Four and Twenty Blackbirds

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.

'I am sorry, High Bishop,' he said again for the fourth time. 'I am truly sorry. Itried 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.

'I doubt that this is the mage,' Ardis continued, picking up the sketch and examining it critically. It was not an ordinary face, although it was not one that would stand out in a crowd, either. 'And not just because no one here in the Abbey recognizes him. You distracted the man pretty severely, Visyr. If he'd been trying to control the murderer—or rather, the tool, as Tal calls them—he'd have lost that control at that point, and—' She frowned. 'I'm not sure what would have happened at that point, but the man certainly wouldn't have thrown himself into a vat of acid.'

'So you think this is an accomplice?' Visyr asked.

Both Ardis and Tal nodded. 'We discussed this before; the murderer might have an accomplice, but we always thought that it might be a Priest and a mage working together. From the way you described this fellow acting, though, he seems to be an accomplished thief, and that possibility hadn't occurred to us. It does explain a lot, though.'

'And we can speculate on who he is and why he's doing this when we've caught him.' Ardis narrowed her eyes. 'In a way, this is going to simplify our task. When we catch him, I very much doubt that he's going to care to protect the real killer.'

'Why wouldn't he claim to be a simple thief?' Visyr asked. 'And why wouldn't you believe him if he did?'

'It is unlikely that a real thief would try to steal a murder-weapon with fresh blood still on it,' Tal said rather sardonically. 'He might try that particular ploy with us, but it would take a great deal to convince me.'

Ardis sniffed. 'A little creative application of magic as the Justiciars practice it would certainly induce him to tell us the truth,' she said, just as sardonically. 'Magic isso useful in these cases—we're forbidden to torture to derive the truth, but the definition of 'torture' includes damage to the physical body, and what I intend to use on him wouldn't harm a single hair.'

'No, he'd only think he was being torn limb from limb,' Tal said sardonically.

'Oh no, nothing so simple as pain,' Ardis assured him. 'No, he'll have a foretaste of the Hell that awaits him. There are very few men that have been able to withstand that experience, and all of them are—were—quite mad.' She studied the sketch again. 'If you can imagine everything you most fear descending on you at once—and your terror multiplied far beyond anything you have ever felt before—that's a pale shadow of what he'll feel. And it won't stop until he tells us everything he knows. That is why, on the rare occasions that Justiciars use this form of interrogation, we always learn the truth.'

'Harsh. Not that he doesn't deserve it.' Tal's face could have been carved from stone. 'So far as I can see, he's as directly responsible for the murders as if he held the knife.'

There was a strangled, very soft moan from Visyr.

Oh, Ardis. You stupid woman, you. Look at what you and Tal have done to Visyr.