Ardis, Tal, and Kayne sat in Ardis's office with the door locked and a guard posted to ensure that no one disturbed them unless it was a life-or-death emergency. Ardis had finally gotten the last of her information. Some came from the farthest town with murders that matched the pattern, and more detailed information arrived from Master Wren, her cousin. She also had something that Tal would never have access to: the records from the Confessional for all of the victims—or at least, all of those that attended Confession. Rather surprisingly, a majority of them had, and she now possessed detailed glimpses into their personalities.
"I'm going to try something different this time," she said to the other two. "Instead of trying to deduce anything more directly about the murderer, I want to look at his victims and come up with more information about him based on what they were like. And I want to start from the negative—what those victims aren't."
Kayne looked alert and thoughtful, but it was Tal who spoke first. "Rich," Tal said promptly. "Or even moderately well-off. I'm talking about the women, of course, but only one of the men was what you would call rich, and that was the last one—the first one we know about in Kingsford. The rest were never better off monetarily than working tradesmen."
"They aren't whores, either; in fact, most of them would have been insulted if you suggested they were," Kayne put in, as Ardis noted that the word "whore" slid off her tongue without eliciting so much as a blush, which was in itself an interesting development. "There are more whores in any town or city than there are street musicians, so he's really having to make an effort to find them."
Ardis nodded, for that agreed with the information she had; when she had been able to find the female victims in the Confessional records, they had been honest musicians who left paid love to the professionals. "What about the men?" she asked.
Tal scratched his head. "There you have me," he admitted. "They don't match a pattern, not even close. They're all kinds."
Now was the time to spring her surprise. "Until you look in here." She tapped the folder of records. "I have access to certain confidential records; I can't let you look at them, but what I see shows at least one pattern, which is that our murderer worked very cautiously, at first."
"Oh?" Tal said skeptically. "He doesn't seem all that cautious to me."
"The men who attacked women in the open, in daylight, in front of witnesses are all recent. I think he's gotten bolder with success." She placed her palm on top of the folder. "Now, the others, the ones that occurred in the street at night under cover, or even under the protection of a roof—that's where I'm seeing a pattern. The men all confessed to sins of the flesh and preferred lights-of-love who at least pretended to be musicians. If at all possible, they wanted a mistress, even for an hour, who was more than just a whore. It made them feel as if they had discernment and taste, according to what I read here."
"Interesting." Tal chewed his lower lip. "So what we have is a man who is likely to be out in the street in the first place, and equally likely to accost women who are acting like musicians to see if they might have other—ah—talents." He blushed, which was interesting; it was unlikely he felt embarrassment on his own behalf, so it was probably because he was in Kayne's presence—or hers. "So, the question is, why go to all this trouble to pick that kind of victim?"
"So that he wouldn't break a pattern of behavior and alert the neighbors or the family that there was something wrong," Kayne declared, her head up.
But Tal shook his head. "Not logical; most of the murders took place too quickly. It wouldn't matter if the neighbors saw something just before that made them think there was something wrong with the man. I still don't think there was a pattern there, or a reason—unless—" He paused, as if struck by a thought.
"Unless what?" Ardis asked.
He frowned and rubbed one closed eye before replying. "Unless it was a peculiar sort of revenge. We've got one theory that he's taking revenge on the girls for being scorned by a female musician, but what if he's also taking revenge on the men they are willing to sleep with?"
"That's not a bad thought," Ardis replied after a moment. "It has a certain twisted symmetry." She considered it for a moment. "But what about the others, where there was no previous contact with street-women? There was at least one man who had no interest in women whatsoever as I recall."
Tal shrugged. "I agree with you that there is a pattern of increasing complication and risk-taking. At first, he takes men who have a reason to be alone with women who make their living in the street, and women who have a reason to go along with these men. This, of course, keeps him from breaking the established patterns of his male victims, which keeps anyone from noticing that there is something wrong."
"There were some cases early on where that isn't true," Kayne protested.
Tal nodded agreement. "But those could have been cases where something went wrong—either he couldn't get the kind of victims he wanted, or something else interfered. And remember, all of those took place under cover of night and four walls, in neighborhoods where no one ever looks to see what's going on if there are cries or screaming in the night."
Ardis couldn't find anything to disagree with yet. "Go on," she said. "What next?"
"Next is more risk," Tal told them, as Kayne frantically scribbled notes. "He takes longer with the victims, mutilating them as well as killing them. Next, he goes out into the street, into the open, and takes men who are strangers to the women he kills, and women who wouldn't normally go off with a stranger unless they thought his purpose completely honest. He breaks the patterns of the lives of his male victims, but he's moving quickly enough that even if anyone notices there's something wrong with the man, they don't have time to do more than wonder about it. Then—we have things like the killing here, in broad daylight, with a male victim who never set foot in that part of town, who might well have been stopped by a family member or retainer before he had a chance to act on behalf of the murderer. A thousand things could have gone wrong for him at that last killing. They didn't, which only means that either his luck is phenomenal, or he's studying his victims with more attention to detail than we've guessed."
