

Mailet grunted. “Then you know the woman who runs
it, too.”

“
Devynck’s not a bad sort,” Rathe
said, mildly. “Honest of her kind.”

“
Which isn’t saying much,” Mailet
retorted. He leaned forward, planting both elbows firmly on the
tabletop. “But that’s neither here nor there, pointsman. What is
important is what Paas—that’s Follet’s journeyman—heard there.
There were two soldiers drinking, Leaguers, and they were talking
about the missing children. And one of them was saying, if he
couldn’t find a company, how could some half-trained butcher’s
brat?”

“
He’d heard of the disappearance,
then?” Rathe asked, after a moment. It was an interesting remark,
and certainly suggestive considering how most of Devynck’s
neighbors felt about the League, but hardly solid enough to be
called evidence, or even a lead.

“
If he had, would I be bothering
you with it?” Mailet said. “He couldn’t’ve done, you see, he swore
he’d just arrived in the city today.”

“
So this Paas confronted him,”
Rathe said.

Mailet looked away. “He was drunk, Follet said, the
soldier put him out—and neatly, too, I’ll give him that, no
violence offered.” He looked up again. “And that, pointsman, is why
I didn’t come to you at once. But since you’re here, I thought I
might as well tell you. Devynck’s a bad lot, and there are worse
who drink in her house.”

“
I’ll make inquiries,” Rathe said.
And I will, too: convenient, being bound there anyway. It’s not
much to go on, but it’s something. I wonder if he’s the new knife
Monteia was talking about?

“
And you still want Herisse’s
nativity,” Mailet said. He sighed and pushed himself to his feet,
crossed to the cabinet that held the hall’s books. He fished in his
pocket for his keys on their long chain—gold, Rathe noted, from
long habit, a good chain worth half a year’s wages for a poor
woman—and unlocked the cabinet, then ran his finger along the
books’ spines until he found the volume he wanted. He brought it
back to the table and reseated himself, folding his hands on top of
the cover. “And what do you want it for?”

“
We intend to ask an astrologer to
cast her horoscope for us,” Rathe answered. “For her on the day she
disappeared, and for her current prospects.” Knowledge of the
girl’s stars would also be helpful if they had to locate a body, or
to identify one long dead, but there was no need to mention those
possibilities just yet. Mailet would have thought of them on his
own, in any case.

“
That’s not likely to do you much
good,” Mailet grumbled.

Rathe said nothing—he knew that as well as anyone;
it was axiomatic in dealing with astrologers that as the focus of
the question narrowed the certainties became smaller—and the
butcher sighed, and opened the book. He flipped through the pages,
scowling now at the lines of ink that were fading already from
black to dark brown, finally stopped on a page close to the end.
“Here. This is her indenture, her chart’s there at the bottom of
the page.”

Rathe pulled out his tablet, and swung the ledger
toward him to copy the neat diagram. It was, he admitted silently,
almost certain to be an exercise in futility. Most southriver
children knew the date and the place of their birth, but were less
clear about its time. Not many common women would have the coin to
pay someone to keep track precisely, and their midwives would have
enough to do, tending the birth itself, and after, to make it
unlikely that the time would be noted with the quarter-hour’s
accuracy the astrologers preferred. He himself knew his stars to
within a half hour, and counted himself lucky at that; most of his
friends had known only the approximate hour, nothing more. He
incised the circle and its twelve divisions with the ease of long
practice—even the poorest dame schools taught one how to construct
that figure—and glanced at the drawing in the ledger. The familiar
symbols were clear enough, the planets spread fanlike across one
side of the wheel, but to his surprise there were numbers sketched
beside each of the marks, and along the spokes that marked the
divisions of the houses. He looked up.

“
It’s very complete. Is it
accurate?”

Mailet shrugged. “I suppose—I assume so. She was
born on the day of the earthquake in twenty-one, and she told me
her mother heard the clock strike five the moment she was born. Her
aunt, the one who paid her indenture, had the chart drawn for her
as an apprenticeship gift.”

