Four and Twenty Blackbirds (31 page)

"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, we
are
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.

Should I go back twenty? she wondered. Or perhaps just fifteen? Where should I place the cutoff? I'll have to look at more than severe penance, that much I know. The first clues to trouble may lie in seemingly minor infractions. 

Kayne was already planning on bringing the full record for the last ten years, and that would be a fair pile to go through, even if she eliminated all those who weren't mages. Well, perhaps if she looked at these records in the light of this new trouble, something would spring out at her.

But nothing came immediately to mind as she skimmed over the records again. Those who were missing simply did not fit the pattern, unless something had occurred to them between the Fire and now that set them off. Mostly, they were undergoing penance for the sins of lust and greed—quite common expressions of both, with no indication of the kind of cruelty exhibited by the murderer. Her headache worsened as she held the records concerning Priest Revaner.

This—this is so frustrating! The only obvious possibilities are dead, or just as good as dead, and he's at that top of that list. 
 

The one thing working against Revaner—aside from the fact that he was probably dead, and the fact that he was a giant bird—was that the murders began so far away from Kingsford. He would have had to travel an enormous distance to get there.

How would he travel as a bird? He couldn't fly—he was too heavy. I very much doubt that he could have walked the distance, and he would have been incredibly conspicuous if he had. Even if he somehow found someone to take him that far away, why would he bother to come back here? There was nothing for him here; even if I wanted to take the spell off, since it was a backlash of his own magic, I'm not sure that I could. He probably ended up in Kingsford and was burned to a crisp—or was killed by some farmer thinking he was after chickens. Or he's in a freak-show as one of the star attractions, which would be nothing more than poetic justice. 

No, it couldn't be Revaner, but she wished she could find some sign that it might be one of the lesser Priest-Mages who'd escaped. Any of them had a perfectly good reason to return to a place they would find familiar. Any of them would be perfectly happy to take revenge on the Free Bards who had foiled the attempt to kill Duke Arden in his own theater.

The trouble was, none of
them
were powerful enough to work this kind of magic.

But would it take power? That's something I still don't know. It might be a brilliant spell, difficult to execute, but actually requiring very little power. This certainly didn't act like the variations on coercive magic she knew; every one of those left the victim still able to fight for his freedom, and the more heinous the act he was forced to do, the more successful he was likely to be at breaking free. Perhaps the mage executing this magic was not powerful, merely brilliant.

Or it might be someone still in the Brotherhood.
She couldn't evade that possibility. There was no use in saying that an active Priest couldn't possibly be doing such things when she knew very well that there were those who could, and with a smiling face. Men with a profound hatred of women often went into the Church because they knew that there would be fewer women there, and that most, if not all of them, would be in subordinate positions to males. The killings themselves demonstrated such hatred of women that even Kayne had commented on it. The garb of a Priest only meant that a man had mastered the book-learning and study required to become a Priest—it didn't mean that the man had automatically acquired anything like compassion on the way to taking Holy Orders. Every person who took vows had a different reason for doing so, and not all of those reasons were admirable.

She made a little face at that thought, for it came very close to home. Even my reasons were not exactly pure. They could be boiled down to the fact that I took vows, "because I didn't have a better offer." 

Her head throbbed. She buried her face in her hands, wondering if this was the punishment she had earned for her cavalier decision of years ago. Was this God's way of chastising her for not coming to Him with a wholly devoted heart?

No. No! I can't believe that. God does not punish the innocent in order to also punish the guilty— 
 

But were those people who had already died so very innocent? By the strict standards of the Church, they were all apostate and in a state of sin. The Gypsies were pagans, and the Free Bards were hardly model citizens or good sons and daughters of the Church. Was God punishing Ardis for her pride and the victims for their sins at the same time?

She dropped her hands and shook her head stubbornly, as if to rid it of those thoughts.
No! Nothing I have ever seen can make me believe God is so arbitrary. It makes no sense!
 

She could not, would not, believe in the petty-minded God so many of the Brotherhood worshiped—the God who demanded obedience rather than asking for worship, who punished like a petulant and autocratic patriarch.

Besides—I may not have had a strong vocation when I entered the Church, but neither have hundreds of others. I have served God and the Church faithfully; I have never swerved from that path, never questioned why I was in the Brotherhood. 
 

