Read Four and Twenty Blackbirds for Free Online

whore—a freelance, and not a member of the Guild or a House. Her official profession was "dancer."
    But there's a tamborine and a set of bones listed among her effects, which means she had at least pretended to be a musician. There's the musical link again.   
    The smith had actually killed her with a single stab of a long, slender knife with a triangular blade—
    There it is again!   
    —but this time, the victim was beaten unconscious first, and rather cut up before she died. She must have taken a long time to die, at least an hour or so. No one had heard any of this, probably because anyone who might have noticed the sound of blows would assume that one of the apprentices was chopping wood. Rain had been pouring down all day—
    Again.   
    —and as dusk neared, it was just turning to ice. The smith had finished with the knife the job he had begun with his fists, and then went into the smithy, picked up a pitchfork he'd been asked to mend, took it back out into the court, braced it in a pile of wood, and ran himself up onto it.
    He'd screamed as he did so, and that was the sound that had brought the apprentices and neighbors running. But he'd done a good job of killing himself; he hit numerous vital spots with the tines, and by the time they arrived, he was dead, and so was the girl.
    There was the expected panic and running about before someone thought to summon the law. The knife was missing by the time the law arrived, a fact that the constable in charge carefully noted. This fellow was competent and thorough, giving the case his full attention. He stayed for several hours questioning those who had been at the scene about the missing blade. He'd even had the apprentices searching the entire smithy for the missing knife, and had ordered them to take the wood and charcoal out piece by piece until they either found it or had determined that it was gone.
    Good for him!   
    Tal handed the report back to Sergeant Brock, who tipped him a wink. "I know you're a-mindful of this sort of affair. It's the sort o' thing a good law-man would find odd. Bodies are at the morgue," he whispered as he slipped the report back inside his desk. "And I've heard there's something peculiar about one of them." He shrugged. "Night like this, no Priest is likely to sit about minding corpses."
    Tal nodded his thanks, and went back to the ward-room to see if there was anything in the way of orders at his locker. He didn't expect anything—the weather had been so miserable all day that it wasn't likely the Captain had bothered to stir from his own comfortable house just for the purpose of appearing in his place at the station. When he made his way past all the tiny cubicles and entered the ward-room, he found his assumption was correct.
    The stove back here had another cheerful fire in it, and the desultory comments of those going off-shift told him that the Captain had indeed sent word by a servant that if he was needed he could be found at home today. No wonder all the stoves were fired up—the Captain wasn't here to economize!
    Nice to be able to work from home when the mood hits, he thought sourly, for Captain Moren, Captain Rayburn's predecessor, had spent most of his waking hours at his post, and the only time weather had ever kept him away from the station was the ice-storm of the year he died. Even then, he'd actually set out for the station, and it was only the urging of the constables that knew his ways and came to persuade him to turn back that prevented him from trying to reach his appointed place.
    But Tal kept those words behind his teeth; you never knew who was listening. "Anything I should know about?" he asked the constable he was relieving.
    "Not a thing; nobody wants to move outside in slop like this," the man said, holding his hands over the stove. "I looked in on a couple folk I thought might be in trouble down by the docks, but they've got smarter since the last storm; families are moving in together to share fuel."