Shensi was going to be an ideal kill, so far as Orm was concerned; as he had it laid out, everything would be accomplished quietly, with an absolute minimum of fuss.
The day of the kill, Orm went into the shabby little bookstore as he had planned and purchased a book—the only title for sale, which might account for the scarcity of customers—explaining the philosophy and goals of Shensi's group. Orm wondered where they got the things printed, and how they managed to afford the printing costs. But the poor quality of the work made him think that they might be printing the things up themselves in the back; certainly the binding was incredibly crude, reminiscent of the little chapbooks children made up to draw in or to use as journals. The sullen boy who sold him the book sneered at him as he made incorrect change; Orm didn't challenge him on the sneer or on being shortchanged, but dropped the dagger in a corner as he had intended. He lurked about in a doorway, waiting to see who would pick the blade up. It pleased him no end to see that same dark-haired, lanky boy leave the place wearing it not more than a quarter hour after Orm had left the shop.
By now, of course, Rand was in the form of the Black Bird, and was lurking up among the chimneys. Except for Orm and the boy, there was no one else on the street. When the boy's back was turned, Orm gave Rand the signal to tell him that the boy was wearing the dagger, and began looking for a place to spend the day—and night, if need be.
He found a place, somewhat to his surprise, directly across the street from the bookshop. It was some indication of the poverty of this group that they were all crowded into a single room at the back of the shop when the building across from them had plenty of real living-spaces. There were several sparsely-furnished rooms to let by the week; he hired one for a week that had a window overlooking the street and moved in immediately. The proprietor was incurious; evidently this was a place where transients moved in before moving on. Then again, there wasn't much that could be damaged in Orm's room, and nothing that could be stolen, so perhaps the proprietor's indifference didn't matter. The bed was a shelf bolted to the wall and furnished with a straw mattress, the chair was too large to fit through the narrow doorway or the window, the wardrobe was also bolted to the wall. The tiny stove, meant for heating and cooking, was of cast-iron, and burned coal provided in a pile beside it. This was supposedly a week's worth of fuel; the stone-faced proprietor informed Orm that if he burned it all, he'd have to provide more at his own expense. Probably the owner didn't care what happened here as long as the resulting stains could be scrubbed off or painted over.
The room was icy, and Orm started a fire as soon as the landlord left. The fuel would barely last the night, by his current standards, but he could remember when it had been otherwise in his life. And I can remember when this would have been a haven of luxury.
As soon as the sun set, Orm opened the window, and the Black Bird flapped clumsily down to the sill.
"I'll be just above," Rand croaked, then pushed off from the sill and flapped up to perch somewhere on the roof. Orm already knew the plan; Rand would have the boy waiting when Shensi appeared just after midnight. There probably wouldn't be any witnesses, since the group couldn't afford candles or much in the way of fuel, and generally went to bed right after returning from their free meal at the tavern. It would be a long wait, but Orm was prepared for it; he amused himself with a little pocket-puzzle he'd purchased from a street-vendor. That, and keeping the stove stoked and the ashes shaken out kept him busy. These tiny stoves needed a lot of tending, but he managed to get the room tolerably warm.
Night fell, the group across the street went out by fours and returned the same way, until everyone had been fed at the expense of Shensi's employers. When the last one returned, the dim light visible through the shop window went out. The midnight bell struck in a nearby Chapel, and Rand's tool walked stiffly out of the front door of the shop. A few moments later, Shensi appeared at the end of the street, walking towards the shop with a careless swagger.
