Master of Plagues: A Nicolas Lenoir Novel

by E. L. Tettensor

  Bevin, Augaud, and Gerd all whooped at this unexpected drama. “He’s going it alone!” Gerd cried. “I don’t believe it!”

  “Abandoning your partner in the second-last round!” Bevin laughed, raising his empty flagon in salute. “You’ve got stones, boy!”

  Hairy took it badly.

  “You little—” Whatever came next was drowned out as Hairy upended the table, scattering cards and coins. The barmaid shrieked and leapt back, spilling ale down the front of her frock. Hairy shoved her out of his way. “I’ll wring your neck for you!” He started around the table, his eyes fixed murderously on Zach.

  Bevin grabbed his arm. “Take it easy, mate. It’s just a game of cards. Not even much coin in it.”

  “And he is only a child,” Augaud added. He gave Zach’s shoulder a friendly thump, fueled with the strength of one too many ales. Zach tottered on his feet.

  A soft chink drew everyone’s eyes to the floor. Augaud had knocked a coin purse out of the inside pocket of Zach’s waistcoat. A blue-and-white one, with the Lerian rose stitched damningly on the side. Isn’t that just like a Lerian, Zach thought ruefully. So proud.

  Augaud looked up, his eyes widening as they met Zach’s. “You were leaned in so close,” Zach said helplessly. “I thought you were looking at my cards . . .”

  “Why you little—” The Lerian went for his knife.

  Zach bolted, leaping over an upended chair and diving for the entrance in a perfect demonstration of Brick’s Fourth Law of Crowns:

  Always sit nearest to the door.

  * * *

  “Interesting,” said Lenoir.

  Zach eyed the inspector doubtfully. As much as he wanted to believe he’d turned up something important, he didn’t see how he could have. He reckoned Lenoir was just trying to make him feel better, not letting on how disappointed he was. He did that sometimes—pretended not to be disappointed. Zach always saw through it, and it was always a blow. This time was especially bad, because it was so important. People were dying.

  At least he could show the inspector that he was smart enough to see where he’d come up short. “It’s not even a sure thing they were talking about the same disease,” he said, sawing off another forkful of steak. He dragged it through the juices, the way Lenoir always did. “Plus, he said it was years ago.”

  “True.”

  Zach talked around his meat. “And even if it was the same disease, and it did come over on the Serendipity, I don’t see why they would spread it around in the Camp. What would they get out of it?”

  Lenoir gave him a funny little smile. “That’s good, Zach. You are thinking like an inspector.”

  Zach squirmed in his chair, trying not to look pleased.

  “Motive is the most important element to work out,” Lenoir said. “Once you understand why a crime has been committed, who stands to gain, you are much closer to solving it.” He sighed and took a sip of his wine. “Which is why you are right to be skeptical. It is indeed hard to imagine what a few ordinary sailors could possibly gain from murdering thousands in the Camp.”

  “Maybe they’ve got something against the slums?”

  “They probably live in the slums themselves when they are not abroad. No, I think it very unlikely they are involved. Still, I will question them, just to be sure.”

  Zach winced. “Could you do it without mentioning me?”

  Lenoir gave him a knowing look. “Pinch a few purses, did we?”

  “He was looking at my cards!”

  “Honestly, Zach, how do you expect to do your job if half the sailors in town are baying for your blood?”

  “It’s not that bad. Anyway, I don’t have to do this for much longer, do I?”

  “I thought you liked the docks.”

  “That was before I spent five days straight listening to sailors talk about whores.”

  Lenoir laughed into his wine cup. “Surely that is not the only thing they discuss.”

  Near enough, thought Zach, and in enough detail to leave little to the imagination. Not that Zach had any imagination. He didn’t spend a lot of time around girls, and the ones he did encounter were pretty much the same as boys, as far as he could tell. Maybe they’d have been more . . . girlish . . . if they were born into different circumstances, but where Zach came from, there were no crisp frocks, no ribbons in your hair. Life on the streets wore you down. It was like those rocks in the river: whatever form God had originally given them, after a few years of being beaten down by the currents, they all became the same.

