Four and Twenty Blackbirds

by Mercedes Lackey

  There is nothing that Rand hates worse than being told "no," Orm thought cynically. What is it about this man that he has never learned how to accept anything other than his way? "If you really want a musician of any kind this time, it's going to be difficult," Orm told his employer as they sat across the table from one another in Orm's apartment. The map of the section Orm thought most promising was spread out between them. "They've gotten wary here in Kingsford a great deal sooner than I would have thought. None of them are going out at night at all, and a great many of the lone women of the Free Bards have left the city altogether."

  Rand frowned, and Orm noticed that he was no longer as handsome as he had been. His features had coarsened, his forehead seemed lower, and his resemblance to the Black Bird was more pronounced. "One would think that they had gotten word from some of the other places we've been," he said, his tone accusing.

  Interesting. Does he think I warned them? If that is the case, he may be losing intelligence along with his looks each time he transforms. Orm held back a smirk. "Well, I did point out to you that the Duke has an interest in these Free Bards. Evidently, he's given orders that his constables are to warn street-musicians here. They might not have believed the constables at first, but they certainly do after your rather spectacular killing on the riverfront."

  Rand didn't snarl, but Orm got the impression that he would have liked to. He glowered instead, and it was clear that he would really have preferred to find someone to punish for these checks to his plan. "Damn the Duke! Can't the Bardic Guild hold him in check?"

  "Not after the Great Fire they can't," Orm replied, feeling rather smug. "Their credit is not very high with anyone in Kingsford, not when there are still persistent rumors that they had a part in trying to kill Duke Arden and in starting the Fire. Hadn't you noticed that you never see a Guild Bard on the street? When they have to travel, they do so in closed carriages, and not for warmth or ostentation. If they show their faces in some parts of the city, they're likely to get pelted with refuse." He warmed to his subject, since it was so obviously annoying Rand. "And meanwhile, since the Free Bards were the ones who actually foiled the plot, their credit is at an all-time high. Now if it was Guild Bards you wanted to murder, I'd have no shortage of them for you, and very few would mourn their passing."

  Perversely, Orm found that he enjoyed annoying Rand. Perhaps it was the man's superior manner; perhaps it was just that he tried so hard to establish control over everything he came into contact with. Orm had never cared for being "under control," and any attempt to put him there only ended in resentment. So often in "conferences" like this one, the more annoyed Rand became, the more Orm's own humor improved.

  Right now Rand was frowning so fiercely that his eyebrows formed a solid bar across his forehead. He looked curiously primitive, as if he might slam a club or gnawed thigh-bone down on the table at any moment.

  "There are no women in the Guild," Rand replied sullenly, stating the obvious. "If you haven't got any Free Bards, what do you have for me?"

  "Oh, the usual," Orm told him. That made Rand look blacker than before, if possible, for "the usual" was a mix of whores and street-entertainers, and such victims rarely yielded the amount of energy that kept Rand in his proper form for as long as he wished.

  Then again, nothing ever kept Rand in his proper form for as long as he wished, so what was the difference?

  Instead of answering that frown, Orm ignored it, bending over the map. "There's a good little prospect who lives here," he said, indicating a building with the feather-end of his quill-pen. "She's the closest thing to a musician that we're likely to get for now. Makes her living as half of a pickpocket team; she chants bawdy ballads to collect a crowd while he picks the pockets, he juggles objects thrown to him by the crowd while she picks pockets. It wouldn't be at all difficult to get your knife into his hands, and it could be a fairly plain one. He's often tossed knives to juggle, and if no one claimed this one at the end of his turn, he wouldn't go looking for the owner."

  Rand nodded, still frowning, but listening now. "What else?" he asked.

  "Unlicensed whore living here—" He touched another spot. "Calls herself a courtesan on the strength of reading poetry to her clients, and the fact that she doesn't charge a set fee. Of course, if you don't pay her what she thinks she's worth, you'll find your pockets lighter after you're home again. She's trained her brat to lift purses while the client's busy. We've done her type before." He tapped another spot on the map. "Now, if you don't mind going for a target who works under a roof, you might want this one. Girl here who thinks she's a musician; ran away from home on the strength of it. Can't make a copper on the street, so she's a tavern-wench until somebody notices what a genius she is." Orm chuckled heartlessly, for the girl was unattractive, sullen, and rebellious, and was probably going to get herself fired before too long. "She'd be all right if she just played other people's songs. But she's a genius, so she's got to do her own. Problem is, she's got two tunes, no voice, and a knack for lyrics that insult her audience. She's as easy as the pickpocket."

  Now Rand's face cleared a little. "We'll look at her and the pickpocket, and I suspect we'll take both of them. Probably the pickpocket first, unless you find an opportunity to get the tavern-wench. I don't like working under a roof, but—"

  Orm shrugged. "Suit yourself; unless the constables get her, the pickpocket is always there for the taking. I'll see if the other girl has a boyfriend or something; if she does, then we have a solid prospect for your knife-holder."

  Orm watched Rand's brows furrow as he thought the situation over. "Does the girl lodge in the tavern?" he asked.

