Four and Twenty Blackbirds

by Mercedes Lackey

  "I doubt that this is the mage," Ardis continued, picking up the sketch and examining it critically. It was not an ordinary face, although it was not one that would stand out in a crowd, either. "And not just because no one here in the Abbey recognizes him. You distracted the man pretty severely, Visyr. If he'd been trying to control the murderer—or rather, the tool, as Tal calls them—he'd have lost that control at that point, and—" She frowned. "I'm not sure what would have happened at that point, but the man certainly wouldn't have thrown himself into a vat of acid."

  "So you think this is an accomplice?" Visyr asked.

  Both Ardis and Tal nodded. "We discussed this before; the murderer might have an accomplice, but we always thought that it might be a Priest and a mage working together. From the way you described this fellow acting, though, he seems to be an accomplished thief, and that possibility hadn't occurred to us. It does explain a lot, though."

  "And we can speculate on who he is and why he's doing this when we've caught him." Ardis narrowed her eyes. "In a way, this is going to simplify our task. When we catch him, I very much doubt that he's going to care to protect the real killer."

  "Why wouldn't he claim to be a simple thief?" Visyr asked. "And why wouldn't you believe him if he did?"

  "It is unlikely that a real thief would try to steal a murder-weapon with fresh blood still on it," Tal said rather sardonically. "He might try that particular ploy with us, but it would take a great deal to convince me."

  Ardis sniffed. "A little creative application of magic as the Justiciars practice it would certainly induce him to tell us the truth," she said, just as sardonically. "Magic is so useful in these cases—we're forbidden to torture to derive the truth, but the definition of 'torture' includes damage to the physical body, and what I intend to use on him wouldn't harm a single hair."

  "No, he'd only think he was being torn limb from limb," Tal said sardonically.

  "Oh no, nothing so simple as pain," Ardis assured him. "No, he'll have a foretaste of the Hell that awaits him. There are very few men that have been able to withstand that experience, and all of them are—were—quite mad." She studied the sketch again. "If you can imagine everything you most fear descending on you at once—and your terror multiplied far beyond anything you have ever felt before—that's a pale shadow of what he'll feel. And it won't stop until he tells us everything he knows. That is why, on the rare occasions that Justiciars use this form of interrogation, we always learn the truth."

  "Harsh. Not that he doesn't deserve it." Tal's face could have been carved from stone. "So far as I can see, he's as directly responsible for the murders as if he held the knife."

  There was a strangled, very soft moan from Visyr.

  Oh, Ardis. You stupid woman, you. Look at what you and Tal have done to Visyr.

  The Haspur's wingtips were shivering and he'd drawn himself in. It was obvious that his mind had still been on his fear of going into that confined space, when she and Tal had inconsiderately gone into detail about the terror-spells and punishments. Now Visyr was probably experiencing not only the fear he had felt at the alley, but the feelings he had suffered any number of other times in his life, all the while speculating what it would be like under one of those interrogation spells.

  "But Visyr," Ardis said gently, trying to correct the situation, "you don't have anything to fear from us. In fact we owe you our gratitude."

  Tal echoed the sentiment, and added, "You have been as brave as any of us, Visyr. None of this is your calling, yet you've taken to dangerous pursuits twice now. You are helping tremendously."

  Visyr sighed heavily. "Do you really think this will help?" he asked.

  Ardis exchanged a look with Tal, and Tal answered him. "I have no doubt of it," he told the bird-man. "You can probably go back to mapping for the next few days, and with any luck, before this monster can kill again, we'll either have him or we'll have his accomplice and be on the way to catching him."

  Visyr gave the Inquisitor a penetrating look, and Ardis wondered if he'd heard anything in Tal's voice to make him doubt the human's sincerity. Tal looked straight back into his eyes, and Visyr finally shrugged and rose to his feet.

  "I do not fly well after dark," he said, by way of apology, "and I would rather not trust myself afoot then, either. I must go."

  "I can't begin to thank you enough, Visyr," Ardis told him, as Tal also rose to let him out. "You have gone far beyond anything we would dare to ask of you."

  But when Tal returned to his chair, Ardis gave him the same kind of penetrating look that Visyr had graced him with. "Well?" she asked. "Just how useful is this sketch?"

  "For now—quite useful," Tal replied, "but its usefulness is going to degrade very rapidly. The moment that this fellow gets word—and he will—that there's a picture of him circulating with the constables, he's going to change his appearance. Hair dye, a wig, a beard, those are the easiest ways for him to look like another person, and if he's really clever, he knows the other tricks, too." He closed his eyes for a moment, calculating. "I'd say the longest this will do us any good is a week; the shortest, two days."

  She nodded, accepting the situation. "Maybe we'll be lucky."

  Tal snorted. "So far, luck's all been with the killer. Think of it! Visyr actually had the accomplice cornered, if only for a short while, and the man got away because he went to ground like a rat down a hole!"

  She tried not to grind her teeth with frustration; it only made her jaw ache. If only she could get her hands on one of those daggers!

