Point of Hopes (44 page)

The door to the rest of the house opened then, and a
liveried servant stepped through. “Madame Allyns,” he said and
Eslingen caught his breath.

The woman who swept through the doorway was enormous
and beautiful, skin like rich cream from the top of her breasts to
the roots of her golden hair, eyes blue as summer skies,
lips—slightly pouting—the pink of the inside of a shell. A strand
of pearls a half-shade lighter than her skin wound twice around her
neck, and vanished into the shadowed valley of her cleavage. A
brooch the size of a man’s hand—Oriane and the Sea-bull, Eslingen
thought, not quite incredulous, in full congress—clasped her
bodice, drawing the eye irrevocably to the divide between her
massive breasts. She was as large as any two women, and four times
as lovely.

“
Hanse,” she said and swept forward
hands outstretched in greeting.

Caiazzo caught them, brought each in turn to his
lips, bowing slightly. “Iniz. How pleasant to see you again.”

“
I trust so,” Allyns answered and
turned smiling, to the others. “Mistress Denizard I know—and I’m
delighted to see you again, my dear—but this gentleman—” The smile
was back, full of heavy-lidded speculation. “I haven’t had the
pleasure.”

Eslingen swallowed hard, willing his arousal to
subside.

Caiazzo said, “May I present Philip Eslingen, late
of Coindarel’s Dragons? My new knife.”

“
A soldier,” Allyns said. “How
charming.” She held out her hand, and Eslingen bowed over it. She
smelled of roses, heavy-scented, late season flowers, a fragrance
men could drown in…. And then she had twitched her hand deftly out
of his grasp, and turned back to Caiazzo, one delicate brow
lifting. “And I hear you have need of a knife these days, Hanse.
I’m—concerned.”

“
There’s no cause for worry,”
Caiazzo answered, and Allyns smiled again, too sweetly.

“
But there is for concern, is there
not? Our partnership has been a profitable one. I’d hate to have to
find another long-distance trader, especially this late in the
season. But I’d hate it even more if my investments failed to
materialize.”

“
I doubt very much it will come to
that,” Caiazzo answered. “Even considering your legendary prudence,
Iniz. Shall we go in?”

Allyns regarded him for a moment longer, and then
nodded. She turned away, the rich silks of her skirts hissing
against the stone floor, against each other. Caiazzo, suddenly,
startlingly drab against her opulence, followed, and the servant
shut the door behind them. Eslingen glanced at Denizard, wondering
if he should follow, but the magist shook her head fractionally.
She seemed to be listening for something, and Eslingen tilted his
head to one side, too, not sure what he was waiting for. The house
was very quiet; in the distance, he heard a door close, and then,
from the street, the rattle of wheels and the sound of a horse’s
hooves.

At last Denizard relaxed, looked at him with a
rather wry expression. Eslingen said, “It’s all right, then?”

The magist nodded. “Oh, yes. Or, if it’s not, it’s
far too late to worry about it.” She saw Eslingen stiffen, and
added, “They’ve been partners for fifteen years, Philip. We’re as
safe here as in our own house.”

Eslingen nodded back, reluctantly. He knew that most
long-distance traders—Merchants-Venturer, as the guild called
itself—formed partnerships with Astreiant’s Merchants Resident:
each needed what the other could supply, goods exchanged for
capital, and markets for each other’s products, but that didn’t
explain the particulars of the situation. “She didn’t sound happy,”
he said, and Denizard looked away.

“
There have been some—difficulties
this year,” she said, after a moment. “As you’ve probably
gathered.”

Eslingen nodded. “Is it something I should know
about? To do my job?”

Denizard sighed. “Hanse said I should use my
discretion, telling you. And since you’ve said you’ll stay on…about
five years ago, when Seidos was in the Gargoyle, Hanse and Madame
Allyns bought a seigneurial holding in the Ile’nord—in the Ajanes,
west of the Gap.”

“
I thought,” Eslingen said, and
chose his words carefully, “I thought only nobles—nobles of four
quarterings—could own those holdings.”

