Four and Twenty Blackbirds Read online

  With that resolution firmly in mind, Orm paid for his food and left the eating-house. He would go ahead and scout the district that Rand wanted him to work, so that he could honestly say he'd been there. But if there was no good prospect—and by that, he meant a safe prospect—well, he'd just have to look elsewhere, wouldn't he?

  He passed a group of children playing in the snow and chanting rhymes; one of them caught his attention for a moment.

  "Four and twenty black birds?" Well Rand hasn't gotten four-and-twenty victims quite yet, but it's very nearly that, and they aren't exactly baked in a pie—but they aren't likely to sing anymore, either.

  Orm kept one ear attuned to the music of a hammered dulcimer as he strolled up to the door of his chosen shop; there wasn't much traffic on this side of the street. Most of the pedestrians were over across the way, listening to the street-musician who had set herself up next to a food-seller's stall. And there wasn't anyone who looked interested in the shop Orm was heading for. With the sign of a rusty ax out front, there was no doubt that the merchant within dealt in used weapons.

  By going just outside the district that Rand had specified, Orm had found a target that suited both of them. By sheer luck, a rather homely Free Bard wench named Curlew had a regular stand right across from this particular shop; either she hadn't heard the warnings, or was disregarding them. It really didn't matter; the fact that she was a Free Bard made her irresistible to Rand, and that was what made it possible for Orm to insist on a district that was a step lower than the one Rand had wanted to work.

  Ashdon, the merchant, saw Curlew at least once every day; she went to him to sell him the pins she accumulated in her collection hat from those who couldn't afford to give her even the smallest of copper coins. Ashdon was terribly touchy about status and normally would never lower himself to so much as take notice of a guttersnipe Free Bard except that she had something marketable to sell him. It was easy for him to clean and straighten pins, and when women came into this shop accompanying their lovers or husbands, they generally bought all the pins he had, assuming from their shiny condition that they were new. So he gave Curlew just enough attention to exchange a couple of coppers for her handful of pins every day, and otherwise ignored her.

  Orm strolled into Ashdon's shop, and before the balding, stringy fellow could break into his sales-speech, he laid a flannel bundle on the counter and opened it. Inside was a lot of a dozen mixed knives, including the all-important one. It had just enough ornamentation on it in the way of twisted gold wire on the hilt to make Ashdon's greed kick in.

  "Ten silver," Orm demanded. This was about six more than the collection was worth, if you left out the important knife. With it, the collection was easily worth nine. If he got seven, he could pretend to be pleased, and Ashdon would be gleefully certain that he'd gotten a bargain.

  Ashdon hawked and spit to the side. "For those?" He picked one up—the cheapest of the lot. "Look at this—" he demanded, holding the rusty blade up. "Look at the state of these things! If I can get them clean, they'll never sell! Five silver, take it or leave it."

  "Nine, or I walk out of here." Orm retorted. "I can take these anywhere and get nine."

  "So why aren't you somewhere else?" Ashdon replied with contempt. "You've already been elsewhere, and you got told what I just told you. Six, and I'm doing you a favor."

  "Eight, and I'm doing you one," Orm said, with spirit, and picked up the special blade—carefully. With luck, Ashdon wouldn't notice that he hadn't removed his gloves. "Look at this! That's real gold! I've had a touchstone to it!"

  "It's probably gold-washed brass, and you're probably a thief trying to sell me your gleanings. Seven. That's my last offer." The flat finality of his voice told Orm that it was time to close the bargain.

  Orm whined and moaned, but in the end, he pocketed the seven silver pieces and left the bundle, feeling quite cheerful. Rand's spell and his own greed virtually ensured that Ashdon would decide to put the dagger on his person or have it at hand rather than putting it away with the rest.

