Four and Twenty Blackbirds Read online

  A broad grin sprang up on Ardis's face, making her look very like a vixen in her coat of scarlet and little round red cap. "I sometimes think that the reason God demands that we leave revenge to Him is because He prefers to keep such delights to Himself," she said sardonically. "I quite understand. Well, Tal, before I send you off to the bed you very much deserve, I only want to tell you three things. Make free of the Abbey library; use of it is one of the privileges of being attached in service to the Abbey, and I think you'll be pleased by what you find."

  He flushed a little and ducked his head, obscurely ashamed for some reason that his hunger for books had been found out, and her smile softened. "Tomorrow you can present your papers to whomever you think you will need to work with; trust me, no hour is too early for Captain Fenris, if you can find him. Use your own discretion as to who you inform of your true rank; I'll take care of notifying the Duke myself."

  He started to object, and stopped himself. She was right; she had ways of getting to the Duke quickly, where he would have to wait days or weeks for an audience. "I'll probably tell this Captain Fenris, High Bishop, and I'd rather tell him in person, myself. I want him to see me, I want to see him, so we can—"

  "So the two hounds can sniff noses and decide not to fight," she interrupted with an ironic look that dared him to say otherwise. And since that was pretty much what was going to happen, he couldn't deny.

  "Well, we do have to know that we can trust each other," he pointed out. "Where I'm going to be prowling—well, I might need someone to come to my aid, and if I have to ask Fenris for help, I want him to be willing to send a man with me. He won't do that if he's never seen me."

  "I rather thought that." She lost her smile. "That brings up the last point—remember that you can't track this murderer down if you're dead, Tal. This is a ruthless creature, and if he realizes that someone is tracking him, he may deviate from his chosen victims to remove you from his trail."

  With a feeling of shock, he realized that she was right. It had not occurred to him, he had been so preoccupied with the pursuit, and so focused on the female victims, but she was right. Whoever this was, he was smart enough to not only elude pursuit, but to avoid it in the first place.

  That meant he was not only clever, he was intelligent. Someone like that would be smart enough to watch for pursuit, and if he could not shake that pursuit from his trail, he would eliminate it, or at least try.

  I'm going to have to think like someone who is stalking one of the Great Cats in unfamiliar territory. At any moment, it could be the Cat who becomes the stalker, and the former hunter becomes the prey. Tal had never been in a position like this. It gave him a very unsettled feeling, to think of himself as the hunted, rather than the hunter.

  "I'll remember," he promised. "And I won't go picking up any strange knives!" She nodded, accepting that promise.

  With nothing else to be dealt with, he took his leave; Kayne was waiting outside the door with another sheaf of papers, and hardly waited for him to clear the doorframe before entering the office. He wondered a little at this; did the woman never rest? It was long past the time when most folk would have considered that they had put in a good day's work.

  When he returned to his little room, and sat down on the side of the bed, he realized that he had been working on nervous energy for some time. The moment he got off his feet, it ran out, leaving him exhausted.

  For a while, he simply sat there, examining his new quarters. This was the first time he'd had a chance to get a good look at them.

  As was to be expected in an Abbey, this little room, about the size of his bedroom back at the Gray Rose, was not what anyone would call luxurious. At least it didn't have penitential stone walls, though; like the rest of the Abbey, this room was plastered and painted white, with all woodwork and exposed beams stained a dark sable. There was a closet opposite the door; the closet stood open, and his bags were inside—obviously, he was expected to tend to his belongings himself. The narrow bed was set along one wall, and a small table and chair on the other. There was a bookcase—empty—at the foot of the bed, a nightstand with a candle alight in a pewter holder on it at the head. Except for a hook on the door and two more on the wall, that was all there was.

  The bed was firm enough, with plenty of blankets, which would be welcome since the room did not boast a fireplace. But there were no windows, either, so at least there wouldn't be any drafts—though in summer, there wouldn't be any cooling breezes.

