Once they were safely ensconced in her office, Ardis turned to Tal, one eyebrow arched significantly. After a week of spending most of his time in her presence, he knew most of her signals. This one meant, "Well?"
Which in turn meant, "Tell me everything you think about what just happened." When Ardis chose, her expressions could be very eloquent. It was convenient, having a way to convey a broad request with a simple gesture of a single eyebrow. He wished he could do the same thing, but his face didn't seem inclined to oblige him.
He began with the first supposition that the Kingsford constables had come up with. "I never for a moment suspected the Haspur of being involved with this, and I doubt that he deliberately murdered the real killer to keep us from finding out that he was involved."
She tilted her head to one side, which meant, "Oh? Why?"
"For one thing, there weren't any Haspur anywhere near any of the other places where we've had similar murders, and it would be cursed hard to hide a Haspur anywhere around a village of less than a hundred people." He raised his own eyebrow, and she nodded. "For another, I never heard anything about Haspur being able to work magic, and if they could, wouldn't you think that poor bird your friend Padrik tried to turn into the centerpiece of a holiday feast would have worked some magic to get his tail out of that cage?"
"Only a few humans have the powers of magic, so just because one Haspur is not a mage does not imply that all of them lack that capacity, but your point is taken," she replied. "Why don't you think he killed the man deliberately?"
"Because he's a predator," Tal said firmly. "You can see it in how he's built—talons and beak like a falcon or a hawk, eyes set in the front of his head rather than the sides like a Mintak's. Predators do their own killing. He'll kill for food, or in the heat of rage, and he'll do it himself, but he won't let the river do it for him. That's what Padrik's captive Haspur did—tore his guard apart in the heat of fear and rage, with his own talons. That's what this Haspur was going to do before the killer cheated him and fell through the ice. At that point, the rage ran out, and the Haspur stopped wanting to kill the man."
"As a theory, I would say that is reasonable. In this case—" she paused for a moment. "I would say that in this case, it probably is true. It certainly fits the facts."
"And all the other reports of the witnesses," he pointed out. "They did say that the Haspur grasped the man by his tunic shoulders and tried to pull him out of the water, and the man tore loose and dove under the ice. It was certainly not too far from the docks for them to see clearly, despite the distracting effect of this Haspur's colors."
"All right, all right!" She held up her hands. "I believe that I can trust your reasoning; I am pleased to see that you don't rely on instincts alone."
He flushed; at one point he had waxed eloquent on the subject of "a trained constable's instincts." Perhaps he had been a little too eloquent.
"Never mind," she continued, "I think you are correct and my 'instincts' also agree with yours. I've sent one of the mages to the river to try and find the body, but as we both know, finding it now will probably be of limited use."
"Because it's been in running water." He sighed. "What about the victim?"
She shook her head, sadly. "Useless," she replied. "The poor child was wearing a Gypsy amulet, and the mere presence of that contaminated any slight aura there might have been from her attacker. It would be analogous to looking for a trace of incense smoke in the presence of a smoldering campfire."
"Damn." He bit his lower lip, then hit his fist on his knee, angrily. "We're still reacting after the fact. We have to anticipate him somehow!"
Her face darkened, and she looked away from him for a moment. "I'm sending warnings out, but I can't reach everyone, not even all the Free Bards. Some of them simply won't hear the warnings, especially the ones who are still traveling. Some won't heed them; even if it comes from me, I am still of the Church and they do not trust the Church. And as you yourself discovered, there are many unfortunate women who are not Free Bards who are still street-entertainers, and most of them will never hear anything but the wildest of rumors."
"And most of them can't afford to spend a single day or night off the street, much less weeks or months," he muttered. He thought it was too low to hear, but her ears were better than he thought, and she bowed her head.
"And there, too, the Church has failed." She sighed very, very softly. Her lips moved silently and her eyes remained closed; and he flushed again, feeling as if he was spying on something intensely personal.
She looked up again, her face stony. Evidently God had given her no revelations, not even a hint of what to do.
"We won't be able to prevent him," she said bitterly, her voice steady and calm. "We both know that. And I can't think of any way that we could even catch him in the act, except by accident."
It was unpalatable—but it was truth. He winced, and nodded.
"So we continue to react as quickly as possible, and we pray that he makes a mistake somewhere, sometime."
He nodded again. "I can't think of anything else to do," he replied helplessly. "And he's proven twice that he can act right in the middle of a crowded street at the height of the day and still get away. He doesn't have to wait for the cover of darkness anymore. He has us at a complete disadvantage, because he'll always wear a different face. Witnesses do us no good. I can't think of anything that will help except to instruct the constables to keep an eye on female entertainers."
"Unfortunately, neither can I." She bit her lip; it was getting a distinctly chewed-on appearance. "I'll—think on this for some time. Perhaps something will occur to me."
Think? She meant that she was going to pray about it. He knew exactly what she was going to do, she was going to spend half the night on her knees, hoping for some divine advice. Maybe she'd get it, but he wasn't going to hold his breath.
Her eyes were focused on something other than him, and he tried to be as quiet as possible to keep from disturbing her. Abruptly, she shook her head and looked at him again.
"You might as well go," she told him. "You go do whatever it is that lets you think; perhaps you can evolve some plan. If anything happens, or if they find the body, I shall have someone fetch you."
He stood up, gave a brief, stiff nod of a salute, and took his leave.
His own form of meditation was to sit and focus his eyes on something inconsequential while his mind worked. When he got back to his room, that was precisely what he did, leaving the door open so that if Kayne came for him, she would know he was waiting for the summons. He sat down on his bed with his back to the wall, and stared at a chipped place on the opposite wall.