  That left the first stage over and done with. Orm slipped back after dark, at closing time, to see what Ashdon had done with the blade. He watched as Ashdon closed and double-locked his shop door, and walked off to his home nearby. As Orm had hoped, the weapons-dealer had improvised a sheath and had the dagger on his own belt, where it would stay until Rand was ready. Once he touched it with bare flesh, he wouldn't have been able to leave it anywhere.

  Orm walked off under the cover of the night, feeling well pleased. They would not strike tonight nor tomorrow, nor even the following day, despite Rand's impatience. They would wait for two whole days to eliminate the chance that anyone would remember Orm going into that shop with a load of weapons to sell. That left Orm free to scout another part of the city for the next target, while they waited for memories to fade.

  Two days later, Orm lingered over a hot meat pie at the stall of a food vendor near Curlew's stand. He would have to slip in and get the dagger quickly once the girl was dead, since this was going to be another daylight kill. He didn't like that. He would have much preferred a nighttime kill like Shensi, but there wasn't much choice in the matter; Curlew respected the warnings enough that she packed up and left just before sunset every night, and spent the hours of the night playing at the tavern where she slept. They would have no chance of taking her after dark, for she could not be persuaded to leave the company of others after nightfall for any amount of money.

  While he waited, he watched Ashdon putter about in his shop, making a concerted effort not to show his tension. In order for Rand to take the man over, Ashdon would have to put his hand right on the hilt of the dagger. Normally that happened several times in a day as Ashdon made certain he still had the weapon with him, but timing could be critical in this case. They wanted a lot of people in the street when the kill took place—the more people there were, the more confusion there would be.

  Rand was up on the roof above Orm's head, near a chimney. No one would pay any attention to him; he was only a bird on the roof. Granted, he was a man-sized bird, but no one would believe that; they'd sooner think that the chimney was unusually small, or that there was something wrong with their eyes.

  Finally, as Orm's meat pie cooled, the watched-for contact took place.

  Rand sensed the contact, and took over; now Orm's tension was for what was to come. Ashdon walked stiffly across the street and waited for a moment, until a break came in the crowd. Then he made a sudden lunge through the gap, and knifed the girl with one of those violent upward thrusts that Rand seemed so fond of, lifting her right off the ground for a moment on his closed fist. It seemed incredible that the scrawny little man had that much strength, but that was partly Rand's doing.

  The girl's mouth and eyes widened in shock and pain, but nothing came out of her but a grunt. As usual, the crowd didn't realize what had just happened at first; it was only when Ashdon shoved the body away and it flopped down into the street, with blood pouring out over the snow, that they woke to what he'd done.

  It was a particularly nasty butcher-job; the knife-thrust had practically disemboweled the girl. Orm sensed that Rand had just vented a great deal of frustration and anger in that single thrust of his blade; this was convenient for both of them, because the sight of the corpse had the effect of scattering most of the onlookers and sending the rest into useless hysterics.

  Now real chaos erupted, as people ran screaming away, afraid that they were going to be the next victims, fainted, or froze in place with terror. This time there were no would-be heroes trying to catch and hold Ashdon; the crowd was composed mostly of women, ordinary merchants or laborers, and youngsters, not of burly longshoremen or bargemen.

  Rand forced Ashdon into the peculiar, staggering run of his tools that looked so awkward and was actually so efficient. Orm felt sealed inside a strange little bubble of calm, while all about him, onlookers were screaming and running in every direction. Still, no one did anything b
ut try to escape, even though merchants, craftsmen, and their customers were coming out of the shops to see what had happened; no one tried to stop Ashdon, or even moved to block his escape. The ones in the street were all trying too hard to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the knife-wielding madman, and the ones coming out of the buildings didn't know what had happened yet.

  Ashdon sprinted past Orm, dropping the dagger, which was no longer needed for the spell by which he was being controlled. Now it was Orm's turn. Orm darted out into the street to pick it up—

  Then came the unexpected. Something dove down out of the sky, headed straight for him, like a feathered bolt of lightning.

