Four and Twenty Blackbirds

unless it was being performed on your behalf, and I don't think you qualify for that degree of urgency. In fact, no one who is the beneficiary of that ceremony is likely to hate the Church; they're more likely to want to spend their lives scrubbing Chapel floors to repay us.'

'Huh.' He was surprised at her candor. He hadn't expected anyone in the Church to admit that they performed pagan-style sacrifices.

'We also excommunicate heretics—' Kayne screwed up her face for a moment. 'We don't do that often. You have to be doing more than just making a Priest angry or disagreeing with him. Six High Bishops have to agree on it—it'shard to be declared a heretic—'

Ardis interrupted. 'We haven't excommunicated a heretic since we did it posthumously to Padrik, the original Priest who bound the ghost at Skull Hill, and all those who sent the ghost further victims.'

'The point is, suppose our murderer did something really heinous that warranted excommunication. Maybe a secular punishment too. He'd have seen the dagger, and he'd know it was an important object intimately connected with the Church,' Kayne said in triumph.

'Especially if a Justiciar-Mage was the one involved,' Ardis added, looking more normal. 'We tend to dress the ceremony up quite a bit—invoking ghost-flames on the blade, and auras around the Priest. Well! In that case, we'll need to get access to the Great Archives and find the records on excommunications in the last ten to fifteen years. And, while we're at it, we should get the ones on defrocked Priests. There's no point in ignoring a theory just because we don't like it.'

'I'll go take care of that now,' Kayne said, getting quickly to her feet. 'I'll send it by a messenger and have him wait for the records. We need this informationnow, not next spring.'

'If there's a Priest-Mage there, have him send it to me directly,' Ardis ordered. Kayne nodded and headed for the door.

She was gone before Tal could say anything more, leaving him alone with Ardis.

He tilted his head to one side, watching her, as she subsided into brooding. The crackling of the fire was the only sound in the room. 'You've never had a case like this one before, have you?' he asked, softly, so as not to break the silence too harshly.

She shook her head; the dark rings under her eyes bespoke several sleepless nights. The case was making inroads on her peace of mind, as well as Tal's. 'Well, I've had difficult cases, but—'

'Not ones that were personally difficult, that involvedyour emotions,' he persisted.

She gave him a rueful glance. 'True. Never one of those. I've had cases that made me angry, even ones that involved other members of the Brotherhood, but they weren't people I liked. In fact, I must confess now as I did then that it gave me some inappropriate personal satisfaction to put them away where they couldn't hurt anyone else.' She looked positively fierce at that moment. 'I above all know that the physical Body of the Church is far from perfect, and some blemish can't be helped—but those who misuse their power and authority arenot to be tolerated.'

'But now—now that it looks as if it's a Priest-Mage, itcould be someone you know, someone you like.' He nodded. 'It's like knowing there's a bad constable on the force, and knowing it probably is someone you know and like, because otherwise he wouldn't be able to get away with it for long.'

She sighed, and rubbed her temple as if her head hurt. 'That's it exactly; we overlook things in friends that we are suspicious of in enemies or strangers, and we do it because we just know, in our heart, that the friend couldn't possibly be doing something bad. The trouble is, I've known enough criminals to be aware that they can be very charming, very plausible fellows, and they make very good friends. They use friendship as a cloak and a weapon.'

'And someone in the Brotherhood?' he ventured.

'That's doubly hard to face,' she said, looking off beyond him somewhere. 'We have no families of our own, you see; that makes the ties of friendship within the Priesthood doubly special. And—quite frankly, we'resupposed to be able to weed bad apples out long before they get out of the Novitiate. We'resupposed to be able to police our own ranks.'

'But if someone entered the Church, intending from the very beginning to conceal his real motives—' Tal shook his head. 'You wouldn't be able to catch him until he did something. It's as if someone planned to have a double identity of criminal and constable from the beginning, and kept the false face intact. Until he was actually caught in the act, we'd never know, never guess, and even after being caught, perhaps still never believe.'

She glanced at him sharply, then looked away. 'This isn't what I anticipated when I joined the Church,' was her only answer.

'Why did you join the Church?' he asked, feeling that an insolent question might take her mind off her troubled conscience. 'And what did you expect when you got here?'

The fire flared up for a moment, briefly doubling the light in the room and casting moving shadows where no shadows had been a heartbeat before.