This case was precisely like all the rest, with nothing left to tie the murderer to an actual person. Tal had been studying case-histories in the files of the Justiciars with Kayne's help over the last week, and he had found one other murderer like this one—a man who'd been compelled by some demon inside him to kill, over and over again. "Demon" was the word the Church clerk had used, but Tal and Ardis had both been a bit less melodramatic. "I would say, need, rather than 'demon,' " she had commented when he showed her the case. "As you yourself pointed out; domination, manipulation, and control. This man was driven by his own need, not by some other creature's, he was the only director of his actions."
That particular man had taken mementos from each of his victims, some personal trinket from each of them, and once the Justiciar-Mages realized what he was doing it was through those mementos that he was caught. They had done something that allowed them to follow those objects to the place where they were lying—which happened to be the man's apartment, hidden behind a false wall in a closet.
It was obvious to Tal that the missing knife or knives served the same purpose here, but a mage would know better than to leave such a knife uncleansed after the murders, so there was no hope that a trace of the victim's blood would provide the link they needed to find him. Tal was certain—and so was Ardis—that the person they sought was male. The fact that all the people taken over had been male was the telling clue, rather than the fact that all the known victims were female. A woman who hated other women usually felt that way for some other reason than confusion about her gender—in fact, other than women who were of the cutthroat variety of thief, females who murdered other females usually did so out of jealousy or rivalry and considered themselves intensely female. It was Ardis's opinion that in order to control the secondary victims, the murderer would have to identify intensely with them, and it was Tal's opinion that most females, even one with severe mental and emotional warping, would find that distasteful.
They could both be wrong, of course, but again, women who murdered women almost always killed people they knew, and it would simply not have been possible for the murderer to get to know all of the widely disparate victims in the short period of time between murders.
Men kill strangers; women don't, except by accident, or as part of another crime. That was the pattern that had emerged from Tal's study of the records.
As to where their killer got his knowledge of magic—the most logical place to look was the Church itself. This troubled Ardis, and although she faced it unflinchingly, Tal avoided bringing the topic up. But that made it yet more likely that the killer was male, for Ardis knew all of the female Justiciar-Mages in all Twenty Kingdoms personally; none of them had gone missing, was subject to strange or inexplicable trances lately, or indeed ever had been in all of the cities, towns, and villages in question. "I don't think it's possible to do this remotely," Ardis had told him. "I think the killer has to be there, nearby, somewhere. There are just too many things that can go wrong if he can't actually see what's happening."
Which meant their killer was hidden somewhere in plain view of the scene. It would have to be somewhere above the level of the street, too, in order for him to have a decent view.
Tal wished that there was some way to conscript that bird-man. If anyone had the ability to spot someone watching the murders, it would be him! And no one in the entire city of Kingsford had a better chance of stopping another murder in the act than this Visyr. At least, he would if the murder took place in daylight, in the open street. After this last incident, the murderer was quite likely to go back to murders at night, or even indoors.
We still don't know how he's taking control of his secondary victims. How hard would it be to take a room in a big inn, stand up on the balcony, and take over one of the patrons? Tal thought glumly. Then, when the constables come to question everyone, the murderer can either be gone completely out the window, or protest that, like everyone else, he was tucked up in his virtuous bed.
Frustrating.
But if Visyr would just volunteer his services. . . .
Ah, but why should he? He wasn't human, he had no interests here except for his paid position in the Duke's household, he probably hadn't the least notion what a Free Bard was. He was a predator; how would he feel about murder?
Well, obviously he felt strongly enough about it to try to kill the presumed murderer. There was that. Tal just wished he could have read the bird-man a little better; obvious things like feather-trembling and eye-pinning were one thing, but what had it meant when the creature went completely still? What had some of those head, wing, arm, and talon movements meant?
You can't coerce a flying creature, and I don't know what to say or do that would tempt him or awake whatever sense of justice lives in him. I fear the answer is that there is no answer for this one, unless the Duke lends us his services. That meant that the Duke would have to do without whatever the bird-man was doing for him, and he didn't know just how willing the Duke would be to sacrifice anything he personally wanted to this man-hunt. Especially when there was no guarantee that there would be any concrete result from the sacrifice.
Well, he'd mention it to Ardis; she had more channels to the Duke than anyone else he knew of.
If only Visyr had managed to snatch the knife! But once again, it was missing. Visyr definitely recalled that the man had had it in his hand when he bolted from the murder scene, and had not had it when he ran out onto the ice. It was a point of pride with the bird-man, how accurate Haspur memory was, and Tal was not inclined to doubt him. So, once again, the telltale knife had vanished into the crowd. Which meant it probably had been dropped, deliberately, in a place where the real murderer could find it. The knives were probably serving the same "memento" purpose—or, more accurately, perhaps, serving as trophies—as the small, personal objects had served for that other killer.
One other thing they had learned that they had not known before. It was not the same knife, although the blade was the same shape. This one, unlike the one that Tal had seen the knife-grinder use, had boasted a gaudy, jeweled hilt—precisely the kind of toy that a young, well-dressed man might wear as an ornament. So it was reasonable to assume that the murderer had several knives of the same type, each suited to a particular "tool" for murder. For the jeweler it might have been this very piece. For the blacksmith, the plainer blade that Tal had seen, or even a rough, half-finished blade. So the "curse" notion, at least, could be discarded. It wasn't at all likely that there were two or more knives of the same type carrying so powerful a curse!
Well, that's one small spot of progress, anyway. Then again, it could be the same blade, with a different handle.
Movement at his open door caught his eye, and he nodded in greeting to Kayne. "They've brought the body in; Ardis is with it," she said shortly. He nodded again and rose to follow her.
Ardis, assisted by another Justiciar, was already in the process of examining the body with a detachment that Tal found remarkable in someone who was not used to seeing the victims of violence on a regular basis—and certainly someone who was not used to seeing nude young men on a regular basis, either!