  For one crazy moment, he thought it was Rand—but the flash of color, scarlet and blue, told him he was wrong. At the same time, he was already reacting; he had not been in this business for as along as he had without developing excellent reactions. When things happened, his body moved without his mind being involved.

  He ducked and rolled, snatching up the dagger at the same time, and continued to roll onto his feet as his pursuer shot over his head. He took advantage of the fact that his attacker had to get height for another dive, and dashed into a narrow alley, too narrow for the creature to fly or even land in. His heart was in his throat; what in Heaven's name was after him?

  He looked back briefly over his shoulder and saw it hovering at the alley entrance. The winged thing was a bird-man, and there was only one bird-man in Kingsford; it could only be Visyr, the bird-man who worked for the Duke, who had nearly caught another of Rand's tools during a kill.

  But how had he known to go after the dagger rather than the tool?

  No matter; he'd worry about that later. Now he had to get away, as quickly as possible!

  The alley was protected from above by overhanging eaves, as Orm very well knew from his study of the area and of Visyr's own maps. The bird-man couldn't track him from above, or follow him into the alley without landing and coming in on foot, losing his advantage. Evidently he came to that conclusion himself, and disappeared for a moment.

  But Orm had already gone to ground in a shallow doorway; from the bird-man's vantage at the head of the alley it should look as if he vanished into the alley and got away. And Orm doubted that a bird would care to penetrate into a place barely large enough to allow his folded wings to pass; cut off from the sky as it was, this alley was a claustrophobe's worst nightmare.

  With a thunder of wings, the bird-man slammed into the snow at the entrance and peered into the alley. His eyes could not possibly adjust to the darkness in here well enough to make Orm out; Orm could see him as he peered carefully around the edge of the doorway, but he couldn't possibly see Orm.

  Could he?

  Orm waited with his heart pounding. Could the bird-man hear that? If he did, would he know that it was his intended quarry?

  For a moment that stretched into eternity, Orm waited, but the bird-man lost patience before Orm did. With a scream of frustration, the bird-man turned and launched himself back into the air, on the trail of the controlled killer. He would be too late, of course. Ashdon was long dead by now; Rand had certainly forced him into an enormous vat of acid used to clean and etch metal.

  Orm waited just long enough to be certain that the bird-man was gone, then cleaned the dagger in the snow, and slipped down the alley. He followed it for several blocks, crossing streets with care in case the bird-man was watching for him from above.

  From there, he threaded his way through back streets, stopping once to buy a coat of faded blue and exchange it for his brown one, stopping again to get a cap and pull it down over his forehead. By hunching himself up inside the oversized coat, he managed to look much smaller than he actually was. From above, there was no way to tell he was the same man that Visyr had seen taking the dagger—he hoped. Finally, when he was absolutely certain that there was no one watching, either on the ground or in the air, he washed the dagger in the water from a pump in someone's backyard.

  Only then did he head homewards, shaking inside with reaction at his narrow escape.

  Something was going to have to be done, if the bird-man had gotten involved. Orm could not spend his time watching for attacks from above as well as trying to snatch the daggers!

  He stopped once to buy a new meat-pie to replace the one he'd dropped, and got himself a particularly strong beer to wash it down with. As he ate, he listened to the gossip around him for word of the latest kill.

  There wasn't much; people weren't talking about it in this neighborhood yet. That was encouraging at least, since it indicated that people still weren't paying a lot of attention to the kills of street-folk like Curlew. Ducal edict or not, people simply didn't think such murders warranted much attention.

  Good. Excellent. Let's hope we can keep it that way. Rand should be content for a while; he had a female Free Bard in a daylight kill and that should keep him human for a good while.

