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 toThe 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 thatsomeone 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 numberhad 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 ofhis 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.
Chapter Four
Reading too long—especially letters with terrible penmanship—always made Ardis's eyes ache, and the Justiciar-Priest closed and rubbed them with the back of her thumb. Rank did have its privileges, though, and no one asked the Priests of her Order to sacrifice comfort in return for devoting their lives to Justice and God. Though plainalmost to the point of austerity, Ardis's quarters were warmed by a fine, draft-free stove, her reading-chair comfortably cushioned, and the light falling on her papers was as clear as fine oil, a carefully-trimmed wick, and a squeaky-clean lamp could provide.
But I'm tired, overworked, and getting no younger.Briefly, she wondered what her life would be like if she had wedded according to her stature, as her family had expected her to. At this hour, she would probably be receiving callers in a luxuriously-appointed reception room, giving final orders for a sumptuous formal dinner, and thinking about which dress she would wear to the evening's ball or party.
I'd be bored, which would be worse than overworked; my mind would have gone to mush, and I would probably have joined some stupid group devoted to mystical rubbish out of sheer desperation for something different in my life. Or I'd be having affair after frantic affair, like so many of my female relations are doing, because they are shackled in loveless, lifeless marriages with nothing to occupy their minds.