Meening went on as though it hardly mattered. “Still, there’s enough for me to work with. In short, Lieutenant, you think you’ve been through some changes lately, personal and professional, but the greatest of them is yet to come. Your world is about to be turned sideways, and with Seidos still in the Maiden, you’ll be without your usual armor until it returns to the Horse. You’re not immune to the urge to gamble, but you’ll have less to lose than usual, so you would be well advised to be very wary.”
Eslingen drew a shaken breath–there were very few astrologers who’d give so blunt a reading–and Meening smiled as though she’d guessed his thought.
“I don’t see disaster, though there is always the potential for it, but a mistake now will waste time you will someday regret.”
“Is this my private life or my profession, madame?” Eslingen asked.
Meening glanced up, then bent her head to the orrery again, “Are you in love?”
What a very good question, particularly since I’m about to lose my job over it. “Honestly, madame, I–”
“You’d better decide then,” Meening said. She straightened in her chair, her eyes suddenly hard, and Eslingen knew then why the actors worshiped her. “Great changes are coming for you, Lieutenant. And great chances, too.”
Wonderful, Eslingen thought, but couldn’t muster his usual distance. “I have reason to believe that I’m about to lose my position,” he began, and Meening smiled.
“You will.”
“And then?”
“I told you. Your life will be turned sideways. I also see the threat of delays. So you will find another position, probably of comparable worth. I do warn you, you have less to lose right now, so I wouldn’t take any unnecessary chances. And don’t gamble. You will lose there.”
Eslingen hesitated, knowing he shouldn’t ask, but couldn’t stop himself. “This position that I’m going to find–”
“You expect much for five seillings,” Meening said.
“Madame–”
Meening held up her hand. “My apologies, Lieutenant, truly. I simply don’t know more than I’ve told you. Without better times, there’s nothing more I can do.”
Eslingen bowed his head in acknowledgment, swallowing an older anger, less at Meening than at his own careless mother. “Then I thank you for what you have done, madame.”
Meening lifted a hand in casual, infuriating dismissal, and Eslingen was reminded again of the actors who were her most avid patrons. “The best I could, Lieutenant. And remember, beware of folly.”
It was a long walk back to Customs Point, where Caiazzo kept his house, and the wind off the Sier carried a definite edge. Eslingen drew his coat tighter around his shoulders, glanced at the nearest clock tower, its face bright against the dull pewter clouds. Plenty of time, he thought, he wasn’t due until the evening meal, or it would be if he didn’t dawdle, but in spite of himself, in spite of knowing better, he found his steps slowing. He didn’t really want to go back to Caiazzo’s house, where everyone knew he was on sufferance, Caiazzo only waiting for the right moment to be rid of him. The streets in their own way were warmer, particularly in the pocket markets where candy‑sellers vied with the hot‑nuts women outside the doors of the more settled stores. Shop‑girls and respectable matrons stood in line for both, and the air was heavy with wood smoke and the sharp smell of the roasting nuts. There would be hot cider in the taverns, better than warmed beer on an autumn evening, and he wished, suddenly, that Rathe was there to share a glass with him. It would have been nice to talk over Meening’s reading with the pointsman, let him turn his southriver common sense loose on it, and hopefully talk him out of the mood that was settling into his bones. Not a bad mood, Eslingen thought, and not a bad feeling, just a melancholy as tart as the smoke‑tinged air, and he hesitated for an instant, almost ready to turn on his heel and walk back to Point of Dreams. Then his own common sense reasserted itself–it was too far, too impractical, and besides, it was still wise to be discreet, to give Caiazzo time to bring about whatever it was he was planning–and he joined the line in front of the nearest sweet‑seller instead. They sold soft sugar candies this time of year, molded in the shapes of castles and horses and–this year– The Drowned Island;he bought four running horses, honoring his birth sign, and paused to nibble one in the doorway of the nearest tavern. The sugar melted on his tongue, sweet with the faintest undertone of bitterness, the taste of autumn itself, and he glanced sideways to see the tavern suddenly crammed with figures. He blinked, startled–he would have sworn there had been only a pair of old men, drinking by the fire–and then recognized at least some few of the faces. Dead men, all of them, old friends and one or two old enemies, and even the winter lover he hadn’t thought of in at least ten years, lounging long‑legged against the mantelpiece, laughing with Contemine Laduri, handsome as he’d ever been before a ball smashed his face in some nameless town ten leagues from Altheim. Eslingen caught his breath, turning fully to the door, and the shades vanished again. It was just the ghost‑tide, he told himself, nothing more, but in spite of himself he stepped into the cool shadows, and was disappointed when they didn’t reappear. He made his way to the bar anyway, feeling the ghosts gathering again behind him, and the barmaid came to meet him with the faint lines of a frown between her brows. She was no maid, more likely a grandmother, and Eslingen forced a smile.
“Is there hot whiskey, dame?”
She nodded, slowly, her eyes fixed on the room behind him, and it was all Eslingen could do to keep from turning. “Ay, soldier. Three demmings.”
Eslingen produced the coins, laid them carefully on the knife‑scarred counter. “How’d you know I’d been a soldier?”
The old woman laughed, a cackle that stirred the old men at the fire to look curiously at them. “You brought your company with you.”
And so I did. Eslingen nodded, seeing them again at the edges of his sight–companionable, really, a company on the verge of going into winter quarters–and slowly felt himself relax a little. It was the ghost‑tide, that was all, the ghosts and his melancholy and maybe even his fears, just the stars turning, opening a brief door, letting the ghosts of the timely dead walk where usually only the untimely could, or did. And the violence of the deaths around him had nothing to do with untimeliness. They had accepted the possibility when they signed on. None of these shades meant ill.
He watched the old woman pour a thrifty dram from the stone bottle warming in its simmering pot, wrapped his long fingers around the thick clay as it warmed to his touch. The liquor smelled of cloves and allspice, and he lifted the glass to the empty room before he drained it. The old woman nodded, grim approval, and he set the glass back on the bar, feeling oddly better. He’d been dreading seeing his ghosts, he realized; at least these weren’t the ones he feared.
Nicolas Rathe hesitated at the top of the stair that led down to the main room of the station at Point of Dreams, ready to offer a hand to the tiny woman at his side. She smiled abstractedly, recognizing the thought, but made her own way down without hesitation, her heeled shoes tapping on the wood. Even with them, her head barely reached his shoulder, and he was merely of middling height himself. In the room below, he could see the duty points watching them sidelong, with barely concealed amusement, and he frowned down at them, willing them to keep silent. Every ghost‑tide–when the shades of the timely as well as the untimely dead made their presence felt, from the greatest to the least–brought people to the points, afraid that their mothers or rich aunts or neighbors had been murdered after all, and most of those could be dismissed as either honest error or hopeful greed. But this one… He suppressed the desire to shake his head, schooled his face to careful neutrality. Sohier, the duty point, had warned him when she escorted the woman up to his workroom: Every ghost‑tide, she said, every ghost‑tide Mistress Evaly comes to say she fears her sister who died last spring might have been murdered after all, and every year for all the four years I’ve been here, it’s been last spring the sister died. They had had the same thing in Point of Hopes, a seamstress whose daughter died in childbed still convinced the girl’s lover had murdered her and the baby, and all any pointsman could do was listen to the tale and send her home again as kindly as possible. He frowned at Leenderts, who seemed inclined to say something, and the younger man swallowed the words unspoken. At least that had been the policy in Point of Hopes; he would make sure it was followed in Point of Dreams as well.