Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page A

freezingly cold day like this one, the heat in a forge was as bad as the full fury of the sun in high summer, and most smiths were half-naked most of the time. This one was no exception; leather trews and a leather apron were his only clothing. And it was because of that lack of clothing that Tal saw immediately what made Sergeant Brock whisper that there were rumors that one of the bodies looked "odd."
    In fact, if Tal had not known that the man's victim was a relatively frail woman, he would have sworn that the smith had been in some terrible fight just before he died. There were bruises all over his arms and shoulders, especially around his wrists.
    That couldn't be post-mortem lividity, could it? The marks were so very peculiar that he picked up the man's stiff arm and rolled the body over a little so he could examine the back. No, those bruises were real, not caused by blood pooling when the body lay on its face. He opened the shutter of his lantern more, and leaned over to examine the bruises closely.
    This is very, very strange. He wished that he was a doctor, or at least knew a Healer so he could get a more expert second opinion. He had never seen anything quite like these bruises before. . . .
    The closest he could come had been in the victim of a kidnapping. The perpetrators had ingeniously wrapped their victim in bandages to keep him from injuring himself or leaving marks on his wrists and ankles. The victim had been frantic to escape, full of the strength of hysteria, and had bruised himself at the wrists, ankles, and outer edges of his arms and legs in straining against his swaddlings. The bruises had looked similar to these—great flat areas of even purpling without a visible impact-spot.
    But no one had bound the smith—so where had the bruises come from?
    Tal stared at the body for some time, trying to puzzle it out, before dropping the sheet and giving up. There was no saying that the smith had not had those bruises before the girl ever showed up at his forge. And in a man as big and powerful as this one was, no one would have wanted to ask him where they had come from if he himself wasn't forthcoming about it.
    Some people have odd tastes. . . .   
    And that could have been what brought the girl to his business today. If she was a girl he'd picked up last night, no one would be aware that he knew her. And if she thought she could get a little extra business—or hush-money—out of him . . .
    He grimaced as he walked back towards the door. All this way—and this could very easily be a perfectly ordinary killing, if murder could ever be called "ordinary." The girl ventured out into filthy weather because she needed money and he was the nearest source of it. And perhaps she threatened him in some way, hoping to get that money, or wouldn't go when he ordered her out, and he snapped.
    But as he put his hand on the door, he knew, suddenly, that this was just too pat an explanation, and it all depended on the very fragile supposition that the smith was a man with peculiar appetites. Just as he could not be sure that the bruises had not already been present when the girl came to the forge, he could not be sure that they were.  
    Furthermore, that did not explain the strange suicide, nor the vanishing murder-weapon. Why would the man kill himself at all? The forge had been vacant at the time, but fully stoked; it would be more logical for the smith to throw the body on the flames and hope it incinerated before anyone looked in the furnace. The temperature required to smelt iron and steel was high enough to deal with one small human body. And why, with the variety of weapons and even poisons available in a forge, had he chosen the particularly excruciating death he had?
    No, this was another of his mystery-crimes again; he had the "scent," and he knew it by now.
    But for the moment, there was nothing more to be done about it except let it all brew in his mind. He stepped back out onto the icy street, and the