  "I wish Visyr could have gotten the dagger, or even a scrap of the man's clothing or a piece of his hair," Tal said, sighing, echoing her thoughts. "Well, he didn't. We'll have to make the best use of what he did get us."

  "He's getting bolder," Ardis said, thinking aloud. "This is another daylight killing, and in a crowd. Maybe someone in the crowd saw something."

  "The tool this time was the used-weapons dealer across the street, so he probably got the dagger in a load of other things," Tal noted. "I don't suppose anything could—well—rub off from the dagger with the magic on it?"

  Ardis pursed her lips and nodded. "Contagion. That's not a bad thought to pursue; it certainly is going to give us as much as we've been getting off the bodies of the victims. If we can at least identify what other weapons were in the lot, maybe we can trace one of them back to where it came from."

  They continued to trade thoughts on the subject, but eventually they found themselves wandering the same, well-worn paths of speculation as they had so many times before this. Ardis noticed this before Tal—and she also noticed something else.

  She was deliberately prolonging the session and he wasn't fighting to get away, either.

  We're both tired, she told herself, knowing at the same time that it was only a half truth. We both hate idleness, and sleeping feels idle. We need rest, and sitting here and talking is the only way we get it aside from sleeping. But there was something more going on, and she wasn't going to face it until she was alone.

  "You'd better go off and get some real rest," she said, with great reluctance. "I know this is something of a rest, but it isn't sleep, and that's what you need. If you can't get to sleep, ask the Infirmarian for something. I know I will."

  He made a sour face, but agreed to do so, and with equal reluctance, left the office.

  That set off alarms in her conscience.

  Instead of going to bed, she went to her private chapel to meditate. On her knees, with her hands clasped firmly in front of her, she prepared to examine herself as ruthlessly as she would any criminal.

  It wasn't difficult to see what her symptoms meant, when she came to the task with a determination to be completely honest with herself. And this was a road she had already gone down before. The simple fact was that she was very attracted to this man Tal Rufen, but the longer she knew him, the more attracted she became. She knew now that if she had met him before she went into the Church she might not be sitting in the High Bis
hop's chair.

  The bitter part is that the attraction is not merely or even mostly carnal, it's emotional and cerebral, too. That was another inescapable conclusion. He was her intellectual equal, and what was more, he knew that she was his. He showed no disposition to resent the fact that she, a woman, was the person in charge, his temporal superior.

  And I had no real vocation when I entered the Church. I took vows as a novice in a state of pique and not for any noble reason. Perhaps that was why she examined the novices herself when they came to take their final vows; she wanted to be sure none of them had come here under similar circumstances, and might one day come to regret their choice.

  Later she had surprised herself with the level of her devotion, once she got past the rote of the liturgy and into the realms of pure faith, but her original intent had been to find a place where she would be accepted, judged, and promoted on her merit. She knew that; she'd admitted it in Confession. She had thought that she was happy. Now—now she wasn't sure anymore.

  If the man I'd been promised to had been like Tal I would have been perfectly happy as the Honorable Lady Ardis, probably with as many children as cousin Talaysen. I certainly do not seem to have lost the capacity for carnal desire and attraction.

  Drat.

  This was disturbing, troubling; did this mean a lack of faith on her part? Had her entire life been based on a lie?

  What am I supposed to do now? she asked the flame on the altar. What am I supposed to think?

  But the flame had no answers, and eventually, her knees began to ache. Giving it up, she went to bed, but sleep eluded her. Finally she resorted to one of the Infirmarian's potions, but even though it brought sleep, it also brought confused dreams in which a winged Tal pursued a murderous mage who had her former betrothed's face.

  The next day brought more work, of course; just because she was pursuing a murderer, that did not mean that other judgments could wait on the conclusion of this case. All morning long she sat in sentencing on criminals who had already been caught and convicted, and in judgment on other miscreants, hearing evidence presented by junior Justiciar-Mages. In the afternoon, she read the latest round of case-records brought from other Abbeys of the Justiciars.

  She hoped that a little time and work and the realization of the direction her emotions were taking would enable her to put some perspective on things. Tal did not appear to give his report until after dinner; but she discovered to her concealed dismay that nothing had changed.

  She listened to his litany of what had been done and the usual lack of progress, and wondered what was going on in his mind. She thought he had given some evidence of being attracted to her in turn, which would have been another complication to an already complicated situation, but she was so out of the habit of looking for such things that she could have been mistaken.

  I feel like a foolish adolescent, she thought, with no little sense of irritation. Look at me! Watching him to see if he is looking at me a little too long, trying to second-guess what some fragment of conversation means! The next thing you know, I'll be giggling in the corner with Kayne!

  "We need a more organized effort, I think," she said at last. "We're going to need more than the tacit cooperation of the Kingsford constables. I think we're going to need active effort on their part. Do you think Fenris would object to that, or resent it?"

  "Not really," he replied after a moment of thought. "He's a professional, and he doesn't like these killings in his streets. I think the only reason he's held back from offering to put on more men to help is that he's afraid you might resent his trying to get involved. After all, this is a Justiciar case."

