Four and Twenty Blackbirds

by Mercedes Lackey

  Oh, I'm making this far too convoluted. I'm not certain any of Rayburn's patrons are that smart.

  Who else could be working this kind of magic? They say that some Gypsies are mages—well, Gypsies have some friends in questionable places, but I've never met a Gypsy that would have done to one of their own what was done to that poor girl. Of course, there are bad cases in everyone's family, and I suppose it could be a Gypsy mage. But that wouldn't cause any trouble with Rayburn's superiors.

  Gypsies, Elves—who else worked magic? Some Free Bards, allegedly, through music. But how would that figure in the fact that the victims were all musicians of a sort themselves?

  Free Bards getting revenge on substandard minstrels? The idea made him smile reluctantly. No, that's too far-fetched, even for me. Who else could it be? The only other mages that I know of are Priests. . . .

  Priests! Suddenly an entirely new range of questions opened up before him.

  What if this is being done by a Priest who is a mage? he wrote on the first page.

  Why? Well, by strict Church standards, every single one of the victims and their putative killers were unrepentant sinners. Of course, the Church would never condone murdering unrepentant sinners, but the Priest could be mad. He could imagine himself to be the punitive arm of a stern and judgmental God; could even believe that God was commanding him to do away with these people in fashions that would horrify other sinners into instant repentance.

  Right. Assume it is a Priest. Assume that the Church doesn't know for certain, but suspects this is what is going on.

  That would definitely fit the other question, which was Rayburn's behavior. One word from a Priest to Rayburn advising him to keep all of this quiet, and Rayburn would be scratching to cover it like a fastidious house-cat. If the Church didn't even have a suspect yet, there would really be a cat among the pigeons, as every Priest that was in on the secret watched his fellows with suspicion.

  Next idea—assume they have a suspect or two, but don't have evidence yet. They'd have Rayburn digging holes to dump evidence, if they had to!

  Next—they know who it is, and they have him locked up, but he's still doing this. A barred cell isn't going to stop a really determined magician, but I've never heard of a Priest being executed. As far as I know, they can't be executed, only imprisoned, and nothing is going to stop a renegade mage but execution. Certainly the Church would not want anyone to know that they couldn't keep a crazy Priest-Mage from killing people! The resulting scandal could rock the Church to its foundations, calling into question virtually every aspect of control now exercised by Church officials. There had been enough scandal already associated with the Church's possible involvement in the Great Fire at Kingsford, and the trickery and chicanery of High Bishop Padrick had caused great unrest.

  Riots? There'd be riots over that one, all right. With the Church claiming its tithe and doing damned little for the poor with that tithe, all it would take would be a hard winter, bad storms, and food shortages. A real, full-scale riot directed against the Church would produce enough angry people to level every Church-owned structure in the city.

  If the Priest wasn't mad—if he was doing this with Church sanction—

  A chill ran down his spine. Don't think that. Don't write it down.

  It could be some terrible experiment in magic gone wrong. And that would be another reason for Rayburn's superiors to want it nicely sunk in the bottom of the harbor. No one would want people to know that the Church permitted anyone to dabble in the kind of magic that would drive a man to murder a relatively innocent woman and then kill himself.

  Something else occurred to him and he wrote that down under the Murders topic. What if this isn't local? What if we aren't the only city to have this going on?

  Well, if it wasn't local, it probably had nothing to do with the Church. Not that the Church couldn't be involved, but mages couldn't work magic at great distance, and something that caused murders in more than one city couldn't be hidden for long if Church officials knew about it. Things like that leaked out, novices learned things they weren't supposed to know, spreading rumor and truth more effectively than if the Church was spreading the tales deliberately.

  There is a bare possibility that this is a mad Priest, that the Church knows about it, and they keep moving him from town to town every time he starts doing things like this, trying to cover up the murders and hoping that at some point he'll just stop, or God will stop him for them.

  Well, there was one way of telling if it was local or not.

  He put his two lists aside and took a fresh sheet of paper, addressing it to The keeper of the mortality lists, Highwaithe, which was the nearest town upriver.

  He sighed, and flexed his hand to ease the cramps in it, dipped the quill in the inkwell, then set the pen carefully to the paper again.

  Good Sir, he began, I am collecting mortality statistics in relation to the weather, and am particularly interested in the occurrence of murder-suicides over the past five years. . . .

  There. Let Rayburn try to stop him now.

  The only thing that is going to stop me now, he thought wryly, is my aching hand, and the number of letters I'm willing to write.

  About the time he began getting replies to his letters, the rash of murders ended, as inexplicably as they had begun.

  There were no more street-musicians cut down with vanishing knives. The only murders occurring now were the sordid and completely uninteresting kind.

  But Tal was not relieved—rather, he was alarmed.

  Every one of the clerks to whom he had written had responded, and most had been delighted that someone was showing interest in their dreary statistics. He'd gotten everything he asked, and more—one enterprising fellow had even sent him a breakdown of his violent-crime statistics by moon-phase.

