A Brotherhood of Crows.

She’d been on the trail for hours now. It was an accident that she had even begun to track him. She’d take a shortcut through Waverley on her way from Leith towards the University, and as she pushed through the crowds running between high-speed trains and jostling in the queues for the short distance airships that carried many of Edinburgh’s commuters, she’d had heard, seen, felt: I will kill you.

It had been a shock that had stopped her dead in her tracks. A man had crashed into the back of her and sworn at her but she had ignored him. She was focussing on trying to pinpoint that sudden feeling, those four words that had arched into her mind in the crowd. There it was again, rapidly moving towards to exit onto Waverley Bridge : I will kill you.

On hearing it again, Zularna Munro, student of psychology at the University of Edinburgh, knew she would not be going to her afternoon seminar. She had something far more important to do.

Her usual gear was still in her flat in half way down Leith Walk, a good twenty minutes walk from here. Luckily, Zularna planned ahead. She diverted through the station to the luggage lockers. She opened her usual locker with an old fashioned combination lock she had chosen over the standard DNA coded devices (too easy to identify her if her stash was ever discovered), and took out a narrow, long cylindrical leather case. She could tell by its weight it had everything she needed. Slinging it over her shoulder, she moved quickly through the crowd towards Waverly Bridge, looking for all intents and purposes like a student with a tightly rolled poster carrier on her back.

The crossbow was her own design, built from light carbon fibre and collapsable down to the length and width of a poster tube. The bolts were homemade, though any archery expert would have marvelled at the craftsmanship. The hatchet, another thing of Zularna’s own design and making, was spring-loaded and collapsed down to size of a small plate, its blade folded neatly into itself. The young woman who took the steps up to the chill, January afternoon did not look like she was armed to the teeth.

On the ground now, she listened, she reached out, she let her eyes become unfocused, and she sought him, sought the one who had said I will kill you. Her heart had begun to race, and she was getting distracted; she caught glimpses from the passing commuters, anxieties about office encounters, fantasties kept secret from spouses, and a few seconds-old fleeting thoughts at what the tall, blue haired woman was doing, standing in the middle of the pavement and looking blank.

Zularna could not read minds. That, as far as she could tell, was impossible. The human mind was not a book one could dip into at will. It was a chaotic stew of fears and feelings and aches and sights and sounds and smells. Memories was what she could see. Zularna was the only twenty one year old woman in the known world that could see into other people’s pasts.

Zularna did not pretend to understand it herself. It didn’t require physical touch, though whenever she did touch people, from brushing into someone on a crowded airship to embracing another person, she got a flash of that person’s memory. Often, it was totally incoherent. Memories were not prefabricated pieces of film; often, they were feelings which defied naming, which the human mind later tried to impose some sort of order upon, or forgot. The first time she had held hands with another person (a boy she couldn’t even remember the name of, when she was six) she’d suddenly been hit by a desire for apples. Zularna hated apples; that desire was not her’s, but that nameless boy’s memory of apples.

As she had grown older, the ability to see the pasts of others had been useful. She had always been able to preempt street harassment. Men didn’t know how to respond when the second before they cat called she told them to fuck off. They were barely even conscious of that sudden desire they’d had, seconds before, to bother that girl, to have a bit of a laugh at her expense. Teachers, and then University supervisors, had struggled to understand how she often finished sentences for them in class, unaware that they had been recalling a fact or figure a moment before. Friends commended her on her ability “to understand,” when something was wrong. They did not know that she already knew what was wrong, and often experienced it when she came near them.

But the talent - if you could call it that - was still chaotic. Sometimes she caught glimpses of recent memories, sensations or feelings or images that had just flickered across someone’s consciousness a second before. Other times, distant memories of childhood had suddenly been displayed before her without reference or relevance. The life she lived was caught in the middle of the chaos of memories.