  How are we supposed to deal with these woolen uniforms in summer? Or do they have a summer uniform as well?

  He couldn't imagine the Priests wearing those long woolen robes in summer either, so perhaps the summer-weight clothing had been packed away for the season.

  Well, if I don't get my things put up now, I probably won't get to them for days. Somewhere, he dredged up a last bit if energy, and got back to his feet.

  The books he had brought with him all fit nicely into one half of the first shelf of the bookcase. He hung his civilian clothing up first, then his new uniforms. All the rest of his belongings, such as they were, fit into the two drawers of the nightstand.

  Except, of course, for his weaponry. He had seldom employed it as a constable, but he kept in constant practice; a hand-crossbow and a belt-quiver of bolts went on one hook on the wall, his short-sword on the other. His various boot-, belt-, and wrist-knives he laid out on the table, along with his cudgel and a bag of lead shot. That last served double-duty, both as a weapon in and of itself and as ammunition for the sling tied to it. Over the back of the chair he laid his wide, stiff leather belt that served as kidney-protection, and the leather collar that protected his throat. His leather wrist-braces went on the table with his knives.

  He'd worn none of this for his interview with Ardis; he hadn't known what kind of guards she'd have and how they'd take to a man bearing arms into her presence. But he had no doubt that someone had looked through his weapon-bag when they put it in this room, and that Othorp knew precisely what he'd brought with him—and that it all had that well-worn look.

  He'd wear all of this tomorrow when he went into the city to find Captain Fenris. He got out of his new uniform, blew out the candle, and was surprised at how dark the room was without the light. There wasn't even a line of light from the hall under the door. He might have been inside a cave.

  And it was quiet; unnervingly quiet to a man used to sleeping in an inn. He couldn't hear anything out there in the hall, and if there was someone on the other side of his walls, he couldn't hear any sounds from them, either.

  He felt for the head of the bed, and climbed under the thick, soft woolen blankets. But once he was there, he kept staring up at the ceiling in the darkness, unable to quite get to sleep. Partly it was the silence, so thick it made his ears ring, but partly it was a belated state of nerves.

  It was all catching up with him now, and he found himself a little dazed. He had come here to the Abbey on a whim when he'd been unable to locate the Captain of the Kingsford constables or the Kingsford Sheriff; everyone knew about the Justiciars, of course, and down in Kingsford he had heard stories about Ardis and had taken the chance that she might hear him out and perhaps get him an appointment with Captain Fenris. He had not expected her to take a personal interest in the case.

  He had expected even less that she would turn around and coopt it and him. After trying to deal with the authorities in Haldene, he had really been anticipating that he would be put off. In fact, if his suspicions were correct, and a Priest or high Church official was involved in this, Ardis would have had every reason to deny him an interview at all. He'd been steeling himself for the long trudge across the bridge to Kingsford again, a scant dinner, and the cheapest room he could find. His resources, never large to begin with, were dwindling quickly.

  And now—

  Now he was beginning to get the feeling there was much more going on here than he had dreamed of, and he was afraid that the High Bishop was privy to more and mo
re serious information than he had yet uncovered.

  Was it possible that he was getting in over his head? Was that why everyone in Haldene had tried to put him off this case? Was it more serious than he knew—did it involve suspicion of someone with a very high rank?

  It didn't have to be a noble, it could be a Priest, as he had suspected many times now—and it could be that she knew it, even had some suspects, but had no way to prove who it was. Perhaps that was why she had conscripted him so quickly. Oh, wouldn't that just open a box of beetles!

  And I could end up being the scapegoat when I catch the man. He could, if Ardis was like other high-ranking people he'd worked under. But nothing he'd seen and heard so far made him inclined to think that she was. In fact, her reputation was that she protected her underlings from those who were higher in rank, provided that those underlings were on the side of the angels.

  So I just have to make sure I'm on the right side.