  Orm shook his head. "I don't think so; the other girls have said something about her being 'too good' to sleep on the floor with them when the tavern closes. And once in a while she'll try a street-corner. For that matter, maybe there's a way to lure her somewhere of your choosing by making her think someone's taken an interest in her as a singer."

  And those should be obvious solutions, Orm thought with disgust. He ought to be able to reason that out for himself. Orm had his own reasons for steering the selection towards Shensi, the tavern-wench. He would much rather study a potential target indoors.

  "All right," Rand said at last. "Get me more on this tavern-girl. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to try for her."

  Rand got up from the table without another word, and stalked off to the front door. A moment later, Orm heard his footsteps on the staircase.

  "Well, thank you for the audience, Your Majesty," he muttered, resentfully. Rand must be about to turn bird again; he was always unreasonable and rude, but he got worse just before he was about to turn.

  With nothing better to do, Orm rose, shrugged on a coat, and went out into the dusk. Other folk scurried by, probably in a hurry to get home before full dark. Far down the street, Orm saw warm beads of light blossoming, as if someone was lighting up a string of pearls. The public lamplighters were out; an advantage to living in this neighborhood. Where Orm was going, there were no public lamps, which made the going occasionally hazardous, and made easy work for footpads. Not that Orm had to worry about footpads; when he entered areas with no lanterns, he moved as if he was one of the footpads himself. In lean times, it often amused him to fell one of them after they had taken a target, and help himself to their ill-gotten gains. It made him think of an old illustration he had once seen, of a big fish, about to swallow a small fish, who was in turn about to be swallowed by a bigger fish.

  It was snowing again, which was going to keep some people home tonight. Thinning the crowd in a tavern wasn't a bad thing; it would enable Orm to see who the regulars were. Even if one of them had nothing whatsoever to do with the girl except order food and drink, the fact that he was a regular would bring him into contact with her on a regular basis. With the knife in his hands, perhaps he could be forced to wait for her outside the tavern door. Then, a note might lure her outside. You never knew.

  For once, this
wasn't the sort of tavern that Orm avoided at all costs—the kind where you risked poisoning if you ate or drank anything. One of his other prospects—one he hadn't bothered to mention—worked at one of those, and Orm would really rather not have had to go in there. Mostly drovers and butchers ate at the Golden Sheaf; it was near enough to the stockyards to get a fairly steady stream of customers.

  Orm didn't look like either, but he could pass for an animal broker, and that would do. He knew the right language, and he kept rough track of what was coming into the stockyards. Depending on who he had to talk to, he could either have already sold "his" beasts, or be looking for a buyer.

  The windows were alight, but there didn't seem to be a lot of people coming and going; Orm pushed the doors open and let them fall closed behind him. The place smelled of wet wool, mutton stew, and beer, with a faint undertone of manure. The men tried to clean their boots before they came in here, but it just wasn't possible to get all of the smell out.

  The ceiling here was unusually high for a place that did not have a set of rooms on an upper floor. This might once have been a tavern of that sort, with a staircase up to a balcony, and six or eight rooms where the customer could take one of the serving girls. That sort of establishment had been outlawed on the recommendation of the Whore's Guild when Arden began the rebuilding of the city. The licensed whores didn't like such places; there was no way to control who worked "upstairs" and who didn't. A girl could claim she was only a serving wench, and actually be taking on customers. There was no sign of such a staircase or such rooms, but they could have been closed off or given back to the building next door, which was a Licensed House now.

  Beneath the light of a half dozen lanterns hanging on chains from the ceiling, the Golden Sheaf was a pretty ordinary place. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all of dark wood, aged to that color by a great deal of greasy smoke. The tables had been polished only by years and use, and the benches beneath them were of the same dark color as the walls and floor. At the back of the room was a hatch where the wenches picked up food and drink; pitchers of beer stood ready on a table beside the hatch for quick refills. There were two fireplaces, one on the wall to the right, and one on the wall to the left; after working all day in the stockyards, drovers and butchers were always cold, and a warm fire would keep them here and drinking even though there was no entertainment.

  Orm looked around at the tables and saw that the place was about half empty; he chose a seat in a corner, though not in his target's section, and waited for one of the other wenches to serve him.

  You didn't get any choice in a place like this; mutton stew, bread, and beer was what was on the menu, and that was what you got. The girl brought him a bowl, plate, and mug without his asking, and held out her hand for the fee of two coppers. He dropped it in her hand and she went away. There was a minimum of interaction with the customers here, and that apparently was the way that Shensi liked things.

  Shensi was the name of his target; Orm had already learned by listening to her and to the other wenches that she was the child of a pair of common shopkeepers who probably had no idea where she was now. Skeletally thin, pale as a ghost, with black hair the texture of straw, a nose like a ship's prow, owl-like eyes, and a grating, nasal voice, she had run away from home when they refused to allow her to join the Free Bards. Winding up in Kingsford, she found that no one was going to give her food or lodging, no one really wanted to hear her music, and she had the choice of working or starving. She chose the former, but she was making as bad a business of it as she could. If it had not been that labor was scarce in Kingsford—especially menial labor like tending tables in a tavern—Shensi would not have had this position for more than a week.

