Obtaining the Deliambren pen was not as difficult as Rand apparently assumed it would be; Orm had information about who might have such items within a day. He'd been quite confident that he would have word within a week at the latest, although Rand obviously was under the impression that such an exotic item would have to be imported at tremendous expense. But a small Deliambren contrivance, while a luxury, was also useful—and it was something that a wealthy person would want to be able to show off. That meant that the wealthy would not leave such an object safely at home, they would take their pens with them. When they removed their little prizes from the secure area of their home, eventually, the pens would be lost—or stolen.
It was the latter that Orm was most interested in. Such things turned up now and again in the goods that pick-pockets disposed of to fences. There was one minor problem, at least as Orm foresaw. Because they were the expensive toys of the very rich, they should be relatively rare, but Orm's information led him to believe that there were more of them here in Kingsford than in many cities Orm had been in. This might have been because a good many of them were gifts from Duke Arden to people he particularly wanted to reward, and Arden had strong Deliambren alliances. This was especially evidenced in the presence of the crimson-winged map-maker, who was, word had it in some circles, helping Arden and Kingsford as a token of Deliambren concern. Pens, however, were more tangible, and likely cheaper than even a day's work from the Haspur.
The fence that Orm was sent to had three of the things, all three of them identical to Rufen's. The case was of black enameled metal, with a close-fitting cap and a lever on the side that somehow enabled the contrivance to drink up the ink it was dipped into. The fence demonstrated one of the devices for Orm with considerable casualness that suggested he must have had these three for some time.
"How much?" Orm asked.
The fence laughed. "What would you say to fifteen silver for the lot?"
Orm was extremely surprised at the low price for a Deliambren rarity, and allowed his surprise to show. "I would tell you I would buy the lot," he said, certain that the fence could not be serious. "And you, of course, would laugh at me and tell me that of course, you meant to say gold and not silver."
The fence acknowledged his surprise, and grimaced.
"I haven't had anyone that wanted one of these for a year. I would gladly sell you all three for fifteen silver, and think myself pleased with the bargain."
Fifteen silver! Orm thought. Why, that's a fraction of their real value—
"Now, don't think to go making a profit," the fence admonished, "Don't think to take 'em out on the street and peddle 'em. Fact is, a constable that notices you've got one of 'em had better know you're a High Muckety Muck yourself, or you'll get clapped in gaol faster'n you can think. That's the trouble; they're easy t'lift but hard t'get rid of. Lots 'o people look at 'em and want 'em bad, but what's the point if you're gonna get arrested if you show one?"
"Then why did you take them if you know you can't be rid of them?" Orm asked.
"I got them in a lot of other stuff," the fence told him. "If I'd known they were in there, I might not have bought it. Maybe you could take 'em out of the city and sell 'em, but not here—and you'd have to get a good piece away just to be safe."
"The things just are not like jewelry, are they?" Orm observed, and the fence nodded his round head vigorously.
"Pree-cisely!" His head bobbed like a child's toy as he waxed enthusiastic. "You get a bit'o jewelry that's hard to dispose of, you can break it down—not these! You even try to open one to see how it's put together, you got a big mess and a lot'o little useless bits."
He speaks as if he had experience with that situation, Orm thought with amusement. I wonder if he meant to try and have the things duplicated? He could make a lively business of them if he could—but I suppose he didn't know that the Deliambrens have a habit of making sure no one can actually take any of their devices apart for precisely that reason.
"And if I don't show them in public?" he asked.
Again, the fence shook his head. "If you figger on keeping these in the house, like, you'll be all right. But don't forget and carry one out with you. I won't be responsible if you do."
Orm chuckled, and promised he'd be careful, then bought all three pens for half the price he thought he'd have to pay for one.
He tucked them into a hidden pocket inside his coat, making sure they were secure from pickpockets. It would be supremely ironic to have bought them from a fence only to have a pickpocket steal them back.
He decided to keep one for himself, and give the other two to Rand; he rather liked the look of the things himself, and was already thinking of ways to disguise his so that he could use it in public. He always had enjoyed a challenge, and this was one worth pursuing as an exercise for his cleverness.
Rand was so pleased that Orm had gotten, not just one, but two pens, and quickly, that he actually produced a monetary bonus for his employee. The bonus was a sizable one, large enough that Orm was taken aback by it. Rand hadn't given him a bonus since the earliest days of their association, and never one this big.
Rand also gave him the evening off—officially—and leave to go spend it however he cared to. "Go on," the Bird croaked. "Enjoy yourself however best pleases you. Do not return until dawn, if that is your wish."
"Thank you," he said flatly. Such "permission" was as galling as the bonus was pleasurable, although Rand probably was not aware that it was.
There wasn't much else that the Bird cared to say, so Orm stood up to leave the apartment with mixed feelings. Arrogant bastard. I can damned well take any night I please any time I please, and without his leave. Orm was half tempted to stay at home—but then another thought occurred to him.
He might want me out of the house because he's planning on trying something magical, and he doesn't want me around when he does. So he thanked Rand solemnly without showing his anger and went down to his own apartment to consider his actions for the evening.
Curiosity ate at him; if Rand was going to try something while he was in the Black Bird form, Orm might very well want to watch. It could be amusing to watch him trying to work magic with no hands. Orm didn't know much about how actual magic was worked, but he had some vague notions culled from tales and common songs. This could be quite hilarious, if Rand had to draw diagrams or mix potions. How would he do it? With his feet?
But another notion was not so amusing. This might very well have something to do with that earlier threat Rand had made. If that was the case, Orm had a vested interest in keeping an eye on the proceedings.
On the other hand, if things went badly, did Orm really want to be there? If he is going to work magic, and he makes a mistake because of his form—it could be very dangerous. I have heard of such things; it would be better if I was far away at the time the mistake is made.
And if Rand was doing something that involved Orm's future, would he have been so blatant about wanting Orm out of the way? No, he's mad, but he isn't stupid. And—I have only silly tales to base my concerns on. He is the last creature in the world to risk himself.
Rand had been too cautious for too long. No, he probably wants me out of the way because whatever he's about to do is going to be noisy, and he doesn't want me trying to burst in on him in the middle of it, thinking he's gotten himself into trouble.
Not that Orm was likely to try to burst in to rescue Rand from his own magical folly; far from it! But too much noise of an odd variety, and even Orm might be tempted to go knock a door down to stop it.
Or too many stinks coming down from above. Orm actually grimaced a little at that thought; Rand had once perpetrated something that caused the worst odor Orm had ever had the misfortune to encounter, an effluvia so rank that it burned the eyes and made the nose water, made him cough for two days, and forced them to get rid of every scrap of food in the house. He wasn't certain what had caused that particularly horrid stench; it might have been Rand trying magic, or it might have been Rand bringing home something his bizarre bird body craved. If something that was going to cause a reek like that was what Rand was up to, Orm would very happily leave for the evening.
So he did, and for the first time in months, enjoyed an evening at one of the city's better Houses. Why not? He certainly had the money for it. He chose the Fragrant Orchard, a House which accommodated discriminating but not exotic tastes—and which had no entertainment other than good food and the ladies themselves.