"And the jeweler?" Kayne asked.
Ardis shook her head. "I don't know. The jeweler often had women in his home, but that doesn't mean that the Gypsy girl didn't go there with legitimate business in mind."
"If he's clever, he could have manufactured that business," Tal pointed out. "Gypsies often wear their fortune; she could have come to the man with coins to be made into a belt or necklace. All he'd have to do would be to drop a good handful of silver into her hat, and she'd be off to the nearest jeweler to have the coins bored and strung before she lost them."
"A good point," Ardis said with a little surprise, since it wasn't a possibility she'd have thought of. "But what else do the victims all have in common?"
Tal made a sour face. "They are people no one will miss. The fact is, all of his male victims were such that even if they did things that were out of character, no one would care enough to stop them until it was too late. Even their relatives don't pay any attention to them until they're dead and the way of their death is a disgrace to the family. Even then, they seem relieved that the man himself is no longer around to make further trouble for them."
Ardis smiled sardonically. "You caught that, did you?" she asked, referring to the behavior of the young dandy's parents when she had questioned them.
Tal nodded, and so did Kayne.
"So we can assume that these men, the secondary victims, are people who would not question the origin of a stray knife that came into their hands, especially if they had any reason to believe that it was stolen." She raised an eyebrow, inviting comment, and once again the other two nodded. "They would simply take the object, especially if it appeared valuable. They would most probably keep it on their persons."
Tal held up a finger and, at her nod, added a correction. "All but one or two—I think the knife-grinder I saw had been given the knife to sharpen. And it's possible the jeweler was brought the knife to repair some damage to the hilt. In both those cases, the men were perfectly innocent of everything. But I'd say it was more than possible in a couple of cases that the men who had the knife actually stole it themselves," Tal told her. "And that may account for a couple of the victims where the connection with music is so tenuous it might as well not be there."
"He took what he could get in those cases, in other words." Ardis made a note of that on the side of a couple of the dubious cases. "That argues for a couple of things. Either there is only one knife—"
"That isn't right, unless he's changing the hilt," Tal interrupted. "The one I saw didn't look anything like the one Visyr saw."
"Then in that case, it is a very powerful and complicated spell, and he can't have it active on more than one weapon at a time." Ardis made another note to herself, suggesting a line of magical research. "To a mage, that is very interesting, because it implies a high degree of concentration and skill, and one begins to wonder why so powerful a mage isn't in Duke Arden's Court."
"Maybe he is—" Kayne began, but Ardis shook her head.
"There's only one mage in his Court, and she's one of my fellow Justiciars. Furthermore, she hasn't detected anyone casting a spell that requires so much power anywhere in the Ducal Palace." Ardis sighed, for it seemed to her that the answer was, more and more, likely to involve a Church mage. "There simply aren't that many powerful mages in the Human Kingdoms outside the Church."
Tal grimaced, and Kayne shook her head. "It certainly seems to be the direction the hunt is tending." She sighed philosophically.
Ardis closed her eyes and told her stomach to calm itself. "I would much prefer to be able to point a finger at an Elf, since there are plenty of Elves who would gleefully slaughter as many mortals as they could get their hands on, but I have been assured that no Elf would be able to cast magic on anything made of iron or steel. So, that's the end of that idea."
"What about other nonhumans?" Tal asked. "I don't think it's likely, mind you, but what about them?"
"I don't think it's likely either," she told both of them. "Any nonhuman is going to be very obvious, and a nonhuman mage even more so. Even if a nonhuman mage didn't practice magic openly, he'd be conspicuous, because he would have to be wealthy. He simply wouldn't be able to purchase the privacy he would need to work magic without being wealthy."
"If this Justiciar-Mage can detect the casting of spells in the palace, why can't we have mages watching for the casting of magic out in the city?" Tal wanted to know.
"You can see the smoke from a fire in the forest quite clearly, but can you pinpoint the smoke from an individual fire in the city?" Ardis countered. "There's too much else going on out in a large population of humans; with as much disruption as there is in Kingsford, a mage would have to be in the same city block as the caster in order to detect the casting of even a powerful spell."
"Have we enough mages in Kingsford to try that?" Kayne asked. "Couldn't we station mages around to catch him in the act?"
A reasonable idea, but not very practical, considering that the priestly mages of Kingsford had more demands on their time than they had hours in the day. "I think we would have better luck trying to find where the knives themselves are coming from," Ardis said tactfully. "If he's using more than one, someone has to be making them for him. There just aren't that many missing ecclesiastical knives."