The other Justiciar was a much older man; thin, bald, with an oddly proportioned face, very long, as if someone had taken an ordinary man's face and stretched it. His eyes were a colorless gray or faded blue; his hands and fingers as long and nimble as any musician's.
"Well, there's no trace of magic, which is what we expected, but it's more than merely frustrating," she was saying to her assistant as Tal and Kayne entered. Kayne went white, then red at the sight of the nude body, then excused herself. Ardis didn't even notice.
Tal took his place on the other side of the table. The body hadn't been in the water long enough for any real damage to have occurred, but Tal did notice one thing. "He doesn't look drowned," he pointed out. "Look at the expression; he doesn't look as if the last thing he was doing was struggling for air." In fact, the expression on the corpse's face was one of profound relief; if Tal hadn't known better, he would have thought that the man had died in his sleep. It was most unsettling to see that expression on this body.
"True." Ardis frowned. "Of course, that could be simply because the cold rendered him unconscious first. His lungs are full of water, at any rate, so drowning is definitely what killed him."
But Tal had already moved on to the next thing he was looking for. Again, the fact that the fellow had drowned in very cold water, and soon after committing the murder, had kept the formation of those strange bruises to a minimum—but the bruises were there. Ardis and the other Justiciar bent over them to study them at close range when Tal pointed them out.
"You say you've seen these on the other killers?" Ardis asked, delicately turning the man's arm to avoid further damage as she looked at the bruising on the inside of the upper arm.
"All the ones I was able to examine," Tal replied. "They don't look like the bruises that would come from falling, or from being struck."
"No, they don't," the other Justiciar replied. "There's no central impact point on them; it's more as if the limb was shoved or struck by something large and soft, but shoved or impacted hard enough to leave a bruise." He looked up at Tal from across the table, and nodded. "You must be the Special Inquisitor; I'm Father Nord Hathon, the Infirmarian."
That accounted for his presence here: his medical knowledge. Ardis was calling in anyone she thought might give her a clue. Tal had no doubt of the Priest's competence, for no one who worked closely with Ardis had ever proved less than competent. I just hope that the same can be said about me.
"Look on the legs for the bruises, too," Tal told him. "You'll probably find them on the backs of the thighs and the calves."
"Fascinating," Father Hathon murmured, following Tal's suggestion. "I can't account for this; kicks would have been directed towards the shins or the knee, blows to the head or torso, and attempts to seize the hands probably wouldn't have left these bruises on the wrists and hands. Those are particularly odd; they don't look like ligature marks, but they don't look like blows, either. Falls would have left bruises on the outside of the arms, not the inside, and on the shins again. This isn't quite the damage one would see from crushing, but it isn't far off from it."
Tal shook his head. "I don't understand it, either," he confessed. "All I know is, they look just like the ones I saw on the other bodies."
"Fascinating," Father Hathon said again. Ardis straightened up from her own examination and wiped her hands on a towel placed nearby.
"I don't think we'll learn anything more here." She sighed. "There's nothing magical in the clothing, no traces on the body. We might as well turn his corpse over to his relations. We're questioning the relatives, but I'm virtually certain that they're going to say precisely what all the friends and relatives of other secondary victims have said."
"This is a most curious case, Ardis," Father Hathon said, still examining the body. "I fear the only way that you will apprehend this perpetrator is when he makes a mistake."
"So you agree with me?" she asked, turning to look at him. "The man didn't simply go mad and murder a stranger, like the fellow at the Cathedral?"
Father Hathon looked up, and nodded.
"Absolutely," he replied. "This is not behavior that can be rationalized even by a very disturbed soul, and despite what the laity might believe, people do not suddenly run mad and begin killing strangers without giving very powerful signs that all is not right with them long beforehand."
"People don't suddenly run mad and murder strangers at all," Tal interjected. "It might look as if they have, but either a person they really wanted to kill was one of the job-lot, or else the people they kill bear some strong connection or similarity to someone they do want to kill but don't dare."
When both Ardis and Father Hathon turned to look at him in surprise, he flushed. "I—handled a case like that," he murmured apologetically. "We caught the murderer and I got a chance to question him. Fellow ran mad in the marketplace and killed three older women. Turned out he really wanted to murder his mother. I got curious and looked up other cases of supposed stranger-killings, and indeed they were like his."
Ardis and Hathon exchanged a look; hers was rather proud and proprietary, his was an acknowledgement. Hathon continued, this time including Tal. "I shall question these relatives myself to assure myself about signs of a disturbed mind, but I believe, with you, that I shall find no such signs, for I find no accompanying signs of physical neglect or abuse on this body, and no signs in the belongings that he planned this crime." He shrugged. "I cannot account for these bruises, and they trouble me. I concur with your analysis. If I did not know better, I would argue for demonic possession."
Tal couldn't resist the obvious question. "What do you mean, Father Hathon, that you 'know better'?"
He smiled, thinly—more a stretching of his lips than a real smile. "I have seen nothing in all my years to make me believe in demonic possession. There are spirits, certainly, even ones we humans might term 'evil.' There may even be demons. But I do not believe that such a creature can infest a human soul and make it do its bidding. That a human could invite one to infest, I do truly believe, but that is voluntary hosting, and not involuntary possession, and the creature that is hosted is no greater in evil than the one doing the hosting." He lost what was left of that faint smile. "Believe me, Special Inquisitor, the human heart is as capable of evils as any supernatural creature of legend. It is capable of things more terrible than any poor, homeless spirit could engender on its own. In my time, I have seen the worst that man can wreak, and I would prefer to face the worst that a spirit could do than fall into the hands of one of my fellow humans who harbors such a damaged soul."
Ardis drew a sheet over the body, shrouding it from view. "Father Hathon, if you would see to dealing with the relatives, I would be grateful. You can tell them that the Church believes their son was a victim himself, and that he can be buried in hallowed ground with all the appropriate rites."
