Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Except— Maybe she went into the Church because the Church was the only place where she would be expected to exercise all of her intellect.

This was all sheer speculation. He didn't know enough about the Church, the lives of the nobles, or Ardis herself to make a really intelligent guess.

That was part of the trouble; he knew nothing about the High Bishop, except the little that she had told him herself. He had nothing to make judgments on, and that left him at a disadvantage.

I'm going to have to make it my business to learn everything I can about her,he decided. This clearly wasn't going to be the kind of situation he'd had back in Haldene, where he was just one constable among many. He was the only Special Inquisitor; he and she were going to be working closely together. It wasn't even the equivalent position to the other Abbey Guards.

In a sense, she's going to be both my superior and my partner. Or—maybe a little more like when I first came into the force, and I was attached to a senior constable. I had to learn as much about him to work smoothly with him as I was learning about being a constable.

It was a long time since he'd been in that kind of position; it was going to take some getting used to. Still— why not? The only trouble was that it meant he was going to be working on two investigations, not one. The murder chase, and the investigation of Ardis.

What the hell. I work better under pressure.

And with that thought, his exhaustion finally overcame his nerves, and he slept.

Chapter Six

Visyr hovered, wings pumping furiously to keep him in place, roughly a hundred wingspans above Archer Lane. Hovering was harder than any other kind of flying, but Visyr was used to it, and his chest- and wing-muscles were stronger and heavier than any of the Haspur who specialized in fancy flying and aerobatics. He kept taking deep breaths of the icy air to bring new fuel to those muscles as he made notes on his pressure-sensitive Deliambren dryboard with the tip of a needle-sharp talon, notes too small for mere human eyes to read. After each entry, he glanced down at the street below and concentrated on the next building on the north side of the street, measuring it by eye and noting its position relative to its neighbors. This was his special talent; any Haspur could hover above a street, and any Haspur could make a rough map that would show the placement of buildings and their sizes relative to one another, but very few could gauge the dimensions so precisely that a physical measurement would be off by no more than a fraction of an inch. It was a peculiarly Haspur talent, this ability to create accurate maps from memory—a useful talent in a race that flew—but Visyr was an artist among the talented.

When he had filled his dryboard—a flat, white board sensitive to pressure, used by the Deliambrens as a note-pad—he would fly back to his drafting room at the Ducal Palace and transform the notes into an actual city block on the new map he was making for the Grand Duke. When he was done, Duke Arden would have a map of Kingsford that showed not only every tiny lane and back-alley, he would have one that showed every structure that existed at the time the map was finished, including sheds and fences. His constables wouldn't have to guess where miscreants might be hiding to ambush the unwary, they would know where every blind-alley, dead-end street, and cul-de-sac lay. This was making Captain Fenris very happy; in fact, the Captain had a page checking on Visyr's maps and making copies of them as Visyr completed each section.He could hardly wait for the whole thing to be done. With the rebuilding of Kingsford proceeding rather chaotically in some sections, Fenris's people were at a distinct disadvantage when they had to pursue a footpad into an area that might have changed since the last time they were there.

This, however, wasnot why Visyr had come down out of the mountains. Although the Duke and his people certainly appreciated what the Haspur was doing, and although he was gaining a great deal of support for himself and other nonhumans with this work, this was not what he had intended to do. Eventually, or so Visyr hoped, he would be part of the great Deliambren mapping expedition; that was why he and his beloved, dynamic mate Syri had left their homeland in the first place. But humans were dreadfully short-sighted when it came to permitting nonhumans to doanything in their lands, and the Deliambrens didn't want to mount this project until they had iron-clad agreements of cooperation as well as permission from the rulers of all of the Twenty Kingdoms, agreements that no subsequent monarch could overrule.

Not that I blame them, Visyr mused, as he noted down the size of the warehouse below him, and the dimensions of the tiny scrap of yard behind it. Taking that ship out is going to be an effort worthy of an epic song, and if they ever have to stop it they may not be able to get it started again. The ship and many of the machines the Deliambrens intended to use were ancient; parts were difficult to duplicate and had to be made one at a time by hand, and the mechanisms themselves were often poorly understood. Intended to be manned by an assortment of races, controls were not always suited to the hands, hooves, or beaks of those who were to operate them. Visyr didn't envy those assigned to tend and use the things. The expedition itself was a massive effort on the part of not only the Deliambrens but of many other nonhuman races, and even of some humans as well. There would be hundreds of people tending and operating the ship and all of its mechanisms, and more working outside it.

His assignment with the ship would be simpler; basically, what he was doing now. He would be one of a few mapping-scouts, making an aerial survey of heavily inhabited areas where the ship couldn't go; other scouts would roam ahead to find a safe route for the behemoth that contained the bulk of the expedition. Once and for all, the Deliambrens hoped to surveyall of Alanda, or this continent, anyway, to locate mineral resources, underground watercourses, and ancient ruins, as well as mapping the surface accurately.

This wasn't altruistic, although the Deliambrens would provide copies of the general topographical maps to anyone who wanted them. Besides their mechanical wonders, the Deliambrens trafficked in information—in return