Tal went very quiet at that. "I didn't know that," he said finally. "I'd just assumed that he'd stolen or found ritual knives—maybe in secondhand shops or something of the sort. But if he's making them—that almost means there has to be more than one person involved."
Ardis felt her stomach turn over again. One murderer was bad enough—but two? "I've had people looking for a maker in Kingsford, and I can't find any smith who'll admit to making triangular-bladed knives."
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that too much," Kayne said with a wave of her hand. "They don't have to come from Kingsford, or this kingdom, or even a Human Kingdom. Any little village smith would do, and I bet there are plenty who would he happy to get a job in the winter when people don't need farm equipment mended. All he needs to do would be to get a smith somewhere else to take a commission for the finished blades, and he can put whatever hilt he wants to on them. For that matter, he could be rehilting the same knife, over and over. That would solve the question of why you saw one kind of knife, Tal, and why Visyr saw another."
Tal shook his head. "I don't think so," he said firmly. "I think I've figured out why they're disappearing when all he'd need to do would be to drop them into the river to destroy our ability to trace him from them. What he's doing is taking them as his mementos."
"His what?" Kayne asked.
"Mementos." Tal offered an apologetic smile. "Trophies. Killers like this like to have things to remember their victims by. A lock of hair, an item of clothing, even jewelry. It lets them experience the thrill of the murder all over again. I know of one man who gave his wife a present of the jewelry he'd taken from the woman he killed; made a point of asking her to wear it, and he said later it was so he could relive the murder. I think that's why the knives are disappearing; I think our man is collecting them, cleaning them, and keeping them as trophies. He probably has them all mounted on a wall somewhere, or done up in a little display case."
Kayne looked a little green. "That's sick," she said in disgust.
"And murdering twenty or thirty women isn't?" Ardis countered, feeling certain that Tal had uncovered another piece of the puzzle. "I think Tal's right. I also think that the mage in question is smart enough to wipe not only every vestige of blood off the blade but cleanse it of every glimmer of magic, so we can't trace it. He may even have shielded the room the knives are in against a trace. We could search till we die of old age and never find the daggers."
Kayne gritted her teeth in frustration, showing openly what Ardis was keeping hidden beneath a veneer of calm. "You do realize what you're saying? We have a murderer who knows as much about the way crimes are traced by way of magic as the constables and Justiciar-Mages do! How can we even try to catch him?"
Tal reached out and patted her hand in a very fatherly fashion—which relieved Ardis. She'd been hoping those blushes weren't on Kayne's behalf. Not that Tal and Kayne would make a bad couple, but . . .
She lost the thought, and didn't care to pursue it.
"We catch him the way constables have always caught clever criminals," Tal said, his calm and even tones belying the tension Ardis sensed beneath his stoic surface. "Firstly, there are more of us than there are of him. Secondly, he will make a mistake. He may already have done so, but we just didn't catch it at the time. Once he makes one mistake, he'll make more, and the consequences will begin to pile up."
"How can you be so sure of that?" Kayne demanded.
He rubbed his forehead and shut his eyes while replying. "It's the oddest thing, you know," he continued, in a matter-of-fact voice, as if he was talking about one of his fellow Guardsmen rather than a multiple murderer. "But I've never seen it to fail. A clever thief can and will continue to steal all his life—a clever sharpster continue to extract money from the unwary until he's in his grave. But a murderer—he may show no signs of remorse at all, may even claim that his victims deserved what came to them—but sooner or later he starts to make mistakes that get him caught."
"Remorse?" Kayne suggested. "Even if he doesn't realize it? Could his conscience be manipulating him so that he does get caught and pays for what he did?"
Tal shook his head. "I don't think so. Maybe it's contempt—when he keeps escaping the net, he starts to think he doesn't need to work so hard to avoid it. Maybe it's a feeling of invulnerability, that we can't catch him however careless he gets. After all, every bit of evidence that he gets shows him that we simply can't find him."
"And maybe it's God," Ardis put in quietly. Tal looked at her with a brief flash of startlement. "God doesn't often act directly in our lives, but when He knows that we are doing all that we are able and are still out of our depth, He may choose to give us a little help." She felt that; she truly did. She only hoped that He would see that they were at the end of their resources and grant that help before any more women died.
I am not going to tell myself that He has reasons for letting those others die, however. God is not cruel; He is not some Eternal Tormentor and Tester. They died because they were unlucky or careless, and not because God had a purpose for their deaths.
Her Special Inquisitor looked for a moment as if he was about to challenge her to a theological discussion, then his lips twitched a little. "I'm not about to argue the point with you, High Bishop," Tal said finally. He looked for just a moment as if he was going to say something more, then just shook his head and remained silent.
I had better change the subject—or rather, get it back where it was supposed to be. "The way this man treats the tools he takes over is interesting," Ardis pointed out. "Once he's done with them, he discards them immediately—within moments of the murder, in fact."
