Four and Twenty Blackbirds (27 page)

He had approached a Gypsy Free Bard named Robin and was rebuffed, publicly, vehemently, and in such a way as led to a great deal of humiliation on his part and amusement on that of the witnesses. But his success had bred overconfidence and inflated his pride, and his pride would not tolerate such a blow. Obsessed with the girl and angered at her contemptuous refusal, he had conspired with a Guild Bard named Beltren, one of his cronies, to kidnap her.

Even that might only have earned him exile to some distant, ascetic Abbey in a harsh and unforgiving climate, constant penance and prayer, and perpetual confinement to his cell if he had been caught—but his pride was too high to merely use her and discard her. No, he had to triumph over her and keep her as a private trophy. He had used his magic to transform her into a man-sized bird of gaudy plumage, placed her in a cage, and compelled her with further spells to sing for his pleasure. Then he displayed her for all the Faire to see.

Pride and folly went hand in hand, and he was bound to fall over such a blatantly stupid action; Revaner was found out, of course, and he was condemned by the Justiciars to the same condition he had forced upon the Gypsy girl. Transformed into a black bird of amazing ugliness, he was displayed in a cage above the gate of the Abbey as an example to others. And since he was a bird, without access to his wealth, his connections, or his persuasive tongue, no one was tempted to try to defend him.

When fall came that year, he was taken down and lodged in a cell in the Abbey until the warmer weather arrived, in larger, if not more luxurious quarters. But when spring came, it was easier to keep him there instead of putting him back on display. Eventually, he became a fixture in the Abbey gaol.

Then came the Great Fire, and the revolt within the Abbey itself. And, presumably, during the confusion or perhaps out of misguided compassion, someone left the cage door open and the bird escaped.

The Gypsy transformed into a bird had not been able to fly, but even as a bird, Revaner was still a mage, and he could use his magic to aid his wings. He had put as much distance between himself and Kingsford as possible, ending up at last in Sandast, a trade-city situated below a cliff riddled with caves. There Revaner had made a home, stole food, and attempted to work out how to change himself back.

That much Orm had managed to reason out for himself. What he didn't know was how Revaner had learned that the key to transforming himself back to a man was the death of someone else, and it was the one thing that he was not likely to ever find out. There were only two people who had ever known that, and Revaner's first victim was the second. Short of bringing back the dead spirit to speak, Orm was unlikely to discover what the circumstance had been.

Orm had recently removed himself to Sandast from the vicinity of Kingsford until a certain party returned to his homeland. A business deal had gone awry, and it wasn't particularly healthy for Orm to linger in the vicinity of Duke Arden's city. Although his original customer was no longer available, it had occurred to Orm that the information he possessed could easily be sold elsewhere. Sandast, for instance. And it was in the course of trying to find a buyer for that information that he had come upon Revaner in the moment of his third attempt at transformation.

Now, there had been rumors of a madman stalking the streets at night and murdering unwary victims by driving an enormous spike or spear through their chests, but Orm had dismissed it. After all, such a person would hardly be inconspicuous, loping about with a spike the size of a small tree trunk over his shoulder! So when his search for a client took him out into the dense fog of a typical Sandast evening, he wasn't particularly worried about coming across anything worse than a pickpocket or back-alley assaultist, either of which he could handle easily.

Not until he rounded a corner and found himself in a dimly lit cul-de-sac, facing a scene out of nightmare.

Filtered light fell down from windows above onto the murderer and his latest victim, and the murderer was a great deal
more
conspicuous than a madman with a spike. A huge black bird, with the body of a street-singer impaled on its lancelike beak, glared at Orm out of angry red eyes. Blood was everywhere, turning the dust of the street into red mud, plastering the feathers of the bird in sticky tufts, splattered against the peeling walls of the buildings surrounding the cul-de-sac. Orm had been so startled, and so
fascinated,
that instead of running, he had simply stood and stared.