Denizard nodded. “That’s right. But there was a
woman, a woman of I think eight quarters, who owed Madame quite a
bit of money. So they made a bargain: d’Or—this woman would take
the title, paid for with Madame’s money, and Hanse’s, and send a
share of the estate’s takings to them as payment.”

Eslingen took a slow breath, let it out soundlessly.
Caiazzo played dangerous games, and not just the ones southriver.
Under the law, a commoner who presumed to purchase a noble title
would lose her investment if she were found out, might, if the
offense were particularly egregious or open, be sentenced to a
fine—but that wasn’t the real deterrent. The nobles of the Ajanes
were jealous of their privileges, jealous to the point of having
forced the queen’s grandmother to agree to attach the rule of four
quarters to the sale of all estates in their domain. And they were
old-fashioned enough to try to wipe out such an insult in the
commoner’s blood. Eslingen could feel the hairs stirring on the
nape of his neck at the thought of trying to protect Caiazzo from
Ajanine nobles and their servants. He had served under an Ajanine
captain once, for eight months when he was sixteen; it had been the
first time he had deserted, and that had been the only thing that
had saved his life. Three days after he had run, the Ajanine had
thrown his company into a mad assault on a well-garrisoned Chadroni
fort, and had lost them all in the space of an hour. Eslingen, and
the ten men sent to track him down, had been the only survivors;
they had enlisted together under a sober League captain less than a
moon-month after that battle. He shook that memory away, said still
cautiously, “But what’s to stop this woman from refusing to pay,
now she’s got the estate?”

Denizard gave him a grim look. “Madame Iniz still
holds notes of her hand for one thing, worth more than that
estate.”

“
Notes can be repudiated,” Eslingen
said.

Denizard nodded “Not easily, but, yes, they can be.
But Hanse trades through there, too. And I wouldn’t want to annoy
Master Caiazzo, would you?”

“
No,” Eslingen agreed. But I’m not
an eight-quarter noble from the Ajanes. The words hung between
them, unspoken, and Denizard made a face.

“
It seemed worth the risk. There’s
a gold mine on the estate, and merchants are always short of
gold.”

Eslingen started to whistle, cut the sound off in a
hiss of breath. Gold made all the difference, made the risks worth
taking, both the risk of buying the property and of threatening the
true noble who held it for them. Merchants are always short of gold
indeed; it’s gold that builds the manufactories and pays the
caravan masters and the Silklands merchants when there’s nothing
else to trade. I see why they did it, why it’s worth it, but,
Seidos’s Horse, it’s a risk.

“
And,” Denizard went on, “the stars
were favorable.”

They would have to be. Eslingen squinted slightly.
Seidos had been in the Gargoyle, she had said which made sense. The
Gargoyle was Argent’s sign, and Argent-Bonfortune was the god of
the merchants: the planet of the nobility in the sign of the
merchant, a reasonable omen. But if Seidos was in the Gargoyle in
the Demean reckoning, that meant it was—somewhere else—in the
Phoeban zodiac. “If Seidos was in the Gargoyle,” he said aloud “it
was also in, what, Cock-and-Hens?”

Denizard looked away. “We’re common, it’s Demis who
rules our lives.”

But that’s noble land. Eslingen killed that
response—he was no magist, and his astrological education came from
the broadsheets he read assiduously; there was no reason to think
he was right, when Denizard said otherwise. But the estate in
question was noble, and fell under Phoebe’s rule, under the signs
of her solar zodiac. And by that reckoning, Seidos was in the sign
of the Cock-and-Hens, the winter-sun’s sign, sign of changing
seasons, of change and suffering and impending, inevitable death.
You could interpret the purchase as a change, and a kind of death,
but still…it’s not a chance I’d want to take.

Rathe leaned over Salineis’s shoulder as she made the
last of the nightwatch’s entries in the station’s daybook—a call to
locate a strayed maidservant, who’d turned out to be standing at
the well chatting with her leman, barely a quarter hour overdue,
the sort of thing they were all seeing entirely too much of these
days—and then added his initials to the entry. It was his day to
supervise the station, something of a welcome break in what had
begun to seem like months of walking from point to point in search
of clues to the missing children. It also meant that Monteia would
not be there, and, since Rathe had had little chance to pursue the
question of the unlicensed printers, he was just as glad not to
have to explain that to her.