She began to walk towards the Old Town, letting her feet guide her, remaining as blank as possible, reaching out for that glimpse (I will kill you) of someone else’s past. She needed to hear it again to make sure it that he (it was almost always a he) was a legitimate target. She’d often caught homicidal wishes in people’s memories - a moment of fury or frustration against a co-worker or a family member, a brief burst of violent mental rage which evaporated into regret within a second. But when it was repeated, when she felt it again and again, it meant more. It meant it was premeditated. It meant someone was planning something.

The first time she had killed someone had been a beater. She’d been in a bar with friends, not far from her flat, and as she’d ordered a round of drinks, her arm had brushed the man next to her at the bar. In that moment, she’d gotten a sudden vivid image of a fist pounding again and again into the prone, foetal body of a woman, and a drunken snarling voice saying I’m gonna give the bitch a black eye. She’d abandoned her friends and trailed the man home. With no weapons at that point, she removed one of the study laces from her boots, waited for a quiet moment, and strangled him on his doorstep. She had felt nothing while doing so. She was much much stronger than she looked, and the man had been flabby and drunk. A few days later she saw a news item on the holo about the murder; no suspects, the man had had a history of domestic violence towards his wife and children, and, though the new article had been diplomatic in its language, no one in particular mourned his loss. Good riddance.

I will kill you. She felt it again as she came to the bottom of Cockburn Street. She had him now - not that far ahead of her, a man, wrapped up tightly against the wind in an old woolen coat which seemed to dwarf and consume him. He was, or had recently, been thinking. Preparing for murder. She quickened her pace, being careful to keep a safe distance behind him, and began to follow him.

Ideally, she’d follow him to a quiet place, maybe even the planned location for the murder. From experience, she knew she needed less than fifteen seconds to draw her crossbow, cock it, and put a bolt into the back of his head. But this man was careful; he roamed the Royal Mile, walking aimlessly among the tourists and shoppers and commuters. The Mile itself was as packed as it would be any day during the Fringe; priests, clerics, and evangelists of a thousand different faiths bellowed from a thousand soapboxes the safe apocryphal blend of death and salvation. The Ministry of Theological Justice must have been concerned about attendances at church, and had driven the clergy out to the streets to boost their congregation quotas. Amidst all the din, the figure shambled unnoticed. Even from well behind him, Zularna could tell there was something odd about him. She could not see his face, his head clearly tucked down against the wind. The people who came too close to him on his shambling, directionless walk shied away, perhaps not intentionally, but out of a sudden sense of unease. As they passed her, she got a glimpse of their minds as well (Who is that? Is he drunk? Weirdo.). All she needed was a bit of privacy and she could finish him off.

Suddenly, he’d turned onto Blair Street, one of the sloping cobbled lanes that led down to the Cowgate. Very few people were around her now. Perfect. She waited, allowing him a small lead, and then dropped as if to tie her boots. In a practised movement, she opened her container, draw the crossbow (still neatly collapsed in on itself, it looked for all the world like a harmless piece of metal) and then slid it into her coat pocket. She wore a long dark coat of her own, but with a hole in the right hand pocket. This allowed her to keep the collapsed crossbow in the lining of her coat, safely hidden from view. Her finger rested on the trigger guard, and her thumb pressed lightly on the button on the bow’s stock that would both take of the safety restraint on the bolt and simultaneously snap open the bow arms, readying the weapon for use. Should she miss, and she rarely did, two reserve bolts were hooked on either side of the stock. It would take her a matter of seconds to yank one free, notch it and fire.

With bow ready, she took up pursuit again. The shambling man vanished around the corner into Cowgate itself, and she picked up the pace. She rounded the corner, half drew the bow and stepped around ready to fire.

The man was gone. The Cowgate stretched, dark and decrepit, filled with generations of rubbish and detritus from the city above, in both directions. Empty.

“Fuck it.” She muttered. How could he have vanished so quickly? He’d been moving at a pace that was almost leisurely. Even if he’d started to run (she was certain he had not detected her), she would see him fleeing.

A sudden wave of fear crept through her stomach. Out of sight of the public, she drew the bow completely, pressed the button to snap out the bow arms, and held it steady in a one handed grip. With her left hand, she drew the hatchet, slid lose its restraints and let it unfold in her hand. She swung the bow around the alley, with the hatchet raised to shoulder level, ready to swing. Nothing. Nothing moved anywhere around her. Beyond the distant sounds of the city far above her, there was silence.

