Four and Twenty Blackbirds (24 page)

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."