"And I shall be suitably vague when they ask me what I believe he was a victim of." He nodded briskly. "You can trust my discretion."
"I never had any doubts," Ardis replied and, gesturing to Tal to follow her, left the room that evidently served the Justiciars as a morgue.
Once again, they retreated to the haven of Ardis's private office. Once they were in their accustomed seats, Ardis leaned back and watched him under half-closed eyelids. "You surprised me back there," she said slowly. "Pleasantly, I might add. I knew that you were intelligent, but I did not know that you were inclined to supplement that intelligence with research. What other oddities have you studied in the case-books, Tal Rufen? Perhaps we might find some similarities with this case."
Kayne came in at that moment bearing a tray with the dinner they had both missed, which was just as well, since Tal's stomach was beginning to tell him that it didn't matter what turmoil his head was in, his body needed food. She set mugs of hot tea and plates of bread, cheese, and pickles in front of both of them.
"Rank hath its privileges, including raiding the kitchen-stores, and I borrowed your rank and your keys on your behalf," Kayne said crisply. "You two need to eat, or you'll collapse and nothing will get done. May I stay? If you can't find anything for me to do as a secretary, I can take a toasting-fork and make you toasted-bread-and-cheese."
Ardis seemed more amused than annoyed; Tal was simply grateful for the food. "Certainly," Ardis replied, picking up the mug and taking a sip. "At this point, you should be part of our investigation. You may be in my position one day, and have to conduct another like it."
Kayne made the sign of the flame with her two hands against her chest. "God forbid!" she exclaimed. "I don't want to see any such thing happen!"
Ardis only arched a brow and waited for Tal to begin. She knows that once a crime has been committed, sooner or later someone will emulate it. He grimaced.
"Well, the first thing that comes to mind probably doesn't have anything to do with this one," he replied, seeing the page before his mind's eye as vividly as if he had a Haspur's memory. "That's the one I call the 'would-be hero.' He's a fellow that does something deliberately to put people's lives in danger so that he can be the first on the scene to rescue them. The fellow in the archives set fires, then rushed in and rescued those who were in peril, but I suppose it would be possible to make holes in boats, set up situations where things could fall on people, lure a boat onto a hidden obstruction—"
"I suppose you find this type out because he's a hero once too often?" Kayne hazarded. "Or he keeps turning up at the scene, whether or not he gets a chance to rescue anyone?"
"Or as in this case, a Justiciar-Mage found a link between him and the fire. He's lucky no one died, so he was only sold into servitude to pay for the damages." Tal personally felt that the man might have gotten off too easily—but then again, it didn't say who he'd been sold to. A life of hard labor on a road-crew would certainly have kept him out of any further mischief, though it might not have cured him of wanting to be a hero at the expense of others.
"Another characteristic of people with this nature is that they tend to try and mingle with constables, fire crews, guards—the people they would like to emulate," Ardis noted, and smiled at Tal. "Yes, I am aware of this type, also. Very often you will discover later that they applied to be a constable or something of the sort, and were let go or turned down because they were clearly unsuitable. Go on, please."
Kayne had taken up a tablet of foolscap and was busily making notes, after making good her offer as toasting-cook. Tal continued, taking time as he spoke so that she could keep up with him.
"There was the fellow I mentioned earlier—the one who walked into the marketplace with an ax and cut down three women before he was stopped," he went on. "I had that case—I brained him with an awning-pole and dropped him where he stood. That one was so sensational that the City Council sent for a special Justiciar-Mage from here in Kingsford to examine him and read his thoughts."
Ardis nodded. "I recall—that would be my cousin Arran, the one who can sometimes read what is in a man's mind."
"Well, this Priest discovered that the man hated his mother, who was one of those nagging, selfish women who raise children by telling them what incompetent asses they are, no matter what they do or how well they do it." He shook his head. "She constantly belittled him, then expected him to serve her like a slave all her life. He wanted to kill his mother, and had gone after her to the market to do just that. He actually struck at her, but she got away, and then he just struck at anyone that looked like her." Once again, he shook his head. "I have to say that I thought and still think that the man deserved hanging, which he got, but once I met the mother, I wished there was a way to hang her alongside him. There was another when I was just beginning in the force, who slaughtered whores—he was inept where women were concerned, never able to handle himself with them. The only women who'd have anything to do with him were the ones he paid. He was punishing all the women who'd mocked him and turned him down by killing the whores."
"And the similar cases you found in the records?" Ardis prompted, looking interested, as Kayne scribbled along as fast as she could.
"There was a young man who'd been denied very unpleasantly by a girl, who went up into a tower and began shooting crossbow bolts into the crowd below—heavy crossbow, too, meant to carry far and kill with a single strike. At first, it was at her and anyone else he imagined had slighted him, but after he'd killed three or four people, he started shooting anything and anyone that moved. His rage and madness fueled his strength, and he fired more quickly than even a professional soldier would with such a hefty weapon." Tal closed his eyes a moment and tried to recall the rest of the cases he'd seen. "A fellow made a practice of murdering wives because the first one was faithless and ran off with a horse-trader, but he didn't do it wholesale, he did it over the course of ten years, and he didn't do it in public."
"That would come under another heading, I would imagine," Ardis agreed, clasping her hands in front of her on her desk. "In fact, that might be the pattern we are seeing here."
"Punishment of many for the sins of one who can't be reached?" He nodded; it made a lot of sense. "That's what I've been thinking for some time now. Of course, if he ever killed the one person he's obsessed with, that doesn't mean he'd stop."
"Punishment of many—that would account for the fact that all the women concerned have some connection to music and musicians," Kayne put in, looking excited, for she had not been privy to most of the discussions Tal and Ardis had had on the subject.