  Orm hoped that this would be enough to make him very, very content because somehow he was going to have to persuade Rand to accept lesser creatures and work at night for a while. If they did that, there was always the possibility that the constables would think that the kills were over, or that the cause was a disease or a poison that had run its course in the population. With luck, no one would look any further than that for a cause. Above all, they had to get the bird-man looking elsewhere; Orm still didn't know why he'd gone after the person with the dagger and not the man who'd done the kill, and he didn't like it. What if someone among the constables had figured out that the cause of the kills was the dagger? That could be very bad. If word began to spread among the people of Kingsford that these peculiar daggers were dangerous, anyone trying to pass one would be in serious trouble. And Rand was going to insist on that one shape; Orm just knew it. It was part of Rand's obsession and nothing was going to make him give it up.

  Orm sighed, pulled his hat farther down on his head, and trudged homewards in a dispirited slouch. This was all getting very difficult, and very dangerous. It was more than time to start exploring some options.

  Ardis was torn by feelings of mingled grief and elation, a mix that made her so physically sick she doubted she'd be eating anything for a while. The Priest in her grieved for the dead, mourned over the useless, senseless act of murder that had ended the lives of two more innocents, but the side of her that was a Justiciar was overjoyed by the break in the situation. At long last they had a face to go with the knife.

  Patrolling in the air as Tal had asked him to, the bird-man Visyr had witnessed the murder of a Free Bard called Curlew. As he had the first time, he reacted instantly, and with speed that no human could have matched. Even though he was a quarter mile away at the time, he was literally at the scene in an eyeblink. But this time he had not followed the apparent murderer as the culprit ran off; this time, under Tal's orders, he had kept his eye on the knife, and dove for it to try and retrieve it.

  Then had come the moment when the break occurred. Only the Haspur's superior peripheral vision had enabled him to catch what happened next. As the murderer tossed the knife away, Visyr had seen a man drop a meat-pie he'd been holding and sprint across the street, running towards the murderer and the knife. It was obvious when the murderer ran off that this man intended to snatch up the knife and try to carry it off. Visyr had gotten an excellent look at the man's face as he turned his dive into an attack, and barely missed catching him. He'd pursued the man, but the culprit had gotten into a narrow, covered alley and Visyr had not been able to follow him in there. Once he'd gotten into that protective cover, Visyr had lost him.

  Ardis felt very sorry for the Haspur. Visyr sat—or rather, was in a position between sitting, mantled and perched—on a stool across from her now, drooping; frustration and depression shaded every word he spoke. He felt terrible guilt over his inability to force himself to enter the alley, despite the fact that it was a place where he would have been helpless against anyone who attacked him.

&nb
sp; "I am sorry, High Bishop," he said again for the fourth time. "I am truly sorry. I tried to follow him, but the alley, it was so small, like a rat-hole—"

  "Visyr, you're a Haspur, your kind get claustrophobia even in small rooms, outside your homes!" she said patiently, as she had said before. "It would have been like asking a man who couldn't swim to pursue someone who went underwater. I know that, and I do believe you, I promise you. No one blames you for anything; on the contrary, you did very, very well."

  Visyr shook his head, still brooding over his failure. "I know where that alley goes, and I tried to find him where it crossed into the open, but somehow I missed him. Either he stayed in it longer than I thought he would, or he escaped out of one of the buildings. I should have—I ought to have—" He stopped, and sighed. "I don't know what I should have done. I only know that it should have been something other than what I did."

  It was Tal's turn to bolster Visyr's sagging self-esteem, and he did so. "You did just fine, Visyr," he said emphatically. "If you hadn't flown straight back to the palace and hunted down Master Rudi, we wouldn't have this." He tapped the sketch on Ardis's desk, a copy of the one Visyr had carried post-haste to the Abbey. The Haspur had really made some incredibly creative and intelligent moves; when he realized that the quarry had escaped, he flew at top speed to the Ducal Palace and sent pages scurrying in every direction to bring him Duke Arden's best portrait-artist. Within an hour, Master Rudi had produced a pencil sketch that Visyr approved, and the Haspur then repeated his speeding flight, this time heading for the Abbey. With the best of the Abbey artists working on it, they now had a half dozen of the sketches to give to the constables patrolling the areas where street-entertainers performed.