Master of Plagues: A Nicolas Lenoir Novel

by E. L. Tettensor

  “What is it?” Kody asked.

  Lenoir drew out a ragged shiver of wood with a bit of canvas drooping from it. Slowly, forlornly, the rest of the painting followed, clinging to its shattered frame like a furled sail. “Garden By Evening, it would appear. What is left of it.”

  Kody winced. “Lord Einhorn won’t be happy about that. Neither will the chief.”

  “Lord Einhorn’s love affair with this monstrosity is obviously over, or he would not have put it up for auction. As for the chief . . . It is not our job to protect works of so-called art. We are policemen, not museum curators.”

  Kody did not look convinced, and he gave the thief a shove with his boot. The man moaned something about his legs. “Broken, most likely,” Kody said. “Want me to carry him, Inspector?”

  Lenoir did not doubt for a moment that the burly sergeant was strong enough, but the question still struck him as bizarre. “You are a sergeant, Kody, not some newly whelped street hound. Leave the heavy lifting to the watchmen.”

  “I’ll go find one,” Kody said, and he loped off toward Warrick Avenue.

  Absently, Lenoir flattened the bedraggled painting against the wall. He scrutinized its bold colors, its harsh, clipped strokes, its muddy texture. A garden only a Braelishman could love. “I shall ask the magistrate to be lenient, my friend,” he muttered to the thief, “for you have surely done a public service.”

  * * *

  “Destroyed,” said Chief Lendon Reck. “As in, destroyed.”

  Lenoir shrugged. “Perhaps that is too strong. I’m sure it can be restored, though why anyone would wish to, I cannot imagine.”

  The chief gave him a wry look. “You’re an art critic now?”

  “I am Arrènais, Chief. We are all art critics.”

  Reck snorted. “Not to mention food critics, fashion critics, theater critics . . .”

  “Criticism builds character.”

  “I guess that explains why you lot are such a humble people.”

  Lenoir’s lip quirked just short of a smile. “Undoubtedly.”

  The repartee was short-lived. The chief’s countenance clouded over again, his thick gray eyebrows gathering beneath the deep lines of his forehead. “You want to tell me what in the below my best inspector is doing running down a thief? That’s his job.” He jabbed a finger at Kody.

  The irony of this lecture was not lost on Lenoir. Small wonder Kody acts like a watchman, when you act like a sergeant. “I was not precisely running the man down,” he said, a little defensively. “I did not expect to meet the thief, merely to discover his hideout.”

  Reck spread his hands, inviting Lenoir to continue.

  “The painting was stolen yesterday, from the auction house. His Lordship wished to recover it, and he asked for me personally. I intended to discover the thief’s hideout and assemble some watchmen to bring him in.”

  “Didn’t quite go to plan, though,” Kody put in, helpfully.

  “So you end up chasing him all over Evenside.” Reck shook his head. “I don’t know what’s got into you, Lenoir. A few months ago, I could hardly get you to take an interest in a murder investigation. Now you’re putting your life on the line for a stolen painting. You have a recent brush with death or something?”

  This time, Lenoir chose to ignore the irony. “I thought you would want me to take the case, Chief. Lord Einhorn is a particular benefactor of the Metropolitan Police.”

  “Don’t I know it! And now I have to explain to His Lordship how a valuable piece of art came to be destroyed!”

  “I can explain it to him, if you wish.”

  The wry look returned. “No, thank you. I’d like to make it sound like we regret ruining his painting.”

  Lenoir shrugged. “As you like. And now if you will excuse me, I have a report to file. . . .” More accurately, Kody had a report to file, but Lenoir saw no point in bothering the chief with extraneous details.

  “Later,” Reck said, rising and grabbing his coat from the rack. “You’re coming with me, Lenoir. We have business with the lord mayor.”

  Lenoir made only the barest effort to conceal his dismay. “We, Chief? I cannot imagine what His Honor could possibly—”

  “Save it. I know how you feel about the man, but fortunately for you, it’s not mutual. His Honor has a crisis on his hands, and he wants our best. That means you. Now let’s go.” Turning to Kody, he added, “I’ll want that report when I get back.”

