Four and Twenty Blackbirds

He stayed up long enough to write sick-notes for both Harden and himself—after all, theyhad eaten the same meal, and theywere both suffering similar symptoms.

Uh-hmm. We're both light-headed, dizzy, flushed, and in the morning we'll both have headaches and nausea. Well, Harden will. Brock will probably guess, but he won't let on to the Captain. Tal decided that if his hangover wasn't too bad in the morning, he would go ahead and appear for duty on his shift, but in case it wasn't, he was covered. He left a third note, telling Harden that he'd written him up for sick-time and not to go in on his shift, on the tiny table beside the bed, and sent one of the inn's errand boys around to the station with the other two notes. Harden, when he took a final look in on him, was blissfully, if noisily, asleep.

Tal nodded to himself with satisfaction, closed the door, and sought his own bed, after taking the precaution of drinking a great deal of water.

But when he finally lay in the quiet darkness, with only the faint sounds of creaking wood and faint footsteps around him, his mind wrestled with the problem of this latest case. It fit; it certainly did. There was no doubt of that.

But what did it all mean?

The whole thing is mad,he thought, tossing restlessly.The pattern is there, but no motive. Maybe that was why Rayburn was so stubborn about admitting that the cases were all tied together; there was no discernible motive to any of them. That was one of the first things drummed into a constable's head when they taught him about murder:find the motive, and you find the killer. But in this case, the killers were obvious; it was themotive that was missing.

Why? Why, why, why? Why these people? Why that particular kind of knife? What was there to gain? It has to be the same hand behind all of them, but what is the motive?

No the killerwasn't obvious, after all. The people who used the knife and spilled the blood couldn't be anything more than tools, hands to wield the blade, and nothing more. So, the law still held true.

Find the motive, and you find the killer.

So what was the motive? What could drive a man to use other people to kill like this? If there was a purpose, what was it? Where was the killer all this time?

Andwho was the killer?

Chapter Three

The next murder got the attention of the entire city; it was a nine-day wonder that kept the taverns a-buzz for long enough that even Tal got tired of it.

But this time, like some strange disease that strikes three homes in a row, then suddenly occurs halfway across the city, this crime happened so far outside of Tal's district he would never have heard of it, if the circumstances hadn't been so bizarre. Whoever, whatever was behind all this, 'he' had moved his area of operation from the waterfront side of the city to the tenement district farthest inland.

Once again, the poverty of the murderer and victim should have relegated the incident to a mere item in a few records. Tal heard about it over his morning meal in the common-room of the Gray Rose, and his first, cynical thought was that if the deaths themselves had not been so outrageous, the entire package of murder and suicide would have been put down as a sordid little sex-crime.

Even so, the details were so unbelievable that he was certain they were exaggerated. It was only when he reached the station that he learned that if anything, the public rumors were less horrific than the truth.

And that was enough to send cold chills over him.

When he heard the official report for himself, he had one of the oddest feelings he had ever experienced in his long career as a constable. Part of him was horrified, part sickened—and part of him knew a certain sense of self- righteous pleasure. He knew what it was, of course. Hadn't he beensaying something like this was going to happen? Well, now it had, and he had told them so. It was a base emotion, but—maybe it was justified.

As Tal read the report, though, he found it very difficult to keep his detachment. A jewel-crafter (too unskilled to be called a full Jeweler) named Pym, who made inexpensive copper, brass, and silver-plated trinkets, was the perpetrator. A Gypsy-wench called Gannet was the victim. And what had happened to the poor whore at the hands of the smith palled by comparison with what happened to the Gypsy.

Gannet showed up at Pym's workshop just before he closed, with a handful of trinkets she wanted him to purchase. That much was clear enough from a neighbor, who had probably been the last one to see either of them