"He doesn't have much choice!" Kayne replied.
"Oh, but he does," Tal responded instantly. "At least, he does in the cases where he's killed in private. I assume he could walk around with that body for as long as he likes, but he doesn't—he kills his chosen victim, then discards the man he's taken." He suddenly looked startled. "I don't suppose we could be dealing with a ghost, could we? Or something like a demon? Something that can come in and possess the killer?"
"Ghosts can't place orders for knives," Ardis pointed out dryly. "And although I'm a Priest, I have to say I truly doubt the existence of demons that can move in and possess someone's body." She thought about the few cases of so-called possession that had been brought before her—until people likely to claim possession realized that she was entirely unsympathetic to the idea. "I've never seen an authentic possession, nor do I know anyone who has. Sometimes it's a simple case of someone being struck with an illness that affects the mind; at other times, it is all fakery. All the accounts of what are supposed to be genuine possessions are at third or fourth hand—or else the symptoms of possession as described are such that they are clearly hysteria or the clever counterfeit of someone with an agenda of her own to pursue."
"Her?" Tal asked wryly.
Ardis shrugged. "Most people claiming to be possessed are female and more often than not young. You can read what you like into that."
Kayne snorted with contempt. "I'll read it as fools for pretending and idiots who believe them. Back to the knives. You've said it before, and I'll repeat it. I don't think the shape is an accident, but we need to discuss that in depth for a moment."
"There could be a number of reasons for picking that shape," Tal mused. "The most logical is that this fellow wants to give the Church and its mages a powerful reason not to pursue him too closely."
"There is no doubt that is why the authorities tried to prevent you from investigating back in your city, Tal," Ardis told him, pleased that her investigation had proved his own suspicions were correct. "No one wanted to be the one to uncover a killer inside the robes of a Priest."
"He could be hoping that a faction of the Brotherhood will take him for a vigilante," Kayne observed. "After all, he's getting rid of people the Church doesn't approve of. Truth to tell, Ardis, if you weren't the High Bishop here, I don't know if the Justiciars would even consider trying to catch him." She pinched the bridge of her nose a moment. "It makes me wonder if he might not be in the pay of someone."
"Who?" Tal asked, surprised.
"I don't know; the Bardic Guild, maybe?" Kayne hazarded, a little wildly. "They'd just as soon be rid of every kind of entertainer that isn't a member of the Guild."
Ardis grimaced. "A madman acting on behalf of the Bardic Guild? I'm afraid you're reaching a bit too far for that one."
"Or being too redundant," Kayne retorted.
"We don't have sufficient evidence that the killer has a collaborator," Tal pointed out gently. "And I don't think I've ever heard of a murderer of this type who had someone working with them."
Kayne made a disparaging face. "It was a thought. Things would be much easier for him if he had a partner in this."
"These murderers tend to be loners," Tal replied. "What you do hear from the neighbors when it's all over is, 'He kept to himself a lot,' and 'He was always very quiet.' My feeling is, people like this man are too obsessed with their own desires, needs, and rituals to want to share them with anyone else."
"Frankly," Ardis said, rubbing her thumb and fingers together restlessly, "I think he has several reasons for what he does—we don't need to limit him to just one. He's obviously intelligent enough to have complex motives." As the other two acknowledged that she was probably right, she continued. "I think he's trying to throw confusion into the ranks of Church officials, and he would get many benefits from doing so. He certainly wants to delay pursuit, and this is one good way to make sure that cooperation with Priest-Mages will be somewhat less than perfect. If he doesn't realize that using a ritual dagger as a murder weapon is likely to cause severe conflict within the Church itself, I'd be very surprised, and as Kayne pointed out, there is a substantial minority among the Brotherhood that would applaud what he's doing—in private, if not in public."
Tal looked as if his stomach was giving him as much trouble as Ardis's was giving her. "Once word gets around that there are murders being done with a piece of priestly equipment—" Tal said very slowly. "God help us. People in the street will be only too willing to believe in some bizarre secret society, sponsored by the Church, dedicated to murder. There is no love lost between the Church and Gypsies, the Church and street-women, or the Church and Free Bards. All three of those groups have good reason to think of themselves as persecuted by the Church. The very people we need to protect most will flee from us in fear."
"And start more rumors," Kayne added.
"And I can't argue with either of you." Ardis couldn't just sit anymore; she got up and paced back and forth in front of the fireplace, keeping a restraining hold on her temper. "I have worked and sacrificed to make the Justiciars respected rather than feared, and trusted to give absolutely impartial justice to those who were loyal Churchmen and those who weren't," she said fiercely. "Now—this! It feels like a personal attack!"
"It can't possibly be, Ardis," Kayne soothed, swiveling her head to watch Ardis pace. "How could anyone connect you with these murders?"