Except there wasn’t. Suddenly, and from what seemed like a long, long way away, she caught another glimpse of memory, from the same mind she’d been tracking. She felt wind rushing around her, the beat of wings on her face and the raw rasping awk of a bird. And she felt something else too, the voice she had heard earlier saying: A murder for a murder for a murder of crows.

“Crows?” she muttered, frowning. Same voice, same memory, but no sign of the man she had been tracking. Something about that memory, something about that image of scavenger birds and the strange, childishly poetic quality of that phrase a murder for a murder for a murder of crows caused fear to prickle against the back of her neck once more. She shook her head to clear it, and began, slowly, methodically, crossbow in one hand and hatchet in the other, to make her way up Cowgate in search of her target.

It was an hour later that she found the body slumped against the wall. She would have walked right past it had it not been for terrible stick; the iron-like stench of blood, the reek of old filthy fabric. She felt herself retch. Not just at the sight of headless body, and the horrific crow like mask that sat on its shoulder, but for the crushing feeling that she had failed, that she had not been able to stop the killer. The stink told her the death was fresh, but she had heard no screams, saw no evidence of the killer’s recent presence. He had made his kill, and vanished into thin air.

She stood and stared at the corpse for what seemed like an age. She would get nothing here. The feeling of failure was worse than anything else. She’d never failed to intervene before. The sudden newness, at once euphoric and crushed, overwhelmed her.

She heard noises from further up Cowgate- someone approaching. She raised her crossbow, expecting the shambling killer to emerge from the gloom with bloodied hands. Instead, she saw two figures stumbling towards her. She fled to further up the alley, an old fire escape dangled limply from an abandoned building, and she climbed it, up to the first level. Rummaging into her leather holster, she drew out a small telescopic scope she attached to her crossbow for long range kill. She crouched, far away to be indiscernible, but with a good enough view of the corpse and the two people approaching it, and raised the scope to her eye, and watched and waited.

One was tall and wore a flat cap. The other was shorter, with the hood of a hoodie pulled over his head. Both, she saw, wore desert scarves wrapped around the lower parts of their faces, and goggles, concealing their identities. They stopped in front of the corpse, and stood, observing the grisly scene. She was too far away to catch the conversation. The taller one in the hat bent down to the corpse and began examining it. Then something happened which she hadn’t expected. As he crouched, staring intently at the body, he seemed to shimmer and flicker, as if he was an image on a holo and static had suddenly broken the signal.

The tall man crouched and flickered, and the shorter man tapped at a holo unit on his wrist. Then suddenly the tall man was whole again, solid, and was jerking away from the corpse. She heard him curse loudly. From her perch, Zularna tried to work out who these two were. No one came down this far without a reason, and they had not been surprised to find the headless corpse against the wall. They didn’t look like the police; their clothes were not uniforms, and they did not seem to be contacting reinforcements. She watched and waited, keeping her crossbow at the ready, her finger resting lightly on the trigger guard.

The tall man rose and spoke with the shorter man. The latter pulled down his scarf; he was only a boy, no more than seventeen, and she could see the concern on his face. The tall man lit a cigarette, and smoked while the boy began to scan the corpse with his wrist unit.

The the tall man shimmered and flickered and moved with unnatural speed towards her. She started, half expecting him to look right up at her. Instead, however, he (or the incandescent spectre of him) appeared to be talking to something in one of the overflowing ancient bins that littered Cowgate. A Cat? she thought, growing more confused. A few moments passed, and then the man was whole again. He had pulled down his scarf, revealing a bearded face, and deep set eyes, eyes which were looking directly up, to the great shadowy shape of George IV bridge. He called the boy over to him, and pointed to something Zularna could not see. Then they both began to head off, at a determined pace somewhere between a walk and a run, into the darkness of the Cowgate.

Zularna pocketed her scope, slipped down to the ground, and began to follow.