A few moments after that, it was over. In a way, Orm was disappointed; he had thought that the girl, after all her posturing, would have at least sensed that she was in danger soon enough to put up a struggle. But Rand wasn't taking any chances; he waited for the girl to pass his tool, then, with a single blow to the back, dispatched her. Shensi lay face-down in the street, with a spreading puddle of blood staining the snow, the knife-hilt protruding from the middle of her back. The tool moved down the street in a jerky, uncoordinated fashion that suggested that Rand was having difficulty controlling him, but he was headed in the direction of the nearest slaughterhouse. Orm trotted silently down the stairs and out the front door; he plucked the knife out of Shensi's back and kept going in the opposite direction, keeping the knife well away from him to avoid getting any blood on his clothing. Not that he intended to do anything other than burn this outfit as soon as he got home. Blood could be traced, and Orm never left anything to chance.
He stopped just long enough to clean the blade in a stream of water from the public pump at the corner, and went on. He took care to go by way of major streets so that his tracks were muddled in the midst of hundreds of others. By the time he reached home again, Rand was already waiting for him in the foyer shared by their apartments, in human form again.
The light from the entry-way lamp cast a sickly yellow glow over his features; the mage held out his hand wordlessly, and just as silently, Orm dropped the dagger into it. Rand turned on his heel and climbed the stairs, and Orm knew by his silence and glower that the kill had not given him the power that he had hoped for. His current tenure as a human would be short-lived.
Well, that was too bad, and it was hardly Orm's fault. At least they had another couple of easy prospects with the pickpockets; long before Rand transformed again, they'd have the next kill set up.
But the next day, when he went out to check on the pickpocket pair, he got some bad news. While he and Rand had been setting up Shensi, the pickpockets had been caught in the act by a private bodyguard and taken off to gaol. And on looking into the third prospect, he learned that one of her clients had set her up as his private mistress, which was evidently the goal she'd had in mind all along. She was no longer to be found in her old neighborhood, and even if he could find her again, she would no longer be accessible to strangers. It would take longer to find her and her patron than it would to locate a new set of targets—and even if he did find them, they were now dangerous to use. If a man of wealth suddenly slew his mistress and killed himself, someone would investigate. They'd gotten off lucky with the young fop; they couldn't count on that kind of luck a second time.
He had hardly anticipated this!
Is it Rand's luck that's gone bad, he wondered, as he returned home, or mine?
Whichever it was, Rand took the news badly, and Orm found himself the victim of a torrent of verbal abuse as well as physical intimidation that strained even his patience.
As Rand heaped abuses on him, and towered over him, brandishing his fists and stopping just short of actually landing a blow, Orm seethed. If this goes on much longer, he thought, his stomach a hot knot of resentment and suppressed anger, I am walking out of here and going straight to the constables.
From there, he could go to the room he'd hired, change his appearance, collect the money he had hidden elsewhere, and escape the city. By the time they collected Rand, Orm would be long gone, and Rand could implicate him as an accessory as much as he liked. Another kingdom, another identity, and it would be business as usual.
But Rand stopped just short of that point, and suddenly sat down in his chair.
"You'll have to find someone else," he said stiffly. "Your choices haven't been good lately; I think it's time you started obeying my orders. While I was—flying—I did some of my own scouting." He stabbed a finger down stiffly at the map on his desk, and an area circled in red. "You will go look there," he ordered. "There must be a dozen prospects, or more, available there. The quality is much higher."
Orm moved warily towards the desk and looked down at the map. He saw to his dismay that the area Rand wanted him to investigate was not one he would have chosen. This was a quarter of the city that contained mostly middle-class shops and businesses, along with a few genteel boardinghouses and inns, and working there was going to be very difficult. Such places had a regular set of customers; people knew each other by name. There were few transients, and people asked a lot of questions. Strangers there would be obvious.
But he also knew better than to argue with Rand in this mood. He simply nodded subserviently and started to leave.
But Rand stopped him.
"Don't think you can go to the constables, Orm," he said as silkily as his voice would let him. "You're as much a part of this as I am. I've taken steps to ensure that they'll know this, even if I'm dead, and I've left them the means to find you even if you leave the city in disguise. Until I have the ability to stay human, the only way you leave my employ is dead."