"Perhaps they wouldn't directly connect me—but what if the Justiciars can't find the murderer?" Ardis asked. "Won't people say that we just weren't trying very hard because we knew that the murderer came from our own ranks? Everything I've built up with the people of Kingsford is in jeopardy!"
Since neither of the other two could refute that, they remained silent.
But Ardis realized that she was being a bad example to both of them. She stopped pacing and returned to her chair, willing herself to the appearance of calm if not the actual state.
"We considered the least pleasant possibility about the identity of the murderer; now let's make it a priority," she said grimly. "We have to do more than allow that this man could be a Priest, we have to actively pursue the idea. Tal, there is nothing you can do to help us with this, so simply continue your investigations as you have been; perhaps you will come up with more information that will help us. Kayne—"
The secretary waited, alert as a grayhound waiting to be loosed.
"I want you to undertake another search among Church records," she said, with a tightening of her throat. "Look for Priest-Mages who have been disciplined in the last ten years. I can't believe this man has just sprung up out of nowhere; I feel certain that he must have been caught at least once."
Kayne grimaced, but made the note. "You are right," she agreed. "A Priest who's been disciplined is the one most likely to have a grudge against the Church—or at least, the Church Superiors."
"The other thing you might look for is Priests who've gone overboard in their chastisement; assigning really dreadful penances or the like." Ardis put the tips of her fingers to both temples and massaged.
"Good idea; a Priest like that won't necessarily get Discipline, but he'll show up in the right records—and that might point us to someone likely to turn vigilante." Kayne looked preoccupied, as if some of these suggestions were turning up uncomfortable thoughts.
"I've got a third request," Ardis finished. "While you're at it, you might ask for the records of those who had a history of sexual crimes or violence against women before they entered the Priesthood. Just because we think he's reformed, that doesn't mean he has."
Kayne nodded, noting all of that down.
"You're probably right in this, Ardis," Tal said slowly. "The signature traits of these crimes—I've been thinking about the things he has to have, the ones that always appear, without exception. Death by stabbing—"
He flushed so scarlet, that Ardis was distracted for a moment with amusement. "Go on," she told him.
"This is—rather indelicate," Tal choked. "You're a—"
"I'm a Priest, dear man, and I've taken my turn in the Confessional with condemned criminals," she reminded him. "There isn't much you can tell me that I haven't already heard in one form or another. You mentioned stabbing—which is, after all, a form of penetration. I assume you think this is his form of rape in absentia?"
Tal was so red she was afraid he would never be able to speak, but he nodded. "I think so; that makes these sexual crimes. The knife is the primary part of his signature, and the shape may be part of that—fantasy. Either he hates the Church or he views himself as an arm of the Church's vengeance. There's nothing in between, and in either case, a Priest would be more—frustrated. More likely to choose a knife as the instrument of death."
"And for either, we have to look at the Brotherhood itself." She sighed, and felt a headache closing down over her scalp like a too-tight cap.
"The second signature element is the sex of the victim, which, if I'm right about this, goes along with the sexual nature of the murders. I have to think that the third element is that the victim preferentially is a musician," Tal continued, his red face slowly fading. "I know I've said all this before, but it was more in the light of speculation than certainty. I would stake my life on the fact that no matter how this man kills people, he has to have those three signature elements to be satisfied. I wish I'd seen more of the crime scenes myself, or I would know more."
"So look particularly for Priests who have had problems with musicians," Ardis directed her secretary. "Either while in Orders or before taking them." A thought struck her, and she voiced it. "I wonder if he's a failed musician himself?"
Tal nodded, now completely back to normal. "Could be. Particularly if he was obsessed with the idea of being considered a Master. Love and hate—add obsession, and you have a nasty little soup. If he tried getting into the Bardic Guild and failed, he might be able to forgive men for making a living at music, but never inferior females."
"He could even consider that the female musicians were somehow polluting music itself," Kayne offered, which drew an approving glance from both Ardis and Tal. "Music being supposedly pure, you wouldn't want an unclean female mucking about with it."
"That's a good thing to add to the list of possibilities," Tal told her. "Once again—love and hate, love and worship of music, hate for those who are desecrating it. But that certainly doesn't preclude it being a Priest."
"Far from it," Ardis admitted. "There are plenty who came into the Priesthood after failing at their first choice of vocation. He might even have discovered his ability at magic after he failed at music. Don't forget, we are looking for mages. He can't do this without magic."
But that seemed to exhaust their inventiveness for the moment, and after they had thrashed the subject around a bit more, they all went back to their respective tasks. Kayne went off to her office to draft more orders for records, and Tal went—wherever Tal went, when he wasn't specifically to meet with someone or go off on one of Ardis's errands. She suspected he had gone back into the city, chasing down elusive leads.
