Four and Twenty Blackbirds Read Online Free Page B

wrong.
    Tal sat at the tiny desk, staring at his notes for a moment, then decided to go prowling in the records-room again. This was a good time to go poking through the records, for during the day, the clerk defended them as savagely as a guard-dog, allowing access to them with the greatest of reluctance.
    He took his notes with him, since the records-room was as good a place as any to write his addition to the report. Besides, now that he officially had the identity of the murderer, he wanted to check the file on current tax-cheats, debtors, heretics, and other suspected miscreants to see if Milas was among them. There was always the barest chance that the girl was a blackmailer who'd found something out about him that could ruin him. Not likely, but best to eliminate the possibility immediately, and leave Jeris no opportunity for speculation.
    As he had expected, the old shopkeeper's records were clean. From the complete lack of paper on him, it would seem that this murderer had, up until this very night, led an amazingly boring life. There wasn't a file on him, as there would have been if he had ever been noticed during a surveillance or a raid on an illegal or quasi-legal establishment.
    Interesting.   
    So, once again, he had the same pattern. The perpetrator was perfectly normal, with no previous record of violent or antisocial behavior, and no indication that he was under undue stress. He had no interest in weapons, music, or musicians, and none in women—and no obvious dislike of these things, either. He had no record of interests outside his shop except for chess.
    In short, he had led an utterly blameless and bland existence, until the moment that he pulled out a knife and used it on the girl. He even had a perfectly good reason to have an odd knife; anyone who owned a secondhand shop would get all kinds of bizarre weapons in over the course of time.
    Maybe I'm going about this wrong. Maybe I should be concentrating on the missing knife. It seems to be the one thing that ties all these cases together.   
    Very well, then; it was an unusually long knife, with a strange, triangular blade, a bit longer than a stiletto. Tal had seen knives like that, very occasionally, as part of the altar-furniture during certain holy days. No one ever touched the knives during the service, and they were evidently the remnants of some earlier, older ceremony. Tal was not particularly religious, but one couldn't help picking up a certain amount of religious indoctrination when one was in school, since the schools were all taught by Priests. He'd had the knack even then for putting things together that other people didn't particularly want put together, and his guess was that the knives were from an old, pagan ceremony of sacrifice that the Church had coopted and turned into a holy day. Good idea, that—if people were going to celebrate something, make them celebrate your ceremony. Keep them in the Church all day so they can't go out and get up to an unsanctified frolic in the woods and fields. . . .
    Tal sat back in his chair for a moment, thinking about that. Perhaps it was the late hour, but his imagination, normally held in check, began to paint wild pictures for him.
    Some of the more lurid tales that had given him goose-bumps as an adolescent rose up out of memory to confront him with bizarre possibilities. What if some of the knives in Church regalia were the original sacrificial knives of an unholy, blood-drenched ritual out of the ancient past? What if this one was one of those knives, one of the cursed blades out of legends, craving blood now that it was out of the safe hands of the Church magicians? Could it be taking over the murderers somehow, and forcing them to use it so that it could drink its fill of blood and lives as it used to do?
    But why pick musicians as targets? And most importantly, where did it go when it wasn't killing someone?
    More to the point, have I got the chance of a snowball in a bakery oven of