Four and Twenty Blackbirds bv-4

by Mercedes Lackey

  Unlike the Cathedral in the heart of the city, which was built all of stone, this one was constructed entirely of wood, many kinds and colors of wood. The vaulted ceiling was of a light, almost white wood, while the curved beams supporting the vaults were of a honey-colored wood. The floor was amber-colored, the walls inlaid with geometric mosaics in every color of wood imaginable.

  Figures adorned every pier supporting the vaults of the ceiling, and at first, Visyr thought that they were, impossibly, figures of Haspur. Then he realized that they were humans, but humans with wings and most impractical, flowing robes.

  "We're very fond of our angel-vault," the High Bishop said, following his gaze. "There is no Cathedral in any city that has one to match it. Each of the angels is different; I am told that the carvers took as models all of the Priests in this Abbey that they admired."

  "That must have caused some hard feelings when some searched the vault for their likenesses and did not find them," Visyr replied, and Bishop Ardis chuckled.

  "I would prefer to think that all of the Priests were admired, and that is why there are extra angels tucked up in odd places where you wouldn't expect to find them," she replied. "The choir members sometimes complain that there are so many angels in the choir loft that there is scarcely room for all the singers."

  "And speaking of music, the organ loft might be the best place to conduct this interview," the man interjected. "Or the choir loft, depending on whether or not you care if this interview is overheard."

  "The organ loft, I think," she replied. This time she led the way to the front of the Cathedral where the enormous pipes of the organ were ranged against the wall in shining splendor. There was a veritable flock of angels here, supporting everything that could be supported, frolicking singly and in pairs, and amid all of this flurry of pinions was hidden the place where the organist sat. They climbed a steep little staircase, more of a ladder, really, and behind a cluster of widespread wings was the alcove holding the keyboard of the instrument, a bench, and two small seats. Visyr hesitated for a moment, but the two humans took the seats, leaving the backless bench for him.

  "This area was designed so that sound doesn't escape it," Bishop Ardis explained. "The noise made by turning music pages can be very distracting, I'm told. But more so, if someone is in here between services, meditating or at prayer, is the sound of the musician practicing silently. If the bellows aren't pumped up, there is no sound, and the organist can practice without disturbing anyone, so long as you can't hear the noise of him pounding the keys and the pedals."

  "If we keep our voices down, no one will hear us in the sanctuary," the man added. "Are you comfortable enough here?"

  Although the alcove was small, the fact that the ceiling was still far above their heads made the situation tolerable. It was very chilly here, but with his insulating feathers, Visyr was comfortable enough—which, interestingly, the humans wouldnot be. Sitting here, they would soon get chilled, and they probably knew that. So they were accepting discomfort that he might be comfortable, and that was exceedingly interesting. Visyr nodded.

  "We'll try not to keep you too long, then," Bishop Ardis said, then began a series of questions that were far more thorough than anyone had yet asked him, even the redoubtable Captain Fenris. He didn't mind, because neither she nor the man—whose name, he finally learned, was Tal Rufen—ever repeated a question as the others had. They might backtrack and ask something that would elicit more details from him, but they never repeated the same question over and over as if they were trying to trip him up.

  In fact, he felt surprisingly comfortable with them; occasionally one would pause for a moment and look thoughtful, and that was when the other would pause in the questioning to make normal conversation and answer any of his questions.

  After a little while, the organ loft seemed cozy; the carved wings cupping them could have been the natural sides of a nesting-crevice, and although Haspur were quite beyond nesting in cliffs, they still reacted well to such surroundings. The soft voices did not travel beyond the wall of wings, and they could easily have been at the top of a cliff in the middle of inaccessible mountains.

  All of which was infinitely more reassuring to him than a windowless room a few paces across.

  He did not learn nearly as much as they did, but he did find out why they were so concerned about this one incident. It was not the first, but the latest of many. They didn't tell himhow many, and he didn't ask, but he had the feeling that it was a larger number than "a handful."

  He didn't think that the local constables were aware of this; their questioning had not tended in the direction that Ardis and Tal Rufen's did. He could not imagine the High Bishop getting personally involved unless this problem extended beyond Kingsford, and he wondered just how far itdid go.

  He was torn between wanting to volunteer his services and wanting to stay out of it all. He really didn't have time to act as a kind of aerial constable. He wasn't trained to do so, he wasn't deputized to do so, and he did have another and very important job to perform.

  On the other hand, the more the Bishop and Tal Rufen spoke, the more he admired them. He found himself wanting to help them however he could.

  And he could not deny the fact that he was curious, very curious, about what was going on. Never mind that these were not his humans, not of his Aerie, nor allied directly with the Haspur; never mind that he was very busy with his own work. He was intensely curious, alive with curiosity, dying to ask questions he knew would not be answered.