Orm didn't answer, although his heart froze. He just continued his path towards the door as if he hadn't heard what Rand had said. There was no point in protesting that he hadn't even thought of going to the constables; Rand wouldn't believe a protest. But that certainly put a damper on his notions of escape.
He walked down the stairs and out of the building altogether, wondering just what it was that Rand had done. If it was something magical, there wasn't a great deal that he could do to counteract it—but if it was something merely physical, such as a journal or letter, or a set of notes, he might be able to find such an object and destroy it. If it wasn't guarded or protected, that is.
But in the meanwhile, he was as tied to Rand as a slave was to a master. The one thing that he was sure of was that he didn't dare abandon Rand; even if the item Rand referred to was a physical one and he destroyed it, the mage would have to be in Church custody or dead before he would feel safe. There were too many things that Rand could do magically to find him, no matter where he tried to hide.
With no definite destination in mind, Orm wandered until he found a small eating-house, half-empty at this hour, with tables in quiet corners. He went in, gave the serving-girl his order, and took his place at a one-person table in an odd little nook. The owner was evidently a frugal soul, for there wasn't a candle or a lantern lit in the entire place; what daylight came in was filtered and dim, which precisely suited Orm's current mood.
Well, now what do I do? he wondered. This was not the first time he'd been caught off-guard since going to work for Rand, but from his point of view, it was the most unpleasant.
The first time he'd had plans go awry, it had been when the wrong person had gotten one of the daggers; a pickpocket had taken it from the intended target. That hadn't worked out too badly, though—the pickpocket had a woman who'd been singing to herself at the time, and Rand had gotten a decent kill out of the situation. The second time, though, had been a disaster from start to finish; the dagger had been intended for a pawnbroker, but had been picked up by the pawnbroker's apprentice, a scrawny, undersized preadolescent who wasn't strong enough to threaten anything, with or without a knife. The magic that caused a tool to pick up the dagger had been a little too strong; once the boy had it, he wouldn't let the blade out of his possession. In the end, Rand just gave up, and forced the boy to jump into the river and drown himself.
That kill had been most unsatisfactory on all accounts, but it had been early enough in their partnership that Rand had not gone off on a tirade. He'd been human for less than a day, and he'd been so anxious to get a real kill in that he hadn't done anything but urge Orm out to find a second target as quickly as possible.
Every time he transforms, he's a little more brutish, and not just in looks. He never was a personable fellow, but he could be charming enough when he exerted himself. He doesn't bother to try anymore. Is this what he really was, all along? It could be.
Orm's meat pie and tea arrived, and he began to eat in an absentminded fashion. No one bothered him here; even the serving-girl left him alone, which suited his mood perfectly.
I should have seen this coming, he realized. Not just that Rand was taking steps to make sure that I couldn't escape him, but that he was going to make our work dangerous. Since arriving in Kingsford, Rand had been steadily working his way up the social ladder in regard to his victims; he had not been pleased with Shensi, and only the fact that she was a musician, even if it was only in a small fashion, had made him agree to settle for her. He obviously hadn't liked the fact that Orm continued to work the poorer districts; he'd wanted choicer prey, in spite of the increased risk.
I have the feeling he is working his way up to something he has been planning for a very long time.
That would explain why he had insisted on coming back to Kingsford—which should have been the very last place he'd want to go. He stood a better chance of being caught here than anywhere else in this kingdom, and more to the point, if he ever was caught, the Church Justiciars would know exactly who and what he was. Secular constables would only kill Rand; the Church could arrange for a much more prolonged punishment. There were rumors about some of their "penances" for erring Priests. Orm wondered how Rand would enjoy being locked back in the body of the Black Bird, then imprisoned in a cell with no door or window, and fed seed and water for the rest of his life.
The higher up on the social scale our target is, the more likely we are to get caught. That was bad enough, but what if the ultimate target that Rand had in mind was someone really important?
He had the sinking feeling that he knew just who that target might be. He already knew that there were three women Rand could have in mind, all of whom were responsible in some way for him being the way he was now.
