Point of Knives Read Free

clothes that quickly resolved itself into a body. His hat was tipped to hide his face, but it was obvious that he was about to go through the fallen man’s pockets.
    “Hold hard,” Rathe said, but the next words died in his throat as the kneeling man turned. “Eslingen?”
    “Oh. Hello, Nico.” Philip Eslingen sounded more sheepish than anything as he pushed himself to his feet. “I might have known it would be you.”
     
    “What are you doing?” Rathe asked. He refused to be distracted by his liking for the man. They had worked well together over the summer, when they’d hunted down the city’s stolen children, and slept together more than once in the heady aftermath of that success, but they served incompatible masters, and had, reluctantly, agreed to part. And that was where the matter had to rest, whether he liked it or not.
    “I’ve found a dead man,” Eslingen answered, his voice suddenly sober. “Old Steen’s all the name I know.”
    “What?” Rathe checked, startled, then moved in so that the light fell squarely on the body. That was the last thing he’d expected, to come chasing Grandad’s murderer, and find instead his dead son. But it was Old Steen all right, lean and wiry, cap missing and his lank brown hair trailing in the mud. He was a man well known to the points and even better to the pontoises who had jurisdiction over the river, but he’d never been on bad terms with his father, was said to bring him the occasional treat from the Silklands and the Further North.
    “Shot with a bird-bolt,” Eslingen said. “And either left to die, or got away.”
    “Got away, I think,” Rathe said, the pieces slotting into place. If someone had been after Old Steen—that made more sense, even if it meant that Grandad’s murder was an afterthought, someone covering her tracks. If Old Steen had been visiting his father when he was shot— He shook himself. “Philip, what are you doing here?”
    “Caiazzo’s business,” Eslingen answered, and Rathe made a face. Of course it was, Hanselin Caiazzo being master of a lunar dozen businesses of just the sort of questionable legality that would lead to meetings in the dead of night, and it didn’t make it any better that he, Rathe, had been the one to find Eslingen the position as Caiazzo’s knife. It didn’t matter that he’d needed Eslingen’s help then—it had been at the height of the child-thefts, and he’d been desperate for any clue—or that he hadn’t realized then quite how much he’d come to like the Leaguer. He’d made his bed, and would have to lie on it: a pointsman could not afford too close a friendship with Caiazzo’s knife.
    Eslingen took his silence for disapproval. “I can’t tell you much, Nico, you know that. I was supposed to meet him at the Bay Tree, but he didn’t show. I waited a bit, and then when it was getting on to sunrise, I came out to see what was what before I went back to Customs Point. And found him here.”
    Rathe nodded, unaccountably relieved. “They’ll vouch for you at the Bay Tree, then?”
    “They will.” Eslingen didn’t seem offended, thankfully, but then, being Caiazzo’s man had left him inured to suspicion. Or maybe that was just being a soldier in a city notorious for its unmartial attitudes. “But why are you here, Nico? And before anyone’s sent for you.”
    “I came from his father’s body,” Rathe said. “Someone stabbed Grandad Steen, and then presumably shot Old Steen—or maybe it was the other way around, but in any case, I followed a blood trail here.” He sighed. “Grandad’s hands were marked. He’d fought, and I hoped I was trailing his killer.”
    “The father dead, too?” Eslingen shook his head. “I didn’t know he had one—living, that is, or anyway one he knew. You know what I mean.”
    “I do. There were three of them, Grandad and Old Steen, and his boy, Young Steen, all sailors—summer-sailors, according to rumor.”
    Eslingen tipped his head in