Four and Twenty Blackbirds

He frowned and rubbed one closed eye before replying. 'Unless it was a peculiar sort of revenge. We've got one theory that he's taking revenge on the girls for being scorned by a female musician, but what if he's also taking revenge on the men theyare willing to sleep with?'

'That's not a bad thought,' Ardis replied after a moment. 'It has a certain twisted symmetry.' She considered it for a moment. 'But what about the others, where there was no previous contact with street-women? There was at least one man who had no interest in women whatsoever as I recall.'

Tal shrugged. 'I agree with you that there is a pattern of increasing complication and risk-taking. At first, he takes men who have a reason to be alone with women who make their living in the street, and women who have a reason to go along with these men. This, of course, keeps him from breaking the established patterns of his male victims, which keeps anyone from noticing that there is something wrong.'

'There were some cases early on where that isn't true,' Kayne protested.

Tal nodded agreement. 'But those could have been cases where something went wrong—either he couldn't get the kind of victims he wanted, or something else interfered. And remember, all ofthose took place under cover of night and four walls, in neighborhoods where no one ever looks to see what's going on if there are cries or screaming in the night.'

Ardis couldn't find anything to disagree with yet. 'Go on,' she said. 'What next?'

'Next is more risk,' Tal told them, as Kayne frantically scribbled notes. 'He takes longer with the victims, mutilating them as well as killing them. Next, he goes out into the street, into the open, and takes men who are strangers to the women he kills, and women who wouldn't normally go off with a stranger unless they thought his purpose completely honest. He breaks the patterns of the lives of his male victims, but he's moving quickly enough that even if anyone notices there's something wrong with the man, they don't have time to do more than wonder about it. Then—we have things like the killing here, in broad daylight, with a male victim whonever set foot in that part of town, who might well have been stopped by a family member or retainer before he had a chance to act on behalf of the murderer. A thousand things could have gone wrong for him at that last killing. They didn't, which only means that either his luck is phenomenal, or he's studying his victims with more attention to detail than we've guessed.'

'And the jeweler?' Kayne asked.

Ardis shook her head. 'I don't know. The jeweler often had women in his home, but that doesn't mean that the Gypsy girl didn't go there with legitimate business in mind.'

'If he's clever, he could have manufactured that business,' Tal pointed out. 'Gypsies often wear their fortune; she could have come to the man with coins to be made into a belt or necklace. All he'd have to do would be to drop a good handful of silver into her hat, and she'd be off to the nearest jeweler to have the coins bored and strung before she lost them.'

'A good point,' Ardis said with a little surprise, since it wasn't a possibility she'd have thought of. 'But what else do the victimsall have in common?'

Tal made a sour face. 'Theyare people no one will miss. The fact is, all of his male victims were such that even if they did things that were out of character, no one would care enough to stop them until it was too late. Even their relatives don't pay any attention to them until they're dead and the way of their death is a disgrace to the family. Even then, they seem relieved that the man himself is no longer around to make further trouble for them.'

Ardis smiled sardonically. 'You caught that, did you?' she asked, referring to the behavior of the young dandy's parents when she had questioned them.

Tal nodded, and so did Kayne.

'So we can assume that these men, the secondary victims, are people who would not question the origin of a stray knife that came into their hands, especially if they had any reason to believe that it was stolen.' She raised an eyebrow, inviting comment, and once again the other two nodded. 'They would simply take the object, especially if it appeared valuable. They would most probably keep it on their persons.'

Tal held up a finger and, at her nod, added a correction. 'All but one or two—I think the knife-grinder I saw had been given the knife to sharpen. And it's possible the jeweler was brought the knife to repair some damage to the hilt. In both those cases, the men were perfectly innocent of everything. But I'd say it was more than possible in a couple of cases that the men who had the knife actually stole it themselves,' Tal told her. 'And that may account for a couple of the victims where the connection with music is so tenuous it might as well not be there.'

'He took what he could get in those cases, in other words.' Ardis made a note of that on the side of a couple of the dubious cases. 'That argues for a couple of things. Either there is only one knife—'

'That isn't right, unless he's changing the hilt,' Tal interrupted. 'The one I saw didn't look anything like the one Visyr saw.'

'Then in that case, it is a very powerful and complicated spell, and he can't have it active on more than one weapon at a time.' Ardis made another note to herself, suggesting a line of magical research. 'To a mage, that is very interesting, because it implies a high degree of concentration and skill, and one begins to wonder why so powerful a mage isn't in Duke Arden's Court.'