The next murder got the attention of the entire city; it was a nine-day wonder that kept the taverns a-buzz for long enough that even Tal got tired of it.
But this time, like some strange disease that strikes three homes in a row, then suddenly occurs halfway across the city, this crime happened so far outside of Tal's district he would never have heard of it, if the circumstances hadn't been so bizarre. Whoever, whatever was behind all this, "he" had moved his area of operation from the waterfront side of the city to the tenement district farthest inland.
Once again, the poverty of the murderer and victim should have relegated the incident to a mere item in a few records. Tal heard about it over his morning meal in the common-room of the Gray Rose, and his first, cynical thought was that if the deaths themselves had not been so outrageous, the entire package of murder and suicide would have been put down as a sordid little sex-crime.
Even so, the details were so unbelievable that he was certain they were exaggerated. It was only when he reached the station that he learned that if anything, the public rumors were less horrific than the truth.
And that was enough to send cold chills over him.
When he heard the official report for himself, he had one of the oddest feelings he had ever experienced in his long career as a constable. Part of him was horrified, part sickened—and part of him knew a certain sense of self-righteous pleasure. He knew what it was, of course. Hadn't he been saying something like this was going to happen? Well, now it had, and he had told them so. It was a base emotion, but—maybe it was justified.
As Tal read the report, though, he found it very difficult to keep his detachment. A jewel-crafter (too unskilled to be called a full Jeweler) named Pym, who made inexpensive copper, brass, and silver-plated trinkets, was the perpetrator. A Gypsy-wench called Gannet was the victim. And what had happened to the poor whore at the hands of the smith palled by comparison with what happened to the Gypsy.
Gannet showed up at Pym's workshop just before he closed, with a handful of trinkets she wanted him to purchase. That much was clear enough from a neighbor, who had probably been the last one to see either of them alive. The neighbor had been loitering about the area in front of Pym's shop and her own; other neighbors said she had "an interest" in Pym, and what they probably meant was that she had her mind set on inveigling him into marrying her. The neighbor was not pleased to see a younger woman show up at the shop, and drew close enough to hear the ensuing conversation. The Gypsy insisted that someone had sent her to Pym specifically to sell her goods, and although the jeweler seldom made such purchases, tonight he waved the wench into his shop and shut and locked the door behind her. That had been so unlike Pym that the neighbor suspected something illegal (or so she told the constables) and set herself to watch Pym's door.
Right, Tal snorted to himself, as he read that particular bit of nonsense. More like, she suspected Pym of a bit of funny-business with a skirt, and was nosy and jealous enough to wait around for details.
But the Gypsy didn't come out, although there were lights and shadows moving about in the back of Pym's workshop all night long. And in the morning, the neighbor, whose imagination had been running at high speed ever since the girl showed up, knocked insistently on the door on the excuse that she had smelled something burning. Then she called the constables when Pym didn't appear to open his shop or answer the door.
The constables, unable to rouse anyone, broke the door down. There was no one in the front of the shop, nor in the rooms above, but what met them when they opened the door to the workshop sent one of them running to empty his stomach in the gutter, and the other to rouse the entire station to come and cope with the scene.
What was left of Pym lay on the floor in a posture of agony at the foot of his workbench. The girl lay spread-eagled on the top of his biggest workbench, also dead. Pym had used the entire contents of his workshop to make a strange display-piece out of the girl, beginning by clamping wrists and ankles down to the table, filling her mouth with wax, then setting to work with copper wire, semiprecious stones, and most of his tools. She was quite chastely covered in a garment of wire and gems, all of it laced through her muscles and skin, and riveted to her bones to anchor it in place. Her eyes were wired open, her head covered with a wig of fine wire riveted to her head. The pain must have been excruciating, and because the wounds were so small, she wouldn't even have lost consciousness because of blood-loss. The knife he had plunged into her breast must have come as a relief.
Now the detachment Tal had been looking for finally came, and with it, that odd ability to analyze even the worst information. If she'd lived, she would have been crippled for life. The amount of nerve-damage he must have done would have been impossible to repair, let alone whatever he did to her brain by spiking that wig into her skull.
But she was not to be alone in her suffering, for Pym finished his night by drinking every drop of acid and poisonous chemicals in his shop. It was the horrified judgment of the Healer-Priest brought in to decide on the cause of death that Pym probably lived about as long as his victim before he died.