  Which was why it was so important to get out of those fast-moving waters and onto solid ground.

  “What about the cargos?” Lenoir asked. “Did you look into those?”

  Zach pulled out a scrap of paper and pushed it across the table. “See for yourself.”

  Lenoir peered at it. “This is illegible, Zach.”

  “Huh?”

  “Illegible.” The inspector waved the page irritably. “It means impossible to read.”

  Zach scowled. “There’s appreciation for you. The only orphan in the Five Villages who can write, and you’re complaining about my penmanship.”

  Lenoir was unmoved. “You can write because I paid for your lessons, but I find myself questioning whether I got my money’s worth.”

  Zach stabbed sulkily at his steak. “It doesn’t say anything anyway. Spices and cotton, cotton and spices. A little bit of wine and spirits.” Zach shrugged and popped his fork into his mouth. “That’s it.”

  “This is everything that has come in since you have been watching the docks?”

  “Pretty much. I also put down stuff that came in earlier that was being unloaded. When I could find out, anyway.” He pointed at the page.

  “Anjet worm?” Lenoir read bemusedly. “Yellow mule?”

  Zach snatched the page from Lenoir’s hands. “Angel wort and yarrow root,” he said, handing it back.

  Lenoir’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. “We really must discuss your spelling, Zach.”

  “What is that stuff anyway?” Zach asked before Lenoir could make good on the threat.

  The inspector scanned the page with a shake of his head. “I don’t know. More spices, most likely, judging by the quantities. You might be eating it right now.”

  Zach considered his plate, but all he saw was steak and blood, butter with a bit of parsley in it. He didn’t really like parsley, but at least he had something green on his plate. Sister Nellis was always telling him he had to have something green.

  “Nothing else, then?” Lenoir said.

  Zach shrugged. “I met a bloke who knew Sergeant Kody. Didn’t seem to like him much. I think maybe the sergeant put him in jail once.”

  “Quite possible. Kody spent a great deal of time at the docks as a watchman.”

  “Oh yeah?” Zach lowered his fork and knife. Here at last was a subject that really interested him. “How long did he have to be a watchman before he became a sergeant?” Zach had been trying to do the maths, figure out how long it would take him to get from street hound to inspector, but he didn’t know enough about it to make a reasonable guess.

  “Less than five years, but that is exceptional. Sergeant Kody was promoted very young.”

  “How come? ’Cause he’s so big?”

  Lenoir sniffed into his wine cup. “Come now, Zach. If that was so important, would I be an inspector?”

  “I suppose not.” Lenoir wasn’t small, but he wasn’t big either.

  “Kody was promoted to sergeant, on my recommendation, because he is a competent investigator. Much more so than most of his peers.”

  “What makes him so special?”

  Lenoir cocked his head, peering at Zach as if he could look through his eye sockets straight to the back of his skull. “Tell me, what do you see when you look at Kody?”

 
My future, hopefully. Aloud, Zach said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “If you were an investigator, what might you deduce about Bran Kody by examining the facts before you?”

  This game again. Lenoir loved it. Zach liked it sometimes, but only when he did well. Otherwise, it just made him feel like a dumb kid. He frowned, thinking.

  “How old do you think Sergeant Kody is?” Lenoir prompted.

  Zach shrugged. “Twenty-something.”

  “Twenty-six.”

  That didn’t sound very young to Zach, but he didn’t say so. It would only make Lenoir feel older. “Okay, so he’s twenty-six. So what?”

  “A handsome fellow, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I guess. Can’t say I’ve really thought about it.” That wasn’t strictly true. Even Zach had noticed the way the barmaid at the Firkin looked at Sergeant Kody the other night. She hadn’t looked at Lenoir that way, or any of the other patrons.