And so he had the unique experience of watching the bird transform into a black-robed man.

Or rather—try to watch it do so, for there was something about the transformation that made his eyes hurt and his stomach churn, as if whatever was going on was not meant to be
watched.
He looked away for a moment, and when he looked back, there was a man in the black robes of a Priest standing over the body of the girl. The man was unarmed, but Orm did not for a moment assume that he was helpless. The very opposite, in fact.

So he did the only thing logical under the circumstances.

"Well, you seem to have a situation on your hands. I believe you can use my help," he had said, as calmly as if the man had just walked into an inn looking for him. "Would you care to come with me to my quarters where we can discuss it?"

Whether it was due to Revaner's own desperation, or Orm's glib tongue, Revaner engaged his services on the spot.

Revaner still had most of his money, and a great deal of it, all deposited with the Goldsmith's Guild, and thus accessible to him any time he cared to write out the proper papers to get it. But when it took seven days to get the money, and he was able to remain in human form for considerably less than that—

Well, he had a problem to say the least.

In the first few days of their partnership, Orm's role had been a simple one; he got a suite of rooms with windows overlooking a bare courtyard used for storage, so that Revaner—or "Rand," as he now called himself—could come and go at his leisure when he was a bird. Orm made certain that all of Rand's physical needs were cared for, both as a bird and as a man. But Rand's period as a human did not last more than three days, and when he transformed, he was nearly beside himself with rage.

Orm let him rage, for there was nothing much in his room he could damage, and waited for him to calm—or at least, to exhaust himself.

Rand-as-bird had learned how to speak, although his Gypsy captive had not had the time to master that art, so when he finally stopped stabbing holes in the bed-linens, Orm ventured a few words.

"This is hardly a surprise," he had pointed out. "You knew you were going to revert eventually."

The bird's voice was a harsh croak, unpleasant but understandable. "Not so
soon
," Rand protested, and made another stab at a pillow. White feathers flew out of the hole, and Orm shook his head.

"But it held for longer this time than the last," Orm replied. "You told me the last time it only held for two days. Things are improving."

Rand tossed the pillow aside with a savage twist of his head, scattering more feathers across the floor as it landed. "It should have been longer," he muttered. "It should have been
permanent
."

Orm shrugged, and spread his hands. "I'm no mage," he replied, "but this is the most powerful piece of magic that I have ever
heard
of outside an Elf Hill—and cast by a—a mage that powerful, I can't imagine how three paltry deaths could negate anything like
this
."

He had caught himself for a moment, realizing that he had been about to say something about a spell cast by a Justiciar-Mage, and even though he hadn't actually said anything incriminating, he caught Rand giving him a suspicious look out of those ruby-red eyes.

It occurred to him that Rand might well consider him expendable at that moment, and he hastened to deal with that contingency.

"It's obvious to me that if each death lengthens the time you are—" he chose his word delicately "—
cured,
you simply have to find more victims. The trouble with that is obvious: already people in this little town are beginning to talk, and it's only a matter of time before someone has the bright idea of starting a house-to-house search. Granted, you
could
fly away during the search, but you wouldn't be able to pick your moment to fly, and what if someone saw you and made the obvious conclusion? You clearly need more sacrifices, but you simply cannot stay here and keep killing people."

"So what am I to do?" rasped Rand. "Move somewhere else and kill people?"

"Why not?" Orm countered. "
I
can move you comfortably—well, more comfortably than flying all that distance. I can find you safe quarters, I can stand watch for you—I can even find potential victims for you. But I think you ought to find a safer way of doing your killings, a way in which you're less likely to be caught in the act. It's already happened once, and you were just lucky that it was me and not a constable who discovered you. Think about life in the long term—we don't have to stay in once place, we can move on when things become risky. Think about what you need to accomplish, instead of frantically slaughtering in the hopes that this time something will work!"