Once again, the girl had been murdered with a knife with a triangular blade, and once again, the knife was missing. The official version was that Pym had stabbed her with one of his files, but none of the files had even a trace of blood on them—in fact, the files were the only tools Pym hadn't used to make his "display."
Tal would have given five years of his life to see Pym's body, but unfortunately, the acid he had drunk had rendered it unfit even to be placed in the morgue. Or, as one of the constables with a mordant sense of humor said, "The only way to put him in the ground was to scoop him up in buckets and pour him in."
But I wish I knew if he had the same bruises as the others I've seen. . . .
The Gypsy-wench was buried the next day with all the pomp due a Guildmaster, a funeral that was paid for by donations. If she had any relatives, they were lost in the throng of spectators who came to gawk rather than mourn, searching for some sign of what had been done to her under the burial-gown of stiff snow-white silk that covered her from chin to toes. Tal didn't go, but Captain Rayburn made a prominent appearance.
The last murder took place right under Tal's nose.
He was making another attempt to find a decent set of shirts, because by now he needed more than one, and this time had gone much farther afield than his usual haunts. Lately, bargeloads of clothing came in at the southern end of the city on a semiregular basis, brought up out of places where a species of establishment called a manufactory was becoming common. There were manufactories in the High King's capital of Lyonarie, but only lately had anyone set them up along the Kanar River. Such establishments produced large quantities of simply-made garments in a limited range of sizes and colors, and shipped them off by water, since shipping them overland would have made them too expensive to compete with locally made garments. Tal was not certain that he would fit any of the sizes available, and he was more than a little dubious about the quality of such garments, but by now he was desperate enough to go look at them when word came that another shipment had arrived.
It was a pleasant enough day, sunny with no more than the thinnest of cloud-cover, and Tal took his time about reaching his goal. The only thing on his mind was the book that he'd just started, and a vague wish that he'd brought it with him to read if there was going to be a queue.
As he arrived, it was obvious that he had come to the right address by the crowd just outside the door, and he resigned himself to a wait. He was only one among a throng of customers at the dockside warehouse, and was met at the door by a man who looked him over with an appraising eye and sent him to stand in a particular queue, one of six altogether. The warehouse was only dimly illuminated by light coming in at some upper-story windows and by skylights in the roof. Enough of the people here felt compelled to chatter at the tops of their lungs that a confusing din echoed and reechoed through the warehouse, adding to the confusion, as Tal inched forward in his queue.
Never having been here before, he was a little bewildered about why the fellow had directed him into this line, until he arrived at the head of the queue and found himself confronting four piles of neatly folded shirts, each pile being shirts of the same size but a different color. His choices were brown, gray, blue, and white, apparently, and the man at the door was evidently practiced in sorting people's sizes out by eye.
Tal took two each of the brown and the gray, on the grounds that they would show dirt and wear less than the white, and fade less than the blue, and moved to one side quickly, for the man behind him seemed very impatient.
He shook out one of the gray shirts and held it against himself, then examined it carefully. Aside from the fact that the stitching was mathematically even—which was entirely possible even when sewn by a human rather than a machine, if the shirt was of high quality—he saw nothing wrong with it. It was just a trifle large, perhaps, but no few of his secondhand purchases were also oversized. There was no real "style" to it, and the pattern it had been made to was a very simple one, but a city constable hardly needed "style." Surprised and pleased, he took his prizes to the front of the warehouse where he paid about the same as he would have for four secondhand garments, even though there was no haggling permitted. The clerk wrapped his purchases into a packet with brown paper and string, and gave them back to him. Given that these should last longer than secondhand shirts which already had a great deal of wear on them, he had gotten quite a bargain, and left the warehouse with a feeling of minor euphoria.
In fact, he had enough left over for a decent lunch, so he decided to treat himself. He seldom got to see the wharfs in daylight; by night, they were dirty, dangerous places to walk, but by day it was no worse than any other mercantile area. There were several warehouses here where individuals were buying things directly; this was something new to the city, and he wondered how the merchants were going to take it.