He entered wearing a suit of clothing he had kept back to use for blending in at just such an establishment; clearly expensive, but in an understated fashion and somber colors. Even though he had not made an appointment, he was ushered to a fine table, and the Madame herself came to ask him his preferences. She sent over a server immediately, and his evening commenced, beginning with an excellent meal, proceeding on to the services of a very talented and supple lady who believed in taking time to appreciate the finer things, and ending with a steam-bath and a massage. He even took a hired carriage home, although he took the precaution of having it leave him on the corner, and he walked the rest of the way. It lacked a few hours until dawn; there was a certain damp quality to the air that promised more snow, though none was falling now. Could the Black Bird fly in snow? Probably, most birds could. There was no one on the street, and not a light to be seen in the windows. Except for the street-lamps at each corner, the only light came from the stars.
He sniffed the air gingerly as he entered, and thought he detected something dubious; he went back into his kitchen and made a similar trial of the food, but couldn't taste anything wrong there. Well, maybe Rand had learned something the last time; the hint of bitter aroma was stronger in the kitchen and bedroom than in the sitting-room, but opening the windows cleared it out, and once the fires were built up again, the rooms warmed quickly. Orm thought once during the process about checking on Rand, but there was no sound from above, and he decided not to bother. Rand had indicated that he didn't want to be bothered; very well, Orm wouldn't bother him. If he was awake and aware, he certainly knew that Orm was home, for Orm hadn't made any attempt to be quiet. When neither sound nor summons came from above as the rooms warmed up to a reasonable temperature, Orm decided to complete his night of freedom with a good rest.
In the morning, however, the expected summons came in the form of three hard raps on the ceiling of his bedroom. Orm answered it with a calm he had not expected to feel. No matter what Rand came up with, he was confident that he had everything he needed in place to deal with the consequences.
But Rand's new plan was a considerable surprise. "We're going back to the old ways," the Black Bird announced, before Orm could even say anything. "I don't need Free Bards, I don't need Gypsies, I don't even need musicians. Just women—but I'm going to need a lot of them; frankly, Orm, the kind of kills we were taking when we first started just don't supply nearly as much power, so what we will lack in quality we must make up in quantity."
"But they're easier to get, and you can get a lot of them," Orm pointed out, feeling a little light-headed from such a pleasant surprise. "For that matter, you could do a few more of the long kills, the indoor ones, like the jeweler-kill—that was how you got more power out of the poorer quality women back when we started."
The Bird's beak bobbed as Rand nodded agreement. "You're right. And we can do that. There's just going to be a slight difficulty for you, though."
Orm's shoulders tensed. A slight difficulty. Now it comes! Now he tells me something outrageous. "What would that be?" he asked.
"I'm going to want you to hide the bodies for a while," Rand told him. "Not forever! Not even for more than a few weeks. I want them found, but I don't want them found immediately—I want them found in a time and place of my choosing."
Oho! There's a complicated plan going on here, and he has no intention of telling me what it is until it's too late for me to do anything about it. Should I be pleased or alarmed?
Pleased, he decided. At least the kills would be easier, safer— "In certain cases, you might not want to use a tool," he said cautiously. "I could take care of the situation myself."
"Oh?" If the Bird had possessed a brow, Rand would have arched it. "I thought you didn't do that sort of thing."
"I can make an exception in the case of expediency, if it's too difficult to find a tool," Orm replied. And I'll be wearing silk gloves so you can't take me over, he added silently. I have no intention of following in the footsteps of the tools.
But Rand only gave a strange, gurgling sound that was his equivalent of a chuckle. "That won't be necessary. I've picked out the women already. The first one is going to be another of that crowd that lives in the bookstore—in fact, I'd like to dispose of all three of the women living there now. We could take all of them in a single night if we planned it right. The women always come back to the shop long before the men do."
"Oh, really?" Orm laughed. Ordinarily, he wouldn't have wanted the exposure that came from repeating a pattern, but if the bodies were going to be hidden, it wouldn't matter. "Fine. Let me find a place to put them. I'll go looking now; when I have a place, I'll come back and tell you."
He wanted to go out immediately, because the idea that immediately occurred to him was to use one of the boathouses or small warehouses out on the riverbank. Pleasure-boats were all in drydock at repair houses for the winter and wouldn't go into the boathouses until spring; if he could find a sufficiently dilapidated place, he might be able to rent it for a bit of next to nothing.
And if Rand doesn't care how and where the bodies are found, only when, we could dump them all into the river unseen from the boathouse, and let the current carry them away. If nothing else, the bodies could be left amid chunks of ice to preserve them as long as winter lasted. There was no reason for customs officials or constables to search boathouses in the winter; there was no smuggling in winter worth mentioning.
Failing a boathouse, a warehouse would certainly do, if it was small enough—but there would not be the option of a quick and "invisible" means of disposal of the bodies.
Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad thing to take some initiative before he delivers orders. "I'll go out and find a—storage facility," he said, standing up. "Unless you have something else in mind?"
Rand was still in a fine mood, and perfectly ready to allow Orm to make his own choice, apparently. "Good. Get something today, if you can. I'd like to begin immediately with this little project; we don't have any time to spare."
We don't have any time to spare? Suddenly, it seems, we have a schedule to meet.
But Orm was not loathe to take the hint, and by nightfall, Orm the spice-merchant had acquired a strongly built but shabby little boathouse, and a small warehouse a mere block away from it, convenient to the districts in which Orm proposed to find most of their kills.
After all, it didn't hurt to be really prepared.
Five kills in one night, and Rand was human again.
In fact, he'd been human after the first kill, a standard scenario for them. One girl was alone in the shop; the young man who'd taken their blade entered the bookshop, knifed the lone girl, dropped the knife beside the body, then threw himself into the river. That left the shop empty as they waited for the arrival of the other two girls. But it was Rand who took up the blade and ambushed the other two as they came in, first rendering them unconscious, then disposing of them at his leisure. He had not personally made a kill since the last woman he'd taken as the Black Bird, several months ago.
Orm watched with utter fascination as Rand made the second two kills; the fierce, cold pleasure the man took in the act, the surgical precision with which he first disabled them, then vivisected them.
Very enlightening. He hadn't known Rand was capable of that much concentration. But then again, Rand had a great deal to gain from these exercises, and the women themselves were limited in use and power unless he drew out their experience as long as he could.
In the end, they were interrupted by the unexpected arrival of one of the men. The fellow entered the shop without either of them hearing him, and blundered right into what must have seemed like a scene out of the Church's tales of Hellfire.
He didn't have long to appreciate it, however. As he stood there, mouth stupidly agape, Rand leapt for him, both blood-smeared hands outstretched and reaching for his throat.
A moment later, the man was on his knees at Rand's feet, making gurgling noises as Rand throttled the life out of him. The mage's hands were locked about the fellow's throat so tightly that although his victim clawed frantically at the fingers, there wasn't a chance of budging him.
Orm watched in detached fascination. Rand didn't let up until the man's face was black, his tongue protruding from his mouth, and his eyes bulging, froglike, out of their sockets. Then the mage released his grip, knuckles crackling, and the body dropped to the floor with an audible thud.
Orm coughed, and Rand turned; he hardly recognized the mage, his face was so distorted with a rage and hunger far beyond anything Orm could even imagine. For one moment, Orm was actually shocked. He had never dreamed that there was this kind of emotion locked within the mage.
He is far more dangerous than I thought.
Then Rand's expression changed, all in a moment, and it was so bland and smooth that Orm wondered if what he had seen had been a trick of the light.
No. I don't think so. I saw it, and that's my warning. But I'd better pretend I didn't see it.
"Why didn't you use the knife on him?" Orm asked, mildly.
Rand sneered. "He wasn't worth it," the mage said. "Now, let's get these husks into hiding, before any of the rest come back unexpectedly."