  “A handsome fellow,” Lenoir said, “and twenty-six, with a respectable job. And yet he is unmarried.” He leaned forward, one eyebrow raised. “What does that tell you?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to be married.” Zach could certainly understand that. Marriage didn’t make a whole lot of sense to him. Sharing what little you managed to scrape together with someone else? No, thanks.

  “It is possible that marriage does not interest him,” Lenoir allowed. “More likely, however, it is evidence of his dedication to his job. And of his ambition. Sergeant Kody wants to be an inspector one day, and perhaps even more. For now, all his energy is focused on that. And that, Zach, is what makes him so special.”

  Zach chewed on that as he chewed on his steak.

  “So, is that why you’re not married?”

  Lenoir’s snort was almost too soft to hear. “Eat your supper, boy.”

  “Hey, how come you’re not eating?” Zach had been so busy inhaling his steak, he hadn’t even noticed that Lenoir hadn’t ordered anything.

  “No appetite,” Lenoir said with a grimace, “not after what I saw today. And before you ask—no, I do not wish to discuss it. Not right now.”

  Zach didn’t try to hide his disappointment, but he didn’t press the matter, either. That never got him anywhere with Lenoir. The inspector opened up when he good and felt like it, which wasn’t often. There was no point in trying to convince him. Zach was pretty sure Lenoir was that way with everyone. In fact, he had a feeling the inspector talked to him more openly than he did to most adults. That felt good, even if Zach didn’t really understand it.

  “Going back out there tomorrow?” he asked.

  Lenoir nodded. “Tomorrow, we find out whether Oded’s treatments worked and the patients he saw will recover.”

  “You think they will?”

  “I don’t know.” There was something in the way he said it—sad and weary, even more than usual—that made Zach’s supper curdle in his belly.

  “There was a plague in your town once, wasn’t there?” It had been a while since Lenoir told him the story about the revolution, and Zach had been more interested in the exciting bits—the soldiers and rebels and great chanting mobs—but he remembered something else too, buried beneath all the adventure, something about everyone getting sick. When Lenoir told that part of the story, he’d worn the same sad, weary look he wore now.

  “There was a plague, yes,” Lenoir said, the words almost lost inside his wine cup.

  “What stopped it?”

  “Nothing. It stopped when it had killed everyone it wished to.”

  Zach swallowed. “How many people died?”

  The inspector’s dark eyes considered him for a moment. He drained his cup and reached for his coat. “Finish your supper, Zach,” he said, and was gone.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Did you get any sleep last night?”

  “If you need to ask, Sergeant, you are in the wrong line of work.” It was needlessly irritable, even for Lenoir, but his nerves were stretched over a razor’s edge. It did not help that he had a lump the size of an apricot at the back of his head, a lingering reminder of the riot. His neck was so stiff that he could hardly turn his head.

  “Me neither,” Kody said tartly, as though Lenoir did not already know. The sergeant was sporting a thin coat of stubble, which was a first, and his boots were so improbably shiny as to suggest a vigorous polish sometime in the past few hours, meaning it had been done well before dawn. Such fits of restless industry were intimately familiar to Lenoir, though it hardly took a chronic insomniac to recognize the signs.

  “I suspect we will find more of the same in there,” Lenoir said, inclining his head at the small green tent where Horst Lideman and the others awaited them. “Let us hope Oded, at least, is rested. He has a lot of work to do.”

  “Assuming he actually healed those people.”

  Lenoir growled under his breath. The one thing he had always been able to rely on from Kody, whether he wished it or not, was foolish optimism. Now, when it might actually come in handy, Kody was trying on a new face. “If I wanted extra negativity, Sergeant, I would carry a mirror.”

  Kody passed a hand over his eyes. He looked more than tired, Lenoir decided. He looked worn. “It’s just . . . this doesn’t feel like our lucky day,” he said, pulling the tent flap aside.

  By the light of a paraffin lamp, Lenoir took in the expressions arrayed around Lideman’s desk, and he sighed. “It appears you are right, Sergeant. This is not our lucky day.”