There are the two Free Bards, one called "Robin" and the other called "Lark." "Lark" is well out of the way, in Birnam, another Kingdom entirely. As the wife of the Laurel Bard of Birnam, she is well protected, but she might be accessible since she would not anticipate being a target. Nothing is impossible if you are really determined. The question is, could Rand be that determined?
But if that was to be the case, why stay in Kingsford? They should be traveling now, not lingering in a city already warned against them. That went entirely against logic, and it wasn't likely that Rand wanted to stay here to build up more targets. There were just as many possibilities on the road, if not more.
And if Rand has this woman in mind, he'd better be prepared to pay me quite a tidy fortune, both for having to leave my own Kingdom and for targeting an important woman. I know Rand has money, but I don't think Rand has that much.
The woman called "Robin" was the one responsible for Rand getting into trouble in the first place; she vanished altogether some time ago, shortly after that debacle in Gradford involving High Bishop Padrik. Given the outcome of that particular incident, it was not too surprising that she had disappeared. It's going to take a while to find her, and if she's gone out of the Human Kingdoms, we may never find her.
But the third woman in question was the one who had actually tried, judged, and punished Rand, setting the bird-spell on him—and given that she, too, was a Priest, that made her the likeliest target of Rand's anger.
She is quite well within reach at the moment—provided that you are obsessed and not particularly sane.
Orm could not for the life of him imagine how Rand thought he would be able to pull off killing her, for she was better protected than Lady Lark. Justiciar-Mage Ardis, High Bishop of Kingsford, not only had the protection of the Church, she was a powerful magician in her own right. How could Rand expect to get a dagger anywhere near her? And whose hands did he think he was going to put it into?
I don't suppose he thinks to slip the knife into the priestly regalia and wait for the Justiciars to excommunicate someone, does he? We might be here for years, if that's his plan!
He finished his meal and told himself not to panic. It could be that Rand already knew where Robin was. He might be building up resources for a kingdom change.
It could be that he's working his way up to going after Lark alone, which would not displease me. I would be quite happy to part company with him.
The only problem was that Rand would probably "part company" with Orm only if the latter was dead. That was hardly in Orm's plans.
I will grant that part of this has been enjoyable. I have found watching the kills to be quite . . . pleasurable. There's a distinct thrill to watching a death, and knowing that you were the one who had the power to bring that particular death to that particular person. Nevertheless . . . this is one set of thrills that I can manage without, given the increasing risk. He could get a great deal of excitement from other experiences just as easily, including a little discreet hunting in the gutters on his own.
I've learned a lot from working with Rand, and the lessons haven't been wasted.
Unfortunately, Rand had not learned reciprocal lessons. One lesson that Orm never, ever forgot was "never pick someone important enough to warrant revenge."
If Rand wants to change the hunts, he can go do it by himself. He's still dependent on me to pick the initial targets, and if I can't find anything suitable that doesn't include risks I find acceptable, well, maybe he ought to try hunting on his own again. He had to remember that the only real hold Rand had over him was to implicate him in the murders. Rand could threaten and rage as much as he wanted, but the moment that Orm was outside his own door and into the street, there was nothing that Rand could do to control him. Rand might or might not realize that, but in the long run, it didn't matter. Words and threats meant nothing; if Rand wanted his victims, he had to leave Orm free to find them and set them up, for he couldn't do it all himself.
With that resolution firmly in mind, Orm paid for his food and left the eating-house. He would go ahead and scout the district that Rand wanted him to work, so that he could honestly say he'd been there. But if there was no good prospect—and by that, he meant a safe prospect—well, he'd just have to look elsewhere, wouldn't he?
He passed a group of children playing in the snow and chanting rhymes; one of them caught his attention for a moment.
"Four and twenty black birds?" Well Rand hasn't gotten four-and-twenty victims quite yet, but it's very nearly that, and they aren't exactly baked in a pie—but they aren't likely to sing anymore, either.