Orm had already made provision for this night's work; in the alley behind the shop was a handcart, the kind the rag-and-bone men used to hold their gleanings. He and Rand wrapped the bodies in sheets of rags, then carried the bodies out to the cart, which easily held four with room for a pile of rags atop them. The alley might have been in a city of the dead; there was no sound other than their heavy breathing, their grunts of effort, the thuds as they heaved the bodies into the cart, and the squeaking and rattling of the cart itself. When they finished loading the cart, they went back into the shop and spent a few moments throwing all the books, paper, and printing supplies to the floor, then dumping out the cans of ink on top of it all. When the rest of the group returned, it would look as if some enemy had come in and ransacked the shop. They might assume it was Duke Arden's people, or the constables. If they did, they would probably flee without ever reporting anything to anyone. No one would ever know what had gone on here, which made Orm perfectly happy.
By the time they were done, the place not only looked as if it had been ransacked, it looked as if several people had worked with great malice to destroy everything here. They glanced around for a moment, and Rand nodded with satisfaction at the extent of the damage. Then, throwing shabby, patched cloaks over their own clothing, they each took a handle of the cart and trundled it openly out into the street. There, they were completely ignored even by a passing constable, for who would ever look at a refuse-collector? The cart was well balanced and light, but it was still dreadfully difficult to pull when fully loaded. As it rumbled and squeaked, Orm laid aside his concern with being stopped, and just concentrated on getting the cart back to the boathouse.
Orm was thoroughly fatigued by the time they reached the haven of the boathouse, though Rand seemed perfectly capable of hauling the cart halfway to Birnam if need be. Orm wondered about that; wondered if the last kill didn't have something to do with this unusual energy.
Or perhaps it was simply because Rand got so much exercise in the form of the Black Bird that he was far stronger than Orm would have supposed.
With the cart inside the boathouse doors and the doors themselves closed, Orm took up the second stage of the night's work. Not too surprisingly, Rand now abdicated in the further work to be done, leaving it all to Orm. Orm suspected that the only reason he had helped in loading and pulling the cart was to get the bodies cleared out before anyone else came back—he was able to handle one intruder, but a pack of them would have been too much even for a mage. But now that they were safely in hiding—well, it would all be on Orm's shoulders.
And if Orm didn't take certain precautions, he could be tied to the kills as easily as Rand. The bodies needed to be immersed in running water for at least an hour to cleanse them of all of the magical traces of Rand's power—and, incidentally, of Orm's touch. That was the easy part; Orm tied ropes around them and lowered them into a hole he'd chopped in the ice. There they would remain for the requisite time, and in the meantime, he and Rand changed their clothing, cleaned up, and threw the clothing, weighted by an old stone anchor, into the hole.
When the hour was up, they both hauled the bodies out of the water and stacked the now-rigid corpses in a corner, throwing an aged tarpaulin over them, just in case. They'd be frozen stiff by morning, and easier to handle. By then, false-dawn lightened the eastern horizon, and Orm was so weary he would have been perfectly prepared to share the boathouse with their four "guests." He and Rand made their way back home together, like a pair of late-night carousers; Orm was too tired to even think and too numbly cold to care. He fell straight into bed and slept around the clock.
They made a kill every two nights for two weeks. Rand remained in human form the entire time, and their kills were mostly by simple ambush out on the street. There were two more that were under roofs, but Orm didn't see those; instead of using a tool, Rand handled the kill personally. Rand was alone with the women, and Orm stood lookout for several hours. Afterwards, the condition of the bodies suggested that Rand had found leisure to be even more inventive than he had been with the bookshop girls, and much more like the jeweler-kill in grisly details.
Other than those two, however, the kills were quick; the longest part of the proceedings was bringing the bodies back to the boathouse and cleansing them. Rand picked out the kills, Rand made the kills, usually with a tool, and Orm cleaned up afterwards. With only one body to pick up in the handcart and take to the boathouse, cleanup wasn't all that difficult and it didn't take a great deal of time. Orm became quite confident as he casually wheeled his rag-cart past constables, though the constabulary appeared more tense day by day. During the days, he continued to pursue his safeguards, as Rand spent most of the rest of the days and part of each night engaged in something in the room of his apartment that Orm associated with magic. Orm could hear him walking about up there, and wondered what he was doing. It was more than idle curiosity; after seeing the mage's "other face"—and one that Orm was more and more convinced was the true one—Orm was very concerned about his own safety. When Rand went down, he wouldn't go without taking Orm with him if he could. And if Rand thought he could arrange for Orm to take the whole blame, he certainly would.
The street-kills were, in some ways, riskier than the ones Rand performed through a tool, and the power-payoffs were nowhere near as high. Orm figured that Rand must need the extra power to stay human, in order to work on something special. He was certainly keeping at his work with amazing diligence, the like of which he had not demonstrated before.
Finally, after three days without a kill, Rand emerged from his apartment and came down the stairs to enter Orm's sanctum, wearing that peculiar nervousness that warned Orm he was about to change back into the Black Bird. He had a small package wrapped in old silk (probably cut from a secondhand garment) in his hand, and gave it to Orm.
Orm unwrapped it; he expected another knife, but it was one of the pens, lying on the yellowed silk in his hand like a sleek, slim black fish.
"I want you to find a way to substitute this for the same object Tal Rufen carries," Rand said, clasping his hands behind him, a gesture that Orm already knew was to hide the fact that they were trembling uncontrollably. "When you've done that, it will be time to move the bodies. Pile them up in the dead-end alley behind the bookshop—no one ever comes there at night. Try to do it artistically if you can."
Orm nodded. "What then?" he asked, taking care not to show the slightest trace of dismay. But he knew—he knew. There was only one reason why Rand would want him to plant an object on High Bishop Ardis's personal bodyguard and assistant.
I can't believe it. He's going to do what I was most afraid of. He's going after the High Bishop. He's beyond insane.
Rand smiled, the corner of his left eye twitching. "Tal Rufen and Ardis will certainly go inspect the site, and that is when—" He broke off. "Never mind. Just go out now; take care of it."
With that, he turned on his heel and left, moving very quickly, though not at all steadily. He was about to turn back into the Black Bird, and he wasn't going to do it in front of Orm.
Meanwhile, Orm was holding himself to this room only by force of will. He wanted to bolt, now, before he got caught up any further in this madness. Steady on, Orm told himself. I saw this coming; I'm prepared for it. The only question is, when do I jump? I have to pick the time and place when Rand won't expect me to abandon him, and when he'll be the most vulnerable.
After due consideration, he decided to wait until the last possible moment at this "special Kill" itself.
I'll get the pen into Rufen's pocket, dump the bodies the way Rand wants me to, and wait around for Rand to make his move. When he does, I'll get out of here. I won't wait around to watch and see what he does. Maybe all he plans is to get Rufen to give the High Bishop the pen and then take over her, but I'm not counting on it. Even if he kills her, he's never going to get away with it; every Church mage in the Human Kingdoms is going to descend on Kingsford to catch the murderer. And when they do, I am not going to be here to see it.
The first order of business was to find Tal Rufen, who could well have been anywhere, and many of the places he might be were those where Orm could not go. The simplest course of action—sending him the pen as if he'd left it somewhere—would just not do. It was likeliest that he would check, discover that he still had his pen, then try to send it back or find its rightful owner. The knives had all had magic on them intended to make the person who touched them want the knife, and feel uncomfortable when it wasn't on their person, but Orm doubted that the same was true for the pen. A spell of that nature wouldn't do for an object that was to enter a place that was the home to dozens of mages, who would likely sense something wrong. The magic on this pen would have to be invisible, undetectable, right up to the point when Rand invoked it.
