Point of Knives Read Free Page B

leash, anyway,” Rathe answered. In the rising light, he could see that the little-captain had a collar already, well-worn studded leather. “Or a rope. Anything like that.” He paused, sure he was going to regret this. “And then, yeah, you can come to the dead-house with me.”
     
    In the four months he’d been in Astreiant, Eslingen had had no reason to visit the city’s dead-house, and couldn’t say even now that the idea particularly appealed to him. It was especially unappealing after an exceptionally early morning, trailing the alchemists’ cart across the fog-wreathed Hopes-Point bridge and across the city to the border the University shared with the manufactory district. The river fog was burning off now that the sun was fully up, the cobbles damp and slick underfoot, and he stifled a yawn. Rathe, walking a little ahead of him so that he could talk quietly to one of the apprentices, looked as though he got up before sunrise every day. Which he easily could, Eslingen thought. It was more startling than he liked to realize how little he really knew about the man. Except that he was good with dogs: the little-captain was following quietly now at the end of his leash, not happy, but recognizing authority.
    Eslingen shook his head. He refused to regret his choices—if, indeed, you could call them choices at all. Leaguers like himself had been the first people suspected when children started disappearing from the city’s streets; Rathe had not only defended him, but found him a place when he’d lost his, and even if that had been as much to make Rathe’s own job easier, Eslingen had been, and still was, grateful. Except that Caiazzo had two fingers in nearly every questionable business dealing in his home neighborhood of Customs Point, and had made it clear that Eslingen would have to choose between his position and his growing affair with Nicolas Rathe. Caiazzo’s knife could not be in bed with the points, in any sense of the words. Probably he should have left Caiazzo’s service, but that would have meant leaving Astreaint altogether, and that—well, it would have put paid to any chance of seeing Rathe again. Better to drift a little longer, and see what turned up, or so he’d kept telling himself. This dead man, however, wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind.
    The dead-house was a long low building with nothing to distinguish it from the other, similar buildings around it except the mage-lights in its windows and the air of quiet bustle already surrounding it. The apprentices brought the cart around toward a back door, but Rathe caught his sleeve when he would have followed.
    “We can use the front door.”
    “Generous of them,” Eslingen said, but followed obediently.
    There was no smell at all, that was the thing he noticed most. The walls and floor were stone laid so tight Eslingen doubted you could slide a slip of paper into the gap, and everything was scoured spotless. A trio of apprentices were washing the far end of the hall, one sluicing the stones, the others driving the water ahead of them with heavy brooms, but all it did was make Eslingen think of the smells that weren’t there. He’d seen dead men in plenty, having been a soldier since he was fourteen, had done his share of burial detail, and this cleanliness felt unnatural.
    Rathe clearly knew his way around the place, as of course a pointsman would. He stooped to tuck the little-captain under his arm, then steered them down a series of halls, finally knocking on a heavy iron-bound door. It opened at once, and a plump homely woman peered out, wiping her hands on her apron.
    “Hello, Nico,” she said. “Are these yours?”
    Rathe nodded. “Afraid so. And I’m going to need answers in a hurry. I have a feeling this one’s going to be ugly.”
    “So I see,” she answered. “I was born in Point of Knives, I knew Grandad and his stories.”
    “Thanks,” Rathe said, with what sounded like relief. “Cas, this is Philip Eslingen.