Four and Twenty Blackbirds bv-4 Read online

  The Mintak nodded wisely. "Hold a moment," he said in that deep voice all Mintaks shared regardless of gender. "Let me put the candle somewhere safer."

  He withdrew his head; there was a little shuffling, and he returned, without the book. "Nobody's using the guest-room," the Mintak offered. "Might as well put him there, and we won't have to move him down any stairs."

  "That might be best," Tal agreed. "He's a good lad, but I'd just as soon not run up too big a bill on his behalf."

  There was a single, very small room on this floor, a room not much bigger than a closet, that the tenants had—with the agreement of the proprietors of the inn—fixed up as a bedroom for their own guests. Sometimes it was used for visiting relatives, and sometimes for those who were in the same condition as Harden. Once or twice it had been used by quarreling couples, and on those occasions, the rest of the tenants were very careful not to ask any questions of either party. Those who were going to entertain visitors for more than a day were careful to schedule the guest-room well in advance, but at any other time it was open for spur-of-the-moment use.

  Harden would be less embarrassed to wake up in what was obviously a guest-room removed from Tal's lodging than he would be if he woke up in Tal's sitting room. And Tal's charity did not extend to giving up or sharing his own bed.

  Ferg followed Tal back to his rooms; Harden looked up at their entrance and squinted at the sight of the Mintak, who towered over Tal by a good several inches.

  "Din' I shee you downshtairs?" Harden slurred.

  "That was my herd-brother, good sir," Ferg replied calmly. "Do you think you can stand?"

  "Not by m'shelf," Harden acknowledged ruefully, after an abortive attempt that left him staggering and finally sitting right where he'd begun. " 'm drunk, butsha couldn' tell by m' dancin'."

  "All right then, old man," Tal said, slightly amused. "We're going to get you to a bed where you can sleep it off."

  Harden nodded wisely. "Good—idea," he said carefully. " 'f I can' stand, I sure can' walk, eh?"

  Tal and Ferg got on either side of Harden and assisted him carefully to his feet. Both of them knew better than to move abruptly with him; at the moment, he showed no signs of getting sick, but any too-sudden movements could change that, and neither of them felt much like cleaning the mess up.

  "Right you are," Ferg said cheerfully. "Now, we'll take your weight and keep you balanced, you just move one foot in front of the other, and we'll get you safely into a nice, warm bed." Obediently, Harden began to walk, swaying from side to side, supported by Ferg and Tal. "Good, you're doing fine," Ferg encouraged. "Right. Left. Right. Left. Now through the door—into the hall—"

  This was hardly the first drunk Ferg had assisted into a bed—the Gray Rose encouraged patrons who had a bit too much to spend the night if they weren't rowdy. It was good for all concerned—the inn got a paying customer overnight, and the customer found himself only a bit lighter in the pocket, rather than waking up in an alley or a worse place. The Mintaks, with their enormous strength, were usually the ones called upon to help the inebriated into their rooms, so Ferg had plenty of experience; either of the brawny brothers could have carried Harden on their own, but the companionability of Ferg and Tal doing this together would likely be important to Harden when he thought back upon it. In a much shorter time than Tal would have estimated, they had Harden down the hall, in the bed with his boots pulled off, and under several blankets, since the room was too tiny to have a fireplace of its own. Tal closed the door quietly and marked his name down on the schedule outside. There would be a linen charge and a cleaning charge, and since Harden was his guest, he would be the one responsible. Ferg nodded approvingly.

  "A friend of yours?" Ferg asked. "A fellow constable? And what brought him to this pass?"

  "A bad incident on his beat," Tal replied, grateful that Ferg knew enough of the constables to know what a "bad incident" was.

  "Ah. His first, no doubt. Well, better to purge himself in the presence of one with the experience to advise him—but I misdoubt he'll be fit for duty in the morning. . . ." The Mintak cocked his head in obvious enquiry, and Tal had to chuckle at his curiosity. Tal never ceased to be bemused by the blazing intellect and extensive vocabulary possessed by Mintaks. Other humans too often dismissed Mintaks as being as stupid as the beasts they resembled, but Tal knew better.

  "Oh, I plan to take care of that," Tal replied. "In my opinion as a senior constable, that boy has a touch of something. Food poisoning, maybe. I'll have a note run over to the station to that effect before I go to bed."

  Ferg chuckled. "Mendacious, but reasonable. A good Captain would have excused him from his duty for a day or two anyway. It is a pity there is nothing in the rules requiring that absence from duty. Well, good night—and I have a history I think you might enjoy, when you have the leisure for it."

  "And I have a Deliambren travel-book I think you'll like," he replied, and saluted the Mintak as he opened his own door.

  He stayed up long enough to write sick-notes for both Harden and himself—after all, theyhad eaten the same meal, and theywere both suffering similar symptoms.

