Ardis sighed, and covered her face with one hand for a moment. "Perhaps you are right," she murmured from behind that shelter. "It must be said, or we won't consider it seriously. Write it down, Kayne, write it down. I don't want to cost people their lives because I don't happen to like the trend the investigation is taking."
"It might not be a Priest at all," Tal pointed out, hoping to spare her some distress by giving her other options to consider. Now that she had made the effort to include this one, she would be honest enough to pursue it to whatever end it led to. "It could be someone who, like those would-be constables, is trying to emulate a Priest in some way. It could simply be someone who wants to make the Church out to be a villain."
Ardis removed her hand and looked up at him. "There is no one who wishes to make the Church out to be a villain so much as someone who has been cast out of the Brotherhood," Ardis said slowly. "And Kayne is right; the number of laymen who know about the ecclesiastical daggers is very low; the ceremonies in which they are used are so seldom performed publicly that it is vanishingly unlikely our particular miscreant could have seen one of them."
An uncomfortable silence reigned, and it was Tal who interrupted it by clearing his throat. "If—if—it is a Priest, or a defrocked Priest, it probably isn't anyone you know," he pointed out lamely. "After all, the murders didn't start here; Kingsford is only the last link in a path that goes out past Burdon Heath. I don't actually know where it started; Rinholm was just the last place I got an answer from."
"And it could be that it isn't a defrocked Priest," Kayne admitted after a moment. "I can think of another enemy of the Brotherhood who would know about the daggers. It could be someone who was sentenced to lifelong penal servitude and excommunication by a Justiciar. Youdo have the dagger on view at the sentencing of those you are casting out of the Church, Ardis, and you use it very prominently when you symbolically cut all ties to the community of God and the fellowship of man." She made a few flamboyant and stylized flourishes, as if she was using a blade to cut something in the air. "It's pretty theatrical, and I would imagine it would stick in someone's mind."
"The ceremony of excommunication is performed on those whose acts are so heinous that the Church cannot forgive them, and sometimes they are people we nevertheless have to allow to live," Ardis murmured aside to Tal. "Granted, we don't do that often, but—"
"But when you do, it's on pretty hard cases," Tal pointed out. "That'swhere I saw it! A Justiciar was excommunicating a particularly nasty piece of work—he hadn't killed anyone, but—well, what he'd done to his own daughters was pretty foul. Caught in the act, no less, and the poor child no older than nine! The local sire had him castrated, and the Church excommunicated him, then they both bound him over into penal servitude, and hestill defied all of us. There's a hard case for you! I thought it was a mock-sacrifice of some kind."
"Oh, we use the daggers there, too, in another rare ceremony," Kayne said cheerfully. "And it isn't a 'mock' sacrifice. It's a case where—well, never mind; the point is there is no way you would have seen that ceremony unless it was being performed on your behalf, and I don't think you qualify for that degree of urgency. In fact, no one who is the beneficiary of that ceremony is likely to hate the Church; they're more likely to want to spend their lives scrubbing Chapel floors to repay us."
"Huh." He was surprised at her candor. He hadn't expected anyone in the Church to admit that they performed pagan-style sacrifices.
"We also excommunicate heretics—" Kayne screwed up her face for a moment. "We don't do that often. You have to be doing more than just making a Priest angry or disagreeing with him. Six High Bishops have to agree on it—it'shard to be declared a heretic—"
Ardis interrupted. "We haven't excommunicated a heretic since we did it posthumously to Padrik, the original Priest who bound the ghost at Skull Hill, and all those who sent the ghost further victims."
"The point is, suppose our murderer did something really heinous that warranted excommunication. Maybe a secular punishment too. He'd have seen the dagger, and he'd know it was an important object intimately connected with the Church," Kayne said in triumph.
"Especially if a Justiciar-Mage was the one involved," Ardis added, looking more normal. "We tend to dress the ceremony up quite a bit—invoking ghost-flames on the blade, and auras around the Priest. Well! In that case, we'll need to get access to the Great Archives and find the records on excommunications in the last ten to fifteen years. And, while we're at it, we should get the ones on defrocked Priests. There's no point in ignoring a theory just because we don't like it."
"I'll go take care of that now," Kayne said, getting quickly to her feet. "I'll send it by a messenger and have him wait for the records. We need this informationnow, not next spring."
"If there's a Priest-Mage there, have him send it to me directly," Ardis ordered. Kayne nodded and headed for the door.
She was gone before Tal could say anything more, leaving him alone with Ardis.
He tilted his head to one side, watching her, as she subsided into brooding. The crackling of the fire was the only sound in the room. "You've never had a case like this one before, have you?" he asked, softly, so as not to break the silence too harshly.
She shook her head; the dark rings under her eyes bespoke several sleepless nights. The case was making inroads on her peace of mind, as well as Tal's. "Well, I've had difficult cases, but—"
"Not ones that were personally difficult, that involvedyour emotions," he persisted.
She gave him a rueful glance. "True. Never one of those. I've had cases that made me angry, even ones that involved other members of the Brotherhood, but they weren't people I liked. In fact, I must confess now as I did then that it gave me some inappropriate personal satisfaction to put them away where they couldn't hurt anyone else." She looked positively fierce at that moment. "I above all know that the physical Body of the Church is far from perfect, and some blemish can't be helped—but those who misuse their power and authority arenot to be tolerated."
"But now—now that it looks as if it's a Priest-Mage, itcould be someone you know, someone you like." He nodded. "It's like knowing there's a bad constable on the force, and knowing it probably is someone you know and like, because otherwise he wouldn't be able to get away with it for long."
She sighed, and rubbed her temple as if her head hurt. "That's it exactly; we overlook things in friends that we are suspicious of in enemies or strangers, and we do it because we just know, in our heart, that the friend couldn't possibly be doing something bad. The trouble is, I've known enough criminals to be aware that they can be very charming, very plausible fellows, and they make very good friends. They use friendship as a cloak and a weapon."
"And someone in the Brotherhood?" he ventured.
"That's doubly hard to face," she said, looking off beyond him somewhere. "We have no families of our own, you see; that makes the ties of friendship within the Priesthood doubly special. And—quite frankly, we'resupposed to be able to weed bad apples out long before they get out of the Novitiate. We'resupposed to be able to police our own ranks."