  Tal had set up one corner of his sitting-room with a map pinned to the wall and his pile of return letters beneath it. He sorted out the letters that showed no real increase in the number of murder-suicides, then stuck a pin into the map for every occurrence in those towns and cities where the number had gone up. The result was a crooked line that began—at least as far as he could tell—at a small town called Burdon Heath. At first, the grisly trail followed the route of the Newgate Trade Road, then it left the road where it crossed the river and followed that instead. There was no doubt in Tal's mind, now that it was laid out in front of him. Whatever this was, it was following the course of trade. The pattern was quite clear.

  And he knew that it was not over, although the deadly shadow was no longer stalking the streets of his city. The mind that had conceived of these murders in the first place was not going to simply stop needing to commit them.

  He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. His first partner had been a constable who had solved the case of a madman who'd gone about mutilating whores. Tal remembered what the man had told him.

  "A man like this has a need in him, lad," the old fellow had said. "It's a craving, like drugs or strong liquor. He needs what he gets from doing things like this, and what he gets is power. The ability to control everything that happens to these girls, the moment they get into his hands—what they feel, how much they feel, and the most important control of all, when and how they die. That's what he gets. When you've got to find the man who does things like this, that's what you look for—that's what'll tell you what he's made of, not how he does it. Look for what he gets."

  If ever there was a case that those words fit, this was it.

  And Tal knew that the mind behind these crimes, the mind that craved the power he had over the victims, had not suddenly been cured of its particular brand of madness. Rather, that mind was aware exactly how dangerous that last death had been—and he had moved on before he could be caught. Being caught was no part of his plan.

  He had to have been watching, somewhere—he won't get the thrill he needs just by hearing gossip. He must have seen and understood what was going on when I took over the situation, and reco
gnized that I was a constable. He wasn't going to take any more chances at that point. The murderer knew how perilous it was that there had been a constable close enough to witness that last death, and to have seen the knife and know it had vanished for certain. Tal's attempt to find the knife only proved to the murderer that Tal knew what he was looking for. The murderer had probably taken himself and his associates (if any) to another hunting ground.

  Mortality Clerks were both cooperative and incurious, a fabulous combination so far as Tal was concerned. They not only supplied him with the bare statistics he'd asked for, they usually gave him the particulars of each murder.

  The "musician" connection was still there. And the dates were in chronological order.

  The further a town is from here, the farther back the rash of murder-suicides goes.

  There was no overlap of dates—no case where there were times when the deaths occurred in two different places at nearly the same date. The unknown perpetrator staged his deaths, no less than three, and so far no more than nine. Then, at some signal Tal could not fathom, he decided it was time to move on, and did so.

  He was finished here. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had moved on.

  Unfortunately, the most likely place was the one city in the entire Kingdom where his depredations would be likely to go completely unnoticed for weeks, if not months, due to the chaotic conditions there. The Kanar River was the obvious and easiest road; it flowed easily and unobstructed through a dozen towns between here and the place that must surely attract this man as a fine, clear stream attracted trout fishers.

  The great, half-burned and half-built metropolis of Kingsford.

  Chapter Four

  Reading too long—especially letters with terrible penmanship—always made Ardis's eyes ache, and the Justiciar-Priest closed and rubbed them with the back of her thumb. Rank did have its privileges, though, and no one asked the Priests of her Order to sacrifice comfort in return for devoting their lives to Justice and God. Though plain almost to the point of austerity, Ardis's quarters were warmed by a fine, draft-free stove, her reading-chair comfortably cushioned, and the light falling on her papers was as clear as fine oil, a carefully-trimmed wick, and a squeaky-clean lamp could provide.

  But I'm tired, overworked, and getting no younger. Briefly, she wondered what her life would be like if she had wedded according to her stature, as her family had expected her to. At this hour, she would probably be receiving callers in a luxuriously-appointed reception room, giving final orders for a sumptuous formal dinner, and thinking about which dress she would wear to the evening's ball or party.

  I'd be bored, which would be worse than overworked; my mind would have gone to mush, and I would probably have joined some stupid group devoted to mystical rubbish out of sheer desperation for something different in my life. Or I'd be having affair after frantic affair, like so many of my female relations are doing, because they are shackled in loveless, lifeless marriages with nothing to occupy their minds.

  "I could read those and give you a summary," said her secretary Kayne Davenkent, a clever and steady young novice that Ardis had plucked from the ranks of the scribes just last summer.

