Mercedes Lackey - Four and Twenty Blackbirds

"All right," he said, as Harden took the glass in both hands but did not drink. "Now tell me what happened."

Harden shivered, his sober, angular face taking on a look both boyish and lost. "It was this morning," he began. "Late morning. I was on my third round; there's a little half-mad beggar-girl that always takes a particular corner, and I have to keep an eye on her, because sometimes she darts out into the street and starts dancing in the middle of the road. She scares the horses and holds up traffic, people get angry." He shrugged apologetically; Tal understood what he did not say—that when something like that happened, people always blamed the constables. But what were they supposed to do? You couldn't lock up every crazy beggar in the city, there'd be no room for real criminals in the gaols.

"So you kept an eye on her," Tal repeated. "She ever done anything worse?"

Harden shook his head. "Mostly she just sits like today and sings hymns, except she makes up words for them. You can tell when she'd be going to cause trouble, she acts restless and won't sit still, and she wasn't like that today, so once I saw that, I ignored her. She's harmless. Was harmless," he corrected himself, growing pale again. "No one ever minded her. I was on the opposite side of the street from her. I—I really don't know what happened then, because I wasn't really looking for any trouble. She wasn't going anywhere, and no one out in the street was going to bother her. I thought, anyway."

He sat quietly for a moment, and Tal sensed his internal struggles as the constable warred with the seriously shaken man. "All I can tell you is that the very next thing I knew was that people on the other side of the street were screaming and pointing, a couple were trying to run, and there was a rag-picker standing over her, waving a bloody knife in the air. Then he threw the knife away, and before I could move, he ran out into the street. And I could swear, honestly, he actually threw himself right under the wheels of a heavy water-wagon. The driver couldn't stop, the wagon turned over and the barrel burst and flooded everything, and by the time I got it all sorted out the rag-picker was dead, too." His hands were trembling as he raised his glass and drained it in a single gulp. "I—didn't do anything. I didn't stop him, I didn't even see him kill that mad girl, I didn't stop him from killing himself—" His voice rose with each word, and he was clearly on the verge of hysteria.

A natural reaction, but not at all useful. Better snap him out of this.

"Are you a mage?" Tal interrupted him.

Harden stopped in midsentence and blinked owlishly at him. Probably the question seemed utterly irrelevant, but Tal had a particular strategy in mind. "Ah—no," he stammered.

"Then you couldn't have done anything, could you?" Tal countered. "There was no reason to assume that a rag-picker was going to murder the beggar; they're normally pretty feeble-bodied and just as often they're feeble-minded, too. They don't do things like that, right? Rag-pickers wander along the gutter, collecting trash, and half the time they don't even see anything that's not in the gutter in front of them. You had no reason to watch him, you didn't even know what he'd done until it was too late."

"But after—" Harden began.

"You said it yourself, it all happened quickly. How close were you? Across the street you said, and I'd guess half a block down." Tal shrugged as Harden nodded. "People were shouting, screaming, blocking the street—panicked. You couldn't possibly have gotten across to him with any speed. There was certainly no reason to think he'd throw himself under a wain! And short of using magic to do it, you couldn't have stopped him from where you were standing! Right?"

Harden nodded again, numbly. Tal poured his glass full and topped off his own. "That was a hell of an experience," he said, with a little less force. "A hell of a thing. Bad enough when you come pick up the pieces, but when it happens right in front of you, it's natural to think you could have done something the cits couldn't. But just because you're a constable, that doesn't give you the ability to read thoughts, move faster than lightning, and pick up water-wagons with your bare hands."

Harden took a few deep breaths, closed his eyes for a moment, then took a small sip of the wine. "You're right, of course," he replied shakily. "I wasn't thinking—"

"No one could be, in those circumstances," Tal replied dryly. "Lad, most of the cits think we can do anything, and expect us to on a regular basis; that kind of thinking can get you believing you're supposed to really be able to. But you're just a man, like any of the cits—just you have a baton and some authority, people listen to you, and you can handle yourself against a couple of armed ruffians. And none of those things make you either a Priest or a mage, to save a soul or a body, either. Now, what made Brock think you should talk to me about this?"

"Well—I guess because it was another murder-suicide, and the knife is missing," Harden said after a moment of thought. "He told me about your theory, and it seems to fit. I suppose you could say that the beggar was a musician; at least, she was always singing. She didn't know the man, I had never seen him on my beat. Judging by the wound, it was a strange knife, too; like a stiletto, but with a longer blade. We looked for it, too, believe me. After he threw it away, it just vanished."

From the moment that Harden mentioned the rag-picker throwing the knife away, Tal had the feeling that this murder did match his profile; now he was sure of it. Once again, the knife was gone, and he was already certain that it would never be found.

He was also certain that no links would be uncovered joining the beggar-woman and the rag-picker, no matter how diligently he looked. The rag-picker probably was not even from this part of town, and he normally would never have been on that street. It was the same pattern all over again; the same damnable, frustrating pattern.

The use of magic could explain it, some kind of compulsion-magic, perhaps operating through the medium of the knife, but why ? All the victims were utterly insignificant!

What was more, all the victims were utterly unalike, especially the last three. A real street-musician, a whore, and a beggar—aside from being poor and female, and marginally connected with music, they had nothing in common.

He shoved it all into the back of his mind and concentrated on coaxing Harden to talk himself out. The wine helped; it loosened the boy's tongue to a remarkable extent, and once Harden started, he kept going until he ran himself out.

Just like I did, the night that fellow jumped off the bridge in front of me. . . .

He hadn't thought of that in many years now, but there had been a time when he literally could not get it out of his mind. Now he knew that his presence or absence would have had no effect on the man, but then—

Half the time I thought I'd somehow caused him to jump by just being there, and half the time I thought if I'd just tried harder I could have talked him out of it. In both cases, the guilt and self-recrimination were the same.

Now it was his turn to listen and say all the things that Harden wanted desperately to hear—things he knew were logical, but that guilt told him could not be true.

They emptied that bottle and another between them, though most of it went into Harden. At one point Tal ascertained that Harden lived alone, and had no woman or relative waiting anxiously for him to come home, and just kept replenishing his glass until he finally broke through the final barrier and wept.