Four and Twenty Blackbirds (5 page)

Tal shrugged; there wasn't much he could say. Except that at least now some of those women he feared were in jeopardy would no longer be
alone,
not for the duration of this cold snap, anyway. And for tonight, at least, none of them would be on the street.

But the last one wasn't taken on the street, was she? I wonder what she was doing there; the girls who pose as street-singers don't usually visit blacksmiths. Futile to speculate; he could find out for himself, tomorrow. That was his day off, and he would be free to invade any beat he chose to.

Tonight he would take advantage of the storm to go a little out of his area and visit the Church morgue. Technically, there should be a Priest there at all hours, praying for the repose of the dead and the forgiveness of their sins—but as Sergeant Brock had pointed out, in weather like this, it wasn't at all likely that anyone would be there. The dead-cart couldn't go out in an ice-storm, for the pony might slip and break a leg, and no amount of roughing his shoes would keep him safe on cobblestones that were under a coating of ice an inch thick. So there was no reason for the Priest in charge of the morgue to stir out of his cozy cell, for he could pray for the souls of those laid out on the stone slabs just as well from there as in the icy morgue. If his conscience truly bothered him, he could always take his praying to the relative discomfort and chill of the chapel.

So Tal would be able to examine the bodies at his leisure, and see what, if anything, was true about the story the Desk-Sergeant had heard, that there was something strange about one of the bodies.

He got his uniform cape out of his locker, and layered it on beneath the waxed-canvas cape. His baton slid into the holster at his belt, his dagger beside it, his short-sword balancing the weight on the other side. Beneath the weight of his wool tunic and breeches, knitted shirt and hose, and two capes, he was starting to sweat—better get out before he got too warm and killed himself with shock, walking into the ice-storm.

He took his spiked staff in hand and clumped slowly back out, saluting Sergeant Brock as he headed for the door to the street. There was a constable at the front entrance handing out the storm-lanterns; he took one gratefully and hung it on the hook in the end of his staff. It wasn't much, but on a night like tonight, every tiny bit of light would help, and if his hands got too cold, he could warm them at the lantern.

He opened the door and stepped into the street. There wasn't much wind, but the pelting sleet struck him in the face with a chill that made up for the lack of wind. He bent his head to it, and told himself it could be worse.
It could be hail,
he reminded himself.

But it was hard to think of how anything could be worse than this; ice so thick that if he had not been wise enough to strap on those metal ice-cleats, he'd have broken an arm or his neck in the first few paces, and cold fierce enough to drive every living thing from the street tonight. It would be a bad night for taverns and families with an abusive member; no one would be going out for a drink, and people with bad tempers didn't take being cooped up well. More often than not, the abuser would take out everything on people who could not run out of doors to escape him. A colicky baby that wouldn't stop crying, a child with a cough that couldn't be soothed, or a woman with the bad luck to say the wrong thing at the wrong time—the triggers were many, but the results were all depressingly the same. There would probably be a few—children mostly—beaten to death before morning. Nights like this one brought out the worst in some people, as the inability to
get away
set tempers and nerves on edge.

Try not to think about it. There's nothing you can do to prevent any of what's coming tonight. You'd have to have a million eyes and be everywhere at once. Tal set the spike of his staff carefully, lifted a foot and stepped forward, driving the cleats into the ice before lifting the other and repeating the motion. His beat would take three times as long to walk tonight.

He was glad that he was not the morning man, who would be the one to deal with the bodies that would turn up with the dawn. Sometimes the perpetrator would manage to hide his crime by burying the corpse or dumping it in the river, but it would take a truly desperate person to manage that tonight.
They never learn; they call the dead-cart and say the mate or the kid "froze to death," the constable shows up with the dead-cart and sees the bruises or the smashed skull, and that's the end of it. Another battering, another hanging.
It generally never even came to a trial; a Justiciar would see the evidence and pronounce the verdict before the end of the day. An easy conviction, but Tal was weary of them, for nothing ever seemed to change, no matter how many batterers were hung.