  Uh-hmm. We're both light-headed, dizzy, flushed, and in the morning we'll both have headaches and nausea. Well, Harden will. Brock will probably guess, but he won't let on to the Captain. Tal decided that if his hangover wasn't too bad in the morning, he would go ahead and appear for duty on his shift, but in case it wasn't, he was covered. He left a third note, telling Harden that he'd written him up for sick-time and not to go in on his shift, on the tiny table beside the bed, and sent one of the inn's errand boys around to the station with the other two notes. Harden, when he took a final look in on him, was blissfully, if noisily, asleep.

  Tal nodded to himself with satisfaction, closed the door, and sought his own bed, after taking the precaution of drinking a great deal of water.

  But when he finally lay in the quiet darkness, with only the faint sounds of creaking wood and faint footsteps around him, his mind wrestled with the problem of this latest case. It fit; it certainly did. There was no doubt of that.

  But what did it all mean?

  The whole thing is mad,he thought, tossing restlessly.The pattern is there, but no motive. Maybe that was why Rayburn was so stubborn about admitting that the cases were all tied together; there was no discernible motive to any of them. That was one of the first things drummed into a constable's head when they taught him about murder:find the motive, and you find the killer. But in this case, the killers were obvious; it was themotive that was missing.

  Why? Why, why, why? Why these people? Why that particular kind of knife? What was there to gain? It has to be the same hand behind all of them, but what is the motive?

  No the killerwasn't obvious, after all. The people who used the knife and spilled the blood couldn't be anything more than tools, hands to wield the blade, and nothing more. So, the law still held true.

  Find the motive, and you find the killer.

  So what was the motive? What could drive a man to use other people to kill like this? If there was a purpose, what was it? Where was the killer all this time?

  Andwho was the killer?

  Chapter Three

  The next murder got the attention of the entire city; it was a nine-day wonder that kept the taverns a-buzz for long enough that even Tal got tired of it.

  But this time, like some strange disease that strikes three homes in a row, then suddenly occurs halfway across the city, this crime happened so far outside of Tal's district he would never have heard of it, if the circumstances hadn't been so bizarre. Whoever, whatever was behind all this, "he" had moved his area of operation from the waterfront side of the city to the tenement district farthest inland.

  Once again, the poverty of the murderer and victim should have relegated the incident to a mere item in a few records. Tal heard about it over his morning meal in the common-room of the Gray Rose, and his first, cynical thought was that if the deaths themselves h
ad not been so outrageous, the entire package of murder and suicide would have been put down as a sordid little sex-crime.

  Even so, the details were so unbelievable that he was certain they were exaggerated. It was only when he reached the station that he learned that if anything, the public rumors were less horrific than the truth.

  And that was enough to send cold chills over him.

  When he heard the official report for himself, he had one of the oddest feelings he had ever experienced in his long career as a constable. Part of him was horrified, part sickened—and part of him knew a certain sense of self-righteous pleasure. He knew what it was, of course. Hadn't he beensaying something like this was going to happen? Well, now it had, and he had told them so. It was a base emotion, but—maybe it was justified.

  As Tal read the report, though, he found it very difficult to keep his detachment. A jewel-crafter (too unskilled to be called a full Jeweler) named Pym, who made inexpensive copper, brass, and silver-plated trinkets, was the perpetrator. A Gypsy-wench called Gannet was the victim. And what had happened to the poor whore at the hands of the smith palled by comparison with what happened to the Gypsy.

  Gannet showed up at Pym's workshop just before he closed, with a handful of trinkets she wanted him to purchase. That much was clear enough from a neighbor, who had probably been the last one to see either of them alive. The neighbor had been loitering about the area in front of Pym's shop and her own; other neighbors said she had "an interest" in Pym, and what they probably meant was that she had her mind set on inveigling him into marrying her. The neighbor was not pleased to see a younger woman show up at the shop, and drew close enough to hear the ensuing conversation. The Gypsy insisted that someone had sent her to Pym specifically to sell her goods, and although the jeweler seldom made such purchases, tonight he waved the wench into his shop and shut and locked the door behind her. That had been so unlike Pym that the neighbor suspected something illegal (or so she told the constables) and set herself to watch Pym's door.

  Right, Tal snorted to himself, as he read that particular bit of nonsense. More like, she suspected Pym of a bit of funny-business with a skirt, and was nosy and jealous enough to wait around for details.

  But the Gypsy didn't come out, although there were lights and shadows moving about in the back of Pym's workshop all night long. And in the morning, the neighbor, whose imagination had been running at high speed ever since the girl showed up, knocked insistently on the door on the excuse that she had smelled something burning. Then she called the constables when Pym didn't appear to open his shop or answer the door.

  The constables, unable to rouse anyone, broke the door down. There was no one in the front of the shop, nor in the rooms above, but what met them when they opened the door to the workshop sent one of them running to empty his stomach in the gutter, and the other to rouse the entire station to come and cope with the scene.

