Four and Twenty Blackbirds bv-4 Read online

  Intelligence, acute observation, courage, wit, and persistence, and the ability to think for herself rather than parroting the opinions of her superior—those were qualities all too often lacking in novices, and qualities that Ardis appreciated. Knowing the young woman was wasted in her position, she had snatched Kayne up for her own staff before Father Leod knew what was happening.

  "I know you could give me a summary, and a good one too, but you know why I won't let you," Ardis replied, putting her head back against the padded leather of her chair, her eyes still closed. "I told you why a week ago when you made the same offer—which is appreciated, by the way, even if I don't accept it."

  "Because a summary won't give you the sense of things they aren't putting down," Kayne repeated, with a little well-bred irritation of her own. "That sounds rather too much like mind-reading, and I can't see where it's all that important in personal correspondence." Her irritation showed a little more. "It also sounds, frankly, as if you simply didn't want me to see the letter, and if that's the real reason, I wish you'd justtell me instead of making something up."

  Ardis laughed at that, and opened her eyes. Kayne was very young to be a novice, but her clever tongue, acidic wit, sharp features and sharper temper were unlikely to win her many friends, much less suitors, so perhaps that was why she never attracted a marriage proposal. Ardis appreciated her sharp tongue, but she was going to have to teach Kayne how to curb it. Kayne was really too intelligent to ever remain a mere secretary, but if it hadn't been for Ardis, she probably would have been kept in a subordinate position all her life, and shewould remain subordinate if she made too many enemies to advance.

  She might have done well enough in secular society, but she had told Ardis in her initial interview that there really hadn't had any choice but to go into the Church. She was too poor to become a merchant, and there were not too many Masters in the more interesting Guilds and Crafts who would take on an Apprentice without the Apprenticing Fee.

  Not much like myself at her age—but I think she's going to go far, if the Church will let her. And it will, if I have any say in the matter and she can learn when it is better to keep your observations behind your teeth.

  "It's not mind-reading, and it's not intuition either," Ardis told her. "It's all based on patterns that I have observed after many years of dealing with these same people. I know what they say, how they say it, and how they conceal things they don't want me to know by the way they choose their words. It's knowledge you can't describe briefly to someone else, but it's knowledge all the same. And it's all the more important in personal correspondence, when the people who are writing to me are the movers and shakers of their areas—like my cousin Talaysen."

  Kayne's brow wrinkled as she took that in. "I don't suppose you could give me an example, could you?" she asked.

  "As a matter of fact, I can, from this letter." Ardis tapped the sheet of thick, cream-colored vellum on the desk, just above the seal of Free Bard Master Talaysen, currently the advisor to the King of Birnam. "My cousin mentions that his King has had three visitors from Rayden—fromour part of the kingdom, in fact—but goes into detail on only two of them. He knows all three of them from his life at Court, before he gave up his position as a Master of the Bardic Guild, although it seems that none of them recognized him as he is now. I know from things we have written and spoken about in the past that he believes that the third man, who appears to be an ordinary enough fop, is actually playing a much deeper game involving both secular politics and the Church; he's warned me about this fellow before. I also know from other sources that this fellow has said things aboutme in the past that are less than complimentary. My cousin doesn't like to worry me, and if he believes there is something going on that threatens me, he will take whatever steps he can to thwart it himself without involving me. Hence, this third visitor has said or done something that makes Talaysen think he is gathering information for possible use against me, and Talaysen is trying to spike his wheels—probably by feeding him misinformation." She raised an eyebrow at her crestfallen secretary. "Now, assume you've read this letter. Would you have made those deductions from it?"

  "No," Kayne replied, properly humbled. "I probably wouldn't even have mentioned the visitors at all, thinking they came under the heading of social chit-chat."

  "Nothingcomes under the heading of social chit-chat when people have managed to make a High Bishop out of you," Ardis corrected sourly. "May God help me." That last came out with the fervor of the prayer it actually was. Ardis would have been much happier if no one had ever come up with that particular notion.