Maybe that's because for every one we see and catch, there are a dozen that we don't, because they don't actually manage to kill anyone. They only cripple the bodies and kill the souls of their "loved ones," they never actually commit murder. And as long as the wife doesn't complain, we have no right to step into a quarrel or a parent punishing his child. 
 

More than the weight of the ice on his shoulders weighed him down, and he wondered for the hundredth time if he should give it all up.

No, not yet. Let me solve this last one, then I'll give it up. It was all a noble motive; tonight he was ready to acknowledge that part too. Part of it was sheerest curiosity. I want to know what can drive a man to kill someone he doesn't even know with a weapon that vanishes. 

As icy as the morgue was, it was warmer than being outside. The ice-storm had finally passed as Tal finished his beat, but its legacy would make the streets impassable until well after daybreak. Even inside his boots and two pairs of socks, Tal's feet felt like two chunks of ice themselves. At least in here he could walk without having to calculate each step, and he didn't have to worry about the cleats scarring the stone floor.

The morgue was a cheerless building of thick gray stone, with tall, narrow windows set into the stone walls, glazed with the poorest quality glass, thick and bubbly and impossible to see through. The anteroom was supposed to hold a Priest who would conduct visitors to bodies they wished to claim when such appeared, and otherwise he was supposed to be on his knees before the tiny altar with its eternal flame, praying. More often than not, he would probably be at his desk, reading instead. But just as Tal had assumed, there was no Priest here tonight, and the door had been left unlocked just in case the dead-cart ventured out onto the ice before dawn. The flame on the altar was the only other source of illumination besides his own lantern, but there wasn't much to see in its dim and flickering light. The morgue was not made for comfort, either spiritual or physical; the only place to sit besides the chair at the desk was on stone benches lining three of the walls beneath the slit windows. These benches, which were not softened by so much as a hint of a cushion, were intended to encourage the sitter to think on the chill of death and the possible destination of the one who reposed beyond the door. Two of the benches were single pieces of carved granite that stretched the entire length of the wall. The door to the street was framed by two more uncompromising structures, just as imposing though only half the length of the wall. The matching granite altar, kneeling-bench, and the door to the morgue proper were ranged with mathematical precision on the fourth wall, and the Priest's desk, holding the records of all bodies currently held here, sat right in the middle of the room. The desk was a plain, wooden affair, but it hid a secret, a charcoal brazier in the leg-well that would keep the Priest nicely warmed all day. Tal began opening drawers and discovered more secrets. One of the drawers held goosedown cushions and a sheepskin pad to soften the hard wooden chair. There was a stack of books, most of them having little to do with religion, and a flask and a secret store of sweets. Finally he found what he was looking for—the records detailing what body lay where. A quick glance at the book told him where to look for the smith and his victim. Tal put the book back, then turned and crossed the intervening space with slow and deliberate steps, disliking the hollow ring of his cleated boot-heels in the dim silence, and pushed the door open.

On the other side of the door, what appeared at first glance to be multiple rows of cots ranged out beneath the stone ceiling. But a second look showed that the "cots" were great slabs of stone, disturbingly altarlike, and the sheet-draped forms on top of the slabs were too quiet to be sleeping—although Tal had known a Priest or two, more iron-nerved or insensible than most, who would take a late-night nap among his charges on an overly warm night. It would almost be pleasant in here then; a special spell kept the temperature low, so that the bodies would not decompose as quickly. On one of those sweltering nights of high summer, when the air never moved and rain was something to be prayed for, the only place to escape the heat besides the homes of the ultra-wealthy was here.

The morgue was crowded; season and weather were taking their toll of the very young, the elderly, and the poor. Judging by the lumpy forms beneath the sheets, the Priests had laid out several children on each slab, and Tal swallowed hard as he passed them. He could examine the bodies of adults with perfect detachment, but he still could not pass the body of a child without feeling shaken. There was something fundamentally
wrong
about the death of a child, and even after twenty years as a constable he still had not come to terms with it.