  Unless, perhaps, he volunteered his services. Perhaps not even then, but the only chance he would have that theymight would be if he volunteered. It was altogether disagreeable.

  In the end, he couldn't make up his mind, and they finally ran out of questions themselves.

  "Thank you, Sirra Visyr," the High Bishop said gravely. "I know that we have, among us all, rather thoroughly disposed of most of your day, and I apologize for that."

  "Not at all," he replied graciously, and before he could say anything more, Tal Rufen had escorted him out of the Cathedral and left him in the courtyard behind the main gate. And at that point, there was nothing left for him to do but endure his curiosity and spread his wings to fly across the river in the last scarlet light of sunset.

  Chapter Seven

  Once they were safely ensconced in her office, Ardis turned to Tal, one eyebrow arched significantly. After a week of spending most of his time in her presence, he knew most of her signals. This one meant, "Well?"

  Which in turn meant, "Tell me everything you think about what just happened." When Ardis chose, her expressions could be very eloquent. It was convenient, having a way to convey a broad request with a simple gesture of a single eyebrow. He wished he could do the same thing, but his face didn't seem inclined to oblige him.

  He began with the first supposition that the Kingsford constables had come up with. "I never for a moment suspected the Haspur of being involved with this, and I doubt that he deliberately murdered the real killer to keep us from finding out that he was involved."

  She tilted her head to one side, which meant, "Oh? Why?"

  "For one thing, there weren't any Haspur anywhere near any of the other places where we've had similar murders, and it would be cursed hard to hide a Haspur anywhere around a village of less than a hundred people." He raised his own eyebrow, and she nodded. "For another, I never heard anything about Haspur being able to work magic, and if they could, wouldn't you think that poor bird your friend Padrik tried to turn into the centerpiece of a holiday feast would have worked some magic to get his tail out of that cage?"

  "Only a few humans have the powers of magic, so just becauseone Haspur is not a mage does not imply that all of them lack that capacity, but your point is taken," she replied. "Why don't you think he killed the man deliberately?"

  "Because he's a predator," Tal said firmly. "You can see it in how he's built—talons and beak like a falcon or a hawk, eyes set in the front of his head rathe
r than the sides like a Mintak's. Predators do their own killing. He'll kill for food, or in the heat of rage, and he'll do it himself, but he won't let the river do it for him. That's what Padrik's captive Haspur did—tore his guard apart in the heat of fear and rage, with his own talons. That's what this Haspur wasgoing to do before the killer cheated him and fell through the ice. At that point, the rage ran out, and the Haspur stopped wanting to kill the man."

  "As a theory, I would say that is reasonable. In this case—" she paused for a moment. "I would say that in this case, it probably is true. It certainly fits the facts."

  "And all the other reports of the witnesses," he pointed out. "They did say that the Haspur grasped the man by his tunic shoulders and tried to pull him out of the water, and the man tore loose and dove under the ice. It was certainly not too far from the docks for them to see clearly, despite the distracting effect of this Haspur's colors."

  "All right, all right!" She held up her hands. "I believe that I can trust your reasoning; I am pleased to see that you don't rely on instincts alone."

  He flushed; at one point he had waxed eloquent on the subject of "a trained constable's instincts." Perhaps he had been a little too eloquent.

  "Never mind," she continued, "I think you are correct and my 'instincts' also agree with yours. I've sent one of the mages to the river to try and find the body, but as we both know, finding it now will probably be of limited use."

  "Because it's been in running water." He sighed. "What about the victim?"

  She shook her head, sadly. "Useless," she replied. "The poor child was wearing a Gypsy amulet, and the mere presence of that contaminated any slight aura there might have been from her attacker. It would be analogous to looking for a trace of incense smoke in the presence of a smoldering campfire."

  "Damn." He bit his lower lip, then hit his fist on his knee, angrily. "We're still reacting after the fact. We have to anticipate him somehow!"

  Her face darkened, and she looked away from him for a moment. "I'm sending warnings out, but I can't reach everyone, not even all the Free Bards. Some of them simply won't hear the warnings, especially the ones who are still traveling. Some won't heed them; even if it comes from me, I am still of the Church and they do not trust the Church. And as you yourself discovered, there are many unfortunate women who are not Free Bards who are still street-entertainers, and most of them will never hear anything but the wildest of rumors."

  "And most of them can't afford to spend a single day or night off the street, much less weeks or months," he muttered. He thought it was too low to hear, but her ears were better than he thought, and she bowed her head.

  "And there, too, the Church has failed." She sighed very, very softly. Her lips moved silently and her eyes remained closed; and he flushed again, feeling as if he was spying on something intensely personal.

  She looked up again, her face stony. Evidently God had given her no revelations, not even a hint of what to do.

  "We won't be able to prevent him," she said bitterly, her voice steady and calm. "We both know that. And I can't think of any way that we could even catch him in the act, except by accident."