It probably isn't going to bother them too much, he decided. Nobody with any significant money is going to come down here and stand in lines when they can go to a fine, warm shop and be waited on, even fawned over. There might be some loss of secondhand trade, but that would even itself out eventually. Those who bought secondhand garments would rightly point out that the market value of such goods had decreased and be able to buy them at a lower value than heretofore, and the very poor, who could not afford even cheap goods like these, would then be able to afford the second-hand goods. The merchandise leaving those warehouses wasn't what he would call luxury goods, either. Most of those who were buying these new items were those who would bargain fiercely, leaving a secondhand merchant with less of a profit anyway.
Taking advantage of the crowds, other vendors had set up shop along the street. There were no entertainers, probably because there was no room for them. Performing on the docks would be dangerous, with wagonloads of heavy goods going in both directions, and the wharfs on one side. Not only that, but the wheels of those wagons, rumbling on the wooden planks of the wharf, made it too noisy for anyone to hear an entertainer. But there were other peddlers and vendors, anyone who could set himself up in a small space. A flash of color caught Tal's eye, and he wormed his way through the press of people to a ribbon-seller. Midwinter Festival was coming up, and he liked to get small things for people who were decent to him.
He bought a bit of scarlet for the black hair of the little wench who cleaned his room, and the little blonde who usually waited on him in the tavern would receive a streamer of blue. Farther along, there was a candy-monger, an orange-girl, a man selling feathers, and a knife-sharpener with his grinder in a barrow. The candy-monger had a clean-looking cart and display, and little bags of candy would make appropriate gifts to the tavern errand-boys; Tal's mind was entirely on the complicated problem of different-but-equal bags of sweets as he wormed his way towards the cart, when suddenly the noisy but relatively peaceful scene changed dramatically.
He had looked down long enough to tuck his bits of coiled ribbon into his belt-pouch and make certain the antipickpocket flap was in place, when the crowd surged into him, knocking him off-balance. People screamed and surged into him again as they tried to escape from something just ahead.
Training went into effect as people tried to move, surged back and forth mindlessly, and generally made things worse all the way around. Reacting as a constable and not as a man in the crowd, he fought free of them with a few precisely placed kicks and elbow-jabs, and broke out into an open space for a moment, looking for the source of the trouble.
He didn't take long to spot it. Ahead of him, the knife-sharpener brandished a bloody blade in one hand, a woman covered in blood lying motionless at his feet. Tal's eyes went immediately to the knife and not the man, for it was obvious who the attacker was, and in this press of bodies, he would not be able to get away.
Though he only saw it for a moment, he knew he would be able to draw a picture of it from memory alone at any time in the next year. It was unusually long, with a wicked point; the cross-guard was minimal, the hilt undecorated, and the blade itself was exactly like a triangular file, except that it was polished to a satin-gleam on all three flat sides, and glinted razor-sharp on all three edges.
Tal dropped his package of shirts at the feet of the candy-monger and launched himself at the murderer. In spite of the fact that he was not frozen with shock or surprise, and in fact was already moving towards the man as his eyes and mind took in every detail of the murder-weapon, he was not fast enough to prevent the next scene of the tragedy. With the speed of the weasel he resembled, the knife-sharpener flung the blade wildly into the crowd, turned, and plunged off the dock into the murky, icy water of the river. And since he was wearing a belt encumbered with several pounds-worth of metal tools, even if he could swim, it wasn't likely he was going to come up again. Tal knew that even before the man hit the water and sank without a sound.
Tal ran to the edge of the dock anyway, but there was no sign of the murderer but a trail of bubbles. He debated plunging in after him—and even teetered on the brink for a moment—when one of the dockworkers grabbed his elbow.
"Don't," the man said shortly. "The bastard's a goner. Won't last a minute in that water, and neither will you."
"You're right," Tal acknowledged, and turned back to the woman's body.
She was dead, and he was unsurprised to find that the woman had been stabbed as viciously as the very first victim he'd seen. She had probably died instantly; the amount of blood soaking the dock and her clothing indicated that the knife-sharpener had used his blade with brutal expertise.
Although it seemed to him that the better part of an hour had passed, he knew it had only been a few minutes, and the crowd was still milling about in panic. He took charge of the scene at once, getting the crowd settled, separating out witnesses from those who only knew that someone had died, and eventually dispersing all those who were not direct witnesses. He also gathered up a few level-headed volunteers.
"You and you," he ordered, picking two large, steady-looking fellows. "You two go north and south along the river, and see if you can't find the constables patrolling this district."
He turned to a smaller, soberly clad man, plain and ordinary. "You go to the station and alert the constables there."
