Honest. And he hasn't said a word about wanting a position.
"I will admit that I'm becoming obsessed with this case," Tal continued, and then she saw a hint, just the barest glimpse, of something fierce and implacable. It gazed at her out of his eyes for a moment, then vanished. "Who or whatever is behind this, I want it stopped."
"And you want from me?" Ardis spread her hands. Now, if there was going to be a plea for anything, she had given Tal an opening.
He hesitated. "I want—authority," he said finally. "Credentials. Not a great deal, just enough that if anyone asks me why I'm snooping around, I can say I'm acting on your behalf and with your knowledge. Of course, I'll keep you informed every day, even if I find nothing, and I won't actuallydo anything unless it is to stop a murder in progress. I won't search houses or people, I won't try and haul anyone off to gaol, I won't threaten or bully. I'll just observe and ask questions."
Ardis graced him with her most skeptical look. "And that's all you want?"
"Well, obviously I'dlike to have all of the Kingsford constables working on this, I'dlike the services of a mage, and I'dlike four or five personal assistants," he replied a little sarcastically. "But I'd also like to be made Captain of the constables, stop this madness before it infects Kingsford, and be rewarded with the Grand Duke's daughter. Obviously none of this is possible, so I'm asking for the least I need to continue to track this case."
"And what had you planned to do to make ends meet?" she asked bluntly. "I assume you aren't independently wealthy."
He shrugged. "I was working on the case in my off-time anyway. I have enough muscle and experience to get a job as a private guard, or even a peace-keeper in a tavern. I can still work on it in my off-time, and without being harassed for doing so, if I can just get minimal credentials."
So, he's willing to support himself in a strange city just so that he can continue following this—whatever it is. He's right. He's obsessed. I wish more people would become that obsessed when it is necessary.
"Let me assume for the moment that there reallyis a—force—that is causing these deaths. It occurs to me that alerting the entire constabulary to this case might also make that force go into hiding," she said aloud, not quite willing to answer his request yet.
"That could easily be true," he agreed. "Which is, unfortunately, a good reasonnot to inform Captain Fenris—or at least, to ask him not to inform the rest of the constabulary. And it also occurs to me that this force knows a great deal about how both investigation and magic operate." He raised one eyebrow at her. "It hadn't escaped my notice that every one of the suicides was eitherby means of running water orunder running water—even the jeweler."
Now she was surprised, for she had thought that last horrific case had all been perpetrated indoors. "How could the jeweler—"
"He worked with acids, and he had a kind of emergency downpour rigged in his studio," Tal replied. "He had a pipe coming down from his rooftop cistern that ended in the ceiling of his studio, with a valve on the end that was operated by a string with a drain beneath it. After he drank his acids and poisons, he staggered over beneath the pipe and pulled the string. When he was found, the cistern was empty—the initial investigation missed that, because by then the floor was dry." He looked at her expectantly.
"Obviously I don't have to tell you that running water is the only certain means of removing evidence of magic." She tapped the ends of her forefingers together and frowned. "This is beginning to form a picture I don't like."
"Because most of thehuman mages are in the Church?" Tal asked quietly.
Surprised, but pleased at his audacity, she nodded. "There is the possibility that it is not a human, but frankly—what you've told me fits no pattern of a nonhuman mind that I am aware of. At least, not a sane one, and the nonhuman races are very careful not to allow their . . . problems . . . to escape to human lands."
"Just as we are careful not to let ours escape to theirs," he corroborated. "Still. Elves?"
She shook her head. "Elves take their revenge in a leisurely fashion, and an artistic one. This is both too sordid and too hasty for Elves to be involved."
"Haspur aren't mages, nor Mintaks, nor Deliambrens," he said, thinking out loud. "It could be someone from a very obscure race—but then, I'd have known about him; he'd stand out in those neighborhoods like a white crow. What about Gypsies? I've heard some of them are mages."
Again, she hesitated. "There are bad Gypsies—but the Gypsies are very careful about policing their own people. If this is a Gypsy, he has somehow eluded hunters from among his own kind, and that is so difficult that I find it as unlikely as it being an Elf. I have information sources among them, and I have heard nothing of—"
She stopped in midsentence, suddenly struck by something. Her cousin's letter—
Tal waited, watching her expectantly.
"I was about to say that I have heard nothing of this," she said very slowly, "but I have hadsome distressing information from my sources. The victims—have they by any chance been Free Bards or Gypsies?"
Again, she got a startled look from him. "I can only speak for the cases in Haldene; I didn't get much detail on the ones in the other towns and villages, and frankly, I didn't spend much time investigating when I learned that the murders were going in the direction that I had feared. No Free Bards, and only one Gypsy," he told her, licking his lips. "But—perhaps this will seem mad to you, which is why I hesitated to mention it—every one of the dead women was either a musician of sorts, or posing as one."
Ardis pursed her lips. "So. There is a link between the victims, even when they seem disparate in everything but their poverty."