The door opened at last to reveal a young woman in a clerk’s dun suit. She looked at him inquisitively, a little dubiously, and said, “Can I help you?” She bit off the honorific, seeing the jerkin, and then her eyes widened as she saw the pointsman’s truncheon in his belt. Rathe hid a grin. Caiazzo’s people were mostly as southriver as himself; a northriver clerk, from a family of unbroken, unblemished history of service, would have a very different attitude toward any pointsman who presumed to knock at the front door.

“Would you tell Caiazzo that Rathe, from Point of Hopes, is here to speak with him?”

“Yes, that is…” She paused, and started over. “I’ll see if he’s in.”

“Ah, now, we’re not going to play that game, are we? Just tell him–tell him he’ll be happier seeing me than not.” Rathe let the smile fade from his face.

The clerk hesitated, then stepped back grudgingly to allow Rathe into the tiled hall. “Wait here,” she said, and disappeared through a side door. Rathe settled himself to wait.

It was only a few minutes before the clerk was back, emerging onto the gallery at the top of the main staircase. “If you’ll come up,” she said, “he says he can see you now.”

She sounded a little breathless–from surprise, Rathe guessed, which means you know about the second set of books, and the printers at the fair, and maybe a few other things. He filed the thought for future use, and climbed to join her.

Caiazzo’s workroom was at the end of the gallery, looking across a side street and his neighbor’s garden to the river and the crowding masts of the docks. The trader worked not at a desk but at a kind of attenuated clerk’s counter than ran the length of the front wall, broken only by the double windows that reached almost to the ceiling. It was littered with papers, charts and logs and ledgers scattered along its length. Caiazzo flipped over one of the sheets just as the clerk paused in the open door, and said, “Pointsman Rathe, sir.”

Caiazzo turned, smiling genially enough, but Rathe had seen the frown fading from his eyes. “Hello, Rathe, come in and stop intimidating my people, will you? All right, Biblis, thanks, I should be safe enough. And it’s adjunct point, by the way.”

The clerk flushed, but made no comment, and slipped out of the room, closing the door softly behind her.

“Gods, Rathe, what did you say to her?” Caiazzo held up a hand. “Not, of course, that you’re ever anything but welcome here.”

Rathe shrugged, crossed the room to look at the books in their case, came to rest within easy reach of the narrow counter. “Didn’t have to say much, really. I suppose she was in just awe of the system.” There was a manifest on the sun‑warmed wood beside him, and he tilted his head to look at it. With a faint smile, Caiazzo reached across and turned it facedown.

“Not feeling cooperative this week?” Rathe asked. “That’s too bad. ’Cause things are turning nasty out there, Hanse, and there’s some even betting on you being involved.”

“And here I was hoping you’d come to offer me your services,” Caiazzo answered easily. The winter‑sun was just rising, and the doubled light leached the color from his skin and dark eyes. “You owe me, Nico. That was a good man you arrested. I still haven’t found a replacement for him.”

“And I wonder why. Come on, Hanse, it’s not that he called himself a duellist, though the laws frown on that, it was his methods,” Rathe said, with a boredom he didn’t entirely feel. “Crying a fair fight’s bad enough, bare murder’s something else. I did him a favor. Many more kills like that, and his mind would have gone. It can in duellists, you know.”

“For a southriver rat, you know a lot about a very high‑class sport,” Caiazzo said.

“Blood sports aren’t all that high class. If I ever leave the points, you’ll be among the first to know.” Rathe took his weight off the counter, and reached into his jerkin, left‑handed, careful to keep his knife hand in view, and produced the broadsheets Guillot had bought for him. He freed the least offensive one and handed it across. “I want you to have a look at this. Recognize the printer’s seal?”

Caiazzo gave him a glance from under lowered eyebrows, but took the proffered paper. “Forged bond mark,” he said, turning the page from front to back. “A direct violation of the law, pointsman, I’m shocked you’re reading something like this.”

Rathe smiled sourly, and gestured for him to continue. Caiazzo lifted an eyebrow, but went on reading. He finished the brief text, and handed it back to Rathe. “Pretty good stuff. Popular, you know. Very dramatic. Why?”

“Lebrune tells me this Agere is printing under your coin,” Rathe said.

Caiazzo shook his head sadly. “Some people get so self‑righteous when they recover their long‑lost status, don’t they? They need to cast blame wherever they can, see villainy where there’s just… free enterprise. I’m told the license fees are fearsome, these days.”

“You’re denying it.”

“Off the books, Nico?”

Rathe hesitated. He’d good information, useful information, from Caiazzo before now, and always off the books, but if Fourie was right, and Caiazzo was involved with the missing children, he couldn’t afford to make any deals with him. But it wasn’t Caiazzo’s style to meddle in something that didn’t turn a tidy profit, and neither the children nor the politics was going to bring anything but trouble to a longdistance trader. “All right, Hanse. Off the books.” And your word against mine, if I have to, if I find you are involved with these kids, he added silently.

“Yes, I’ve loaned Franteijn Agere the coin she needs. She’s sound, hires decent readers, they cast their own horoscopes and stay strictly away from political matters. Agere prints to the popular interest, and that’s it.”

“Politics are a popular interest these days, with the starchange,” Rathe said. He found the second paper, and handed it across, shaking his head. “Stays strictly away from the political? I bought this off her an hour ago. I’d say you need to do some housecleaning, if you can’t keep a printer in line.”

Caiazzo’s lips tightened as he skimmed the paper. “I appreciate your concern, pointsman, but I assure you it’s quite unnecessary.”

Rathe sighed. “It would be very bad timing–I would take it personally–if any of Agere’s astrologers, or Agere, for that matter, were to disappear just now.”

“Don’t tell me my business, Rathe.” Caiazzo took a deep breath, handed the paper back. “I’m not a fool, how ever many of my people are. So. Why are you really here? Unauthorized printers aren’t your line at all, Adjunct Point, especially when there’s something more important troubling the city. Unless you’ve fatally annoyed your superiors at last?” He sounded vaguely hopeful.

Rathe shook his head. “Not so far. But, as you say, there are more important things on my mind than unlicensed printers and politically minded astrologers. And since you–loan money–to more than one of them, I thought I’d warn you, it could go hard if you don’t control them better.”

“Warning me, Nico? Not your habit at all. You’d love to catch me dead to rights and score a point or two off me.”

“Wouldn’t I just,” Rathe agreed. “But I’m more interested in finding out who’s stealing these children, and putting a stop to it. And to tell you something I probably oughtn’t, I don’t think you’re involved in that.” He fixed his eyes on Caiazzo’s face, watching for any shift, any flicker of expression that might give the trader away. “Of course, if I find you are, it’ll just go that much harder for you. Keep your astrologers and printers in line, Hanse. Or they’ll go down for a lot more than the usual two months.”

“Oh, come on, Rathe. On what charges?”

“Incitement to riot. Petty treason. Possibly great treason, if this one”–he held up Agere’s sheet touting the Palatine Marselion’s candidacy–“is any example. I could name a few others, if I were pressed, and the judiciary will hear all counts. Just a friendly warning, say.”