  If it was a Priest, in one of the other Orders, say, he and Othorp and Fenris might end up having to go in and pry the fellow out, which could get very ugly. Then again, at least if it was a Priest, as a Special Inquisitor he wouldn't have the problems with bringing him to Justice that he would have had as a constable. A Priest could claim immunity from secular authority, but not from someone delegated by the Church.

  I'm the enforcement arm of the Church. I can throw anyone I need to into gaol. It wasn't the heady thought it might have been; he'd never cared for the power of the baton, only for its use as a tool to get bad people put where they couldn't hurt anyone again. It only meant that there was nowhere he could not go in the course of this investigation; he hoped that he wouldn't need to use that authority.

  The other complication was the one Ardis herself had briefly touched on. If his target was a Priest and a mage—or just a mage—well, he would know that Tal was coming, and who Tal was, long before Tal ever learned who he was, and there would be plenty of opportunity for "accidents" to occur. Magic opened up an entirely new set of problems, given that Tal really didn't know the full breadth of what a mage could and could not do.

  This is no time to get cold feet, he chided himself. You've never backed away from a case before; not when you had to go after mad drunks, murderers, and cutthroats. Any one of them could have disposed of you if you'd made the wrong move. She's already told you that you can go to her or any of the other Justiciar-Mages she thinks is discreet and get help, which includes finding out what a mage can do. And besides, the High Bishop is counting on you. She thinks you can handle this, or she wouldn't have given you the authority in the first place.

  Yes, and just what had convinced her to give him the authority? He'd like to think that he showed his own competence as clearly as she showed hers, but he doubted that was the case. How could he have looked like a professional, when he'd come in exhausted, travel-worn, in shabby clothing? He wouldn't have impressed himself, and he doubted that his outward appearance had impressed her.

  I probably looked like one of her Gypsy friends. Then again, maybe that wasn't so bad. If she had contacts among the Gypsies and Free Bards, she must be used to looking past shabby clothing and weary faces.

  It could have been his careful investigation thus far that had impressed her—and he'd really like to think that was the case. He had done good work, especially considering all the opposition he'd faced. He could have done more if he'd just had some cooperation, and she probably knew that as well.

  But the reason why she trusted him could also have been desperation. If you didn't have the faintest idea where to start with a problem, wouldn't you take the first person who came along and said, "I know what to do" and throw the whole thing at him? She'd had that letter on her desk when he came in; she'd probably just gotten it. She wasn't supposed to track criminals, she was supposed to sentence them, and considering that the Bardic Guild had its Guild Hall in Kingsford, she might not get much cooperation from the Kingsford authorities in trying to hunt down a killer of Free Bards. For that matter—maybe the killer was some high-ranking, crazed Master Bard! Hadn't he heard it said, more than once, that Bards were supposed to be mages?

  It might be that when he walked in her door with additional evidence, she'd been disposed to welcome him as God's answer to her difficulty.

  Maybe so. But she didn't get where she is now by being incompetent to handle her own problems.

  For that matter, why did he agree so readily to become her servant? Or the Church's servant, really, but it amounted to the same thing in this case. What in Heaven's name made him throw away everything he'd done to this moment to take this position? He'd never imagined himself serving the Church, not even as a secular adjunct. He never wanted to be a Guard, even one with other duties. He would have done so if that had been the only answer, but he hadn't even begun to explore his options in Kingsford. He certainly hadn't come into that office looking for a position!

  It might have been the personality of Ardis herself that had persuaded him. Tal knew that, in some respects, he was a follower, not a leader. He felt more comfortable with someone competent in authority over him, for all of his cherished independence; and what was more, he was honest enough to admit it, at least to himself.

  Competent—I'd say. She couldn't run this Abbey better if she was a general and it was a military barracks. Not that he'd been in a lot of Abbeys—but there were little signs when things weren't being run properly. Dirt in the corners, things needing repair, indifferent food, an aura of laziness or tension, a general sense of unhappiness.

  A lot like the headquarters back in Haldene, as a matter of fact.