Orm kept one ear attuned to the music of a hammered dulcimer as he strolled up to the door of his chosen shop; there wasn't much traffic on this side of the street. Most of the pedestrians were over across the way, listening to the street-musician who had set herself up next to a food-seller's stall. And there wasn't anyone who looked interested in the shop Orm was heading for. With the sign of a rusty ax out front, there was no doubt that the merchant within dealt in used weapons.
By going just outside the district that Rand had specified, Orm had found a target that suited both of them. By sheer luck, a rather homely Free Bard wench named Curlew had a regular stand right across from this particular shop; either she hadn't heard the warnings, or was disregarding them. It really didn't matter; the fact that she was a Free Bard made her irresistible to Rand, and that was what made it possible for Orm to insist on a district that was a step lower than the one Rand had wanted to work.
Ashdon, the merchant, saw Curlew at least once every day; she went to him to sell him the pins she accumulated in her collection hat from those who couldn't afford to give her even the smallest of copper coins. Ashdon was terribly touchy about status and normally would never lower himself to so much as take notice of a guttersnipe Free Bard except that she had something marketable to sell him. It was easy for him to clean and straighten pins, and when women came into this shop accompanying their lovers or husbands, they generally bought all the pins he had, assuming from their shiny condition that they were new. So he gave Curlew just enough attention to exchange a couple of coppers for her handful of pins every day, and otherwise ignored her.
Orm strolled into Ashdon's shop, and before the balding, stringy fellow could break into his sales-speech, he laid a flannel bundle on the counter and opened it. Inside was a lot of a dozen mixed knives, including the all-important one. It had just enough ornamentation on it in the way of twisted gold wire on the hilt to make Ashdon's greed kick in.
"Ten silver," Orm demanded. This was about six more than the collection was worth, if you left out the important knife. With it, the collection was easily worth nine. If he got seven, he could pretend to be pleased, and Ashdon would be gleefully certain that he'd gotten a bargain.
Ashdon hawked and spit to the side. "For those?" He picked one up—the cheapest of the lot. "Look at this—" he demanded, holding the rusty blade up. "Look at the state of these things! If I can get them clean, they'll never sell! Five silver, take it or leave it."
"Nine, or I walk out of here." Orm retorted. "I can take these anywhere and get nine."
"So why aren't you somewhere else?" Ashdon replied with contempt. "You've already been elsewhere, and you got told what I just told you. Six, and I'm doing you a favor."
"Eight, and I'm doing you one," Orm said, with spirit, and picked up the special blade—carefully. With luck, Ashdon wouldn't notice that he hadn't removed his gloves. "Look at this! That's real gold! I've had a touchstone to it!"
"It's probably gold-washed brass, and you're probably a thief trying to sell me your gleanings. Seven. That's my last offer." The flat finality of his voice told Orm that it was time to close the bargain.
Orm whined and moaned, but in the end, he pocketed the seven silver pieces and left the bundle, feeling quite cheerful. Rand's spell and his own greed virtually ensured that Ashdon would decide to put the dagger on his person or have it at hand rather than putting it away with the rest.
That left the first stage over and done with. Orm slipped back after dark, at closing time, to see what Ashdon had done with the blade. He watched as Ashdon closed and double-locked his shop door, and walked off to his home nearby. As Orm had hoped, the weapons-dealer had improvised a sheath and had the dagger on his own belt, where it would stay until Rand was ready. Once he touched it with bare flesh, he wouldn't have been able to leave it anywhere.
Orm walked off under the cover of the night, feeling well pleased. They would not strike tonight nor tomorrow, nor even the following day, despite Rand's impatience. They would wait for two whole days to eliminate the chance that anyone would remember Orm going into that shop with a load of weapons to sell. That left Orm free to scout another part of the city for the next target, while they waited for memories to fade.
