Four and Twenty Blackbirds

He was just about frozen all the way through, his feet numb, his fingers aching, as the sun hovered redly just above the western horizon.Rand is just going to have to wait a day, he told himself, wanting to shout aloud with frustration.Maybe two. Maybe more! After all, it's not as if I could somehow call Rufen out into Kingsford—it's not my fault that he hasn't been stupid enough to leave a perfectly comfortable, warm building and traipse across a bridge in a frigid wind.

He looked up to gauge the amount of time left until dark, and for a change looked back at the city instead of the Abbey.

That was the moment that he saw Tal Rufen being carried along in a knot of congestion towards the bridge, heading for the Abbey.

He didn't stop to think, but he didn't move quickly, either. He already knew what he had to do, but he had to make it look genuine.

I'm a discouraged fisherman after a day of catching nothing, and when I go home, I can look forward to no supper. I'm numb with cold, and I'm too wrapped up in my own troubles to pay attention to where I'm going.

He bent in a weary, stiff stoop to pick up his bait-bucket, draped his pole over his hunched shoulders, and began to make his way towards the Kingsford side of the bridge, nearing that tangled clot of pedestrians, small carts, and riders with every step. Rufen was afoot rather than on horseback, and there would never be a better time than this to make the substitution.

I can't feel my fingers; what if they won't work right? What if he realizes I've gotten into his document-pouch? What if—

As his mind ran over all the worst prognostications, his body was acting as he had told it to act. He limped towards Rufen with the gait and posture of a man twice his age. At just the right moment, he stumbled and fell against the constable.

And even as Rufen was apologizing, asking if he was all right, and handing him back his fishing rod, Orm was continuing to 'stumble' against him, accepting his support and using it to cover his real actions. Rufen had dropped his document-pouch; Orm picked it up, dropped it, picked it up again, and dropped it a second time, then allowing Rufen to pick it up himself. In the blink of an eye, as Orm picked the pouch up the first time, the pen was gone, lifted neatly out of the document-pouch. In another blink, as Orm picked it up the second time, Rand's pen was in the pouch with the rest of Tal Rufen's papers—and Rufen never knew his 'pocket' had been picked twice, once to extract the first pen and once to replace the pen.

Orm 'shyly' accepted Rufen's apologies, stumbled through a clumsy apology of his own, then hurried on to the city as Rufen headed back to the Abbey. Orm's job wasn't complete yet. He still had a baker's-dozen bodies to put out before daybreak.

Captain Fenris was an actual veteran of combat, a survivor of one of the feuds that had erupted among the nobility until the High King came back to his senses and put a stop to them. The Captain was no stranger to mass slaughter, but most of his constables were not ready to see bodies heaped up in a waist-high pile. The callousness of the scene unnerved them completely; even the hardiest of his constables was unable to remain in the vicinity of the cul-de-sac. Only Fenris waited there, as Tal and Ardis answered the early-morning summons. The rest of the constables guarded the scene from the safe distance of the entrances to the alleyway.

'It's not as bad as it could be,' Fenris said, quite calmly, as he led the two Church officials down the alley. 'No blood and the bodies are all frozen. If this had been high summer, it would have been bad.'

It was quite bad enough. Tal had learned after many hours spent in morgues how to detach himself from his surroundings, but the number of dead in itself was enough to stun. Fenris's warning about what they would find made it possible for him to face the pile of about a dozen bodies with exterior calm, at least.

The corpses were all fully clothed, in straight positions as if they had already been laid out for burial. That made the way they were neatly stacked all the more disturbing; just like a pile of logs, only the 'logs' had been living human beings before they were so callously piled. Three of them had been severely mutilated, with patterns carved into their flesh; patterns resembling, in a bizarre way, ornamentation. These three were on the top of the pile, their garments open to the waist, to best display their condition.

Of all the many scenes where crimes had occurred that Tal had seen over the years, this was the most surreal. The alley was deep in shadow, the sky overcast, the area so completely silent that the few sounds that passing traffic made never even got as far as this cul-de-sac. This could have been the Hell of the Lustful, the damned frozen in eternal immobility, denied even the comfort of their senses.

Inside, while part of him analyzed what was in front of him, the rest of him was trying to cope with the idea of someone capable of such a slaughter.And someone capable of making a display like this, afterwards. That's what's the most unnerving. He strove to take himself out of the scene, to view it as if it was a play on a stage, but it was difficult not to imagine himself as one of those victims.

'I sent a runner to tell Arden's people. What do you think?' Fenris asked as he edged his way around the pile.

'Have them laid out, would you?' Tal asked, instead of answering him. The bodies were all coated in ice, which was interesting, for it suggested that they had all been in the water at one time. Even their garments were