Four and Twenty Blackbirds

at the door.

Tal had been in and out of many similar places in his career as a constable, and he wasn't afraid, merely cautious. In the winter there wasn't as much traffic on the river, which meant that sailors and river-men had less money to spend. It wasn't a festival night, the weather wasn't very cooperative, and most men would chose to stay where they bunked if they had a bed or a room. On a night like tonight, the men in this place wouldn't be looking for trouble—but they wouldn't try to avoid it, either. As long as he watched his step, he should be all right.

He trudged down the five steps made of uncut rock, and pulled the curtain aside to enter.

The reek of unwashed bodies, stale beer, cheap tallow-lights, and other scents best left unnamed hit him in the face like a blow. He almost turned around and walked back out, but his sense of duty prevailed and he stalked across the dirt floor to the bar, avoiding the tables, chairs, and a staggering drunk more by instinct than by sight. What light there was didn't help much in navigating the room. There were only four thick tallow-dips to light the entire room, and two of them were over the bar. They gave off a murky, smokeladen light that didn't cross much distance.

Then again, I'm probably better off not being able to see. The closer he got to the bar, the more his eyes stung from the smoke. If I knew how much filth was caked on the tables and the floor, I'd probably be sick.

Behind the bar was a huge man, running to fat, with the last two fingers of his right hand missing, and a scar across the top of his bald head. The man grunted as Tal approached, which Tal took as an inquiry. 'Beer,' he said shortly, slapping down a couple of copper pieces on the unpolished slab of wood that passed for a bar-top.

The bartender poured flat beer out of a pitcher into a cheap earthenware mug. The stuff looked like horse- piss, and probably tasted the same. Tal took it, but didn't drink. 'Hardysty here?' he asked, and without waiting for an answer, shoved a handful of coppers across the bar. 'This's for him. Split on a bet. Said I could leave it here.'

With that, he turned and took his beer off to a corner table, where he sat and pretended to drink. In reality, he poured the beer onto the floor, where it soaked in without adding measurably to the stink or the filth.

His eyes were adjusting to the gloom; now he could make out the rest of the room, the scattering of tables made of scavenged lumber, the few men who sat at them, slumped over the table or drinking steadily, with a stony disregard for the wretched quality of the stuff they were pouring down their throats.

The bartender scooped up the money, pocketed part of it, then poured another beer and took it over to a man half-lying on another table nearby, as if he had passed out. He grabbed the man's shoulder and shook it until the fellow showed some signs of life, batting his hand away and blinking at him blearily.

'Wha?' he slurred. The bartender slapped both the beer and the remainder of the money down on the rough wooden table in front of him.

'Yours,' he grunted. 'Ya made a bet. Part paid off the tab, this's what's left.'

Hardysty stared at him a moment, as Tal pretended to nurse his beer. 'Ah,' he slurred. 'Bet. Yah.' Clearly he didn'texpect to remember the apocryphal 'bet' that had been made on his behalf. All he knew was that money had somehow appeared that supposedly belonged to him, and he wasn't about to question the source.

He drank the beer down to the dregs in a single swallow—Tal winced inside at the mere idea of actuallydrinking the stuff. He knew what it was; the dregs out of the barrels of beer emptied at more prosperous taverns, and the dregs of brewing, mixed together and sold so cheaply that it often went as pig-slop. There was not a viler beverage on the face of the earth. A man that drank the stuff on a regular basis cared only for the fact that it would get him drunk for pennies.

Whatever Hardysty had been, the fact was that he was too far gone in drink to have had any connection to the murders. If he remembered who he was and where he was supposed to go from one day to the next, he would be doing well.

When Torney said he was cadging drinks, he meant it. He's probably a street-beggar for just long enough to get the money to drink.

Whatever had gotten him dismissed from the Church? Tal thought he remembered something about theft of Church property. Had the disgrace broken him, or had the drinking started first? Perhaps the thefts had gone to pay for drink.

This was one vice gone to excess that Tal never could understand; intellectually, he could sympathize with a man who had lost his head over a woman, and he could understand how the thrill of risk could make a man gamble away all he had in the heat of a moment—but he never could understand this rush to oblivion, be it by drink or by a drug. Why do something that made you feelless alive, rather than more? Why would anyone willfully seek to remove ability?

Hardysty dropped the mug down onto the table, stared at the pile of coppers for a moment, then shoved them back across the table to the bartender. 'More,' he said—which was probably what the bartender had expected him to say. Before Tal could blink, the coppers were gone.

Tal pretended to drink two more mugs of the awful stuff before staggering out into the darkness. At no time did the bartender ask him about his connection to Hardysty; at no time did Hardysty make any attempt to find out where the money had come from. That was typical behavior in a place like this one. No one asked questions, and