  "I thought you wanted to become a High Bishop," Kayne said in surprise. "How could you not?"

  "What, how could I not want to become a bigger target for slander, libel, and intrigue than I already was?" she responded tartly. "If I were only the Abbess and the Chief Justiciar, I would have been much safer; as a woman, they would always underestimate me so long as I didn't intrigue for a high position. If I had the power, but not the title, I would not be nearly the threat to other power-holders inside and outside the Church as I am since I wear the miter. I am not so fond of fancy hats that I was pleased to put up with all that just so I could wear one."

  Kayne snickered at Ardis's designation of the High Bishop's miter as a "fancy hat." Ardis leaned over her desk and fixed her young secretary with a stern look.

  "If you are going to prosper in the Church, you'd better keep in mind that a woman is always in a more precarious position than a man," she said carefully. "It is much better to hold power quietly, without trappings, than it is to make a show of it. The men will resent you a great deal less, listen to you a great deal more, and might even come to respect you in time."

  Kayne nodded, slowly. "So that's why—" She spread her hands, indicating the office.

  "Correct. The appearance of austerity and modesty, the reality of a certain level of comfort." Ardis smiled. "You should have seen this office when my predecessor sat here. It looked like a cross between a Cathedral and a throne room. I cleared most of that out, sold the expensive trash to pay for this, and donated the rest to one of the orphanages Arden established after the Fire." She chuckled reminiscently. "Somewhere in Kingsford there are orphans bouncing on his overstuffed, plush-covered sofa and grinding muddy little feet into his appalling carpet, and I do hope he finds out about it."

  Kayne snickered again. "Well, is there anything you'd like to dictate to me before I retire to my office and catch up on the last of the work from yesterday?"

  Ardis considered the stack of correspondence before her. "How are things coming across the river?"

  By "across the river," Ardis meant in the city of Kingsford, which had been half burned down by a disastrous fire a little more than two years ago. The fire itself was not natural; it had been set by conspirators hoping to murder Duke Arden who had joined forces (or so Ardis suspected) with members of Ardis's own Order in an attempt to usurp control of the Cloister and Cathedral of the Justiciars, and then take full control of all of the Church holdings in Kingsford and put the lot in the hands of a group of closed-minded fanatics.

  Ardis only suspected that the two groups had been in league with each other, even though there was nothing but rumor to link them—the fires had certainly been started magically, in the rafters of the Duke's Theater while the Duke was attending a performance. So far as Ardis knew, the only humans in Kingsford and the surrounding area who could use magic were Priests of the Order of Justiciars. There had been any number of the fanatical faction preaching and stirring up trouble before the Fire, and there were a few witnesses among the actors and musicians who had seen a figure in the robes of a Priest loitering about the theater in a suspicious manner just before the fire. And the uprising within the Cloister walls had occurred so simultaneously with the fires in the theater that even the most skeptical were convinced that it could not be a coincidence. But a hot, high wind combined with the driest summer on record had contributed to spreading
the fire out of control, while the uprising within the Cloister walls had ensured that there were no mages to spare to fight those fires, and when it was all over, the greater part of Kingsford lay in ruins. It was only the personal effort of Arden himself that kept the disaster from being worse than it was. The Duke had led the battle against the fire himself, working side by side with the lowest citizens of the city. His actions had earned him the undying loyalty of all of Kingsford, and the title "Good Duke Arden."

  Two years later, the city was still partly in ruins, and Ardis felt very sorry for the Grand Duke. He had beggared himself to help pay for the rebuilding, with the intentions of creating an ideal city out of the ashes, a city with no slums, a city that was planned from the beginning, a city where residential districts would not sit cheek-by-jowl with tanneries, and sewers would not dump their noisome contents upstream from places where people drew out their water.

