Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Orm's shoulders tensed. A slight difficulty. Now it comes! Now he tells me something outrageous. 'What would that be?' he asked.

'I'm going to want you to hide the bodies for a while,' Rand told him. 'Not forever! Not even for more than a few weeks. I want them found, but I don't want them found immediately—I want them found in a time and place of my choosing.'

Oho! There's a complicated plan going on here, and he has no intention of telling me what it is until it's too late for me to do anything about it. Should I be pleased or alarmed?

Pleased, he decided. At least the kills would be easier, safer— 'In certain cases, you might not want to use a tool,' he said cautiously. 'I could take care of the situation myself.'

'Oh?' If the Bird had possessed a brow, Rand would have arched it. 'I thought you didn't do that sort of thing.'

'I can make an exception in the case of expediency, if it's too difficult to find a tool,' Orm replied.And I'll be wearing silk gloves so you can't take me over, he added silently.I have no intention of following in the footsteps of the tools.

But Rand only gave a strange, gurgling sound that was his equivalent of a chuckle. 'That won't be necessary. I've picked out the women already. The first one is going to be another of that crowd that lives in the bookstore—in fact, I'd like to dispose of all three of the women living there now. We could take all of them in a single night if we planned it right. The women always come back to the shop long before the men do.'

'Oh, really?' Orm laughed. Ordinarily, he wouldn't have wanted the exposure that came from repeating a pattern, but if the bodies were going to be hidden, it wouldn't matter. 'Fine. Let me find a place to put them. I'll go looking now; when I have a place, I'll come back and tell you.'

He wanted to go out immediately, because the idea that immediately occurred to him was to use one of the boathouses or small warehouses out on the riverbank. Pleasure-boats were all in drydock at repair houses for the winter and wouldn't go into the boathouses until spring; if he could find a sufficiently dilapidated place, he might be able to rent it for a bit of next to nothing.

And if Rand doesn't care how and where the bodies are found, only when, we could dump them all into the river unseen from the boathouse, and let the current carry them away. If nothing else, the bodies could be left amid chunks of ice to preserve them as long as winter lasted. There was no reason for customs officials or constables to search boathouses in the winter; there was no smuggling in winter worth mentioning.

Failing a boathouse, a warehouse would certainly do, if it was small enough—but there would not be the option of a quick and 'invisible' means of disposal of the bodies.

Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad thing to take some initiative before he delivers orders.'I'll go out and find a—storage facility,' he said, standing up. 'Unless you have something else in mind?'

Rand was still in a fine mood, and perfectly ready to allow Orm to make his own choice, apparently. 'Good. Get something today, if you can. I'd like to begin immediately with this little project; we don't have any time to spare.'

We don't have any time to spare? Suddenly, it seems, we have a schedule to meet.

But Orm was not loathe to take the hint, and by nightfall, Orm the spice-merchant had acquired a strongly built but shabby little boathouse,and a small warehouse a mere block away from it, convenient to the districts in which Orm proposed to find most of their kills.

After all, it didn't hurt to bereally prepared.

Five kills in one night, and Rand was human again.

In fact, he'd been human after the first kill, a standard scenario for them. One girl was alone in the shop; the young man who'd taken their blade entered the bookshop, knifed the lone girl, dropped the knife beside the body, then threw himself into the river. That left the shop empty as they waited for the arrival of the other two girls. But it was Rand who took up the blade and ambushed the other two as they came in, first rendering them unconscious, then disposing of them at his leisure. He had not personally made a kill since the last woman he'd taken as the Black Bird, several months ago.

Orm watched with utter fascination as Rand made the second two kills; the fierce, cold pleasure the man took in the act, the surgical precision with which he first disabled them, then vivisected them.

Very enlightening. He hadn't known Rand was capable of that much concentration. But then again, Rand had a great deal to gain from these exercises, and the women themselves were limited in use and power unless he drew out their experience as long as he could.