  Lenoir trailed the chief down the stairs and into the kennel, bracing himself for the throng. The shift was just changing over, and watchmen teemed in every direction, choking the narrow avenues between work spaces. Sergeants tucked themselves more tightly behind their desks, and scribes pressed up against walls and collected in corners, clutching their ledgers and ink bottles and waiting out the tide. The chief made no such accommodation, nor did he need to; as soon as his boots hit the floor, the pack of hounds parted as if by some collective instinct, standing aside to let their alpha through. Lenoir followed closely in Reck’s wake, feeling the pack close up behind him.

  The chief’s carriage waited for them in the street, a pair of watchmen serving as driver and footman. Reck waved the latter off as he climbed in, and he was still scowling when Lenoir took the seat across from him. “If you hate the carriage so much, why do you take it?” Lenoir asked, amused.

  “For the dignity of the Kennian Metropolitan Police,” Reck said dryly. “If I showed up at the lord mayor’s mansion on horseback, I’d never hear the end of it.” He rapped his knuckles on the wall behind him, and the carriage started up.

  The chief said nothing for the first several blocks, preferring to stare out the window, lost in the cares of his office. Ordinarily, silence suited Lenoir perfectly well, but he did not wish to arrive at the lord mayor’s without any notion of why he had been summoned. “There is a body, I presume?” he prompted.

  “If only it were just the one.” Reck’s reflection in the carriage window was weary. Lines crisscrossed his pale face, each one a journey, tread and retread, like game trails in the snow. He had been strong once, Lenoir judged, a heavy like Kody, but in the ten years Lenoir had known him, he had always seemed . . . used. Not for the first time, Lenoir wondered why the man did not simply retire. He had earned his rest many times over. And if there was no one around capable of taking his place . . . well, that was not going to change anytime soon. The Kennian Metropolitan Police had a few stray threads of competence, but they were tightly woven into a fabric of mediocrity. Unless the chief planned to cling to his post until he died, he was going to have to accept the fact that his successor, whoever he was, was most likely not going to measure up.

  In the meantime, Reck had more than one body on his hands. A serial killer, or a massacre? Sadly, the City of Kennian was no stranger to either. “How many dead?” Lenoir asked.

  “Over a thousand, at last count.”

  Just like that. A hard blow to the stomach.

  Lenoir stared. “I don’t understand. There cannot have been a thousand murders in the entire history of the Metropolitan Police.”

  “Who said anything about murders?”

  Lenoir frowned. “It’s not like you to be coy, Chief.”

  Reck scowled back at him. “I’m not the one being coy. All I know is what His Honor’s letter said, and that wasn’t much. There’s some kind of epidemic at the Camp, and he’s afraid it’s getting out of hand.”

  “I have heard the rumors, of course, but . . . what has it to do with us? It is unfortunate, but hardly unusual. Disease is the wildfire of the slums. You can count upon it razing the ground every now and then. It is not a matter for the police.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” Lendon Reck, like Nicolas Lenoir, was not a man inclined to sentimentality. “Look, there’s no point grousing about it. The lord mayor calls; we come running.” The chief’s to
ne left little doubt about his own lack of enthusiasm for this endeavor, and Lenoir decided it was pointless to press the matter further. He would have his answers soon enough.

  The walls outside the carriage window soon gave way to sloping lawns and manicured hedges, signaling their arrival at the mayoral mansion. Lenoir could not suppress a sour turn of his mouth. Emmory Lyle Hearstings had been lord mayor of Kennian for three years, and in that time, he had thoroughly distinguished himself as one of the most fatuous creatures on hind legs. Lenoir had never been endowed with a great store of patience, but few taxed his meager reserves more thoroughly than His Honor. The sole stroke of good fortune was that Hearstings was generally too thick to notice. Still, Reck was taking no chances: as the carriage shuddered to a halt, he leveled a finger at Lenoir and said, “On your best behavior, Inspector, or I’ll have you patrolling with the pups.”

  Lenoir might have declared such an activity to be preferable to the current enterprise, but he had no wish to antagonize the chief further, so he merely nodded.