Find Rufen. That was his first order of business. So, with a hearty sigh, he donned his fisherman-gear, and plodded out into the freezing cold to wait on the bridge. Sooner or later, Tal Rufen would have to pass him here, no matter where he went in the city.
But as the day dragged on, Orm thought for certain that his luck had deserted him; he had gone out onto the bridge before noon, and never saw the least sight of Tal Rufen all day. Even his fishing-luck left him: his bait was stolen a dozen times without ever getting a solid bite; Orm suspected that there was a single, clever fish down there that kept taking the bait and passing it out to his friends. He could picture the miserable thing now, thumbing its nose at him—if fish had noses—and telling an admiring crowd just how poor a fisherman Orm really was.
He was just about frozen all the way through, his feet numb, his fingers aching, as the sun hovered redly just above the western horizon. Rand is just going to have to wait a day, he told himself, wanting to shout aloud with frustration. Maybe two. Maybe more! After all, it's not as if I could somehow call Rufen out into Kingsford—it's not my fault that he hasn't been stupid enough to leave a perfectly comfortable, warm building and traipse across a bridge in a frigid wind.
He looked up to gauge the amount of time left until dark, and for a change looked back at the city instead of the Abbey.
That was the moment that he saw Tal Rufen being carried along in a knot of congestion towards the bridge, heading for the Abbey.
He didn't stop to think, but he didn't move quickly, either. He already knew what he had to do, but he had to make it look genuine.
I'm a discouraged fisherman after a day of catching nothing, and when I go home, I can look forward to no supper. I'm numb with cold, and I'm too wrapped up in my own troubles to pay attention to where I'm going.
He bent in a weary, stiff stoop to pick up his bait-bucket, draped his pole over his hunched shoulders, and began to make his way towards the Kingsford side of the bridge, nearing that tangled clot of pedestrians, small carts, and riders with every step. Rufen was afoot rather than on horseback, and there would never be a better time than this to make the substitution.
I can't feel my fingers; what if they won't work right? What if he realizes I've gotten into his document-pouch? What if—
As his mind ran over all the worst prognostications, his body was acting as he had told it to act. He limped towards Rufen with the gait and posture of a man twice his age. At just the right moment, he stumbled and fell against the constable.
And even as Rufen was apologizing, asking if he was all right, and handing him back his fishing rod, Orm was continuing to "stumble" against him, accepting his support and using it to cover his real actions. Rufen had dropped his document-pouch; Orm picked it up, dropped it, picked it up again, and dropped it a second time, then allowing Rufen to pick it up himself. In the blink of an eye, as Orm picked the pouch up the first time, the pen was gone, lifted neatly out of the document-pouch. In another blink, as Orm picked it up the second time, Rand's pen was in the pouch with the rest of Tal Rufen's papers—and Rufen never knew his "pocket" had been picked twice, once to extract the first pen and once to replace the pen.
Orm "shyly" accepted Rufen's apologies, stumbled through a clumsy apology of his own, then hurried on to the city as Rufen headed back to the Abbey. Orm's job wasn't complete yet. He still had a baker's-dozen bodies to put out before daybreak.
Captain Fenris was an actual veteran of combat, a survivor of one of the feuds that had erupted among the nobility until the High King came back to his senses and put a stop to them. The Captain was no stranger to mass slaughter, but most of his constables were not ready to see bodies heaped up in a waist-high pile. The callousness of the scene unnerved them completely; even the hardiest of his constables was unable to remain in the vicinity of the cul-de-sac. Only Fenris waited there, as Tal and Ardis answered the early-morning summons. The rest of the constables guarded the scene from the safe distance of the entrances to the alleyway.
"It's not as bad as it could be," Fenris said, quite calmly, as he led the two Church officials down the alley. "No blood and the bodies are all frozen. If this had been high summer, it would have been bad."
It was quite bad enough. Tal had learned after many hours spent in morgues how to detach himself from his surroundings, but the number of dead in itself was enough to stun. Fenris's warning about what they would find made it possible for him to face the pile of about a dozen bodies with exterior calm, at least.
The corpses were all fully clothed, in straight positions as if they had already been laid out for burial. That made the way they were neatly stacked all the more disturbing; just like a pile of logs, only the "logs" had been living human beings before they were so callously piled. Three of them had been severely mutilated, with patterns carved into their flesh; patterns resembling, in a bizarre way, ornamentation. These three were on the top of the pile, their garments open to the waist, to best display their condition.
Of all the many scenes where crimes had occurred that Tal had seen over the years, this was the most surreal. The alley was deep in shadow, the sky overcast, the area so completely silent that the few sounds that passing traffic made never even got as far as this cul-de-sac. This could have been the Hell of the Lustful, the damned frozen in eternal immobility, denied even the comfort of their senses.
Inside, while part of him analyzed what was in front of him, the rest of him was trying to cope with the idea of someone capable of such a slaughter. And someone capable of making a display like this, afterwards. That's what's the most unnerving. He strove to take himself out of the scene, to view it as if it was a play on a stage, but it was difficult not to imagine himself as one of those victims.
"I sent a runner to tell Arden's people. What do you think?" Fenris asked as he edged his way around the pile.
"Have them laid out, would you?" Tal asked, instead of answering him. The bodies were all coated in ice, which was interesting, for it suggested that they had all been in the water at one time. Even their garments were stiff with ice.
And that would make sense, if he's using the water to remove magic we could trace. That would be why there was no blood, and no obvious bloodstains; they had been underwater long enough for the blood to wash out of their clothing.
And isn't that what all the advice-givers say? Rinse out blood with cold water to keep it from staining? He fought a hysterical urge to laugh.
Fenris nodded at the two silent figures waiting to one side; robed and hooded, these must be two of the Priests who collected the dead in Kingsford. They said nothing, but simply went to work; handling their charges respectfully, carefully and gently, as if the corpses they moved were of the highly-born, or were sleeping, not dead. Tal, watching them with surprise and admiration, found himself wishing that all those who cared for the dead were as compassionate as these two.
When they were finished, Tal walked along the row, carefully examining each one. Interestingly, one was male, and strangled, but the rest were all women, and had been stabbed. With a third of them, the mutilated ones, it was difficult to be certain, but he thought that the final, fatal wound was the knife-blow to the heart that was so characteristic of "their" killer. In the case of the rest, except for the man, that was certainly so.
These victims were not musicians, but there were enough similarities in how they had died that Tal was certain that they tied in with their murderer, and he told Fenris so.
"You think perhaps that one was someone who walked in at the wrong time?" Fenris hazarded, pointing to the lone male.
Tal nodded. "And those, the ones that were cut up—he's done this before, that Gypsy I told you about."
"That was at the hands of a jeweler," Fenris noted.
"As it always has been at the hands of a tool," Tal agreed. "But this time it does look as if he's done the work with his own hands, and I have to wonder why."
Fenris leaned over one of the bodies to take a closer look. "Interesting. I think you may be right. Maybe he didn't want to expend the magic he needed to use tools? But I can see something else here—these are all—well, human flotsam. They're not musicians. Is he getting desperate? Could that be why he didn't take tools?"
Tal considered that for a moment. "He might be. We've made a fairly good job of warning real musicians off the street. But do remember—just because we haven't found tools, that doesn't mean he didn't use them—they may simply be under the ice downstream, and we won't find them until spring."