  “It is not anyone’s lucky day,” Lideman said. He sat behind his desk, hands folded primly before him. Across from him, Oded sat rigidly upright, gazing into nothingness like a soldier under inspection. Merden hovered in a corner, his countenance inscrutable.

  “What happened?” Lenoir asked, though he could already guess the answer.

  “The treatment failed.” There was no smugness in Lideman’s tone, only regret. “The patients died.”

  “What, all of them?” Kody’s tone was a mixture of despair and disbelief.

  “It is not so surprising,” Lideman said. “Their diagnoses were terminal, remember, and the disease kills quickly.”

  “It is surprising,” Oded said, so quietly he might have been speaking to himself. “The woman . . . I knew she was lost. I said so last night. But the others . . . they were out of danger. For all four of them to die . . .” He shook his head, his gaze still abstracted. He is in shock, Lenoir thought.

  “I do not deny your good intentions, sir,” Lideman said in an apparent attack of amnesia, “but as I told you, your remedy has no basis in science.”

  Oded continued as if the physician had not spoken. “I cannot understand it. I did everything right. The demons were cast out, the strength of the patients restored. They were out of danger, all but one.”

  “Maybe it was our fault,” Kody said. He rubbed his forehead, as though the idea pained him. “Maybe having other people in the room distracted you.”

  The healer shook his head. “That cannot be. You were only present for the first treatment, with the boy. After that, it was only Merden, and he is mekhleth. His power helped make the patients stronger, not weaker.”

  Lenoir swore under his breath. He had not come here expecting good news—it was still too early for that—but he had at least expected some ambiguity. Some hope. Some bit of improvement, however modest, in one or two of the patients. To face such unmitigated failure, and so soon . . . “It makes no sense.”

  “No,” Merden said from his corner, “it does not.”

  But if Oded had no power over the disease, then why were the death rates so much lower among the Adali? “Perhaps your people are immune after all,” Lenoir said.

  “I’m afraid not, Inspector,” Lideman said. “One of the four patients Oded saw yesterday was Adali. He was the first to perish.”

  Oded gave a dismis
sive wave. “Many of my people have died, just not so many as yours. We are not immune.”

  Lenoir shook his head, bewildered. “I cannot account for it.”

  “It makes no sense,” Merden repeated, his golden eyes fixed on Lenoir.

  “Nevertheless,” said Lideman, “we cannot dispute the facts. I applaud your efforts, Inspector, and those of your companions, but I’m afraid I cannot devote any further time to this experiment. Good day, gentlemen.”

  Oded rose slowly, his posture stiff and straight, his head held high. Beneath the armor of his dignity, however, the healer was visibly wounded. Whether he understood it or not, his patients had died, and the skeptical Braelish physician had been proven right. For a brief moment, Lenoir wondered which of those unpleasant facts bothered Oded more. Then he saw the grief in the old man’s eyes, and he had his answer.

  “I will return to my tent,” Oded said once they were outside. “I must continue my work.”

  “Do not allow this incident to shake your faith, my friend,” Merden said. “Your gift is real, and it is sorely needed.”

  Oded nodded wearily. He said something in Adali, bowed, and took his leave. Lenoir watched him go, something suspiciously like guilt tugging at his gut. He had brought the healer into this—distracted him from his work, subjected him to ridicule and derision, deprived the Adali of his care. If, after all that, the only thing they had achieved was to damage the healer’s confidence . . . Not only have you failed to improve the situation, Lenoir, you may actually have made things worse.

  But there would be time enough for self-recrimination later. For now, something else demanded his attention. He turned to Merden. “You were trying to tell me something in there. What?”

  Merden grunted. “I did not think you noticed.”

  “Of course I noticed, but why the guile? Why not just speak your mind?”

  “Because I do not trust that physician.”

  “Lideman?” Kody cast a hasty look at the green tent and lowered his voice. “What are you talking about?”