  What was left of Pym lay on the floor in a posture of agony at the foot of his workbench. The girl lay spread-eagled on the top of his biggest workbench, also dead. Pym had used the entire contents of his workshop to make a strange display-piece out of the girl, beginning by clamping wrists and ankles down to the table, filling her mouth with wax, then setting to work with copper wire, semiprecious stones, and most of his tools. She was quite chastely covered in a garment of wire and gems, all of it laced through her muscles and skin, and riveted to her bones to anchor it in place. Her eyes were wired open, her head covered with a wig of fine wire riveted to her head. The pain must have been excruciating, and because the wounds were so small, she wouldn't even have lost consciousness because of blood-loss. The knife he had plunged into her breast must have come as a relief.

  Now the detachment Tal had been looking for finally came, and with it, that odd ability to analyze even the worst information. If she'd lived, she would have been crippled for life. The amount of nerve-damage he must have done would have been impossible to repair, let alone whatever he did to her brain by spiking that wig into her skull.

  But she was not to be alone in her suffering, for Pym finished his night by drinking every drop of acid and poisonous chemicals in his shop. It was the horrified judgment of the Healer-Priest brought in to decide on the cause of death that Pym probably lived about as long as his victim before he died.

  Once again, the girl had been murdered with a knife with a triangular blade, and once again, the knife was missing. Theofficial version was that Pym had stabbed her with one of his files, but none of the files had even a trace of blood on them—in fact, the files were the only tools Pymhadn't used to make his "display."

  Tal would have given five years of his life to see Pym's body, but unfortunately, the acid he had drunk had rendered it unfit even to be placed in the morgue. Or, as one of the constables with a mordant sense of humor said, "The only way to put him in the ground was to scoop him up in buckets and pour him in."

  But I wish I knew if he had the same bruises as the others I've seen. . . .

  The Gypsy-wench was buried the next day with all the pomp due a Guildmaster, a funeral that was paid for by donations. If she had any relatives, they were lost in the throng of spectators who came to gawk rather than mourn, searching for some sign of what had been done to her under the burial-gown of stiff snow-white silk that covered her from chin to toes. Tal didn't go, but Captain Rayburn made a prominent appearance.

  The last murder took place right under Tal's nose.

  He was making another attempt to find a decent set of shirts, because by now he needed more than one, and this time had gone much farther afield than his usual haunts. Lately, bargeloads of clothing came in at the southern end of the city on a semiregular basis, brought up out of places where a species of establishment called amanufactory was becoming common. There were manufactories in the High King's capital of Lyonarie, but only lately had anyone set them up along the Kanar River. Such establishments produced large quantities of simply-made garments in a limited range of sizes and colors, and shipped them off by water, since shipping them overland would have made them too expensive to compete with locally made garments. Tal was not certain that he would fit any of the sizes available, and he was more than a little dubious about the quality of such garments, but by now he was desperate enough to go look at them when word came that another shipment had arrived.

  It was a pleasant enough day, sunny with no more than the thinnest of cloud-cover, and Tal took his time about reaching his goal. The only thing on his mind was the book that he'd just started, and a vague wish that he'd brought it with him to read if there was going to be a queue.

  As he arrived, it was obvious that he had come to the right address by the crowd just outside the door, and he resigned himself to a wait. He was only one among a throng of customers at the dockside warehouse, and was met at the door by a man who looked him over with an appraising eye and sent him to stand in a particular queue, one of six altogether. The warehouse was only dimly illuminated by light coming in at some upper-story windows and by skylights in the roof. Enough of the people here felt compelled to chatter at the tops of their lungs that a confusing din echoed and reechoed through the warehouse, adding to the confusion, as Tal inched forward in his queue.

  Never having been here before, he was a little bewildered about why the fellow had directed him into this line, until he arrived at the head of the queue and found himself confronting four piles of neatly folded shirts, each pile being shirts of the same size but a different color. His choices were brown, gray, blue, and white, apparently, and the man at the door was evidently practiced in sorting people's sizes out by eye.

  Tal took two each of the brown and the gray, on the grounds that they would show dirt and wear less than the white, and fade less than the blue, and moved to one side quickly, for the man behind him seemed very impatient.

  He shook out one of the gray shirts and held it against himself, then examined it carefully. Aside from the fact that the stitching was mathematically even—which
was entirely possible even when sewn by a human rather than a machine, if the shirt was of high quality—he saw nothing wrong with it. It was just a trifle large, perhaps, but no few of his secondhand purchases were also oversized. There was no real "style" to it, and the pattern it had been made to was a very simple one, but a city constable hardly needed "style." Surprised and pleased, he took his prizes to the front of the warehouse where he paid about the same as he would have for four secondhand garments, even though there was no haggling permitted. The clerk wrapped his purchases into a packet with brown paper and string, and gave them back to him. Given that these should last longer than secondhand shirts which already had a great deal of wear on them, he had gotten quite a bargain, and left the warehouse with a feeling of minor euphoria.

  In fact, he had enough left over for a decent lunch, so he decided to treat himself. He seldom got to see the wharfs in daylight; by night, they were dirty, dangerous places to walk, but by day it was no worse than any other mercantile area. There were several warehouses here where individuals were buying things directly; this was something new to the city, and he wondered how the merchants were going to take it.