When they were gone and the door to her office closed and locked, the room felt strangely quiet and empty. It was difficult to tell what time of day it was in here, since the room had no windows. The previous occupants had all been old and subject to rheumatism; this office shared a wall with the huge kitchen ovens, and as a consequence was nicely warm all winter, even without a fire in the fireplace. There might have been problems in the summer, but as soon as the weather was warm enough, all baking was done in ovens in the kitchen court.
Usually the lack of windows didn't bother her, but this afternoon it occurred to her that she was curiously isolated from the world outside because of that lack. Was this good, or bad? As a Priest, perhaps she should cultivate that isolation, since it theoretically would enable her to get closer to God. But as a Justiciar, she needed to remain within the secular world so that she could understand and dispense justice to its inhabitants. As with so many things in her life, it seemed this required striking a delicate balance, too.
Ardis removed a fat, brown folder from the locked drawer of her desk: the record of the Priests and Priest-Mages who had vanished from the Kingsford Abbey during the Great Fire. Coincidentally, she had not had enough time to devote to unraveling the mysteries the stiff pasteboard contained before all this fell upon her, and now the very records she would have requested from the Archivist for her own Abbey were already on her desk.
But these were only the records of those who had been severely disciplined by the Order over the past ten years, and it could be that this simply wasn't long enough.
Should I go back twenty? she wondered. Or perhaps just fifteen? Where should I place the cutoff? I'll have to look at more than severe penance, that much I know. The first clues to trouble may lie in seemingly minor infractions.
Kayne was already planning on bringing the full record for the last ten years, and that would be a fair pile to go through, even if she eliminated all those who weren't mages. Well, perhaps if she looked at these records in the light of this new trouble, something would spring out at her.
But nothing came immediately to mind as she skimmed over the records again. Those who were missing simply did not fit the pattern, unless something had occurred to them between the Fire and now that set them off. Mostly, they were undergoing penance for the sins of lust and greed—quite common expressions of both, with no indication of the kind of cruelty exhibited by the murderer. Her headache worsened as she held the records concerning Priest Revaner.
This—this is so frustrating! The only obvious possibilities are dead, or just as good as dead, and he's at that top of that list.
The one thing working against Revaner—aside from the fact that he was probably dead, and the fact that he was a giant bird—was that the murders began so far away from Kingsford. He would have had to travel an enormous distance to get there.
How would he travel as a bird? He couldn't fly—he was too heavy. I very much doubt that he could have walked the distance, and he would have been incredibly conspicuous if he had. Even if he somehow found someone to take him that far away, why would he bother to come back here? There was nothing for him here; even if I wanted to take the spell off, since it was a backlash of his own magic, I'm not sure that I could. He probably ended up in Kingsford and was burned to a crisp—or was killed by some farmer thinking he was after chickens. Or he's in a freak-show as one of the star attractions, which would be nothing more than poetic justice.
No, it couldn't be Revaner, but she wished she could find some sign that it might be one of the lesser Priest-Mages who'd escaped. Any of them had a perfectly good reason to return to a place they would find familiar. Any of them would be perfectly happy to take revenge on the Free Bards who had foiled the attempt to kill Duke Arden in his own theater.
The trouble was, none of them were powerful enough to work this kind of magic.
But would it take power? That's something I still don't know. It might be a brilliant spell, difficult to execute, but actually requiring very little power. This certainly didn't act like the variations on coercive magic she knew; every one of those left the victim still able to fight for his freedom, and the more heinous the act he was forced to do, the more successful he was likely to be at breaking free. Perhaps the mage executing this magic was not powerful, merely brilliant.
Or it might be someone still in the Brotherhood. She couldn't evade that possibility. There was no use in saying that an active Priest couldn't possibly be doing such things when she knew very well that there were those who could, and with a smiling face. Men with a profound hatred of women often went into the Church because they knew that there would be fewer women there, and that most, if not all of them, would be in subordinate positions to males. The killings themselves demonstrated such hatred of women that even Kayne had commented on it. The garb of a Priest only meant that a man had mastered the book-learning and study required to become a Priest—it didn't mean that the man had automatically acquired anything like compassion on the way to taking Holy Orders. Every person who took vows had a different reason for doing so, and not all of those reasons were admirable.
She made a little face at that thought, for it came very close to home. Even my reasons were not exactly pure. They could be boiled down to the fact that I took vows, "because I didn't have a better offer."
Her head throbbed. She buried her face in her hands, wondering if this was the punishment she had earned for her cavalier decision of years ago. Was this God's way of chastising her for not coming to Him with a wholly devoted heart?
No. No! I can't believe that. God does not punish the innocent in order to also punish the guilty—
But were those people who had already died so very innocent? By the strict standards of the Church, they were all apostate and in a state of sin. The Gypsies were pagans, and the Free Bards were hardly model citizens or good sons and daughters of the Church. Was God punishing Ardis for her pride and the victims for their sins at the same time?
