Four and Twenty Blackbirds

If the Priestwasn't mad—if he was doing this with Church sanction—

A chill ran down his spine. Don't think that. Don't write it down.

It could be some terrible experiment in magic gone wrong. And that would be another reason for Rayburn's superiors to want it nicely sunk in the bottom of the harbor. No one would want people to know that the Church permitted anyone to dabble in the kind of magic that would drive a man to murder a relatively innocent woman and then kill himself.

Something else occurred to him and he wrote that down under the Murders topic. What if this isn't local? What if we aren't the only city to have this going on?

Well, if it wasn't local, itprobably had nothing to do with the Church. Not that the Churchcouldn't be involved, but mages couldn't work magic at great distance, and something that caused murders in more than one city couldn't be hidden for long if Church officials knew about it. Things like that leaked out, novices learned things they weren't supposed to know, spreading rumor and truth more effectively than if the Church was spreading the tales deliberately.

There is a bare possibility that this is a mad Priest, that the Church knows about it, and they keep moving him from town to town every time he starts doing things like this, trying to cover up the murders and hoping that at some point he'll just stop, or God will stop him for them.

Well, there was one way of telling if it was local or not.

He put his two lists aside and took a fresh sheet of paper, addressing it toThe keeper of the mortality lists, Highwaithe, which was the nearest town upriver.

He sighed, and flexed his hand to ease the cramps in it, dipped the quill in the inkwell, then set the pen carefully to the paper again.

Good Sir, he began, I am collecting mortality statistics in relation to the weather, and am particularly interested in the occurrence of murder-suicides over the past five years. . . .

There. Let Rayburn try to stop him now.

The only thing that is going to stop me now, he thought wryly, is my aching hand, and the number of letters I'm willing to write.

About the time he began getting replies to his letters, the rash of murders ended, as inexplicably as they had begun.

There were no more street-musicians cut down with vanishing knives. The only murders occurring now were the sordid and completely uninteresting kind.

But Tal was not relieved—rather, he was alarmed.

Every one of the clerks to whom he had written had responded, and most had been delighted thatsomeone was showing interest in their dreary statistics. He'd gotten everything he asked, and more—one enterprising fellow had even sent him a breakdown of his violent-crime statistics by moon- phase.

Tal had set up one corner of his sitting-room with a map pinned to the wall and his pile of return letters beneath it. He sorted out the letters that showed no real increase in the number of murder-suicides, then stuck a pin into the map for every occurrence in those towns and cities where the numberhad gone up. The result was a crooked line that began—at least as far as he could tell—at a small town called Burdon Heath. At first, the grisly trail followed the route of the Newgate Trade Road, then it left the road where it crossed the river and followed that instead. There was no doubt in Tal's mind, now that it was laid out in front of him. Whatever this was, it was following the course of trade. The pattern was quite clear.

And he knew that it was not over, although the deadly shadow was no longer stalking the streets ofhis city. The mind that had conceived of these murders in the first place was not going to simply stop needing to commit them.

He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. His first partner had been a constable who had solved the case of a madman who'd gone about mutilating whores. Tal remembered what the man had told him.

'A man like this has a need in him, lad,' the old fellow had said. 'It's a craving, like drugs or strong liquor. He needs what he gets from doing things like this, and what he gets is power. The ability to control everything that happens to these girls, the moment they get into his hands—what they feel, how much they feel, and the most important control of all, when and how they die. That's what he gets. When you've got to find the man who does things like this, that's what you look for—that's what'll tell you what he's made of, not how he does it. Look for what he gets.'