His targets were at the very end of the morgue, a little apart from the rest, as if distaste for what had happened made the Priests set them apart from their fellows. Tal was mostly interested in the smith, but just for the sake of seeing if he spotted anything the first constable had not, he pulled back the sheet covering the girl.

The sight of her battered face shocked him, and he had not expected to be shocked. When he'd read that she had been beaten, he had not really expected that she'd been beaten nearly to death. He spotted three injuries that by themselves would have killed her in a day or less. He could hardly imagine how she had survived long enough to be killed with the knife—her jaw was surely broken, and there was a pulpy look about her temple that made him think the skull might be crushed there, broken ribs had been driven into lungs, and her internal organs must have been pulped. She was so bruised that he could not really imagine what she had looked like before the beating, and that took some doing. The places where she'd been cut up were odd—symmetrical, forming patterns. Her clothing was tasteless and gaudy, cheap, but not shabby, indicating that she was not as poor as the last victim. That was probably because the last victim had insisted on earning her bread in ways that did not involve selling her body. As so many girls had found, when men were willing to pay more for sex than any other kind of unskilled work, it was hard to say no to what they offered.

Not that I blame them. You've got to eat. 
 

He couldn't spot anything that caught his attention, so he pulled the sheet back over her and moved on to the smith.

Even on a freezingly cold day like this one, the heat in a forge was as bad as the full fury of the sun in high summer, and most smiths were half-naked most of the time. This one was no exception; leather trews and a leather apron were his only clothing. And it was because of that lack of clothing that Tal saw immediately what made Sergeant Brock whisper that there were rumors that one of the bodies looked "odd."

In fact, if Tal had not known that the man's victim was a relatively frail woman, he would have sworn that the smith had been in some terrible fight just before he died. There were bruises all over his arms and shoulders, especially around his wrists.

That couldn't be post-mortem lividity, could it?
The marks were so very peculiar that he picked up the man's stiff arm and rolled the body over a little so he could examine the back. No, those bruises were real, not caused by blood pooling when the body lay on its face. He opened the shutter of his lantern more, and leaned over to examine the bruises closely.

This is very, very strange.
He wished that he was a doctor, or at least knew a Healer so he could get a more expert second opinion. He had never seen anything quite like these bruises before. . . .

The closest he could come had been in the victim of a kidnapping. The perpetrators had ingeniously wrapped their victim in bandages to keep him from injuring himself or leaving marks on his wrists and ankles. The victim had been frantic to escape, full of the strength of hysteria, and
had
bruised himself at the wrists, ankles, and outer edges of his arms and legs in straining against his swaddlings. The bruises had looked similar to these—great flat areas of even purpling without a visible impact-spot.

But no one had bound the smith—so where had the bruises come from?

Tal stared at the body for some time, trying to puzzle it out, before dropping the sheet and giving up. There was no saying that the smith had not had those bruises before the girl ever showed up at his forge. And in a man as big and powerful as this one was, no one would have wanted to ask him where they had come from if he himself wasn't forthcoming about it.

Some people have odd tastes. . . . 
 

And
that
could have been what brought the girl to his business today. If she was a girl he'd picked up last night, no one would be aware that he knew her. And if she thought she could get a little extra business—or hush-money—out of him . . .

He grimaced as he walked back towards the door. All this way—and this could very easily be a perfectly ordinary killing, if murder could ever be called "ordinary." The girl ventured out into filthy weather because she needed money and he was the nearest source of it. And perhaps she threatened him in some way, hoping to get that money, or wouldn't go when he ordered her out, and he snapped.

But as he put his hand on the door, he knew, suddenly, that this was just too pat an explanation, and it all depended on the very fragile supposition that the smith was a man with peculiar appetites. Just as he could not be sure that the bruises had not already been present when the girl came to the forge, he could not be sure that they
were.