All three nodded, and went briskly off on their assigned errands. That left him with four more, all dockworkers, who should know this area. "You see if you can't find that knife," he told them, although he knew it was a hopeless quest. The mysterious, vanishing blade was going to vanish again, and there wasn't anything he could do about it. "You saw him throw it away; something about it may tell us why he went crazy that way."
The four looked at him a little oddly, but began their search the moment he explained that he was a constable. He dealt with the murder scene a few moments later, draping the girl's body with a tarpaulin given him by a barge-man.
At least this time I saw it, and I know exactly what it looks like, he thought bleakly. I can describe it to knife-makers, armorers, smiths—there can't be that many knives like that in this city. I can check with secondhand stores and have people keep a watch for it. Maybe I can track it down that way, or at least find out what kind of a knife it is.
Or he would—if this was not some strange cult of murder and suicide, with special ritual blades of their own. There were not many things more secretive than a religious cult, and doubly so in a circumstance like this one.
Still, someone has to forge these things. I'll check with smiths.
By the time the local constables arrived—more than a bit annoyed that an apparent outsider had so cavalierly taken over their crime—he had all of the information that really mattered to him. The girl was local; she cleaned and gutted fish at one of the salting-houses. The knife-sharpener was new; no one had ever seen him here before. The orange-girl, the candy-monger, and the fellow with the feathers were all locals as well, and knew the fish-cleaner by sight.
"Everyone knew her," the orange-girl sobbed, weeping messily into her apron. "She was always singing, whistling—so cheerful, her voice so pretty, we always told her she ought to go for a Free Bard—"
Tal froze inside, although he knew there was no sign of his reaction on his face. There it was, the music connection again! What was going on here?
He patted the girl on the shoulder, trying awkwardly to comfort her, then turned to the newly arrived constables. "I'm sorry to have barged into your territory like this," he began, knowing that if he apologized immediately, the new arrivals would stop being annoyed and start being grateful that he had done all the preliminary work for them. "I would never have, except that I know from my own experience that if you don't take over in a case like this, there's a panic. Wild tales spread like a fire in dry grass, and the next thing you know, you're getting reports of a wholesale massacre of fishwives. And if you don't herd all these people together at the start, they'll manage to wander off on their own errands before you can get any sense out of them."
He handed the man he judged to be the most senior his own notes. "Here's what I've gotten, sir, and I hope it will be of use to you," he continued, as frowns softened to reluctant approval. "The ones who swore they had to go, I got addresses for in case you have to do a follow-up. Any my statement is in the pile as well, and my own address."
"Oh, we know where to find you," the senior constable replied, with more approval showing when Tal made no mention of getting credit on the report, or indeed having anything to do with this other than be a witness. "You can go ahead and go now, if you like. We can take it from here."
Tal turned to go, and the candy-monger, with a display of honesty that was quite remarkable, handed the package containing his shirts back to him, undamaged except for a bit of dirt. "You tried, sir," the sad-eyed little man said. "Most wouldn't have done that for her. Thankee."
Tal nodded, accepting the compliment in the spirit intended, and tucked his package under his arm, but his mind was elsewhere, planning the report he was going to write for Captain Rayburn. He had several cases now, including one with an impeccable eyewitness in the person of himself. Now the Captain must believe him!
Enthroned in splendid isolation behind the walnut bulwark of his desk, Captain Rayburn gazed down his long, thin, aristocratic nose at Tal with mingled contempt and disbelief. "Would you mind telling me what you were drinking when you wrote this bit of imaginative fiction?" he asked sarcastically. "I'd like to get hold of a bottle or two myself."
Tal considered any number of possible responses and confined himself to a civil one. "You can't argue with the facts, Chief," he replied. "All the murders are in the records; they were all committed with the same kind of weapon, which always disappears."
"They were all committed with a knifelike object," the Captain corrected. "We don't know what that object could be, and there is no evidence that it is the same or even a similar object in any two of the murders. The instrument of death could have been a file—or a piece of bar-stock—or an ice-pick—or, for that matter, an icicle! There is nothing connecting any of these murders except your half-toasted idea that the victims were all musicians of a sort, and that is too absurd to even credit. There is also no trace of magic involved in any of these deaths, and they have been checked by a reputable Priest-Mage."
