Four and Twenty Blackbirds

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, theyhad 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 thecause 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.