  They were shown to a frilly parlor and offered tea. They both declined. The chamberlain invited them to sit, indicating a delicate-looking sofa upholstered with elaborately embroidered silk. Reck frowned at it dubiously, as though he had been invited to sit on a poodle. He opted for a more functional-looking chair instead. Lenoir perched on the proffered sofa, if a little gingerly.

  “A fine piece, newly commissioned,” the chamberlain said, his pride evidently piqued by the chief’s rebuff.

  “It’s . . . nice,” Reck said, a peace offering. “Goes with the style of the room.”

  “Arrènais,” the chamberlain said, and Lenoir succumbed to a fit of coughing.

  His Honor kept them waiting, as was his wont. It would not do for him to seem too available. Reck folded his arms and scowled at the carpet. Lenoir drummed his fingers on his trousers (the only genuinely Arrènais fabric in the room, or he was a fishwife). The clock on the mantel measured out the passage of time with prim precision. The chamberlain reappeared now and then to update them on His Honor’s unavailability, and to offer tea. Eventually, he was obliged to draw the curtains against the increasingly intrusive slant of the afternoon sun.

  By the time Hearstings graced them with his presence, even Reck had had enough; he sprang to his feet like a scalded cat. “Your Honor.”

  “Chief Reck.” The lord mayor’s improbable mustaches perked up as he smiled. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long. And Inspector! I trust you are par rinn . . . er, par renne—”

  “Very well. Thank you,” Lenoir said before further violence could be done to his mother tongue.

  “Yes, well. Very good. Please, gentlemen, take a seat.” Hearstings lowered his own ponderous girth into an armchair. Even as he sat, he reached inside his jacket and consulted his pocket watch in a gesture contrived enough to grace a portrait, or perhaps even hard currency. “How are things at the station?”

  “Fine, thank you, Your Honor,” Reck said.

  “A lovely graduation ceremony last week. You must so enjoy welcoming the new lads.”

  “One of the privileges of the job.”

  “Excellent food too. We must be allocating too much coin to the Metropolitan Police!” His Honor barked out a laugh.

  A vein swelled in the chief’s forehead, a sign every hound knew and dreaded.

  Hearstings was oblivious. “By the way, Reck, are you looking into that business of Einhorn’s?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, good. I heard there was quite an incident at the auctioneer’s. Why, did you know—”

  “Excuse me, Your Honor, I thought you wanted to discuss the Camp?”

  “Ah, indeed.” The lord mayor assumed a solemn look, running his thumb and forefinger along his mustaches. “I’ll come straight to the point.”

  Somehow, the chief managed to nod without a hint of irony.

  “We have an epidemic in the Camp,” Hearstings said. “Horrid disease, from what I hear. Men bleeding to death from the inside out.”

  Reck grimaced. “Sounds ugly.”

  “That’s an understatement. Have you ever heard of anything like it?”

  The chief shook his head. “You, Lenoir?”

  “No, Chief, I have not.”

  “Neither has my physician,” said Hearstings. “So far, it’s confined to the Camp, thank God, but it’s making a damn mess of the place. If it gets out of hand, I’ll have panic on my hands.”

  Lenoir did not doubt that was true, but he still failed to see where the police came into it. So did Reck, apparently, for he asked, “What exactly do you need from us?”

  Hearstings fluttered his hand, as though shooing a fly. “I’m sure it’s nothing, but I promised Lideman I’d send for you. Head out there first thing in the morning. Talk to him. Hear him out, let me know if you think there’s anything in it, that’s all.”

  Lenoir and Reck exchanged a blank look. “Lideman? And he is . . . ?”

  “From the College of Physicians. Head of Medical Sciences. He’s been out at the Camp the past few days looking into this. He has . . . theories.”

  “About what, exactly?”

  “Why, about the disease, of course. About where it came from.”

  “No doubt that is a fascinating puzzle for a physician,” Lenoir said, “but it is not the concern of the Metropolitan Police.”

  Reck shot him a warning look. “What Lenoir means, Your Honor, is that my hounds are hardly qualified—”

  “You misunderstand,” the lord mayor said. “I’m not asking you to solve a medical mystery. I’m asking you to look into a potential crime. You see, Lideman doesn’t think the disease reached the Camp on its own. He believes it was planted.”