Tal clamped his mouth shut on the things he wanted to say, for there was no point in going any further. He wanted to point out that the examinations of the wounds of the victims showed identical characteristics consistent only with a triple-edged blade, and remind Rayburn that none of the weapons had ever been recovered, much less identified. He wanted to tell the Captain that the Priest-Mage was less interested in finding traces of magic than he was in getting his unpleasant task over with as soon as possible, and that this particular man was hardly as reliable and reputable as Rayburn painted him. He wanted to say all of these things, but he said none of them.
The Priest in question is in his position because he is out of favor with the current Bishop, and liaison with the constables is the lowest position a Priest-Mage can have. But I'm not supposed to know that. Rayburn wants this thing covered up, and it suits him to pretend that the man is careful and competent. The only question is, why is he so intent on covering this up?
"I hope you aren't planning a new career in sensational storytelling, Constable," Rayburn continued, tapping the pile of papers with his index finger, "because this is too far-fetched to attract any publisher."
Tal dropped his eyes and studied the top of Rayburn's immaculate desk, knowing that if he wanted to keep his job, he was going to have to keep his temper.
But I'm beginning to wonder if this is a job worth keeping. Why is it worth Rayburn's while to sweep this under the rug?
Rayburn waited for him to say something, and when he did not speak, the Captain shook his head. "I would have expected a piece of nonsense like this out of one of the green recruits, not out of a senior constable," he said with an undisguised sneer. "Really, you make me wonder if you are not ill with a brain-fever yourself! I hope you haven't been spreading this nonsense about—"
"I've told no one," Tal replied stoically. No one else would have cared, you bastard, except a few idiots like me who want to do their jobs right, and they don't have any power or influence. The rest are all too busy playing politics, just like you. "I saved it all for my report."
"Oh, did you?" Tal's hands, hidden by the desk, clenched at Rayburn's tone. "In that case, I won't have to order some punitive assignment for you for spreading rumors designed to cause panic or unrest." Rayburn drummed his fingers on the desktop for a few moments. "In that case, because of your fine record, I am going to forget I ever saw this."
Tal looked up in time to see the Captain turn in his seat, take the report that he had labored over for so long, and toss it into the stove beside his desk. Tal stifled an oath as Rayburn turned back to him.
"Now, I order you to say nothing more about this," Rayburn said with a cold core of steel underlying the false cordiality. "I won't have wild rumors of death-cults or renegade mages circulating through the streets. Do I make myself clear?"
The weak blue eyes had turned as icy and flat as a dead fish's, and Tal said what he was expected to say.
Go to Hell, Captain.
"Yes, Captain," he replied, trying not to choke on the two words.
Rayburn settled back into his chair with an air of satisfaction. "This district is quiet, and I intend to keep it that way," he warned Tal. "Even if any of that nonsense was true, I would order you to hold your tongue on the subject. Rumors like that are all that it takes to spark a riot, and I will not have a riot on my watch." He waved his hand in a shooing motion at Tal. "Now, get out of here, and don't let me ever see anything like this report again."
Tal shoved the chair back, watching Rayburn wince as the legs grated on the floor, and left the office before he could say anything he didn't want Rayburn to hear.
He won't have a riot on "his watch"! As if he paid any attention to his district at all!
He seethed all the way back to his rooms at the Gray Rose, and only long practice helped him to keep his stoic expression intact. Not even the Mintaks, notoriously sensitive to body-language and able to read trouble from the most subtle of expressions, had any idea that Tal was suffering from more than his usual moodiness.
When he reached the safe haven of his rooms, his first impulse was to reach for a bottle—but he did not give in to it. He wanted a drink—he wanted to numb his mind and his soul, wanted the oblivion that a bottle would give him, the few hours of respite when nothing mattered anymore. But that respite was a lie, and oblivion cured nothing, and he knew the depth and shape of the trap far too well to fall into it himself. Liquor had been the ruin of many a constable, in part because they needed to numb their feelings and their memories, and in part, he suspected, because more and more of late the good constables were not able to do their jobs properly.
You can drop into despair, or you can beat the bastards at their own game. I'll be damned if I let a pinheaded little shoe-licker keep me from doing my job.
Instead of reaching for that bottle, he sat down at his desk with pen and paper in hand. There was more than one mystery here, and the second one was a question that concerned him intimately.
Why had Rayburn suppressed all of this? Why was he so adamant that nothing was to leak out?