She dropped her hands and shook her head stubbornly, as if to rid it of those thoughts. No! Nothing I have ever seen can make me believe God is so arbitrary. It makes no sense!
She could not, would not, believe in the petty-minded God so many of the Brotherhood worshiped—the God who demanded obedience rather than asking for worship, who punished like a petulant and autocratic patriarch.
Besides—I may not have had a strong vocation when I entered the Church, but neither have hundreds of others. I have served God and the Church faithfully; I have never swerved from that path, never questioned why I was in the Brotherhood.
Until now, perhaps.
A twinge of guilt assaulted her, as she recalled how, less than an hour ago, she had been admiring the strong line of Tal Rufen's jaw. Something was threatening to come between her and her service.
If there was ever something she would have named as a test of her fidelity, it had come in the person of Tal Rufen—intellectually her equal and willing to acknowledge it, resourceful, creative. Precisely the sort of person she would have been willing to spend a lifetime with.
Unwedded. And, if I'm any judge of human nature, attracted to me.
Ardis had never been particularly impressed by rank, not when so many of her own set were absolute idiots. That Tal was a commoner would not have bothered her before she entered the Church, and it certainly didn't now that she'd spent years in the company of other commoners who were her equals or superiors in intelligence and rank within the Church. She was pleased to have him as a subordinate, would be even more pleased if the relationship became one of friendship. But she would have been lying to herself if she denied that, from time to time, she didn't wonder how her life would have turned out if she had met someone like him before taking her final vows.
Now, with Tal on the scene, she was doing more than wonder about it.
Give me the motivation and opportunity to break my vows—oh, yes. I can see that. The God she pictured had a finely-honed sense of humor as well as curiosity, and she could readily see Him giving her great temptation just to see if she could resist it—
Or see if she could find another solution to her problem.
Like leaving the priesthood.
There was no great stigma attached to a Priest who resigned her position, left the Church, and took up a secular life. There were always those who discovered that something inside them had changed, and with that change had come the need to leave the Church. Of course, if she did leave the Church, she would no longer have any more status than any other commoner. She had formally given up all secular bonds with her family when she took vows, and if they took her back, they would probably do so grudgingly, since in her tenure as High Bishop she had made as many enemies as friends. Those enemies would happily take advantage of the fact that the Church no longer sheltered her, and the friends were not always exactly in high places.
In short, she would have nothing more to rely on than her own personal resources and abilities. She would come back into the secular world with rather less than when she had left it.
And that is why Priests break their vows rather than taking the step of renouncing them. They want to have their pleasure and keep their position.
She was no more suited to the secular world of trade and business than Kayne was, and she had never really thought about earning her place in the world. Now, she found herself making plans. Perhaps she could use her abilities as a mage to solve thefts, find missing persons—perhaps she could get permission from the Church to act as a physician. She would still sacrifice status and comfort, but neither meant that much to her.
Given the right set of circumstances—it might be worth it. Physical comfort wasn't everything. Status didn't mean a great deal except as protection from current enemies and to make the way a bit smoother. The loss of status could be compensated for with cleverness and charm.
With myself using magic and the skills I've learned as an administrator, and Tal using his wits and experience, we could do a great deal of good. The mental image that accompanied the thought was attractive. Very attractive. There were always crimes that the constables had difficulty solving. There were also the occasions when a solution was found, but it was difficult to bring a burden of proof before the Justiciars. Justiciar-Mages were not necessarily supposed to solve crimes, and more often than not, Ardis had been forced to sit back and grit her teeth while constables bumbled through a case or let the real criminal get away for lack of evidence. But if she left the Church—she could take on anything she chose. Granted, the people she would probably want to help most often wouldn't be able to pay her much, but there would be so much satisfaction in seeing real justice done!
You know, I imagine my cousin the Duke could see clear to hiring us. . . .
She shook her head suddenly. What was she thinking of? How could she even contemplate renouncing the Church?
Her stomach knotted, and her hands clenched. This was insanity; what was Tal Rufen that she should throw out everything that had come to give her life meaning? Where were her senses?
Dear and Blessed God—what's putting this into my mind? The stress? Am I under such pressure that my mind is conjuring these fantasies just to give me something else to think about?
Surely, surely that was the explanation. Now was not the time to even consider such things; she did not want to continue this case with anything less than the full authority that her status as High Bishop gave her. That would be a betrayal of herself and all those victims as well as of the spirit of her vows. If this murderer really was an active Priest, nothing less would serve to catch and convict him.
She fiercely recited one of her favorite meditations to drive all thoughts of Tal Rufen as anything other than a subordinate and a colleague out of her mind—for the moment, anyway. She must concentrate. Her own feelings meant nothing in the face of this threat.