Two days later, Orm lingered over a hot meat pie at the stall of a food vendor near Curlew's stand. He would have to slip in and get the dagger quickly once the girl was dead, since this was going to be another daylight kill. He didn't like that. He would have much preferred a nighttime kill like Shensi, but there wasn't much choice in the matter; Curlew respected the warnings enough that she packed up and left just before sunset every night, and spent the hours of the night playing at the tavern where she slept. They would have no chance of taking her after dark, for she could not be persuaded to leave the company of others after nightfall for any amount of money.
While he waited, he watched Ashdon putter about in his shop, making a concerted effort not to show his tension. In order for Rand to take the man over, Ashdon would have to put his hand right on the hilt of the dagger. Normally that happened several times in a day as Ashdon made certain he still had the weapon with him, but timing could be critical in this case. They wanted a lot of people in the street when the kill took place—the more people there were, the more confusion there would be.
Rand was up on the roof above Orm's head, near a chimney. No one would pay any attention to him; he was only a bird on the roof. Granted, he was a man-sized bird, but no one would believe that; they'd sooner think that the chimney was unusually small, or that there was something wrong with their eyes.
Finally, as Orm's meat pie cooled, the watched-for contact took place.
Rand sensed the contact, and took over; now Orm's tension was for what was to come. Ashdon walked stiffly across the street and waited for a moment, until a break came in the crowd. Then he made a sudden lunge through the gap, and knifed the girl with one of those violent upward thrusts that Rand seemed so fond of, lifting her right off the ground for a moment on his closed fist. It seemed incredible that the scrawny little man had that much strength, but that was partly Rand's doing.
The girl's mouth and eyes widened in shock and pain, but nothing came out of her but a grunt. As usual, the crowd didn't realize what had just happened at first; it was only when Ashdon shoved the body away and it flopped down into the street, with blood pouring out over the snow, that they woke to what he'd done.
It was a particularly nasty butcher-job; the knife-thrust had practically disemboweled the girl. Orm sensed that Rand had just vented a great deal of frustration and anger in that single thrust of his blade; this was convenient for both of them, because the sight of the corpse had the effect of scattering most of the onlookers and sending the rest into useless hysterics.
Now real chaos erupted, as people ran screaming away, afraid that they were going to be the next victims, fainted, or froze in place with terror. This time there were no would-be heroes trying to catch and hold Ashdon; the crowd was composed mostly of women, ordinary merchants or laborers, and youngsters, not of burly longshoremen or bargemen.
Rand forced Ashdon into the peculiar, staggering run of his tools that looked so awkward and was actually so efficient. Orm felt sealed inside a strange little bubble of calm, while all about him, onlookers were screaming and running in every direction. Still, no one did anything but try to escape, even though merchants, craftsmen, and their customers were coming out of the shops to see what had happened; no one tried to stop Ashdon, or even moved to block his escape. The ones in the street were all trying too hard to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the knife-wielding madman, and the ones coming out of the buildings didn't know what had happened yet.
Ashdon sprinted past Orm, dropping the dagger, which was no longer needed for the spell by which he was being controlled. Now it was Orm's turn. Orm darted out into the street to pick it up—
Then came the unexpected. Something dove down out of the sky, headed straight for him, like a feathered bolt of lightning.
For one crazy moment, he thought it was Rand—but the flash of color, scarlet and blue, told him he was wrong. At the same time, he was already reacting; he had not been in this business for as along as he had without developing excellent reactions. When things happened, his body moved without his mind being involved.
He ducked and rolled, snatching up the dagger at the same time, and continued to roll onto his feet as his pursuer shot over his head. He took advantage of the fact that his attacker had to get height for another dive, and dashed into a narrow alley, too narrow for the creature to fly or even land in. His heart was in his throat; what in Heaven's name was after him?
He looked back briefly over his shoulder and saw it hovering at the alley entrance. The winged thing was a bird-man, and there was only one bird-man in Kingsford; it could only be Visyr, the bird-man who worked for the Duke, who had nearly caught another of Rand's tools during a kill.