Never before or since had he seen such a transformation come over a creature. Rand went from a creature dangerously enraged and making no effort to hide that fact, to one suddenly locked in thought. Literally locked in thought—Rand went rigid, and his eyes unfocused. Silence prevailed for some time, but Orm was in no hurry to leave, so he waited the creature out. He had, he thought, just proved to Rand that his services were indispensable. Rand had a great deal of ready cash, and Orm wanted as much of that money transferred to himself as possible. He also wanted to continue living, and he was under no illusions about his continued existence if Rand decided to get rid of him.

This, of course, was not the first time he had found himself in that position. A man who sells information often comes into possession of knowledge that others would rather he didn't know, and sometimes those others are willing to take drastic steps to ensure that the information is lost again. Orm had always saved himself in the past by proving that it was more expensive to eliminate him than to purchase his cooperation, and he was fairly certain he could do the same thing this time.

Finally, Rand shook all of his shabby drab feathers and fastened his gaze on his would-be partner. "You are right," the bird croaked. "And I want to think about this for a while. I have been very shortsighted until this moment."

"In that case," Orm had said, rising and making a little bow, "I shall leave you in peace to think." He knew then that he was safe, for Rand had spoken the key word:
shortsighted.
Rand had just made the jump from thinking only about the immediate need of becoming and staying human, and had moved on to other desires as well. And a man who looked as Rand did probably had a major desire driving him.

Revenge.
Orm loved that motive; it was one of his most profitable. Revenge was complicated and expensive; it involved elaborate plots and a great deal of planning. And given that Rand would probably want revenge on at least one person moderately difficult to find—well, the possibilities for profit were staggering.

Rand made several requests of Orm over the next couple of weeks, with the most difficult being the acquisition of an ecclesiastical dagger. Rand had probably intended for Orm to steal one, but Orm had no intentions of leaving that kind of trail for the Church to follow. It wouldn't be too difficult for Church mages to put the theft of a piece of regalia of that sort together with a murder by means of that kind of weapon—and Orm had the suspicion they might be able to tell who had taken it and what had been done with it. Instead, he broke into a Chapel all right, but when he found one of the daggers, he only studied it. The next day he purchased a triangular file of approximately the correct dimensions, broke into a smithy whose owner was out of town, and ground it into a similar knife-blade himself. Since the new "knife" already had a wooden hilt of sorts, Orm had judged that it would do.

When he brought it to Rand, the creature studied the offering closely, then clacked his beak in a way that Orm had come to learn signified his approval. "Very clever, and usable for the first attempt, anyway," the bird croaked. "We may have to do something else next time, but this will do. Now—I want you to find me two people."

Rand outlined the kind of victim Orm had already assumed he would want: female, a musician—a Gypsy or a Free Bard by preference, but any musician or dancer would do, so long as she was female. But he also wanted a
man,
someone who might plausibly pick up the clumsy knife that Orm had constructed, at least for a moment.

Orm already had a few candidates for the first position, but the second was something of a puzzle for him. In the end, he chose a petty tough with a penchant for knives; the man couldn't resist a blade, no matter how clumsy or poorly made, and once he had one, he could be counted upon to carry it with him. If the man ever fell into the river, he'd sink to the bottom from the weight of steel he carried.

Rand made the final selection of the girl, and gleefully chose a wench who at least wore the ribbons of a Free Bard, though Orm privately suspected that if any real musician heard her sing, they'd demand the ribbons back. Too much drinking and other abuses of her own body had taken a heavy toll of her voice, mind, and musical talents. All of her songs sounded alike, and all of them were similar in theme as well. She fancied the company of people precisely like that young street-tough, perhaps for the thrill of association, although she claimed that they gave her ideas for more of her songs. Bitter, uncertain of temper, aggressive and yet cowardly, she made trouble just for the sake of seeing what happened. Orm privately considered that he would be doing the world a favor in helping to rid it of the ill-natured creature.

Orm got the blade into the hands of the street-tough as Rand requested. Only then did he hear the rest of the plan.