Sometimes it helped him to make physical lists, and he began two of them, writing slowly and carefully, with his tongue sticking out at the corner of his mouth as he concentrated. Writing did not come easily to him, although reading did, but working at a difficult task would keep him from doing something he might regret later. Like reaching for that bottle.
Murders he headed the first list, and Rayburn was what he put on the second page.
He started the second page first.
Rayburn is trying to cover up the murders, he wrote. He's trying to make them appear perfectly common. Why?
Why, indeed? The victims were all poor, insignificant; their neighborhoods were those where crime was, if not a daily occurrence, certainly not a stranger. Except for the Gypsy girl, whose death had not even occurred in his district, there had been no notoriety attached to any of the cases. And there were no relatives clamoring for any other solution than the "official" one. Maybe he shouldn't be looking at the victims for his answer—maybe he should be thinking about the hand behind the murders.
Who or what could be doing this? he wrote on the first page. A disease of the mind—possibly spreading. A curse, or more than one. A mage.
Now he returned to the second page. Rayburn could be trying to prevent people knowing that there is a disease that makes them kill for no reason. But that assumed that Rayburn would be aware there was such a thing. . . .
Huh. He might. There was that tainted-wheat scandal. Nearly two dozen people died raving mad from eating flour made from it. The moneyed in this town would not want anyone to know about tainted food, especially not if it was a common article, like flour.
A good reason for Rayburn's superiors to want it hushed up—the only thing wrong with that theory was that in the wheat scandal, there were a lot more victims, spread across all classes, for they had all bought their flour from the same merchants.
It could still be a disease or a taint, but it would have to be coming from something only the poor are likely to come into contact with. He racked his brains on that one. Maybe the water? The poor got their water from common well-pumps that stood on every street corner. The rich? He didn't know, and decided to let the idea lie fallow for the moment.
A curse is more problematic—I've never actually seen a curse that worked, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. Elven curses—everybody's heard of those. I can't imagine why a curse would take this particular form, though, unless it happens to be as undiscriminating in who it attaches itself to as any disease. Why a curse, why here, and why now? And why were all the victims of the poorer classes? It would make more sense for a curse to strike the rich and powerful—wouldn't it? Or was that just wishful thinking?
I suppose a curse or a cursed object would be able to work itself out no matter who was the victim, so long as they fit its qualifications. If the qualification is something as broad as "human," well, just about anyone would fit.
He made a note, but he didn't expect to get much information. He just didn't know enough about the subject of curses and cursed objects to ask the right questions.
But there was another question that was related. Why did Rayburn keep talking about riots if any of this got out? Did the Captain have some information, perhaps passed on from his superiors, that would make him think that there was a possibility of a riot if wild enough rumors began to spread?
It could be. There've been riots and near-riots over nonhumans recently. There was that nonhuman ghost that carried off a High Bishop! When people talk about curses that work, they usually claim they came from nonhumans. Elves and the like, most of the time, but still . . . people tend to lump all nonhumans into one group, and figure that if Elves work magic, they can all work magic.
There were a fair number of nonhumans working in this city, some of them quite prosperous, and the usual prejudices and resentments against them by those too lazy to make their way by hard work. Nonhumans were easy targets whenever someone wanted a scapegoat. Maybe Rayburn knew more about the riots and disturbances in other cities than Tal did—and maybe he was keeping a lid on this because he was afraid there would be more of the same here if rumors of curses and nasty magic got out.
That certainly fits in with all that talk of civil unrest and rioting. Oh, talk of a knife with a curse on it would certainly set people off, especially if they thought it was part of a plot! Things had been unsettled lately, and he doubted that they were going to get any calmer. There were a lot of changes going on, Deliambrens moving huge machines across the countryside, new mechanical devices showing up and putting people out of work as more machines replaced hand-labor, more and more nonhumans moving into the Twenty Human Kingdoms. That would make a lot of people unhappy and uneasy, and ripe for trouble. There were always troublemakers happy to supply the trouble. Maybe Rayburn wasn't as much of an idiot as Tal had thought.
And maybe he is, doing the right things for the wrong reasons. Keeping things quiet because he wants to make some rich patrons happy, instead of keeping things quiet so trouble-mongers don't have anything to work with.
