Four and Twenty Blackbirds

managing to do so when I won't see it.

That would be very difficult to do, unless—

Unless it is hunting at night.

Itwas black, and perfectly well camouflaged by darkness. And if the records were to be trusted, there had been plenty of killings at night, including at least one possible killing here in Kingsford, between the first one he'd witnessed and the second. That meant it had hunted by night before, which meant it could probably see just fine at night.

Which, unfortunately, I cannot. But I am not limited to my own unaided eyes, which is something that I doubt it has thought of.

Hecould fly at night, he just didn't like doing so, because unlike T'fyrr, his own night-vision was rather inferior by Haspur standards. Once night fell, all of his advantage of superior vision vanished; he couldn't even see as well as some humans he knew. That was why he always got back to the palace before dusk, and never went out at night if he could help it. It was a weakness he had never liked about himself, so when the opportunity had arisen for him to compensate for it, he had. He had something in his possession that he hadn't had occasion to use yet, something that would render the best of camouflage irrelevant at night.

He chuckled to himself as he thought of it. There hadn't been any need to use it in Duke Arden's service, because it wasn't at all suited for his mapping duties. No one here knew he had it. And he rather doubted that anyone in all of this Kingdom had ever evenseen this particular device.

He reached immediately for a bell-pull and summoned one of his little attendant pages. Talons were not particularly well suited to unpacking, but clever little human hands were.

At his direction, the boy who answered his summons dug into the stack of packing-boxes put away in a storage closet attached to his suite. The boxes were neither large nor heavy; the few that were beyond the boy's strength, Visyr was able to help with. In less than an hour, the page emerged from the back of the closet with an oddly-shaped, hard, shiny black carrying-case.

The page looked at it quizzically as he turned it in his hands. 'What is this?' he asked, looking up into Visyr's face. 'What is it made of? It's not leather, it's not pottery, it's not stone or fabric—what is it?'

Visyr didn't blame the boy for being puzzled; the material of the case resembled nothing so much as the shiny carapace of a beetle, and the case itself was not shaped like anything the boy would ever have seen in his life. 'I'll show you what it is,' he said to the youngster, taking the case from him and inserting a talon-tip into the lock- release. 'Or rather, I'll show you what's inside it. The outside is a Deliambren carry-case for delicate equipment; what I wanted is inside. But you have to promise that you won't laugh at me when I put it on. It looks very silly.'

'I won't,' the boy pledged, and watched with curiosity as Visyr took out his prize. Indeed, prize it was, for arguing with the Deliambrens for its design and manufacture had fallen upon Visyr himself, and it was with no small amount of pride that he knew these very same devices would be in use by Guardians and rescuers, thanks to him.

A pair of bulging lenses with horizontal lines, made of something much like glass but very dark, formed the front of the apparatus. The device itself had been formed to fit the peculiar head-shape of a Haspur, and the hard leathery helmetlike structure that held it in place had been added in place of the straps that Deliambrens used so that no feathers would be broken or mussed when he wore it. That 'helmet' was based on a very old and successful design, and the page recognized it immediately.

'It looks like a falcon's hood!' the boy exclaimed, and so it did, except that where the hood was 'eyeless,' this was not meant to restrict vision, but rather the opposite. With its special lenses in the front and the mechanism that made them work built in a strip across the top curve of the head, rather like one of those center-strip, crestlike hairstyles some Deliambrens wore, it almost looked fashionable, and certainly sleek.

That was so that Visyr would be able to fly with the thing properly balanced; in the Deliambren version, the mechanisms were all arranged around the front of the head, which would have made him beak-heavy. It would be very hard to fly that way.

'These are Deliambren heat-lenses,' Visyr explained to the boy. 'They let me see at night. If you'd like, I'll show you how.'

The boy needed no second invitation; Visyr lowered the 'hood' over his head and turned the device on, then turned the lights of the suite off one by one.

The page held the hood steady with both hands, as it was much too large for his head, and looked around curiously. 'Everything's green,' he said, dubiously, then exclaimed when he turned the lenses in Visyr's direction. 'Sir! You're glowing!'

'No, it's just that you only see what is warm,' Visyr told him. 'It is a different way of seeing. The warmer something is, the brighter it seems to be through the lenses. I am very warm, and it looks as if I am glowing. Come to the balcony and look down.'

The boy did so, picking his way unerringly across the pitch-dark room. He passed through the second room, came out on the balcony with Visyr, and spent some time exclaiming over what he saw through the lenses of the device. Even though it was broad daylight, the lenses worked extremely well, for things that were warm stood out