Until now, perhaps.

A twinge of guilt assaulted her, as she recalled how, less than an hour ago, she had been admiring the strong line of Tal Rufen's jaw. Something was threatening to come between her and her service.

If there was ever something she would have named as a test of her fidelity, it had come in the person of Tal Rufen—intellectually her equal and willing to acknowledge it, resourceful, creative. Precisely the sort of person she would have been willing to spend a lifetime with.

Unwedded. And, if I'm any judge of human nature, attracted to me. 
 

Ardis had never been particularly impressed by rank, not when so many of her own set were absolute idiots. That Tal was a commoner would not have bothered her before she entered the Church, and it certainly didn't now that she'd spent years in the company of other commoners who were her equals or superiors in intelligence
and
rank within the Church. She was pleased to have him as a subordinate, would be even more pleased if the relationship became one of friendship. But she would have been lying to herself if she denied that, from time to time, she didn't wonder how her life would have turned out if she had met someone like him before taking her final vows.

Now, with Tal on the scene, she was doing more than wonder about it.

Give me the motivation and opportunity to break my vows—oh, yes. I can see that.
The God
she
pictured had a finely-honed sense of humor as well as curiosity, and she could readily see Him giving her great temptation just to see if she could resist it—

Or see if she could find another solution to her problem.

Like leaving the priesthood. 
 

There was no great stigma attached to a Priest who resigned her position, left the Church, and took up a secular life. There were always those who discovered that something inside them had changed, and with that change had come the need to leave the Church. Of course, if she did leave the Church, she would no longer have any more status than any other commoner. She had formally given up all secular bonds with her family when she took vows, and if they took her back, they would probably do so grudgingly, since in her tenure as High Bishop she had made as many enemies as friends. Those enemies would happily take advantage of the fact that the Church no longer sheltered her, and the friends were not always exactly in high places.

In short, she would have nothing more to rely on than her own personal resources and abilities. She would come back into the secular world with rather less than when she had left it.

And that is why Priests break their vows rather than taking the step of renouncing them. They want to have their pleasure and keep their position. 
 

She was no more suited to the secular world of trade and business than Kayne was, and she had never really thought about earning her place in the world. Now, she found herself making plans. Perhaps she could use her abilities as a mage to solve thefts, find missing persons—perhaps she could get permission from the Church to act as a physician. She would still sacrifice status and comfort, but neither meant
that
much to her.

Given the right set of circumstances—it might be worth it.
Physical comfort wasn't everything. Status didn't mean a great deal except as protection from current enemies and to make the way a bit smoother. The loss of status could be compensated for with cleverness and charm.

With myself using magic and the skills I've learned as an administrator, and Tal using his wits and experience, we could do a great deal of good. The mental image that accompanied the thought was attractive. Very attractive. There were always crimes that the constables had difficulty solving. There were also the occasions when a solution was found, but it was difficult to bring a burden of proof before the Justiciars. Justiciar-Mages were not necessarily supposed to solve crimes, and more often than not, Ardis had been forced to sit back and grit her teeth while constables bumbled through a case or let the real criminal get away for lack of evidence. But if she left the Church—she could take on anything she chose. Granted, the people she would probably want to help most often wouldn't be able to pay her much, but there would be so much satisfaction in seeing real justice done!

You know, I imagine my cousin the Duke could see clear to hiring us. . . . 
 

She shook her head suddenly. What was she thinking of? How could she even contemplate renouncing the Church?

Her stomach knotted, and her hands clenched. This was insanity; what was Tal Rufen that she should throw out everything that had come to give her life meaning? Where were her senses?

Dear and Blessed God—what's putting this into my mind? The stress? Am I under such pressure that my mind is conjuring these fantasies just to give me something else to think about? 
 

Surely, surely that was the explanation. Now was not the time to even consider such things; she did not want to continue this case with anything less than the full authority that her status as High Bishop gave her. That would be a betrayal of herself and all those victims as well as of the spirit of her vows. If this murderer really was an active Priest, nothing less would serve to catch and convict him.

She fiercely recited one of her favorite meditations to drive all thoughts of Tal Rufen as anything other than a subordinate and a colleague out of her mind—for the moment, anyway. She
must
concentrate. Her own feelings meant nothing in the face of this threat.