  But the best-laid plans of men and Grand Dukes were subject to the whims of fate, and fate had decreed otherwise. Unwilling or unable to wait on the Duke's plans to rebuild their homes and businesses, those who had money of their own proceeded to put those homes and businesses wherever they pleased—usually building on what was left of their old property.

  The result was that half of the rebuilt city was laid out along Duke Arden's plans, and the other half was laid out the same way it had been—in as haphazard a fashion as could be expected. The only real change was that he had been able to decree that streets would be laid out on a grid, so there were no more dead ends and cul-de-sacs, or meandering alleys that went nowhere.

  "Arden finally got the fireboats he ordered," Kayne reported. "They arrived today. Whether they work or not—" She shrugged.

  "If they don't, I'll make a point of assigning someone to get those pumps working by magic, providing Arden doesn't browbeat a Deliambren to come up with something better," Ardis replied. She still suffered from twitches of mingled guilt and anger when she thought of how easy it would have been for Church mages to halt the fire before it had spread more than a block or two. Not thatshe was responsible for the fact that they hadn't, but still—

  I am a mage and a Justiciar, and what happened to the people of Kingsford was a gross miscarriage of Justice.

  "He probably will; he already has them working on a system to pump water to every part of the city," Kayne observed. "What's a little thing like fixing the pumps on a fireboat, compared to that?"

  Ardis nodded absently. If the idiots that started those fires didn't perish in the conflagration, they had better be so far from Kingsford that humans are an oddity. Because if I ever get hold of them, they'll pray to be handed over to the Duke for punishment. He'll only hang them. She had already taken care of those she had been able to catch. Recalling a magic transformation discovered and abused by another renegade Priest-Mage, she had put his discovery to better use. The miscreants were serving out life sentences, toiling under baskets of rubble and ashes, and wearing the forms of donkeys. Titularly the property of the Abbey, they were under long-term loan to the city. And when all the rubble was cleared away, they would be hitched to the carts that carried away the dead. They were well cared for, housed in their own stable in the city, where a special Priest of one of the Service Orders—a close, personal friend of both Ardis and the Duke—who knew what they were had been assigned to their physical and spiritual needs. They were awakened every morning at dawn with prayer, put to bed in their stalls with prayer, and prayed over while they worked. They would have ample opportunity for repentance, redemption, and contemplation.

  They were also performing the hardest physical labor they ever had in their lives, seven days a week, from dawn to dusk, in pouring rain, burning sun, or blinding blizzard. They would never be human again, for Ardis had locked the spell on them herself. No one knew of their fate except Ardis, the Grand Duke, and the young Priest assigned to their care, who was far more concerned with the state of their souls than the discomfort of their bodies. Even Duke Arden agreed that the punishment was sufficient. Ardis had similar fates planned for any more miscreants that turned up.

  "As for the rest, Arden has given up on the Carpenters, and now he's trying with the Weavers and Dyers." Kayne looked thoughtful. "I think he'll have a bit more luck with them; they need water for their work more than the Carpenters do."

  Arden was trying to persuade those who had built according to their own plans to tear down what they had put up, and rebuild according to his. He was having mixed success, and often it depended on the season and whether or not he had alternatives available while those who were displaced waited for the new construction to be completed. People who might not mind spending a month or two in a well-appointed tent in the summer, would get decidedly testy about the idea in midwinter, and those whose businesses required that their materials stay dry were not likely to give up a roof for the sky.

  Ardis chuckled. "Poor Arden! He'll never give up, not as long as there is a single crooked street in Kingsford."

  "Perhaps. Or perhaps he will find other things to occupy him," Kayne observed. "He can't stay out of politics forever, as you have pointed out in the past. Speaking of politics, have you anything you'd like me to take care of for you, since you haven't got anything to dictate to me?"

  "Here—" Ardis handed the young woman a small packet of invitations. "Accept the invitation to Duke Arden's musical entertainment, give permission for the Novice's Choir to sing at the opening of the new Wool Guild Hall with the stipulation that no more than half the repertory be hymns mentioning sheep, shepherds, spinners, weavers, or wool, and decline everything else with my sincere regrets." She shook her head. "I never got this many invitations to dinners and parties when I was a maiden looking for a husband; I can't conceive of why I'm getting them now."