"He may need power, and a great deal of it." That was Ardis, her face so white and still it could have been a marble likeness. "That would make him desperate enough to do the work himself, and to murder so many in so short a period of time."
"Or he's taunting us," Tal suggested. That was his private opinion. "He's piled up all these victims to say—'Look at me! See what I can do, and you can't stop me!' He knows we're after him, and he knows we haven't got a single idea of who he is or where to find him. This is his way of thumbing his nose at us."
Ardis shook her head dubiously. "I don't know about that. I've never heard of a murderer flaunting himself—"
"People like this are different," Tal reminded her. "They have something to prove. They want to show that they're better, smarter than anyone else; it enables them to think of the rest of us as inferior. But at the same time, they have to have someone to impress. So—you get displays—" he gestured at the line of corpses "—though I'll admit the displays aren't usually this lavish."
Ardis shuddered visibly. "With this many victims—one person couldn't have moved all of them here in a single night. It would take at least two people; that means that he had to help his accomplice. This may be the mistake we were looking for. I think that there will be traces of both of them here—maybe a less-practiced mage wouldn't be able to find those traces, but if they're there, I will. And once I have the 'scent,' I'll be able to find the men."
Fenris blinked at her, at the fierce tone of her voice and stepped to one side. "Your site, High Bishop," he replied, in the most respectful of voices.
Tal stepped to the side as well, and watched her as she knelt down by the side of the first in line. He fingered the pen in his pocket as he wondered what she intended to do.
The pen—odd, he didn't usually carry it there, but this morning, he felt as if he wanted it there, like a luck-piece. The smooth surface was oddly soothing beneath his fingers, like the surface of the prayer-beads so many of the Priests carried—
Suddenly, with no warning at all, something seized complete control of him.
It felt as if his clothing—or the air surrounding him—had hardened around him like a shell. And the shell had a mind of its own. His throat was paralyzed, and the air over his face had hardened like a mask, keeping his features from moving. He watched, his heart beating in a panic, as his hand slowly came out of his pocket holding the pen exactly like a fighting-knife.
His hand rose with the pen in it, and held it in front of his eyes, mocking him. He knew, with dreadful certainty, just what this strange and powerful force meant him to do, and that the pen had been the means by which it had taken him over. How had the spell been put on the pen? When and where? Never mind—the killer now had him as a puppet; this entire scene had been a trap, a way to put him where the killer could get at him. Somewhere above them, he was laughing, and about to use Tal just as he had used every other tool he had taken. Tal knew what his expression was—he'd seen it before, on other killers. A blank, dead mask, with only his eyes giving a glimpse of the struggle going on within him. Only his mind was free—and that was meant to be a torture, that he should know what he was doing, and be unable to stop it.
No! he thought at it, anger blazing up in him. Not this time! Red-hot rage flared inside him, consuming him, mind and soul. He would not let the killer do this again!
He fiercely fought the magic that encased him, and within a few moments he knew exactly why the tools all had strange compression-bruises on their limbs. They, too, had struggled against this shell, this second skin of force, and their struggle had left bruises where the force crushed their flesh. There was nothing for him that he could fight with his mind—this was no mental compulsion, it was a greater power than his forcing his limbs to do what it willed, as an adult would force a child's clumsy and unwilling limbs to walk. He could as well try to force a river in flood to reverse its course; nothing he could do would make it release him.
He wanted to shout, to scream, but he could not even move his lips. His hands removed the cap of the pen and dropped it; he advanced on the unsuspecting Ardis, who still knelt with her back to him, the sharp-pointed pen in his hand held ready to stab her at the base of her skull, killing her with a single blow.
Fenris, completely oblivious to what was going on, had gone to the end of the alley to speak to his men. Tal heard his voice echoing along the brickwork, in a murmur too soft to be properly understood. Ardis was wrapped up in her magics, and wouldn't move until it was too late.
Horror twisted his stomach and throat, and sent chills of fear up his backbone. Anger reddened his vision and put a fire in his belly. Neither helped. He was still a prisoner to the crazed killer, and in another few steps, Ardis would be dead.
Abruptly, he gave up trying to fight in all areas but one—his voice.
He had to shout, to scream, to get out something to warn her!
His body reduced the interval between them to six steps—five—
"Rrdsss!" He managed to make a strangled noise and Ardis looked up, and saw him poised to strike, hand upraised.
She was bewildered for a moment, probably by his expression, or lack of it. It would never occur to her that he was a danger to her! As he continued to lumber forward, he labored to get something more out of his throat. Despair gave him another burst of strength. She didn't understand; he had to make her understand!
"Rrrdisss!" he gurgled through clenched teeth. "Rrrnn!"
Then, she blinked, and bewilderment gave way to startlement; then startlement gave way to astonishment. He saw her tense, and start to move. She knew!
As he made his first lunge at her, she managed to get out of the way. But that put her into the cul-de-sac, out of sight of Fenris and help, and well within his reach. As he pursued her, chasing her in the filthy, slippery alley, he was astonished and appalled to realize that she wasn't trying to escape him!
Instead, she kept edging backwards as she frowned with concentration and focused her intent gaze on his face. He saw her lips moving; saw her fingers weaving odd patterns in the air—
Then he knew what she was trying to do, and if he could have screamed with anguish, he would have.
My God—my God—she's trying to break this thing to save me—she'll get herself killed trying to break this thing—
Visyr had gone out at dawn, brought by the summons of a messenger from the Abbey sent by Ardis. An odd message, he had not been entirely certain what to make of it.
We have victims, it had read. Please meet us at this address, but stay up above. I want to see who—or what—is watching us.
That had him a little puzzled. Why would anything be watching them? It was during the time of a murder that the Black Bird appeared, not afterwards.
Nevertheless, he obeyed the summons, launching himself out onto a damp, chill wind into an ugly gray morning. This was not a day he would have chosen to fly in; the air was heavy, and the dampness clung to his feathers.
I'm going to be late, he realized, as he thought about how long it would have taken the messenger to come from the Abbey, then for one of the pages to bring the message to him. It would be just my luck to get there after they've all finished and gone away.
He pumped his wings a little harder, wishing that the cloud-cover wasn't so low. He wouldn't be able to get any altitude to speak of in this muck.
As he neared the area Ardis had directed him to, he started to scan the rooftops for possible landing-spots. The address the messenger had specified was in an alley, not in the street; he couldn't hover there indefinitely. Sooner or later he would have to land and rest.
It was then, with a startled jolt, that he finally spotted the Black Bird he'd been looking for all this time.
It was dancing around on a rooftop overlooking the alley; it probably thought it was hidden from view by an elaborate arrangement of cornices, chimney-pots, and other architectural outcroppings, but it wasn't, not from directly above. And there was something about the way it was moving that was the very opposite of comical. In fact, the moment he saw it, he had the same feeling that vipers, adders, spiders and poisonous insects gave him—a sick, shivery feeling in the pit of his stomach and the instinctive urge to smash the cause flat.
Without a moment of hesitation, he plunged down after it. As he neared the halfway point of his dive, it saw him. Letting out a harsh, startled, and unmusical set of squawks, it fled, half flying, half scrambling along the roofs, like no bird he had ever seen before.
The very sound of its voice made him feel sick; he pumped his wings hard and pursued it with all of his strength. Whatever it was, whatever it had been doing—well, it was wrong, evil. There was nothing Visyr wanted at that moment more than to feel his talons sinking into its skull.
Suddenly, Tal froze in place, as a strange series of squawking noises came from up above. Something flashed by overhead, and a moment later, Tal felt the strangling hold on his throat and tongue ease—not much, but enough for him to speak? At least he wasn't chasing Ardis anymore!