  "Well, it ought to be more than just a Justiciar case," she replied. "Get us a meeting with him tomorrow, if you can—"

  She broke off as he frowned; he had been trying to take notes with a pen that kept sputtering, and his efforts at trimming the nib only made it worse.

  "Only scribes ever learn how to do that right," she said after the third attempt to remedy the situation failed. "Here. Take this; keep it. I can always get another, but to be brutally frank, it isn't something you would be able to find easily."

  She handed him a refillable Deliambren "reservoir" pen, the only gift her fiancé gave her that she ever kept. He accepted it with a quizzical look, took the cap off at her direction, and tried it out. His eyebrows rose as he recopied the set of notes he'd ruined.

  "Impressive," he said quietly. "Deliambren?"

  She nodded. "One of those things that you have to have connections for. I can get another from Arden, and considering who gave me that, I really ought to." She smiled crookedly. "We are supposed to discard everything from our past when we take final vows; I should have gotten rid of it long ago."

  And was that reminder of what I am meant for him or for myself?

  He finished his notes and went away, intending to go across the river and try to catch Fenris in his office to set up that conference for the next day. She played with the quill pen that he'd ruined for several minutes, caught herself caressing the feather, and threw it angrily into the wastebasket.

  She was having a serious crisis of conscience, there was no doubt of that. But second-guessing her life-decisions was not going to solve anything.

  The cure for all of this is work, she decided, and went back to that old file of defrocked Priest-Mages. There was something there, she knew it had to be there, if only she could figure out what it was. Thanks to Tal's investigative work, there were some she could remove from the file altogether—although she left the drunk in. The drunkard-act could have been just that, an act, intended for the benefit of Tal alone. No, she would not dismiss him just yet.

  But if I'm going to keep him, perhaps I ought to reconsider some of the others I'd dismissed.

  She came to the file of Revaner Byless; she remembered him with extraordinary clarity, and every time she reread his file, she became more convinced that he fit the profile of their killer perfectly. But although the Black Bird had escaped, it was surely dead by now—

  And how could he be doing all this as a bird, anyway? How could he possibly work magic?

  But—maybe he wasn't a bird anymore.

  A sudden thought struck her with the force of a blow—the recollection of an incidental comment that Tal had made.

  Dear and Blessed God—didn't Tal say that Visyr had seen some sort of odd bird around during the first murder?

  She scrambled frantically through her notes, but couldn't find any mention of it. She drummed her fingers on the table, wanting to leap up and take a horse across to Arden's Palace, rouse the poor Haspur from sleep, and interrogate him then and there!

  I can't do that. It can wait until the morning. I can talk to him in the morning. The killer has already taken his victim, and he isn't going to take another for a while. It can wait until the poor creature is alert and able to actually remember things. What's more, there are other things I have to put into motion now, if it's him, and those can't wait at all. She wrote out a note to Visyr and had Kayne find her a messenger to take it over immediately.

  If Revaner is alive and this is his work, then Robin and Talaysen's wife are in danger, terrible danger! She'd tried to send oblique warnings once, but now she had to be more direct. She hastily wrote a letter to Talaysen and another to the Gypsy named Raven in the Duke's household who might know where Robin was or how reach her to warn her—then wrote a third to Arden asking him to send the first letter to Talaysen by special courier. As she finished her letters, the messenger Kayne had gotten out of the Guard-room presented himself, and she gave him all four missives.

  Her work wasn't over for the night, and she knew it. Revaner! This would certainly explain the pattern of victims.

  When we caught the blackguard, he was working with a Guild Bard named Beltren. I think we should have a little interview with Beltren, she decided, and reached for pen and paper again. She addressed the letter to the Guildmaster, and phrased it in such a way as to make them believ
e that she had a commission in mind for Bard Beltren. And I do have a commission for him, she thought sardonically, as she signed and sealed it, I do want to hear him "sing," as the thieves cant has it. I want to hear every note he can "sing" about Revaner.

  Now she had a last set of letters to write, all of them brief and to the point. It might be that Revaner was already gone on his way after Lark or Robin, and in that case, she had to warn anyone who would listen about the danger he represented. That meant any and every Free Bard and Gypsy she had ever come into contact with, for there was no telling what direction he might take, or where he might go. From the Free Bards resident in Kingsford to the Gypsy called Nightingale who was the High King's own special musician; all must have every scrap of information she possessed. Above all, they must watch for the Black Bird. . . .

  She still did not know how he was doing the killings and there was no telling when or where he might strike. This, too, she told them. Admitting that she, and by extension the Church, was powerless in this situation was galling—but better a little loss of pride than another life lost.

  This took precedence over any personal matters. She continued to work in a frenzy, long into the night, writing and dispatching letters to anyone she thought might be able to warn those at risk.

  When it was all done, and every letter written, she sat for a moment with empty hands—weary, but still unable to sleep.

  There has to be something more I can do. . . .

  Just as she thought that, a restless movement at her altar caught her eye, and she turned to see the flame flaring and falling like a beating heart.

  There is something that I can do.

  She rose, deliberately emptying her mind and heart of any personal feelings, and retired to her private chapel to pray.