But how had he known to go after the dagger rather than the tool?
No matter; he'd worry about that later. Now he had to get away, as quickly as possible!
The alley was protected from above by overhanging eaves, as Orm very well knew from his study of the area and of Visyr's own maps. The bird-man couldn't track him from above, or follow him into the alley without landing and coming in on foot, losing his advantage. Evidently he came to that conclusion himself, and disappeared for a moment.
But Orm had already gone to ground in a shallow doorway; from the bird-man's vantage at the head of the alley it should look as if he vanished into the alley and got away. And Orm doubted that a bird would care to penetrate into a place barely large enough to allow his folded wings to pass; cut off from the sky as it was, this alley was a claustrophobe's worst nightmare.
With a thunder of wings, the bird-man slammed into the snow at the entrance and peered into the alley. His eyes could not possibly adjust to the darkness in here well enough to make Orm out; Orm could see him as he peered carefully around the edge of the doorway, but he couldn't possibly see Orm.
Could he?
Orm waited with his heart pounding. Could the bird-man hear that? If he did, would he know that it was his intended quarry?
For a moment that stretched into eternity, Orm waited, but the bird-man lost patience before Orm did. With a scream of frustration, the bird-man turned and launched himself back into the air, on the trail of the controlled killer. He would be too late, of course. Ashdon was long dead by now; Rand had certainly forced him into an enormous vat of acid used to clean and etch metal.
Orm waited just long enough to be certain that the bird-man was gone, then cleaned the dagger in the snow, and slipped down the alley. He followed it for several blocks, crossing streets with care in case the bird-man was watching for him from above.
From there, he threaded his way through back streets, stopping once to buy a coat of faded blue and exchange it for his brown one, stopping again to get a cap and pull it down over his forehead. By hunching himself up inside the oversized coat, he managed to look much smaller than he actually was. From above, there was no way to tell he was the same man that Visyr had seen taking the dagger—he hoped. Finally, when he was absolutely certain that there was no one watching, either on the ground or in the air, he washed the dagger in the water from a pump in someone's backyard.
Only then did he head homewards, shaking inside with reaction at his narrow escape.
Something was going to have to be done, if the bird-man had gotten involved. Orm could not spend his time watching for attacks from above as well as trying to snatch the daggers!
He stopped once to buy a new meat-pie to replace the one he'd dropped, and got himself a particularly strong beer to wash it down with. As he ate, he listened to the gossip around him for word of the latest kill.
There wasn't much; people weren't talking about it in this neighborhood yet. That was encouraging at least, since it indicated that people still weren't paying a lot of attention to the kills of street-folk like Curlew. Ducal edict or not, people simply didn't think such murders warranted much attention.
Good. Excellent. Let's hope we can keep it that way. Rand should be content for a while; he had a female Free Bard in a daylight kill and that should keep him human for a good while.
Orm hoped that this would be enough to make him very, very content because somehow he was going to have to persuade Rand to accept lesser creatures and work at night for a while. If they did that, there was always the possibility that the constables would think that the kills were over, or that the cause was a disease or a poison that had run its course in the population. With luck, no one would look any further than that for a cause. Above all, they had to get the bird-man looking elsewhere; Orm still didn't know why he'd gone after the person with the dagger and not the man who'd done the kill, and he didn't like it. What if someone among the constables had figured out that the cause of the kills was the dagger? That could be very bad. If word began to spread among the people of Kingsford that these peculiar daggers were dangerous, anyone trying to pass one would be in serious trouble. And Rand was going to insist on that one shape; Orm just knew it. It was part of Rand's obsession and nothing was going to make him give it up.
Orm sighed, pulled his hat farther down on his head, and trudged homewards in a dispirited slouch. This was all getting very difficult, and very dangerous. It was more than time to start exploring some options.