  As it was, the tavern-keeper put up with her sullen disposition and her acerbic comments to the customers, because the customers themselves, who were mostly brutes a bare step above the cattle and sheep they drove to market or slaughtered, hadn't the least idea what she meant by the things that she said to them. She wasn't pretty enough or friendly enough for any of them to want to bed her, but as long as she kept their plates and mugs full, they didn't particularly care what she said or did around them.

  What Orm hadn't bothered to tell Rand was that Shensi was one of a small band of malcontents intriguing to overthrow Duke Arden. The constables knew all about them, of course, and left them alone because they were so totally ineffectual. Orm had taken the relatively bold step of reporting them to the constables just to see what they would say, and the results had been laughable. According to the constabulary records, they spent all their time arguing about the structure of their group and not a great deal in anything else. They had no fixed addresses, because the members of the group, disdaining such plebeian pursuits as employment, usually squatted in the ruins of buildings until they were evicted, lived with relatives, or left their lodgings when the rent came due. Shensi wrote what she thought were stirring songs about Arden's tyranny; what she didn't know was that most people who heard them thought they were comic-songs, and bad ones at that.

  Orm hadn't bothered to tell Rand about this, because he was afraid that Rand would consider it too dangerous to target a member of a rebellious political group. Not that anyone was going to miss Shensi, or even consider her a martyr to the cause—her death wouldn't even make the constables heave a sigh of relief, except for those few who were music-lovers. But it was a possibility that Orm could find the knife-wielder in that group, and he was hoping to see some of them here tonight.

  As he ate his tasteless stew and equally tasteless bread, he looked over the occupants of Shensi's tables.

  Two were drovers, who shoveled in their food with stolid obliviousness to their surroundings. There was a butcher at a second table; evidently he had been working past his normal quitting time, for he hadn't even bothered to remove his leather apron before coming here to eat. But at the third table was a group of four, clearly some of Shensi's coconspirators.

  There were three men and a woman. All four wore shabby, ill-fitting black clothing, all four had identically sullen, furtive expressions, all four sported the pale complexions of people who seldom came out during daylight hours. They huddled over their food and spoke in hushed voices, casting suspicious glances at the drovers and the butcher. The former ignored them with indifference, the latter with amusement.

  They might have resembled footpads, except that they were armed with ostentatious knives instead of sensible saps and cudgels, and they all wore great clumping boots instead of soft, waterproof shoes.

  From time to time, Shensi came over on the pretext of renewing their drinks, but she spent longer than she needed to, and she whispered to them while she filled mugs. Orm also noted that she didn't take any money from them; evidently they were meeting here more for the free beer than because it was a good place to meet.

  He watched them closely, although they had no idea he was doing so. Any of them would make a good tool, even the woman, who watched Shensi with the worshipful eyes of a puppy. In fact, that would be a very amusing combination, now that Orm came to think about it. He wondered how Rand would react to that idea.

  Probably poorly, he decided. He has to identify to some extent with his tool, and the last thing he would want to identify with is a woman. Or maybe by now for him the term is "sow."

  When his plate was empty, he signaled to his wench that he wanted a refill; the portions here weren't particularly generous, and it wasn't difficult to find room for another round. As he finished that second helping, the conspirators at the table got ready to leave; he left what remained and followed them out into the darkness.

  The snowfall had eased to mere flurries, but the snow still covering the street reflected all the available light and made it quite easy to follow the group. They stood out against the white snow quite remarkably well. He didn't stay close enough to them to hear what they were talking about; what he wanted to know was where they lived, not what they were saying. They were completely oblivious to the f
act that he was trailing them, in spite of the fact that he was not being particularly subtle about it. His presence actually protected them, ironically enough; he saw more than one footpad assess them and give them up as not being worth the trouble when he came into view.

  Interestingly enough, they led him to a cheap storefront which displayed a few badly-printed books in its window. This was evidently their headquarters and their sole source of income—unless more of them had finally stooped to take on jobs, as Shensi did. This must be where she slept at night. He wondered which of them she shared her bed with—or was it with all of them in turn? That would have suited the stated philosophy of the group, as Orm understood it—share and share alike in everything, with everyone equal to everyone else, and nothing held in private, not even personal secrets.

  Well, that was all the information he needed. He turned and headed back to his own cozy dwelling, with a rudimentary plan already in mind. He could go into the store by day and buy one of their silly books. He could leave the dagger behind, dropping it on the floor in a corner where it probably wouldn't be noticed for a while. When it was, obviously someone would pick it up and put it on; he'd watch them to see which it was, then inform Rand. Rand could do the rest, forcing the tool to wait outside the storefront for Shensi.

  Easy, simple, neat. Everyone would assume it was a lovers' quarrel, or had something to do with the power-struggle within the group. Or both. There would be nothing to connect this killing to the others.

  From here, it was no great distance to the stockyards, which stood beside the river. The tool could go right down the blood-sluice into the river itself. He might even get eaten by the fish that lived there, which fed on minnows that fed on the tiny creatures that in turn fed on the blood.