  Kayne accepted the packet with a shrug. "I haven't the background to tell you," she said with callous frankness. "Maybe they hope God will judge their entertaining with charity when they die if you attend."

  Ardis stretched, the heavy sleeves of her scarlet robe falling down around her elbows. "That's as good a theory as any," she replied. "Now, I'll just write a brief letter to my cousin, and you can pick it off my desk and address it in the morning."

  Taking that properly as her dismissal, Kayne rose and made the ritual bows: a brief nod of respect to Ardis, and a deeper genuflection to the small altar in the corner of the room. When she was gone, Ardis picked up her pen and took a clean sheet of paper. It never took long to write to Talaysen; words flowed as easily as if she was talking to him rather than writing. No matter how long it had been since they last saw each other, or how many leagues lay between them, they were still closer than many siblings.

  When she had finished, she sanded the letter to dry the ink, then set it aside in the tray for Kayne to take in the morning. There were more records to deal with, for record-keeping had not been a priority when there were people who were going to die of injuries or exposure if something wasn't done about their needs right that moment.

  Ardis had never minded record-keeping or paperwork, unlike some of her colleagues. These days it gave her some time to herself, time when she was not the High Bishop. Even now, it still gave her a twinge when she realized that the title and all that went with it were hers. It was an honor and a responsibility she had not expected to attain before her hair was totally white, if ever.

  She had known all along that the position would be as much trouble as honor, and she was resigned to dealing with the former. These records were a part of that; extremely sensitive information that she did not want in the hands even of her loyal secretary. These were the Abbey records that dealt with crime and punishment.

  Priests who "failed the Faith"—the euphemism for criminals—were seldom turned over to secular authorities, and were never punished publicly. Every Abbey had a section of cells with locks on the outside of the doors—effectively a gaol—and some even referred to that section by that name. Others, like the Justiciars' Kingsford Abbey,
were more discreet, and called the section by the term "repentance retreat." Those who stole, committed fraud, or violated Church canon law ended up there until they truly, sincerely repented. Sometimes, however, there were cases that were more serious and required a solution that went beyond simple incarceration. There had been four such cases locked in the cells at the time of the rebellion and Fire, three of whom had been mages, and like the others who had been down there, they had been released by the rebels. One had died in a mage-battle. The one who was not a mage had fled, though not to the rebels, but to Ardis's people and had earned a certain amount of forgiveness by warning them and fighting at their side. Two had vanished completely.

  Since they had last been seen fleeing for the city, it was presumed that they were dead, but Ardis didn't much care for making such presumptions. Especially not where these two were concerned, since both of them, like her little donkeys, had been locked into forms that were not human. One of them was the renegade Priest-Mage named Revaner, who had discovered transformative magic in the first place, and his transformation was public knowledge, since it had occurred very dramatically at the Midsummer Faire.

  It was a tale that had been made into more than one song. Revaner had lusted after a young Free Bard and Gypsy named Robin; she had spurned his advances, and in revenge, he had conspired with a Guild Bard named Betris to catch and confine her. When she was caught, Revaner transformed her into a huge, brightly-colored bird that he displayed as a curiosity and forced to sing for his guests at the Faire. Master Talaysen, his apprentice Rune, and another Free Bard called Heron had discovered what had happened to Robin and appealed to the Justiciars. Ardis had directed them to bring the bird before her; they had stolen the captive and after a long and dramatic chase through the grounds of the Faire, had brought not only the transformed Bard, but had brought Revaner who had been pursuing them. The Priest made the mistake of underestimating Ardis's power and had claimed the bird as his property; Ardis and the other two Justiciar-Mages with her had demonstrated by breaking his spells that the bird was the Gypsy after all.