Ardis was torn by feelings of mingled grief and elation, a mix that made her so physically sick she doubted she'd be eating anything for a while. The Priest in her grieved for the dead, mourned over the useless, senseless act of murder that had ended the lives of two more innocents, but the side of her that was a Justiciar was overjoyed by the break in the situation. At long last they had a face to go with the knife.
Patrolling in the air as Tal had asked him to, the bird-man Visyr had witnessed the murder of a Free Bard called Curlew. As he had the first time, he reacted instantly, and with speed that no human could have matched. Even though he was a quarter mile away at the time, he was literally at the scene in an eyeblink. But this time he had not followed the apparent murderer as the culprit ran off; this time, under Tal's orders, he had kept his eye on the knife, and dove for it to try and retrieve it.
Then had come the moment when the break occurred. Only the Haspur's superior peripheral vision had enabled him to catch what happened next. As the murderer tossed the knife away, Visyr had seen a man drop a meat-pie he'd been holding and sprint across the street, running towards the murderer and the knife. It was obvious when the murderer ran off that this man intended to snatch up the knife and try to carry it off. Visyr had gotten an excellent look at the man's face as he turned his dive into an attack, and barely missed catching him. He'd pursued the man, but the culprit had gotten into a narrow, covered alley and Visyr had not been able to follow him in there. Once he'd gotten into that protective cover, Visyr had lost him.
Ardis felt very sorry for the Haspur. Visyr sat—or rather, was in a position between sitting, mantled and perched—on a stool across from her now, drooping; frustration and depression shaded every word he spoke. He felt terrible guilt over his inability to force himself to enter the alley, despite the fact that it was a place where he would have been helpless against anyone who attacked him.
"I am sorry, High Bishop," he said again for the fourth time. "I am truly sorry. I tried to follow him, but the alley, it was so small, like a rat-hole—"
"Visyr, you're a Haspur, your kind get claustrophobia even in small rooms, outside your homes!" she said patiently, as she had said before. "It would have been like asking a man who couldn't swim to pursue someone who went underwater. I know that, and I do believe you, I promise you. No one blames you for anything; on the contrary, you did very, very well."
Visyr shook his head, still brooding over his failure. "I know where that alley goes, and I tried to find him where it crossed into the open, but somehow I missed him. Either he stayed in it longer than I thought he would, or he escaped out of one of the buildings. I should have—I ought to have—" He stopped, and sighed. "I don't know what I should have done. I only know that it should have been something other than what I did."
It was Tal's turn to bolster Visyr's sagging self-esteem, and he did so. "You did just fine, Visyr," he said emphatically. "If you hadn't flown straight back to the palace and hunted down Master Rudi, we wouldn't have this." He tapped the sketch on Ardis's desk, a copy of the one Visyr had carried post-haste to the Abbey. The Haspur had really made some incredibly creative and intelligent moves; when he realized that the quarry had escaped, he flew at top speed to the Ducal Palace and sent pages scurrying in every direction to bring him Duke Arden's best portrait-artist. Within an hour, Master Rudi had produced a pencil sketch that Visyr approved, and the Haspur then repeated his speeding flight, this time heading for the Abbey. With the best of the Abbey artists working on it, they now had a half dozen of the sketches to give to the constables patrolling the areas where street-entertainers performed.
"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 Bishop'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 believe 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.
It was the one thing she could do for all those potential victims that no one else could.
With hands clasped before her and her jaw set stubbornly, she stared at the flame on the altar. Lay-people often made promises to God in the mistaken supposition that one could bargain with Him. She knew better; God did not make bargains. He seldom moved to act directly in the world, for He had given His creations free will, and to act directly would take those glorious or inglorious choices from them.
But she did ask for one, small thing. Let the killing end, she begged. And if there is a cost to ending it, let me be the one to pay it. As I am the servant of the Sacrificed God, let me be permitted to offer myself as a lesser sacrifice. Let no more innocents die; let the deaths end, if need be, with mine.