She returned her rebellious mind to the proper path, but at least in its wanderings something else had occurred to her, based on the fact that as a commoner, she would be treated very differently from the deference her current status afforded her. There was another characteristic of the murders that made her think the murderer was either a Priest or a noble—or both. The sheer contempt with which the man used and discarded his "tools" argued for someone who regarded the common man as completely disposable and not worth a second thought. So many Priests in her experience held commoners in scarcely concealed contempt, a contempt she thought she saw operating now.
There didn't seem to be any point in pursuing another hare—all the information they had fit the idea that this mage was or had been a Priest-Mage. If he was a former Priest, well, he had earned himself double punishment, both secular and sacred, and neither the secular nor the sacred Judges would be inclined to grant him any mercy. But what do I do if it is an active Priest? How can I handle this to do the least amount of damage to the trust that people have in the Church? The disaster in Gradford had shaken the trust of many to the core. Ardis and many others had barely averted a worse disaster involving the High King. There were many nonhumans who feared the Church and its representatives so much that they would probably do anything in their power to avoid even casual contact with it. If this was an active Priest—
I have to hope it's an apostate, someone who has been ejected from the Church for previous crimes. Otherwise—no matter how well we handle it, the situation is going to result in an enormous setback. It will take decades to recover from it.
Her hands and feet were cold; her ankles ached. Her stomach was a mass of knots. She left her chair behind her desk to take her place beside the fire.
For a moment she felt completely overwhelmed by the situation; felt that it was more than she could handle. She wanted, desperately, to give it all up, put it in the hands of someone else, and run away. Oh, if only she could do that! If only she could retreat somewhere, to some place where she could concentrate on minutiae and forget this dreadful burden of responsibility, the torment of a wayward heart! She clenched her hands on the arms of her chair and forced back tears of exhaustion.
But when the Sacrificed God faced the Flames, He didn't run away. He entered them bravely, without looking back. And I don't care what the cynics say that the fact that He knew He was immortal made him fearless; the Flames weren't any less agonizing as they burned away His mortal flesh and permitted His immortal soul to escape. He had every reason to fear the Flames, yet to save the world, He stepped into them. If He could face His own death, how can I not face my own life?
She wanted faith, wanted to believe. The problem was that she was at heart an intellectual creature, not an emotional one. Belief didn't come easily for her; she wanted empirical evidence. She envied those whose belief simply was, who believed as matter-of-factly as they breathed, or dreamed.
And the only evidence I have is that evil has a freer hand in this world than good.
All her life she had waited in vain for that tiny whisper in the depths of her soul to give her an answer. She didn't really care what question the answer addressed—she just wanted to hear the whisper, once.
Maybe she was unworthy. If that was true, then maybe she ought to renounce her vows and run off with Tal Rufen. There would certainly be no loss to the world if she did. She was no Priest if she could not believe herself in what she preached. If she was unworthy, she should give over her place to someone who was worthy of it.
But maybe the reason she had never heard that whisper was only because she had always had the capability to find her own answers, if she just worked hard enough at it. And if that was the case, then running off with Tal would be a terrible betrayal of everything she was, everything she hoped to be, and most importantly, everything God had placed her here to do. Would a person with more faith and fewer wits be making a better job of this problem, or a worse one? She had to think that it would be the latter. Faith would only sustain a person through this situation; only intelligence and reasoning would bring an end to it.
The murderer will make a mistake, she told herself. That's the pattern with crimes like these, too. He'll get overconfident and make a mistake. He'll choose a target who has protection—or one of our people will get the knife before he does. I have to believe that. If we just work hard enough, we'll find him.
She wasn't altogether sure she wanted to face the troubles that would erupt when they did find and catch him, but failure was not an option here.
Perhaps I can have the Free Bards in Kingsford spreading the word to be wary among the women of the streets. If I can keep them all within walls, I'll have an easier chance of finding him.
Of course, the only Free Bard likely to believe her was that disreputable rascal, Raven—and Raven was off somewhere else this season with that saucy young bride of his. But maybe he'd returned by now—
I can certainly find out. And just maybe the letters from Talaysen will convince his friends that I'm trustworthy.
Action. Doing something. That made her feel better, less helpless, more effective.
Maybe a little more discreet pressure on the bird-man. I could remind him that some of the people dying are friends of his friends. How important are kin and friends to one of his kind? I should find that out if I can.
Now that would be a coup; if she could get Visyr to cooperate, he might be able to get his talons on a knife before the killer stole it back. If they just had a knife, their job would be enormously easier.
I'll concentrate our efforts on stopping the murders by getting women under cover, she decided. And once they're under cover, I'll concentrate on getting hold of a knife.
She sighed, and felt a little of the tension ease. With clearly formed tasks of her own to concentrate on, it would be easier to keep other, more troubling thoughts at bay.
She got up and returned to her desk, prepared now to open the complicated channels of communication between the Church and the people of the streets. There was, after all, only so much time before the murderer struck again, and she was determined to give him as few opportunities as possible.