Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online

door to the morgue proper were ranged with mathematical precision on the fourth wall, and the Priest's desk, holding the records of all bodies currently held here, sat right in the middle of the room. The desk was a plain, wooden affair, but it hid a secret, a charcoal brazier in the leg-well that would keep the Priest nicely warmed all day. Tal began opening drawers and discovered more secrets. One of the drawers held goosedown cushions and a sheepskin pad to soften the hard wooden chair. There was a stack of books, most of them having little to do with religion, and a flask and a secret store of sweets. Finally he found what he was looking for—the records detailing what body lay where. A quick glance at the book told him where to look for the smith and his victim. Tal put the book back, then turned and crossed the intervening space with slow and deliberate steps, disliking the hollow ring of his cleated boot-heels in the dim silence, and pushed the door open.
    On the other side of the door, what appeared at first glance to be multiple rows of cots ranged out beneath the stone ceiling. But a second look showed that the "cots" were great slabs of stone, disturbingly altarlike, and the sheet-draped forms on top of the slabs were too quiet to be sleeping—although Tal had known a Priest or two, more iron-nerved or insensible than most, who would take a late-night nap among his charges on an overly warm night. It would almost be pleasant in here then; a special spell kept the temperature low, so that the bodies would not decompose as quickly. On one of those sweltering nights of high summer, when the air never moved and rain was something to be prayed for, the only place to escape the heat besides the homes of the ultra-wealthy was here.
    The morgue was crowded; season and weather were taking their toll of the very young, the elderly, and the poor. Judging by the lumpy forms beneath the sheets, the Priests had laid out several children on each slab, and Tal swallowed hard as he passed them. He could examine the bodies of adults with perfect detachment, but he still could not pass the body of a child without feeling shaken. There was something fundamentally wrong about the death of a child, and even after twenty years as a constable he still had not come to terms with it.
    His targets were at the very end of the morgue, a little apart from the rest, as if distaste for what had happened made the Priests set them apart from their fellows. Tal was mostly interested in the smith, but just for the sake of seeing if he spotted anything the first constable had not, he pulled back the sheet covering the girl.
    The sight of her battered face shocked him, and he had not expected to be shocked. When he'd read that she had been beaten, he had not really expected that she'd been beaten nearly to death. He spotted three injuries that by themselves would have killed her in a day or less. He could hardly imagine how she had survived long enough to be killed with the knife—her jaw was surely broken, and there was a pulpy look about her temple that made him think the skull might be crushed there, broken ribs had been driven into lungs, and her internal organs must have been pulped. She was so bruised that he could not really imagine what she had looked like before the beating, and that took some doing. The places where she'd been cut up were odd—symmetrical, forming patterns. Her clothing was tasteless and gaudy, cheap, but not shabby, indicating that she was not as poor as the last victim. That was probably because the last victim had insisted on earning her bread in ways that did not involve selling her body. As so many girls had found, when men were willing to pay more for sex than any other kind of unskilled work, it was hard to say no to what they offered.
    Not that I blame them. You've got to eat.   
    He couldn't spot anything that caught his attention, so he pulled the sheet back over her and moved on to the smith.
    Even on a