Rathe nodded. He remembered the earthquake himself,
the way the towers of the city had staggered; it hadn’t done much
damage, but it had terrified everyone, and untuned all the city
clocks so that the temple of Hesion had been jammed for a solar
month afterward and the grand resident had built a new tower from
the offerings. No one would forget that date, and the astrologers
would know the stars’ positions by heart. “This was copied from
that chart, the one her aunt bought her?” he asked and Mailet
nodded. “Did she take it with her, or would it be in her room?”

“
She carried it around with her
like a talisman,” Mailet answered. “You’d think it named her some
palatine’s missing heiress.”

Rathe sighed. He would have to hope that whoever
copied it into the indenture had been accurate—or pay to have the
chart drawn again, which would be expensive. He drew the symbols
one after the other, then copied the numbers, checking often to
make sure he had it right. Nothing looked unusual, there were no
obvious flaws or traps, and he sighed again and closed the tablets.
“Thank you,” he said and pushed himself to his feet.

“
For all the good it does you,”
Mailet answered but his expression softened slightly. “Let us know
if you find anything, pointsman. Send to us, day or
night.”

“
Of course,” Rathe answered and let
himself back into the hall.

The Old Brown Dog lay just off the Knives Road on
the tenuous border between Point of Hopes and Point of Dreams, and
neither station was eager to claim it. In practice, it fell to
Point of Hopes largely because Monteia was able to deal with
Devynck woman to woman. Or something, Rathe added silently,
watching a flock of gargoyles lift from a pile of spilled seeds
beside a midden barrel. Maybe they’d simply settled on an
appropriate fee between them.

The main room was almost empty at
midafternoon, only an ancient woman sitting beside the cold hearth,
her face so wrinkled and shrunken beneath her neat cap that it was
impossible to tell if she were asleep or simply staring into space.
A couple of the waiters were playing
tromps
, the table between them strewn
with cards and a handful of copper coins, and a tall man sat in the
far corner reading a broadsheet prophecy, feet in good boots
propped up on the table in front of him. Good soldier’s boots,
Rathe amended, and his gaze sharpened. Devynck liked to hire
out-of-work soldiers, and this just might be her new knife. The
stranger looked up, as though he’d heard the thought or felt
Rathe’s eyes on him, and lowered the broadsheet with a smile that
did not quite reach his eyes. He was handsome, almost beautiful,
Rathe thought, with the milk white Leaguer complexion that was so
fashionable now, and long almost-black hair. In the light from the
garden window, his eyes were very blue, the blue of ink, not sky,
and he’d chosen the ribbons on his hat and hair to match the shade.
And that, Rathe thought, recalling himself to the job at hand,
bespoke a vanity that, while not surprising, was probably not
attractive.

“
I’m here to see Aagte,” he said,
to the room at large, and the handsome man’s smile widened
slightly. One of the waiters put his cards aside with palpable
relief—he’d been losing, Rathe saw, by the piled coins, and
scurried through the kitchen door. He reappeared a moment later,
held the door open with a grimace that wasn’t quite a
smile.

“
She says, come on back,” he said,
and Rathe nodded, and stepped through into the hall that led to the
kitchen. The smell of food was much stronger here, onions and oil
and garlic and the distinctive Leaguer scent of mutton and beer,
not unpleasant but powerful; through the open arch he could see
Devynck’s daughter Adriana helping to scour the pans for the
night’s dinner. She saw him looking, and grinned cheerfully, her
hands never pausing in their steady motion. Rathe smiled back, and
a side door opened.

“
So, Rathe, what brings you here?”
Devynck’s eyes were wary, despite the pleasant voice. She beckoned
him into the little room—another counting room, Rathe saw, though a
good deal smaller than Mailet’s—and shut the door firmly behind
him.