  It was unpalatable—but it was truth. He winced, and nodded.

  "So we continue to react as quickly as possible, and we pray that he makes a mistake somewhere, sometime."

  He nodded again. "I can't think of anything else to do," he replied helplessly. "And he's proven twice that he can act right in the middle of a crowded street at the height of the day and still get away. He doesn't have to wait for the cover of darkness anymore. He has us at a complete disadvantage, because he'll always wear a different face. Witnesses do us no good. I can't think ofanything that will help except to instruct the constables to keep an eye on female entertainers."

  "Unfortunately, neither can I." She bit her lip; it was getting a distinctly chewed-on appearance. "I'll—think on this for some time. Perhaps something will occur to me."

  Think? She meant that she was going to pray about it. He knew exactly what she was going to do, she was going to spend half the night on her knees, hoping for some divine advice. Maybe she'd get it, but he wasn't going to hold his breath.

  Her eyes were focused on something other than him, and he tried to be as quiet as possible to keep from disturbing her. Abruptly, she shook her head and looked at him again.

  "You might as well go," she told him. "You go do whatever it is that lets you think; perhaps you can evolve some plan. If anything happens, or if they find the body, I shall have someone fetch you."

  He stood up, gave a brief, stiff nod of a salute, and took his leave.

  His own form of meditation was to sit and focus his eyes on something inconsequential while his mind worked. When he got back to his room, that was precisely what he did, leaving the door open so that if Kayne came for him, she would know he was waiting for the summons. He sat down on his bed with his back to the wall, and stared at a chipped place on the opposite wall.

  This case was precisely like all the rest, with nothing left to tie the murderer to an actual person. Tal had been studying case-histories in the files of the Justiciars with Kayne's help over the last week, and he had found one other murderer like this one—a man who'd been compelled by some demon inside him to kill, over and over again. "Demon" was the word the Church clerk had used, but Tal and Ardis had both been a bit less melodramatic. "I would say,need, rather than 'demon,' " she had commented when he showed her the case. "As you yourself pointed out; domination, manipulation, and control. This man was driven by his own need, not by some other creature's, he was the only director of his actions."

  That particular man had taken mementos from each of his victims, some personal trinket from each of them, and once the Justiciar-Mages realized what he was doing it was through those mementos that he was caught. They had done something that allowed them to follow those objects to the place where they were lying—which happened to be the man's apartment, hidden behind a false wall in a closet.

  It was obvious to Tal that the missing knife or knives served the same purpose here, but a mage would know better than to leave such a knife uncleansed after the murders, so there was no hope that a trace of the victim's blood would provide the link they needed to find him. Tal was certain—and so was Ardis—that the person they sought was male. The fact that all the people taken over had been male was the telling clue, rather than the fact that all the known victims were female. A woman who hated other women usually felt that way for some other reason than confusion about her gender—in fact, other than women who were of the cutthroat variety of thief, females who murdered other females usually did so out of jealousy or rivalry and considered themselves intensely female. It was Ardis's opinion that in order to control the secondary victims, the murderer would have to identify intensely with them, and it was Tal's opinion that most females, even one with severe mental and emotional warping, would find that distasteful.

  They could both be wrong, of course, but again, women who murdered women almost always killed people they knew, and it would simply not have been possible for the murderer to get to know all of the widely disparate victims in the short period of time between murders.

  Men kill strangers; women don't, except by accident, or as part of another crime. That was the pattern that had emerged from Tal's study of the records.

  As to where their killer got his knowledge of magic—the most logical place to look was the Church itself. This troubled Ardis, and although she faced it unflinchingly, Tal avoided bringing the topic up. But that made it yet more likely that the killer was male, for Ardis knew all of the female Justiciar-Mages in all Twenty Kingdoms personally; none of them had gone missing, was subject to strange or inexplicable trances lately, or indeed ever had been in all of the cities, towns, and villages in question. "I don't think it's possible to do this remotely," Ardis had told him. "I think the killer has to be there, nearby, somewhere. There are just too many things that can go wrong if he can't actuallysee what's
happening."

  Which meant their killer was hidden somewhere in plain view of the scene. It would have to be somewhere above the level of the street, too, in order for him to have a decent view.

  Tal wished that there was some way to conscript that bird-man. Ifanyone had the ability to spot someone watching the murders, it would be him! And no one in the entire city of Kingsford had a better chance of stopping another murder in the act than this Visyr. At least, he would if the murder took place in daylight, in the open street. After this last incident, the murderer was quite likely to go back to murders at night, or even indoors.

  We still don't know how he's taking control of his secondary victims. How hard would it be to take a room in a big inn, stand up on the balcony, and take over one of the patrons? Tal thought glumly. Then, when the constables come to question everyone, the murderer can either be gone completely out the window, or protest that, like everyone else, he was tucked up in his virtuous bed.