"If this is true, and we could deduce what kind of person is the source of his anger, we might be able to anticipate him," Tal continued for Kayne's benefit. "The trouble with that is, in order for the deduction to be of any use, we would have to allow that sort of person to walk in danger, and—" He shook his head. "It's morally reprehensible. We can't be everywhere, and protect everyone."
"I agree," Ardis said firmly, to his immense relief. "But let's do what we can for the purpose of warning exactly that sort of person."
This was the first time that they had made a point of delineating all of the similar characteristics of the primary victims. It didn't take long to deduce that the targets that had been attacked with the most ferocity and in the riskiest circumstances were all young, dark-haired or of the Gypsy clans and real musicians. Even the half-mad woman Tal's colleague had seen attacked was a real musician in that the source of what little income she had came from her hymn-singing. The trouble was, because of regional tendency, half the young women in Kingsford were dark-haired, and from the way the murderer was behaving, he would probably react to someone simply singing because she was happy.
"This is an awfully broad description," Kayne said dubiously, her brows knitted as she studied their too-brief notes.
Tal licked a bit of hot cheese off his finger. "That's not the only problem. The trouble with this is that even if we get this sort of woman to be careful, he'll either find a way to ambush his chosen victims or he'll switch to something else," Tal replied glumly. "He's done that before, and if he doesn't get the satisfaction of a perfect victim, he's likely to make up in quantity what his kills lack in quality. Look at that list in Derryton—six over the course of four evenings!"
Ardis winced, and nodded, and finished her own slice in a few quick, neat bites. "That would take a mage of considerable power and endurance, unless he was fueled by his determination, like that crossbowman you spoke of. There's another problem, in that we don't have any physical characteristics for him. We certainly can't search door-to-door for every man who feels he's been wronged by a Gypsy musician."
"Without Arran along to know if they told us the truth, that wouldn't exactly be productive, even if we could confine every man in Kingsford to his own house until we questioned him," Kayne pointed out. "If he knows we're looking for him, he's hardly going to tell us the truth if we find and question him!" She folded a bit of paper over and over, a nervous habit Tal hadn't noticed until now.
Tal gritted his teeth. "So, we're back to where we were when we started."
"Maybe not—" Ardis said slowly, tapping the desk with her forefinger. "We actually know a few things about the man himself. He must have a source of wealth; he's been moving freely from city to city, and evidently has leisure to seek out victims that match his needs. Conversely, he's unexceptional, unmemorable, because no one has commented a word about seeing strangers lingering conspicuously before the murders."
"Except for the secondary victims," Tal pointed out. "They're often strangers to the area themselves."
Ardis nodded, and picked up a slice of cheese, nibbling it delicately. "If he's doing this within line-of-sight, as I think he must be, he's either in the crowd or above it, which means he's either very good at getting himself into other peoples' homes or businesses and up to a second story, or he's climbing about on roofs." She finished the cheese and started as a knot popped in the fire. "If I were in his place, I'd offer myself as a cheap roof-repair service; after a snowfall followed by a day of sun, roofs are always leaking."
Tal felt a rising excitement. Now we're getting somewhere! "We could see if there was anyone having his roof repaired at the last site," Tal offered.
"That's a start," Ardis said, brightening a little. "We could also check with all the business-owners down by the docks, and find out if there were any strangers working around their buildings at the time."
Workers; it wouldn't necessarily have to be workers. "People who claimed they were inspectors, maybe, or surveyors—" Tal put in, as Kayne scribbled madly. "Or extra workers they can't account for—"
"Checking inns for strangers—" Kayne began, catching the excitement, then shook her head. "Impractical, and besides, an inn isn't the only place a stranger to Kingsford might lodge. Good heavens, he could even rent a place, and with all the disrupted neighborhoods, he might not be recognized as a stranger."
For a moment, there was silence as they ran out of ideas. "There's another reason why he must have considerable resources," Tal put in. "The daggers. We already know that there was more than one, and the second one was jeweled, decorated well enough that a well-dressed man did not look out of place carrying it. He either had to buy or make them, and I don't expect that sort of blade is the kind of thing you could pick up at an arms shop." He gave Ardis a sidelong glance, to see if she admitted that the daggers were what he thought they were.
Ardis's face darkened for a moment at that reminder, and she finally shook her head and put down her tea. "Perhaps not as rare as one would think, since this is a city recovering from a great fire, and trading an heirloom dagger for a cook-stove or some wood would not be out of place when hunger and cold tap on one's shoulder. I also dislike saying it, after how helpful the Haspur was, but a Haspur's—or most bird's—vision would be good enough that if this killer is seeing the murder scenes from above, perhaps he is also, somehow, seeing through the eyes of birds and is nowhere near the murder site itself." Tal nodded grimly, and Kayne looked bewildered despite her best attempts to appear matter-of-fact. Ardis continued. "I think we are looking for someone who has a grudge against the Church as well," she said to Kayne with some reluctance. "Tal and I have touched on this before. Perhaps even a defrocked Priest. I cannot imagine why anyone else would be using an ecclesiastical dagger."
"Probably a defrocked Priest," Kayne snapped, then colored. She must have been thinking the same thing after seeing Visyr's description of the murder-weapon. "Forgive me, Ardis; I know this is probably the last thing you want to hear, but I'm only a novice and I don't have the—" she searched for words "—the emotional investment in the Church that you have. Maybe I can see things more clearly because of that. There just aren't that many lay people who know about ecclesiastical daggers!"
Ardis sighed, and covered her face with one hand for a moment. "Perhaps you are right," she murmured from behind that shelter. "It must be said, or we won't consider it seriously. Write it down, Kayne, write it down. I don't want to cost people their lives because I don't happen to like the trend the investigation is taking."
