Four and Twenty Blackbirds

turning up uncomfortable thoughts.

'I've got a third request,' Ardis finished. 'While you're at it, you might ask for the records of those who had a history of sexual crimes or violence against womenbefore they entered the Priesthood. Just because we think he's reformed, that doesn't mean he has.'

Kayne nodded, noting all of that down.

'You're probably right in this, Ardis,' Tal said slowly. 'The signature traits of these crimes—I've been thinking about the things hehas to have, the ones that always appear, without exception. Death by stabbing—'

He flushed so scarlet, that Ardis was distracted for a moment with amusement. 'Go on,' she told him.

'This is—rather indelicate,' Tal choked. 'You're a—'

'I'm a Priest, dear man, and I've taken my turn in the Confessional with condemned criminals,' she reminded him. 'There isn't much you can tell me that I haven't already heard in one form or another. You mentioned stabbing—which is, after all, a form of penetration. I assume you think this is his form of rapein absentia ?'

Tal was so red she was afraid he would never be able to speak, but he nodded. 'I think so; that makes these sexual crimes. The knife is the primary part of his signature, and the shape may be part of that—fantasy. Either he hates the Church or he views himself as an arm of the Church's vengeance. There's nothing in between, and in either case, a Priest would be more—frustrated. More likely to choose a knife as the instrument of death.'

'And for either, we have to look at the Brotherhood itself.' She sighed, and felt a headache closing down over her scalp like a too-tight cap.

'The second signature element is the sex of the victim, which, if I'm right about this, goes along with the sexual nature of the murders. I have to think that the third element is that the victim preferentially is a musician,' Tal continued, his red face slowly fading. 'I know I've said all this before, but it was more in the light of speculation than certainty. I would stake my life on the fact that no matterhow this man kills people, he has to have those three signature elements to be satisfied. I wish I'd seen more of the crime scenes myself, or I would know more.'

'So look particularly for Priests who have had problems with musicians,' Ardis directed her secretary. 'Either while in Orders or before taking them.' A thought struck her, and she voiced it. 'I wonder if he's a failed musician himself?'

Tal nodded, now completely back to normal. 'Could be. Particularly if he was obsessed with the idea of being considered a Master. Love and hate—add obsession, and you have a nasty little soup. If he tried getting into the Bardic Guild and failed, he might be able to forgive men for making a living at music, but never inferior females.'

'He could even consider that the female musicians were somehow polluting music itself,' Kayne offered, which drew an approving glance from both Ardis and Tal. 'Music being supposedly pure, you wouldn't want an unclean female mucking about with it.'

'That's a good thing to add to the list of possibilities,' Tal told her. 'Once again—love and hate, love and worship of music, hate for those who are desecrating it. But that certainly doesn't preclude it being a Priest.'

'Far from it,' Ardis admitted. 'There are plenty who came into the Priesthood after failing at their first choice of vocation. He might even have discovered his ability at magic after he failed at music. Don't forget, weare looking for mages. He can't do this without magic.'

But that seemed to exhaust their inventiveness for the moment, and after they had thrashed the subject around a bit more, they all went back to their respective tasks. Kayne went off to her office to draft more orders for records, and Tal went—wherever Tal went, when he wasn't specifically to meet with someone or go off on one of Ardis's errands. She suspected he had gone back into the city, chasing down elusive leads.

When they were gone and the door to her office closed and locked, the room felt strangely quiet and empty. It was difficult to tell what time of day it was in here, since the room had no windows. The previous occupants had all been old and subject to rheumatism; this office shared a wall with the huge kitchen ovens, and as a consequence was nicely warm all winter, even without a fire in the fireplace. There might have been problems in the summer, but as soon as the weather was warm enough, all baking was done in ovens in the kitchen court.

Usually the lack of windows didn't bother her, but this afternoon it occurred to her that she was curiously isolated from the world outside because of that lack. Was this good, or bad? As a Priest, perhaps she should cultivate that isolation, since it theoretically would enable her to get closer to God. But as a Justiciar, she needed to remain within the secular world so that she could understand and dispense justice to its inhabitants. As with so many things in her life, it seemed this required striking a delicate balance, too.

Ardis removed a fat, brown folder from the locked drawer of her desk: the record of the Priests and Priest- Mages who had vanished from the Kingsford Abbey during the Great Fire. Coincidentally, she had not had enough time to devote to unraveling the mysteries the stiff pasteboard contained before all this fell upon her, and now the very records she would have requested from the Archivist for her own Abbey were already on her desk.

But these were only the records of those who had been severely disciplined by the Order over the past ten years, and it could be that this simply wasn't long enough.