He shook his head. Not enough information. Without knowing what Rayburn knew, and who (if anyone) had ordered him to keep all this under the rose, it was still most likely that Rayburn was being a sycophant and a toady.
Last of all on his list—what if it all was being done by magic, magic that was directed and purposeful, rather than random like a curse?
Well, that kind of magic meant a mage was working it, and that meant—what?
Elves are mages, they don't like humans, and we humans are encroaching more and more into their lands. If it was an Elf, or it was rumored that it was an Elf that was doing this, that would bring up more resentment against nonhumans. That just didn't feel right, though. As he understood it, when there was some indication that nonhumans were going to have their rights taken away, the rich were in favor of the move because they would have had first chance at confiscated properties and would have been able to purchase former free creatures as slaves. Rayburn's patrons would not want riots—unless the ultimate goal meant more profit—
Oh, I'm making this far too convoluted. I'm not certain any of Rayburn's patrons are that smart.
Who else could be working this kind of magic? They say that some Gypsies are mages—well, Gypsies have some friends in questionable places, but I've never met a Gypsy that would have done to one of their own what was done to that poor girl. Of course, there are bad cases in everyone's family, and I suppose it could be a Gypsy mage. But that wouldn't cause any trouble with Rayburn's superiors.
Gypsies, Elves—who else worked magic? Some Free Bards, allegedly, through music. But how would that figure in the fact that the victims were all musicians of a sort themselves?
Free Bards getting revenge on substandard minstrels? The idea made him smile reluctantly. No, that's too far-fetched, even for me. Who else could it be? The only other mages that I know of are Priests. . . .
Priests! Suddenly an entirely new range of questions opened up before him.
What if this is being done by a Priest who is a mage? he wrote on the first page.
Why? Well, by strict Church standards, every single one of the victims and their putative killers were unrepentant sinners. Of course, the Church would never condone murdering unrepentant sinners, but the Priest could be mad. He could imagine himself to be the punitive arm of a stern and judgmental God; could even believe that God was commanding him to do away with these people in fashions that would horrify other sinners into instant repentance.
Right. Assume it is a Priest. Assume that the Church doesn't know for certain, but suspects this is what is going on.
That would definitely fit the other question, which was Rayburn's behavior. One word from a Priest to Rayburn advising him to keep all of this quiet, and Rayburn would be scratching to cover it like a fastidious house-cat. If the Church didn't even have a suspect yet, there would really be a cat among the pigeons, as every Priest that was in on the secret watched his fellows with suspicion.
Next idea—assume they have a suspect or two, but don't have evidence yet. They'd have Rayburn digging holes to dump evidence, if they had to!
Next—they know who it is, and they have him locked up, but he's still doing this. A barred cell isn't going to stop a really determined magician, but I've never heard of a Priest being executed. As far as I know, they can't be executed, only imprisoned, and nothing is going to stop a renegade mage but execution. Certainly the Church would not want anyone to know that they couldn't keep a crazy Priest-Mage from killing people! The resulting scandal could rock the Church to its foundations, calling into question virtually every aspect of control now exercised by Church officials. There had been enough scandal already associated with the Church's possible involvement in the Great Fire at Kingsford, and the trickery and chicanery of High Bishop Padrick had caused great unrest.
Riots? There'd be riots over that one, all right. With the Church claiming its tithe and doing damned little for the poor with that tithe, all it would take would be a hard winter, bad storms, and food shortages. A real, full-scale riot directed against the Church would produce enough angry people to level every Church-owned structure in the city.
If the Priest wasn't mad—if he was doing this with Church sanction—
A chill ran down his spine. Don't think that. Don't write it down.
It could be some terrible experiment in magic gone wrong. And that would be another reason for Rayburn's superiors to want it nicely sunk in the bottom of the harbor. No one would want people to know that the Church permitted anyone to dabble in the kind of magic that would drive a man to murder a relatively innocent woman and then kill himself.
Something else occurred to him and he wrote that down under the Murders topic. What if this isn't local? What if we aren't the only city to have this going on?
Well, if it wasn't local, it probably had nothing to do with the Church. Not that the Church couldn't be involved, but mages couldn't work magic at great distance, and something that caused murders in more than one city couldn't be hidden for long if Church officials knew about it. Things like that leaked out, novices learned things they weren't supposed to know, spreading rumor and truth more effectively than if the Church was spreading the tales deliberately.