"Ardis!" he croaked. "Ardis, something's turned me loose! For a moment!"
She stopped what she was doing and held perfectly still.
"I'm in the spell, the magic—" Each word came out as a harsh whisper, but at least they were coming out now! "It's like a shell around me, forcing me to do whatever it wants. I think it's using the pen—not the knife, but my pen—I think that's how it got hold of me!"
She nodded—then moved, but not to run. She closed the few steps between them faster than he had ever thought she could move and began taking things away from him, virtually stripping him of anything that might be considered a weapon, starting with his belt-knife and the pen. As her fingers touched the pen, he felt something like a shock; as she pulled it away, he felt for a moment as if he'd been dropped into boiling lead. He screamed, the focus of the worst pain he had ever experienced in his life.
Visyr was a hunter; more than that, he was an angry, focused hunter, one who had pursued difficult game through the twisting caverns of the Serstyll Range. And he was not going to let this particular piece of game get away from him again.
He narrowed the gap between them, until he was close enough to snatch a feather from the tail of the Black Bird. It wasn't squawking now, as it tried desperately to shake him off its track. It was saving its breath to fly.
But Visyr the hunter was used to watching ahead of his prey as well as watching the prey itself, and he saw what it did not yet notice.
It was about to run out of places to hide.
A moment later, it burst out of a maze of gables into the open air above the river.
It realized its mistake too late. Before it could turn and duck back into cover, Visyr was on it.
Two hard wing-pumps, so hard he felt his muscles cry out, and he had his hand-talons buried in its rump. He executed a calculated tumble, which swung it under, then over him, and brought its head within reach of his foot-talons. One seized its skull; the other seized its chest.
He squeezed.
And a moment later, he landed safely on the docks amid a crowd of shouting, excited humans, with his prey safely dead, twitching, beneath his talons!
Of all of Orm's calculations, these events had not entered into them.
He had been watching from the safety of the recessed doorway of his own rented warehouse, figuring that Orm the spice-merchant had a perfect right to be in his own property, and a perfect right to investigate anyone rattling about in the alley. From here he could not see the pile of bodies, so he wouldn't "know" there was anything wrong. This was a good place to watch for the moment when Rand took over the Church constable; when Rand was completely occupied, Orm would have a chance to flee.
But then everything went wrong.
The constable got taken over, all right—but before he could do anything but chase the High Bishop around a bit, there was a flash of black overhead, followed closely by a flash of red, blue, black, and gray. Orm had seen that particular combination before.
It was the bird-man, and it was after Rand. Rand, who could not duck down alleys too narrow to fly in, Rand who was subject to exactly the same limitations as the creature who was chasing him, and who did not have that creature's sets of finger-long talons to defend himself with. Oh, he had that long, spearlike beak, but the bird-man had a better reach, and besides, Rand wasn't used to defending himself physically. The only things he'd ever used that beak on were helpless human women, not six-foot-tall predators.
The two Church officials were out of sight in the cul-de-sac, but Orm knew what was happening: Tal Rufen was no longer being controlled by Rand. The High Bishop would free him in a moment—and she would have the pen in her possession in another. Nothing he could do or say would take away the fact that he still had Rufen's pen in his room, and traces of his essence would be on the pen in Rufen's hand. Ardis was famed for being able to dig the true facts of a matter out of people who might not remember them. None of Orm's alibis would hold up against her investigation. Once she began unraveling his web of deceptions, it would fall completely to pieces. Rand might die by the talons of the bird-man, but Orm would be taken by the Church constables, and—
And he'd heard rumors about what they did to prisoners. Look what they'd done to Rand!
Nothing he had planned had included the High Bishop surviving Rand's attack.
His luck had run completely out. He could not run far or fast enough to escape the Church's justice with Ardis in charge.
But for a little while longer, at least, Rufen would not be able to move. Until Rand was actually dead, Rufen would be frozen in place. There was only one hope for Orm, only one way he could buy himself enough time to flee.
Kill them both. Now.
He had learned a lot from Rand. It would be easy. First the woman, then the man—she, while she was held in frightened shock, he, while the spell still imprisoned him. Humans died so very easily; a single moment of work, and he would be safe.
Lightly as a cat, quickly as a rat, he dashed from shelter, his knives already in his hands.
Just as the spell broke and freed him, Tal heard the sound of running footsteps behind him; he did not wait to see what it was or who it was.
He could move; that was all that counted. Freed from the force that held him, he flung himself between Ardis and whatever was coming. His body answered his commands slowly, clumsily, but he got himself in front of her just barely in time, and turned to face what was attacking them.
That was all he had time to do; he wasn't even able to get his hands up to fend the attacker away.
He felt the knife more as a shock than pain—the attacker plunged it into the upper part of his chest, in a shallow but climbing uppercut through his chest muscles, glancing off bone, too high to do any mortal damage. Tal had been through too many knife-fights to let that stop him.
He thought he heard shouting; he ignored it, as everything slowed for him and his focus narrowed to just the man in front of him. The attacker—a thin, supple, ferretlike man—still had another knife. Ardis was still in danger. He had to deal with the attacker; he was the only one who could.
Cold calm, as chill as an ice-floe, descended over him.
The wound began to hurt; the pain spread outwards through his body like an expanding circle of fire. Hot blood trickled down his arm and side. None of that mattered; what mattered was the other man. He pushed the pain away, pushed everything away, except his opponent.
As time slowed further, Tal watched the attacker's eyes flick this way, that way, then focus over Tal's shoulder. Ardis. He was going after Ardis. His shoulder twitched. His upper arm twitched. He flipped the knife in his hand, so that he held the point. He was going to throw that second knife.
There was more shouting. Tal ignored it.
Tal distracted him for a crucial second by making a feint with his good hand, then lunged for the attacker, knocking him to the ground and landing on top of him. Tal grappled him while he was still stunned, keeping him from using the knife, then used the advantage of his greater weight to keep his attacker pinned. Then Tal shoved a knee into his chest, seized him by the chin with his good hand, and began pounding his head into the ground.
Now anger took over, and the red rage completely overcame him. He continued pounding the man's head into the dirty ice, over and over, until he stopped struggling, until the body beneath his grew limp. There was a growing red smear on the frozen ground of the alley, when he realized that there was no more resistance or movement from the body beneath him.
It was over.
There was more shouting, but suddenly Tal was too tired to pay any attention to it.
Time resumed its normal course.
Tal fell off their attacker's chest and rolled over onto his back, and stared up into the gray slit of sky above the alley.
He was tired, so very tired.
His shoulder and chest hurt, along with most of his body, and he rather thought that he ought to close his eyes now. . . .
"Ardis!" Fenris shouted, pounding into the cul-de-sac ahead of his men. "High Bishop!"
"I'm all right," she managed, getting to her feet and stumbling in the direction she'd last seen Tal. "There's been some trouble—"
By that time, she had seen where Tal and the assassin had ended up their battle.
Oh, no—
She ran the last few paces, and knelt quickly at Tal's side, feeling the cold and wet of the melting ice seeping through the thick wool of her robe where her knees met the pavement. He was unconscious, but nowhere nearly as hurt as she'd first thought. She made a quick assessment of his only obvious injury, his shoulder and chest. He's still bleeding, but he'll be all right, she judged. He remained unconscious, but it was because of shock, not from any significant damage or blood-loss.
But as her hands touched him, she braced herself, expecting a shock to the heart. There should have been such a shock.