  People weren't tense here, but they weren't slacking, either. Nobody was running around as if they were always forgetting to do things until the last minute, but no one dawdled. That novice, Kayne—she moved briskly, got things done, but there was no panic about it, no sense of being harried, and that went for every other person he'd seen. Even the rest of the Guards—though Othorp sighed over their condition, they were competent and they got their jobs done properly; their biggest problem was that they were set in their ways. They weren't lazy, just so used to routine that changes in it made them uneasy. When it came down to it, that would probably hold true for all the Priests as well, and why not? Routine was part of an Abbey. No, Ardis had this place well in hand. Maybe that was what he had responded to.

  The moment I got here, I felt it. He hadn't even ridden all the way into the courtyard before someone came to greet him and ask his business—one of the Guards, he realized now. A stablehand had come to take his mules and tie them up for him, a novice had led him to a little chamber just inside the front door, and brought Novice Kayne to him. Kayne had questioned him briefly, and everything had fallen into place, and all without a lot of running about and fuss and feathers.

  Not what I would have expected from a place being run by a woman. But just as he thought that, he knew it could just be prejudice on his part.

  I don't expect much out of women when it comes to running things. But—really, look at the women he'd had the most to do with! You didn't expect much of women, when all you saw them doing was falling apart in a crisis. The women he saw on a day-to-day basis mostly seemed to be looking for men to take care of them.

  And they weren't very bright. Or if they were, it had been starved or beaten out of them a long time ago. You could have some pity for the pathetic streetwalkers of the dockside district, you could have sympathy for all the hard work a tavern-wench had to do—but the women who took those jobs were not exactly the cream of the day's skimmings when it came to intelligence. So far as that went, most of the men he saw were not long on mind-power.

  Well, more than half the battle in getting rid of a prejudice was in recognizing that it was one. Ardis would have been as formidable as a man; the Abbey would have been just as well run; hence, there were other women who were her equals in intelligence, and he had just never run into any before. Which was not too surprising, when you considered his social
circle—or lack of one.

  That brought him to the High Bishop herself; she seemed very young to be wearing a miter, and even younger to be wearing the gold miter. Most of the Bishops he had seen had been gray haired—and male. He might have a prejudice, but so did the Church; females in any position of authority were rare birds, indeed.

  So how had Ardis, not only female, but relatively young, gotten where she was now? It couldn't have been an accident that she had been the highest ranking Priest in this Abbey when the previous High Bishop died—and even then, it wasn't the usual thing for a Priest to simply step into the vacancy. He vaguely recalled that High Bishops had to be elected by the Council of Bishops, which meant she had to pass muster before all of them—gray-haired men. She can't be any older than I am, or not much, he decided. Not that I'm all that young, but I'm not all that old, either.

  Well, she was related by blood to a lot of important people, including Grand Duke Arden. After almost single-handedly saving Kingsford from a fire which—so rumor had it—renegade Priests had a hand in setting—well, if Duke Arden suggested that his cousin ought to be made High Bishop, he rather suspected that there were plenty of people on the Council of Bishops who would take that as a Very Good Idea.

  The Great Fire might have had something to do with the decision. He hadn't been in Kingsford long, but stories about the Fire had spread all the way to the High King's capital. The Grand Duke was considered a hero—but Ardis was considered a saint for throwing herself and the Abbey into the problem of healing, housing, and feeding all of the refugees. If I have my politics right—making Ardis High Bishop might solve some problems here for the Church, in the case of those rogue Priests. The Bishops wouldn't want to give up their authority over their own renegades, but unless the Grand Duke had assurance that the caught Priests would get full and appropriate punishment, well . . . If he had been Duke Arden, he'd have been tempted to hang the bastards from the highest tree and let the Church complain all they liked about it. But by making Ardis High Bishop, everybody would be satisfied—the Duke had assurance that the criminals would get everything they deserved, and the punishment would all come from an instrument of the Church.