"It might not be a Priest at all," Tal pointed out, hoping to spare her some distress by giving her other options to consider. Now that she had made the effort to include this one, she would be honest enough to pursue it to whatever end it led to. "It could be someone who, like those would-be constables, is trying to emulate a Priest in some way. It could simply be someone who wants to make the Church out to be a villain."
Ardis removed her hand and looked up at him. "There is no one who wishes to make the Church out to be a villain so much as someone who has been cast out of the Brotherhood," Ardis said slowly. "And Kayne is right; the number of laymen who know about the ecclesiastical daggers is very low; the ceremonies in which they are used are so seldom performed publicly that it is vanishingly unlikely our particular miscreant could have seen one of them."
An uncomfortable silence reigned, and it was Tal who interrupted it by clearing his throat. "If—if—it is a Priest, or a defrocked Priest, it probably isn't anyone you know," he pointed out lamely. "After all, the murders didn't start here; Kingsford is only the last link in a path that goes out past Burdon Heath. I don't actually know where it started; Rinholm was just the last place I got an answer from."
"And it could be that it isn't a defrocked Priest," Kayne admitted after a moment. "I can think of another enemy of the Brotherhood who would know about the daggers. It could be someone who was sentenced to lifelong penal servitude and excommunication by a Justiciar. You do have the dagger on view at the sentencing of those you are casting out of the Church, Ardis, and you use it very prominently when you symbolically cut all ties to the community of God and the fellowship of man." She made a few flamboyant and stylized flourishes, as if she was using a blade to cut something in the air. "It's pretty theatrical, and I would imagine it would stick in someone's mind."
"The ceremony of excommunication is performed on those whose acts are so heinous that the Church cannot forgive them, and sometimes they are people we nevertheless have to allow to live," Ardis murmured aside to Tal. "Granted, we don't do that often, but—"
"But when you do, it's on pretty hard cases," Tal pointed out. "That's where I saw it! A Justiciar was excommunicating a particularly nasty piece of work—he hadn't killed anyone, but—well, what he'd done to his own daughters was pretty foul. Caught in the act, no less, and the poor child no older than nine! The local sire had him castrated, and the Church excommunicated him, then they both bound him over into penal servitude, and he still defied all of us. There's a hard case for you! I thought it was a mock-sacrifice of some kind."
"Oh, we use the daggers there, too, in another rare ceremony," Kayne said cheerfully. "And it isn't a 'mock' sacrifice. It's a case where—well, never mind; the point is there is no way you would have seen that ceremony unless it was being performed on your behalf, and I don't think you qualify for that degree of urgency. In fact, no one who is the beneficiary of that ceremony is likely to hate the Church; they're more likely to want to spend their lives scrubbing Chapel floors to repay us."
"Huh." He was surprised at her candor. He hadn't expected anyone in the Church to admit that they performed pagan-style sacrifices.
"We also excommunicate heretics—" Kayne screwed up her face for a moment. "We don't do that often. You have to be doing more than just making a Priest angry or disagreeing with him. Six High Bishops have to agree on it—it's hard to be declared a heretic—"
Ardis interrupted. "We haven't excommunicated a heretic since we did it posthumously to Padrik, the original Priest who bound the ghost at Skull Hill, and all those who sent the ghost further victims."
"The point is, suppose our murderer did something really heinous that warranted excommunication. Maybe a secular punishment too. He'd have seen the dagger, and he'd know it was an important object intimately connected with the Church," Kayne said in triumph.
"Especially if a Justiciar-Mage was the one involved," Ardis added, looking more normal. "We tend to dress the ceremony up quite a bit—invoking ghost-flames on the blade, and auras around the Priest. Well! In that case, we'll need to get access to the Great Archives and find the records on excommunications in the last ten to fifteen years. And, while we're at it, we should get the ones on defrocked Priests. There's no point in ignoring a theory just because we don't like it."
"I'll go take care of that now," Kayne said, getting quickly to her feet. "I'll send it by a messenger and have him wait for the records. We need this information now, not next spring."
"If there's a Priest-Mage there, have him send it to me directly," Ardis ordered. Kayne nodded and headed for the door.
She was gone before Tal could say anything more, leaving him alone with Ardis.
He tilted his head to one side, watching her, as she subsided into brooding. The crackling of the fire was the only sound in the room. "You've never had a case like this one before, have you?" he asked, softly, so as not to break the silence too harshly.
She shook her head; the dark rings under her eyes bespoke several sleepless nights. The case was making inroads on her peace of mind, as well as Tal's. "Well, I've had difficult cases, but—"
"Not ones that were personally difficult, that involved your emotions," he persisted.
She gave him a rueful glance. "True. Never one of those. I've had cases that made me angry, even ones that involved other members of the Brotherhood, but they weren't people I liked. In fact, I must confess now as I did then that it gave me some inappropriate personal satisfaction to put them away where they couldn't hurt anyone else." She looked positively fierce at that moment. "I above all know that the physical Body of the Church is far from perfect, and some blemish can't be helped—but those who misuse their power and authority are not to be tolerated."
"But now—now that it looks as if it's a Priest-Mage, it could be someone you know, someone you like." He nodded. "It's like knowing there's a bad constable on the force, and knowing it probably is someone you know and like, because otherwise he wouldn't be able to get away with it for long."
She sighed, and rubbed her temple as if her head hurt. "That's it exactly; we overlook things in friends that we are suspicious of in enemies or strangers, and we do it because we just know, in our heart, that the friend couldn't possibly be doing something bad. The trouble is, I've known enough criminals to be aware that they can be very charming, very plausible fellows, and they make very good friends. They use friendship as a cloak and a weapon."
"And someone in the Brotherhood?" he ventured.