There was the sick sensation she always had when she encountered a wound created by human hands—there was concern, and relief that the injury wasn't life-threatening—
But no shock. No heart-shattering moment that screamed, The man I love is wounded at my feet! Just the same feelings she would have had if it had been Talaysen who lay there, or Kayne.
And that was as much a shock in its way.
She rose, wet robes clinging to her ankles, as Fenris reached her side.
"Someone take care of Rufen, he's hurt," she ordered and, striding through the mud, turned her attention to their attacker. Once again, she knelt beside an injured man, but this time it was with a feeling of grim satisfaction that she should probably do penance for when she returned to the Abbey. It was obvious without much examination that he wasn't going to be doing anything more; Tal had managed to cave in the back of his skull. He was still breathing, but Ardis didn't think he'd live for much longer.
Fenris had already gotten four of his men to rig an improvised litter out of two spears and two coats; they were lifting Tal into it as Ardis straightened.
"Take him to the Abbey," she said, her mind already calculating where and what to look for to trace the foul magics back to their caster. "Keep a compress on that wound, and keep him warm."
"Stop at the inn at the corner and requisition a warming-pan full of coals," Fenris elaborated. "Get one of their cots for a litter, and borrow the dead-cart to carry him."
The four men carried Tal off, and as soon as they were out of sight, Tal was out of her thoughts as well as out of her hands.
Ardis turned her attention and her concentration back to the scene of the attack. Fenris didn't ask what had happened, but Ardis wasn't going to leave him in suspense any longer.
"Help me gather up some evidence before it disappears," she said in a low voice. He took the hint, and followed her to the back of the cul-de-sac where she had been tossing items she'd taken off of Tal when he froze in place.
"Something back here was carrying that same spell we talked about," she said quietly, as he picked up items using a silk glove she supplied and dropped them into a silk bag she held out for him. "It took over Tal, and he started after me. Then—for some reason, he got out a warning, then froze. I don't know whether he managed to fight the magic successfully, or whether something else happened, but he got control of his voice enough to tell me what was going on, and I started stripping him of anything that could have carried the magic. He said, and I think—" she said, fishing the pen out of a pile of refuse and holding it up "—that this is it."
Fenris frowned at it. "Visyr came tearing overhead chasing something black," he told her as she dropped the pen into a separate bag. "I sent men off after him."
She nodded. "Right after I pulled these things off Tal, that man came out of the alley with knives. You'll want to ask Visyr, but it looks to me as if he bears a pretty strong resemblance to the fellow he saw." She smiled humorlessly. "It's a good thing that Tal was pounding the back of his head into the ground, or we wouldn't be able to make that identification. Anyway, Tal got between me and him, and he wounded Tal. Then Tal fought him off and got him down, and took care of him."
She didn't have to add anything; Fenris saw the results for himself. More footsteps out in the alley heralded the arrival of one of Fenris's men.
"Sir!" he shouted as he came. "The bird-man wants you, quick! The High Bishop, too! He's killed something!"
Fenris gave her a quick glance that asked without words if she was fit to go. She smiled, crookedly.
"Let's go, Captain, there's work to be done," she told him firmly. "This case isn't over yet, although I think . . . the killings are."
Tal had been hurt before, and it wasn't the first time he'd come to in an Infirmary. He knew the sounds, and more importantly, the smells, pretty well. He stirred a little, trying to assess the extent of the damage this time, and apparently gave himself away.
"Well, the sleeper awakes."
The voice was amused, and quite familiar. He opened his eyes, expecting a headache to commence as soon as light struck the back of his eyeballs, and was pleasantly surprised when one didn't.
"Hello, Ardis," he croaked. "Sorry, but I seem to have rendered myself unfit for duty for a while."
"It happens to the best of us," she replied, and reached over to pat his hand.
The touch sent a shock through his body, despite weakness, dizziness, and the fog of pain-killers. But no sooner had the shock passed, then a chill followed.
That had not been the gesture of a woman to the man she loved. A caring sister, a mother even—but not a lover.
And when he looked into her eyes he saw only the serenity of the High Bishop, and the concern of a friend. Nothing more. Nothing less, but nothing more.
Had he imagined that there had ever been anything else there?
If there had been, it was gone now.
Ardis went on, oblivious to the tumult in his heart. "We got the mage—and there won't be any more murders. If it hadn't been for you, I would probably be dead, and the murders would still be going on, because I rather doubt that Revaner would have stopped with me—"
A low voice Tal couldn't quite hear interrupted her; she looked up, listened for a moment, and nodded. He tried to turn his head to see who it was that had spoken to her, but it was too much of an effort.
"The Infirmarian tells me," she said, with a quirk of her mouth, "that if I don't leave you alone to rest, he'll bar me from the Infirmary. He told me that you'll be well enough in a day or so to make your report, and that until then I'm not to bother you."
"It's—no bother—" he began thickly.
She reached out again, and laid her hand on his. "Rest," she commanded. "You saved my life, Tal Rufen. The least I can do is let you have a little peace."
Once again, he looked deeply into her eyes—but what he hoped to see was not there.
If it ever had been.
Then, she was gone, and it was too much effort to keep his eyes open anymore.
"—and that, more or less, is when I fell over," Tal concluded.
Ardis nodded. It was very good to be sitting in her chair, knowing that there would be no more dead women to deal with. Across from her sat Kayne and Tal, both of them much the better for an uninterrupted night's sleep, Tal bandaged and a little pale, but in good spirits. Ardis wrote down the final word of Tal's statement in her case-book, and leaned back with a sigh. "So," she said, closing it, "that's the last that we'll ever know."
"I wish we knew more," Kayne said fretfully. Tal said at the same time, "That's more than enough."
She smiled wryly at both of them. "From now on, between the two of you, I ought to have a completely balanced set of opinions on everything."
Kayne made a face. "All we know is that Revaner didn't die, he escaped. We don't know how. We don't know how he got where he was when he started killing people. We don't know why he was killing people, we only guess that he needed the energies for magic. We don't know how he met that other fellow, or even who that other fellow is, really. We don't know how he persuaded the man to help him!"
"But we do know that he was the one behind the killings," Tal pointed out quietly. "And we do know why he was doing them, and why he chose the targets he did. We know he was building up to take revenge on the people he felt had gotten him into the situation he was in; nothing else explains behavior that was completely irrational. The fellow he chose for his accomplice was probably a criminal, and there was plenty of money on him; the easiest way to persuade a criminal is to offer him a great deal of money." He turned to Ardis. "I also think that if he'd had access to female Priests, he'd have murdered them the way he murdered female musicians; in my opinion, gathering magical energy was secondary to him, and what he really wanted was revenge."
"I suspect you're right," Ardis agreed, as Kayne shuddered.
"I'm just glad I never leave the Abbey," the novice said. "I could have been one of his victims!"
Ardis put her hand on top of the book, glad to have it all over and done with. "Tal is right," she said. "We know enough. We know who, how, and why. We might even know enough now to catch someone else who follows the same path. We mustn't let this knowledge be lost; though may God protect us from another one such as Revaner."
"May God help us to prevent another one such as Revaner." Tal rubbed his shoulder, and nodded. Ardis wondered if it was hurting him, or if the gesture was only habit. Well, if it is, he's bright enough to take himself to the Infirmarian and have it dealt with, she thought dismissively.
And that was not the reaction of a woman in love.