“
Not a bad night, on the whole,”
Salineis said, and Rathe dragged his attention back to
her.

“
How’re things by the Old Brown
Dog?”

The woman shrugged and unclasped her heavy jerkin.
The bodice beneath it was sweat-dark at her underarms, and another
damp patch showed between her shoulder blades as she turned to hang
it on the wall. “Not too bad, actually. The Huviet boy’s master,
what’s his name, Follet, he’s let it be known he blames Paas, and
that’s shut up most of them. Of course, Follet’s never liked
Mistress Huviet—who does?—but at least it seems to be keeping the
peace.”

Rathe nodded. “And Aagte?”

“
Devynck,” Salineis said, with some
precision, “is keeping her mouth shut and herself out of sight, for
which I thank her stars and all my gods.” She shook her head, set a
dashing cap on top of her piled hair. “And it seems to be working.
They’re doing a decent business again, and Timo says he saw some of
the locals drinking there when he checked in last night. If they
blame anyone, it’s that knife of hers.”

“
That’s good news,” Rathe said, and
meant it. Eslingen was well clear of Point of Hopes; he could
afford to take the blame for a little longer, at least until it had
been forgotten.

“
Well, we’ve needed some, after
clock-night,” Salineis answered, and turned away.

Rathe seated himself in front of the daybook, paged
idly through the events of the last three days. The clock-night had
frightened and sobered the city, it seemed; since then things had
been relatively quiet, except for the false alarms, and, best of
all, no children had gone missing in that period. Half a dozen had
been reported, but all of those had been found within a few hours.
And that reminds me, he thought, I still have to get myself over to
Point of Dreams and see if the Cytel boy is really with Savatier’s
company. The memory brought with it a twinge of real dread: surely,
he thought, if Albe was there, and safe, Gavi would have told me.
But Jhirassi had been working; their waking hours had not
overlapped. Still, he decided, I’ll make it my business to walk by
there on my way home tonight.

The front door opened then, and he looked up,
expecting one of the duty points or someone come to report another
missing child. To his surprise, Monteia swept in, bringing with her
the distinct scent of manure. She scowled at him, scraping her
shoes on the iron blade set in the floor by the sill, and Rathe
said, cautiously, “I didn’t expect you in today, Chief.”

“
No more did I.” Monteia inspected
her soles, swore under her breath, and scraped again. “I dined with
the other chiefs last night, Nico, and there’s some business that
won’t wait.” She looked at. her shoes again, nodded, satisfied, and
leaned back out the door. “Vatan! Send one of the runners to sweep
the gate and clean up here, and then get in here yourself. I need
to talk to Nico.”

Rathe rose, already dreading her news, and followed
her into the workroom. Monteia kicked her shoes into a corner,
padded in stocking feet to her chair and sat down, planting both
elbows solidly on the cluttered surface.

“
Sit, man,” she said. “It’s not you
I’m annoyed with, not personally.”

There was no good answer to that, and Rathe perched
warily on the nearest stool.

“
I take it the night was quiet?”
Monteia went on.

“
According to Sal, yeah. Nothing
but false alarms, though by the look of the book that kept them on
the run.”

Monteia grunted. “That’s what I’m hearing from all
the points, and it’s one piece of good news, I suppose. There
hasn’t been a child stolen in the last ten days—oh, plenty of
reports, but those kids have all been found.”

“
So what’s the bad news?” Rathe
asked after a moment. “Aside from the fact we haven’t found the
first eighty-five.”

Monteia gave him a sour look. “The bad news is what
I’m hearing from our own markets. Not only are all of us too busy
to do more than shake our fists at the illegal printers, the
printers are blaming us for the kids—and I want to see that
stopped. Claes tells me you were inquiring after one called
Agere?”

Rathe nodded. “She’s printed some of the worst that
I’ve seen sold here. I told Claes we’d split the point if we made
it, since Agere works out of Fairs’ Point. I handed the sheets I
got over to the judiciary.”

“
Fair enough.” Monteia’s scowl
deepened again. “But I want her.”