"That's doubly hard to face," she said, looking off beyond him somewhere. "We have no families of our own, you see; that makes the ties of friendship within the Priesthood doubly special. And—quite frankly, we're supposed to be able to weed bad apples out long before they get out of the Novitiate. We're supposed to be able to police our own ranks."
"But if someone entered the Church, intending from the very beginning to conceal his real motives—" Tal shook his head. "You wouldn't be able to catch him until he did something. It's as if someone planned to have a double identity of criminal and constable from the beginning, and kept the false face intact. Until he was actually caught in the act, we'd never know, never guess, and even after being caught, perhaps still never believe."
She glanced at him sharply, then looked away. "This isn't what I anticipated when I joined the Church," was her only answer.
"Why did you join the Church?" he asked, feeling that an insolent question might take her mind off her troubled conscience. "And what did you expect when you got here?"
The fire flared up for a moment, briefly doubling the light in the room and casting moving shadows where no shadows had been a heartbeat before.
She cast him another sharp glance, but an ironic smile softened her expression as the fire died down again. And although she had no reason to answer him, she chose to indulge his curiosity. "Well, I actually joined because I convinced my father that it was more—economical—to send me here. I was sixteen and betrothed to a man who was forty, and not at all looking forward to my coming marriage."
Tal winced. "Not exactly a pleasant prospect for a young woman," he ventured.
"Oh, it could have been; there were people in my father's circle—older men—who were quite attractive and clever. I was a precocious child, audacious enough to be amusing, intelligent enough to be worth educating; many of father's friends found me charming and several said outright that if they were not already married, they'd have snatched me up as soon as I was of legal age. Marriage to one of them would have been no hardship—but not the man my father had chosen." She made a little face of distaste. "He wasn't one of my father's intimate circle, rather, he was someone my father had wanted to cultivate. Boring, interested only in his business, and convinced that women were good only for bearing and caring for children and being ornamental at the occasional dinner. He'd already buried two wives, wearing them out with multiple sets of triplets and twins, and I was to be the third. He wouldn't hire a proper overseer for the little ones, and not one of his children was older than twelve."
"You were supposed to shuttle from his bedroom to the nursery and back, I take it?" Tal asked. "Sounds as if he expected you to be a nursemaid as well as an ornamental bed-piece."
"Well, what he expected and what he would have gotten were two different things," she replied tartly. "I already had plans—but as it turned out, around the time when the wedding would have been scheduled, the old goat lost his political influence through a series of bad choices. Since political influence was the reason father had arranged the marriage in the first place, it was fairly easy to convince him that he would gain more by sending me to the Church instead. He was skeptical, until I proved to him I had what it took to become a mage. Priest-Mages are never without influence in the Church, and it didn't take him a heartbeat to realize how much good it would do him to have one of his own blood saying what he would say in closed Church conclaves." She grinned. "So, he told the old goat I'd discovered a genuine vocation; the old goat didn't have so much influence now that he was willing to fight the Church for a promised bride. My father told the Justiciars that I had mage-talent, and the Justiciars didn't give a hang if I had a vocation or not, so long as they could make a Justiciar-Mage out of me."
"And you?" Tal asked.
"In the Church I would get things I wanted: education, primarily, and eventual independence. Bless his heart, Father never intended for me to act against my conscience or against the Church itself—what he wanted is essentially what I have been doing, especially with regard to softening the Church's hardening attitude towards nonhumans. It was a good enough bargain to me." She shrugged. "If I didn't have a vocation when I entered, I discovered that there was pleasure in using my abilities to the utmost, pleasure in being of service, and yes, a certain pleasure in piety. Not the kind of piety-for-show that makes up most Church ceremonies, but—well—belief. Belief, and living what you believe."
"I see," Tal said, though he didn't really understand that last. Perhaps he just didn't believe enough in anything to know how it felt. "Then what?"
She chuckled. "Then, after several years of fairly pure service, I discovered that my father's talent for politics hadn't skipped my generation. I found myself in the thick of politics, lured in by my own sense of justice—or injustice, perhaps. Eventually that led to a rift in the Kingsford Brotherhood, which led to one faction allying itself with enemies of the Grand Duke, which led in turn to the Great Fire. That essentially hastened a purge that would have been inevitable, though less immediate, costly and dramatic than it was after the Fire." Her smile turned a trifle bitter, a trifle feral. "To be plain-spoken, it was a little war, a war of magic and of physical force. It was a war I didn't intend to lose, not after seeing the Fire raging across the Kanar. In a way, the worst mistake they ever made was in helping to set the Fire. Everyone here knew it had to have been set by magic, and that brought many of the Brotherhood over to my side who might otherwise have remained neutral or helped the opposition. So I won the war, and won it in hours, and I will never permit its like here again."
He took in her expression, and decided that he didn't want to be involved with any faction opposing this woman. If she was opposed, and was certain to the depths of her soul that she was right, she would never relent, never admit defeat. "And what happened to the old goat?" he asked, changing the subject—or rather, returning the conversation to the original subject.
"He found another bride within a month; he still had money, even if he didn't have the influence he'd once possessed. His political star had set, and he knew it, so he found a pretty little kitten with no more brains than a duck. Two more sets of twins, then he died, somewhat to everyone's surprise." She shook her head. "The girl managed to hold her looks, so now she had beauty and money, and needed to answer to no man for what she chose to do. She hired an army of tutors and nursemaids to care for the children, and has been working her way through a series of lovers unencumbered by offspring, scruples, or husband. And there are plenty of my former set who envy her."
Her gaze wandered off elsewhere, and he thought that perhaps she was wondering what she would have been like, had she tamely allowed the wedding to take place.
She might have been able to prevent having children entirely until he died. She would have had the old man's money, and as a widow, she'd have been able to do whatever she chose. She could have bought that education she craved, helped her father politically, traveled, had freedom she doesn't have now. He wondered if she had thought of that at all.