  For a moment, Lenoir was not sure he had heard right. “Planted. Meaning, deliberately.”

  “Yes.”

  Reck leaned forward, his chair creaking beneath him. “You think someone started a plague on purpose?”

  “It sounds outlandish, I know, but Lideman is absolutely convinced. If he’s right, it means someone is trying to commit mass murder.”

  More than a thousand bodies, the chief had said. And that was just the beginning. “If he is right,” Lenoir said, “someone is succeeding.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “I don’t get it,” said Kody.

  If he had all day, Lenoir could not possibly enumerate all the ways in which that was true. “Could you be more specific, Sergeant?”

  “It just seems kind of far-fetched. I mean, why would anybody want to start an epidemic?”

  Lenoir guided his horse toward the stone archway that marked the Stag’s Gate, nodding at the guard as he neared. It had always struck him as a quaint anachronism—putting guards on a gate that no longer held any significance, the old walls having long since been outstripped by the growth of the city—but he played along. It was still theoretically possible for the guards to refuse someone passage, and in Lenoir’s experience, minor authorities enjoyed nothing better than flexing their muscle. It was best not to tempt them. Instead, he held his horse patiently while the guard made a great show of inspecting a handcart before waving it through, as though the old woman wheeling it were passing from the countryside into the city, instead of from Houndsrow to Whitmarch.

  “And if you did want to start an epidemic,” Kody went on, “why do it in the Camp? Why not somewhere more central, like Greenmire or Stonesgully?”

  The sergeant had a point. If the goal was to spread the disease as rapidly as possible, it would make more sense to plant it somewhere within the city walls, where conditions were ripest. The population density, the location—the inner city slums made ideal breeding grounds for disease. The Camp outdid them all for sheer squalor, but it was far enough on the outskirts of the city that some did not even consider it part of Kennian proper.

  “T
hose are the right questions,” Lenoir said, “but this is not the right time to ask them. It is far too early to guess at motives. We do not even know if this Lideman’s theory is correct, and the disease was planted deliberately.”

  “I wonder if he’s the real thing. Most of these so-called physicians are charlatans, if you ask me. Although, I suppose if he’s Head of Medical Sciences at the college, he must have some credentials. . . .”

  The sergeant continued to prattle on, but Lenoir had stopped listening. In moments like these, he pined for the good old days, when Bran Kody had despised him too much to indulge in idle chatter. Like a plant that wants nothing but air to survive, Lenoir had been content for his relationship with Kody to subsist entirely on cold silences. Alas, those days were gone.

  “Speculation is fruitless, Sergeant,” he interrupted. “We have not a shred of evidence to go on. For the moment, we must content ourselves with observation.” Silent observation, God willing.

  Kody took the hint and subsided.

  As they drew farther away from the old walls, the scene around them grew ever more disorganized. Where the inner city was a complex warren of narrow, twisting alleys, and the more distinguished suburbs of Morningside an ordered procession of genteel houses, the streets of Houndsrow seemed almost to exist by accident. Eight-story tenements vied for space with ancient stone farmhouses capped with thatch, the latter looking for all the world as if they had sprouted up between the gaps like furry little mushrooms after a rain. The tenements were topped with timber jetties that slanted out over the streets, giving the buildings a precarious lean, as if they had suffered a paralytic stroke. Every inch of space was accounted for, yet few of them well. Every now and then, Lenoir and Kody would pass a cobbled square with a fountain, or an ancient church, or some other remnant of a village that had long since been swallowed by Kennian’s voracious appetite for expansion. Mostly, though, the Evenside suburbs were a place of semipermanence, a haphazard landscape sketched in rough, hasty lines. Lenoir and Kody wended their way through the jumble until they reached Addleman’s Bridge, a narrow path of stone arching over the slow, moody waters of the River Sherrin. The river marked the edge of the city proper. On the near bank stood the modest suburb of Fishering; on the far bank, the Camp. In between, Addleman’s Bridge marked the last bastion of civilization.