Free Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Mercedes Lackey Page A

clamping wrists and ankles down to the table, filling her mouth with wax, then setting to work with copper wire, semiprecious stones, and most of his tools. She was quite chastely covered in a garment of wire and gems, all of it laced through her muscles and skin, and riveted to her bones to anchor it in place. Her eyes were wired open, her head covered with a wig of fine wire riveted to her head. The pain must have been excruciating, and because the wounds were so small, she wouldn't even have lost consciousness because of blood-loss. The knife he had plunged into her breast must have come as a relief.
    Now the detachment Tal had been looking for finally came, and with it, that odd ability to analyze even the worst information. If she'd lived, she would have been crippled for life. The amount of nerve-damage he must have done would have been impossible to repair, let alone whatever he did to her brain by spiking that wig into her skull.
    But she was not to be alone in her suffering, for Pym finished his night by drinking every drop of acid and poisonous chemicals in his shop. It was the horrified judgment of the Healer-Priest brought in to decide on the cause of death that Pym probably lived about as long as his victim before he died.
    Once again, the girl had been murdered with a knife with a triangular blade, and once again, the knife was missing. The official version was that Pym had stabbed her with one of his files, but none of the files had even a trace of blood on them—in fact, the files were the only tools Pym hadn't used to make his "display."
    Tal would have given five years of his life to see Pym's body, but unfortunately, the acid he had drunk had rendered it unfit even to be placed in the morgue. Or, as one of the constables with a mordant sense of humor said, "The only way to put him in the ground was to scoop him up in buckets and pour him in."
    But I wish I knew if he had the same bruises as the others I've seen. . . .   
    The Gypsy-wench was buried the next day with all the pomp due a Guildmaster, a funeral that was paid for by donations. If she had any relatives, they were lost in the throng of spectators who came to gawk rather than mourn, searching for some sign of what had been done to her under the burial-gown of stiff snow-white silk that covered her from chin to toes. Tal didn't go, but Captain Rayburn made a prominent appearance.
     
    The last murder took place right under Tal's nose.
    He was making another attempt to find a decent set of shirts, because by now he needed more than one, and this time had gone much farther afield than his usual haunts. Lately, bargeloads of clothing came in at the southern end of the city on a semiregular basis, brought up out of places where a species of establishment called a manufactory was becoming common. There were manufactories in the High King's capital of Lyonarie, but only lately had anyone set them up along the Kanar River. Such establishments produced large quantities of simply-made garments in a limited range of sizes and colors, and shipped them off by water, since shipping them overland would have made them too expensive to compete with locally made garments. Tal was not certain that he would fit any of the sizes available, and he was more than a little dubious about the quality of such garments, but by now he was desperate enough to go look at them when word came that another shipment had arrived.
    It was a pleasant enough day, sunny with no more than the thinnest of cloud-cover, and Tal took his time about reaching his goal. The only thing on his mind was the book that he'd just started, and a vague wish that he'd brought it with him to read if there was going to be a queue.
    As he arrived, it was obvious that he had come to the right address by the crowd just outside the door, and he resigned himself to a wait. He was only one among a throng of customers at the dockside warehouse, and was met at the door by a man who looked him over with an