"Was there anyone you would have rather married?" he asked curiously. "Your own age, I mean. You were sixteen, that's a pretty romantic age, after all. At sixteen, every pretty girl had me ready to pledge my all."
"But I was never more romantic than I was practical," she pointed out to him. "Unfeminine of me, but there it is. In some ways, Tal, you and your peers have far more freedom than me and mine. I knew that the boys my age were all under the same constraints that I was; we had to marry or take positions to suit our families. If we didn't, we'd be cut off, the way my cousin Gwydain was when he passed the Trials and joined the Bardic Guild against his father's wishes. Even when he became a Master Bard and was feted by everyone, his father refused to acknowledge him. Of course," she smiled crookedly, "being in the Guild was no great hardship, and being a Master Bard meant he had any luxury he wanted, so he didn't lose anything by his choice. And neither did I, if it came to that, and once I knew I could be a mage I'd have gone into the Church whether or not my father consented. He knew it, I think, so—" She chuckled. "It's a good thing we're a great deal alike. He knew not to push me too far, and I knew not to push him, either."
"But running off with an inappropriate boy—"
"Would have gotten both of us cut off from family and support, with neither of us suited to or trained for a trade, and I didn't care to live in poverty," she said crisply. "Love in a hovel quickly turns sour for those who aren't mentally and emotionally inclined to sacrifice. Great sacrifice, anyway, all for love and all of that—there was some sacrifice involved in going into the Novitiate, but those who are granted exceptional gifts get exceptional treatment, inside the Church as well as outside of it."
But there was a tinge of regret in her voice, and Tal was suddenly taken with a devilish wish to pursue the subject, but she might have sensed that, and she turned the tables on him.
"And you—there's nothing wrong with your looks, and the constabulary doesn't require celibacy, so why aren't you married?" she asked, a wicked gleam in her eye. "What happened to all those pretty girls you yearned after?"
He flushed in confusion. "I don't know—" he confessed. "For a while, none of those girls was interested in anyone who was earning barely enough in the constabulary to support himself—they'd flirt with me, but they married tradesmen. Then later, when I was a full constable, I didn't ever see anyone I wanted to pursue. I suppose it was because I was always in districts that didn't have any decent women. I mean, they had decent women, but the ones who weren't married were brainless. Even most of the ones who were married were brainless. And when I saw ones who had a few brains, they spoiled it all by falling in love with some muscle-bound idiot who'd get them with child then leave them with the baby and spend most of every night with a pretty barmaid." He shook his head. "I never understood it."
"Well, maybe they fell in love with muscle-bound idiots because that's what they thought they were supposed to do," Ardis commented sardonically. "It's amazing what sheep women are, sometimes. But it's equally amazing how happy men are to have them that way, so there's plenty of blame on both sides."
"I suppose so," Tal began, and she fixed him with that penetrating stare again.
"You suppose so? Did you ever go to one of those women who attracted you and encourage her to think for herself? Did you ever compliment her on making a clever decision? Did you ever show her that you valued brains over looks?" At his shamefaced flush, she nodded. "I thought so. Well, what's a girl to do, when her parents are telling her she has to be a pretty little fluff-head, her peers are rewarding the behavior of a pretty little fluff-head, and the handsome fellows only seem impressed by big, empty eyes and a slender waist? If her parents can't afford to apprentice her, and they don't have a business she can learn or they won't let her learn it, what is she to think and do?"
He felt obscurely ashamed. "I suppose—they do what they feel they're supposed to do."
Ardis was clearly relishing her low-key but heartfelt tirade. "If someone ever gave them encouragement to think for themselves, you might get a few girls outside of the Novitiate who find pleasure in spending as much time cultivating and nurturing their intelligence as they do their hair," she said crisply. "You know, I tried starting a school down in Kingsford for girls with brains and ambition, and it got nowhere, because there weren't any men saying that girls with brains and ambition were attractive. The ones that stuck ended up in the Novitiate, where they'd have gone anyway."
"That was then," he pointed out, rather desperate to get his gender out of trouble. "Maybe now you would be able to make it work. You're a High Bishop, you're a woman, young girls have your example. Things have changed in Kingsford, and there are a lot of women who've had to make their own way—"
"Yes, well, maybe now it would work," she admitted, grumbling a little. "Especially now that I could get a Free Bard tutor or three from my cousin, some help and encouragement from Duke Arden and Lady Asher, and I could requisition quite a few folk from this Abbey as teachers. I know Kayne would be perfectly happy to provide her services as example and teacher."
"You see?" he said eagerly. "You just took on too much by yourself. All you needed to do was to wait until you had the authority to get more help, and the power yourself to be an example."
She gave him an odd, sideways look. "You can be very persuasive yourself, Tal Rufen," she said. "I shall have to requisition your skills for this school; then we'll see what you have to say about it."
"So long as all you ask me to teach is history, I have no particular objection," he said, surprised by the sudden longing that came over him when she made the suggestion. "I am not suited to teaching much of anything else."
Again, she gave him one of those sidelong glances. "Perhaps I shall do just that. But in the meanwhile, we have another sort of work ahead of us." She brooded for a moment. "I want you on the street, Tal. Go make those inquiries we spoke about; get some coin for bribery, and see if anyone knows anything. And warn the women."
"That could let him know we're looking for him," Tal pointed out, "if he's watching for such things."
"We'll have to take that chance." Her face had taken on the look it had when she spoke of the "little war" she'd fought within the Church. "You can defend yourself, Tal; what defenses have those women got?"
He sighed. "None. I'll do everything I can, Ardis—and there is this. We may not be able to catch him—but perhaps we can make it so difficult for him that he becomes desperate. Desperate men make mistakes."
Her face sobered. "We will have to hope for those mistakes. At the moment, that is the only hope we have."