  Ardis didn't immediately reply, but she smiled to herself as she recalled the occasion that the novice had been brought to her attention. Like most novices in the Order of the Justiciars, she had been assigned to the copying of legal documents from all over the Twenty Kingdoms; these copies were sent out to Church libraries everywhere, in order to keep everyone current on legal precedent in all of the Kingdoms. There were only two forces common to all of human life on Alanda, the Church and the High King; and of the two, only the Church substantially affected the life of the common man. Kayne had persisted in questioning the authenticity of a recently acquired document she was supposed to be copying, which had irritated her superior. Ordinarily, he would have taken care of the problem himself, but he was of the faction that had not been in favor of Ardis when she asserted her control over the Abbey of the Order of the Justiciars at Kingsford, and he delighted in taking the smallest of discipline problems directly to Ardis rather than dealing with them himself. He probably hoped to overwhelm her with petty details, so that he and his faction could proceed to intrigue her right out of her position while she was drowning in nit-picking nonsense.

  Unfortunately for his plans, she was already aware of his intentions, and in particular this attempt to irritate his superior had backfired. Intrigued by the notion of a novice who stood her ground against a Priest's judgment, Ardis demanded the particulars, and discovered that Kayne was right and Father Leod was wrong. Further, she discovered that in disputes of a similar nature, Kayne was usually right and Father Leod wrong.

  Intelligence, acute observation, courage, wit, and persistence, and the ability to think for herself rather than parroting the opinions of her superior—those were qualities all too often lacking in novices, and qualities that Ardis appreciated. Knowing the young woman was wasted in her position, she had snatched Kayne up for her own staff before Father Leod knew what was happening.

  "I know you could give me a summary, and a good one too, but you know why I won't let you," Ardis replied, putting her head back against the padded leather of her chair, her eyes still closed. "I told you why a week ago when you made the same offer—which is appreciated, by the way, even if I don't accept it."

  "Because a summary won't give you the sense of things they aren't putting down," Kayne repeated, with a little well-bred irritation of her own. "That sounds rather too much like mind-reading, and I can't see where it's all that important in personal correspondence." Her irritation showed a little more. "It also sounds, frankly, as if you simply didn't want me to see the letter, and if that's the real reason, I wish you'd just tell me instead of making something up."

  Ardis laughed at that, and opened her eyes. Kayne was very young to be a novice, but her clever tongue, acidic wit, sharp features and sharper temper were unlikely to win her many friends, much less suitors, so perhaps that was why she never attracted a marriage proposal. Ardis appreciated her sharp tongue, but she was going to have to teach Kayne how to curb it. Kayne was really too intelligent to ever remain a mere secretary, but if it hadn't been for Ardis, she probably would have been kept in a subordinate position all her life, and she would remain subordinate if she made too many enemies to advance.

  She might have done well enough in secular society, but she had told Ardis in her initial interview that there really hadn't had any choice but to go into the Church. She was too poor to become a merchant, and there were not too many Masters in the more interesting Guilds and Crafts who would take on an Apprentice without the Apprenticing Fee.

  Not much like myself at her age—but I think she's going to go far, if the Church will let her. And it will, if I have any say in the matter and she can learn when it is better to keep your observations behind your teeth.

  "It's not mind-reading, and it's not intuition either," Ardis told her. "It's all based on patterns that I have observed after many years of dealing with these same people. I know what they say, how they say it, and how they conceal things they don't want me to know by the way they choose their words. It's knowledge you can't describe briefly to someone else, but it's knowledge all the same. And it's all the more important in personal correspondence, when the people who are writing to me are the movers and shakers of their areas—like my cousin Talaysen."

  Kayne's brow wrinkled as she took that in. "I don't suppose you could give me an example, could you?" she asked.

  "As a matter of fact, I can, from this letter." Ardis tapped the sheet of thick, cream-colored vellum on the desk, just above the seal of Free Bard Master Talaysen, currently the advisor to the King of Birnam. "My cousin mentions that his King has had three visitors from Rayden—from our part of the kingdom, in fact—but goes into detail on only two of them. He knows all three of them from his life at Court, before he gave up his position as a Master of the Bardic Guild,
although it seems that none of them recognized him as he is now. I know from things we have written and spoken about in the past that he believes that the third man, who appears to be an ordinary enough fop, is actually playing a much deeper game involving both secular politics and the Church; he's warned me about this fellow before. I also know from other sources that this fellow has said things about me in the past that are less than complimentary. My cousin doesn't like to worry me, and if he believes there is something going on that threatens me, he will take whatever steps he can to thwart it himself without involving me. Hence, this third visitor has said or done something that makes Talaysen think he is gathering information for possible use against me, and Talaysen is trying to spike his wheels—probably by feeding him misinformation." She raised an eyebrow at her crestfallen secretary. "Now, assume you've read this letter. Would you have made those deductions from it?"

  "No," Kayne replied, properly humbled. "I probably wouldn't even have mentioned the visitors at all, thinking they came under the heading of social chit-chat."

  "Nothing comes under the heading of social chit-chat when people have managed to make a High Bishop out of you," Ardis corrected sourly. "May God help me." That last came out with the fervor of the prayer it actually was. Ardis would have been much happier if no one had ever come up with that particular notion.

  "I thought you wanted to become a High Bishop," Kayne said in surprise. "How could you not?"