There is a bare possibility that this is a mad Priest, that the Church knows about it, and they keep moving him from town to town every time he starts doing things like this, trying to cover up the murders and hoping that at some point he'll just stop, or God will stop him for them.
Well, there was one way of telling if it was local or not.
He put his two lists aside and took a fresh sheet of paper, addressing it to The keeper of the mortality lists, Highwaithe, which was the nearest town upriver.
He sighed, and flexed his hand to ease the cramps in it, dipped the quill in the inkwell, then set the pen carefully to the paper again.
Good Sir, he began, I am collecting mortality statistics in relation to the weather, and am particularly interested in the occurrence of murder-suicides over the past five years. . . .
There. Let Rayburn try to stop him now.
The only thing that is going to stop me now, he thought wryly, is my aching hand, and the number of letters I'm willing to write.
About the time he began getting replies to his letters, the rash of murders ended, as inexplicably as they had begun.
There were no more street-musicians cut down with vanishing knives. The only murders occurring now were the sordid and completely uninteresting kind.
But Tal was not relieved—rather, he was alarmed.
Every one of the clerks to whom he had written had responded, and most had been delighted that someone was showing interest in their dreary statistics. He'd gotten everything he asked, and more—one enterprising fellow had even sent him a breakdown of his violent-crime statistics by moon-phase.
Tal had set up one corner of his sitting-room with a map pinned to the wall and his pile of return letters beneath it. He sorted out the letters that showed no real increase in the number of murder-suicides, then stuck a pin into the map for every occurrence in those towns and cities where the number had gone up. The result was a crooked line that began—at least as far as he could tell—at a small town called Burdon Heath. At first, the grisly trail followed the route of the Newgate Trade Road, then it left the road where it crossed the river and followed that instead. There was no doubt in Tal's mind, now that it was laid out in front of him. Whatever this was, it was following the course of trade. The pattern was quite clear.
And he knew that it was not over, although the deadly shadow was no longer stalking the streets of his city. The mind that had conceived of these murders in the first place was not going to simply stop needing to commit them.
He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. His first partner had been a constable who had solved the case of a madman who'd gone about mutilating whores. Tal remembered what the man had told him.
"A man like this has a need in him, lad," the old fellow had said. "It's a craving, like drugs or strong liquor. He needs what he gets from doing things like this, and what he gets is power. The ability to control everything that happens to these girls, the moment they get into his hands—what they feel, how much they feel, and the most important control of all, when and how they die. That's what he gets. When you've got to find the man who does things like this, that's what you look for—that's what'll tell you what he's made of, not how he does it. Look for what he gets."
If ever there was a case that those words fit, this was it.
And Tal knew that the mind behind these crimes, the mind that craved the power he had over the victims, had not suddenly been cured of its particular brand of madness. Rather, that mind was aware exactly how dangerous that last death had been—and he had moved on before he could be caught. Being caught was no part of his plan.
He had to have been watching, somewhere—he won't get the thrill he needs just by hearing gossip. He must have seen and understood what was going on when I took over the situation, and recognized that I was a constable. He wasn't going to take any more chances at that point. The murderer knew how perilous it was that there had been a constable close enough to witness that last death, and to have seen the knife and know it had vanished for certain. Tal's attempt to find the knife only proved to the murderer that Tal knew what he was looking for. The murderer had probably taken himself and his associates (if any) to another hunting ground.
Mortality Clerks were both cooperative and incurious, a fabulous combination so far as Tal was concerned. They not only supplied him with the bare statistics he'd asked for, they usually gave him the particulars of each murder.
The "musician" connection was still there. And the dates were in chronological order.
The further a town is from here, the farther back the rash of murder-suicides goes.
There was no overlap of dates—no case where there were times when the deaths occurred in two different places at nearly the same date. The unknown perpetrator staged his deaths, no less than three, and so far no more than nine. Then, at some signal Tal could not fathom, he decided it was time to move on, and did so.
He was finished here. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had moved on.
Unfortunately, the most likely place was the one city in the entire Kingdom where his depredations would be likely to go completely unnoticed for weeks, if not months, due to the chaotic conditions there. The Kanar River was the obvious and easiest road; it flowed easily and unobstructed through a dozen towns between here and the place that must surely attract this man as a fine, clear stream attracted trout fishers.
The great, half-burned and half-built metropolis of Kingsford.