Her peace of mind and heart was back, as surely as if it had never deserted her. After she had gotten back to the Abbey, with the body of the Black Bird and all of the evidence in hand, she had not thought of anything else until she had the bones of her solution in place. After that, she had assigned the rest of the investigation to other Justiciar-Mages, so that all of the loose ends could be neatly packaged up with the appropriate evidence. She looked in on Tal long enough to assure him that the long quest for the killer was over. Then she sent word to the other Orders in Kingsford to begin ministering to the souls of the murdered dead and the bereaved living, and had gone to bed to sleep deeply nearly twice her normal hours.
When she awoke again she worked like a fiend to catch up on some of the work she'd neglected all these months, and only when she had done a full day's work did she look in again on Tal. It was at that moment that she had realized her work, her vocation, and her duty were more important to her than Tal was—and that what she had felt for him might well have been attraction, but it wasn't a passionate love.
One could be attracted to a colleague, or a friend, but that didn't mean one had to go and make a lover out of him.
I am as I thought I was, and what we have been through has not changed that. I am still Ardis, High Bishop of Kingsford, and true daughter of the Church. And that is good. There will be no more sleepless nights. If he felt any different from that—well, she could feel sympathy, even pity for him, but that was nothing she had any control over. He would not die of an unrequited passion, and if it went unrequited long enough, it would surely fade. Meanwhile the surest relief for it would be work.
"I hope that the end of this hasn't made you reconsider, and that you plan to stay on as my Special Inquisitor, Tal Rufen," she continued. "I won't hesitate to tell you that I'm counting on your help from here on. There will still be more than enough work for you—as Kayne can tell you."
"Work!" Kayne rolled her eyes. "There's work enough here for ten Special Inquisitors, and it's only going to get worse as Kingsford grows."
Ardis spread her hands wide. "There you have it."
Tal looked at Ardis solemnly and searchingly, and evidently was satisfied by what he saw in her eyes.
"Thank you," he said simply. "I would like to stay."
Since his shoulder was still bothering him, Tal Rufen returned to his bed in the Infirmary at the Infirmarian's orders, and drank the potion he was given as obediently as even that worthy could have asked.
"Well?" Infirmarian Nord Hathon asked. "Is everything tied up to everyone's satisfaction?"
"Everyone but Kayne," Tal told him, as he lay back down into the soft embrace of the bed with a sigh. "Revaner is rightly tied into all the murders and the names of his tools are cleared of any wrongdoing. She's arranged for special services to be held for their souls, and the souls of the more obvious victims. So now we can all go back to normal routine."
"You aren't satisfied?" the Priest asked shrewdly.
"It's somewhat bitter justice, but Ardis claims that the families get some comfort out of it." That was true, so far as it went; Tal did not intend to confess the rest of his mixed feelings to this particular friend of Ardis's.
I must have been mistaken when I thought I saw some sign of attraction. No—no, I couldn't have. After all, she's a Priest; her first and deepest love is for her service to the Church. It is the way things are, and should be. I was deluding myself. Or it was the stress of the case that made me see things that weren't there? Were my eyes tired or my mind distracted, making me see expressions and glances that weren't what I thought they were? No, this is for the best, I think.
When he'd looked into Ardis's eyes, he hadn't seen anything there except confidence in him, and simple regard. When he'd come to himself for the second time in the Infirmary, she hadn't been there, and hadn't made any inquiries about him for a whole day.
Granted, she'd known he wasn't that badly hurt—but a woman in love would have been out of her mind with anxiety until she saw for herself that he was all right. A woman in love would have held a vigil at his bedside; she wouldn't have busied herself with work and only dropped by long enough to wish him a cheerful good night.
"The High Bishop wants me to take the position with her permanently," he continued. "She says there's plenty for me to do."
"Will you take the offer?"
He nodded, his eyes closed, while Infirmarian Hathon laid his hands on the wounded shoulder, and a soothing warmth spread from them into the shoulder-joint. This was another good reason to stay on; no secular constable ever got the benefit of magical healing!
"I've got no reason to want to go back to being an ordinary constable again, even though Fenris offered me a place with his force in Kingsford," he said. "This will be interesting, I'm going to learn a lot about magic, and at least Ardis will believe in my hunches."
"Well, Ardis has seen enough to know that what you call a 'hunch' is merely the result of adding together many, many bits of information based on years of experience," the Infirmarian murmured. "I believe you'll be happy among us. And when you finally do retire, you will certainly never need to worry about your pension. The Duke's certainly going to see to that."
Tal laughed. "Maybe the Duke was a little too enthusiastic when he wanted to reward all of us." He chuckled. "However, I'm personally glad that Ardis persuaded him to give the special medals and ceremony only to the Haspur. The old bird deserved every bit of being made out a hero—and as for me, I will be a lot happier if every miscreant in Kingsford is not personally aware of what I look like!"
The Priest chuckled as well, and removed his hands. "Now the Duke will have to make sure he has a Haspur in residence at the palace from now on, or the people will never be happy! There," he finished. "Now you'll sleep."
Tal yawned. "You're right—about—that—"
He fell into slumber, only to be awakened by someone shaking him—carefully.
"Wha—" he muttered, peering up at a lantern held in one of Kayne's hands. The other hand was shaking him.
"I hate to do this to you, Rufen, but Ardis needs you," Kayne said apologetically. "There's been a murder—not in Kingsford, but outside it. This one is going to require more than Fenris can supply. One of Arden's Sires was found in his locked study with a knife in his back, and the Duke has especially asked for you and Ardis to come look into it."
Another murder under mysterious circumstances? So soon?
And the Duke asked for us?
Now he knew what an old war-horse felt like when he heard the trumpets calling the troops to battle. Energy surged into him, and excitement galvanized him; he was wide awake, and even if his shoulder had still been in poor shape, nothing would have kept him from Ardis's side at that moment. He swung his legs out of bed and pulled on his tunic.
The excitement and anticipation he felt at that moment told him something he had not really known consciously.
Maybe it isn't Ardis that attracted me, it was the job and the challenge, and the chance to share both with a clever, swift-thinking colleague. I think—this situation isn't something I'd ever considered, and maybe that's what made me read things into it that weren't there. Ardis is a law unto herself. But I have a friend in her, a real friend, the first one I've ever had. Maybe it's love of a kind, but it might not be the romantic kind, and not the sort that needs anything physical to seal it. And anyway, that's clearly how she feels. That's hardly bad.
He was old enough and wise enough to take what he was given and be pleased with it. He wasn't going to pine away and die because Ardis wasn't in love with him, and she wasn't going to run off with him like some daft young idiot in a play. He would always envy people who had romantic love, the kind the Bards made songs about. But that kind of love was not for the High Bishop of Kingsford, and especially not with her Special Inquisitor.
Partners. That's all I can be to her, and that is not bad at all. Two hounds in double-harness, that's us, sniffing out the scent. Even if that's all it is, it's the best thing I've ever had.
He had a place where he was needed, the job he was best suited to, and people who valued him. And right now his harness-partner was howling for him!
And what would the High Bishop of Kingsford have said if she knew he was comparing her to a dog?
She'd probably laugh and say that more than one man has compared her to a prize bitch. Then she'd point out that Justiciars are always called the Hounds of God and ask when I was planning on taking Orders, that's what she'd do.
Kayne would have been shocked if he laughed, given the gravity of the situation—but he whistled all the way to Ardis's study.
There was work to do, the work he'd been born to do, and in the end, that work was more important to him than anything else. The game was afoot, and his life was better now than he ever would have believed possible. He was ready. A wrong had been done, the Hounds had been called, and once again the hunt was on!