Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Mercedes Lackey

want anyone to know that they couldn't keep a crazy Priest-Mage from killing people! The resulting scandal could rock the Church to its foundations, calling into question virtually every aspect of control now exercised by Church officials. There had been enough scandal already associated with the Church's possible involvement in the Great Fire at Kingsford, and the trickery and chicanery of High Bishop Padrick had caused great unrest.
    Riots? There'd be riots over that one, all right. With the Church claiming its tithe and doing damned little for the poor with that tithe, all it would take would be a hard winter, bad storms, and food shortages. A real, full-scale riot directed against the Church would produce enough angry people to level every Church-owned structure in the city.
    If the Priest wasn't mad—if he was doing this with Church sanction—
    A chill ran down his spine. Don't think that. Don't write it down. 
    It could be some terrible experiment in magic gone wrong. And that would be another reason for Rayburn's superiors to want it nicely sunk in the bottom of the harbor. No one would want people to know that the Church permitted anyone to dabble in the kind of magic that would drive a man to murder a relatively innocent woman and then kill himself.
    Something else occurred to him and he wrote that down under the Murders topic. What if this isn't local? What if we aren't the only city to have this going on? 
    Well, if it wasn't local, it probably had nothing to do with the Church. Not that the Church couldn't be involved, but mages couldn't work magic at great distance, and something that caused murders in more than one city couldn't be hidden for long if Church officials knew about it. Things like that leaked out, novices learned things they weren't supposed to know, spreading rumor and truth more effectively than if the Church was spreading the tales deliberately.
    There is a bare possibility that this is a mad Priest, that the Church knows about it, and they keep moving him from town to town every time he starts doing things like this, trying to cover up the murders and hoping that at some point he'll just stop, or God will stop him for them. 
    Well, there was one way of telling if it was local or not.
    He put his two lists aside and took a fresh sheet of paper, addressing it to The keeper of the mortality lists, Highwaithe, which was the nearest town upriver.
    He sighed, and flexed his hand to ease the cramps in it, dipped the quill in the inkwell, then set the pen carefully to the paper again.
    Good Sir, he began, I am collecting mortality statistics in relation to the weather, and am particularly interested in the occurrence of murder-suicides over the past five years. . . . 
    There. Let Rayburn try to stop him now.
    The only thing that is going to stop me now, he thought wryly, is my aching hand, and the number of letters I'm willing to write. 
     
    About the time he began getting replies to his letters, the rash of murders ended, as inexplicably as they had begun.
    There were no more street-musicians cut down with vanishing knives. The only murders occurring now were the sordid and completely uninteresting kind.
    But Tal was not relieved—rather, he was alarmed.
    Every one of the clerks to whom he had written had responded, and most had been delighted that someone was showing interest in their dreary statistics. He'd gotten everything he asked, and more—one enterprising fellow had even sent him a breakdown of his violent-crime statistics by moon-phase.
    Tal had set up one corner of his sitting-room with a map pinned to the wall and his pile of return letters beneath it. He sorted out the letters that showed no real increase in the number of murder-suicides, then stuck a pin into the map for every occurrence in those towns and cities where the number had gone up. The result was a crooked line that began—at least as far as he could tell—at a small town called Burdon Heath. At first, the grisly